October 2005

The Nobel Prize for Literature has just been awarded to the British playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter. The good news, I suppose, is that at least I knew who he was when I learned about his prize. That is a good deal more than can be said for Elfriede Jelinek, John Maxwell Coetzee, and Imre Kertész, his three predecessors as Nobel laureates in literature.

Pinter wrote several plays that have had continuing worldwide success since they were written, mostly more than 40 years ago, and several distinguished screenplays. That includes one of my all-time favorite movies, The Go-Between, which has for some mysterious reason never been released on DVD. (It is taken from a wondrous novel of the same name by L. P. Hartley, and Pinter had the good sense to use Hartley’s unsurpassable opening line: “The past is a foreign country: They do things differently there.”)

I just received the following correspondence from David Lander, a friend of and frequent contributor to American Heritage, and thought I'd share it:

“Joshua Zeitz, in his piece on The Jazz Singer that went up on AmericanHeritage.com on October 6, refers to the assimilationist aspirations of the movie’s Jewish protagonist and asks rhetorically, ‘Who, but a white man . . . needed to black up to play an African-American?’

“As the cover photo of the Winter 2005 issue of American Legacy shows, the seminal black actor Bert Williams felt he did. In the accompanying story, the late Ralph Allen, who wrote Sugar Babies and other musicals, noted that Williams and an African-American partner named George Walker developed an act in the 1890s that was ‘similar to those of the white comedians who wore burnt cork. Billing themselves as “the Two Real Coons,” they took whatever jobs were offered them [and] appeared in small-time minstrel shows, in medicine shows, and in honky-tonks. Along the way they encountered all the difficulties that black men, performers or not, [then] suffered.’

Ellen Feldman writes that post-election fatigue is an unlikely reason for President Bush’s recent troubles, given “the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina.” I’ve taken a few cheap shots myself over the years, so I don’t much mind this rather gentle one, especially as I’m sure that Ms. Feldman realizes full well that Presidents don’t get to take anything that the rest of us would consider a vacation at all. The daily briefings, the endless consultations, the telephone calls with foreign leaders, the reading of important but deadly dull reports, goes on relentlessly whether he is wearing a coat and tie in the Oval Office or shorts and a T-shirt in Crawford, Texas.

I think John Steele Gordon is onto something in his remarks about our genetic need to tell stories. Though second-term blues have been common throughout our history, the reasons for them, as both he and Fredric Schwarz point out, are wildly disparate. A glance at three recent presidents reveals just how varied the problems can be and how diametrically opposed the underlying causes often are.

Frederic Schwarz speaks of post-election fatigue and depression. In the case of Clinton, I think we can add boredom to the list, plus a flair for shooting himself in the foot to relieve the boredom. After achieving a first term and reelection, what was this superachiever to do but raise the stakes for what he could do, or get away with?

The Bush Administration right now is going through a major bad patch.

Hurricane Katrina, the rising cost of oil, the Miers nomination, and the undropped shoe of the Valerie Plame investigation are but some of its troubles. As a result, Bush’s approval ratings are at the lowest point of his Presidency. And Democrats—and their minions in the media—are whispering excitedly about the Bush White House sliding into terminal lameduckness and even taking back Congress in 2006.

I’d recommend holding off on ordering the champagne just yet. Political situations, like a game of backgammon, can be reversed by a single good roll of the dice.

As if we didn’t get enough of the moronic circus that was the O. J. Simpson trial the first time around, now we’ve been forced to observe its tenth anniversary. But does it really deserve notice?

After the verdict came down, on October 3, 1995, I remember my dad, who grew up black in Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s and who witnessed more than his share of racism up close and personal, saying, “Now they know how we feel.” This was in reference to the absurd trials, held mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, that saw Klansmen and the like walk off scot-free from murder indictments, the blood still fresh on their hands. One in particular springs to mind, since it occurred 40 years nearly to the month before the O.J. trial.

A few days ago, I wrote that the federal government’s meltdown in the wake of Hurricane Katrina might, in the long run, lend the Republican party a boost. In response to this argument, my colleague John Steele Gordon wrote the following:

“Mr. Zeitz notes that the Watergate scandal of the Nixon era—far and away the greatest political scandal since World War II—gave the Democrats only a temporary boost. He argues that Watergate was evidence that government doesn’t work and conservatives always benefit in the long term from such evidence. I disagree. I think Watergate was evidence that while men are frail and always will be, the Constitution is not frail and government did indeed work.”

I think two points need clarifying here:

First Mr. Gordon has not accurately summarized my argument. I did not write that Watergate was “evidence that government doesn’t work.” I wrote that “Watergate shook the American public’s faith in government.” These are two very different ideas.

Fred Schwarz notes below that New York State has little that unifies it into a politically cohesive whole and that that is reflected in the state’s flag. Let me leave New York’s tangled politics and its even more tangled political history to another time and write a little about state flags.

They are for the most part simply terrible. You can see them at Visit 50states.com/flag/

I certainly agree that the New York State flag is one of the worst in the country, but partly that is because it is virtually indistinguishable at any distance from 16 other state flags (Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, and Utah). They are all the state seal on a dark blue field. One wonders if the governors of these states told some underling at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend to design the state flag before he went home.

According to a recent newspaper article, Syracuse University is now marketing itself on a Manhattan billboard as “New York’s College Team,” for football at least. The idea is that since there’s no major college-football team in New York City, its residents will adopt the Orangemen as their own. One potential problem with this plan is that Syracuse is 250 miles away. Rutgers, a mere 30-odd miles distant, would seem to have a much better claim, except that they’re in New Jersey, which is equivalent to having cooties for most New Yorkers. So it’s a question of which place New York City feels less of a connection to: New Jersey or Upstate.