7 Quick Takes – Snow Day Edition

— 1 —

Well, this is…unusual.

It’s not the mere fact of snow. We’re not Texas, which got hit Thursday night. We do get snow here in Alabama and throughout the Southeast, just…not usually in early December. Our snow (and more treacherously, ice) comes in January and February.

But here it is:

When my son brought home Rumors of Snow on Friday earlier in the week, we both scoffed. Even the forecast called for no more than 10% chance of precipitation today. Well, I guess we hit that 10%.

Early yesterday evening, the schools announced a two-hour delay, and across the land, prayers were sent up that this was only a warning shot, a placeholder for something bigger and greater to come.

And they got it.

Now, here’s my ritual warning to hardy Midwesterners and New Englanders: Don’t mock us. It may seem silly to cancel school for, um, an inch (maybe) of snow, but listen: we don’t have masses of snow-clearing equipment around here ready to send out and blanket the county. It’s hilly – mountainous even. An inch of snow in the early morning falling on Alabama hills and mountains, with only minimal salt or ploughs at the ready is not the same as an inch falling in on the flat, fully prepared land of northeastern Indiana.

Although I will say, there’s no ice with this – the roads are just wet. They could easily be driven. But it is supposed to snow much of the day so eh, why bother? It’s Friday….

Update:

 — 2 —

And it’s the Immaculate Conception! Time for this annual gift from me – and the Monkees – to you.

I toss the same general post up every year. I don’t care. No need to search my brain for heartfelt spiritual metaphors from Daily Life™. When we have the Monkees!

Riu riu chiu, la guarda ribera;
Dios guardo el lobo de nuestra cordera,
Dios guardo el lobo de neustra cordera.

El lobo rabioso la quiso morder,
Mas Dios poderoso la supo defender;
Quisola hazer que no pudiese pecar,
Ni aun original esta Virgen no tuviera.

Riu, riu chiu…

Este qu’es nacido es el gran monarca,
Christo patriarca de carne vestido;
Hemos redemido con se hazer chiquito,
Aunqu’era infinito, finito se hiziera.

Translation:

River, roaring river, guard our homes in safety,
God has kept the black wolf from our lamb, our Lady.
God has kept the black wolf from our lamb, our Lady.

Raging mad to bite her, there the wolf did steal,
But our God Almighty defended her with zeal.
Pure He wished to keep Her so She could never sin,
That first sin of man never touched the Virgin sainted.

River, roaring river…

He who’s now begotten is our mighty Monarch,
Christ, our Holy Father, in human flesh embodied.
He has brough atonement by being born so humble,
Though He is immortal, as mortal was created.

River, roaring river…

And the Kingston Trio:

More from Fr. Steve Grunow on the song and the feast.

— 3 —

It’s a good day to buy a .99 book on the Blessed Virgin, don’t you think?

— 4

You might recall that my 7^th grade homeschooler and I are reading The Yearling. He’s got a couple of chapters to go, but I finished it last night and was just about as wrecked as I was when I read it in 7^th grade and solemnly declared:

I repeat what I said a few weeks ago: if you’ve never read The Yearling – do. In a way it’s a young people’s book, but it did win the Pulitzer Prize. The writing is lush and some of the most powerful, evocative descriptive language you’ll find – and I’m a reader who normally – I admit – skips through landscape descriptions. I didn’t want to do that with Rawlings’. It’s a powerful, painful and true coming-of-age story.

As he reads his “school novel” – along with his leisure reading he’s always got going, I toss in some short stories and poetry a couple of times a week. This week he read “The Reticence of Lady Anne” by Saki and “The Death of a Government Clerk” by Chekov. He declared that he saw the twist of the first one coming well before the end, but was quite surprised by the second. The Chekov indeed gave us more to talk about. It’s short, amusing and ironic. The theme we dug into is: Okay, you’re worried and stressed out. But in your anxiety about that thing, are you missing the real thing that you should be worried about?

–5 —

Earlier this week, we took an afternoon at the Birmingham Museum of Art. You might have heard me rave about our local treasure before, but bear with me. It’s a very fine museum, with a solid collection that changes it up just often enough to stay fresh. There’s no admission charge, so if you’re a local you have no excuse not to visit regularly.

My son has been reading a lot about Japanese history, so we took time to revisit the very good Asian collection.

Take a look at this. Read the placard and enjoy the little rats fashioning the mallet. It’s a charming piece.

I’d seen this painting of St. Bernardino of Siena before, but never really stopped to study it. This time I did, and discovered that this was not simplistic hagiography. It’s something else – I’m not sure what – a commentary on the varied attitudes we bring to these moments? An observation of a scene? I don’t know if you can see it, but see what you can of the individuals gathered – they’re not all listening, in fact…most of them aren’t. I’m particularly taken with the boy hanging on the platform, and the friar slouched behind the preacher….taking a nap.

–— 6 —

Watching: Tonight we finish Lost, and I am of two minds about it. I’m sorry that we’ll be done – this has really been one of the best things the three of us have done together, apart from traveling. I’ll be sorry to leave this Lost crew behind, once again. But…it will be just a bit of a relief to free up some brain space and not have 75% of the conversations around here start with…”So what is that other reality all about???”

Maybe I’ll read a book?

I did watch all of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel last week and I wouldn’t recommend it. I had watched the pilot in the spring, found it annoying and disappointing and predictable, but decided to give the series another chance.  Well, that was aggravating. Not quite at a hate-watch level, but more at the: I really want this to be better, so I’ll keep watching hoping that happens. It didn’t. Very pretty to look at with rich period detail, but generally superficial both in human terms and in relation to the culture it purported to present. I’ve never watched a nanosecond of The Gilmore Girls, so I didn’t come to it as a fan of that show, but I was very open to the concept – upper-class 50’s Jewish housewife discovers a flair for stand-up comedy – but what emerges is not recognizably authentic in any way. I wasn’t watching people, I was watching a script being recited and cultural caricatures being embodied. Mad Men had its weaknesses, but the one thing it did right was the character of Peggy Olson, who began the series as a mousy, naive secretary, and ended it as a confident copy-writer, a transformation that was earned and authentic every step of the way. I wasn’t expecting that level of work here, but I was hoping for something a little closer than I got.

— 7 —

Bambinelli Sunday!

I just noticed that The Loyola Kids Book of Saints is priced at $7.25 on Amazon at the moment. I don’t know how long that will be the case – but there it is, if you’re interested.

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#Synod2015! Week 3! According to Mad Men.

SO!

How’s everyone doing?

Yeah, me too.

What’s your #Synod2015DrinkofChoice?

Does it contain alcohol?

Then we’re good.

Every morning, I open up The Internets and by way of that road,  The Twitter and The Facebook.

Kind of scary.

Sometimes Roscia or Spadaro hits my feed first.

/smarm

But then sometimes, I hit a Chaput! Or an Aquila! Or some Romanian doctor!

And it’s all good!

But not for long. Because then, damn. They’ll find  way, you know?

Yeah, that happens.

But no matter what, bishops are all like, “Everything is FINE. And if you don’t think it’s FINE, you’ve got issues and …[weird combination of religious indifferentism and faux-pietistic Petrinish blackmail bullshit to serve our current agenda blah blah blah].”

And I’m all

And then I’m all like… 

….we’re going down….

Oh, and then do you know what happens?

PEOPLE START TALKING ABOUT THE HOLY SPIRIT. EVERY DAMN HOUR OF EVERY DAY.

The liberals are all like

Holy Spirit at work y’all!

The conservatives are way different. Because they’re all like, “Holy Spirit at work y’all!”

Geniuses.

And then some German bishop pops up, talking about welcoming, right? Because, hey..

By that point it’s mid-afternoon. I need to be homeschooling and cleaning and driving and stuff. But everyone keeps tweeting and I keep thinking about my convert friends who went Roman instead of Anglican or staying in their tight, super-engaged Reformed circle, all because they were taken by unam sanctam Catholicam and believed it. 

I start thinking I want to leave the country. But wait. That won’t help. Catholic Church. Right. But maybe? If it’s a Synodal Listening Church a-birthing? Somewhere?

Okay!

And, as I have wondered daily for months, why is this Synod happening? In a Church in which we are supposed to be environmentally sensitive and in which bishops are supposed to stay close to their flocks, why is there this meeting to which hundreds have exerted many carbon footprints to spend weeks away from the people to whom they’re supposed to minister? And I’m all…why…

Eh. But here we are. People saying, Us? We don’t want to change doctrine!!! Just the pastoral stuff! Super cool! Inclusive of Peripheries! Cause no one ever thought of that before!

Then some more spokesmen and bishops, every one of them about some Narrative or other. Basically, if you are listening and read between the lines, and think for more than 3 seconds about what’s being said, a narrative about how, everything was sort of, well, how shall I say it…wrong from Jesus up to now?

And saying this why?

Oh well. I’m off. You know where to find me.

Tomorrow: #Synod2015 via Breaking Bad

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Granite Flats

So…we watched all three seasons of Granite Flats. 

For those of you who don’t know, Granite Flats is a three-season television drama originally produced by BYUTV, yes LDS. A few months ago, Netflix added it to the queue, I read about it on some blogs and thought, “Huh. Why not?”

And so, the two boys were introduced to the joys and agonies of binge-watching.

Let me say, that if had been up to me, I would have watched a couple of episodes from the first season, checked in with the second season to see matters had improved, then jumped to season 3 to check in with some episodes featuring Christopher Lloyd and/or Parker Posey and then called it a day. (or night.) It wasn’t great.

But as it turned out, the boys got hooked, went berserk at the end of every cliff-hanger episode (which was…every episode), and so I’ve watched the whole durn thing.

More specifically:  Granite Flats  has been described by some as a cross between Mad Men (because it’s set in the early 1960’s) and The X-Files (because it involves espionage and a bit of the paranormal).  Perhaps “they” have a point, but I’m going to say very quickly and firmly right here and now that Granite Flats doesn’t have the quality of either. It’s not horrible, but it doesn’t have the subtlety of great television drama, either. On my scale, Breaking Bad is a 10, Mad Men is a 7, and Granite Flats comes out, therefore, as maybe a 2.5.

YMMV, but in my opinion, while the boys were intrigued (and this is the first show like this they’ve ever watched, btw) and enjoyed it, it didn’t live up to the promise of the premise, the theme, the literary allusions (Shakespeare and Whitman, mostly) or the retro gestalt. 

The gist:

Um, forget that.  It’s too complicated to give a gist.

There are 3 young teens.  One is the son of a widowed single mother VA nurse – widowed because her military husband died. (And you know what that means…..)  The other is the son of the Granite Flats police chief.  The girl is the native Korean adopted daughter of a physician and a chemist, both of whom work for the VA hospital.

These teens are drawn together by weird circumstances and are then inspired to investigate said weird circumstances. The weird circumstances lead to Bigger Things, which involve the CIA, the FBI, the KGB and a bit of the paranormal.

It can be fairly confusing at times.  I think my 14 year old could probably draw you a map of it all, but some parts of it left me befuddled.

As I am wont to do these days…bullet points:

• If you are looking for a show to hook your kids on that’s pretty much absolutely “clean” – this would be a good candidate.  There’s some tense stuff about marriage here and there, but that’s real.
• It’s a show produced by an LDS network, so I was watching it with an eye to that.  Religion of the generic Christian kind plays a role in the show, but I have to say, it’s a refreshingly natural role. There’s a young non-denominational Protestant pastor involved, so that give the script opportunities to quote Scripture. The general tone (and I will get back to this in a second) is oriented towards an understanding of life as being *for* something rather than for anything or nothing.  But beyond that, there’s some interesting conversations between the kids about faith.  Madeleine (the adopted girl) is being raised in an atheist home, and so the kids actually talk about that the first season in honest ways. The only almosts-explicitly LDS-type thing I noted was in one of the lasts episodes when a wife said to a husband something like “I’m going to be happy with you the rest of my life here in this world – and the next.”
• One of the primary writers on the show (who is also the father of one of the child actors and husbands of one of the adult actors) is a very serious Buddhist. Here’s an interview with him. 
• Speaking of which…the writing is okay.  It’s strongest in the the third season, when Plummer (from the previous bullet point) takes over most of the scripts. Before that, it’s mostly fairly pedestrian and lacking in subtlety.  (I watched episode 4 of Rectify last night after we finished up Granite Flats, and oh, the difference was so, so clear.). As is often the case, the climactic episodes contain the strongest writing.  I confess that the last episode of season 3 of Granite Flats, even though it contained some weirdness, was very strong .
• Pulling together my last two bullet points, the last episode of the show was well-written and quite affecting, bringing out issues of truth, love and the mystery and worth of each human person in a rather moving way.  It made some of the previous lameness worth it.
• I was impressed, though, by the nuance given to the theme of patriotism – this was probably the strongest thematic element, and dealt with very well. While the KGB and Soviet Communism are certainly treated as inimical to American values, the question of how America has actually lived up to American values is bandied about with a bit more honesty than I expected. A major character – an FBI operative – is African-American, and the racism he encounters in and out of the agency is a plot point. Even the issue of Americans belonging to the Communist party in an American context isn’t dealt with simplistically – the characters who are are given credible reasons for their membership, including skepticism about the American project from a character whose beloved was a Japanese-American interred in her own country during World War II.
• The acting varies in quality. I do wonder why it’s such a challenge to find really excellent natural American child actors. That said, the strongest actors included a young person – Charlie Plummer (son of aforementioned writer), who played Tim. There are some sort-of well known names in the cast, including Cary Elwes of The Princess Bride, Christopher Lloyd and most winningly, Parker Posey, who blasts into the third season and grabs all the best lines.  It was fascinating to watch because it shows how a crazy, eccentric character can inspire strong writing.
• Also…and this amused the boys when I finally put all this together – featured through all three seasons is David Naughton.  I knew that I should know the name and the face was vaguely familiar.  Today, I finally looked him up, and yes..it’s that David Naughton, and hey people, let’s all FEEL SUPER OLD.

• Finally: There’s a bit of controversy about the show right now – BYUTV had produced three seasons – the first two shown, with the third scheduled to be broadcast this fall.  Netflix picked up all three seasons this past spring and has them all streaming.  Not long after Netflix picked it up, BYUTV announced that it was cancelling the program. There’s a bit of a campaign going on to encourage BYUTV to produce at least a few more episodes to wrap up some lose threads (and the last episode of season three did end with a huge hanging plot point), and some of the actors are on board…so we’ll see….

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What Mad Men Missed

(This will be quick)

The show had quite a bit.  Style, 2/3 excellent acting, great humor and did I mention style?

The most powerful, pointed works of art reach both outward and inward.  A character is recognizable as both a symbol of some telling aspect of the world around him and as a human being.

The problem with Don Draper was that, in the end, he was all symbol, and not, as written, recognizable as a real human person.

What did he symbolize?

The modern man’s lack of identity and roots. His willingness to slip in and out of roles with no deep sense of who he is.  The resultant endless search and treatment of other people as non-persons as well.

The endless circle of materialism that we exploit and dig into as we search, search, search.

Interpersonal exploitation and exploiting what one learns in the exploitation so one can dream up ads for crap that no one needs but now thinks they do because they, too, are searching, dreaming, and yearning.

But Mad Men, unlike, say, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, ultimately, I think fails in this regard (while it succeeded in many other) for two reasons:

First, the absence of any real satirical edge.  I wrote about this before.  Mad Men gives us all these interesting people tossing about occasionally interesting ideas and recognizing certain truths in service of….ads for stuff. And if you look at advertising in the 1960’s, it’s mostly goofy and ridiculous and lame and doesn’t match the pseudo-elevated tone of the creative strivings of the characters.  There were flashes here and there, but the whole series would have been more honest if there had been at least one character who consistently grappled with the moral questions that arise from striving for wealth and using one’s gifts to produce awkward clips that  seek to manipulate consumers into buying things.

Secondly, as I began this post…Don Draper is ultimately not a real person.  And perhaps that is the point? Okay, but again, here’s where irony and satire comes in play.  If the ending had been satirical, I would have bought it with great enthusiasm.  And perhaps it was?  But…I don’t think so.  It’s presented as the completion of a circle of sorts in terms of Draper’s relationship with himself and advertising as an extension of himself.  Fine.  There’s a point to that that is consistent with the entire series.

But. It’s coy and unsatisfying as well because it doesn’t address the fact that Don Draper has failed as a human being. This failure is symbolized most powerfully and even ironically, in terms of the whole series, by the fact that cigarettes, where he made his mark, killed the woman who became his ex-wife because of his lies about his identity and his infidelity. That’s no secret, and yeah, Betty’s still smoking in that last shot, lung cancer or no.

It’s not unrecognized in the episode, either, that failure.  When he tries to give the same “You won’t believe how easy it is to walk away from your child” speech to Anna’s niece as he had given to Peggy, she rejects it out of hand, and in that, he is forced to confront the falsity of his entire life of walking away from his children.

And he does, breaking down into really nothing.

Then he meditates, cut to Coke.

Which, as I said, works on a certain level…when you have had a character development trajectory that has been dosed with a knowing satirical and ironic critical edge all along.  Yup, here we go, we’d be able to say.  One more con.  One more attempt to compensate for your moral failure by creating an advertisement that expresses what you should be bringing to your actual life, but aren’t.

But we haven’t had that edge, testing and teasing Don.  We’ve been immersed in Don’s endless agonizing and victimization of others as a serious human quest for identity and acceptance, and therefore, the resolution should be consistent with that path.

It wasn’t.  The bare facts of it could have been, but structurally, it didn’t work and wasn’t satisfying, not because we “need to know what happens” regarding Don and his kids, for example, just because we’re curious, but because that along with all of Don’s personal problems, was an issue. 

In the end, Weiner couldn’t create a character that held all of this in the right sort of tension, balancing truth about human life and choices with a knowing, ironic look at all we throw out there as a distraction and ultimately fruitless compensation.

But yeah, I’d watch The Campbells of Wichita.  In a heartbeat.

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What you are going to do, do it quickly

Spoilers ahead. Don’t whine.

As I wrote before, I had some doubts about Better Call Saul, even though I trust Vince Gilligan’s creative vision. Since we know the destiny (up to a point) of the two major characters, the stakes, it seemed to me, were not that high – and stakes are what make compelling drama.  If we know what happens to Mike (death) and Saul (Cinnabon), what is going to keep us coming back to Better Call Saul aside from close calls and ridiculous courtroom analogies?

Well, even though I do hope that the series ultimately takes us to the “present,” at this point, one episode from the end of this first season, I’m in, and the stakes have been driven in. Firmly, ingeniously and with a huge dose of agonizing heartbreak, which, if you’re driving in dramatic stakes, is the way to go.

The question has always been….where did Saul come from? How did Jimmy McGill become Saul? In Breaking Bad, Saul answers a question about his name with the glib assertion that criminals feel more confident with a Jewish lawyer representing them, but the genius of this new series is that it takes that claim for what it is: the justification of a choice that actually goes much, much deeper.

As the series has progressed, we might have been content in our assumptions that Jimmy became Saul as a way of either hiding from his past or simply taking on less-classy persona in order to distinguish himself from the firm that (sort of) set him on his way in the legal profession.  But you know what? That still wasn’t enough. Why does someone change his or her name? The name they were given as a member of a family? 

Well, with episode 7, aired last night, we get it – you do it when you want to separate yourself from precisely that – your family. 

And it all clicks, so beautifully and sadly into place.

Jimmy McGill, on the verge of actually doing good (in the legal context) in a big way, so anxious to please his older brother, so willing to help that same brother in his illness, eccentric, brash, but endlessly and even ingeniously creative, is slapped down, rejected and yes, betrayed by his own flesh and blood who doesn’t want him getting too close with his JD from the University of American Samoa and who, after years of getting him out of scrapes and trouble, can’t believe that any good can come out of any of this.

You’re not a real lawyer. 

People don’t change. 

One could argue that subsequent events prove Chuck right – that Slippin’ Jimmy is inevitably Saul Goodman.  But the point of view on human existence is just what was expressed in Breaking Bad  – our personal qualities can take is one direction or the other. We have a choice, and as much as the pressure is to make bad choices, we still, at every moment have the freedom to make that choice – and our treatment of others influences their choices as well.

(I long maintained that the most compelling thread of Breaking Bad was Walter White’s perverse master-student relationship with Jesse. His personal corruption in turn, corrupted Jesse – instead of finding this lost former student and saying, “Hey! Let me help you!” He said, “Help me do horrible things!” Original Sin.)

Despite this deep, wounding betrayal, we won’t see Jimmy McGill portrayed as a victim – and that’s what lends Gilligan’s work even more depth – he doesn’t do fated victims with no personal agency. Yes, he could still shake it off and obey his better instincts and pursue the, if not exactly noble path, the path that is not the one to being, as he will tell Walter White a few years down the road, a criminal lawyer rather than just a criminal lawyer  (echoing the important conversation Mike has with the proto-Walter White) – and I’m guessing, just from how this first season has gone, that even though the die has clearly been cast, this won’t be the last chance Jimmy has to run up against that choice.

Seen in Alcala de Henares, Spain.

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On the Air

Taking a travelogue break to offer quick reviews of the movies I watched on the plane:

• I didn’t watch any movies on the way over, only the two episodes of Mad Men they offered.  I didn’t want to get too committed to full-length films because I was all MUST SLEEP. GO TO SLEEP. NOW.
• Of course, I didn’t sleep at all. I never do.  Even the time I flew to Europe by myself, with empty seats on either side of me….I didn’t sleep. I’m too anxious about sleeping to sleep, that’s all.
• On the way back, I watched three movies, though, and part of two others.
• I’d been looking forward to Foxcatcher since reading about it, probably a year ago.  It sounded complicated and layered and had Steve Carrell.  But I’m sorry to say…no.  About 45 minutes into it, I couldn’t believe it was only 45 minutes into it and there were 90 minutes left to go.  Carrell was fine, if a little mannered and caricatured (but perhaps that’s the way DuPont actually presented), and I thought Channing Tatum was just fine, but the whole thing was just a little too…careful. Money Quote: “Ornithologist, Philatelist, Philanthropist…”
• I’d also been wanting to see Whiplash.  It was certainly more entertaining that Foxcatcher, albeit fairly crazy and over the top. J.K. Simmons, as an uber-intense, authoritarian, sadistic instructor of jazz band was fun to watch, but it was, as I said, just too much to take at times.  What interested me was to see what the film would do with the standard tough master v. student trope and to follow the various mind games being played. It certainly wasn’t predictable, that’s for sure, but there were points at which the unpredictability morphed into unbelievability – as in, a perfectionist musician would take an opportunity given to him to shine and use that moment to humiliate one guy? Nope.
• But. The last fifteen minutes are, well…great. They are earned. It’s exhilarating to see the put-upon, even abused student take charge and to observe the dynamic of master-student: taking what’s been learned and shooting it right back – played out in the context of Caravan. 
• Fr. Robert Barron wrote about this film today in the context of spiritual mentoring.  It’s a reasonable jumping-off point, but I had a hard time connecting to the movie on that subject because the Simmons character was so ridiculous, really. Rather, what I was thinking about, especially during those last few minutes of the film, was art – and perhaps more so because I’d spent a week contemplating the likes of Bosch, El Greco, Velasquez, Picasso, Ribera, and Goya. My final takeaway of those final seconds, in particular, was that in order to make truly great art you probably have to be a little bit crazy, and you might just have to sell your soul.  Money Quote: “Mmmm….not my tempo.”
• Enough Said was one of James Gandolfini’s last films, and he stars in this tale of love and courtship in middle age with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Catherine Keener and Toni Colette.  Loved it. I have to say that my 32-year old son had seen it some months ago and recommended it, so it’s not just a middle-aged thing.  It’s very real, funny and the acting is terrific. People have doubts about each other, get angry, and connect in unexpected ways with unexpected people and talk about the issues they have in ways pretty close that we do in real life, with enough of the elevated focus and wit of theater to make you both nod in recognition and laugh because they’re funnier than you are.  It’s also striking because one character really does mistreat another, and handle a situation very badly…and is called on it, and must bear the consequences..and eventually finds forgiveness, but it’s not easy.
• I also watched part of The Skeleton Twins, mostly because I like Bill Hader – what I watched struck me as pretty formulaic, but I couldn’t finish it because the sound putzed out.
• So I tried to give St Vincent  – the film about the irascible Bill Murray being impacted (I assume) by the Kid Next Door, but we landed about 30 minutes in, and I wasn’t interested enough to pick it up later…should I?  It struck me as situational – as in, let’s create a Wacky Situation which leads characters to confront a Quirky Situation which leads to Understanding Despite the Odds.
• And didn’t we see this in Kolya, and wasn’t it much better then?

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In honor of Mad Men…

..a little something from the era.

One of the items I found in Knoxville was a journal my dad kept sporadically from 1961-64, and then with a couple of ’67 entries.    It’s quite interesting to me from a lot of perspectives.   Having a clearer picture of what his goals were in those early years, the glimpses of our family life, my baby and toddler antics (hey…sorry about that box of cereal and six (!)  bananas mashed together on the living room rug…) , as well as his comments on current events.

Brief background: my dad was a political scientist.  During the time of these journal entries he was working (as a Congressional Fellow) in Texas Representative Jim Wright’s office in Washington, D.C., followed by a couple of years at Texas Tech, and then at Northern Illinois.  He was at the time a liberal to moderate Democrat. A progressive in the context of Southern Democratic politics – his ideological landscape at the time –  to be sure.  I range in age from 1-4.

A lot of people use blogging and online life as a way of journal keeping for their children. I can see it, but words on paper are better – so at least print it out. Your children will appreciate it. It might help them understand.

What I excerpt here only skims a fraction of the surface.  The journal is really centered on detailed accounts of what he saw in Washington, his observations of the legislative process and political life and then some of the agony of faculty politics.   That requires too much context to duplicate here.

August 7, 1961:

The second Russian cosmonaut is back to earth after orbiting 17 times. It will be months before we are able to do the same thing. They tell us that we are using our exploratory resources in more basic ways. This may be true, but the propaganda effects are devastating. …

...We are in the same predicament culturally and politically as we are scientifically. We are fat, lazy, complacent and smug. We have no empathy for other people. Our government’s representatives are incredibly naive.  We cannot put our best foot forward.

What the outcome will be I am not sure. If our realization and our energies can be mobilized, perhaps our values can prevail. But I am not sure that the values we profess are those we believe in and follow in planning our actions.

For some reason we love to fool ourselves. I have just seen a TV plug for fallout shelters. The music is bright and sprightly. The charming little family continually has a smile on its face. Even when sitting in the shelter midst the nuclear holocaust and the fall-out raining down, they are smiling and engaging in peaceful pursuits. Apparently they do not realize that before it is safe their supplies and facilities will be inadequate, that they will go out in a land of anarchy where “essential” services are unavailable and where, in short, the most primitive conditions will prevail. Apparently in their comfortable shelter they do not think about the genetic alteration that will likely come. Oh, yes, when they are not using the shelter for protection, they may use it as a recreation room. All is rosy. 

3/26/62

Saturday we saw our first movie in months, La Dolce Vita,  which was wonderful. But still I prefer entertainment to enlightenment in movies. I kept feeling as if I should be taking notes.  Met B. Tucker  and wife in the ticket line. This will probably be the first and last meeting in Washington.  Grey, vague Tucker and the Czarina.

7/14/62

Tuesday afternoon went to the All-Star game…It was a good game, and I enjoyed it more than I anticipated. ….Kennedy and a large party attended. Humphrey was there early, with his Senators cap and coat off, sitting at the edge of the Presidential box. When Jack came, quick as a flash he had the cap off, coat on, and was standing over JFK’s left shoulder, large smile on his face, for the picture-taking.

It was as hot where they were as we were in our spot. No one there took a coat off until Jack removed his in the second inning. Then there was a tremendous flurry; the fellows couldn’t wait once they had the opportunity.

July 23, 1962

Tonight the first regular Telstar program, live from Europe. Chills went up and down my spine when the first image, Big Ben, came into view. This is a tremendous achievement. 

10/22/62

A sad day: the imposition of the Cuban blockade. It is a dangerous thing, and I reluctantly support Kennedy, not on the basis of the announced reasons, but because they must know more than do I, in addition to being better strategic thinkers. Just the fact of missiles should not result in such drastic action, because this does not materially strengthen the Russian position. There have to be other factors.  

12/10/62

This evening we went to a toy store. Trying to get her to leave, I took hold of her coat. Very sternly, she said, “Don’t pull my coat.” Aline thinks this is cute but I can’t see it….She is really getting hard headed and assertive..

Ahem.

More to come…

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