The Electron Pencil

Just watched the Humphrey Bogart movie, “Knock on Any Door ” (1949).

It was an example of the many movies Hollywood started putting out after World War II that today would be called “woke.”

Bogart not only starred in it, he formed a company called Santana Productions to actually make the film. In doing so, he infuriated the big shot Hollywood studio heads like Harry Cohn at Columbia, Adolph Zukor and Barney Balaban at Paramount, and Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox who were scared to death that other major movie stars would start forming their own production companies and weaken their iron grip on the industry.

Hollywood had flirted with liberal, socially-conscious movies in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Before the War, audiences saw “message” movies like “Dead End,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Our Daily Bread,” and the most left-leaning, almost socialist of all, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Those movies were often called “populist,” back when the term meant something other than adoration and fealty for a bronzed, combed-over oaf. Hollywood became, more or less, a propaganda arm of the US government during the War and then, once the Axis Powers had been defeated, began inching its way back to throwing shade at the inequities and oppressions of capitalist America.

“Knock on Any Door” was the story of a first-generation Italian-American hood named Nick Romano (John Derek in his first screen role). He’s been running afoul of the law since he was a teenager and has consistently made the wrong decisions in his life. Then one night, after a cop has been shot and killed point blank in a dark alley, all the known hoods, punks, reprobates, smart alecks, and hooligans are rounded up. The cops decide one of them, Nick Romano, was the killer.

Panicky, he reaches out to a lawyer named Andrew Morton (Bogart). Morton grew up in the same neighborhood Romano did but resisted temptations and turned himself into a respected attorney. He believes Nick Romano when the young man swears he didn’t kill the cop and goes on to defend him at trial. Morton tells the story, in flashbacks, of how an innocent kid could be turned into a delinquent when forced to grow up in abject poverty, where the cops assume the worst about him, where jobs are scarce even for people with clean records, and where toughs have money cars, and nice clothes.

The “message” of the film is it’s society’s fault young guys go bad. Nicholas Ray directed “Knock on Any Door” and revisited the theme, in part, six years later with “Rebel Without a Cause.”

It’s funny to watch how some of these themes evolved through the years in Hollywood movies. In the 1960s and ’70s, starting with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Easy Rider,” criminals became heroes (or anti-heroes). Then, by the 1980s, White people, dipping their toes into “bad” neighborhoods and “rescuing” punks and dropouts from their fate became so prevalent the trend was turned into a punchline.

Now, of course, socially conscious movies are passé. There are only Marvel superhero movies and money-losers. And on television, for the last couple of decades-plus, bad guys, criminals like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Tommy Shelby, Nucky Thompson, and Dwight Manfredi have become male role models. You doubt me? Try reading the comments under YouTube clips from those shows.

In any case, back to “Knock on Any Door.” It was heavy-handed and offered facile observations about life in the slums. Nevertheless, I loved it because it tried to delve into the complexities of our Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth. It didn’t have to be right. It just had to try.

Now, the movie was based on the 1947 novel of the same name written by newspaperman Willard Motley. He wrote a column called “Bud Says,” for children, using the pen name Bud Billiken.

Throughout my childhood, every August there’d be a big shebang on the South Side of Chicago called the Bud Billiken Back-to-School Parade. It celebrated the end of summer vacation and featured floats, marching bands, politicians wearing sashes, choreographed majorettes, huge banners for local businesses, and was always telecast live on a Saturday morning on WGN.

All the marchers in the parade were Black. As was Bud Billiken. As was Willard Motley. The newspaper he qwrote the column for, the Chicago Defender, was the leading Black daily in America.

“Knock on Any Door” was only the second major motion picture ever based on a novel written by a Black person. I don’t know of the novel was similarly heavy-handed and offered facile takes on life in the slums because I haven’t read it. Motley had founded the Hull House magazine and was part of FDR’s Federal Writers Project so I’ll bet his book was more nuanced and penetrating. And I do know Hollywood had to make the characters White in order for the movie to be shown around the country.

It reminds me of how the murder victim in “Crossfire” (1947) had to be made a Jew and the evil to be overcome was anti-semitism when the book the movie was based on had a homosexual being beaten to death and the then-gay demimonde was explored.

We’ve come a long way since then.

I have to keep repeating that, otherwise I’d get awfully depressed reading today’s headlines.

The last time I felt optimistic about America, this self-imagined “beacon on a hill,” was, to be precise, the evening of Tuesday, November 4, 2008.

That date might ring a bell for you. It was the night Barack Obama was declared the winner in that year’s United States presidential election.

That night I bought into the pronouncements by so many wits and wags that this nation had at last advanced beyond its racist past, that we were hurtling headlong into what some had already dubbed a “post-racial America.”

Hah!

Now I realize I was as self-deluded as all those state lottery jackpot winners who told themselves their problems are over, that they’ll be on easy street for the rest of their lives.

You know, all those folks who pissed away their prize money and now they have nothing left but empty bank accounts, insuperable debts, alienated friends and family, and even thoughts of suicide. Or at least the wish that, their god willing, they’ll go to sleep tonight and never wake up tomorrow morning.

We — I — pissed away something, too. Something different, even more dear than dough. We pissed away every ounce of goodwill and hope that we imagined Obama’s election would endow us with. We Americans value precious little, being smug participants in a throw-away, consumer culture. We figure even if we smash, lose, mar, stash, or forget about every goddamned thing we ever bought, owned, inherited, or found under the cushions, we can always get another one. Hell, get me over to Walmart or link me to Amazon, it’s no big deal, I’ll just buy a replacement. Whatever it is.

Problem is, there will never be another First Black Man Elected President of the United States of America, as symbolic an event as ever occurred here. There’ll never — ever — be that sublime moment, that opportunity, for us to atone and move past one of our nation’s cardinal sins, the creation of an empire so hugely dependent on the stolen labor of a kidnapped people and the subsequent institutional marginalization of their daughters and sons.

We were thisclose to absolving ourselves of that sin.

Or so we though at the time. So I thought.

We were deluded. I was deluded. As deluded as a certain other ex-Commander-in-Chief about the outcome of the 2020 election.

At least my — our — delusion was positive. Optimistic. Actually, Pollyannish. And, like all Pollyanna’s dreams, it was impossible.

We thought the racists, the haters, the twisted supremacists and the nativists and the proto- and crypto- and Neo-fascists, the militia members, the Hitler idolators, the Confederate flag wavers, the survivalists, the paranoiacs arming themselves against the hordes of Mexicans and Muslims and other brown-skinned people as well as the feminists and homosexuals who are right around the corner for Christ’s sake, the droolers chomping at the bit for the coming civil war, all those people, in short, whom we perceived to be such a laughable, tiny minority back in 2008, would henceforth scuttle back under their rocks and never again show their faces in polite society.

Only our society has turned out to be not quite so polite.

The starter’s pistol shot came the moment Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell declared the entire aim of his party was to make the Barack Obama presidency a failure. But the dash actually had begun years — decades — before that. The bullet had been supplied by Newt Gingrich 15 years before when he laid out his nefarious plan, the infamous GOPAC Memo, roadmapping the GOP’s plan to turn Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, and anyone not four-square in line with his new order into enemies of right and good. Enemies of the state.

And even before Gingrich, there were the Birchers and other obsessives who actually believed figures as apple pie-ish as Dwight Eisenhower were radical dangers to the nation. To mix my metaphors, they were the ones who planted the seeds that sprouted, eventually, into the America we live in today.

Seeds. Bullets. Take your pick. It doesn’t matter one whit.

For years — decades — we thought that hateful, paranoiac gang, all of them, were outliers, so few in numbers and so isolated from each other that they couldn’t get anyone elected dogcatcher. Republican strategists, though, recognized them as a reliable, rock-solid bloc that’d provide the party with a foundation in every election from the local to the national.

We’d underestimated their numbers and then the internet served to connect them all, instantaneously. And certain 24-hour news peddlers went to work on the psyches of tens of millions of people who otherwise would have been repelled by them. Suddenly, Mom and Pop America found themselves sharing fears and grievances with heretofore whackos.

Add clever gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and strategic judicial appointees at every court level, and voila, Republicans now control most state governorships, most statehouses, and, most important, the United States Supreme Court. This despite the fact that a slim majority of Americans support the Democratic Party over the Republican.

While the coalition that came together to put a black man in the White House in 2008 and then reelect him in 2012 was drifting off to sleep, believing with all our hearts our problems were over and we’d be on easy street for the rest of our lives, the Republican Party worked harder and more passionately than ever to take over and manipulate every niche and nook of our country, from dogcatcher to school board member to county commissioner to governor and, at last, to president. Even though the Democratic nominee for president has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight national elections, the Republican have captured the White House on three separate occasions in that time. Those Republicans have named five of the current justices serving on the United States Supreme Court. The court that this past session has remade America. And that promises to further remodel it in coming terms.

The Republicans achieved their gains though brilliant planning, both long-term and short, and hard work.

The Democrats, the Liberals, the Progressives, and even the silent middle that often leans slightly left, snoozed. I snoozed as much as anybody. The alarm is ringing. It’s morning in Trump’s America.

From The Pencil’s correspondent, District 9 delegate Cathi Crabtree, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at 5:00pm:

I am so excited to be here! The gavel just started the convention and it is so exciting! Still feeling very honored and privileged to be a delegate for Hillary Rodham Clinton!

Proceedings have started and I’m getting so angry with the radical Berners who are disrupting this historical event.

But I’m proud of the Indiana Bernie delegates for behaving with dignity.

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The Big Time

One of our town’s youngest and brightest journalism stars just may be leaving Bloomington for a post with a major NPR affiliate soon.

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I can’t wait to break the good news here, if indeed good news is in the offing.

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Play Nice

Maxxwell Bodenheim points out some excellent advice for Hillary in the pages of The Nation. Writer D.D. Guttenplan offers the presumptive Dem nominee for prez five useful tips if she wishes to sweet talk a sufficient number of Bernie supporters to her camp for the Nov. election. They are:

1. Back off.
2. Try to be genuinely gracious.
3. Listen to Bernie
4. Change the rules, even though they helped you win.
5. Take the fight to Trump.

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Read the entire piece (it’s not long at all) for details. One good thing: Hillary already seems to have moved on from fingering Bernie as the opposition and has pointed in recent weeks exclusively at Donald Trump.

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Detention?

Why did the FBI raid the offices of the Vigo County School Corporation yesterday? The feds, w/ help from the Indiana State Police, seized items but they’re not named. In fact, no info is forthcoming from either the FBI, the ISP, or the school board.

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The first thing that came to my mind was child porn. Did one or more central office employees download kid stuff on corp. computers?

My pal Pat thinks it’s more likely the feds are interested in contract hijinks — kickbacks and bribes in exchange for school corp. business.

Either way, a certain number of public employees in Terre Haute must be walking around these days in a constant state of panic.

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June 9th Birthdays

Elizabeth Garret Anderson — The queen of firsts: she was the first female surgeon in England, co-founded the first hospital staffed by women, the first medical doctor in France, and the first female mayor in England.

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Cole Porter — Indiana-born composer and lyricist. The scion of an extremely wealthy Peru, Indiana, family, he lived in Paris for a time, where he married a Kentucky-born heiress. Their apartment was decorated in platinum wallpaper and zebra-skin upholstery.

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Les Paul — Born Lester Polsfuss, Paul helped develop the solid-body electric guitar. He built his first such instrument in 1940, using a block of pine wood to which he affixed a pickup and strings. Historians credit Paul’s innovation with facilitating the development of rock ‘n roll. Paul recorded with his wife, the singer and guitarist Mary Ford.

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Robert McNamara — Former Ford Motor Company president who was named US Sec’y of Defense by John F. Kennedy and continued in that role through most of Lyndon Johnson’s term. McNamara was part of the brilliant, Ivy League-educated group of JFK advisors whom author David Halberstam nicknamed ‘the best and the brightest.” Despite their smarts, these advisors pushed for and succeeded in getting America stuck on the quagmire of Vietnam.

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Patricia Cornwell — Bestselling mystery novelist; she’s sold +100 million books. Her series of novels with lead character Dr. Kay Scarpetta, helped popularize the forensic work of medical examiners. Cornwell had an affair with the wife of an FBI agent in the early 1990s; the affair came to light when the woman’s husband attempted to murder her.

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On this date in the year 68 BCE, Nero died. Born Nerō Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, he succeeded the reasonable, more republican Claudius as emperor of Rome in 54 BCE. The old line about him fiddling while Rome burned was a canard. The violin had not yet been invented at that time. The historian Tacitus writes that Nero was out of town at the time of the fire. In any case, by the time of the fire Nero had become extremely unpopular (justifiably), so rumor mongers were eager to portray him in an unflattering light at any opportunity. Nero decided to kill himself in 68 BCE, but lacked the courage to do so. He begged and ordered any number of advisors, guards, and colleagues to stab him to death. All refused until he finally persuaded his private secretary to kill him.

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Blue-Eyed Soul Brothers (and Sisters)

For some odd reason, this old chestnut jumped into my mind. Well, it is May, isn’t it? Enjoy:

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It charted in the spring of 1969. Wikipedia characterizes the band’s music as a cross between “blue-eyed soul and beach music,” although this 45 was unmistakably ska.

This makes me think: What were the greatest blue-eyed soul acts ever?

Here are a few of them:

• Average White Band
• Hall and Oates
• The Righteous Brothers
• The Rascals
• Paul Butterfield Blues Band
• The Doobie Brothers
• Tower of Power
• Lisa Stansfield
• Eric Burden and the Animals
• David Bowie
• Dion
• Tom Jones
• The Spencer Davis Group
• Rod Stewart
• Tony Joe White

Quite a few other solo and group acts have been categorized as B-ES — for instance, Three Dog Night and George Michael — but I arbitrarily rule them out because either I don’t like them or whoever categorized them thusly was flat-out wrong.

Anyway, who’s your fave?

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Understanding Studs

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Studs Terkel’s birth. I adored Studs. He was one of the most sincere, thoughtful, sensitive, unaffected people I’d ever met in my life. I patterned much of my writing after him, using a tape recorder and then, eventually, a digital recorder, placed unobtrusively to the side as I interviewed people at length and in depth, reaching as far as I could into their pasts and their memories.

Studs spoke at Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s first inauguration, which was fitting. There was no more liberal or progressive guy around than Studs — unless it was Harold. Then, after a few pretenders tried to fit into Harold’s shoes after he died of a massive heart attack the day after Thanksgiving, 1987, Richie Daley, son of the first Boss Daley, finally won election as mayor in 1989. Daley selected Saul Bellow to speak at his inauguration and political columnist Steve Neal, no progressive, hoorah-ed that Chicagoans wouldn’t have to endure Studs’ “stale polemics.” Neal then insulted Studs by calling him nothing more than a “recordist.”

I never read Steve Neal again after that.

Harold Could Charm Even Those Who Hated Him

[Photo By Marc PoKempner]

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Studs would have shrugged his shoulders at Neal’s broadsides. I believe in his most private moments such sans souci would have held. He really didn’t care what critics said about him. He wrote about human beings, reaching almost into their souls, his famed Uher reel-to-reel recorder spinning away next to him and his subjects.

Oh, and he would have said to me, “Why are you using terms like sans souci? Who are you tryin’ to impress?”

You want an example of how down-to-earth Studs was? He was married to the same woman, Ida Goldberg, for 60 goddamned years until she died. Hell, I’ve had a hard enough time living with myself for 60 years.

Well before US gov’t eavesdropping became a hot topic thanks to Edward Snowden, Studs in 2006 was part of a federal lawsuit to stop AT&T from turning customer phone records over the the National Security Administration just for the asking. Studs and his co-litigants said, Hey, how about a court order?

It’s not surprising, therefore to learn that Studs was a victim of the McCarthy-era blacklist. Terkel was big in Chicago TV, hosting Studs’ Place, set in a stage barroom with notable figures from literature, politics, film, activism, and other fascinating fields dropping in for conversation. The show is considered one of the defining pieces of the Chicago School of Television. No matter. Studs had rubbed shoulders with too many iffy characters whose favorite colors were pink or even red. His television career came to a screeching halt.

My favorite book by Studs was Talking to Myself, A Memoir of My Times. In one chapter he recounts bringing British journalist James Cameron to Lincoln Park to observe the Sunday night clash between Chicago Police — yelling “Kill! Kill! Kill!” as they charged — and a ragamuffin group of anti-war protesters during Democratic Convention week, 1968. Studs and Cameron eventually sought refuge in the Lincoln Hotel at Wells and Clark streets, where they mingled with the likes of playwright Jean Genet, poet Allen Ginsberg, author William S. Burroughs, and screenwriter Terry Southern, also eager not to have their skulls caved in by cops’ billy clubs.

Blood Flowed At Lincoln Park

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Oddly, Studs never waxed with rage at things like that police riot. He viewed such infamy almost with the remove of a zoologist witnessing a cheetah bringing an impala down and tearing into its abdomen. Violence, Studs seemed to convey, is what we visit upon each other. It’s our normality.

One of Studs’ books, The Great Divide, featured a long interview with wealthy socialite Sugar Rautbord. One reporter once called her the “outspoken blonde at the top of the social heap in Chicago.” Sugar ate only at the most exclusive restaurants, wore only the chicest designer fashions, knew only the hottest models and photographers. It’s said she once rode around a city she was visiting in a limousine filled with her luggage after the hotel she was supposed to have stayed at had screwed up her reservation. She later claimed bouncing from hotel to hotel — the city was hosting some major event that day — taught her what a bag lady must feel like.

I happened to interview Studs for a TV book program soon after The Great Divide came out. I opened the interview with an intentionally daring statement:

Me: You delve into the life and mind of Sugar Rautbord, someone I already despise. You reveal her so completely that I now despise more than ever.

Studs: I don’t want you to despise her. I want you to understand her.

You know what? He was right.

Then again, I wonder if he’d be able to maintain this sangfroid (again, who am I trying to impress?) today, had he been alive, interviewing Donald Trump, delving into his life and his mind.

Studs died at the age of 96 in 2008. He’d smoked two fat cigars a day for decades.

He was my hero.

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Straight Talk

Prez Obama got down during his speech to the 2016 graduates at Rutgers University Sunday. This stuff stands w/o comment from me — it needs no explanation or preamble. Go, Barry:

But if you were listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from. So, Class of 2016, let me be as clear as I can be. In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real, or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about.

I’m sorta falling in love with this guy again.

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May 17th Birthdays

Erik Satie — French composer who wrote Trois Gymnopédies, a hauntingly beautiful piece for piano, covered by the brass rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears on their eponymous second album. Satie coined the term “furniture music” to describe live musicians playing background music in a home or at a small event, the very early precursor of what would become ambient music. Satie had an unquenchable thirst, to use the euphemism of his times, and was partial to the quasi-toxic absinthe. He died of cirrhosis in 1925.

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Archibald Cox — The first special prosecutor charged with delving into the Watergate affair. When the Nixon scandal had become to big to stonewall anymore, Attorney General Elliot Richardson called Cox to offer him the position of special prosecutor. Cox only hours before awoke from his night’s sleep suddenly and unexpectedly deaf in one ear. His doctors informed him he’d lost his hearing permanently. He took the position anyway and was eventually fired by Nixon for doing his job too well, along with Richardson and the AG’s second-in-command William Ruckleshaus, both of whom refused to axe Cox. That task was left to future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried it out with relish.

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Dennis Hopper — Easy Rider‘s Billy. He also appeared in Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson’s Head, starring the Monkees.

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Taj Mahal — Nee Henry Fredericks, a self-taught musician and composer who seasoned his blues playing with Caribbean influences and other international styles. As a child he listened to his family’s short wave radio, hearing music from all corners of the world, and eventually incorporating those disparate sounds into his repertoire.

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Patricia Aakhus — Author (under the pen name Patricia McDowell) of a trilogy of novels dealing with Irish life and history, she was a high-ranking official in both the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and the International Studies Department at the University of Southern Indiana until her death in 2012.

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Rosalind Picard — MIT computer genius who developed the “affective computing” model. She explains: “Affective Computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena.” She’s a convert to Christianity after growing into adulthood as an atheist. Picard is a proponent of many “Intelligent Design” precepts. She endorsed the conservative Christian group The Discovery Institute’s 2001 “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism.”

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On this day in 2012, Queen of Disco Donna Summer died. And, no, she wasn’t a transgender person, although rumors to that effect flitted around at various times during her long career. Ironically, she found herself in hot water after being accused of issuing an anti-gay statement in the wake of the AIDS crisis during the 1980s. She’d become a born-again Christian by this time and was accused of saying the disease was god’s punishment for homosexuals’ sinful lifestyle. She denied saying it. Funny thing was, her mid- to late-’70s hits had been gay anthems and were heard constantly in the era’s enormous, airplane-hangar-sized gay dance clubs. In any case, she and her producer Giorgio Moroder, changed the course of pop music forever with their synth disco hits.

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Today

When I’m angry, I don’t post.

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