Coover's Cockroaches and the Power of a Single Incident

I've never read anything by Robert Coover. From what I understand, he's a fine writer. But whenever I think of Coover, I think of cockroaches. In the fall of 1966, I was living with my mother and younger brother on Hudson Street in Iowa City. My parents had divorced the previous year, and my mother was working as an instructor at Iowa while pursuing a Master of Fine Arts. We weren't financially well-off. Hudson Street, which lay right under the flight path of the Iowa City Airport, was an inexpensive place to live, and seemed to attract single parents. The ex-wife of poet W.D Snodgrass and their daughter lived right across the street. For some reason, our rented house either had no stove, or the existing stove no longer worked. The landlord told my mother to buy a used stove, and she'd be reimbursed.

Robert Coover, a visiting faculty member at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, had a stove for sale. I remember that it was a Roper--a brand I had never heard of before. One Saturday he came by with the stove He seemed like a nice guy. My mom bought the stove.

Several days later, we began seeing cockroaches in the kitchen. Hundreds of them. It couldn't have been a coincidence. Robert Coover had sold us a stove with a major roach infestation. To be fair, it's possible Coover didn't realize the stove was full of roach eggs. But because of that one incident, Coover and cockroaches will always be linked in my mind.

Fast forward to the fall of 2002. My daughter Sarah is a senior at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. She's at the student health office to get her medications. An attractive, dark-haired woman comes in from the outside. She's left her rented SUV running while she takes care of her daughter's medications. She's very demanding, and expects special treatment. Because she is Demi Moore, she gets it. Her daughter, Rumer Willis, is a freshman. (She's not at Interlochen now, i.e, 2006). Just about everyone has an opinion of Demi Moore. (When Kathleen saw the cover of Cigar Aficianado showing Moore with a cigar and headlined something like "Demi Moore's secret," she said, "Demi Moore has no secrets.") But for Sarah, Demi Moore will always be the pushy woman who fouled the pristine Michigan air with exhaust fumes.

Another fast-forward, to May, 2003. We're back at Interlochen for Sarah's graduation. Bruce Willis, Rumer's father, is there. I'm prepared to dislike him His movies were mostly violent ones. More important, he had been a vocal supporter of the American invasion of Iraq. Virtually no Interlochen student (including Rumer) supportes the war. But for all that I dislike about him, he's far more likeable than his ex-wife. Sarah's roommate, who wears socks with images from Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings, says Willis complimented her on her socks. Later we see him at the Melody Freeze (the school's ice cream stand), standing in line with everyone else. No pushing, no asserting his privileges--just another parent. At commencement, when the valedictorian makes a strong antiwar statement, he applauds with everyone else (maybe a little too loudly, but I'll forgive that). And when he has to leave early, he does so as unobtrusively as possible.

Single incidents, like first impressions, are sometimes unfair. But they do have staying power.

Radio Days

In the 1960s the closest thing to surfing the Internet was tuning the radio. There was television, of course, but in eastern Iowa before the advent of public broadcasting, the options were pretty limited. But radio, especially in the late-night hours, had so many possibilities. Clear Channel didn't mean a corporation with a near-monopoly on broadcasting, but certain AM radio stations which were allowed to broadcast at the maximum 50,000 watts.

I had a transistor radio which could pick up AM, FM, and short wave. The short wave was fun, but had a limited range. I could pick up the Voice of America and Radio Havana. Radio Havana would tell of every U.S. helicopter the National Liberation Force shot down. If they weren't exaggerating, it made me wonder whether helicopters were just too vulnerable. Voice of America, on the other hand, celebrated every U.S. victory and multiplied the enemy body count to the point that I wondered how there could be any Vietnamese left. It's interesting to hear propaganda for a while, but it gets tiresome.

The really interesting stuff was on the AM band. Talk radio was just beginning, and the king of talk was Joe Pyne. He was an ex-Marine who had lost a leg fighting in the Pacific. People remember him as a conservative, but he was really a Cold War liberal, who supported the Vietnam War but had absolutely no use for racial bigotry. Unlike Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, he didn't cut off people who were getting the better of him in an argument. He could be loud and abusive--the working-class Philadelphia accent made him sound even more abusive--but he didn't hide. A lot of people listened to Pyne, hoping to hear someone get the better of him. And we sided with him when he had a racist for a guest. I had a grudging respect for the guy.

For a liberal, antiwar alternative to Limbaugh, there was Dale Ulmer, who hosted an evening call-in show on WHO Radio in Des Moines. Unlike Pyne, he didn't yell or insult, but used logic and reason in his arguments. People rarely, if ever, got the better of him. Even though WHO was a clear-channel station which could be heard from the East Coast to the Rockies, few remember Dale Ulmer. His tenure as a talk show host was short, and he wasn't outrageous enough to be memorable, except to me, and perhaps a few others.

There were a lot of religious programs, but the strangest one whas hosted by the Reverend Curtis Springer. "This is the Reverend Curtis Springer, coming to you from the shores of Lake Tunedae, in the beautiful Mojave Desert." He spoke in deep but oily voice, in the manner of Senator Edward Dirksen (The Wizard of Ooze), and pronounced Tunedae something like Too-Wenda-Wee. In between recorded gospel tunes, such as "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb," he'd advertise his miracle remedies and invite people to visit his resort. The resort was called Zzyzyx, which Springer claimed was the last word in the English language. It was clear that Springer was a flim-flam artist, but I wasn't aware of the extent of his rascality. His crimes were certainly not on the scale of many of today's televangelists, but he was surely a scoundrel of the first order. (Check the link on his name for details.)

And late at night on weekends, there was Beaker Street, on the KAAY, "The Mighty 1090," a clear-channel station from Little Rock. I was never a great fan of what people later called "Progressive Rock," but I listened to it more for the atmosphere than the music. "This is Clyde Clifford, from Beaker Street," he'd say in his deep, slow, voice. He always sounded stoned, though I suspect he wan't. "That was 'Astronomy Domine,' by Pink Floyd, from their album, Ummagumma." He often played "Friends of Mine," by the Guess Who, which was not great poetry, but did make you listen. Strangely enough, Beaker Street is back on the air, though not on KAAY, which is now a religious station, but on FM, and downloadable on the Web.

AM Radio, with few exceptions, has become the domain of right-wing ideologues and Christian fundamentalists, while most of FM is niche-marketed and controlled by mega-corporations such as Clear Channel. I haven't follwed the "Net Neutrality" debate closely, but I'm wondering whether there are people in the boardrooms who'd like the Internet to be more like what commercial radio has become.

An Easter Message from the Vampire Corner

In spite of what the TV weather people assume, not all of us crave the sunshine. And a lot more of us can't stand the glare of artificial light. In the mid-1990s, when I was working at Amtrak's Chicago Call Center up on the 38th floor of the Mid-Continental Plaza building, those of us who didn't like the glare congregated at the back of the former training room, where most of the overhead lights were turned off. The Vampire Corner, we called it. In those days there were slow times during the early afternoon and most of us vampires got to know each other pretty well.

I worked with a delightful young woman I'll call Julia. We often sat together and had amazing conversations about current events, art, philosophy, and religion. She was a former Roman Catholic who had converted to a fundamentalist sect which believed that the King James Version--and only the King James Version--was the inerrant Word of God. I appreciated the KJV for its poetic images, but preferred the New Revised Standard Version for meaning. We remained friends even though our religious views were poles apart.

One spring, she told me that Easter was actually named for Astarte, the Semitic goddess of fertility. I replied that it had been named for Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring. Julia was originally from South America, so I asked her about the Spanish word for Easter. She acknowledged that is was Pascua, or Passover. But she stuck to her belief that Easter was named for the goddess often associated with sexuality, and appropriated by modern Satanists in their rituals.

I never understood why her denomination insisted on associating the principal holy day of Christianity with a pagan fertility goddess. After doing some research, I learned that a number of fundamentalist sects, such as the Restored Church of God, reject Easter as a pagan festival. They celebrate Passover, and believe Christ was resurrected on a Saturday. Their association of Easter with Astarte, or Ishtar, is folk etymology. Eostre is Germanic and Indo-European in origin, while Astarte is Semitic. And while there were cults of Ishtar in Rome and the Hellenic world, they did not exist among Germanic-speaking peoples. The name Easter is a borrowing from pre-Christians, but a rather benign one.

Nonetheless, Julia believed the word Easter was derived from Astarte, and nothing I or anyone else could say would shake her of that belief. In spite of this, she was beautiful person, and brought her spiritual light into that pleasant darkness.

I lost track of Julia after she left the office. The pressure of working at the call center was getting to her. And it was going get worse. The slow times when agents had time to chat were decreasing. She had young children and needed to spend more time with them. Her husband was a Chicago police officer, so she didn't have to worry about losing health benefits. The last I heard, she was working at a small health clinic.

Whenever I want to declare a blanket condemnation of fundamentalist Christians I try to remember her. Julia was a fundamentalist and had what I considered to be wacky beliefs, but was (and, I'm sure still is), a sweet, caring, and altogether wonderful human being.

This does not mean I can't oppose the fundamentalists when they want to tear down Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state, or try to impose their dogmas on the rest of us. It's just a reminder that when we attach labels to people, we can't forget that they're still human beings like ourselves.

Wet Monday

From the Wikipedia article, Dyngus Day:

Dyngus Day or Wet Monday (Polish Śmigus-dyngus, lany poniedziałek or Oblewania) is the name for Easter Monday in Poland. In the Czech Republic it is called Velikonocni Pondeli or Pomlázka.

Both countries practice a peculiar custom on this day. Traditionally, boys will awaken girls early in the morning and douse them with water and strike them about the legs with long thin twigs made from willow, birch or decorated tree branches (palmy wielkanocne). This practice is possibly connected to a pre-Christian, pagan fertility rite, although the earliest documented records of Dyngus Day in Poland are from 15th century, almost half a millennium after Poland adopted Christianity.

Most recently, the tradition has changed to become entirely water-focused, and the Śmigus part is almost forgotten. It is quite common for girls to attack boys just as fiercely as the boys traditionally attacked the girls. With much of Poland's population residing in tall apartment buildings, high balconies are favourite hiding places for young people who gleefully empty entire buckets of water onto randomly selected passers-by.

Here in the U.S., the spanking element has pretty much disappeared, and the liquid most common on Wet Monday is beer. Dyngus Day is mainly an occasion for eating sausage and quaffing brew. In South Bend, it's also the traditional kickoff for political campaigns. In 1968, the last time the Indiana Democratic presidential primary had any significance, Robert Kennedy was at the West Side Democratic Club on Dyngus Day. He won South Bend and Indiana handily.

Tonight, I expect Joe Donnelly to be at that same club. He's running against Chris Chocola, the plutocratic Republican congressman from Indiana's Second District. Two years ago Donnelly, a virtual unknown and without support form the national Democratic party, lost to Chocola by eight percentage points. This year, Democrats are taking the Second District seriously. MoveOn.org has been running ads against Chocola. Donnelly is a fairly conservative Democrat, like former Congressman and 9/11 Commission member Tim Roemer, who represented what was then the Third District from 1991 to 2003. But compared to Chocola, the guy's a godsend.

James Frey and Kenneth Rexroth: Memoir vs. Autobiographical Novel

"One of the most disturbing things about the whole James Frey brouhaha this week is that the book that sold 3.5 million copies was turned down by nearly every major publisher when it was offered as fiction." -Patry Francis, simply wait, January 14, 2006

When I first read about the controversy over James Frey's memoir, A Million Little Pieces, I thought about Kenneth Rexroth's An Autobiographical Novel, published in 1964. Rexroth is a far better writer than Frey, but he also blurs the line between fact and fiction. As in Frey's book, some of the questionable incidents take place in what the Chamber of Commerce types call Michiana--north central Indiana and southwest lower Michigan.

From 1998 to 2003, I wrote a column in the Elkhart, Indiana Truth which focused on local history. Rexroth, who was born in South Bend and spent his early years in Elkhart, was a fascinating subject, but An Autobiographical Novel. made research frustrating. For example, Rexroth says both his grandfathers were named George. I spent hours looking for maternal grandfather "George Reed." Finally, I located the obituary for Charles Reed, whose daughter was a Mrs. Charles Rexroth. Had Rexroth forgotten, or was he uncomfortable with the fact that his mother had married a man with the same name as her father? Freud was gospel in those days, and Rexroth may not have wanted to give his mother an Oedipus/Electra complex.

Sometimes Rexroth exaggerates events. A flour mill explosion he claims to have witnessed, "killed everybody in the place." In fact, the explosion took place in the wee hours of the morning, and the only casualty was a cat. He can also make people more interesting. In 1912 Charles and Della (Kenneth calls his mother Delia, though official records list her as Della) lived on South Second Street in Elkhart, two doors down from the Winchester/Knickerbocker mansion, "....the home of an elderly couple named Knickerbocker. They manufactured a galvanic battery health device which made them a fortune." They claimed the device could cure "cholera morbus, rabies, paralysis, galloping consumption, or cancer." The truth was more prosaic. William Knickerbocker was a banker. (After William died in 1937, his widow, Nellie Winchester Knickerbocker, became more interesting. She drove around Elkhart in an ancient electric car, with flowers in vases on either side of the seat. Her ghost is said to haunt the mansion.)

But in spite of all the factual errors, Rexroth's book is provides a fascinating look at Elkhart in the years before the Great War. Chicago in the Twenties, and San Francisco in the Thirties and Forties. Unlike, say, Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, or Sherwood Anderson, he sees progressive values in the upper Midwest:

The towns in northern Indiana lying along the Michigan border had been the last stops on the Underground Railway. They had a good many Negro freedmen living in them. Elkhart became one of the centers of the Ku Klux Klan some fifteen years after that, but in my days there if you called a man a nigger in the street a white man would very likely walk up to you and knock you down.

While Frey's memoir is not in the same league with Rexroth's, reading (or rather listening to) it gave me an insight into the mind of an addictive personality. I'm willing to forgive a few factual errors, or even outright untruths. Rexroth, in the preface to the second edition, writes:

How much of it is true? Substantially it's all true. The title was the first publisher's notion of one way of deflecting possible libel suits. Some of the people are divided up into two or three characters and then opportunely die. Now everybody of whom anything the least unpleasant is said really is long dead. Names have been changed throughout to avoid any embarrassment to the character or heirs; otherwise, this is all pretty much the way it actually happened. It will never happen again.

And in one sense he's right. In spite of factual errors, it's one person's memory of times events that "will never happen again." It's unfortunate that Frey's publisher did not subtitle A Million Little Pieces An Autobiographical Novel.

How I Passed Bonehead Math

Just about the only commercial television program I watch is Numb3rs. I like the program in spite of the fact that I've never been good at mathematics. For people like me, math is a very difficult subject to learn, for the perplexing reason that its teachers are good at math. In eighth grade trigonometry, I was totally baffled about what to do with the sines, cosines, and tangents. The teacher would give formulas on how to calculate them, but not what to do with them once calculated. Once I learned how to use them ( as I recall, it involved multiplication), I had no problem. But the math teacher didn't bother explaining things that were obvious to mathematicians. Nor did my math text explain it clearly.

I managed to get through high school math with mostly Cs. When I took the ACT, I did better in math than I expected, but not well enough to test out of the University of Iowa's core math requirement, informally known as Bonehead Math. And a recent episode of Numb3rs reminded me of how I got through the course with a C, thanks to antiwar violence in the 1970s.

The episode began with black-and-white footage of antiwar protesters, then cut to an unidentified person making a bomb. The Hollies' "Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress" played in the background. The bomb goes off at an Army recruiting office, killing a bystander. It appears to be a copy of a 1971 bombing at an ROTC office, and a retired FBI agent, who worked on the 1971 case, is brought in to assist. I won't get into the details, but math whiz Charlie Eppes uses network analysis to solve both cases.

I took Bonehead Math during the spring semester of 1970. By May, I was still holding on to a C, but I wasn't confident about passing the final. On May 4, the Ohio National Guard opened fire at Kent State University, and four people died. That night, the protests at Iowa turned violent. I was living at home in North Liberty, six miles north of Iowa City, so I didn't witness the rioting. On the morning of May 5, I saw the aftermath. Many of the downtown stores had their windows broken; the legend KENT was writ large on a concrete underpass. The Iowa Highway Patrol arrived later.

After more demonstrations, the University effectively shut down. While the university officially  remained open, virtually all students took the option of taking the grade they had at the beginning of May or taking an incomplete. I had my C, and I had passed the math requirement. Even though I had avoided the final exam, I had a recurring nightmare of having to take it, and being thoroughly unprepared.

Weird Habit No. 5: Violent Movies? I Can't Even Handle Sitcoms.

I didn't realize I was a Highly Sensitive Person until my daughter Anne was diagnosed with the condition. In fact, I had no idea it was a recognized condition. But, after Anne got the label, I took the HSP self-test. I answered yes to all but four of the questions. One of the questions was: I make a point to avoid violent movies and TV shows. That I do. In fact, I even try to avoid situation comedies in which people are embarrassed or are put in emotionally painful situations. Recently, I started watching The Terminal. It was just too upsetting to watch the Tom Hanks character's ordeal. Being of a practical bent, Kathleen asked me if I'd rather wash the kitchen floor. I washed it.

Weird Habit No. 4: I'm Oppositionally Defiant

It's one of those psychobabble terms, but I'm afraid it applies to me. When I hear something, I automatically think of objections to it. It can be maddening for a spouse, for instance, but on the whole, it's served me well. Both my parents were smokers. I never even tried a cigarette. I didn't try the other kind of smoke that some of my friends were doing. Or those other drugs that were supposed to expand the mind. When I lived in Iowa City, one of those places the right-wingers call a "people's republic," a lot of people thought I was a conservative. In Elkhart, Indiana, I seemed to be a radical. (Actually, in both places, I was a liberal Democrat, so maybe oppositional defiance didn't have anything to do with it.)

Weird Habit No. 3: Lost in a Fog

"Like a ship at sea, I'm just lost in a fog," begins that beautiful song by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. I remember listening to a recording of it with Kathleen. (I think it was sung by Connee Boswell.) Whether she pointed at me, or just gave me a knowing look, it was obvious that the song applied to me. Too often I'm just oblivious to my surroundings. In the early 1980s, I worked for CIT Tours, (Compagnia Italiana Turismo) in its Bensenville, Illinois office, as the Rail Coordinator. I finally got to go over to Italy for a familiarization trip, and finagled a way to take Kathleen with me. We were in the Sforza Castle in Milan, when we walked through a room which seemed to be completely empty. I said something to that effect, and Kathleen (probably with a roll of her lovely brown eyes), told me to look up. Of course she, as an art student, knew exactly what was there. Leonardo da Vinci had painted an incredible fresco on the ceiling. I, being lost in a fog, just thought it was an empty room.

Betty Friedan and McCarthyism--What if?

I've become a regular listener to courses on tape and CD. Last week, Kathleen, who works at the library, saw a course she knew I'd love and checked it out for me. It was "American Inquisition: The Era of McCarthyism," presented by Professor Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University. It's part of Recorded Books' "The Modern Scholar" series.

It was one of those odd coincideces that I was listening to Schrecker's final lecture on the legacy of McCarthyism just after the death of Betty Friedan. Schrecker talks about the era's influence on the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the American Left, and feminism. And while she emphasizes that McCarthyism wasn't the only factor in changing these institutions, she makes a persuasive case that was an important one.

During the 1940s, Friedan worked for the United Electrical Workers, writing pamphlets--at least one of which dealt with the double burden of working women who had to work a full day and handle most of the household chores. The Electrical Workers were a left-wing union and a target of the anti-Communist crusade. The union, weakened by the attacks, had to lay off a number of people, including Friedan.

Schrecker points out that when Friedan emerged as the "mother of the second wave of feminism," she was writing and speaking primarily about middle-class housewives and professional women.

It's one of those perplexing "what if" questions. Had there been no McCarthyism, would the second wave of feminism have been more inclusive of working-class women? Too many of America's blue-collar workers have been seduced by the Right, religious and otherwise. Yet there was a time when progressive causes, such as feminism, civil rights, universal health insurance--the list goes on and on--were workers' causes.

It's been a long time since I read The Feminine Mystique, but I remember being impressed with her arguments--especially her comparison of popular women's literature of the 1930s versus that of the 1950s. She certainly left a strong legacy. But still, what if...

Weird Habit No.2: I'm still a hopeless romantic.

A recent post in simply wait shows an Indian wedding with the caption, "come live with me and be my love." Of course, that's the first line of Christopher Marlowe's poem, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love." I've always loved that poem. And even though I usually read the parody first, and often appreciate it more than the original, I've never much liked Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," which is sort of a parody. Raleigh's heavy dose of stark realism gives me the feeling that he knows it's a dog-eat-dog world out there, and he wouldn't have it any other way. The ballad "The Golden Vanity" is based on a broadside naming Walter Raleigh as the heartless captain. Somehow, I have an easy time believing it.

While I grew up reading Bierce, I don't see his cynicism in the same way as I do Raleigh's. While Bierce's Civil War stories are often gruesome and seem to celebrate death, they often show his passion for the beautiful countryside of western Virginia. "A Horseman in the Sky," is a good example. In his later years, Bierce fought the barons of the Southern Pacific, who were trying to get out of repaying a loan to the U.S. Treasury--a noble campaign if there ever was one.

My causes often seem hopeless ones--what Howard Dean called the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," railroad passenger service, and the Episcopal Church (particularly struggling urban parishes like the Memorial Church of St. Luke in Philadelphia and St. Martin's in Chicago). And I've been married to the same woman for 32 years--and I still think she's amazing. I may often sound cynical, but underneath I'm a hopeless romantic.

Weird Habit No.1--I Read the Parody First

Patry Francis, of simply wait, tagged me with the five "weird habits" meme. I pretty much asked for it. I'll start with the one I mentioned in my earlier post--I tend to read the parody before the real thing. This probably comes from finding a copy of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary as a child. I now appreciate Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," but I got Bierce's version first:

The cur foretells the knell of parting day;
The loafing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The wise man homewards plods; I only stay
To fiddle-faddle in a minor key.

And like a lot of baby-boomer kids, I subscribed to MAD. Rarely did I see any of the movies it parodied, but in most cases, the parody not only pointed out the flaws, but pretty much explained the film.

Jay Ward and Bill Scott gave me Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken. I'm afraid I saw a lot of the fractured tales before knowing the originals. The same people (I think) produced a show called "Fractured Flickers," which took old silent films, cut them up, and added narration. Hans Conreid was host. Before I saw the classic Lon Chaney "Hunchback of Notre Dame," I saw the fractured version, in which Chaney is the head cheerleader for Stanford University. (At the end, he transfers to Notre Dame).

In 1969, while staying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while my mother did research for Paul Engle, who was writing a book on American women, I discovered the Harvard Lampoon. The issue that summer was a parody of LIFE Magazine, which proclaimed "The End of the World." And there were advertisements for the next issue: "Tolkien Will Never Be the Same." Of course, I had to get Bored of the Rings. The book is as much a satire of America in the late 1960s as it is a parody of Tolkien's trilogy. I finally did read Lord of the Rings--some 30 years after reading the adventures of Frito Bugger, Goodgulf the Wizard, and Stomper (later known as Arrowshirt of Arrowroot).

And I have yet to see "Shakespeare in Love." "George Lucas in Love," I've seen.

My brief stint as an SDS member

SDS is back! The Students for a Democratic Society, which began in the early 1960s as a coalition of liberal and radical students, imploded in the last years of the decade. By 1969, SDS had abandoned its goal of participatory democracy and split into two factions: the Revolutionary Youth Movement, or Weatherman, and a faction affiliated with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.

The revived SDS appears to be pursuing the ideals of the early organization. I for one, am happy to see they're back. As in the late sixties, the United States is pursuing an undeclared and unjust war. And the influence of multinational corporations and wealthy individuals on government, the environment, and human life itself is now truly frightening. I applaud those of the millennial generation who are taking up the good struggle, as well as those older SDS members who are assisting them.

My own brief SDS membership came in the fall and winter of 1966-67, when I was a sophomore at University High School in Iowa City. Alan Soldofsky, a budding poet (now professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State), organized the chapter. There weren't many of us--mostly misfits like ourselves. I attended a couple of University of Iowa SDS meetings. The memorable one happened to coincide with the Military Ball. As the ROTC cadets and their dates left the Iowa Memorial Union, we serenaded them with "We Shall Overcome."

In December, 1966, I went with my mother and brother to to visit family friends in Elgin, Illinois. One day during that vacation, I took the Milwaukee Road commuter train into Union Station, Chicago. I knew the SDS headquarters were on West Madison Street. I figured the easiest way to get there was to take the L (There's a rhyme which begins, "In Chicago El is L"), so I walked up to the Lake Street L, and boarded a westbound train. I didn't know about A and B stops, so I ended up at Lake and California, on the big, bad West Side.

I walked down California to Madison and caught an eastbound bus. The neighborhood changed from black to Asian as the bus rolled along. When I got to my block, most of the faces were white, male, and middle-aged. The SDS headquarters were on the western edge of Skid Row.

It was a second-story walk-up office. I didn't meet Carl Oglesby or any other high honchos of the movement. A young woman was there, too busy to talk. I picked up a few leaflets and a copy of the Port Huron Statement and took the bus back to Union Station. Naive 15-year-old kid that I was, I had just gone through what were reputedly some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago without receiving so much as a sidelong glance.

I wore my SDS button through the spring, but the group was beginning to abandon nonviolent resistance. By the fall of 1967, when I left Iowa City for Cedar Falls, SDS wasn't talking much about participatory democracy.

But my hopes are buoyed by the group's revival--especially since these younger members are looking to the SDS of the Port Huron Statement, with its ideal of participatory democracy, as its grounding.

"That weird shall never daunten me"

Patry Francis, who writes the blog simply wait, was recently tagged with a meme. In genetics (at least as I attempt to understand it), a meme is like a gene, but its traits are passed on socially and culturally. But here in the blogosphere, it’s a sort of cross between a questionnaire and a chain letter. You get a meme, answer the questions, and then send it on to friends/victims. Thanks to the very limited readership of this humble blog, I’ve never been tagged with a meme.
The meme Patry received had just one question: Expose five weird habits. Her answers are fascinating. She correctly interpreted weird to mean odd, unusual, or eccentric. I doubt whether the meme’s author had in mind the word’s traditional meaning.

In the Scottish ballad, “Thomas the Rhymer,” the Queen of Elfland rides up to Thomas while he is lying under a tree. She dares him to kiss her—“If ye dare to kiss my lips, sure of your bodie I will be.” Thomas answers:

Betide me weal, betide me woe,
That weird shall never daunten me.
Syne he has kissed her rosy lips.
All underneath the Eildon Tree.

Here, weird is a noun, and means fate. Fate, with more than a hint of the supernatural. It’s a cognate of the German werden, to become. German uses werden to form the future tense, similar to the way we use will or shall. Back in my university days, when I took German, I asked my professor about the connection between werden and weird. He responded that yes, they were cognates, and that in some parts of southern Germany the future tense was formed with
sollen (cognate of the English shall) because of the pagan, supernatural implications of werden.

As an adjective, before its meaning was diluted, weird was enveloped in the sense of fate and the supernatural. The comic Weird Tales and Jim Morrison’s line, “Weird scenes inside the gold mine,” have held on to the traditional meaning. A few years ago, Kathleen and I were talking about the word, and she quoted from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” an example of something truly weird:

But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Should I be tagged with the meme, unlikely as that is, I could easily come up with five eccentric or unusual habits, such as my propensity for reading the parody before the real thing (I read Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings more than 30 years before I finished Tolkien’s trilogy, for example. I still think of Frito and Spam, not Frodo and Sam.) But in the classic sense of weird, I couldn’t come up with one example. At least I hope not.

When I was Clean for Gene

The news of Eugene McCarthy’s death brought back memories of that hopeful and dreadful year when he challenged Lyndon Johnson for the presidency. I was too young to go off to New Hampshire or Wisconsin to campaign for McCarthy. In the fall semester of 1967-68, my mother had taken a teaching job at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. I would be a junior at Cedar Falls High School.

After two years at University High School in Iowa City, Cedar Falls was a big change. Even though it was part of the Iowa City public school system, U-High was very much an elite institution. I was an outsider—a boy with divorced parents and limited income in a school dominated by professors’ kids.

At first, I had some apprehension about going to a large public high school. But I found more acceptance at Cedar Falls than I ever had at U-High. I wrote for the school paper, acted in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and was part of a clique of political liberals.

Eugene McCarthy declared his candidacy for the presidency on November 30, 1967—my sixteenth birthday. While I didn’t know anything about the man until then, I was very much against the Vietnam war and happy to see someone challenging Johnson. The obvious challenger, Robert Kennedy, had declined to run. But the eccentric senator from Minnesota, who wrote poetry, played baseball, and had been a novice monk, was willing to take on a sitting president.

I went to the Students for McCarthy group at the UNI and agreed to sell “Million for McCarthy buttons. While I sold only ten or twenty, I did contribute to the effort. But the most bizarre event in my personal campaign for McCarthy came at the Cedar Falls High School mock convention.

By the time we had the mock convention, Johnson had pulled out of the race and Robert Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey had jumped in. There weren’t many Humphrey or Kennedy delegates. The two strongest candidates were McCarthy and Wallace. That’s right. George Corley Wallace, unreformed and segregationist. Cedar Falls, with the exception of UNI students, was virtually all white. If you were black, you lived in nearby Waterloo. On the east side, where some of the streets weren’t even paved. A lot of Cedar Falls residents, including many of my fellow students, wanted to keep it that way. And they weren’t embarrassed about supporting the nation’s most celebrated racist.

The mock convention was held in a large classroom, which resembled a small auditorium. It began with the nominations. McCarthy’s began with a Chinese fire drill display, and the announcement that the senator had once led a Chinese fire drill team. The Humphrey and Kennedy nominations were not memorable. But the Wallace nomination, with Confederate battle flags waving and the playing of “The Bonny Blue Flag” (a song glorifying an early Confederate banner) was. The leader of the Wallace contingent—a very bright young man who argued that Wallace had the best interests of blacks at heart—was caught up in the pro-Confederate enthusiasm.

The deliberations and negotiations went on, it seemed, for hours. Some of the Kennedy and Humphrey people came around to the McCarthy side, but not enough for a majority. After several ballots, we realized we had to accept Wallace as running mate. (The alternative would have been to walk out and let the Wallace people win.) Thus our mock convention ended with an oxymoron—a McCarthy-Wallace ticket.

The McCarthy group met at a local restaurant to celebrate, but it was a curious celebration, mainly spent waiting for two very popular and attractive people to show up. We had won, but only by accepting a running mate whose politics we detested. Yes, it was just a mock convention. But in retrospect, it exemplified the polarization of America in 1968.

The issue of the war was secondary in that mock convention—something we McCarthy supporters hadn’t realized. I think we believed, like most northern liberals, that sensible people had overcome race prejudice. I knew there were racists in Cedar Falls, but I thought their cause was on the decline. My family had attended a memorial service for Martin Luther King, jr. at a black church on the east side of Waterloo, where we were welcomed by the parishioners. It seemed to me that blacks and whites would learn to accept each other.

But the riots after King’s assassination, including some disturbances in Waterloo, had frightened too many whites. And in retrospect, the war was a secondary issue in the November election as well. Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee, finally broke with Johnson on the war, but still lost the 1968 election. He couldn’t overcome Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which used the race issue to win border states which normally went Democratic, while Wallace, running as an independent, took much of the Deep South from Humphrey.

Had he lived and been nominated, Robert Kennedy might have been able to bring Americans together. McCarthy, with his acerbic wit and professorial air, had little chance of attracting enough middle-of-the-road whites to win the election. But that doesn’t detract from his courage to take on LBJ. For a few months in the winter and spring of 1968, Gene McCarthy gave us the hope of a better world. For that, I’m proud to say I supported him.

Proust's Madeleine from the Portuguese

I hadn't had Rojoes Cominho in a long time. It's pork cubes browned and then braised in garlic, cumin, and white wine, with lemon slices and flat-leaf parsley added at the end. When Kathleen asked me what I wanted for my birthday dinner, I decided on Rojoes Cominho with Portuguese fried potatoes. We used to eat it a lot. Pork was cheap in the 1970s, especially in Iowa, and we had acquired several of the Time-Life "Foods of the World" books, including The Cooking of Spain and Portugal.

In those days we lived in Parklawn Apartments in Iowa City. Today it's a regular dormitory. In 1991 it became infamous as the residence of Gang Lu, the brilliant Chinese physics student who murdered four professors and a rival student, and crippled another student. But during the 1970s it was married student housing. We were lucky to get an apartment there, as the rent was considerably lower than in the private housing market.

At Parklawn was a very sophisticated couple. He was slightly built, and wore a moustache and goatee. She was a red-haired beauty who kept her maiden name. They seemed a bit aloof. But when someone organized a get-together for the residents, which included a potluck dinner, they participated. I decided to make Rojoes Cominho for the potluck. And I was surprised and pleased that the sophisticated husband sought me out and complimented me for making the dish.

That would be the end of the story, except that several months (or perhaps years) later the young man I had thought so urbane made a radical conversion to fundamentalist Christianity. He spent his days on the Pentacrest (the center of the University, on the hill overlooking the Iowa River, and named for the Old Capitol and the four great limestone halls surrounding it) lawn proclaiming the power of Jesus Christ to all who would listen.

I was an an agnostic in those days. Sometimes I still am. But I was shocked and perhaps frightened by this radical conversion. The young man had not lost any of his intelligence, but he now seemed a fool, sermonizing and arguing with all who would listen. It's doubtful he won any converts.

My own conversion took place over years--it's still taking place, sometimes retreating, sometimes advancing. When I learned of Kant's view that people should act as if they are free--whether they're free or not--I applied this to my faith, or lack of it. I try to act as though a benevolent and just God exists, even when my doubts are overpowering. I don't wish for a "blinding light" conversion. But making and eating Rojoes Cominho brought back memories of that young couple, who are, of course, now as middle-aged as I am.

The Great Train Robbery--Coming Soon

“Here I go again, crossing the country in coach trains.”
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Starting from San Francisco.”

If George W. Bush gets his way, tomorrow’s poets won’t have the benefit of Ferlinghetti’s rolling muse. And most of us who care about this form of transportation suspect that it’s not just the wonderful long-distance trains that the Bush Administration wants to snuff out, but all passenger train service. Because they couldn’t kill passenger trains through Congress--even a Republican Congress--the Bush loyalists appear willing to do, in the campaign parlance, “whatever it takes,” to make flying and driving our only transportation options.

David Gunn, who was president of Amtrak until November 9, when the Bush-appointed Amtrak Board of Directors fired him, put it bluntly to Railway Age Magazine: “They have to do a lot of dirty stuff this year, because next year is an election year, and what they’ve got in mind will be very unpopular.” Within the next few months," Gunn said, “there will be a lot of train-offs and other service cutbacks.”

Earlier this fall, the Amtrak board secretly voted to authorize the dismantling of the Amtrak system by selling off the Northeast Corridor. Such a move would have to be approved by Congress and all indications are that even this Congress will not go along.

While Bush loyalists speak the language of “Amtrak reform,” Gunn calls their bluff: “Anything they’ll tell you is bullshit… The Administration is serious about taking this place apart.”
Except in the Northeast Corridor, passenger trains do not seriously compete with the fly-drive culture. But so long as there are passenger trains running, it’s a reminder to the oilmen who dictate Bush's policies that perhaps there is a civilized alternative to fuel-guzzling jets and SUV‘s. They want to nip that possibility in the bud. Hence this backhanded attack.

And when they whine about Amtrak subsidies, they ignore the hundreds of billions “invested” in the airport-airways and highway systems--not all of it from user fees.

But perhaps it’s the very civilized nature of rail travel which offends the Bush administration. The possibility of sitting in your window seat and seeing an America not dominated by Wal-Marts and strip malls. Of riding the Capitol Limited, the quintessential Slow Train, out of Pittsburgh and into the Alleghenies, following the Monongehela, Youghiogheny, and Casselman rivers to the eastern divide, then down the Potomac through Cumberland, Maryland, stopping at Martinsburg, West Virginia, with its roundhouse, and Harpers Ferry (the armory John Brown captured can be seen from the train), past Point of Rocks and its high Victorian depot, and into Washington’s incomparable Union Station. You won’t see these views from the Interstate, or on a flyover.

“Who stole America?” writes Ferlinghetti at the end of his poem. “Myself I saw in the window reflected.” Perhaps, but I'm not convinced. Stealing America isn’t a single act. As the technocrats like to say, it’s a process. And what Amtrak chairman David Laney and his fellow Bush-appointed directors are trying to do is certainly a big part of the process.

Our only hope is a big backlash from Congress.

The Universal Soldier and the Twilight of Democracy

Jana Oliver, a fantasy writer, recently attended the Romance Writers of America convention in Reno, and reported that the conventioneers showed their support for our young men and women serving in Iraq while deploring President Bush and his war policies. And while romance and fantasy writers aren’t exactly a scientific sampling of American society, I believe their viewpoint is the prevailing one in America.

That contrasts with the antiwar movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, in which a substantial minority felt the ordinary soldier was culpable. Perhaps the best summation of that argument can be found in Buffy Sainte-Marie’s song, "Universal Soldier," which concludes:

But without him how would Hitler have condemned him at Dachau,
Without him Caesar would have stood alone.
He’s the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war,
And without him all this killing can’t go on.

He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame.
His orders come from far away no more.
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers, can’t you see
This is not the way we put an end to war.

I personally never blamed the ordinary soldier for the Vietnam war. A large number were draftees. Most of those who volunteered believed they were fighting for a good cause. But those who did blame them were reflecting a belief in democracy which is virtually absent from today’s society.

The Students for a Democratic Society called it "participatory democracy," and it is as radical an agenda as anything proposed by Marx, Lenin, or Mao. Many SDS members rejected republican, or representative government, arguing that only pure democracy, with all decisions made by popular vote, was worthy of the name democracy. (Unfortunately, practical application of the idea led to farce, when SDS members in Cleveland would debate for hours on whether to take a dinner break.)

But the ideal of participatory democracy was a powerful one. America was a democracy, or at least a democratic republic. And if "we the people" rule, then we bear responsibility for its failings. In fact, Sainte-Marie went beyond blaming the soldier by saying his orders come "from…you and me." We were all, as members of a democratic society, culpable for the sins of war.

While many of us still believe in the ideals of democracy, few see ours as a democratic society, in which the ordinary citizen has any power to make changes. We all remember the election of 2000, in which Al Gore had won the popular vote, and appeared to have won Florida, giving him an electoral majority. But five members of the Supreme Court stopped the recount and awarded the election to George W. Bush.

In 2004, Democrats nominated one of the most decent people in public life to run for president, but the false and malicious "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" campaign, plus Republican vote suppression and probable voter fraud, gave Bush the victory over John Kerry. After two successive presidential elections which appear to have been won fraudulently, it’s hard to talk about a democratic society.

I’m glad we’re not blaming common soldiers for Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. But we should also remember that one reason we don’t blame them is because we believe that they, like ourselves, are powerless in the face of governments and corporations.

Al Stewart's Question

What if you reached the age of reason
Only to find there was no reprieve
Would you still be a man for all seasons?
Or would you just have to leave
We measure our days out in steps of uncertainty
Not turning to see how we’ve come
And peer down the highway
From here to eternity
And reach out for love on the run
While the man for all seasons
Is lost behind the sun.

Henry Plantagenet still looks for someone
To bring good news in his hour of doubt
While Thomas More waits in the Tower of London
Watching the sands running out
And measures the hours out from here to oblivion
In actions that can’t be undone
A sailor through darkness
He scans the meridian
And caught by the first rays of dawn
The man for all seasons
Is lost behind the storm.

And I should know by now
I should know by now
I hear them call it all around
Oh, they go
There’s nothing to believe in
Hear them,
Just daydreams, deceiving
They’ll just let you down

What if you reached the age of reason
Only to find there was no reprieve
Would you still be a man for all seasons?
Or would you just disbelieve?
We measure our gains out in luck and coincidence
Lanterns to turn back the night
And put our defeats down to chance or experience
And try once again for the light
Some wait for the waters of fortune to cover them
Some just see the tides of ill chance running over them

Some call on Jehovah
Some cry out to Allah
Some wait for the boats that still row to Valhalla
Well, you try to accept what the fates are unfolding
While some say they’re sure where the blame should be falling
You look round for maybe a chance of forestalling
But too soon it’s over and done
And the man for all seasons
Is lost behind the sun

-Al Stewart, "A Man for All Seasons," from Time Passages, 1978

Recently I bought a cassette of Al Stewart’s Time Passages at public radio station WGLT’s "Recycled Music Sale." I knew the title track, of course,with its wonderful refrain, "Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight," but the song I played and replayed was "A Man for All Seasons," which relates the ordeal of Thomas More to present times.

It seems at first that Stewart is simply expressing the futility of life. But if that were all, why is the song so intriguing? My own interpretation is that he’s asking the listener whether he or she can stand up for principle in the face of "no reprieve." It’s too easy in postmodern times simply to disbelieve—in God, or in one’s own principles, rather than face condemnation. Or one can "just leave," washing one’s hands of the whole affair. And while "the man for all seasons is lost," Stewart is imploring his audience to find the man for all seasons in himself or herself in an age where such principled courage is considered passé.

Thomas More went to his death because he refused to sign oaths of allegiance to King Henry VIII, specifically to accept Henry as the head of the Church of England and to recognize his children by Anne Boelyn successors to the throne. More is, in an indirect way, one of the first victims of the Anglican Communion, of which I am a member. But I believe he is very much in the tradition of the great Christian martyrs, as are Anglican bishops Hugh Latimer and Thomas Ridley, who were burned to death during the reign of Catholic queen Mary Tudor.

Unlike some early Christians, few of us aspire to martyrdom. And very few will be put in the situation of Thomas More. But in this postmodern world, we are constantly pressured to betray our beliefs and principles. The voices which call out, "there’s nothing to believe in" are stronger than ever.

Can one still be "a man for all seasons?" I hope and pray one can, even as I hope and pray I will never be put to such a test

The Closet Over the Stairs

So move your fam’ly westward,
Good health you will enjoy,
And rise to wealth and honor
In the state of Elanoy.

-Folk Song, "Elanoy"

No wealth and honor so far, but I’ve found a place to stay in Illinois—a little efficiency apartment near downtown Bloomington. I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books—actually listening to them on tape on the long weekly drive between Bloomington and Elkhart. At the beginning of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [Sorcerer’s] Stone, the ten-year-old Harry is living "in the closet under the stairs" at his aunt and uncle’s house on Privet Drive in Little Whinging, Surrey. My apartment, on the top floor of a 1900-era house, is small enough to be called "the closet over the stairs."

It appears the house was converted into apartments sometime in the 1920s, given the "Pullman kitchen" complete with the original gas stove (no pilot light, but the landlord provides a lighter). I have a new refrigerator, as the original one isn’t working.

My neighborhood, the "old east side," appears to be fairly stable, in spite of fact that most of the houses on East Locust have been made into apartments. One block to the north is the Franklin Park Historic District, which includes the onetime home of the first Adlai E. Stevenson, vice president during Grover Cleveland’s second term. A sign in front of the Italianate brick house reads that Stevenson was born in Kentucky in 1835, and attended Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, practiced law in nearby Metamora, then moved back to Bloomington, and was elected to Congress in 1874 and 1878.

Having served two nonconsecutive terms in the House, it was appropriate that he serve in the administrations of the only president elected to two nonconsecutive terms—as first assistant postmaster general from 1885 to 1889, and as vice president from 1893 to 1897.

Another sign honors Letitia Green Stevenson, who was president general of the Daughters of the American Revolution during the years her husband was vice president. That was before the DAR began its successful crusade to alter the Pledge of Allegiance (changing "my flag" to "the flag of the United States of America" to prevent immigrants from pledging to the old country’s flag) or preventing Marian Anderson from singing at their hall. That’s not to suggest that the DAR wasn’t an elitist organization in the 1890s. Any group that requires a pedigree isn’t exactly living up to (lower-case r) republican principles.

Just up the block from Stevenson’s house, another sign marks the residence of Joseph W. Fifer, Republican governor of Illinois from 1889 to 1893. Like Stevenson, he attended Illinois Wesleyan. Perhaps the most fascinating house is across the park from Fifer’s—a red sandstone castle built in the Richardson Romanesque style. The evening I passed it, a tortoiseshell cat was sitting on a low wall, blending into the background.

Another curiosity in the old East Side is the former Moses Montefiore Temple. (Montefiore, in spite of his name, was a British philanthropist.) Its architecture is Moorish, with elements of Greek and Gothic. So we have a former synagogue built in an Islamic style, which later functioned as a Christian church. It's now a private residence. The present temple is out in the subdivisions.

Until last week, I was living out of motels while learning the arcane rules and Byzantine accounting procedures of an Amtrak ticket agent. I remembered that I hated the accounting end of the job, but had forgotten how hellish it was for a mathematically challenged person. I hope I'll get used to it.

The best news I've had is that Classic Trains wants to buy "Magic Summer," an account of my trainriding experiences during the summer of 1967. I recieved an e-mail from Robert McGonigal, the magazine's editor. My wife has decided that he's a distant cousin of Professor Minerva McGonigall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.