Photo of the Day: Christmas at St. Cecilia’s Church, Englewood NJ

Yesterday I attended a Christmas vigil Mass at my parish church, St. Cecilia’s in Bergen County, NJ. For me and my family—as well as, I suspect, for more than a few of my readers—this venerable, beautiful building holds a lifetime of memories.

Those memories continued to warm my heart even on a hideously cold day outside.

Quote of the Day (Zbigniew Brzezinski, on History, Chaos and Conspiracy)

“History is much more the product of chaos than of conspiracy.” —Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, quoted in Hedrick Smith, “Brzezinski Says Critics Are Irked by His Accuracy,” The New York Times, January 18, 1981

As winter turned into spring in 1976, various relatives and friends mentioned to me a parishioner at my local Roman Catholic church, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ. Nobody I knew had remarked on him during his 16 prior years as a professor at Columbia University. 

But proximity to potential power, as foreign policy adviser to the presumptive Democratic nominee for President, now made him an object of curiosity. “That’s Brzezinski,” they whispered, pointing at a figure near the back of the church while trying not to draw undue attention to themselves in the process.

That was my remote introduction to Zbigniew Brzezinski, who died yesterday at age 89. I would learn shortly that he had raised his family (including daughter Minka, now a morning-show fixture on MSNBC) in a Victorian house only several blocks from my home. 

But the psychic distance from that white-collar area to my blue-collar neighborhood might as well have put him on the other side of the moon.

By the time I entered Columbia myself two years later as a freshman, my interest in him had strengthened. The campus—particularly the school newspaper that I wrote for, filled with political science majors and/or liberals—was now avidly following his adventures in Washington, where he had gone, on extended sabbatical from the university, to serve as National Security Advisor under President Jimmy Carter. 

Soon, that service had taken on all the aspects of an intramural mudfight, as Brzezinski’s hawkish views clashed with the more dovish perspective of another university academic now in the State Department, the Sovietologist Marshal Shulman.

In Washington, Brzezinski became more familiar than he might have liked with the notions of “conspiracy” and “chaos” that he discussed in the above quote. 

Right-wingers (and a few left-wingers) charged in the late Seventies and Eighties that a group that he had helped establish, the Trilateral Commission (formed, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, of prominent academics and politicians from North America, the European Union and Japan with a strong orientation toward global economics), was a secretive cabal out to rule the world.

At the same time, Carter Administration foreign policy was increasingly regarded by large parts of the American public as being rocked by chaos. Brzezinski battled internally not just against Shulman but also against Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. 

By the third year of Carter’s Presidency, that internal sense of coming apart was being mirrored almost nightly on the evening news, with OPEC generating a second American oil shortage in less than a decade and American hostages being seized in Iran.

When he spoke to the New York Times Hedrick Smith, then, Brzezinski was being as defensive as he was philosophical in leaving office. 

He said what had annoyed his critics was how often his vision of policy had been borne out. He derided “any grand schemes regarding a new international world order,” noting that policymakers were simply liable to be “overwhelmed by events and information.”

No policymaker, even the best, gets it right all of the time, and Brzezinski didn’t either. He correctly predicted that the strain of dealing with so many different nationalities would lead the U.S.S.R. to collapse. 

But in his eagerness to hasten that day, he backed the ill-fate attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages and supported financing the mujahideen in Afghanistan in response to the Soviet deployment of forces there, unknowingly encouraging the forces of radical Islam that have bedeviled the U.S. in the Mideast these last two decades.

(It must also be said that, long before it became universally truth even in Democratic circles, this onetime "hardliner" warned that George W. Bush's Gulf War would turn out to be a "historic, strategic and moral calamity.")

Himself the annoyed target of political paranoids, Brzezinski in 1981 couldn’t imagine a President who promoted both chaos and conspiracy. But that is what life is like in the U.S. today. 

The thoughtless blusterer once derided memorably by Jeb Bush as the “chaos candidate” is now the Chaos Commander in Chief, an executive who sows doubt in the efficacy and value of the government he leads by screaming about nonexistent plots (e.g., about President Obama wiretapping him).

To his credit, unlike other Cold Warriors who sought to undermine Soviet Communism only to make their peace with Vladimir Putin, Brzezinski before his death criticized both the Russian dictator and the American President who has uttered nary a word of criticism of him. 

He castigated the Russian President's "thuggish tactics" and "thinly camouflaged invasion" of the Ukraine in 2014, while this year scathingly dismissed Trumplomacy: The president, he said, “has not given even one serious speech about the world and foreign affairs.”

Photo of the Day: William C. Ryan Memorial Bridge, Bogota, NJ

Most people know the span connecting Bogota and Hackensack, N.J., as Midtown Bridge, but its formal name, following a renaming in 1978, is the William C. Ryan Memorial Bridge. When I walked around adjacent Foschini Park in Hackensack a few weeks ago, I snapped several pictures of the bridge, including ones where the current name is clearly visible.

Who knows how many people have driven over this bridge, in the three and a half decades after its renaming, and thought about the life it commemorated? Few, and only fleetingly, if that, I imagine.

You can’t see the name of the bridge from the angle where I shot this picture, nor even get a sense of how rickety this 114-year-old bridge has become. But at least this picture conveys the peace that Lt. William C. Ryan got to enjoy so little during his abbreviated lifetime, and that small flag signifies the stubborn persistence of memory concerning the hundreds of thousands of young American service personnel cut down in their prime—those we honor this Memorial Day weekend.

If you’re going to really connect with the past, it helps to have a point at which you can connect with it. For me with Lt. Ryan, that connecting point was our high school, St. Cecilia, now closed, in Englewood, N.J.

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post that reviewed the circumstances of Billy Ryan’s education, heroism, and disappearance while flying a combat mission while serving in the Vietnam War. But I think some more can be said still, because of some numbers and dates.

The first date is May 11, 1969 (the day before he was scheduled for rest leave), when Lt. Ryan flew his last combat mission and went missing in action. This means that it is 45 years since he is gone, with the events of that time as distant as a Mad Men episode. Two generations have been born who never experienced the gaping national wounds of that era.

The other date is April 24, 1944. Last month, had he survived, Lt. Ryan would have reached 70. Yet he never had a chance to live anything close to a normal, extended life.

So yes, this weekend, let us rest, remember the extraordinary bravery these young people displayed, and shed a tear, but make a resolution, too: that the politicians responsible for the shortening of the lives of Lt. Ryan and so many others—through blindness to the injustice and other grievances that cause war, through the rank mismanagement that have put so many young men in harm’s way over the years—are questioned relentlessly, then held to account.

Flashback, December 1938: On-Set Fire Sidelines Hamilton From ‘Wizard’

Margaret Hamilton came near to losing her career-defining role—not to mention her life—when her costume as the Wicked Witch of the West went up in flames during this month 75 years ago, sidelining her from The Wizard of Oz for six weeks before she could resume filming.

Victor Fleming suffered a nervous breakdown while filming Gone With the Wind, but the issues he contended with on The Wizard of Oz, by themselves, would have been enough to endanger the director’s health. Ms. Hamilton’s mishap just before Christmas wasn’t the only problem on the set of the musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s fantasy classic. In fact, it was, as a 2009 article in the U.K. newspaper The Express indicates, “a casualty ward.”

Buddy Ebsen’s health turned out to be even more of a problem than Ms. Hamilton’s. His reluctant agreement to exchange with initial "Tin Man" Ray Bolger his role as the Scarecrow became one he rued even more so when he suffered an allergy to aluminum dust in his makeup, forcing his replacement by Jack Haley. (Ebsen complained for the rest of his life about the health ills he incurred as a result of the film—and Haley himself developed a severe eye infection from his makeup as the new Tin Man.)

Hamilton had gotten her role to begin with when Gale Sondergaard, one of the great character actors in Hollywood (and the first recipient of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar), grew so unhappy about the change that transformed the Wicked Witch from glamorous to ugly that she asked out of the part.

I was relieved to know that Hamilton—a gentle, former Midwestern schoolteacher who had loved the Baum works as a girl—was nothing like her terrifying screen crone. It would have terrified me no end if she had been even one-hundredth as bad as her character.

I wouldn’t, at the tender age when I began to watch the film, have felt the slightest bit of sympathy at the thought that her grass-green pallor—courtesy of an all-out studio effort to spend untold hours and expense on makeup—almost led to Hamilton’s death.

On December 23, 1938, a bit more than two months after she began shooting, Hamilton was in the midst of the second filming of the witch’s departure from Munchkinland in a burst of flame. The stage trap door did not open quickly enough, causing her to be caught in the pit and her costume to be lit aflame. She was saved from death in the pit by someone on set (accounts differ as to whether it was her makeup artist or an alert “Munchkin”). But her green makeup caught fire, leaving her severely burned on the face and right hand and sending her to the local hospital.

Rather than pressing for worker’s compensation, which would have left her persona non grata with not only MGM but all the other studios, Hamilton agreed not to sue, but only on one condition: that she no longer have anything to do with any more fire once she returned. That turned out to be a wise condition, as her double and stunt stand-in was herself involved in another accident that left her legs permanently scarred—and forced her off the set for the remainder of filming.

With the help of that makeup, plus her talent, Hamilton made herself over so completely that, in effect, she was too good in the role. She appeared so frightening that MGM studio execs trimmed some of her best scenes and deleted others completely, leaving her with a grand total of only 10 minutes onscreen—only increasing her chagrin about a role that not only put her at risk, but was hardly even mentioned by critics upon its release in 1939.(The film, not a box-office smash when it opened, only assumed iconic status when it began to be shown annually on CBS, then NBC, beginning in 1959.)

I gloried when Dorothy and her quartet of searching, incomplete new friends skipped and sang down the yellow brick road to those infectious Yip Hamburg-Harold Arlen songs, but I gulped and shivered when I caught sight of that female in black with the wart-encrusted face. The witch’s evil cackle sent me scampering for safety behind the big chair in our living room, waiting for the coast to clear. It was the least I could do. If she could threaten a nice girl like Dorothy with “I'll get you, my pretty--and your little dog, too!” what would she do with the likes of me?

I wasn’t the only TV-raised baby boom child transfixed by Ms. Hamilton’s all-too-convincing thespian witchery. In fact, a couple of my relatives (who shall remain nameless) saw a figure in their own lives who, in certain ways, was not unlike the Wicked Witch of the West.

The woman, a nun in our elementary school, St. Cecilia’s of Englewood, NJ, possessed a unique physiogomy—including thin, dark face, irregular nose and scowl of supernatural animation that, when displeased, bore in on you. The nun’s nickname, “Shotgun Rosie,” was a bit like the force that lifted the Wicked Witch aloft on her broomstick: Its derivation mattered less than that its possession now left observers dumbstruck.

“Shotgun Rosie” was also given to devising punishments that probably never occurred to her screen counterpart. My female relative was forced to kneel in front of a shrine on the side of the classroom for an entire afternoon—especially bewildering, I think, as this relative was, if not the best-behaved girl in her class, very close to it. By comparison, my male relative escaped lightly, having only to stand in a trash can in the corner in the front of the room for an hour.

The legend of this terror of St. Cecilia grew until one Friday afternoon in November 1963, when the nun was called from class into the hallway to meet with the principal, who looked gravely concerned. When “Shotgun Rosie” emerged a short while later, her tearful eyes caused more consternation among her confused students than her disciplinary methods.

“Class, President Kennedy’s been shot,” she was finally able to get out in a choked voice.

And at that point, just as a waking Dorothy realized that the people of Oz bore more than a passing resemblance to the Kansas she called home (even the Wicked Witch was just poor Miss Almira Gulch), so the fifth graders at St. Cecilia understood that the woman with the dour mien was just as human as anyone else they knew.

Graduations, Then and Now: The Doors Where We Enter

“We busted out of class, had to get away from those fools

We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school.”—Bruce Springsteen, “No Surrender,” from his Born in the USA LP (1984)

Thirty-five years ago today, as I received my high school diploma, I felt much the same sense of relief and release that Springsteen expresses. It wasn’t that I was done with educational institutions—in fact, many of my waking hours would be given over to attending classes, writing papers and cramming for tests, for most of the next 19 years, for undergraduate and graduate degrees, even for adult and continuing ed.

But from this point on, I felt more like a free agent: able to attend a school of my choosing, take majors and additional courses I wanted, manage my work pace, even win friends (or not) among people with no preconceptions about me based on my family or background.

Over the next few weeks, millions of American kids will experience the same sense of wonder and exhilaration that my classmates and I felt in 1978, and that Springsteen—recognized as a fellow member of our tribe of working-class Jersey kids—felt before us.

Part of it is that we struggled to achieve, but we also struggled to endure. For the sad fact of the matter is that the early leaders of the American republic, in an attempt to create a well-informed electorate—voters worthy of rendering “the consent of the governed”—gave birth to a regimented system deeply harmful to young minds. For all the millions this nation has spent, thousands still languish in our vast educational system, loathing (even despairing of) every minute of it.

High school has to be the most artificial, injurious institution ever devised to (mis)shape young people—from the administrators and teachers who, out of the best intentions, devise a web of rules that the young seem bound to challenge, to fellow students who, often out of their own fear of being friendliness, use peer pressure. It is all designed to squeeze out individuality. The pain that adolescents feel during this time—the pain that many don’t even forget years later—stems from that daily struggle.

It just hasn’t seemed to change, from one generation to the next: We are so intent on protecting who we are that we don’t know how to break through to others.

As for subject matter: I can’t say, all these years later, that I can tell you much about cosines or paramecium. It is enough that I recall some details—and, most of all, that I absorbed habits of self-discipline that I’ve been able to apply since then. (It was a geometry teacher who always kept telling me and my classmates, "Always think with a pencil in your hand"--advice that I've applied, oddly enough, in a realm he probably never intended: writing.)

I would need these habits, as the coming fall I was about to leave the cocoon of a high-school graduating class of only about 80—many of whom I had known for 12 years of parochial elementary and secondary school—to go to a secular, Ivy League institution far larger in size.

I certainly didn’t know all that would await me at Columbia, but I already sensed that I would find a community bursting with urban edginess, contention, intellectual energy, ambition and maybe even a few egos. It might not have the close atmosphere of my high school, St. Cecilia, a place where you knew not only everyone in your class but very likely your classmates' other family members. But the university also might nurture a society of achievers in which my drive would not look so exotic, where ideas might excite me in ways I never had known before. It might move me much closer to the person I could become.

Springsteen and others have shown that learning doesn't end with the schoolhouse door, that students are individuals who need to be reached for the impulse that makes them tick. “In the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter,” young Eugene Gant vows in Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. 

As I left high school, I was filled with more anxiety about my future than I could really let on. I was also filled with deep affection and love for the people along the way that had helped me seek that “door where I may enter.”  Decades later, I couldn’t forget them if I tried. I hope those who graduate this month will be as lucky to have the kind of friends and teachers I had back then.