YAPHET KOTTO: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of one of my favourite actors, Yaphet Kotto, was online at the Guardian last Friday, 26 March; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. 

It is pretty much as I wrote it, but there was of course A lot more to say. The most curious thing was how difficult it was to be sure of the information about his biographical details; various sources had his name two different ways; the stories about his father's name and origins changed when he told them; was his mother's maiden name Marie or was that her middle name; more details about his maternal grandparents, who raised him, and how they (Roman Catholics) managed to raise him Jewish were all, in the end, left for supposition. I couldn't find much about the Mobile Theatre Project in the Bronx, which is where he first trained, or where he played Othello aged 19; I assumed it was for them and not professional, but I couldn't find details.

Besides Judy Holliday, he claimed a couple of other actresses as mentors, including Mary Astor--how he got into that position is an interview question I didn't see posed in the ones I found.

There were, of course, other black actors of note besides Sidney Poitier, though he was only real 'star': Ivan Dixon, Ossie Davis, Abby Lincoln, Ruby Dee and the like; Bill Cosby in the first starring role on TV.  But Kotto was a different story, and I believe he helped open the door for great "character" actors like Forest Whittaker or Lawrence Fishburne --the preference for matinee idols continues to this day, particularly on TV: think of any number of very attractive black actors whose careers have stalled in TV, or of the ones who have made successes, from Denzel to Halle Berry.

And of course nowadays, black British actors might be taking those roles, which may be because many of them come up the traditional way, and get judged by their acting, rather than their faces, though no one's going to compare Idris Elba's looks with Kotto's.

Bone is a film that should be seen again. First because it really is Larry Cohen's take on Boudu Saved From Drowning (though he would have probably denied it) and second because it would probably offend most of its audience. It was Cohen's first feature and if you know his work you will understand why, but Kotto's character is not the problem in the film, it really is, like Jean Renoir's film, a satire of the bourgoise; something its big budget Hollywood remake, Down And Out In Beverley Hills found it difficult to be,

Similarly, I can't emphasize strongly enough how important a movie Blue Collar is, not least for the way race divides working people against their own interests, but at the same time because race is not understood as the same kind of problem on both sides of the colour line. And Schrader's casting of Kotto, Keitel and Pryor, none of them pretty boy Hollywood types, escaped the swamp of what the Firesign Theatre once called portrayals of  "tales of ordinary working people as played by rich Hollywood stars".

And it would have been nice to discuss Homicide, where Kotto in a way was the star, and also the comic centre. There is a famous episode of the show, "Subway", in which Vincent D'Onfrio plays a commuter pushed in front of a train, and trapped between the carriage and the platform. Andre Braugher plays Frank Pembleton, the detective on the scene, who is aware that D'Onfrio's spine has been severed and he will die as soon as the trains are separated. Thinking of Kotto's career brought it to my mind; two tremendous actors, neither a matinee idol, who act the hell out of the two-man show which is at the episode's core. Yes, there is space for them, but how much? How well will Jamie Hector do? As Al Giardello tells Pembleton: "Come on Frank, it's a new age. The world's becoming a perfect place." RIP Yaphet Kotto

LOU OTTENS: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

 My obit of Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette, and the portable tape recorder, and had a hand in the creation of the CD, is online at the Guardian; it should appear in the paper paper soon. You can link to it here.

This happens to be a piece which appears exactly as I wrote it (after one brief rewrite when a sort of re-organsation was required. It was one of those rare times when I was asked for 800 words and filed exactly 800 words; I didn't bother to recount after I did the touch-up!

It occurred to me that Ottens reminded me of a number of engineers I have worked with in my years of broadcasting: very bright men who are practical problem solvers, very calm and reasonable, and who enjoy nothing more than a problem to solve. It's always the producers, or the talent, who often couldn't plug the machine into the wall, who get all excited. It's much more fun to work with them!

NORTON JUSTER: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer (and architect) Norton Juster was published in The Guardian online on 11 March, I am hoping it will appear in the paper paper soon, but you can link to it online here. 

The odd thing about it was I couldn't actually remember when I read The Phantom Tollbooth; I may have been too old or advanced in my reading to have latched on to it the first time. In fact I may have been introduced to it by my college roommate Winsor Watson; that idea popped into my head long after I had filed my copy. And I don't recall ever reading The Dot And The Line; but it's on You Tube and when I showed it to my son, who's 17 and very good at maths, he loved it. I realised I had never read The Phantom Tollbooth to him; my copy was probably left in storage in London.

And as I wrote it the day before my birthday, the quote from the Terrible Trivium seemed especially apt: “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones that are so difficult.”

The piece as printed is virtually as I wrote it; the only omissions were part of the first quote from Jules Feiffer, which talked about their lifelong friendship, and then the second quote from Feiffer which closes the piece; it was cut short. The rest of it, which would have ended my story, was "He was my oldest friend...and we managed to concoct a classic together. I miss him badly. Who knew?".Somehow I felt that "who knew?" was the perfect way to summarize Juster's life, and indeed, his work.

VARIAN FRY: LOST AMERICAN HERO

I wrote this review for the Financial Times in 1999, and it was published in January of 2000. It popped up, unbidden, in my computer as I was attempting to store material, and it seems as if I had at some point restored some elements which may have been edited from the original. But Fry's story has been retold since, and deserves to stay in the forefront of our attentions today as a warning about the way no good deeds go unpunished, especially as we see Breckinridge Long reflected in both the Trump and Johnson regimes, and also in the way so-called geniuses ignore those who sacrifice and risk to help them, indeed, save their lives.

In August 1940, Varian Fry, an unassuming American editor, arrived in Vichy France on a brief fact-finding mission, representing the Emergency Rescue Committee. He carried a list of 200 worthy artists, writers and intellectuals endangered by the Nazis, whom the ERC had been founded to aid. When he was finally expelled 13 months later, Fry had created an underground operation which saved thousands, not just the Max Ernsts and Marc Chagalls, but “ordinary” refugees, as well as hundreds of British servicemen. Yet Fry, a true heroic figure of the Second World War, died in obscurity, teaching high school in suburban Connecticut.

 

“Pimpernel” is a particularly apt title, because Fry seemed an unlikely candidate for such heroism. A pampered child who feigned illness to escape school bullying, he became a precocious aesthete at Harvard. His modest career on liberal magazines was transformed in Berlin when he witnessed Kristallnacht, and received a blunt assessment of the Nazis’ plans from their international spin-doctor, a fellow Harvard man. His Associated Press reports were the first to warn that Germany intended to “exterminate” the Jews.

 

Fry’s low tolerance for political in-fighting had seen him sacked from Spanish Civil War relief, and there was no hint of his practical abilities when he landed in France. Yet within weeks he created an organisation which hid refugees, forged papers, smuggled people into Spain, and kept one step ahead of the Vichy authorities. The players were worthy of a movie cast, and Andy Marino retells their stories with piquant details not included in Fry’s contemporary memoir SURRENDER ON DEMAND.

He can also be more honest than Fry about those he saved. Many showed little gratitude and worse, endangered those who saved them. Lion Feuchtwangler revealed his escape route to the New York press. Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler meant to sneak across the Spanish border with 17 pieces of luggage, supposedly filled with her first husband’s manuscripts.

 

Marino deals best with Fry’s twin enemies: Vichy’s officials, keen to out-shine their German masters, and the US State Department, to whom Fry was persona non grata. The consular section headed by Breckinridge Long was overtly anti-Semetic, with no desire to fill unused immigrant quotas with Jews, reds, and other undesirables. The US also wished to maintain Vichy’s paper neutrality, keeping its fleet out of Nazi hands. Fry’s conflicts with the government (who denied him the Swiss visa offered all Americans for safety in case of a German invasion) soon had his own committee trying to force his replacement. When he returned to America they fired him. 

 

Returning to journalism, he detailed, in 1942, the extermination of some 2 million Jews in Nazi death camps, facts which the Allies finally acknowledged officially only the following year. By now Fry’s marriage had also collapsed, and it's not until this point Marino begins to examine the book’s most intriguing question: what made Varian Fry such a successful secret agent? It’s understandable when Fry’s personality fades into the shadows of wartime derring-do and a gallery of memorable characters. But Marino also glosses over Fry’s early years. His subtle hints about sexual orientation underlie an equally subtle theme which Marino himself only faces in his conclusion. By then, with Fry’s second marriage and attempts to play corporate family man broken up, it is too late to hear suggestions of his inner torment; his participation in the Kinsey report, and some of the demons which drove this man. It’s as if he’s inherited Fry’s own reserve. Marino concludes, perceptively, that the pretending and repressing which tormented Fry also prepared him for his clandestine life as spy. But with better writing and organisation, we should have apprehended this crucial fact from Fry himself. 

 

Through the efforts of Andre Malraux, France finally granted Fry the Legion d’Honneur in 1967, though for services to the Resistance, not for saving refugees from Vichy. Five months later Fry died, alone. In 1996, Israel named him “Righteous Among the Nations”, the only American so honoured. The US government continues to ignore his accomplishments. 

 

 AMERICAN PIMPERNEL

by Andy Marino

Hutchinson, 1999, £16.99, 403pp

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: ON POETS & LAUREATES

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has died, aged 101, and by coincidence (or not) on the 200th anniversary of John Keats' death. See my previous post for more about the Keats anniversary, and for a poem of mine from 1972 about him.

I've gone back to 1999 for this piece about Ferlinghetti, whom I interviewed for the Financial Times Weekend; the angle being his recent appointment as Poet Laureate of San Francisco contrasted with the long-running story about the choice of a new Poet Laureate of Britain. I've appended a little note about the editing of the piece, and about Ferlinghetti's interview, which was entertaining in the extreme...

You can link to it here at Medium, and with this link you do not need to be a subscriber, though you might well consider being one.

ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH: Keats' 200th anniversary

For the 200th anniversary of John Keats' death, I've unearthed a long-lost poem (of mine, not his) I committed way back when & prompted a little essay about the day I wrote it & more since then. I'll reprint the poem below, but if you want to know the story behind its writing in 1972, and about Keats' and my relationship, you can get the full package over at Medium. Use this friends link, and you'll get have access to it even if you don't subscribe to Medium. 

 

ACROSS HAMPSTEAD HEATH

He measured the room with a fury of pacing;

It shrunk, more confining, with each angry stride.

His eyes at the window through dim glass were tracing

The flight of a swallow, its leisurely glide.

But he felt no leisure; he was bound to his writing,

And each unfinished line made his solitude worse.

His muse was his torture, each thought fled him fighting

Against being committed to the prison of verse.

Just to be one with nature, footsteps drowning his cry

But the swallow had hidden, in some corner of sky.

Darkened clouds passed him quickly; the words came and went,

He failed to grasp them with his weakening eye,

And could not now write them; his pen gone bone dry.

Words flown away wasted; the energy spent.

TALES FROM ISOLATION ROW: DAWN ADDAMS, THE SAINT AND LIFE MAGAZINE, MAY 17, 1954

Tonight on isolation row: I watched a 1964 episode of The Saint called The Lawless Lady, with Dawn Addams opposite Roger Moore (this was their second pairing I've seen). Anyway, a few clicks later, I am looking at the May 17, 1954 issue of Life magazine. Big stories: The 'tragic' fall of Dienbienphu; too much fuss over the 'boring' Army-McCarthy hearings; Roger Bannister breaks the 4 minute mile; and a big show at the Met with Sargent, Whistler & Mary Cassatt (in case you thought Cassatt has been ignored until recently). But what was the cover story? Dawn Addams' wedding in Rome to Vittorio, Prince of Roccasecca di'Volsei. Guess who showed up late, and had to order off the menu at the reception? Charlie and Oona Chaplin (you may remember Addams in King Of New York?) There was a scandi royal wedding that week too and Sister Cecilia battling commies in Slovakia....Life did it all: celebrity gossip & right wing politics, and an amazing set of ads for the American Way of my childhood dreams...

 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IVMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA131&dq=%22Dawn+Addams%22&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22Dawn%20Addams%22&f=false

 

RUSH LIMBAUGH: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Rush Limbaugh went up quickly last night on the Guardian's website; you can link to it here. His was the kind of life that tests the obituary writing concept of "nil nisi bonum" to the utmost. I tried to keep my writing balanced while not "normalizing" him as either a political thinker or broadcasting stalwart. This meant that a few points needed to be left out.

I had pointed out then when Limbaugh was a struggling high school student, his parents, pillars of privilege in the Cape Giradeau community, got him an internship at a local radio station--and he was quickly on the air as "Rusty Sharp", which would have been a good stage name for the rest of his career.

Later, when he dropped out of college, he faced the draft, like all of us from the Vietnam era. He appears to have been deferred by a medical condition called a pilonidal cyst, which is on that grows around the cleft in the tailbone cleft just above the buttocks. There appears to be no truth to his sometimes claim that it was a football knee injury; he played only one year in high school and his coach recalled no injury at all. Limbaugh, like many war-mongerers, was himself a "chicken hawk", which did not stop his constant attacks on Bill Clinton for his deferments. 

I mention Limbaugh's link to Morton Downey, and earlier TV talk hosts like Joe Pyne and Alan Burke. They were all right wing; Downey in the 70s, the other two in the 60s: when I was in high school I went along with the other two "smart guys" in my class to be in Burke's studio audience. He was more erudite than Pyne, who looked like Jimmy Hoffa's meaner brother, but part of his shtick was putting down his audience, and some of his guests, with ad hominum insults. The thing was, these guys were never considered legitimate news and not billed as such, and their programmes were not carried on networks (because of the fairness doctrine) but sold in syndication to local stations. I also mentioned Long John Nebel, the greatest of the all-night talk DJs, the model for the Nightfly in Donald Fagen's great record detailing the Sixties. Nebel was proof that weirdness sold, and the lesson was not lost on Limbaugh's predecessors, nor on Limbaugh himself.

He realised that he could turn political discussion into a sort of late-night freak show: equate his political enemies, "liberals" "feminazis" whatever, as loonies just like the people who told Long John at three ayem about being kidnapped by aliens and having pilonidal cyst probes while in their spacecraft.

It was the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan that opened the door for right-wing talk radio and eventually Fox News. Roger Ailes was no one's fool, and he saw the opportunity characters like Limbaugh provided now that stations and networks no longer faced an obligation to at least be truthful or let the other side present its own arguments. O'Reilly, Hannity, my namesake but no relation Tucker, Ingraham and the rest all spring from the viagra loins of Limbaugh.

The one case left out, which probably should be in, was his treatment in 2012 of Janet Flake, a Georgetown grad student who testified in Congress about the denial of access to contraception which many health-care plans enforced on women. Limbaugh attacked her and her parent non-stop for weeks, calling her a slut and a prostitute---and it cost his show sponsors. It was not quite a beginning of the end, but from that moment until now, in the obituary season, it was hard to argue Limbaugh was an honest player in the political world, rather than an ideological bully more interested in attacking those in whom he perceived weakness than actually bolstering the right ot the Republicans. But they were grateful for his help--hence Trump's awarding him the tarnished Presidential Medal of "Freedom", which in the end didn't get Limbaugh's support when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.

URSA MAJOR DANCES: A POEM

Lockdowns appear to induce looking back. I wrote this poem in August and September of 1978, and it was published forty years ago in my first small collection, Winter Lovers, by Bran's Head Press in Somerset, 1981. I was reminded of it by a letter I received recently, saying it was a shame I had not pursued my poetry. I never gave it up, of course, and I have been recently trying to see if it has given up on me, but in memory of those optimistic days, here it is. It was one of the two poems in Winter Lovers not previously published in magazines. With one very small change from the original...

 

URSA MAJOR DANCES

she spins

beneath

stars

looks up

about to

be-

come a

dream, bear

soft

shoes a-

cross

night

sky dark

as fur

light

HENRY AARON: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Henry Aaron is up at the Guardian online, you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, although my preferred first reference for him would be Henry, not Hank. I wrote it some time ago, then revised it briefly, trying to explain in more detail the civil rights situation in Atlanta and how important Aaron was there--I would have liked to have spent more time on the exact nature of the abuse he received while chasing Babe Ruth's record, and I probably should have mentioned that the response of the crowd at Fulton County Stadium when he did was a standing ovation. RIP Hammerin Hank. 

Lots of people, including me, mentioned Aaron's consistency. I noted in the obit that he benefited from the Braves moving from County Stadium in Milwaukee, which was a tough home run park for righties, to Fulton County Stadium "The Launching Pad" in Atlanta. According to baseball historican Bill James, Joe Adcock, who was Aaron's teammate for nine years, hit more homers per at bat than Aaron, and lost more homers to his ballpark than anyone in history other than Joe DiMaggio and Goose Goslin. Eddie Matthews, who batted left, holds the HR record for the Milwaukee part of the Braves years. Of course the other big change came in 1969, after Carl Yastrzemski staged a late season surge to win the AL batting title with a meagre .301, when the mound was lowered and strike zone shrunk, to, in James' words, stop Bob Gibson from pitching 32 shutouts a year. This came in a comment about Eddie Collins, another all-time great with a long career whose stats look better as he got older. But by James' 'Win Shares' method, he pointed out each was actually most effective in his late 20s. They didn't become  'better' players as they aged, but circumstances became more favourable for them and they were still great enough to take advantage of that.

Just this morning I read in an NFL column by Peter King a fantastic story; it wouldn't have made this obituary, but I can share it here: Aaron was a lifelong Cleveland Browns fan. He was originally drawn to the Browns (there were no NFL teams in the South when he was young, and the Miami team in the AAFC (in which the Browns played) was short-lived. It was also segregated, and the Browns left their black players at home when they travelled to Miami in 1946. But the presence of black stars like Bill Willis and Marion Motley made them young Aaron's favourite team when they joined the NFL in 1950. They were dismissed by NFL partisans, yet they beat the defending NFL champion Eagles in their very first game, and won the league title at the end of the season. Aaron had liked them as underdog heroes, with black stars alongside greats like Otto Graham and Dante Lavelli, and he was hooked.

As an adult, Aaron would buy a single ticket in the "Dawg Pound" end zone section, fly up from Atlanta incognito, and cheer anonymously among the Browns' most fervent fans. But in 1986, when he took a trip to watch the team in preseason, Browns GM Ernie Accorsi, a big baseball fan, recognised him. He went up and introduced himself and Aaron said "I know you you are. It's an honor to meet you." The became friends, but although Accorsi offered him better seats gratis, or a view from a box, Aaron preferred to stay in the Pound. "I didn't throw bones or do crazy stuff like that," he said, but he felt comfortable studying the game with the most enthralled fans.

I also had to leave out the idea that, had the Giants offered him just a little more money, they could have had both Aaron and Willie Mays in their outfield. Although Mays too had been offered a contract by the Boston Braves, before he signed with New York.

One last point: when Aaron joined the Indianapolis Clowns in 1952, the major leagues were, of course, integrated, but the Negro American League actually continued until 1962. The Clowns are said to have begun in Miami around 1935, though I have a replica hat from the Ethiopian Clowns, who barnstormed just after that, which was the team they morphed into before settling in Cincinnati and then Indy. It was my cricket cap when I kept wicket for ABC Sports London cricket club. When Aaron left the team, the Clowns signed a woman, Toni Stone, to play second base. The following year they sold her contract to the Kansas Cith Monarchs, and replaced her with two other women. The Clowns continued to barnstorm as entertainers after the NAL folded, and finally gave up themselves in 1989.

LARRY KING NOT LIVE: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of Larry King is up at The Guardian online, you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon, probably Monday. King's was a challenging piece to write: I wanted to put the importance of his show on CNN at the centre, what it meant in terms of news coverage--I was a little more direct in my analysis than what is printed, but King's success led Fox News to follow suit with O'Reilly, Hannity et al ad nauseum, though in their case the motivation was more being able to control the take on news by not "reporting" it than using the interview slot to feature ratings-grabbing celebs. 

The other problem was trying to deal with King's personal life, which was, as I suggest, the stuff of trash TV. The paper left out much of the loonier stuff of his later days, but it occurs to me that, since I have heard from people who worked in the CNN building just how personally friendly and kind King was, that he was just a kid having fun with the gig of his life.

The Simpsons show was the one where Homer eats fugu and is told he has 24 hours to live. After fulfilling his check list of last things to do, he sits in his La-Z-Boy listening to Larry King reading the Old Testament. King finishes the Begats, then gives one of little run downs of things he thinks, like in his USA Today column, as Homer snores. Marg comes down and thinks Homie is gone, only to see the drool coming out of his mouth. Having survived, Homer vows to live each precious day to the fullest.

The show ends with a crunching noise over black. As the camera pulls back it reveals Homer on the couch, eating pork scratchings, watching bowling. RIP Larry King.

GEORGIA ON MY MIND: THE NEW SOUTH & THE OLD (MY ARC DIGITAL ESSAY)

 In 1973 I was teaching a short-term course at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, about 80 miles south of the Confederate capital of Richmond. I was staying at a boarding house, and one evening I came back and the lady who ran the house was watching the news. I stood in the doorway for a second, watching a report on the mayoralty race in Atlanta between Maynard Jackson, who would become the city’s first black mayor, and the incumbent, Sam Massell. She saw me there and pointed to the screen. “Will you look at that,” she said. “A big ol’ city like Atlanta, and they can’t even find one white man to run for mayor.” I took the bait. “But Massell’s white,” I said. “He’s not white,” she told me, “he’s a Jew.”

I thought about that moment today when Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff both won, apparently, their US Senate races in Georgia. Warnock became the first black candidate ever to win a statewide race in Georgia, and he spoke movingly of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Herschel, who marched alongside Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr back in the day (if you aren’t aware, Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Ave in Atlanta, where Warnock is the pastor, was King’s church, and his father’s before him).

Back in 1996, after the Olympics had finished and my de-rigging at the Georgia Dome was done, I went to Sweet Auburn, the old heart of Atlanta’s black community, to visit the King Historical Center, across the street from the church. It was amazingly moving, watching that footage of marchers having fire hoses and police dogs set on them, before the police and others moved in to finish the job. I’d seen it on TV, in snippets, when I was a kid, and now the full horror set in again, wrapped in the context of people who were required to put their lives on the line just to achieve the justice and equality they were due as humans.

Afterwards, I went across the street to a luncheonette, sat at the counter and ordered a sandwich. Out the window, I could see the Georgia Dome, just a few miles from where I sat. The counterman brought the sandwich and I said “you must’ve been pretty busy the past few weeks?” He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?” "Well, with the Olympics and all those tourists. No offense, but there isn’t that much touristy in this city, and the King site, well, that’s the best thing I’ve seen. There must’ve been people coming to see it?” The guy looked out the window and pointed toward the downtown. “That was THEIR Olympics,” he said. “They didn’t send nobody here.”

Atlanta may have had black mayors, in fact every one since Jackson, but they didn’t actually run the city, in the same way that Georgia remained a state governed by whites, one that sent white senators to Washington. Gerrymandered congressional and state house districts kept the black vote restricted, as we saw in 2018, when Stacey Abrams ran for governor against the then-Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp,who aided his own campaign with wholesale purging of the voter lists: 700,000 cancellations in 2017 alone. Abrams lost by 50,000 votes statewide, but rather than challenge the result in the courts, she turned her attentions to voter registration. Combined with the Covid pandemic making remote and absentee voting more acceptable, Georgia went for Biden as well as the two Senators—by narrow margins that might well have been bigger were the state’s minority voters fully enfranchised.

It should be instructive that Kemp, and his secretary of state, have avoided following Trump’s challenges to the election results in Georgia. This does not make them “good guys” in this business of electoral suppression and fraud: they certainly do not want any full-scale examination of Georgia’s voting practices, and by upholding the rule of the law they set the stage to use that as part of their response should they be accused in 2022 or 2024 of abuses of voting rights.

Meanwhile the election of Ossoff, who will become the only member of the US Senate to have played in the British Baseball Federation (where he hit .200) reminds us that, although Atlanta billed itself as “the city too big to hate” that slogan arose from the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman convicted (in all likelihood wrongly) of the murder of a 13 year old girl, when his death sentence for the crime was commuted. He and Warnock entering the Senate together, a rare occurance brought about by Kelly Loeffler’s having been appointed to fill an unexpired term, will be like a symbolic restatement of that bond which used to link the black and Jewish communities, and, symbolically at least, holds out a modicum of hope for the Democrats and their pseudo-majority in the Senate.

I wonder how they took it in Ashland, and around the rest of the Confederacy? A few days later back in 1973, I returned to the boarding house after a night at a bar, and the husband of the lady who watched the news called me in to see some football. “Y’all played football in college up north?” he asked. “Yup.” “Well take a looksee at this,” he said, as Monday Night Football replayed a 100+ yard kickoff return touchdown by Miami’s Mercury Morris. “Jest lookit that thing run!” he exclaimed. I used to tell that story and point out it was then more than 100 years since the Civil War ended, at least on the battlefield. Now I tell it to remind us that this was less than 50 years ago, and there were then, as our president believes there are now, “fine people on both sides”. 

(Note: I wrote this for Arc Digital, a platform available on Medium. Check it out)