Flashback, May 1925: Future Novelist Richard Wright in Clash Over Graduation

Being named valedictorian should have been cause for celebration for 17-year-old Richard Wright in May 1925. Instead, the insistence of his principal at Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Miss., that the youth put aside his own speech for one prepared by the school administrator triggered a threat to withdraw his diploma.

“Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night,” he was told. “What can you think of saying to them? You have no experience.”

But, in an early sign of the future novelist’s determination, Wright refused to yield.

The pressure campaign began a career in which the future African-American novelist, short-story writer, and memoirist found himself in lonely opposition to white racists, religious zealots, union busters, communists, American publishers, and the U.S. State Department for what he regarded as their infringement on his freedom of thought.

What made this situation—recounted in Wright’s searing 1945 bestselling memoir, Black Boy—so painful was that the principal was a fellow African-American. It wouldn’t be the last time that he would be disappointed in members of his own race—nor the last time that he would irritate them with his independence.

Just to survive to this point in his life was a miracle. The grandchild of slaves, he was also the son of an illiterate sharecropper who deserted the family when Richard was five. The following year, Richard could commonly be found drunk, in taverns.

A stroke left his mother virtually crippled and Richard in the case of his grandmother, a strict Seventh-Day Adventist who forbade him reading anything that didn’t accord with the gospels. And, still as a preteen, he accidentally set fire to and destroying her home.

In 1921, Wright had started fifth grade in another school two years behind his age group. Spurred by a hunger for food and learning, he prevailed upon his grandmother to let him take jobs after school, which allowed him to purchase books for classes as well as food. Until he could save enough money for a bicycle, he had to walk several miles a day to and from school.

Everywhere he looked, Wright could find little to savor in a Deep South deformed by Jim Crow legislation, leaving whites cruel or indifferent and blacks despairing of a better life in the face of broken families, illiteracy, poverty, ill health, and underpinning it all, disenfranchisement. He was coming, at a young age, what his fiction would continually address: “What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity?”

The one refuge he could find in all of this was reading, an activity that fed his dream of writing novels in the North:

“Where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote. I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”

A short story published with his name (but without payment) in a Jackson black weekly, the Southern Register, heightened his aspirations even as they increased his frustration with a sociopolitical order that hindered his dreams “that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.”

Seen in this light, the principal’s draft of the valedictory address posed a special dilemma for Wright: “I wanted to graduate, but I did not want to make a public speech that was not my own,” he noted.

In quick succession the principal bullied, baited, wheedled, and tempted the young man he called “a young, hot fool,” all to no avail. Attempts by Wright’s brother Leon and friends met with no better success. At last the principal relented, and Wright delivered the speech he had written—one, he admitted, not as simple and clear as the principal’s, but expressing his thoughts.

The teenager blushed, stammered and looked abashed as he addressed the audience. When the ceremony was over, he ignored the outstretched hands of well-wishers and walked home, confirmed in his thinking that, no matter how long it took—and comparatively, that turned out to be a short time—there was fundamentally nothing keeping him in Jackson.

What lay beyond Jackson? Wright didn’t know, but he was determined to find out. That fall he dropped out of Lanier High School and left Jackson, never to live there again. He took jobs in Memphis and Chicago before joining a group of Communist intellectuals in the latter city (an affiliation he would break in short order, angered by their crushing of member dissent).

By the late 1930s, Wright was gaining critical attention, but it was Native Son (1940) that finally announced him as a force in American letters. Five years later, Black Boy reached number one on the bestseller list.

Increasingly frustrated with American limits on his personal freedom, Wright emigrated to France, where he died in 1960. More than six decades after his death, the voice of protest in his mature work rings with all the clarity and urgency he was not yet able to master as an uncertain but ultimately brave teen facing an authority figure.

Quote of the Day (Martin Scorsese, on Family Moviegoing Experiences in the Early Postwar Era)

“I realize now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.”—American Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese, “The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 15, 2015

The image accompanying this post, of Martin Scorsese at the 2023 Montclair Film Festival, was taken Oct. 27, 2023, by Neil Grabowsky.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Gilmore Girls,’ on the Secrets to Being Organized)

Lorelai Gilmore [played by Lauren Graham, pictured]: “Okay, let's be organized. Make it fast, make it snappy, and if there's any impulse buying, make it chocolate."— Gilmore Girls, Season 3, Episode 2, “Haunted Leg,” original air date Oct. 1, 2002, teleplay by Amy Sherman-Palladino, directed by Chris Long

This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!) who is quite an admirer of Lauren Graham—AND of the actress who plays her daughter on Gilmore Girls, Alexis Bledel.

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on Russia’s Leaders, ‘Corrupt With Power’)

“Russia's leaders, rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power, have rejected democratic ideals and the obligations of a responsible power. They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world's oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of re-assembling the Russian empire. And the brave people of Georgia need our solidarity and our prayers.”—US Senator (R-AZ) and former POW John McCain (1936-2018), “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, MN,” Sept. 4, 2008, The American Presidency Project

For years, Donald Trump has acted weirdly and inexplicably towards Vladimir Putin, to say the least—from urging Russia in the 2016 Presidential campaign to release Hillary Clinton’s emails to claiming this year that Ukraine started its war with Russia. 

That behavior became even odder earlier this week, when he posted that the Russian dictator has “gone absolutely CRAZY” by escalating attacks on Ukraine amid peace negotiations.

Crazy? Hardly. That adjective, many would say, applies more to Trump.

No, despite the American President’s dictator-wanna aspirations, Putin has been unrelenting about his nationalist goals, pursuing them with a silence that Trump is temperamentally unable to maintain and with a cunning he can only envy.

Most of all, he has known how to appeal to Trump’s overweening ego, calling him a “genius” and feeding his misperception that Putin disregarded Barack Obama and Joe Biden because he didn’t “respect” them as he did their successor in the Oval Office.

So, over last weekend, Trump voiced frustration that Putin is “killing a lot of people.” Where has he been these last three years, since the invasion of Ukraine? Or the past decade? Or, to take McCain’s point, the last two decades?

You have to wonder, why is Trump squawking about Putin now? From the moment he became a serious contender for the GOP nomination a decade ago, he adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude on the former KGB operative.

Do you think the President is reading polls that show Americans don’t approve of that posture—and wonder if he is taking a tough enough stance against Putin?

Maybe, like Rip Van Winkle, Trump fell asleep for a generation, only to wake up to find the world utterly changed. Maybe his short-term memory is vanishing.

Long ago, that same phenomenon took hold of the MAGA faithful. How else to explain why, even after Putin’s actions unleashed the concerns of McCain (and the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney), delegates to the 2016 convention agreed, without the slightest fuss and following the urging of Trump representatives, to water down that year’s platform language about “providing lethal defensive weapons” to help Ukraine fight against pro-Russian separatists?

Whatever the case may be, Moscow can barely disguise its amusement over Trump’s incoherent rhetorical flailing. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov referred to “emotional overload,” while a female flunky trotted out for Putin-controlled television said Trump’s warning that the Russian strongman might be “playing with fire” would last “until tomorrow.”

Remarkably, the Russian government finds itself in accord with Wall Street about Trump’s mood and policy shifts—all that loud blustering followed by hasty retreats. The nickname most applicable, an acronym that made the President lash out yesterday at yet another reporter for asking a “nasty question,” was TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out.”

(The image accompanying this post—John McCain's official senatorial photo, taken Jan. 23, 2009—derived from his Facebook page.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Burns, on ‘Youthfu' May Its Bloom Renew'd’)

“O were my love yon Lilac fair,
Wi' purple blossoms to the Spring,
And I, a bird to shelter there,
When wearied on my little wing!
How I wad mourn when it was torn
By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!
But I wad sing on wanton wing,
When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd.”—Scottish Romantic poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), “O Were My Love Yon Lilac Fair” (1793), in The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (2000)
 
(I came upon this poem on an episode of Parks and Recreation, in which Ron Swanson—sitting on a gloriously green hillside in Scotland—reads this poem and is unexpectedly moved to tears.)

Flashback, May 1965: The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ Starts Climbing the Charts

With lyrics taken from a sprawling, trippy Bob Dylan song and a jangling guitar sound like the Beatles, a recently assembled Southern California quintet, The Byrds, launched the folk-rock movement with “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which began its march up the pop charts in May 1965.

A month later the tune hit #1—the only Dylan-penned tune ever to do so—and, as the lead song and title track of their first album, turbocharging sales of that collection.

The term “folk rock” was coined specifically by journalist Eliot Siegel to account for what “Mr. Tambourine Man” sought to bring together: the depth and lyrical sophistication of folk music with the energy and backbeat of rock ‘n’ roll.

By the end of the summer of 1965, record companies couldn’t rush musicians fast enough into studios to capitalize on the new trend. (Tom Wilson was especially influential, producing an electrified version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” that revived the duo’s partnership after their underperforming debut, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.)

The band—which formed only the year before when Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke joined Jim (later Roger) McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark of The Jet Set—came across the song via their producer and manager Jim Dickson, who had secured a rough demo by Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott from Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman.

With Crosby particularly opposed to recording the song, it took strenuous convincing on the part of Dickson to bring the band around. In his 2020 memoir Time Between, Hillman remembered the producer’s clinching argument:

“You guys need to go for substance and depth. Make records you can be proud of—records that can hold up for all time. Are we making an artistic statement or just going for a quick buck?”

Dickson and the band had to figure out first, however, how to adapt this acoustic tune to the rock ‘n’ roll market:

*They switched from Dylan’s 2/4 time—more suitable for country/bluegrass—to a 4/4 groove;

*They added electric guitars, including McGuinn on a twelve-string Rickenbacker also used by the Searchers and the Beatles’ George Harrison;

*Though the Byrds played on the rest of the album recorded to follow up on the single, the only member to play an instrument on the single was McGuinn, as the famous session ensemble The Wrecking Crew were brought in for the breakthrough single;

*In place of Dylan’s idiosyncratic vocal, McGuinn aimed for a sweet spot between Dylan’s and John Lennon’s, with Clark and Crosby layering in background harmonies, with the result capturing “that angelic sound I’d heard when they were first becoming familiar with each other’s voices,” noted Hillman.

*With FM radio still a few years away, the group condensed Dylan’s four word- and image-heavy verses down to one, to accommodate AM stations’ time limits of 2½-3 minutes for singles.

Dylan, for one, was excited by the results of their three-hour January 20, 1965, studio session with the song, exclaiming “Wow, man, you can even dance to that!” So, too, was the preteen daughter of influential nightclub owner and talent agent Benny Shapiro, whose enthusiasm persuaded her father to talk it up with prominent figures in the music industry.

Eventually, the Byrds’ demo brought to the band’s door Columbia Records, which offered a deal for a couple of records that, if successful, would lead to an album. The company then assigned producer Terry Melcher (son of Doris Day) to work on the follow-ups.

With the success of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Los Angeles became “the main spawning ground for folk rock,” according to a 1986 Rolling Stone article. Several groups followed in the vein that The Byrds opened, including The Turtles, We Five, The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Mamas and the Papas, Buffalo Springfield, and Spanky and Our Gang, to name just a few.

Ironically, The Byrds’ biggest impact may have registered on the songwriter whose work helped jumpstart their careers: Dylan. It wasn’t only that, according to critic David Fricke, the songwriter, “until then largely known as King Folk, suddenly had the ear of an enormous teenage pop constituency.”

Furthermore, hearing their version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” spurred him to record an electric side for his next LP, Bringing It All Back Home. Later in 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, he would outrage folk purists by pursuing this experimentation more intensively.

Perhaps responding to criticism that they were too reliant on covers of Dylan and other songwriters—and by the outspoken Crosby’s urging that they (and especially he) should compose their own songs that would earn royalties—the Byrds, over the next few years, increased the original content of their LPs.

Not content with launching folk-rock, the group went on, through restless innovation and personnel changes, to pioneer, through their own compositions, other musical genres through the late Sixties: psychedelic rock (through “Eight Miles High,” an account of a disastrous trip to Britain that many interpreted as laden with drug references) and country rock (Sweetheart of the Radio, featuring Hillman’s friend Gram Parsons).

For years, I wished that The Byrds had recorded “Mr. Tambourine Man” beyond their abbreviated, AM-oriented version. Then, in 1990, I was delighted to find that the briefly reunited McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman had included such a longer version at a Roy Orbison tribute concert featured on the group’s 1990 career-spanning 4-CD box, The Byrds. 

You can watch that performance—featuring a surprise appearance by Dylan himself—in this YouTube clip.

Quote of the Day (Vaclav Havel, on ‘A New Moral Effort’ vs. ‘The Dictatorship of Money’)

“The dictatorship of money, of profit, of constant economic growth, and the necessity, flowing from all that, of plundering the earth without regard for what will be left in a few decades, along with everything else related to the materialistic obsessions of this world, from the flourishing of selfishness to the need to evade personal responsibility by becoming part of the herd, and the general inability of human conscience to keep pace with the inventions of reason, right up to the alienation created by the sheer size of modern institutions—all of these are phenomena that cannot effectively be confronted except through a new moral effort, that is, through a transformation of the spirit and the human relationship to life and the world.” — Playwright, essayist, dissident, and first President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), “Paying Back the West,” The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1999

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ on Unexpected and Unlikely Management Material)

Pam Beesly [played by Jenna Fischer, pictured]: “I have this little vacuum cleaner that's broken. If Dwight doesn't work out, maybe that can be manager.”— The Office, Season 3, Episode 3, “The Coup,” original air date Oct. 5, 2006, teleplay by Paul Lieberstein, directed by Greg Daniels

Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, on Americans’ Rights and Those Who ‘Died to Win Them’)

“Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them.”— U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), “Proclamation 2524—Bill of Rights Day,” Nov. 27, 1941, The American Presidency Project

Photo of the Day: The Last Picture Show in Tenafly, NJ

I took the attached photo two weeks ago, right after reading the news that Bow Tie Cinemas, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, had been demolished.

For the last half-century—really, since the premieres of Jaws and Star Wars—millions of movie fans have marked their calendars for the start of the summer season, with the Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial kickoff.

But that won’t be the case at Bow Tie Cinemas this year.

Its last poster outside, just when COVID-19 shut down the film industry and so much else five years ago, advertised Ben Affleck’s The Way Back. As late as November 2020, its marquee proclaimed, TEMPORARILY CLOSED—WILL REOPEN SOON. Unfortunately, both predictions proved overly optimistic.

Despite the effort of community groups to keep it open—at least, to preserve its original façade—the borough of Tenafly decided that this would be the local version of the classic The Last Picture Show. Current plans call for the site to be redeveloped as a mixed-use property.

This script has become all too common in recent years across the country, and Bergen County has been no exception.

Next year would have marked the movie house’s centennial. It began as a single theater before, like so many other cinemas a few decades ago, being converted into a quad.

With the closure of the Englewood Theater and the Plaza Theater (later repurposed as BergenPAC) in my hometown, the Bow Tie (then called the Bergen Theater) became the de facto movie house for me and my friends by the mid-Seventies.

I agree with Sean Baker, the Oscar-winning director of Anora, that the big screen rather than at-home streaming is the best way to experience a film. But watching a film with others is more than a matter of technology—you also come away with memories only tangentially connected to what’s projected overhead, as I found several other times in Tenafly:

*In the mid-Seventies, my mid-teens, I joined several older guys in watching the R-rated shocker The Exorcist. Despite the massive publicity the horror flick had generated over the prior few years, we were still so unprepared for its terrifying scenes of demonic possession that we staggered out of the theater late that night. When one of my close relatives piped up with, “Hey guys, let’s go get some pizza!”, they looked ready to kill him.

*A decade later, a new owner took over, eventually turned the theater from a single screen into the quad form it retained for the rest of its existence. I just wish he had spent more on HVAC equipment. As a long line of moviegoers waited patiently outside one summer night in 1985 to see A Room With a View, the owner (who I thought of thereafter as Baldy for his chrome dome) yelled out, “Folks, I just wanted to tell you: It’s close in there.” Close? I thought. It wasn’t till I settled into my seat that I discovered he had come up with a euphemism for “no air conditioning.”

*In early 1988, the theater—now known as Tenafly Cinema 4—ran The Last Emperor. This Oscar-winning Best Picture was 163 minutes long, but moved so slowly that it felt more like 240 minutes. I watched it on a Friday night with seven or eight friends from work at the time. Every one of us caught 40 winks, at one point or another, as we viewed it, but we were collectively able to piece together the plot afterward at a local diner.

It’s estimated that more than 3,000 cinemas have closed since the start of the pandemic, a situation not helped any by the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, which slowed new products down to a trickle.

But in truth, the malaise affecting theater has been developing for years. Higher ticket prices masked the problem for a while, as did the increase in the number of screens. (Just when audiences had finally gotten used to the idea of multiplexes—usually regarded as properties with two to 20 screens—they found themselves going to megaplexes, with upwards of 24 screens. A shakeout was bound to come sooner or later with so much overbuilding.)

Over the last five decades, independent, usually single-screen, theaters, often located in downtowns, have become endangered, if not extinct, species. In addition to the ones named above, my part of Bergen County has seen the final curtain come down on the following cinemas:

*The Fox and Oritani (Hackensack)
*The Rialto (Ridgefield Park)
*The Park Lane (Palisades Park)
*The Grant Lee (later the Sharon Cinema) (Fort Lee)
*The Ramsey Theater (Ramsey)
*Bergenfield Cinema 5 (Bergenfield)
*The Warner Theater (Ridgewood)

(These last two were part of the same Bow Tie Cinemas chain that owned the Tenafly location.)

Longtime residents of this blog who, at one time or another, have resided in Bergen County can undoubtedly supply other area locations that I may have missed. Some readers will simply observe that these closures are simply a product of the passage of time, and, compared with the departure of other longtime institutions, not something to especially concern ourselves with.

I don’t agree. Movie audiences have been forced to accept a diminished experience over time: While screens inside the home expanded in size, those outside contracted. Gloria Swanson’s faded screen queen in Sunset Boulevard was more correct than anyone could have imagined 75 years ago when she complained, “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Towns pay a price, as well, for these closures, in ways more significant than merely dollars and cents. Sociologists speak about “third places”—relaxed, informal environments outside the home and work where people can gather, talk, exchange ideas, build community, and feel a sense of belonging (or, as the theme song of Cheers goes, “where everybody knows your name”).

Movies were among such places for the longest time, and, as I indicated in the examples above, people carried those experiences with them to other businesses in downtowns and, indeed, elsewhere. In an era when so much divides Americans, it is an unwelcome sign that they lose yet something else that brings them together.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (C.S. Lewis, on Pride)

"Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, contentment, or even common sense." — British novelist and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity (1952) 

Quote of the Day (Jen Wieczner, on ‘The Daily Whipsaw Induced by the Tariffs’)

“The daily whipsaw induced by the tariffs feels fundamentally different from crashes past, as if the deep-seated rules underlying the usual chaos of buying and selling no longer apply now that a single man has managed to instigate a financial crisis on an inane whim….

“As… traders were waiting [in early April] with a mix of dread and anticipation for the next headline or Truth Social post to drop, some had already declared the end of an era. Tom Lee, an investor who runs a firm called Fundstrat that distributes market analyses to more than 10,000 clients and manages $900 million, is known on the street for his evangelical enthusiasm that stocks would rise ever upward in the long term. But in a note to his clients, he admitted his zeal might have been misplaced. Trump, he said, had committed ‘a fundamental breach of capitalism's regulatory covenant.’ It's one that could reverberate with unpredictable consequences for a long time to come, even if the tariffs are eventually repealed and their champion replaced. Or as Spencer Hakimian, who manages a $78 million hedge fund called Tolou Capital, told me, ‘I did not think for one second he was going to go this crazy.’”— American journalist Jen Wieczner, “Nightmare on Wall Street,” New York Magazine, Apr. 21-May 4, 2025

The word that comes to mind when I read this passage—and the larger New York cover story from which it derives—is schadenfreude, the German term for joy felt at another’s misfortune.

Or, in the words of “Cell Block Tango,” the cynical, show-stopping number from the musical Chicago: “They had it coming.”

You’re not going to find much sympathy from me on the plight of Wall Street—or, more broadly, executives at America’s largest corporations—following the Trump tariffs, nor their higher costs because of fewer low-wage workers in the wake of deporting undocumented workers.

Far too many of these captains of industry shared what Financial Times reporters Sam Fleming, Harriet Agnew and Gregory Meyer have called “Trump’s belief that corporate animal spirits would be unleashed by deregulation, tax cuts and hacking back bureaucracy.”

The 1% were all too willing to disregard the evidence from the President’s first term of his chaotic management style and maddening caprice. And that “fundamental breach of capitalism's regulatory covenant”? How is that any worse than his violation of time-honored bipartisan norms about a seamless transfer of power on January 6, 2021?

As late as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the week of Trump’s second inauguration, one bank executive exclaimed, according to Fleming, Agnew and Meyer: “It’s five minutes to midnight for Europe,” adding, “Everyone is all-in on America.”

What a difference a few months—and stratospheric tariffs—can make.

Traders may have breathed sighs of relief after Trump scaled back his initial plans, pausing the stiffest tariffs on most countries for 90 days. But that would still leave a baseline 10% rate—and that’s not counting the threats he made to China.

And their heart palpitations surely returned with yesterday’s news that the President was now threatening to impose a 50% tariff on goods from the European Union and “at least” a 25% import tax on Apple iPhones not manufactured in the US.

In a Democratic administration, you could take it to the bank that cries of “creeping socialism” would ring across Corporate America at any such move that would add to the cost of doing business. But you’ll be lucky to hear a squeak, let alone a howl, from this crew today.

Nobody, but nobody, wants to get Trump mad, lest he denounce them on social media. 

I hope Jeff Bezos went to an ENT specialist after hearing the President complain in a phone call about Amazon’s projected, then hastily withdrawn, plan to display costs of US tariffs next to prices for certain products. And Doug McMillon surely have felt a bad case of acid reflux coming on when Trump urged the Walmart CEO to “eat the tariffs.”

Bezos, McMillon, their C-suite comrades, and Wall Street will likely get their tax cuts, all right, courtesy of the “big, beautiful bill” just passed by the GOP-dominated House of Representatives. But it’s part of a package that’s estimated to add $5.2 trillion to US debt, further destabilizing an already anxious bond market—not to mention jittery consumers.

So now, Wall Street waits…and wonders: What will this madman do next?

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ As Michael Comes Up with a ‘Celebrity Couple Name’)

Michael Scott [played by Steve Carell]: “Phyllis and Bob: their celebrity couple name would be Phlob.” — The Office, Season 3, Episode 15, “Phyllis' Wedding,” original air date Feb 8, 2007, teleplay by Caroline Williams, directed by Ken Whittingham

Quote of the Day (Michelle Obama, Urging Graduates ‘To Protect the Ground That’s Already Been Won’)

“We’ve got a responsibility to protect the ground that’s already been won, because it can just as easily be lost. It can be gone. We’ve got a responsibility to live up to the legacy of those who came before us by doing all that we can to help those who come after us.”—Former First Lady Michelle Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at North Carolina A&T University Commencement,” Greensboro, N.C., May 12, 2012

(The image accompanying this post, of Michelle Obama at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, was taken Aug. 23, 2024, by Armando Tinoco.)

Quote of the Day (Oliver Sacks, on Why We Speak)

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”— British-born American neurologist, naturalist, and historian of science Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989)

The image accompanying this post of Dr. Oliver Sacks was taken in 1985 by Bernard Gotfryd and is part of his collection at the Library of Congress.

Flashback, May 1525: German Peasant Revolt—Inspired, Then Disowned by, Martin Luther—Falters

After terrifying nobles with its rapidity and ferocity, the German Peasant Revolt, the most significant mass uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, received decisive blows in three separate engagements in May 1525 for the same reason it sprang to life in the first place: the rebels’ major material disadvantages vis-a-vis their feudal masters.

The three battles—Böblingen, Frankenhausen, and Saverne, all fought within a week of each other—proved that peasants on foot armed only with pitchforks, no matter how determined or brave, were no match for princes and knights on horseback, loaded with ammunition.

At Frankenhausen, for instance, though the peasants outnumbered their opponents, they had no cavalry and only 13 guns, facing an army with 2,500 cavalry and considerable manpower.

In the three engagements, once the peasants were surrounded, mass slaughter ensued. Altogether, estimates for the number of peasant casualties for the entire conflict range up to 100,000.

The painfully lopsided difference in casualties reflected the disparity in firepower: 5,000-6,000 dead, wounded or missing among the peasants with another 600 taken prisoner, versus no more than a dozen casualties for the princes. It didn’t help that, unlike the princes, the rebels did not learn to coordinate efforts beyond the regional level.

Unlike the French Revolution, this revolt was not confined to a single country. Starting in what is now southwestern Germany, near the Swiss border, it eventually spread to many parts of the Holy Roman Empire, including Alsace (now in France) and parts of what is now Austria and Hungary.

Much like today, the Holy Roman Empire was undergoing a wrenching transition to a new era that fundamentally altered economies and occupations.

Twenty-first century America has struggled to adjust to the digital revolution, not unlike how the Continental Europe of Martin Luther’s time moved from a rural-based feudal system to a more merchant-dominated, town-centered environment that represented the first stirrings of capitalism.

Instead of tech princes, the Holy Roman Empire numbered real ones who acted as disruptors. Called on to support monarchs waging expensive wars, they squeezed their peasants until it hurt—privatizing for their own purposes land that the serfs had previously used in common to farm and fish. Moreover, subsistence farming put tenants on edge when they experienced a crop failure or tax increase.

Lords were abrogating the system of mutual rights and obligations on which feudalism rested. But the nobles also used their privileged perch not just to exploit their tenants economically but also to punish them for lapses in deference (e.g., in one case, confiding a family member to a dudgeon for not doffing his hat as the lord passed by).

Against these powerful institutional forces was a revolutionary invention, Johann Gutenberg’s printing press. Though invented in 1450, its importance didn’t become fully apparent until nearly 70 years later, when Martin Luther begin to air his defiance of the church in a series of tracts widely circulated, in the peasants’ native German.

Before long, peasants were extending their person-to-person interactions in markets and fairs with pamphlets attacking the privileges of upper estates.

The most succinct summary of peasant grievances, the Twelve Articles, began with demands that were theologically based: the rights to elect their own preachers and to have ones with enough education to explain scripture adequately to them rather than simply to voice what nobles and the church hierarchy wanted them to say. Only after that did they get to monetary issues.

Tracts such as The Freedom of the Christian (1520) convinced the rebels that Luther sympathized with them. But it turned out there were limits to such feelings on his part.

The rebels focused on one statement in The Freedom of the Christian— “A Christian is an utterly free man, lord of all, subject to none” —without inquiring what Luther meant by a paradoxical statement later in the document: “A Christian is an utterly dutiful man, servant of all, subject to all.”

In his Admonition to Peace, Luther, while commiserating with the peasants, counseled them to obey their masters and not take up arms. He insisted that the freedom he had in mind applied to the spiritual, not the secular, environment.

Luther’s position was not without self-interest. He depended heavily on the Protestant princes to protect him against Rome’s decision to try, convict, and sentence him to death for heresy.

By spring 1525, the rebellion had gained a leader: Thomas Muntzer, an Anabaptist minister more radical than Luther in his views on the sacraments and divine revelation—and more willing to take on the old order through violence.

In the town of Weinsberg, in an episode that became notorious as the “Weinsberg Blood Easter,” Count Ludwig von Helfenstein and his attendants were seized from their castle and made to run a gauntlet lined with peasants screaming their grievances (e.g., “you caused the hands of my father to be cut off because he killed a hare on his own field”). The count was then executed for his transgressions.

Luther was now ready to disown various adherents of the movement he had spearheaded. His bloodthirsty turn towards the lords in his tract Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (“Stab, smite, slay whoever you can”) alienated many peasants. He did not disguise his eventual pleasure in the May 1525 destruction of Muntzer’s printing press and his execution for inspiring the peasants.

“When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible,” observed religion historian John J. Friesen in an October 2017 article for Meetinghouse.

The Anabaptists soon joined the Roman Catholic Church among the targets of Luther’s vitriol. Their movement would veer markedly away from what was becoming his more theologically and conservative direction.

Luther’s defiant stance against papal authority—an attempt to de-politicize religion—would, ironically, be replaced by an ironclad commitment to civil authority that seeped into the German consciousness, finding its most terrible expression in obedience to the Third Reich.

But the Nazis were also ready to capitalize on the posthumous reputation of the peasants. The name of one of their leaders at the “Weinsberg Blood Easter,” Florian Geyer, was given to the 8th SS Cavalry Division in March 1944.

Today, the German peasant revolt is largely forgotten—not merely because it occurred five centuries ago, but because it failed. It deserves to be better known, however, with lessons applicable for today:

*Violence by aggrieved groups are counterproductive, triggering backlashes that can be fatal to their cause.

*The forces of reaction are extremely powerful, limiting reformers’ progress.

*Freedom of thought and freedom to worship usually don’t immediately carry the day, requiring decades—or, in this case, even centuries—to achieve goals.

Quote of the Day (Honore de Balzac, on Hatred, ‘A Vice of Narrow Souls’)

“Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.”—French novelist Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), The Muse of the Department (1843)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Murder and Free Speech)

“Murder is forbidden both in form and in fact. Free speech is granted in form, but forbidden in fact. By the common estimate, both are crimes. They're held in deep odium by all civilized people. Murder is sometimes punished, free speech always when committed, which is seldom.”—American novelist and short-story writer Mark Twain (1835-1910), “The Privilege of the Grave," The New Yorker, Dec. 22 and 29, 2008 issue

Quote of the Day (Bob Uecker, on His Professional Baseball Experience)

“I was once named minor league player of the year. Unfortunately, I had been in the majors for two years at the time.”—Former baseball player, announcer, commercial pitchman and actor Bob Uecker (1934-2025), quoted by Richard Sandomir, “Bob Uecker, Clubhouse Wit Turned Popular Sportscaster, Dies at 90,” The New York Times, Jan. 17, 2025

The image accompanying this post, of Bob Uecker as a St. Louis Cardinal, was taken in 1965 and made available by tradingcarddb.com.

Photo of the Day: St. Andrew Kim Taegon Statue, St. Raphael's Church, Long Island City, NY

 

A post of mine earlier this month briefly summarized the history of St. Raphael's Church, a mainstay of Long Island City, NY for 140 years. But I left for a later date a discussion of the white statue in front of the church honoring St. Andrew Kim Taegon, a source of great interest and pride for the parish, especially its Korean congregants.

The son of Christian converts, St. Andrew studied in Macao before his 1845 ordination as a Roman Catholic priest—Korea’s first. He did not last long, falling victim to persecution by the Josean dynasty. He was only 25 when he was beheaded for his evangelism efforts a year later. Religious freedom would not be granted in Korea until 1883.

Fr. Andrew, together with 102 other Korean martyrs, was canonized by Pope John Paul II on a trip to the nation in 1984. He is now the patron saint of Korean clergy.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (First Letter of St. Peter, on Christians’ Obligations to Each Other)

“Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received.” —1 Peter 4: 8-10

The image accompanying this post is from a painting of the apostle by Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640).

Quote of the Day (Laura Miller, on Mystery Stories)

“In a detective story, the mystery both propels the plot and gives the sleuth license to venture into places and milieus where she doesn't typically belong. Who done it, then, is the secret that strips all other secrets of their sanctity. In the better mysteries, the solution also turns the world of the story inside out, revealing how things actually work behind the façade. And, in the best mysteries, the detective herself is cracked open and remade, sometimes even destroyed, by the truth. This points to another shortcoming of series detectives: their fans find their familiar methods and quirks comforting and would be disappointed if each book didn’t serve up more of the same.”— American journalist and critic Laura Miller, “Walk the Line” (review of Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies), The New Yorker, Apr. 24-May 1, 2023

Quote of the Day (Ken Rosenthal, on Rob Manfred’s Pete Rose Decision)

“[Major league baseball commissioner Rob] Manfred is nothing if not shrewd. He surely did not want to risk the president embarrassing him publicly on social media. He also probably did not want to get on Trump’s wrong side at a time when he is pushing for a direct-to-consumer streaming service for the league, and the migration from broadcast to streaming by professional sports leagues is under government scrutiny. Also, while Trump is known to be pro-management, it's not out of the realm of possibility that, if sufficiently annoyed, he could threaten baseball’s antitrust exemption.”—Ken Rosenthal, sportswriter for “The Athletic,” on the decision to remove Pete Rose from MLB’s “permanently ineligible” list, in "Hall Must Weigh 4,256 Hits Against a Heap of Questions," The New York Times, May 15, 2025

Two decades ago, as many entertainers raised their voices against the Iraq War, a Laura Ingraham book popularized unsought advice that right-wingers offered progressives who were, to their way of thinking, sticking their noses where they shouldn’t: Shut Up and Sing.

These days, many Americans are likely to co-opt the first two words of Ms. Ingraham’s title and hurl them at President Trump. 

Prior Presidents, too busy with affairs of state, never felt the need to comment 24/7 on so many non-governmental areas of life to which people, no matter their parties or ideologies, retreated for relief.

Consider this just one more precedent, one more norm broken wide open by the current administration.

Don’t imagine that such blustering and blundering will end with the case of baseball’s all-time hits king (who, it has come out, also sought to score with a teenager in the Seventies, at a time when he was married with two children).

This week, former Death Row Records head Suge Knight predicted that Trump could pardon Sean “Diddy” Combs if the rapper is convicted at his current trial.

In that case, will Rose fans—will Trump fans—continue to excuse the President’s intrusions in areas that should not concern him?

Flashback, May 1975: ‘Seven Beauties’ Scores With Pitch-Black Satire on the Death Camps

With the world premiere of Seven Beauties in France in May 1975, Lina Wertmüller not only maintained the buzz surrounding her since Love and Anarchy three years before, but reached what turned out to be her career zenith.  

No other filmmaker had created such a brand of biting, individually rendered satire since Preston Sturges’ run of Hollywood comedies in the early 1940s.

Then, like Sturges, Wertmüller made the mistake of releasing a movie that didn’t make money—and found her critical cachet as depleted as her box office grosses.

Even notoriously acerbic movie critic John Simon hailed her in a New York Magazine cover story as “The Most Important Film Director Since Ingmar Bergman." 

Such was the acclaim and attention that she became the first female to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar with this film, briefly reminding Hollywood that women had been at the forefront of industry back in the silent era.

Her iconoclastic views on class, sex, and politics in The Seduction of Mimi, Love and Anarchy, and Swept Away—all featuring Giancarlo Giannini as an antihero—set the stage for this latest triumph, at a time when loosened censorship made these topics a matter of incessant debate among cinephiles.

What made her work so compelling—and, at the same time, flummoxed many viewers—was Wertmuller’s refusal to fit neatly into an ideological box. Professedly a socialist, she gravitated more toward anarchism. (Pedro, a philosophical concentration camp inmate, echoes the director’s belief that “A new man in disorder is our only hope.”) Though a trailblazing female director, she evinced little interest in feminism.

The filmmaker’s creative methods were as unconventional as her subjects. The supercharged, slapstick energy of the films of her prime derives from her early training in the Italian commedia dell'arte form, characterized by extensive improvisation.

Most of the film’s scorn is directed at Giannini’s Pasqualino Frafuso, a small-time Neapolitan hood sarcastically nicknamed “Seven Beauties” for the group of homely sisters whose honor he continually boasts of protecting.

Flashbacks detail how his foolish machismo lead him to kill one sister’s pimp, fall into the hands of the police (right after boasting loudly that he’d never be taken alive), fake insanity to avoid jail, volunteer for service in Mussolini’s army when he fears he will go crazy with other lunatics, desert from the Eastern Front, and find himself in a German concentration camp. He is now face to face with the question: how far will he go to survive?

That turns out to be desperately far: first, when he decides to seduce the grotesque, pitiless female camp commandment, then when given charge of fellow inmates—including with responsibility for selecting who will live and who will die.

The lesson that Wertmuller drives home—that the horrors of Fascism become possible not just by political criminals who seize control of the state, but by the supine complicity of ordinary citizens—comes early in the film, when Pasqualino and fellow army escapee Francesco stumble upon Nazi soldiers perpetrating a massacre against helpless prisoners in an open field.

Carefully hiding while watching helplessly from a distance, Pasqualino and Francesco debate what they could have done. Francesco says that they are accomplices in the atrocity: “We didn't make a sound, didn't come out and spit in their faces.”

Nothing doing, Pasqualino counters: that would just be a “useless suicide.”

But Francesco persists: “No, it wouldn't have been useless because in the face of certain things you've got to say no, and instead I said yes to Mussolini, to duty, and to all that crap.”

As demonstrated in Maureen Orth’s October 1975 profile in Newsweek, Wertmuller indulged her penchant for non-professional actors by including the American journalist (originally on a brief leave of absence as her assistant) and her mother among the extras as a prostitute and her madam.

Like mentor Federico Fellini (for whom she worked on 8½), she sought unusual, sometimes grotesque, faces. Moreover, she often preferred visual to verbal instructions forgoing a translation of her remarks to the American actress Shirley Stoler, saying, “I don’t care if she understands what I say, I just want her to imitate what I do.”

Despite its considerable critical acclaim, Seven Beauties has not lacked detractors, then or now. Like Wertmuller’s prior films, it featured graphic violence (including rape, which has troubled many feminists who would otherwise champion her work).

Although its depiction of the Nazi death camps is grim, its tone veers as often into the satiric as the sorrowful. In the opening minutes, grainy black-and-white images of World War II contrast with a sardonic male voice-over intoning, “Oh, yeah” two dozen times (“The ones who vote for the right because they're fed up with strikes. Oh yeah. The ones who vote white in order not to get dirty. The ones who never get involved with politics. Oh yeah.”)

The repetition feels much like the “so it goes” mantra that Kurt Vonnegut used to comment on the senseless carnage of that conflict in Slaughterhouse Five.  The sequence is a necessary prelude to understand how Pasqualino will exhibit the amoral survival instincts of a cockroach.

Furthermore, though the Nazi victims onscreen include political dissidents and deserters, none are specifically identified as Jewish, even though that group was the major target of Nazi extermination schemes. That fact is all the more surprising given that Wertmuller based her screenplay on an Italian-Jewish death-camp survivor who, like Pasqualino, killed his sister’s pimp—and whom she even cast as an extra.

Seven Beauties opened in broader release around the world in the fourth quarter of 1975, giving it exposure for Oscar consideration. In the end, the film came away with four nominations (including for Wertmuller and Giannini) but no wins. (Even in the Best Foreign Film category, it lost to Black and White in Color.)

For a while, it seemed that Wertmuller’s white eyeglasses would become as synonymous with Italian cinema as Fellini’s Borsalino fedora. Hollywood even came calling, courtesy of a four-film contract she signed with Warner Bros. But after the failed English-language A Night Full of Rain (1978), the studio canceled the remaining three projects.

The filmmaker returned to Italy, making 16 more films for the big screen—each one progressively more strident and less available in America than the last. 

Yet the likes of Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig owe her a debt for making manifest the possibilities inherent in a female director’s vision—and Hollywood recognized that contribution by awarding her an Honorary Award, at age 91, for her career in 2019, two years before her death.

With Eurocommunism in fashion in the year of the release of Seven Beauties, few could have predicted the end of Marxism as a viable force. But fewer still could have guessed that far-right nationalism would stage a comeback in Wertmuller’s Italy a half-century later, let alone that it would enter the United States.

That situation makes viewing Seven Beauties far more disturbing today than it was at the time. Its opening minutes of World War II footage immediately connect an ignorant, benighted, machismo-dominated populace to life in a dictatorship.

Thinking, a socialist tells Pasqualino while the two are awaiting prison, is “the most atrocious crime a citizen could commit.” In the present state of democracies worldwide, thinking is as dangerous as Wertmuller’s political prisoner suggests, but also as much of an absolute necessity.