To Kill A Mockingbird

 Right out of the pages of that novel, predating it by five years only ...

CNN — 

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman whose accusation led to the 1955 lynching of Black teen Emmett Till in Mississippi – and whose role in the brutal death was reconsidered by a grand jury as recently as last year – has died in Louisiana, the Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office confirmed to CNN.

...

In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett was beaten and shot to death after he allegedly whistled at Bryant – now Donham – in Money.

Later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, took Emmett from his bed and ordered him into the back of a pickup truck and beat him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River. They were both acquitted of murder by an all-White jury following a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed and verbally threatened her. 

Milam, who died in 1980, and Bryant, who died in 1994, admitted to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.

In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on any charges.

Donham testified in 1955 that Emmett grabbed her hand and waist and propositioned her, saying he had been with “White women before.” But years later, when professor Timothy Tyson raised that trial testimony in a 2008 interview with Donham, he claimed she told him, “That part’s not true.”

A Slightly Different Color

It's a noteworthy moment when a person finds themself writing something like this:

Thank you for these wise words. After a certain age, life takes on a slightly different color. The future is more limited, the past heavier. Certain joys in life decrease, and if they are not replaced by others, this leads to a feeling of sadness. At least it has in my case.

Remembering Blair Fox

One of the truly consequential people in my life will depart the living earth today or perhaps tomorrow or maybe even the next day. But there is no reason to expect it will be longer than that.

Blair Fairchild Fox, son of Jill and Joe Fox, brother of Logan, Jeff (himself too deceased) and Michael Fox

Child of Guard Hill Road, Bedford NY, he grew up in a house down the hill from his grandmother's larger Georgian mansion. He came into his teenage years in the early 1970s. 

Speaking of his teenage years, he lived in a tenement on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with a buddy when he was probably 16. Those were different times.

He joined the Navy, was sent to Australia, broke his neck in an auto accident while on base and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The year was 1976. He was 18. 

Our lives intersected many times over the decades to follow.

I remember visiting him with my dad and Jill at the VA hospital in Roxbury, Mass. when he returned stateside shortly thereafter.

He lived for a while in an apartment building on West End Avenue that also housed folk singer Judy Collins.

He spent much time in Vermont, and lived for many years on Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, California. I had many a good glass of wine over there in the late 1980s. 

He then moved himself to Austin, Texas. It was warmer in Texas. Too cold in the Bay Area, that chilly kind of cold that gets into your bones.

Blair's body has finally given out on him. He dodged many a bullet over the years. By some measures, he lived decades longer than anyone predicted he might, but none of us lives forever and Blair did not find a way to be exempted from that rule. 

You won't find much about him on paper. He wasn't that kind of person. But for anyone lucky enough to interact with him, he was nothing short of amazing. An amazing life lived by an amazing human being. 

This past weekend, I walked boots-deep into a streamlet in central Massachusetts and poured out some Prosecco and scattered some sheep poop. It was the only way I could think to honor the man. Sheep poop is a wonderful fertilizer. Ashes to ashes kind of thing. Then yesterday, I asked a guitarist to play the Grateful Dead song Ripple to remember him by. The final line of the song is thus

If I knew the way, I would take you home.

Blair Fox

It was really all about this ...

 It occurs to me, the underlined words are what the entire American Revolution was about, full stop ...

CREATING AN ENGLISH KING

Here are the words of the proclamation announcing that Prince Charles had become King Charles the III on September 10, 2022 (quoted from a CBS News report):

The proclamation, as read out to the world by the Garter King of Arms, saw the assembled Privy Counsellors and other members of the Accession Council formally declare that they "do now hereby with one voice and Consent of Tongue and Heart, publish and proclaim that the Prince Charles Philip Arthur George is now, by the death of our late Sovereign of happy memory, become our only lawful and rightful liege lord, Charles the III, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of all His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, to whom we do acknowledge all Faith and Obedience with humble Affection, beseeching God by whom Kings and Queens do reign, to bless his majesty with long and happy Years to reign over us."

CREATING A U.S. PRESIDENT

Here is the oath that Joe Biden swore on January 20, 2021: 

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Why We Build The Wall

 A beautiful, painfully relevant, song by Anais Mitchell (Thanks to WUMB for this one.)

You Can't Buy a Newspaper in Harvard Square Anymore!

How about this shocking news -- you can't find a newspaper in Harvard Square anymore. It's true. Any my goodness, how is that for a strange turn of events? The newsstands are all gone, and the bookstores don't carry them anymore. Magazines either.

What does this mean? Feel free to comment below to share your thoughts.

Thoughts on January 6, 2021

The attack on the U.S. Capitol brings these thoughts to mind:

1. Conservatives spend so much time genuflecting before the shrine of Winston Churchill. Paradoxical that they've spent the last four years appeasing a fascist.
2. Does anyone remember the Republican outrage over the storming of the U.S. compound in Benghazi? 10 hearings. A House Select Committee created solely for the purpose of investigations.  The endless disparagement of Hillary Clinton. Well, we now wait for the remorseless Republican outrage over a Republican president who, along with his two Senate accomplices (see below), fomented an insurrection and the storming of the U.S. Capitol and the killing of a U.S. Capitol police officer.

****

Here's my best go at a headline:

This is the face of American Fascism

****

And here's my best perversion of T.S. Eliot ...

This is how America ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Meet John Doe in today's election

I didn't have a line at my local polling place this morning. The voting was easy, organized and painless. Hard to imagine who I might have voted for, but I'll give you a hint. His name was Joe Biden.

The other evening, ambling on YouTube as I often do, I ran into the film Meet John Doe, a 1941 Frank Capra gem of Americana starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. 

She's a wild, wise-talking journalist who upon getting fired from her newspaper pens one last column creating a character so distraught at the neglect of the little people, he's going to kill himself on Christmas Eve by jumping off of City Hall. His name is John Doe. It turns out, her story has struck a nerve. John Doe is popular, and newspapers are selling.  So her paper decides to keep her around and get a real John Doe to play the role. In walks Gary Cooper.

In the ensuing twists and turns, themes emerge -- the admiration of the little guy, the miseries of Depression-era men, the rapacious newspaper owner looking to turn a feel good story into political power, corruption in all its guises. And watching it, it didn't feel very far from today. Especially the love of the little guy, the downtrodden, forgotten soldier of decency in the American system. Get to know your neighbor, what's so hard about that?

As if to heighten the point, Capra culminates the film with a scene redolent with Christian crucifixion imagery. Determined to actually kill himself after he learns that he's been a pawn in a much larger scheme by newspaper owner Edward Arnold to take over the American political system, Cooper climbs City Hall tower on Christmas Eve. His persecutors and his supporters deduce that he may try to jump, so they climb the tower to meet him there. Stanwyck climbs the tower too, and in the snowy drifts of a cold night, she talks him down. John Doe does not have to die so that others might live.

Meet John Doe, thematically reminiscent of today.