Musing's musings

Now he, too, belongs to the ages

I awakened this morning to the sad news that Senator Edward Kennedy had died early this morning of the brain tumor that was diagnosed just about a year ago today. Just yesterday afternoon, I heard a park ranger at Ford's Theatre quote the words of Edwin M. Stanton on the passing of Abraham Lincoln, and they were the first words that leapt to mind as I contemplated what to title this post.

After watching a bit of CNN's coverage, I got cleaned up and left the hotel bright and early to walk down to the Mall. From what I could tell, there didn't appear to be any visible signs of mourning: the flags surrounding the Washington Monument, and on every building I saw, governmental or otherwise, were all still at the top of their staffs. (I suspect that even once President Obama gave the order to lower the flags in Washington, those around the monument will stay up--they don't appear to have a mechanism for lowering them.) However, as I hiked further east toward the Capitol, I finally noticed a flag at half-mast. It was flying, somewhat interestingly, over the Rayburn House Office Building. Finally, when I got close enough to the Capitol itself to make out the flagstaff in the morning haze and the glare from the sun climbing higher in the sky behind it, this is what I saw:

By the time I walked back down the Mall to the Washington Monument to see if I could get in for the first tour of the day, I noticed that the flag over the White House was also at half-mast, though that was the only other one I noticed. By the time I headed back to the hotel to get a shower and check out, I was noticing flags at half-mast all over the place. And, to borrow a phrase I saw carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial a couple of nights ago, "it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this." Whether one liked Kennedy or loathed him (and/or his politics), the fact that the man served in the United States Senate for longer than I've been alive is something worthy of respect.

Fortunately, I've been mostly incommunicado all day--but I gather, from things I've seen here and there, that the haters have been out spewing their typical bile--and on the same day that the man died. Probably just as well I haven't been confronted with any of that BS, because I'd absolutely freak if I did. Again, say what you like about the man's politics--or his personality--but for the love of all that's holy, if you must tear him down, couldn't you at least have the common courtesy to wait until he's had a chance to cool off in his grave? Once upon a time, we knew the meaning of the phrase nil de mortuis nisi bonum, "speak nothing but good of the dead." Now, not so much, apparently.

With Ted Kennedy's passing, we may also have witnessed the passing of the last remnant of comity in the U.S. Senate. As one of the morning talking heads on CNN observed, one of Kennedy's closest friends was Senator Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican whose political positions are about as far away from those of Senator Kennedy as it's possible to get. After nearly fifty years in the Senate, the man knew how to get things done--and had the clout and the character to make it happen. How many of his ninety-nine remaining colleagues can honestly say that of themselves, in this era of the politics of personal destruction? At the time Ted Kennedy entered the Senate, when a senator uttered the phrase "the enemy," he did not mean his colleagues on the other side of the aisle, he meant those idiots on the other end of the Capitol--the House of Representatives. We really should do what we can to return to that way of thinking--especially if we ever want to get any of the umpty-bajillion bits of pressing legislation passed that we have to get passed.

A couple of nights ago, I was sitting on top of a tour bus, coming across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, on our way to the Marine Corps War Memorial. In the darkness, just below the Custis-Lee mansion, I caught a glimpse of the eternal flame that burns on John F. Kennedy's grave. It flickered for a moment, and then disappeared from sight. It almost makes one believe in omens.

I hope to see his brother laid to rest there beside him, or in some other place of honor and respect. It is only his due, after a lifetime of service to this country. Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. We shall absent ourselves from felicity awhile in your memory.

Terribilis est locus iste

The title of this post is from the Vulgate Latin of Genesis 28:17. Of old, it was the Introit or entrance hymn proper to the dedication of a new church in the Catholic tradition. Literally translated, it means "This is a terrible place," but "terrible" needs to be understood not in the modern sense of something awful or bad, but a place that inspired awe. I'd have said "awesome," but those connotations are not right, either--especially in view of the context in which I'm writing.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (of which I have the honor to be a charter member), was shot and killed this afternoon in the line of duty at the museum. An 88-year-old Maryland man, James W. von Brunn, walked into the museum carrying a rifle, pointed it at Mr. Johns, and pulled the trigger. Mr. Johns did not even have time to draw his own weapon. Mr. von Brunn, described as a "hard-core" white supremacist (is there another kind?), was wounded by other guards who returned fire. He is listed in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital.

This was heller Wahnsinn, to use the language Mr. von Brunn's ancestors probably spoke, "utter madness." Wahn is virtually an untranslatable word in German--there is no clear English cognate. "Madness," "insanity," "mania," "delusion," "craziness"--all fit, but none of them precisely.

The last time I was in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. It was, indeed, both a terrible and an awesome place: not quite the equal, in my estimation, of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but nevertheless a hallowed place for what it commemorates and the work that goes on there. Terribilis est locus iste, indeed. The museum may not, to carry on with the text of Genesis, be literally a domus Dei et porta caeli, "the house of God and the gate of heaven," but it is certainly now a more terrible and awesome place for having the blood of a martyr spilled at its very gates.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Mr. Johns. I will leave them with some words that may perhaps provide some comfort in their time of sorrow:

...all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

--John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

A lion passes

Pioneering lesbian activist Del Martin has died, aged 87. She had been in declining health for some time, but thankfully lived long enough to be able to marry her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon, on June 16 of this year.

I used the word "lion" in the title deliberately: but not with any intention of punning on the surname of Ms. Martin's widow. Del Martin was a gay activist before that phrase was even invented. She and Phyllis were gay activists together for twelve years before the man (San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom) who married them this summer was even born. Del and Phyllis jointly founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States. That was in 1955, when the word "lesbian" was uttered in public only in the titles of lurid "thrillers" purveying bad genre soft-core porn in "dirty" bookstores. The National Organization for Women, which Martin and Lyon both joined, jointly, as the first lesbian couple to do so, was founded eleven years later.

Let us remember what life in 1955 was like. It was the era of Eisenhower Republicanism. The Second World War formally ended when the Soviet Union ended its state of war against Germany. West Germany became a sovereign nation. Richard J. Daley (father of the present mayor, Richard M. Daley) became mayor of Chicago. Jonas Salk announced his polio vaccine. Rock and roll got its start. Ray Kroc was beginning to push McDonald's into becoming a household name and a worldwide economic force. Disneyland opened in California. Emmett Till was killed because he was black and visiting in the wrong part of the country. Racial segregation was banned on interstate buses and trains. Fred Phelps founded the Westboro Baptist Church. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. Gay sex (or "sodomy," or "buggery," or "the unspeakable crime against nature," as it was more usually referred to) was illegal in all 50 states. Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking book on sexual behavior in the human male had appeared just seven years previously. The whole thrust of culture and society was toward conformity, and yet two women, who had met and fallen in love five years previously, decided to buck that trend and stand up for their right to live their lives honestly and openly.

Someone will have to explain to me, not that I think such a thing would even be remotely possible, exactly how it is that the legal union of these two courageous women demeaned or desecrated the marriage state. They had been married in everything but name for half a century and more before the state got around to recognizing that salient fact. Not many couples--of whatever sexual orientation--can boast relationships of that length and stability. A world where Britney Spears can walk into a wedding chapel and legally marry a man--whom she would divorce fifty-five hours later and claim the whole thing had been just a "joke"--but two women who had been in a loving relationship for fifty-five years were denied the same opportunity until a mere two months before one of them died is not what I would call either just or fair. And I would certainly argue that while one of the two relationships I've just mentioned absolutely tarnished and desecrated the institution of marriage, it was not that of Ms. Martin and Ms. Lyon.

Those two women had the courage of their convictions--and stood up for them-- at a time when most gay and lesbian folk were doing their utmost to stay hidden in the closet. They may have been afraid at times--as who would not have been?--but they were indomitable in fighting for what they knew to be right. I rejoice that they were able to see that long-held dream become a reality before one of them was gathered to her everlasting reward.

I'm certain that that odious little man from Kansas will come out with some sort of hateful press release denouncing Martin and Lyon's relationship and hubristically announcing that Del is now roasting in hell for the sin of having loved another woman. It matters only a little, and that primarily for the pain it will cause to Del's loved ones. The good news is that the sort of hatred espoused by Phelps, once the norm at the time Del and Phyllis began their relationship, is gasping out its last breaths on its own deathbed. It's a pity it couldn't have died before she did. Its end will come soon enough, though--thanks in large part to lions like Del Martin. God be good to her.

Another titan bids farewell

Reuters is reporting that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has died at his home near Moscow. He was 89.

Solzhenitsyn had the satisfaction of outliving the Soviet regime he criticized so often and so bitterly that, after the publication of one of his major works (The Gulag Archipelago) it stripped him of his citizenship and sent him into exile. But I never did manage to delve into his longer works--or at least I haven't yet. I do have a copy of August 1914 that I picked up a couple of years ago. But, as with so many other books on my shelves, I just haven't had the time to get around to reading it, what with the pressures of coursework and research (and family, and a full-time job...)

What captivated me in Solzhenitsyn's writing was the one book he managed to get published in the Soviet Union--with the explicit permission of Nikita Khrushchev, during the early phases of the latter's de-Stalinization campaign--One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I first read that book (or at least excerpts from it), if memory serves, when I was in the sixth grade. My middle school was offering a not-for-credit elective in Russian at the time, and the teacher had us read it. I've since come back to it many, many times.

Methinks I'll go re-read it again.

Harvey Korman, 1927-2008

I'm sure they're laughing a little harder in heaven tonight. Harvey Korman, who played through a great deal of my youth alongside Carol Burnett and Tim Conway (among others), has died of complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. He was 81, God be good to him.

Many will remember him best from his role as Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles, a movie which I've never seen and probably never will. I'll remember him as the prissy Comte de Monet in History of the World: Part I. But most of all, I'll remember all the classic sketches he did on the Carol Burnett Show, which was a regular weekly feature in our home for as long as I can remember.

It got to be a game, as the show wore on, to see who could get Harvey to crack up first. The winner was usually Tim Conway; frequently in their scenes together it was all either one of them could do to keep a straight face. And we were laughing just as hard as they were, if not harder. I can't remember the last time I saw anything on broadcast television that made me laugh like that. Heck, I can't even remember the last time I saw anything on broadcast television that even tried to make me laugh like that. Où sont les neiges d'antan?, indeed.

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Good night, sweet prince

Dick Martin, who played the straight man to Dan Rowan for five risqué years (1968-1973) on NBC in the salad days of my youth, died yesterday at the age of 86.

I remember watching Laugh-In when I was growing up, though it wasn't targeted to five-year-olds by any means. I don't recall getting all the jokes--but many of the sketches have held up well. My mom got a couple of DVDs of the first two seasons of Laugh-In for Christmas a couple of years ago, and we watched some of them that year and laughed ourselves silly. Not bad for 40-year-old comedy.

Will Martin be missed? To use his own catchphrase, "You bet your sweet bippy."

Charlton Heston, 1924-2008

Charlton Heston, the veteran actor and quondam spokesman for the National Rifle Association, has died, probably from complications of Alzheimer's disease. The family spokesman who announced his death last night refused to disclose the cause, but Heston himself admitted he had symptoms "consistent with Alzheimer's" in 2002.

Heston has always been a conflicted figure for me--and that conflict extends to my feelings about the man and his politics. As the New York Times notes in the headline to its obituary for Heston, he was an "epic film star." As I parse that phrase, however, the emphasis belongs on the phrase "epic film." Heston was not an epic star, he was a star in epic films. And I never really felt that his acting was all that good in them.

Heston always seemed wooden to me on the screen--and especially in the biblical epics for which he was most famous (though perhaps that is part and parcel of that particular genre of film). The role that made Heston's career was Moses in The Ten Commandments. I still watch that movie at least once a year, but nowadays it's more for its appeal as an unintentional camp classic than for the brilliance of the acting (or the lack thereof; for my money, the best performance in that film was turned in by Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Sethi the Great). Moreover, playing the role of Moses and also doing the voice of God in that film, it always seemed to me that Mr. Heston identified a little too closely with the Deity thereafter, confusing his own voice and his opinions with those of the Lord.

Heston's politics were conflicted as well. Early in his life he was a Democrat and something of a liberal. He campaigned for John F. Kennedy, supported Martin Luther King, Jr., and participated in the 1963 civil rights march on Washington. After Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, Heston appeared on television with Gregory Peck, Kirk Douglas, and Jimmy Stewart and urged support for Lyndon Johnson's Gun Control Act. He changed his political affiliations after Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate. In 1998, he became president of the NRA. And while the most iconic image of Heston's career may well be the shot of him as Moses, standing by the shore of the Red Sea with hands outstretched to part the waters, the photograph of a much older Heston, holding a replica of a colonial musket over his head at the 2000 NRA convention and intoning "From my cold, dead hands," cannot be far behind.

Whatever one might think of Heston's politics, and it certainly seems to me that he spent the last twenty years of his life hanging out with the wrong crowd, and lending credibility to people who did not deserve it and whose actions would likely have been repulsive to Heston in his earlier days, no one deserves Alzheimer's and it is far from being an easy or a pleasant way to die. I hope he finds some peace at last. My condolences to his wife and family on their loss.

ψυχή δ' Ἄϊδόσδε κατῆλθεν

To paraphrase his translation of the tagline from Homer that I've paraphrased for this post's title, "the soul of Robert Fagles has drifted down to the House of Death." (It's Iliad VII.330 if you want to check it; I've just changed the number of the noun from plural to singular, and changed the verb accordingly.)

Sadly, it is a little out of the ordinary that a classicist's passing gets mentioned in the national media. It's not like there are classics groupies or anything like that. Heck, most people aren't really clear on what it is classicists do in the first place.

But Fagles was different. As the Paper of Record noted, he is one of the few people to have attempted tackling the three biggest epic poems of classical antiquity: the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid. Not only did he tackle all three, but he produced bestsellers with his translations. And that is a singular accomplishment in this diminished age when reading itself is on the decline, and when the classics are no longer exactly flying off the shelves.

I'm not surprised at the success of his works, however. I haven't yet made the acquaintance of his Aeneid (but I'm putting it on my wishlist for birthday and/or Christmas gifts), but I've had the immense pleasure of devouring both his Iliad and his Odyssey. I've taught Homer in the original Greek, and I can attest from bitter personal experience that making sense out of his text is not always an easy thing. Making not only good poetry, but good poetry that is both readable and captures something of the flavors of the original, takes a translator with more on the ball than I've got. In addition to the originals, I have four (I think it's four) translations of each of Homer's epics on the shelf behind me in the office: the Classics Club's edition of Samuel Butler's translation, Robert Fitzgerald's poetic rendering, Richmond Lattimore's more-or-less word-for-word translation, and Fagles's.

The last two are the two I'm most likely to pull off the shelf, though for different reasons. The Butler is the one I cut my teeth on as a wee sprout in junior high. It's stilted, archaic, and prosy. (But even with all those faults, it was good enough to keep me turning the pages; I think I'd read both the Iliad and the Odyssey two or three times apiece before I hit high school.) The Fitzgerald I forget how I came by. It may have been a required text for one of my high school classes, or it may have been a Christmas or birthday gift from my folks. I know plenty of people who swear by Fitzgerald's translation, but it's always left me cold. He uses a very odd transliteration scheme for the common names, and while he keeps to a poetic form, I never felt it singing to me. The Lattimore was a college text, and it's the one I reach for if I want a fairly precise rendering in English. Lattimore was no slouch as a translator, but given his decision to stick closely to the original, it can be a little dense in places.

But Fagles's translation, on the other hand, not only sticks to at least a mostly six-beat line (echoing the epic hexameters of Homer's original) and fairly closely to the original text, but manages to make it sing. His is the translation I pull down when I want a reasonably accurate rendering with some oomph behind it.

Of course, that skill makes his passing at a reasonably young age (he was 74) all the more tragic. If we're ever going to get more people reading the good stuff from antiquity, we need people who can turn them into bestsellers. And thus I will lament his death with words from another classical author (the Bard this time) and paraphrase the beginning of a famous soliloquy pronounced by the leading character in a play connected with Scotland,* "[he] should have died hereafter."

*One does never speak the name of the Scottish Play!

And then there was one

Le Monde is reporting that one of the last two surviving French veterans of World War I has died:

Louis de Cazenave, l'un des deux derniers poilus de la première guerre mondiale, est décédé, dimanche 20 janvier, à l'âge de 110 ans, a annoncé le ministère des anciens combattants. L'information a ensuite été confirmée par son fils à l'antenne de France Info. M. de Cazenave est mort dans la matinée à son domicile de Brioude, dans la Haute-Loire. Il sera inhumé mardi.

Louis de Cazenave, one of the last two poilus of the First World War, died Sunday, 20 January, at the age of 110 years, announced the Minister of Former Soldiers. The information was later confirmed by his son on France Info. M. de Cazenave died in the morning at his home in Brioude, in the Haute-Loire. He will be buried on Tuesday.

The story goes on to say that de Cazenave was the eldest of the surviving French veterans, born almost two months earlier than the last remaining veteran, a Mr. Lazare Ponticelli. De Cazenave joined a Senegalese colonial regiment in 1916 and fought with it until September 1917, taking part in the Second Battle of the Aisne, along the "Chemin des Dames," where ultimately nearly 100,000 French soldiers gave their lives in the course of nine days, nearly half of those casualties coming on the first day of the battle.

I must confess to being a little torn by the sentiments expressed by MM de Cazenave and Ponticelli against the idea of a state funeral for the last of the poilus. I doubt their fallen comrades would think it presumptuous of them--and it would make some small amends for the generally shabby way that WWI veterans were often treated when they came back home--particularly if they were wounded or handicapped. (And, as the final sentences of the linked article from Le Monde make clear, huge numbers of them were: WWI claimed a total of 9 million dead, all told, and 20 million wounded--half of whom were disfigured.) On the other hand, it's entirely in character that they should refuse the honor due them.

Sadder still than this death is the fact that hardly anyone remembers the Great War, the war that was supposed to end all wars, anymore. Its brutality, futility, and senseless slaughter were superseded by those of the war that followed it just a generation later. World War II and its veterans have become somewhat iconic in late 20th- and early 21st-century culture. They were the "Greatest Generation," fighting in the last "good" war. And now those veterans, too, are dying off in their thousands each day. It won't be much longer before we won't have any living links to those days, either--a situation we are very likely to encounter with regard to its predecessor war before too many more years pass.

The politics of self-destruction

Both Towleroad and the Internet Movie Database are reporting that actor Brad Renfro has died, aged 25. Speculation abounds that his death may have been drug-related, though the coroner has not yet ruled on the cause of death. Speculation also abounds that it was the "Hollywood culture" that was the proximate cause of Renfro's death, that he was shoved into prominence too young, and lacked suitable adult guidance in the dog-eat-dog world of professional acting.

But that's too easy. No culture, whether Hollywood, New York, Chicago, or Bumfuck USA, can create an addiction. But it can certainly make feeding one a lot easier. When you make an awful lot of money in a very short time, when you're surrounded by people whose job it is to puff you up and make you look larger than life (and in some cases to satisfy your every whim), it's difficult to keep your head about you and make good decisions. It's somewhat similar to the situation of the worker in the candy factory: with all that chocolatey goodness around, it's bloody hard not to sample it--until you gorge yourself sick. At least with chocolate, if you overindulge the only thing you have to worry about is feeling a little queasy and putting on a few pounds (and maybe acne, if you're young enough).

Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and all the rest of the recreational pharmacopoeia, on the other hand, are quite a different kettle of fish. Once you get hooked on one of those, a whole new world of hurt opens up in front of you.

No, this is most emphatically not going to turn into a Nancy Reagan-esque "Just say no!" rant. That campaign was a stupid fucking idea when it was introduced in the 1980s, and it hasn't improved any with age. The only difference between then and now is that now we have ironclad proof that it doesn't work.

So why is it that our drug laws are still stuck in the days of bad hair, greed, and bad politics? It would be easy, fairly pleasant, and even mostly true to blame the Republicans. "Just Say No!" is yet another Reaganite albatross they have willingly bound around their own necks. It fits too easily into the Republican paradigms of how the world works and what it ought to look like. In Republican-World, virtually everything is a personal choice. When someone makes what is held to be a wrong choice the answer isn't to fix the mess or to treat the problem, the answer is to shame the transgressor and appeal to his/her moral nature so that s/he doesn't repeat the transgression.

The problem is, of course, that many of the things Republicans want to portray as choices are really not choices at all--at least not in the morally and/or philosophically relevant ways. In Catholic theology, for example, in order to commit a sin and be held responsible for it, one must first know that a particular action (or sometimes a thought) is wrong--and then decide to do it anyway. One must absolutely be in control of one's faculties, and also know the difference between right and wrong. It is not at all clear to me that this can be reasonably said of an addict, given what we know about the biology of addiction.

However, while the Democrats may have their hearts and their heads in the right places, they have nevertheless been enablers of the Republicans. The problem on our side of the aisle is, I believe, the perennial fear of being seen or portrayed as weak or soft or wishy-washy. Never mind that we're right. Never mind that if we'd had our way, we might have escaped untold thousands of wasted lives, blasted homes, petty crimes by the million--and saved whole boatloads of money on prisons. No, our biggest worry is that the Republicans might run an attack ad and say we're soft on crime and want to coddle drug addicts and drug dealers. Heaven forfend, and somebody bring me my fainting couch!