Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun Gets an Update with Mixed Results at Steppenwolf

A Raisin in the Sun is an American classic.

Set in post-World War II Chicago and based in large part on her family’s experience, Lorraine Hansberry’s play tells the tale of the Youngers, an African-American family set on realizing their version of the American Dream and buying a house.

But, as they learn, even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the enforcemnt of racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional in the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, the path to homeownership was not a straight line.

After the purchase, the family receives a visit from Karl Linder, a nervous man who presents him as the representative of a homeownership association, and, in essence, offers the family more money than they’ve paid not to move into the community, where they would be the first black neighbors.

Lindner’s visit to the Youngers is the backdrop for Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park, now playing at the Steppenwolf. The play, which earned this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, shows the other side of the home purchase in 1959, and then revisits the scene with the same actors a half century later.

In the first act, Lindner enters the house of Bev and Russ, a couple seeking to sell and leave the bad memories caused by the suicide of their son several years earlier.

Lindner is relentless in pushing Russ to reconsider his purchase because of the negative consequences the move will have for the neighborhood and his property values. In an ironic twist, he has a deaf wife, showing a tolerance for people with disabilities, although Norris explained that artistic choice in an interview by asking who would marry Lindner if he could hear him.

For her part, Bev tries to vanquish her pain by bustling along with excessive good cheer and by making directive comments. Although unappealing at first, she does have moments during the confrontation with Lindner where her acceptance of the Younger family’s rights to live where they choose are a proverbial “save the cat” moment.

Meanwhile, Francine, the family’s long serving and eager to leave maid, finds her polite and deferent veneer punctured at the end of a lengthy and explosive conflict in which her husband Albert tries to intervene physically.

The dialogue is quick and snappy, with Norris capturing certain details like Bev’s lack of knowledge about how many children Francine has.

The second act brings us closer to the present, only the racial tables are turned. Now a white couple wants to move into the neighborhood, and a black couple, representing the community is asking not to make physical alterations to the building that they feel would destroy the architectural integrity

This time, the white husband of the purchasing couple takes offense at what he believes to be the racially motivated request. This is soon followed by a series of race and gender jokes that takes the whole interaction down into a predictable and presumably painful conclusion.

Norris shows how the echoes of the past live on in the house, the community and the nation, as the second act reveals part of the purpose behind many of his choices in the first half. Lindner’s daughter is the lawyer for white couple, for example, and we learn that Karl and Betty moved to Rosemont. Lena, the advocate for architectural integrity, reveals that her great aunt, presumably Ruth Younger, lived in the home.

In a similar vein, lines and even the physical conflict are repeated between black and white, showing the ways in which race continues to bedevil us, even as Barack Obama, based in the same South Side that the Youngers wanted to leave, now holds the nation’s highest office.

Norris said that he was aiming for a white, rather than general, audience, and he succeeds in raising these issues and showing the many layers that collide in the often visceral intersection between personal experience, private property and the lofty promises of the unfettered pursuit of happiness in our nation’s founding documents.

Unfortunately, the work’s power is diluted by the characters’ generally unappealing nature-I found myself drawn to perhaps two of the actors in each act-and the stiff way in which they carried themselves

At no point was I unaware that I was watching a play.

Still, one standard by which a work of art can fairly be evaluated is by the depth of discussion and thought it provokes. Clybourne Park does not explode, as the raisin in the Langston Hughes poem Hansberry alluded to in her work. But it does at least succeed in showing the many layers that collide in the often visceral intersection between personal experience, private property and the lofty promises of the unfettered pursuit of happiness in our nation’s founding documents.

 

New Orleanians’ generosity

It’s little secret that New Orleans is a city that has bewitched and entranced many a visitor, including former fourth grade teacher, mentor and friend Paul Tamburello, who at this point may be accurately termed as having three residences: one in Watertown, a second in Westport, Mass. and a third in the Crescent City.

The city’s brew has many interrelated ingredients.  For some, it is the music that pulses through the city’s squares and streets and clubs and sites official and unofficial.   For others, it’s the gut-expanding, artery-clogging, utterly delicious Creole cuisine of etouffees, red beans and rice with andouille sausage and grilled oysters drenched in cheese.  For yet others, it’s the vibrant fusion of  races and cultures-African, French, Cajun, Creole, Vietnamese and Latino-that give the place its rich history and vibrant future.

And, for still other people, it’s the attitude, the gut-level festive orientation that propels residents to seek and find endless opportunities to, as the often-invoked phrase says, Laissez les bon temps roule.”

For me, it’s all of these, and something different besides.

It’s the generosity.

I saw it surface in yesterday afternoon at an Office Depot near Tulane, where Dunreith and I were picking up some refresher schools supplies for Aidan.

It had been long enough since my morning smoothie that I was starting to feel my stomach rumbling in earnest.

Dunreith asked the woman ringing us out for suggestions to eat on nearby Magazine Street.

The woman at our cash register said she didn’t know because she lives in Metairie, but her colleague on the next one did, and she shared her suggestion with gusto.

She couldn’t remember the name, she said, but she knew the food was excellent.

Meanwhile, the first woman had enlisted the help of a third colleague, a gentleman who told apparently lived much closer to Magazine than the woman who asked him. He said there were plenty of restaurants that would do us just fine, but didn’t want to give a recommendation until he heard from us what kind of food we were looking for at that moment.

But what he could tell us was how to get there-a piece of information the second woman, who knew the restaurant, could not tell us.

The gentleman gave directions.

The second woman produced a piece of paper and pen and wrote down the cross street.

We were on our way.

The interaction probably took a couple of minutes, tops, but had a palpably relaxed and welcome feel.  Each of the three people who we spoke to about what we wanted to eat-remember, this is an office supply store-took the time and care necessary to make us feel that our culinary destination and experience was at least as important as our having found the pencil sharpener, pens and index cards we were buying for Aidan.

Now, there are some people who may chalk this up to the first second stew ingredient I mentioned earlier—the people’s visceral love for area cuisine.  Others could say this was just a function of people being in a working situation, and thereby feeling obligated to tell us whatever we wanted to know.  The much-vaunted Southern hospitality may have been in evidence.

Far be it from me to say they’re wrong, yet I felt something else.

I felt a fundamental decency that treats work as just that, that is not hedonistic, but does see pleasure as pretty important in life, and that is based in a generosity that acknowledges a shared humanity in all of life’s interactions and relationships.

I already had a positive impression of New Orleans, and Dunreith and I are eager to return throughout the next four years that Aidan spends here.

And my appreciation of the place got a little deeper and a little less based on touristy impressions, thanks to the kindness of three employes, who,  as Bobby Simpons of Cranks, Kentucky would say, never met  a stranger.

 

Gratitude for birthday gifts.

I don’t want to beat the proverbial dead horse, and I consider myself a very fortunate man.

While I generally make an effort to register and feel my appreciation on a daily basis, I will be honest and say that birthdays are special ones for me, and not just because Kim Kardashian was born exactly 15 years after I was (Just kidding about the last part.).

The gifts began early this morning, when Dunreith and I went down to the spa at the hotel where we are staying here in New Orleans’ fabled French Quarter.  I rode the recumbent bike while she hit the hot tub, and I was reminded anew of my exercise addiction (As addictions go, it’s a relatively healthy.).

From there we ventured out into the Quarter, passing by a group of street musicians who riffed on the Gershwin class “Summertime,”, two of them playing their “bone,” the lead singer, a woman, making her clarinet sing with equal virtuosity to her voice-all of this happening while a bride-to-be sporting her wedding dress and tennis sneakers struck a pose behind them as her mother, whose facial structure the bride has received, smiled with the kind of indulgent and joyous anticipation can.

Even though it was Friday morning, the weekend’s arrival draped over the square near Cafe du Monde, where another band sat on benches and sang and clapped in unison, “Let the good times roll,” the mighty Mississippi moving in its endless rhythm under a sunny sky.

We stopped into Pirate’s Alley and into the home in the Crescent City where William Faulkner wrote his first novel and that now is a bookstore filled with novels and non-fictional works, like John Updike’s description of Ted Williams’ last game in which hit his 521st home run in his final at bat against Orioles pitcher Jack Fischer-a feat supremely fitting as the closing to a career that saw him realize his goal of being the greatest hitter who ever lived, or at least come awfully close, but somehow did not move him sufficiently to break his vow of never exiting the dugout to tip his hat to the crowd, no matter how much the crowd and even the umpires implored him to do so.

“Gods do not answer letters,” wrote John Updike in a beautifully concise sentence for The New Yorker about Williams’ final blow and refusal.

The bookstore also had on one of the walls copies of a typed Tennessee Williams poems about eyes, complete with edits made in pencils, and a handwritten note by Flannery O’Connor about a 14-part series for NBC about Catholic writers to which she had contributed a comment that she did not know would run.

From the bookstore we entered Mr. Apple, a confectionary store where I bought the tastiest smoothy $7 can buy,  the yogurt, raspberries, walnuts and honey prepared by Momo Julie-she says she has that name because she “acts like a mother”-with supremely loving care.

Julie explained that the family opened the store 40 years ago when friends and family who consumed their tasty treats and suggested they start a business.  A brother had the relevant degree, and so they did.

The speciality: Creole praline, or prah-leen, depending on who is talking.

Julie said she was just using the recipe that had been passed down by her great-great-great-grandmother one generation at a time, from mother to daughter, in kitchen after kitchen.

After that we drove to the Lower Ninth Ward and by the Brad Pitt “Make It Right,” homes, two story, brightly colored, architecturally creative structures perched on stilts that are just tall enough to give the illusion of security, but that would certainly be no match for another hurricane the magnitude of Katrina.

Although many of the homes show signs of life, along with signs for brush clearance, mold removal and home sales, many others still look largely as they did after the biblical deluge subsided more than six years ago.

We met Aidan for dinner and drove to Mosca’s, a roadside legend founded by Al Capone’s former chef, or so the legend goes, Aidan informed us.

While there we dined on food that took an hour to prepare.  I followed Dad’s instructions and ordered the Oyster Mosca, a concoction with enough garlic to require two bottles of Listerine to eliminate the smell.

I loved it.

Aidan’s settled in to college life smoothly, making friends on his floor, playing flag football and lacrosse, studying enough to earn respectable grades and generally holding his own in this new phase of his life.

The conversation between the three of us was animated and easy, with the restlessness and anxiety before his departure gone, replaced by appreciation of what we’ve done for him and what we were sharing together.

Which of course was the point.

People from all different parts of my life told me what we have shared, through Facebook, email, texts, cards and calls.

I heard from friends from Pierce School and Brookline High School, from former students in South Africa and Longmeadow, Massachusetts, from journalism and teaching colleagues and friends, and, of course, from family.

I talked to Mom and, as I do every year on this day, thanked her for having me and making the conversation possible.

I spoke to Dad and told him we had fulfilled the oyster mandate.

I received calls from Aunts Ginna and Helen, from brothers- and sister-in-law Shaun, Rebecca, and Josh, and from both brothers, my best men Mike and Jon.

Returning to the hotel after dropping Aidan off at campus and making plans to meet tomorrow (not too early), watching a film with Dunreith before she started to drift into a sweet slumber, and having space to let all that had happened start to sink in, I felt the gratitude start to sink in and around and through me.

I remembered previous renditions of this day and struggled to believe that it truly has been 25 years since I became of age and thanked a clerk for carding me in Palo Alto.

But, rather than look back, I mostly felt the moment and the love that each of these calls, cards, texts, emails, and post represented.

I am a lucky man indeed.

I have been, and will continue to be.

And, today, in the city that spawned jazz, one of the truest American art forms, and whose residents, even as they are wounded, let their generosity shine through, I felt particularly deeply the gifts I have received from the web of family and friends with whom I have woven my life.

Thank you.

Dan Middleton on Occupy Wall Street

I have been interested in the Occupy Wall Street movement (which was actually incubated and hatched by a small group of Canadiens). It is now known as OWS, and through social media techniques and a reluctant mainstream media, which has basically sneered at the effort, OWS is something to take seriously.

What specifically is behind the movement? Well, initially that was hard to discern, but as the movement has become better organized, the message is clear. Protesters, many of them young and well-educated are maturing into an capitalist society which has become dangerously destabilized through wealth inequality. 

By 2007, the top 1% of the US population controlled 42% of the nation’s wealth and took in about 65% of distributed income. The top 5% controlled a remarkable 70 % of the the nation’s wealth. One would think that since the bursting of the housing bubble and ensuing Great Recession in 2007/2008 these figures would have changed, but they haven’t. Indeed, wages for middle class workers have flatlined since 2000, and despite the severe recession, corporate profits are exceptionally strong. Though job creation in the private sector is improving bit by bit (though not quickly enough), job losses in the public sector (teachers, law enforcement, etc) are about 600,000 since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and many state houses, a year ago. Consumer demand remains weak as people continue to unwind years of accumulated debt, or fear losing their jobs, or live in homes now worth less than what they were bought for; in many cases, people are afflicted with all three of these difficult problems.

[We could slip back into recession, as seems likely in Europe, but I am optimistic we won't. The September retail sales report was the best one in seven months, led by increased sales in the US auto sector (a hearty "thanks!" to President Obama for ignoring Mitt Romney and all the other Republicans in Congress who wanted the 75% of US auto industry to go bankrupt with a loss of 2-3 million jobs).]

So things are tough for many, many people: they, particularly those just entering the labor market, are finding out that the Great Recession was far deeper, and will last much longer than anyone expected. It is an unnerving, even frightening new reality. OWS is essentially a distilled expression of a general nationwide frustration that in these difficult times that call for shared sacrifice and a collective commitment to solve problems, people are keenly aware that those in the top 1 or 2% are not only unaffected by the Great Recession, but thriving. This series of charts makes the case more clearly than my words ever could. I urge you to look them over; it is eye-popping stuff.

I am generally sympathetic to the OWS movement because the numbers don’t lie. Financial inequality in the US has rarely been so stark, which leads to an erosion of faith in the social compact, the essential concept which keeps our American Experiment intact: the idea that opportunities exist for all who strive for them and that in times of trouble or advancing age, there is a safety net to help the unlucky and the vulnerable.

However, one part of me resists OWS because some–and I emphasize–some of its supporters want to do away with capitalism all together. That I can’t support. Capitalism, for all of obvious imperfections, is the economic model we have chosen, and scrapping it altogether for what? makes no sense to me. 

Also, I don’t begrudge money or those who have it; I just want the more fortunate not to be greedy hoarders who pay their allies in Congress or lobbyists handsomely to make sure their contribution to the social compact is minimal. Because when people feel that the US is fast on its way to becoming this,

or the likely nominee for the Republican Party, who made his 250 million dollars by destroying companies and firing people and whose only suggestion to help the economy is to cut taxes even more for the wealthy than George W. Bush is one of these guys,

…yes, that is Mitt Romney center front….then there are reasons to worry deeply about the direction of the country. Not because people make money. Go ahead and make it, but at least give back a bit to a great country which enabled you to do so well. Wonderful Elizabeth Warren succinctly made this point, which is why she will displace the dim-witted Scott Brown as the next junior senator from Massachusetts. 

So this brings me to Washington D.C. where an invigorated president has continued to push hard for the American Jobs Act. As I have written before, it is a sensible, meaningful piece of legislation which independent analysts agree will create or rehire anywhere from 1.8 to 2 million jobs in the public and private sectors, with a focus on infrastructure projects; it would preserve the current $1000 payroll tax due to expire on January 1st, further cut taxes for businesses large and small who hire American workers, particularly veterans returning from the wars; and is paid for by asking those with incomes over one million dollars (0.01% of the population) to pay a 5.6 % tax surcharge. It is a good plan that won’t solve our economic problems by a long shot, but would help a lot of people, add to our growth, and cut the unemployment rate to perhaps 8%.

So far so good. But its debut in the Senate was scuttled this week once again by the Republicans, who, remarkably, filibustered (meaning you need a supermajority of 60 votes to proceed towards a final vote on a bill) the Jobs Act. Every Republican said “no” to even beginning a conversation on the bill. Why? Because a wounded economy hurts the president’s re-election chances. So for a year, the Republicans have done nothing to help the economy. Nothing. And the other reason? They didn’t like the millionaire’s surtax (really? I mean, come on…), though the public strongly support it, as they do all the other parts of the bill. 

Stung by the backlash to yet another filibuster, Senate Republicans put out there own jobs bill at the end of the week, which was immediately panned as the same austerity economics they love (no government spending, meaning public sector jobs disappear, which further depresses overall growth; austerity simply doesn’t work in times of economic recession. Just look how badly the U.K. has falteredsince severe austerity measures were enacted there last year.)

But the president is not backing down. Next week, he and Senate Democrats will break the American Jobs Act into its component parts, and force the Republicans to vote on things the public likes. First on the agenda will be the public sector portion of the bill. Republicans disdain teachers, firefighters, police, park rangers, i.e., people whose salary is paid for by taxes. But these people are admired and valued by the public. The president values them, and wants to either hire or rehire as many as he can (after all, they spend money, too, just like private sector workers). The president will force the Republicans  to explain their animosity to public sector workers in a time of economic difficulty. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but the president is certainly no more Mr. Compromise with the Party of No in regard to this very important jobs bill.

Meanwhile in the House, Republicans spent their time not on economic matters, but once again, abortion. In the Orwellian titled “Protect Life Act”, is a bill that would deny any hospital which receives federal funding in the form of Medicare and Medicaid (is there a hospital which doesn’t?) from performing an emergency abortion in a case where a pregnancy has gone terribly wrong. So, in an effort to preserve the “sanctity of life”, Republicans would put a woman in a situation where not only would the baby likely die, but the mother as well. The bill passed, but thankfully, President Obama will veto yet another egregious assault on women.

But Republicans will keep trying this stuff over and over again until they are confronted, and defeated at the ballot box. So put on your marching shoes.

Jack Crane brings Slavoj Zizek into the Occupy Wall Street conversation

So my wife, Michele, asks me this morning, “what do you think about Occupy Wall Street?” as I tighten my tie and head off to Chicago’s Wall Street (LaSalle Street). “I have no idea,” says I, “but it is getting interesting, no?”

Slavoj Zizek is a leading intellectual (whatever that means) from Slovenia (wherever that is), and he spoke at Occupy Wall Street. I think he captures what a lot of us have been wrestling with as we grapple with our growing economic chaos. Here is a transcript:

Subject: Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street

In the 2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like – oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?

Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…

Part Two

….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.

Mic check

We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.

The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.

We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!
Last Note

This is only a part of the entire speech he gave today, and if it was recorded in its entirety we’d be very glad to have a copy for transcription purposes.

(Thank you to everyone who offered transcripts, we had multiple offers)

An Open Letter to Red Sox Fans

Dear fellow Red Sox fans,

Admit it.

Isn’t this just a little bit fun?

I mean, we’ve had an incredible run in the past decade with John, Larry, Theo and Terry.

The agonizing Game 7 loss to the Yankees in 2003 when Grady Little left Pedro in too long and Aaron Boone, of all people, went yard in extra innings off of a valiant Tim Wakefield-a blow that led my brother Mike to call from California, and say, with absolutely no hint of irony or hyperbole, “The Holocaust. Rwanda.  The Yankees over the Red Sox. Must evil always triumph over good?”

The self-described “bunch of idiots” who did what no other club had ever done before in winning four straight from the same Yankees of A-Roid, Jeter and Matsui, then sweeping the Cardinals for the first championship in 86 years.

The retooled lineup getting down 3-1 to the Cleveland Indians and feeling, rather than certain it was over, we had them right where we wanted them.

Seven games later, a second championship.

Beyond the victories, the team moved beyond the racist roots of the Red Sox, who were the last team to employ a black player and who were routinely listed as the least desirable club for black and Latino players.

To me, it all started coming a bit easy for us.

The bandwagon fans who joined the mythical “nation.”

The endless spending that placed us in the very upper echelons of teams.

The arrogant expectation that we would simply win every year.

You see, I came up in the 70s and 80s.  While there were a lot of adjectives you could use to describe Red Sox fans of our vintage, smug was not in the top 10.

I’d venture to say it wasn’t in the top 100.

Insanely informed and knowledgeable?  Yup.

Intensely pasionate? Check.

Hoping against hope that things would work out, but somehow knowing that it would all come down in the end?  You got it.

I grew up that way.

I turned 10 years old the night Carlton Fisk waved his Game 6 home run fair, then barged through the fans who had stormed the field.  It was a classic moment that lives on to this day, but the fact remains that Joe Morgan’s Game 7 single won the series for the Reds, not us.

I was 12 going on 13 in the summer of ’78, and remember as if it was yesterday scoffing at my mother, a Brooklyn native, when she said in July the race was not over when the Sox were 13 games up on the Yankees.

I lived Bucky Dent and Yaz flying out to end the 5-4 playoff game with Rick “the Rooster” Burleson in scoring position.

I had just turned 21 the night that the hobbled Bill Buckner let Mookie Wilson’s ground ball go through his legs.  I knew then we didn’t even need to watch Game 7, which, if you care to think about it, also saw the Red Sox take an early lead that we somehow knew would go away.

I remember the agony, and, while it was tough, it was part of me. It formed me, made me grittier, just that bit more skeptical toward the world.

This September has brought that back.

The Sox didn’t just lose, they collapsed in unprecedented fashion, blowing a nine game lead and playing .259 baseball the entire month.

The aftermath has been even uglier, as management has leaked unseemly details about Francona’s life and former wunderkind Theo Epstein, another Brookline native, is apparently preparing to come here to Chicago to help another historic franchise to break its curse.   And Big Papi, the ultimate Yankee slayer, is making approving comments about our enemies-a potential first step, some say, in what could be the first step in the ultimate betrayal.

It’s been ugly.

It’s been toxic.

Yet it’s also gotten us back in some ways to our roots.

The epic failure revives some of the gut-level insecurity we carried with us for generations.

The ownership dysfunction brings back the worst of the Yawkeys and Haywood Sullivan combined.

And, as always, the haunting specter of the Yankees looms.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not happy we lost.

I think the way ownership treated Tito is reprehensible.

I’m definitely sorry to see Theo conclude he has to go.

But I am glad that the smugness is gone.

And, if we had to go down, I’m glad we did it in memorable and classic Red Sox fashion.

One of the questions Red Sox fans asked for generations was, “What will we do if we actually win?”

We’ve found out.

Now it’s time for a different chapter.

I, for one, am excited.

I hope you are, too.

Jeff

 

 

Thinking of Gary Adelman

My thoughts tonight are with Gary Adelman, my mother’s cousin who really has been like an uncle to me.

He’s in his mid-70s, but, in many ways, never should have lived this long.

After contracting a case of childhood diabetes, he went blind by the time he was 25. This means that the last images he saw were in the late 50s and early 60s.

At age 44, his mother Estelle gave him a kidney-he called it “a gift of life twice given”-that was supposed to last for five years at most.

It lasted 22.

Phyllis, his devoted wife, happened to be a match with Gary and donated one of her kidneys to him seven or eight years ago.

Some people would have led this and the other difficulties caused by diabetes defeat them, but not Gary.

He finished his doctoral studies in English at Columbia University and began a more than 40-year career as a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I’ve had the privilege of walking next to him many times, and can say first hand that for him many of the characters in his beloved Dostoyevsky, Conrad, or Beckett are at least as alive to him as the people walking next to him.

Conversation with Gary is a combination contact sport and Socratic dialogue. You best come prepared, too, because with his Brooklyn roots and love of verbal combat, he’ll root out any inconsistency or equivocation in your positions or ideas.

Possessing a near photographic memory, he’s also become more and more productive as a scholar as technology has made it much easier for him to write than before computers existed.

Gary’s always been a loving critic and fierce supporter of my projects and life path, and, for that and the connection to the Adelman side of the family, I’m enormously grateful.

Now, though, he’s ailing and possibly heading toward the end of his life.

We spoke yesterday, and, while he wanted me to give him a full, rather than summary report of Mike and Annie’s wedding he wanted so desperately to attend, he was too tired at that moment to hear it, but not so exhausted that he could not summon Don Quixote’s words:

The next time we speak

Make haste: tell me all, and let not

an atom be left behind in the ink-bottle.

We talked again this morning, and his voice was stronger.

“My spirits are good,” he told me this morning after comparing himself to early twentieth century Poland, surrounded by hostile empires but still proudly flying its flag high.

I hope they stay that way.

It’s been a full season of life and death for us these days and months.

In less than an hour Dunreith and I will leave to pick up Aidan, who is returning home for fall break after his first half-semester in college.

As we drive down Lake Shore Drive, I’m sure my thoughts at some point will drift to my valiant and much-loved Gary, and to the hope, perhaps fanciful, that we will again soon be able to talk as we have so that no atom remains in the ink bottle.

 

Danny Postel advances the climate change discussion.

There are several things you can count on in life besides the proverbial death and taxes.

The first is that Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak will never be broken.

The second is that no one will ever match Ted Williams’ .406 average in 1941.

And the third is that Danny Postel has an email list for any topic imaginable.

Teaching. South Africa.  Obama.  Parenting.

These are four of the lists that my dear friend and uber-connector-cultural doyenne Lois Weisberg, the protagonist in one of the chapters in  Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, has nothing on Danny-has placed me on in the past decade.

Today I joined another one: the climate change.

In his typically generous fashion, Danny responded to learning about my upcoming trip to South African by sending me the link to a book review by Michael Lynn he edited for The Common Review, information about Christian Parenti’s new book on the intersection of climate change and neo-liberal economic policy and two links.

Here’s an excerpt from Danny’s email:

My friend Mike Lynn here in Chicago follows the issue about as closely as anyone I know. In the one print edition of The Common Review that came out under my editorship, he reviewed the book Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change by Clive Hamilton. You can find his review here:

http://www.thecommonreview.org/article/archive/2011/01/article/the-future-looks-impossible.html

If you haven’t already, you might want to get your hands on Christian Parenti’s new book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. I’ll send you a recent interview with him on the subject. 

And here are some highlights from the two links he sent.

This first from Michelle Chen for ColorLines:

Over the next few decades, tens of millions of people will be driven from their homes. Braving violence and poverty, they’ll roam desperately across continents and borders in search of work and shelter. Unlike other refugees, though, their plight won’t be blamed simply on the familiar horrors of war or persecution; they’ll blame the weather.

If you haven’t heard about the rising tide of environmental migrants, that’s because throngs of displaced black and brown people don’t evoke the same public sympathy as photos of polar bear cubs. The governments of rich industrialized nations will scramble to shut the gates on the desperate hordes with the same self-serving efficiency with which they’ve long ignored the social, ecological and economic consequences of their prosperity. But both efforts at blissful ignorance will fail, because climate change is forcing society to confront the mounting natural and man-made disasters on the horizon.

And here’s a key question from interviewer Michael Busch and answer Parenti in interview Danny mentioned and sent:

Michael Busch: I wanted to begin by briefly touching on the book’s title and, more importantly, discussing the theoretical concept that largely gives shape to the book’s narrative arc: what you refer to as the “catastrophic convergence.”Can you give us a sense of what you mean by each and talk about how they informed your research and analysis? 

Christian Parenti: The “tropic of chaos” is less important than the “catastrophic convergence.” The tropic of chaos is more of a play on words that refers to the conditions in the Global South, which is that belt of post-colonial, underdeveloped, over-exploited states that mostly lie between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. So, it’s sort of a name for that region of the world.

The “catastrophic convergence” is the driving thesis of the book, the argument that climate change doesn’t just look like tornadoes, floods, and droughts. It also looks like religious violence, ethnic pogroms, civil war, state failure, mass migration, counterinsurgency and anti-immigrant border militarization. And so, climate change rarely works on its own. Usually, it arrives in the Global South on a stage preset for crisis. The forces that have preset that stage are militarism and radical free-market restructuring—neoliberalism. Cold War militarism, and now the War on Terror, have flooded the Global South with cheap weapons and men trained in the arts of assassination and interrogation, smuggling, small unit attacks, and terrorism.  Neoliberalism has created increased poverty, increased inequality, and a tattered and stressed social fabric. As a result, it leads to less social solidarity. It damages and degrades traditional economies. And it makes more populations more vulnerable to sudden weather shocks, extreme climatic events like drought and flooding, which are due to anthropogenic climate change kicking in hard. And it is combining with these two preexisting crises—militarism and inequality/poverty—and the three of them are meeting in this catastrophic convergence and articulating themselves as increased violence. That can be religious violence, ethnic violence, sometimes class-based violence. Sometimes this is expressed as chaos and relative or outright state failure. 

But in the Global North, the catastrophic convergence presents itself as a renewed emphasis on building-up the incipient police state that exists in many western European countries as well as the United States. So, we now have a reengagement with the discourse around border militarization, a reanimation of the xenophobic discourse that goes with those policies, which are increasingly articulated in environmental terms—there’s an environmental crisis; there’s not enough to go around; immigrants need to be rounded up; everybody needs to sacrifice some civil liberties; the border needs to be militarized. If climate change pushes chaos and state failure in the Global South, it creates authoritarian state hardening in the Global North, at least in its earliest stages.

Provocative stuff, and just the beginning of my deepening understanding of one of, if not the most, critical issues our planet faces.

I’ll share more of what I read and learn here.

Chances are high that Danny will have a part in both.

Shades of Kennedy in the Making of Obama

It’s probably hard to remember at this moment, between his getting hammered on every conceivable front from his would-be Republican opponents to his erstwhile supporters occupying a web of cities and hamlets radiating out from Wall Street, but there was a time not that long ago when Barack Obama was a fresh-faced 40-something candidate for president who shattered all kinds of barriers on his way to claiming the presidency in November 2008.

There have been plenty of books, an outpouring really, about every aspect of Obama’s campaign to his presidency, and I am finding all kinds of parallels between his quest for the nation’s highest political office and that of another charismatic yet emotionally aloof, lean, Harvard-educated Senator with a flair for writing and an attractive wife who set all kinds of fashion standards.

I am referring of course to Brookline’s own John F. Kennedy, who became the youngest elected president in the 20th century, who invited an aging Robert Frost to read at his inauguration where he stood without a hat and delivered a harsh if inspiring message to the nation and the world.

Kennedy devotee Theodore White chronicled his ultimately successful journey to the presidency in The Making of the President, 1960, and I’m having a terrific time making my way through it.

The pleasure comes both from the writing-White actually appears in David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, about the media-which is on full display, especially in the book’s opening chapter, which describes Kennedy’s agonizing wait on Election Day for the results from the voters who will determine his fate.

Yet it’s also enjoyable for its prescience and for its description of the electoral system, which has only morphed and expanded in the ensuing half century.

Then, Kennedy, after winning the first primary against Hubert Humphrey  in Wisconsin, expected the contest to be over, and in fact was irritated, if not enraged, at the Minnesotan’s failure to do so.

Also lurking in the wings was Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic standard bearer who hoped to be drafted at the Los Angeles convention.

The time frame-Kennedy spent a year all told-the scale of money, and the role of the primary all seem miniscule compared with the arduous 20-month churn that has become standard fare for presidency seekers of both major parties.

The delegates’ and bosses’ roles do appear to have diminished, which is on the whole an advance for democracy if not for government as the primary season, even with Super Tuesday, essentially means that little substantial governance happens in the entire year leading up to the first Tuesday in November every four years.

I’ve not yet gotten to the Republican side of things, and am eager to do so.

In the meantime, we are rapidly approaching the number of days in Obama’s tenure when Kennedy was assassinated  during his term.  Obama’s plummeting poll numbers may make him yearn for the days of his candidacy, when his hair was not coated in grey and he was able to promise more than try to deliver on his thus far thwarted plans of transformational change.

White’s book is not only a primer on the American system, it is a reminder of how our democracy remains an imperfect work in progress in which we have made progress in some areas yet have oh so far to go in others.

Heading back to Durban, South Africa to cover climate change.

This is a big one.

I received word last week that I have been selected to represent Hoy and attend the COP 17 conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The gathering will be held in Durban, South Africa, just a few miles south from where I taught and coached at the Uthongathi School during the 1995-1996 school year as part of the Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.

As you can read in the release below, I’ll be joined by 17 other journalists from around the world-we’re talking everywhere from Argentina to China, Nigeria to India, Malawi to Brazil, to name just a few-all of whom actively cover the issue of climate change.

Our attendance is sponsored by the Climate Change Media Partnership, a joint initiative between the International Institute for Environment and Development, Internews and Panos London to improve media coverage of climate change. Since 2007 it has provided over 170 fellowships to enable journalists to attend and report on the UN climate change negotiations.

This conference is particularly critical because UN talks in Durban could spell either the demise or rebirth of the Kyoto Protocol.

In all, we’ll spend two weeks  reporting on the intergovernmental negotiations and receiving training, editorial support, special briefings from senior scientists and a field trip, among other activities.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled and honored beyond belief.

I’ll keep you posted about the preparations for the big trip, and, for now, just wanted to share the good news.

Here’s the text of the release:

Journalists win fellowships to report on key climate-change conference

Submitted by Mike on Wed, 05/10/2011 – 17:23

The Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) has awarded journalists from 14 countries with fellowships to attend crucial UN talks in Durban that could spell the demise or rebirth of the Kyoto Protocol.

The 18 journalists – from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States – will spend two weeks at the COP17 conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to report on the intergovernmental negotiations and receive training, editorial support, special briefings from senior scientists and a field trip, among other activities.

“Without the CCMP, many countries would have zero media representation at the UN negotiations,” says James Fahn of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network. “Now, millions of people worldwide will get locally relevant media reports about what is going on at the conference, as negotiators make decisions that could affect our lives for many years.”

The CCMP is a joint initiative between the International Institute for Environment and Development, Internews and Panos London to improve media coverage of climate change. Since 2007 it has provided over 170 fellowships to enable journalists to attend and report on the UN climate change negotiations.

“The CCMP fellowship improves the skills of journalists as they grapple with complex climate change issues,” says Tim Williams of Panos London. “It also provides opportunities for journalists to meet leading scientists and policy-makers from around the world and build lasting relationships with them and other networks over the years ahead.”

Around 700 journalists — almost 100 more than last year — applied for the fellowships through a highly competitive process.

“We are excited at the thought of working with a new cohort of CCMP fellows, and would like to bring more of the top candidates,” says Mike Shanahan of IIED. “Former CCMP fellows have gone on to become leading climate change journalists in their countries and part of a growing global family that is committed to quality reporting on this issue.”

The CCMP will publish stories from the COP17 conference on its website — www.climatemediapartnership.org — which provides a platform for the fellows’ climate-change reporting and useful resources for other journalists.

The 2011 fellows and their media outlets are: Maria Gabriela Ensinck (El Cronista Comercial, Argentina); Flavia Moraes (O Eco, Brazil); Li Jing (China Daily, China); Lorenzo Morales (Semana, Colombia); Stella Paul (Planet Earth, India); Isyana Artharini (Yahoo! Indonesia, Indonesia); Carol Francis (TVJ, Jamaica); Tiwonge Ng’ona (The Guardian Newspaper, Malawi); Chrisjan Appollus (Namibian Broadcasting Corporation, Namibia); Armsfree Ajanaku (The Guardian Newspapers Ltd, Nigeria); Faisal Raza Khan (DAWN News, Pakistan); Dave Durbach (Daily Sun, South Africa); Sean Christie (Mail and Guardian newspaper, South Africa); Fidelis Zvomuya (Agriconnect Communication Media, South Africa); Hasina Mjingo (Tanzania Standard Newspaper Limited); Deodatus Mfugale (Journalists Environmental Association of Tanzania); Heather King (Greenbiz.com, United States) and Jeff Kelly Lowenstein (Hoy, United States).