A Madness To The Method

Title: The Method

Rating: 5 Stars

Acting must be a weird job. You have to appear effortlessly natural in a completely self conscious manner, typically in front of a large crowd or in front of an entire crew of people shining lights and pointing cameras at you. Considering how most people freeze up when someone just records them on a phone, it is a skill that requires a unique set of training and natural gifts.

The Method, by Isaac Butler, takes you through the history of how acting changed, especially in the US, over the span of about a century.

It starts in Tsarist Russia. In the 1890s, a respected theater professional named Vladimir Nemirovich-Dancheko thought that Russian theater was stuck. All acting was stylized with prescribed dramatic gestures and loud declamation of lines directed at the audience. There was no drama to the, well, dramas being performed. To start fresh, he reached out to a young, independently wealthy, amateur actor who went by the stage name of Konstantin Stanislavski.

They had a meeting that, in their excitement, lasted eighteen hours. Out of that came a brand new theater called Moscow Art Theater.

Working together, they came up with a new, more natural technique to acting. Instead of rote memorization of the lines of the play, the actors were encouraged to break their roles into bits. For each bit, they were to question what is the role trying to accomplish and how it is to be accomplished. Adding all of the bits together will give you the through-line for that role.

Instead of using stock gestures to register emotion, the actors were encouraged to use affective memory. They were encouraged to understand the emotion being expressed and then mine their own memories to recollect a time when they had experienced a similar emotion. This was to be used to guide their performance.

Stanislavski called this a system. Using modern plays written by playwrights like Chekhov, they were able to create theatrical experiences that struck a deep emotional chord with the audience. The group toured both Europe and the United States, exposing audiences to these new ideas.

The Russian Revolution then happened. Several members involved with the system and the theater group left the country. Two of them, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, landed in the United States. They founded and taught Stanislavski’s system at the American Laboratory Theatre. In the mid 1920s, among many others, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler were two students of the laboratory.

Strasberg specifically felt that there was more to acting than the system. Strasberg, Adler, and Harold Clurman (and some others) founded the Group Theatre. There, they started teaching their variation of the system, now called method. Sanford Meisner joined the Group Theatre. For the ensuing decades, Strasberg, Adler, and Meisner taught method acting to generations of actors. Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Dustin Hoffman, Daniel Day Lewis, Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Marilyn Monroe, Ellen Burstyn, Shelley Winters, and Jane Fonda, among so many others, all received training by at least one of the three.

Here’s the thing. Even though they all started from the same point (ie the Laboratory) and they all thought that there were teaching the method, their individual teachings quickly diverged. Therefore, the very idea of method acting has become muddled.

Strasberg’s teaching was very psychological. He encouraged actors to dig deep within their psyche to bring out their most powerful performances. While this produces great results, in a theater setting, you have to do that night after night. Doing so left actors psychologically damaged. Adler discouraged students from using their own personal experiences and to strengthen their imaginative powers. Meisner’s approach was much more pragmatic and simple. He recommended memorizing the script completely and then attempting to improvise within it.

It’s interesting to realize that the actors that most people would associate with acting are those who subsume their own selves within the role that they’re playing. Most famous examples of this include Robert De Niro and Daniel Day Lewis. They are considered quintessentially method, but to some teachers of the method, what they are doing are not method in any way at all.

The work is also interesting in that it gets into personalities. Strasberg and Adler hated each other. Strasberg comes across as a mostly cold asshole with a volcanic temper given to withering criticisms. James Dean comes across as a poser that wasn’t really all that interested in becoming an actor so much as wanting to imitate Brando and Clift. It’s not clear to me that Stanislavski really even understood himself what he was trying to teach. Much like Strasberg, when it came down to it, Stanislavski would just throw words around and hope that his students could get meaning out of them.

Even so, method acting had a huge impact on American acting. I’ve written about it before, but moviegoers that walked in unaware to watch A Streetcar Named Desire must have been blown away. Seventy years and oh so many method actors later, it’s hard to understand how different Brando’s performance was to previous actors. Even now, watching it, his performance leaps off of the screen.

One of the things that I have done during the pandemic was to dive deep into old films. This book did an excellent job of tracing the dramatic changes that have taken place in American acting over the last century.

Toxic Masculinity In A Cowboy Hat

Title: The Power of the Dog

Rating: 5 Stars

Just a week ago or so, I wrote about toxic masculinity in the Kubrick film, The Shining. Here again we get to see it on full display.

Like most people who’ve read the book over the last couple of months, I was brought to it by the film adaptation. Typically I’d do a compare/contrast with the film and the book. Since I haven’t seen the film in several months and don’t have the time/inclination to re-watch it, I’ll focus most of my thoughts on the novel.

It’s the story of two brothers, Phil and George Burbank. Set in 1924 on a ranch in Montana, it portrays the last days of what people would consider the old time American West. Their parents, members of the Eastern elite, had moved to Utah to take up ranching. In due time, they’d become quite wealthy. Some years ago, there was some kind of altercation between Phil and his parents. The parents now live in a hotel in Salt Lake City. The two brothers run the ranch together.

The two couldn’t be any more different. George can be best described as stolid. He doesn’t get too upset. He’s not a big intellectual. He doesn’t read much. He just quietly goes about his way.

Phil, at 40, is the eldest by two years. He is brilliant, having graduated with honors from college. An accomplished banjo player, he learned it on his own. He thinks circles around George and doesn’t hesitate to show his superiority.

Phil is also a manly man. As a matter of principle, he refuses to wear gloves while working. He showers at most once a month. He wears grimy clothes to dinner. He likes to sit and talk with the hired men, most of whom can barely write. The novel opens with a graphic description of him castrating a number of young calves. As he does, he makes a number of lewd comments, much to the other men’s amusement. As an example of a real man, he regularly tells stories of Bronco Henry, a mentor to Phil as he was growing up.

Into this mix arrives an innkeeper named Rose and her son Pete. Rose’s husband (and Pete’s father) had committed suicide some years earlier. Unbeknownst to them, it was Phil who played a key role in driving him to it. Pete, being effeminate, is mocked by Phil.

Later, George and Rose get married. Phil is shocked and disgusted. He treats her with contempt. Phil’s effeminate ways drives Phil to further scorn. Phil’s treatment to Rose drives her to drink, and she loses herself to alcohol.

Even though Phil makes fun of Pete, Phil notices that, although Pete doesn’t aggressively respond back to Phil, he is not intimidated by him either. Interested, Phil begins to attempt to draw Pete closer to him.

It becomes clear that Phil, despite the veneer of his macho bravado, was in an deeply secret, intimate relationship with Bronco Henry. Written in 1967, this is at best hinted at in the text, but if you read closely, it’s pretty clear. Bronco Henry was gored in front of his eyes when Phil was twenty. Twenty years later, he’s clearly still fighting  that trauma as well as his own hidden, hated sexuality.

Pete, while a child, had been the one to cut down his father after he hung himself. This trauma, as well as perhaps his own nature, has made Pete unemotional and calculating. Pete sees his mom being reduced to an alcoholic and understands that it’s Phil that is driving her to it.

Phil, confident in his high intelligence and his external masculinity, is no match for Pete’s coldly manipulative brilliance. Pete waits for his opportunity to take vengeance and makes full use of it when the moment appears.

Regarding the film, I can say that the film hews closely to the novel. The casting is superb. Benedict Cumberbatch embodies Phil. Jesse Plemons does good work as the stolid George. Kodi Smit-McPhee is a wonderfully odd but self composed Pete. Kirsten Dunst does a good turn as the woman caught in Phil’s web of psychological torture. It is a very well executed film.

A major theme in the novel is the death of the Old West. The year is 1924. Together, Phil and George have been doing cattle drives for twenty-five years. Phil wants to adhere to the old ways, as typified by Bronco Henry. Now, there are cars on the roads. Some of the men working on the farm seem to be more interested in playing cowboy than actually the hard work of being one. In modernism, Phil sees weakness. George, on the other hand, is nothing if not adaptable. He owns and drives a car. He attends to the business side of ranching. When he sees change coming, he understand its inevitability and adjusts to it.

Phil embodies toxic masculinity. Anyone that doesn’t work with his hands is somehow less than a man. The now nearly mythic Bronco Henry is held up as an ideal. He mocks George’s quiet gentleness. In his eyes, Pete’s father was a weak drunk to be treated with contempt. He initially finds Pete’s effeminacy abhorrent. He’s horrified when George marries Rose. He can’t stand the idea of having to share his house with a woman and refuses to talk to her. Being insightful, he zeroes in on Rose’s insecurities and uses them to tear her down. Underestimating the seemingly nonthreatening Pete, Pete makes use of Phil’s own performative masculinity to bring about his downfall.

As I was reading this, I was reminded of John William’s Butcher’s Crossing. If you know the novel, then you’ll know that that’s high praise indeed. They are both brilliant literary re-imaginings of living in the American West.

Political Infighting For Freedom

Title: The Color of Abolition

Rating: 4 Stars

Despite being interested in the time around The Civil War, I have to confess that I didn’t really know much about the abolition movement. This book isn’t a broad survey of the subject, so there are still many gaps left to fill, but I certainly found the information found herein enlightening.

It focused on the biography of three individuals: William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, and Maria Weston Chapman. Many people are familiar with Frederick Douglas. If you’ve had much exposure to Civil War history (and its causes), you’ve probably have at least heard of William Lloyd Garrison.

By focusing on a black man and a white woman, it was refreshing that the history didn’t completely focus on the heroic white men narrative. You see the bias that so often happens in history of ignoring / downplaying the contributions of women and people of color. Weston Chapman, who I’d never heard of before, played a crucial role in the Boston abolitionist society. She was the center of all action and, during Garrison’s many absences, took over the writing and the editing of  the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. She was a major fundraising source and much of the abolitionist action centered in her home. It was her voluminous letter writing that allowed such a rich history to be uncovered.

A black activist, David Walker, wrote and published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829. This document, with its harsh condemnation of the actions of Christian American slave owners and its explicit imitation of the Declaration of Independence, was the impetus for the abolition movement.

Garrison read it and committed his life to the cause. In 1831 (still in his mid twenties), he started publication of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Almost always desperately poor, he was only kept afloat through the subscriptions of free blacks.

The main thing that I found interesting about Garrison was his essential belief that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. He believed that the Northern states had entered into a Faustian compact with the Southern states. Therefore, the only moral solution available to the Northern states was secession. For obvious reasons, you always read about the Southern arguments for secession. I had a vague idea that there were some Northern factions that wanted to secede, but I’d never encountered their arguments before. Dedicated to nonviolence, on several occasions he narrowly escaped being assaulted (or worse) by irate pro-slavery mobs.

Garrison’s beliefs were in direct contrast to other abolitionists that were centered in New York state. They believed that the Constitution wasn’t fundamentally pro-slavery and that they could work within the confines of it to eradicate slavery. They would first work within the Northern states, safely secure runaway slaves, keep slavery out of the newly emerging states, and then use the governmental structures in place to gradually eliminate slavery everywhere.

Ultimately, these two approaches proved inimical to each other and eventually a breach resulted. Both sides wanted to free the enslaved from tyranny, but their difference in tactics tore them asunder.

And then there’s Frederick Douglas.

Even in this book, he looms large. At the same time that she was teaching her young child, a relatively kind mistress started to teach Douglas (when he was also a young child) to read. Her husband caught her and admonished her to stop, telling her that teaching a slave to read will only encourage them to want their freedom. Hearing this only drove Douglas to want to learn to read even more. He would do errands, chores, or favors for young white children. In exchange, they would teach him a few more snippets of reading. With this drive, he became secretly literate.

One enslaver that kept him decided that Douglas was getting too obstreperous. As punishment, he was loaned out to a known vicious slave-breaker. Douglas reached his limit and refused, despite all of the beatings, to back down. The slave-breaker returned him, not wanting to acknowledge that he failed to break him. It was at this point that Douglas knew that he must escape.

It was only a scant three years after his escape that he became a featured speaker on the abolitionist speaking circuit. With his authentic experience as a former enslaved person, he could speak with an authenticity that the white abolitionists lacked. His eloquence and charisma made him an extremely popular speaker. What I found most interesting was that, beyond his eloquence and charisma, he was actually hilarious. He was gifted at mimicking the words and actions of Christian slave owners. To suffer such degradations and emerge from it with his humanity fully intact is truly awe-inspiring. Beyond that, when he started, he was so young. A licensed preacher at nineteen, he gave his first abolitionist speech in front of a white crowd at twenty-two.

All during this time, due to his status as an escaped slave, he was still a wanted man. When he published his first autobiography, to make sure that the Southerners couldn’t discredit it, he included real names and dates. This put his freedom even more in danger, so after publishing it, he moved to England, where, again as a speaker, he was a huge success. It was only when benefactors managed to purchase his freedom that it became safe again for him to come back to the US.

Douglas was in the middle of schism between the two abolitionist communities. At first, he was hard in the Garrison camp. Even so, he was not as much interested in the philosophy of the correct approach but in what was the best and fastest path to free the most enslaved.

Eventually, he’d come to the side of those that believed that the Constitution wasn’t an inexorably pro-slavery document. This led to a break between Garrison and Douglas. Although they both behaved with grace, the break was permanent.

Child Abuse As Entertainment

Title: Camera Man

Rating: 3 Stars

This is a biography of the silent film star Buster Keaton. He had a very long career that spanned from vaudeville to silent films to major studio films to television. Stevens uses this very long career arc to posit that Keaton was on the forefront of the breaking trends of the twentieth century.

Before I start about Buster’s life, first a few words about the book. It was fine. I was just hoping that it would provide a bit more detail about the making of his classic films from the 1920s. The book was strong in his early vaudeville years and in his later television years. I would have liked more detail about his inspirations, how he pulled off his stunts, and just a bit more detail on the inside baseball of making films. This had some of that, but I would have liked more. This lack could have been the nature of the subject. Keaton was notoriously reticent in revealing anything about himself in interviews. Also, Stevens is a film critic, not a historian, so perhaps it was not to be expected that she’d go deep into archives to try to flesh out more about Keaton the man. There is a notes section at the end of the book, but it’s relative lightness would seem to indicate that deep research was not one of her goals in writing it.

Born in 1895 to a vaudeville family, Buster was put to work quickly. By the age of three, he was already performing. For more than ten years, he was part of the family act. The usual scene enacted was that Buster would somehow annoy or interrupt his father, at which point his father would pick him up and fling him around the stage. There were handles sewn into his outfit to facilitate his father picking him up and tossing him. All of the while that this was happening, his mom would be in the background playing the saxophone. Through this school of literal hard knocks, Buster became essentially indestructible and fearless when it came to stunts. Much later in his life, when he was around seventy, he would nonchalantly perform stunts that would terrify his director.

Over a hundred years later, this would seem to be a pretty thin foundation upon which to build an amusement. In the early 1900s, the Keaton family were top billing. Buster’s antics were unquestionably the draw. People would crowd the theater to see him being flung against walls and down stairs. His pratfalls were so central to the act that he de facto became the financial supporter of the family. Long after the act broke up, for decades, he was the primary financial support for his family, including his siblings where, not only did they not join the act, they attended private schools. As for Buster, there is little evidence that he spent any time in schools.

This was during the age of the Progressive movement, so there were movements to create child protection laws. The Keaton family act in particular came under attack. Buster’s father, and indeed, Buster himself, considered these efforts to be do-gooder nonsense that they ignored.

The family act broke up when Buster was around sixteen. By this time, the onstage battles between Buster and his alcoholic father were becoming serious affairs. It wasn’t quite as adorable to see a teenage son fight his father. While on tour, Buster and his mom abandoned his father at one of their stops.

Moving to New York, he accidentally ran into the silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle and embarked upon his career. After a couple of years, he had his own production company. This company generated the hits that nearly everyone remembers him by (eg The General, Steamboat Bill Jr). While there, he exercised full artistic control.

There seems to be a pretty direct line from his vaudeville antics to his films. Known as The Great Stone Face, he is imperturbable in the face of all that life throws him. Police chase him. Houses fall on him. Parents disrespect him. Women scorn him. Hurricanes knock him down. Through it all, he reacts with implacable aplomb. Every new disaster that he faces is just another day in his life that he must get through. Just like after his father threw him against a wall, Buster always just picked himself up, brushed himself off, and dealt with the situation at hand.

With the advent of sound pictures and the rise of the studio system, he signed with MGM. Within the studio system, there was no concept of artistic control. It was all controlled by the studio producers. Although his films during this time were successful, they were a mere shadow of his previous efforts. Disgruntled, he followed the pattern of his father and took to drink. The head of MGM fired him after a couple of years.

This led to years in the cinematic wilderness. Now behind the scenes, he became a punch-up joke writer. He had a couple of failed marriages. Eventually he was able to manage his alcoholic addiction and entered a loving, stable marriage.

With the advent of television, he found opportunities to perform again. He had a couple of variety series and he appeared on many other variety shows. During this time, a deeper appreciation of his films started to grow. At his death he was still working, his work respected, and he was happy in his marriage.

Considering where he came from, not to mention the fate that seems to often befall child stars, that has to count as an extremely successful life.

A Tweet By Any Other Name

And now for something completely different.

Although I haven’t tweeted in years, I do follow several accounts. One of my favorite accounts is that of comedian Blaine Capatch. He is basically a joke machine. He tweets several jokes a day, many of which fall somewhere in the border between clever and sophomoric (eg My wife’s gonna shit when she sees I fixed the toilet!).

Every now and then he gets inspired and will go on a run. It’ll be a list based upon a topic and the list is utter madness. He just recently did a ranking of all Bond films (eg Don’t Always Never, Vaginapussy, Honey I Jamesed The Bond). His magnum opus (and his pinned tweet) is The Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Albums, which you just have to read to believe. I can’t imagine how long it took him to put together that list.

My favorite, because I’m a Shakespeare geek, is his ranking of Shakespeare’s plays. Here’s a subset:

• She’s Gotta Like It
• Christopher Marlowe Is a Douchebag And You Can Quote Me on That
• 2 Shake 2 Speare
• Henry VIII Is Enough
• Othello And Louise
• Honey I Shrunk the Gentlemen of Verona
• Die Bard
• A Weekend At Caesar’s
• How About LOOSEST Andronicus
• Joust the Tip

With the world at war, in a pandemic, and catching on fire, Capatch is a safe refuge. Check it out: https://twitter.com/blainecapatch

The Horror Of Toxic Masculinity

Title: The Shining

Rating: 5 Stars

I saw The Shining when it first was released in the theaters. I remember going to the now closed (due to Coronavirus with no plans to reopen) Cinerama theater in downtown Seattle with my brother. I was a teenager, so was used to horror films where some evil is running amok but eventually is destroyed and the world is safe again (although open to further shocks to come in future sequels). The Shining was not like that. In especially the last thirty minutes or so, you are left with more questions than answers. What does it mean that apparently Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is front and center in the photo taken in 1920? If they’re only the three of them in the whole hotel, how does Torrance get out of the locked storage room? What is the deal about Room 237? And for the love of God, why is that guy getting a blowjob from a furry? With my teenage brain, I found it incredibly frustrating. Why aren’t there answers?

I’m sure that I’ve seen pieces of it over the years on television, but I don’t know if I’ve ever watched it front to back in one sitting since my initial viewing. Even so, I’ve learned a lot about the film in the interim. Kubrick treated Shelley Duvall horribly, forcing her to do hundreds of takes of emotionally intense scenes. She had to cry so much that she literally ran out of tears. He was scarcely better with Scatman Crothers, who had to do so many takes just getting out of a car that he broke down in tears. He did that while, at the same time, totally protecting the child actor that played Danny (Danny Lloyd), who apparently thought he was just in some basic family drama film.

There’s a whole tin hat conspiracy vibe that has built around the film, most notably in the documentary Room 237. One of the theories is that Kubrick made the film as kind of an apology for the role that he allegedly had in faking the moon landing (you see, it’s room 237 because the moon is exactly 237,000 miles from the Earth and Danny, when he enters the room, is wearing an Apollo sweater, totally obvious, right?).

The film was based on Stephen King’s novel. It’s fair to say that King and Kubrick did not see eye to eye. Kubrick ignored much of the book in writing the screenplay. Kubrick ignored King’s casting suggestions. As a final poke in the eye, Torrance’s car in the novel was a red VW Beetle. In one scene in the film, passing by a car wreck, you see a crushed red VW Beetle. It’s fair to say that King is not a fan of the film.

That’s some of the lore. How did it feel sitting down to watch it again forty years after first seeing it?

I’d forgotten how legitimately creepy it is. There are sections in it that are downright scary. It is spine-chilling when the twins  make their occasionally appearances. The blood pouring out of the elevator is disturbing. You can feel the helpless terror that Wendy feels, trapped in a hotel for months with her increasingly insane husband with nowhere to go but desperately wanting to protect her child. It’s creepy when Danny channels Tony, his inner voice. It’s an unsettling film to watch.

Forty years later, I came away with a take that I most certainly wouldn’t have had when I watched it as a seventeen year old, especially having grown up in a blue collar, lower middle class neighborhood where masculinity was seen as a prized virtue.

I now see the film as a condemnation of what would have once been considered heroic masculine values. Jack Torrance is brought to the hotel to work as a caretaker. He brings his wife and child with him. He should be their provider and protector. Having failed previously as a teacher (another caretaker kind of role), he is now going to use his time in isolation to start work on a novel that will hopefully provide for his family. He once fell into alcoholism and, when drunk, hurt his child. He has sworn to Wendy that he has forever thrown off the weakness of drink. On the other hand, Wendy first appears to be fragile, vulnerable, and weak. She looks like the type of person that would welcome the opportunity for a strong man to come in and take over.

This is his chance to finally take on the role that he feels that he needs to play. He will now be the provider, the source of strength, and protector for his family. He will take care of the hotel.

And he absolutely fails at all of this.

You never really see him actually do any of his hotel caretaker responsibilities. It is Wendy that is walking around, checking gauges, and checking in with rangers. While she’s doing literally everything else, Jack is busy typing away on his manuscript. Well, he fails at even that. All he has is page after page after page of All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy. The fact is, he can’t even do that right. There’s many typos and formatting problems even on that one sentence of repetition. Even though there is no drink in the hotel, through the magic of horror he still manages to get drunk. Even the imaginary spirits are unimpressed with his failures and they goad him on to further acts of violence. He is repeatedly outsmarted by the apparently fragile Wendy. Although terrified and trembling, she beats and stabs Jack when her or Danny’s life is at stake. She emerges as the strong heroine of the film.

Jack wants so desperately to be a man’s man, but all of his attempts to do so end in abysmal failure. In all ways, from his creativity to his love to his rage, Jack is impotent.

We Need To Talk About Thomas

The modern Republican party seems to be bereft of policy (just see how quick they disavowed / ignored Rick Scott’s recent manifesto) and are all in on stoking fear, hatred, and division via cultural wars. The whole brouhaha over Critical Race Theory (as discussed recently by John Oliver) is exhibit A. The modern Republican party (I really can’t even call them conservative anymore so this awkward term is about the best that I can do) has taken this ivory tower purely academic theory that has been discussed for some fifty years and that is being taught quite literally nowhere in public schools and have managed to make it some weird conspiratorial agenda whose goal is to make whitey hate being white.

The attacks on CRT are not really about some obscure academic theory but strike at the heart of how history should be taught. Should our history be some whitewashed aggrandizing propaganda? Should our founding fathers be put on some immaculate pedestal? There are prominent people that believe that. All of their blemishes should be ignored.

This thinking has consequences beyond school board fights. For reasons not having to do with CRT,  my older brother, no red meat conservative, is convinced, once brown people take power (and he believes that their ever growing numbers make this inevitable), that they will seek to erase all white history. He thinks, maybe even in his own lifetime (and both of us are now retired, so that means relatively quickly), that there will be no Washington Memorial or Jefferson Memorial. Of course, the actions of fringe people like the recently recalled San Francisco School District members that proposed renaming schools (but note, never actually doing it) makes his fears seem prescient.

I, as you can probably tell from the tone of this post, don’t exactly think that this white erasure future is imminent.

What do you think? For example, for founding fathers like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, should we just take the hagiographic biographies that we were taught in primary school? Should we think of them as immaculate august people that were blessed upon us by some higher power?

Just for fun, let’s talk for a minute or two about Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is, without doubt, a great figure in our history. After all, he was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal”), a document that served as an inspirational call not just for our revolution but for many others around the world. He drafted a Virginia statute that was the basis for our freedom of religion constitutional Amendment. He was our third President. As President, the Louisiana Purchase was signed, doubling the size of our country, which led directly to our manifest destiny claims of the entire breadth of land between the two coasts. He sponsored the Lewis and Clark expedition. Hell, his extensive book collection was the basis for our Library of Congress.

All of that is true and should be celebrated.

There are also other things about Jefferson that are true.

George Washington owned enslaved people. Upon his death, he freed the ones that he owned (others not freed were owned by Martha). This demonstrated, if only a bit, some sense of conflict that Washington must have felt about owning other human beings.

Jefferson also felt unease on the subject of slavery. As President, he signed the law abolishing the slave trade. His original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a denunciation of slavery (“cruel war against human nature itself”).

Jefferson owned somewhere around 175 enslaved people. He bought and sold them regularly. There is written evidence of his enslaved, some of them boys as young as 10, being whipped.

Unlike Washington, only a handful of Jefferson’s enslaved people were freed when he died. Since he died in debt, the rest of them were put on the block and sold. Families were split up. In fact, before Jefferson died, one of his admirers died. That admirer made Jefferson his executor. One of the bequests was to Jefferson himself. It was money that was specifically to allow Jefferson to free his enslaved. Jefferson turned down the bequest so that he could keep them. One of the reasons why plantation owners didn’t support abolition was that the enslaved represented real property. Here was an opportunity to free his enslaved and to actually realize their property ‘value’ and Jefferson turned it down.

And then there’s Sally Hemings.

Let’s start with Jefferson’s great love. He fell in love and married Martha Wayles. Thomas and Martha had six children, only two of whom survived to childhood. The last pregnancy was the most difficult. About four months after giving birth, Martha died at the age of 33 in 1782. She exacted a promise from Thomas that he never remarry. At her death he was inconsolable and he kept his promise to her.

In 1784, Jefferson was an American envoy in France. In 1787, he requested that his 9 year old daughter Polly come live with him. Since she couldn’t travel alone, the enslaved Sally Hemings was selected to escort her.

A word about Sally Hemings. Hemings was the child of the enslaved Betty Hemings and John Wayles. If you remember, Martha’s maiden name was Wayles. This was not a coincidence. John Wayles was both of their fathers. Betty Hemings was herself the daughter of a white man. So, Sally Hemings was Jefferson’s beloved deceased wife’s half sister and was 3/4 white. She was described as having light skin and bearing a striking resemblance to Martha.

While in France, Hemings and Jefferson started a sexual relationship. I’m not sure what to even call it. In 1787, Jefferson was 44 years old. Hemings was 14. In the US, Hemings was legally the property of Jefferson. He had the power of life and death over her. She was both a playmate and caretaker to his daughter Polly. What kind of consent could Hemings give to Jefferson?

When they returned to the US, they continued their sexual relationship. Hemings bore six of Jefferson’s children. The children were 7/8 white. Even so, they were raised as enslaved people and were the legal property of Thomas Jefferson, their father. Some of them, when they entered adulthood, escaped. The remaining children with Jefferson were freed upon Jefferson’s death.

All of this is true. Jefferson had a sexual relationship with a 14 year old that was unable to give meaningful consent for any number of reasons. The many children that she bore him were enslaved by Jefferson.

We should not celebrate this but ignoring it seems to be an equally bad idea. I’m not saying that truths like this should be taught to 2nd graders, but it’s important that we have an honest reckoning with our past.

After all, we expect Germany to reckon with their Nazi past. We expect Japan to reckon with their WWII deeds like the Rape of Nanking and Korean comfort women. Should we expect no less of ourselves?

Important people in our history have moments of greatness and moments of ingloriousness. This is all part of our history. This is not about hating our history or our heritage. It’s about reckoning with it.

An Island Of Misfit Presidents

Everyone has already dunked on this when it came out on Presidents’ Day, but as someone that has a minor obsession with US Presidents, this really blew my mind.

This came from the official GOP twitter account, so this represents the official thinking of the Grand Old Party. And what thinking it is!

To fill in the grid, you need to have eight Republican Presidents. First of all, it’s amusing to me that, for the ninth President, they put Joe Biden in the middle. As any child that has ever played tic-tac-toe can tell you, that is the most powerful position on the grid. Visually presenting Biden in the center makes the other Presidents seem like mere appendages to him. Even grammatically, it would make more sense to put him in the lower right hand corner (Happy Presidents’ Day To Such Great US Presidents. Not You!). Whatever.

Of course, you have Abraham Lincoln. On the one hand, it’s a no-brainer.  Any list of great Republican Presidents has to start with him. On the other hand, the power base of the Republican party is now in the South. Considering how so many modern Republicans love to wave the Confederate battle flag, it seems somewhat incongruous to have Abraham Lincoln as your standard bearer.

Next is Calvin Coolidge. If shown a picture of Calvin Coolidge, how many members of the modern Republican Party would even recognize him? How many of them could list his policies? It was some of his administration’s policies (led by his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon) that led to the Great Depression. At the time of the Great Depression, many recognized this and he subsequently experienced a serious decline in popularity. In Presidential rankings, on his best day he’s in the third quartile.

We next have Dwight Eisenhower. As everyone knows, he led the Allied military to victory in WWII. He’s consistently in the top quartile of the Presidential rankings. Over the last several years, the Republican party has been increasingly flirting with authoritarianism, if not actual fascism (Nazi flags seem to be making a comeback). As the architect of the victory over fascism, what do you think Eisenhower would make of the modern Republican party and its on-again / off-again lapdog acquiescence to figures such as Putin?

Richard Nixon in the house! Facing near certain impeachment and conviction, he chose to resign in disgrace. After many years, he managed to claw his back into some mild respectability as an eminence grise. On his best day he makes it into the third quartile of the rankings. He’s now on the list of great Republican Presidents!

Ronald Reagan is an altogether unsurprising choice. After all, his Presidency represents the flowering of the modern conservative movement. On average he appears in the top or second quartile in the rankings. One of his most famous policies was ramping up Cold War rhetoric and dramatically increasing defense spending. His summits with Gorbachev nearly resulted in dramatic reductions of nuclear weapons. How do you think he’d think about the modern Republican party cozying up to the ex-KGB Putin?

Next comes George H W Bush. He lost his reelection effort to the much hated Clintons. He and Clinton later teamed up on several humanitarian efforts. He is the epitome of the East Coast intellectual elitist that the modern Republican party now despises.

Then we have George W Bush. Although serving two complete terms, he is now so hated by the modern Republican party that he hasn’t even been invited to talk at their national convention since 2012.

Finally, of course there is Donald Trump. Among his inglorious achievements is losing his reelection (in the popular vote by what is considered, in modern times, to be a landslide) to the notably uncharismatic Joe Biden and getting impeached not once, but twice.

And this is the great gallery of Republican Presidents? Presidents that resigned in disgrace, that lost reelection, that were impeached, that sunk in popularity by the end of their terms, that would have been heartbroken at the current state of their party, or have themselves come to be despised by the modern Republican Party?

Let’s talk about the Presidents that they left off the list. First of all, seriously, no Theodore Roosevelt? How could they have left him off? You’d think that his manly, rough and tumble image would be purpose built for the modern Republican party. How about William McKinley? He was exceedingly pro-business and arguably launched the modern US empire with the successful execution of the Spanish American War. Both of these have a greater claim to be on the list than some that made it. Let’s not forget about US Grant. Sure, he had his shares of scandals, but as the general who led the North to victory in the Civil War and then in his efforts at Reconstruction, his great acts outshine most others on this list. Oh wait, given the modern Republican party’s love of the Confederate battle flag, maybe they were a bit uncomfortable with the military man most responsible for its destruction appearing on this list.

If you wanted to keep the losing reelection theme going, they should have included William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Gerald Ford. At least Taft went on to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Hoover, for all of his Presidential fumbling, at least had the reputation of being a great humanitarian after helping feed Europe after WWI. From a Republican point of view, Ford’s pardon of Nixon removed the possibility of a former Republican President being hauled off to jail.  Throw in Benjamin Harrison, who as sitting President lost the rubber match with Grover Cleveland, and six of the eight slots on this list could have been populated by reelection losers. It is interesting to contemplate that, in the 120 years of Presidential elections from 1900 to 2020, that of the six sitting Presidents that have run for reelection and have lost, five of them have been Republicans.

Be that as it may, this picture, if nothing else, inspired amused thoughts in this Presidential geek’s head. In the year 2020, this is the best Presidential hall of fame that the modern Republican party could conjure up.

As that once great but now banished tweeter would say, “sad”.