Don’t Underestimate A Mother

I just listened to a Great Courses lecture on the Susan B Anthony trial. She was arrested and convicted in 1872 for casting a presidential vote for Ulysses Grant.

While listening, I was entertained by an interesting fact regarding the ratification of the 19th Amendment. That was the amendment, passed in 1920, that prohibited states or the federal government from denying the right to vote based upon sex.

This amendment was a long time coming. Weirdly enough, the founding of the United States actually took some rights away from women. Some colonies granted women the franchise before 1776. With the founding of the United States, those limited states rights vanished. By 1807, all states explicitly forbade women from voting.

An argument can be made that the 14th Amendment, which forbids the abridgment of the privileges or immunities of any citizen, granted women the right to vote because, after all, sex is not mentioned in its text and there’s no question that women are citizens. That’s one of the arguments that Anthony unsuccessfully used during her trial.

So, the struggle for women’s rights continued even after the end of slavery. Some states, mostly in the West, did grant women the right to vote in state elections, but it was very slow going at the federal level. Starting in 1878, various proposals were made to Congress for an amendment granting women’s suffrage. They went absolutely nowhere.

World War I than happened. The US was sending soldiers overseas to allegedly fight for democracy. Isn’t a bit hypocritical to be willing to die for democracy overseas but then disenfranchise half of your population back at home? This argument did carry a lot of weight. Woodrow Wilson came out in favor of women’s suffrage. A suffrage amendment was proposed and passed by the national congress.

That’s the first step. 36 of the 48 state legislatures now needed to ratify it. Nearly immediately, 22 state legislatures did. Can anyone guess which part of the country was the most reluctant? It’s not a hard question. Alabama and Georgia were the first states to decisively defeat the amendment. The Governor of Louisiana worked to build a coalition of 13 other states to make sure that it could not pass. Of the Southern states, Texas was the only one that ratified it.

By June of 1920, 35 state legislatures had ratified it. The backers of the amendment worked with four states to bring it to a vote in their respective legislatures. Three of the states refused to take action.

That left Tennessee.

This brings us to Harry Burn. He was a Tennessee state legislator. He was, in 1920, 24 years old.

In the legislature, supporters of the amendment wore yellow roses while opponents wore red roses. Burn wore a red rose.

There was twice a vote to table the amendment (effectively killing it). Each time the tabling motion was voted down with  a vote of 48-48, so there was going to be a vote.

The vote for the amendment was 49-47 in favor. There was some additional chicanery to try to change the outcome, but the Tennessee legislature passed it, ratified it, and with it the women had the right to vote in all elections.

Harry Burn was the person that changed his vote to get to 49. Why did he change it? He was once in favor of the amendment and then was convinced that his constituents were opposed. He seemed at least open to the idea of women’s suffrage.

What tipped him over to vote in favor of the amendment was…a note from his mother. In it, she said, “Don’t forget to be a good boy” and to vote in favor.

In case there was doubt, Burn entered the following statement into the legislative record: “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”

Yes, tens of millions of women across the nation got to vote because one man decided to listen to his mother.

Think about that when historians talk about the inevitable tides of history and some such nonsense.

The actions of one person matters.

Oh yeah, one more thing. I’ve previously mentioned a couple of times that Mississippi only ratified the 13th Amendment banning slavery in 2013. Yes, seriously, that’s a fact. Well, don’t worry, Mississippi did much better on the subject of women’s suffrage.

Mississippi ratified the 19th Amendment in 1984. Well done!

Failure To Launch

Title: The Adventures of Augie March

Rating: 4 Stars

The Adventures of Augie March usually makes the list of possible candidates for the twentieth century Great American Novel.

It’s easy to understand why. It’s a broad coming of age story. As I was reading it, I was reminded of everything from The History of Tom Jones to David Copperfield to Vanity Fair to even Candide.

Like Dickens, Augie March is populated with an army of characters, all full of life, usually extremely verbal, and finely drawn. They regularly disappear for long intervals, only to reappear in a dramatically different context, leaving you to think, yes, I’ve seen this character before, but where exactly?

Augie March is proudly born in Chicago, somewhere around the end of WWI. His father is completely out of the picture. It’s just him, his brother Simon, his mentally disabled brother Gregory, and their meek mother.

The novel describes Augie’s struggle to find his place in the world. One aspect to this struggle is that, for some reason, there is something about Augie that encourages wealthy and successful people to help him.

Sometimes it’s his brother Simon, who, through fits and starts himself, ultimately ends up marrying a wealthy heiress and becoming a successful businessman. When Augie crosses paths with Simon, Simon pretty much continually harangues him to apply himself and follow the same path that Simon did.

There is also Einhorn, the paralyzed son of a very successful businessman named The Commodore. The Commodore dies immediately before The Great Depression, nearly ruining Einhorn, but he does manage to land on his feet. At various times throughout the 1920s, Einhorn mentors Augie as Augie attends to Einhorn’s, at times, very personal needs.

Next come Mr and Mrs Renfort. The Renforts are successful owners of a sporting goods store. Augie makes a great impression upon them and becomes a successful saleman. Mrs Renfort becomes so enamored with Augie that she wishes to adopt him. Afraid of being suffocated by the pair, Augie flees.

Later is the Armenian Mintouchian. A wealthy lawyer that takes Augie under his wing, Augie ends up in business with him after WWII selling GI supplies to the desperately poor but rebuilding Germany.

When he’s not being taken under the wing by wealthy businessmen, it’s women that step in and take over. Thea Fenchel, who a young Augie barely takes note of, takes him aside one day, tells him that she loves him, and that they will end up together.

Years later, Thea hunts down Augie and they promptly do fall in love. Augie and Thea go down to Mexico to follow her dream of training a bald eagle to hunt like a falcon to catch large lizards. Ultimately, it all falls apart and Thea abandons him in Mexico. While in Mexico, Augie meets Stella, the woman, again, years later, that he reconnects with and ultimately marries. While he’s in Europe conducting his business, Stella is pursuing an acting career in Paris.

In contrast to all of the business men of action, the intellectual characters in the novel have a curious passivity, if not actual insanity. There is Arthur, the son of Einhorn, who stands to inherit all of Einhorn’s business, but is content to be a languishing poet. Later Augie works for Robey, an eccentric millionaire that claims to be wanting to write one of the great masterpieces of all time, but makes little progress on it and just wants to talk. There is also Basteshaw, a carpenter that ends up in a lifeboat alone with Augie after their ship is torpedoed in WWII. At first Basteshaw actually seems to be a brilliant biochemist that has discovered how to artificially replicate life in a laboratory. Within days, he has gone clearly mad and Augie has to tend to him as they await their rescue.

This is interesting because Augie himself appears to be trapped between the business and the intellectual world. He understands the need for money, appreciates luxury when he has it, but just seems to lose interest in any one career path. He also has a passion for learning. At times he takes courses at a university but never completes. Other times he saves up money to go back but never quite does. During down times, he finds himself spending hours reading the Harvard Classics (the famous five foot shelf), but again, allows himself to become distracted.

At the end of the day, it seems that Augie can’t make up his mind to pursue business, relationships, or intellectual pursuits. Therefore, the other major characters in his life, by and large, dictate his path. He just seems to passively go along with whoever he happens to be with. By always trying to fit in with other people’s schemes, that seems to allow him to defer him choosing his own path.

At some level, he recognizes this and seems to want to change and to choose his own way. However, at the end of the novel, he is still married to Stella and is in business with Mintouchian.

If I were to make a guess, at some point in the future, Augie’s marriage to Stella will fail and his business venture with Mintouchian will end. If so, he will simply just fall under the spell of another woman or another successful businessman and will passively move along in their slipstream.

That truly appears to be Augie’s destiny.

10 Out Of 1974

I occasionally get caught going down a historical wormhole and discover depressing and/or discouraging things.

Recently, I discovered that, at least as of this writing, a total of 1,974 people have been US Senators. Of that total, 10 of them have been black. That is 1/2 of 1 percent of all US Senators.

Obviously, there was no hope before The Civil War. After The Civil War, the 14th amendment (1868) granted citizenship to all and the 15th amendment (1870) gave the vote to all men.

Amazingly enough, it was shortly after The Civil War that the first two black Senators were appointed by their respective state legislatures. Hiram Rhodes Revel was appointed in 1870 to fill out the final year of a term. Blanche Bruce was appointed in 1875 and served a full term.

Unless you’re really on top of your post Civil War history, you might not guess which state both of those men represented. Mississippi! Yes, the state whose flag to this day contains elements from the Confederate battle flag, that only officially ratified the 13th amendment banning slavery in the year 2013, and that even now has an official state holiday for Robert E Lee, was the first state to have black senators.

If you wonder why, of course the answer is Reconstruction. The victorious Union government managed the Southern state governments during that time to ensure that civil rights would actually be implemented. So called carpetbaggers and scalawags formed biracial governments.

Southern states fought external oversight and gradually gained back the power that they lost during The Civil War. Reconstruction officially ended in 1877. This ushered in wonderful things like Jim Crow laws where blacks were, in all but name, second class citizens.

To make the obvious point that racism isn’t just relegated to the Southern states, it wasn’t as if the Northern states were electing a bunch of black Senators during this time either.

In fact, after Bruce was appointed in 1875, the next black Senator wouldn’t be voted into office until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts. He was elected in 1966, nearly 100 years after the previous black Senator had served.

That apparently was enough for a while. The next black Senator to be elected was Carol Mosley Braun from Illinois, elected in 1992. Also from Illinois was Barack Obama, elected in 2004.

It seems crazy to me that it took until 2004 to have 5 black Senators to have ever served. youTube was founded only a month after Obama was sworn in to begin his first senatorial term, for fuck’s sake.

Next up was Roland Burris, once again from Illinois. He was appointed to serve Obama’s term after Obama was elected President. Similarly, Mo Cowan from Massachusetts was appointed to serve the remaining term of John Kerry after he was appointed Secretary of State.

Tim Scott from South Carolina was also appointed to fill a term (in this case, the Senator chose to leave government). However, after he completed the interim appointment, he was able to win election on his own.

The final two, Cory Booker from New Jersey and Kamala Harris from California, both won elections to the Senate.

What does all of this tell us?

Well, first of all, Reconstruction ended way too soon. The fact that it took nearly 100 years after Reconstruction for a black Senator to serve is proof of that.

Racism is a national pastime. A grand total of six states have had black senatorial representation. Granted, it’s a bit much expecting Wyoming (.9% black population) to have a black Senator, but how about states like Louisiana, Delaware, or Michigan?

Of the ten that served, three of them didn’t even serve a full term. That tells me that those three were, by and large, at best symbolic appointments.

Of the ten, only five of them first got into the Senate by winning a popular vote. That tells me that, even now, after having had a black President, the will of the people is still not particularly friendly towards black candidates.

Not exactly headline news, but lordy, 1/2 of 1%?

Sparta In Space!

Title: Starship Troopers

Rating: 4 Stars

I admit that I’m not a big fan of sci-fi. I might have mentioned this before, but it seems like there’s typically too much science and too little fiction. Things like character development often seem to be missing. I do every now and then reach into some sci-fi best-of list and read one just to prove myself wrong.

That’s how I ended up reading Starship Troopers. I know that this is kind of a questionable choice because of its reputation surrounding its politics.

I found the story itself to be quite enjoyable. Set in some distant future, it’s the story of Johnnie Rico, a somewhat directionless spoiled rich boy about to graduate high school. On little more than a whim, he decides to join the military. With virtually no aptitude in anything else, he ends up in the Mobile Infantry, one of the most dangerous branches of the military.

It’s the story of his boot camp, first battles, increasing danger, decision to enter the candidate officer school, and ends up with him as a wizened veteran leading soldiers into battle.

At that level, the tale is pretty much every non-ironic coming of age story that you’ve previously encountered. Heinlein describes the punishing boot camp, Rico’s increasing maturity, the thrill and danger of combat quite well. It was addictive reading as Rico was propelled from situation to situation. This was the primary reason why I gave it four stars.

You cannot discuss Starship Troopers without discussing the politics. There is a global government on planet Earth. To be a full citizen and to be able to vote, you must serve a term of federation service. Effectively, for a man this means the military.

The vast majority of people do not join and thus are not full participants in the society. Such people can become quite successful and affluent (if not actually quite rich). Generally, they look upon soldiers with ill disguised contempt.

The soldiers, of course (and also for that matter, it’s safe to say Heinlein himself), see the matter differently. They see themselves as the only true citizens. Their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the federation proves that deeper commitment. Their training, with the emphasis on sacrificing the one for the all, uniquely prepares them for the full participation of being a citizen.

It’s important to realize that this novel was written in 1959. Heinlein wrote it in response to the US suspension of nuclear tests. From a Cold War point of view, it’d be harder to find a time much colder than 1959. Sputnik had been launched a couple of years earlier and the US was in a panic about losing the space race. The US was in the midst of another panic regarding a nonexistent missile gap with the USSR. People were building bomb shelters under their houses. Eisenhower knew how ill prepared the Soviets actually were but could not reassure the American public without revealing intelligence sources.

Could it be that the central planning of the USSR is a superior form of government to the individual initiative of the US? Would the twentieth century liberal society collapse as it turned its men into effete marshmallows?

This was a time when the US was convinced that it was in a battle to the death with a philosophy utterly opposed to the Western democratic / individualistic philosophy upon which it was based. For those people, like Curtis LeMay, who literally had their hand on the button that could result in millions of deaths, this was no time to be soft. We were in a bitter fight to the end. We must be willing to lose and kill millions of lives to save our American Way.

Given that context, the novel makes more sense. The enemy that the forces of Earth are fighting are The Arachnids (literally called bugs by the soldiers). They are faceless, fearless, amoral fighters mindlessly fighting to the death under central direction. Armed with all kinds of weapons (including nuclear), the Mobile Infantry soldiers willingly jump into danger and face, at times, near certain death, to protect the comfortable way of life of those non-citizens back on Earth. They are hard men having to make hard decisions while facing death on a far away planet.

Of course, this fetishizing of the military can lead to um, a more fascist society. There is that. Also, although women with their faster reflexes (!?) make better pilots, there are scarcely any women in the novel at all. The few times that the subject comes up, it seems to be in the context of the big manly soldiers protecting them, thus rendering them as essentially equivalent to children.

Given that it was written in 1959, I’m not saying that that makes the politics in the novel awesome, but it does make it understandable.

Just in case you think that this is all in the past and that there aren’t people that still think like this, here’s a quote from A Few Good Men, where Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) sneers at the young lawyer Kaffee (Tom Cruise) by saying:

We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way.

Robert Heinlein (and for that matter, Dick Cheney) couldn’t have said it better.

Don’t cross the streams of consciousness!

Title: Mrs Dalloway

Rating: 3 Stars

I’ve written a bit about existentialist novelists such as Camus. Although I appreciate their creativity and innovation, actually reading them can be a bit of a chore. I certainly don’t regret reading them, but after finishing one, I’m not exactly leaping out of my chair to grab the next one.

So it is with the modernists. Last year, I climbed one of my long time literary mountains when I read Ulysses. It took me over a month. I had to have two separate supporting references to even begin to understand it as I read it. I read it. I finished it. I appreciated it. I’m not sure how much joy I got out of it other than the satisfaction of tackling an extremely challenging work. As I’ve read other modernists like Faulkner, Proust, or Beckett, I usually end up with those same feelings.

So it is with Virginia Woolf. I’d previously read To The Lighthouse, which I somewhat surprisingly enjoyed. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like reading Lee Child, but I was actively engaged and interested throughout the novel.

With Mrs Dalloway, although a significantly less challenging read, I was reminded of Ulysses. I was so reminded not only because, like Ulysses, all events take place on one day. Some of the stream of consciousness threads that ran throughout Mrs Dalloway seemed reminiscent of Ulysses. Woolf, in ways similar to Joyce, tries to capture the transitory thoughts that flit through a person’s brain as they are, for example, idly staring through a store window.

Although definitely interesting, it does put real requirements upon a reader trying to do even a semi-serious reading of the work. For me, I essentially required near absolute silence. I put away my phone so that I wouldn’t be disturbed. Even so (and maybe this is part of the point), I found my own thoughts wandering as I was reading the wandering thoughts of whoever had the current point of view.

The multiple points of view is one of the interesting aspects of the novel. At least a dozen or so characters have their moment in the literary spotlight. The transitions of the streams of consciousness from one character to the next was done in an almost eerily seamless manner, almost as if Woolf’s proposing that we’re all part of one big hive of semi-random thought patterns.

There’s not a tremendous amount of plot. Mrs Dalloway is planning a party. During the day, she meets Peter Walsh, who was one of her suitors decades ago before she meets and weds someone more socially appropriate for her. Walsh, now in his fifties, has led a mediocre life and is questioning his life choices.

The other major thread is Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI soldier suffering from serious PTSD. In public, he mutters to himself and often hallucinates seeing Evans, one of his dearest, now dead, friends from the war. His wife, Lucrezia, is desperately trying to get help for him before he kills himself. Considering Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental health and that she ultimately did commit suicide, her imaginings of the inner thoughts of Septimus seem both insightful and tragic.

It was beautifully written and certainly much more accessible than Ulysses. I just probably will not be jumping up and starting A Room Of One’s Own any time soon.

The Frozen Chosin

Title: On Desperate Ground

Rating: 5 Stars

I guess that I’m officially a fan boy of Hampton Sides. I’d previously read Ghost Soldiers, about the Battle of Bataan, the Death March, and the rescue of some American POW’s deep behind enemy lines; and Hellhound on His Trail, about Martin Luther King’s assassination and the pursuit of his assassin, James Earl Ray. I thoroughly enjoyed both of those two works.

On Desperate Ground is about the Korean War. It is centered around the First Marine Division and their desperate attempt to break out of a Chinese encirclement at the Chosin Reservoir. This might be my favorite Sides history.

Sides has a special talent for pulling you into whatever historical event that he’s focusing on. Here he does it by both focusing on the grand strategy of generals and Presidents and focusing on nearly unimaginable acts of personal heroism.

First, let’s start with the grand strategy. It basically begins and ends with the narcissistic egomania of Douglas MacArthur.

North Korea launches a surprise invasion of South Korea. It is initially so successful that they nearly drive the South Korean / US forces into the sea. They manage to maintain a stronghold on the tip of the peninsula.  The prevailing thought was that the US / UN would send forces to shore up this defensive line and then push their way back up the peninsula.

MacArthur has the idea to launch an invasion force much further North at Inchon. This seems suicidal, but MacArthur got his way and the invasion is completely successful. They effectively destroy the North Korean army as a fighting force as it somewhat chaotically retreats. The US/UN/South Korean army recovers the original line of demarcation and continues to press northward.

MacArthur sees this as a great opportunity to push all of the way to the Yalu river, eliminate the North Korean government, and unify the Korean peninsula under the South Korean government. The Truman government is not opposed to this but does not want to, in any way, antagonize the Chinese.

The Yalu river is the Chinese border. The Chinese are not at all interested in having an American imperialist lackey state on its border. It will do whatever it takes to save North Korea.

China openly communicates this, both in words and in actions. US forces encounter Chinese soldiers in North Korean territory. The US army captures Chinese soldiers that freely tell them how many Chinese soldiers are in North Korea.

MacArthur refuses to believe these eyewitness reports. At this point in his career, he simply imagines that he’s incapable of error. Right is on his side. His sycophantic intelligence chief echoes what he thinks MacArthur wants to hear. His hand selected general leading the invasion army insists that all evidence on the ground be ignored and that the drive to the Yalu, through mountainous regions in the bitter cold, be continued.

The First Marine Division is spearheading this advance. They stop one night up in the mountain ridges over the Chosin Reservoir. Although exhausted, they seem a little on edge, so they do take extra precautions and dig themselves into the frozen ground as much as they can.

That night, to whistles and bugle calls, the Chinese attack. The US forces are outnumbered at least 10 to 1. The Chinese do not have adequate supplies. In fact, some soldiers apparently in the charge do not have any weapons at all. But they do have numbers.

The area quickly becomes a charnal house. Sometimes, the Chinese get so close that they have to be driven off by the Marines using their guns as clubs. The Chinese throw hand grenades. One Marine in particular becomes adept at swatting at the grenades with his shovel to drive them back. Thousands of Chinese die. Hundreds of US soldiers die. Nearly all of the US soldiers are wounded, some of them horrifically. One soldier (Ken Benson), completely blinded, continues to fight by loading a gun while his buddy (Hector Cafferata Jr) fires another one. They then switch as one gun empties so that he can lay continuous fire.

Keep in mind that all of this is taking place in unimaginable cold. It is 25 degrees below zero. It is 70 degrees below zero with the windchill. At least one soldier was sleeping in his sleeping bag when the attack started. He didn’t even have time to put on his boots. He fought the entire night in that cold in his socks.

Unbelievable acts of heroism / survival are described. In one desperate battle, one soldier (Jack Chapman) continues to fire his truck mounted weapon even as he was repeatedly shot. He was shot seven times before he finally collapsed. He was then captured and spent 2 1/2 years in a POW camp.

Another soldier (Ed Reeves) suffered severe leg injuries that left him unable to walk. He was in a truck with other wounded soldiers when the entire caravan was completely wiped out by the Chinese. A Chinese soldier came into the truck and shot each of the wounded soldiers dead. However, the shot just grazed Reeves’ head. All of the other soldiers were dead. As the dead soldiers were being unloaded from the truck, one of the Chinese soldiers noticed that Reeves was still alive. The Chinese soldiers then repeatedly beat Reeves on the head. Reeves held up his hands to protect himself, which only resulted in having severely broken hands. Convinced that he was dead (again), the Chinese abandoned him. After the Chinese soldiers moved on, Reeves tried to escape. With both his legs and his hands now useless, he could only propel himself forward using his elbows. He did this for hours. He ended up crossing across the frozen Chosin reservoir, where he was one of the last soldiers to be recovered alive.

Surrounded, the First Marine Division has to fight their way back to a port from which they can escape. That fighting retreat is itself a fascinating story and fills the latter part of this history.

Hampton Sides tells the story of the Korean War in such a way that you simply can’t stop reading. I’ve noticed this in his other works as well. Even though it’s history, even though you know how it’s going to end, he manages to build up so much suspense that you find yourself compelled to read.

This is narrative history at its finest.

Cross Dressing Oscar Bait

Title: Tootsie

Rating: 2 Stars

As I have been making my way through the 2008 AFI Best Films list, occasionally I’ve been hard on some of the older films for reasons that probably aren’t fair to them. There are films that weren’t really controversial at all in their time but in the lens of the current day, now appear problematic. I’m talking in particular about Fred Astaire’s extended black face scenes in Swing Time (not to mention that as a good guy protagonist his character is actually kind of an asshole) as well as the decidedly Pro-South Civil War points of view of the films The General and Gone With The Wind.

Just to prove that it’s not only films from the 1920s and 1930s that I have such concerns about, along comes 1982’s Tootsie.

It’s the story of a chronically unemployed actor named Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) who is talented but difficult to work with. Desperate to get some money so that he can produce his roommate’s play, he learns of an opening for a female character on a soap opera. Knowing that he’s now essentially unemployable as himself, Dorsey dresses up as a woman and auditions for the role. Of course he gets it. He now assumes an alternate identity as Dorothy Michaels.

As Dorothy, Michael demonstrates independence, much to the consternation of the chauvinistic director, Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman). The other (real) women, heretofore having no such independence, cheers him (her) on. Dorsey finds himself falling for the leading lady of the soap, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), who is currently in a relationship with Carlisle. In a comedic turn, Nichols widowed father, Les Nichols (Charles Durning), begins to fall for Dorothy.

Merry madcap mishaps ensue.

Before I start to talk about the film, I find it interesting to remember how big of a thing soap operas were in the 1980s. I just looked. On the major networks, there are 4, count them 4, soap operas still on. In the 1980s, soap operas were huge. Each of the three networks had many hours of them on every day and they were, without question, part of the cultural conversation. Some of these shows were started in the 1950s or the 1960s and were still going strong decades later. Giant shows like All My Children, As The World Turns, Guiding Light, and One Life To Live are now all gone. Soap operas, if I recollect correctly, were filmed largely in New York City. Since a lot of them were an hour a day, five days a week, they were legitimate vehicles for struggling actors to find work. Watching Tootsie, I realized that that was an entire part of the entertainment world that was just basically overcome by events, the victim both of women no longer staying at home during the day and the high cost of producing a scripted show as opposed to game shows or talk shows.

Now, about the film. In its day, it was considered progressive. Here is a previously chauvinistic actor (Dorsey) learning what it really means to be a woman and becoming better from the experience. As Dorsey tells Nichols after he appears as his true self, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man”.

That’s well and good, but look at the message behind the message. The women in the film start to exert their independence only after a man disguised as a woman blazes the path for them. The underlying message seemed to be that the women really needed a man to show them how to live a freeing life. That seems problematic to me now.

In another scene, Dorsey, dressed as Dorothy, is actually the victim of an attempted rape. It’s played as a joke. A doddering, oversexed, drunk man just can’t resist the charms of Dorothy and tries to aggressively pull her to a couch. With #MeToo, this no longer really seems like comedic material.

There’s another character named Sandy Lester (Teri Garr) that I haven’t mentioned yet. Lester and Dorsey are longtime friends. Lester catches Dorsey in a compromising position, and instead of trying to explain, he starts an affair with her. Let’s just start with the fact that it’s almost as if Lester has no agency at all. Dorsey decides that they should have sex and they do. He then promptly abandons her. This is before Dorsey has learned the errors of his way, so I guess this is to show his growth when he apologizes to her. I guess. However, after the apology, the Lester character essentially disappears. As far as I can tell, she literally existed as a character so that Dorsey can have sex with her, abandon her, and then kind of feel bad about it.

Finally, there’s Dustin Hoffman himself. He has been caught up in the #MeToo movement. Multiple women have accused him of sexual harassment, including a woman that was, at the time, a 17 year old intern on the set of a film that he was starring in. Besides those actual potentially criminal allegations, in the name of acting, he’s done some pretty questionable things to female actors to illicit ‘true’ performances out of them. Knowing that, seeing him in this role is unsettling.

Interestingly enough, this is not the only cross dressing film on the AFI list. There is also Some Like It Hot. Somehow that film still seems enjoyable as a comedy. This could be because it’s not even trying to make some deeper social statement. It’s much more of like, hey, look at these dudes in dresses being silly, aka Bosom Buddies if you want to translate that film to its 1980s equivalent.

I first watched Tootsie in the theater back when it was released and I remember enjoying it.  Because of some combination of all of what I just discussed plus nearly 40 years of cultural change, Tootsie just no longer seems that funny to me.

Famine, Typhus, and Landlords, Oh My

Title: The Graves Are Walking

Rating: 4 Stars

This is the brutal story of Ireland during the famine. It primarily discusses events between 1845 to 1847, but the effects extended well into the 1850s.

In 1845, the Irish economy was pretty simple. Nearly everyone either owned a small to middling plot of land or worked on a larger plot in exchange for their own little plot to grow their own food. There was hardly any kind of economic system involving merchants, transportation, or finance. Most Irish usually bartered for any goods that they needed.

Although desperately poor, this system kind of worked. Potatoes are relatively easy to grow and are dense in calories. Therefore, despite their extreme poverty, the Irish were surprisingly robust in health and the typical family was large in number.

By 1845, Ireland was essentially a potato mono-culture. Not only that, but they strongly favored one particular species of potato.

In 1845, there arose rumors of a potato blight in Europe that was devastating crops. Not much concern was expressed until it appeared in Ireland. The species of potato that the Irish favored was especially susceptible to the blight. Nearly overnight, all of the potatoes in a field turned black and the smell of death hung in the air. As the blight spread throughout Ireland, concern began to grow. The blight took about 25 percent of the crop. Although scary, it was a bumper year for potatoes. Although certainly difficult, the Irish managed to make it through the year without significant famine.

1846 was completely different. The weather throughout the year was cold, wet, and miserable. With so much crop damage from the previous year, not as much was planted. Early optimism proved premature when the fields started failing again. This time, about 90 percent of the crop failed.

For Ireland, 1846 was the year of death. People ate grass. They would cut the necks of live cows and drink their blood. Entire families died of starvation in their homes. Babies were trying to nurse from dead mothers. Mothers were carrying around dead babies. People bartered away their clothes until they were virtually naked. There wasn’t enough coffins to bury the dead, so they started using coffins just for the service and then would reuse the coffin for the next service.

The famine brought the Irish into close quarters with each other. That, in conjunction with their weakened state, allowed diseases to flourish. Diseases such as Typhus killed ten times as many people than starvation.

At the time, the English government was dominated by a group of men called the Moralists. They believed that the Irish were lazy, undisciplined, and that their whole society needed structural reform. In accordance with that, they at first tried to associate relief with work programs and with agricultural structural reforms.

The fall of 1846 was unseasonably cold. There was regular rain and snow. In this horrible weather, the work programs were forcing nearly naked men dying of starvation to work building roads leading to nowhere and leveling hills for no purpose.

The English government also passed Poor Laws, which taxed the Irish landowners for the poor on their land that needed relief. The landowners responded to this law by hiring toughs to forcibly evict their tenants and to tear down their dilapidated housing, rendering thousands of families homeless, starving, and miserable.

Understanding that their country was dying, many Irish took any opportunity that they could to emigrate. Large numbers of Irish ended up in Liverpool. From there, they tried to emigrate to Canada or to the US. Between their physical condition and how they were crammed into unhealthy holds in a ship, the death rate on crossings was around 20 percent. Where ever they ended up, the Irish were considered little more than beasts and treated with contempt.

Finally, the English government understood the scale of the cataclysm and set up soup kitchens and fed all, regardless of their work state.

By the end of the disaster, out of an Irish population of eight million, an estimated one million people died and two million people emigrated.

I’ve heard about the famine before, but this history did an outstanding job of not only describing the suffering but also identifying root causes.

From Joseph McCarthy to Donald Trump

Title: Where’s My Roy Cohn?

Rating: 4 Stars

Whatever else you might want to say or think about Roy Cohn, one thing is certainly true, he led an interesting life. He was a (possibly, the) dark malignant force in the US for some thirty-five years.

This was marked from his very first entry onto the main stage. He graduated from law school at the age of twenty but had to wait until he was twenty-one to take the bar.

At the age of twenty-four, he took his first big case, prosecuting the Rosenberg trial. For those of you not up on your communist nuclear paranoia, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were accused of being atomic spies by passing on Manhattan Project documents to the Soviet Union. It became quite the cause celebre with conservatives demanding their execution and liberals fighting against what they saw as state paranoia.

I believe that the current consensus is that Julius was a spy but that Ethel was not. Regardless, in a sign of things to come, Cohn used every illicit trick in the book to secure their convictions and, ultimately, their executions.

Such lack of ethics in the ruthlessly brutal pursuit of his own aims drew the attention of Joseph McCarthy. Cohn became McCarthy’s chief counsel during his communist witch hunt. Interestingly enough, one of his investigations was the so-called Lavender Scare, in which the investigation was focused on Soviet agents making gay government employees spy for the Soviet Union to keep their sexuality from being publicly revealed. This led Dwight Eisenhower to sign an order excluding gay people from government service.  This was interesting because it was a barely kept secret that Cohn was gay and it’s a fact that he died of AIDS.

It could be argued that Cohn’s sexuality ultimately brought down McCarthy. At the time, Cohn had an intimate relationship with a man named David Schine. Schine was drafted into the army. Cohn tried to coerce the army into giving Schine light duty. Cohn threatened to “wreck the army”. This led to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which dramatically included the army’s chief counsel calling out McCarthy with the phrase “have you no decency, sir”. This hearing broke our country’s fever of paranoia and McCarthy never recovered.

However, Cohn just kept on going on. He entered the world of New York law. Most famously, he became the go to lawyer for the mafia, representing, among others, Tony Salerno and John Gotti.

In case representing gangsters wasn’t enough, Donald Trump enters the picture. He was a large owner of rental apartment properties. Many of those properties illegally discriminated against minorities by doing such things as quoting different prices for the same apartment and falsely claiming no vacancy when a minority tried to apply. The government accused him of violating the Fair Housing Act.

Trump hired Cohn and Cohn counterattacked with his usual lack of fear and ethics. He filed a massive counter suit against the government that was dismissed. Trump ultimately accepted a settlement that he found acceptable.

This started a decade long relationship where Cohn served as Trump’s mentor if not father figure. All of the things that we now know and love about Trump, from his repeating known bald face lies to never backing away from a fight to having no sense of shame are lessons directly from Cohn’s life.

Also, Cohn introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch, so we have him to thank for that as well.

In the political arena, he was credited with encouraging John Anderson’s third party candidate run in 1980 to benefit Ronald Reagan. There were rumors that he worked with the media to publish Thomas Eagleton’s medical history (complete with depression and shock treatments) to torpedo McGovern’s 1972 campaign. Considering his own relationship with the mafia, he might have appreciated the irony of digging up the dirt accusing the 1984 Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, of having mafia ties through her husband.

To his dying day, he claimed that he had liver cancer. Everyone knew that he was dying of AIDS, but he was so deeply closeted that he would take that secret to his grave. Once it became known that he was dying of AIDS, Donald Trump stopped receiving his phone calls.

Do you think that this fact hurt Roy Cohn, or do you think Trump’s abandonment of him in his dying moments served as proof to Cohn that he taught his protege well?

O.G. True Crime Non Fiction Novel

Title: Compulsion

Rating: 5 Stars

When I went to hear James Ellroy speak, he mentioned two novels that inspired his true crime writing career. First there was True Confessions, about the Black Dahlia murder. The second was Compulsion, a very thinly fictionalized version of the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Frank. Of the two, Compulsion is the superior novel and is ground breaking in many ways.

I’d never heard of Compulsion. With all of the hoopla regarding Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and how innovative it was, I just assumed that it was the original of its genre. After all, Truman Capote claimed it was a new type, the non-fiction novel. The novel In Cold Blood, which I enjoyed, was written in 1966. Compulsion was written in 1956.

Before I go too much into the novel, let’s first talk about the crime upon which it was based. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two brilliant young men from wealthy families in Chicago. They were 19 and 18 respectively. By that age, Leopold had already graduated from the University of Chicago.

When they were introduced, they quickly became nearly inseparable. Loeb was obsessed with murder mysteries. Leopold was obsessed with Nietzsche, specifically his philosophy of the Superman, those very few people that are so great that they are beyond social constraints such as law.

Leopold was also obsessed with Loeb. They made a pact. Leopold would plan a murder with Loeb in exchange for Loeb’s sexual favors.

They spent many months planning the perfect murder. In May of 1924, they kidnapped a younger neighborhood child named Bobby Franks. They immediately killed him and stuffed his body into a culvert. They then started their elaborate scheme to collect a ransom. The ransom was for ten thousand dollars, a relative pittance to children of millionaires. Generally it’s believed that the ransom was just part of their weird game.

It all fell apart almost immediately. The body was not well hidden and was discovered while the ransom was still being negotiated. Leopold somehow managed to leave his glasses (which had a very special hinge that nearly uniquely identified him) behind. When brought in for questioning, their alibis fell apart. Loeb confessed first, claiming Leopold actually did the killing. Leopold then confessed and pointed the finger at Loeb. To this day no one really knows who killed Franks, although most people think it was Loeb.

Given the youth and status of both the murderers and the victim as well as the Nietzschean motiveless nature of the murder, the case quickly became one of the first ‘crimes of the century’. There was tremendous nationwide and local coverage. It was generally believed that if anyone deserved the death penalty, it would be those two.

Enter Clarence Darrow, the great lawyer of the time. Usually taking the cause of the downtrodden and the indigent, he took the case due to his passionate hatred of capital punishment.

With Darrow’s presence, the crime of the century became the trial of the century. Pleading the two men guilty, Darrow just tried to save their lives. Bringing in psychiatrists from all over the country to analyze the two, he tried to make the case that even though the young men are guilty and should never be freed again, that there are mitigating circumstances that should spare them the death penalty.

Ultimately he succeeds and both are sentenced to life imprisonment. Loeb is shanked in a shower several years into his sentence and dies. Leopold ultimately spends over thirty years in prison before getting paroled. He moves to Puerto Rico and lives there for some years before dying of natural causes.

The author, Meyer Levin, was a peer to Leopold and Loeb and worked for a Chicago newspaper during the crime and trial. Writing some thirty years later, he brings it all back to life.

He does change names, but only slightly. Instead of Leopold and Loeb, we have Judd Steiner and Artie Strauss. For Clarence Darrow, there is Jonathon Wilk. There’s even Sid Silver, who is Levin’s own caricature.

The novel follows the actual story quite closely. In fact, during Wilk’s summation, he quotes entire paragraphs from Darrow’s summation.

It’s more than just a recitation of facts. Levin gets deep inside the head of Steiner and Strauss and gives them thoughts, emotions, and motivations that are of his own invention. He gives full range to their fantasies and to their troubled psychological states.

Not just Steiner and Strauss but all of the major characters are deeply inspected and exposed to public view.

In fact, thirty years later, when the book was released, Leopold was horrified when he read it. He said that it left him feeling naked and exposed.

Considering that it was written in 1956, the homosexual relationship between Steiner and Strauss was handled relatively explicitly and sensitively. Sure, there are policemen and reporters calling them perverts, but that was the time of 1924. The actual relationship between the two described in the novel seemed well rendered.

In my opinion, In Cold Blood owes much to Compulsion. It’s really obvious in the structure, as the reader gets a birds eye view of the two planning the crime, the police and the reporters trying to solve the crime, the cat and mouse game between the two and the police, as well as the trial. In fact, the respective confession scenes between the two sets of killers struck me as quite similar in nature.

At the end of the novel, there is an extensive discussion of Steiner’s psychological state. Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the final scene in Psycho as Norman Bates sits quietly alone in a room as you listen to a psychiatrist discuss in some details the motivations behind his actions.

One final note about the fact that it was written in 1956. In 1924, the philosophy of Nietzsche seemed exotic but probably theoretical. Writing in 1956, after the rise and fall of Nazism and their exaltation of themselves as some master race, Levin creates a thread between the beliefs that drove Steiner and Strauss to senseless murder to the senseless murder of millions by the Nazis.

If you’re a fan of true crime, if you haven’t read this yet, you should add it to your list. It’s one of the original examples and even now, over sixty years later, it still sits atop the genre.