(1) a teacher may not be compelled to discuss a particular current event or widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs;
(2) a teacher who chooses to discuss a topic described by Subdivision (1) shall, to the best of the teacher’s ability, strive to explore the topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective —from the text of Texas House bill HB3979
A Texas school superintendent apologized to his district on Thursday after one of his top officials advised teachers that, if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should give students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective.—“Texas Superintendent Apologizes After Official’s Holocaust Remarks,” The New York Times, 10/15/21
Editor’s note: for the convenience of anxious Texas public school teachers who don’t know just what they can teach any more, we present here some lesson plans that include “diverse and contending perspectives” along with their sources. You’re welcome!
Lesson: “Smoking greatly increases one’s risk of lung cancer.”
Alternative: “My granddaddy smoked for seventy years and he never catched cancer!” Source: this guy I met in a bar.
Lesson: “According to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Alternative: “In my experience the unexamined life is totally awesome!” Source: Darrell next door
Lesson: “George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, two of our most revered founding fathers, owned slaves.”
Alternative: “No they didn’t!!” Source: Gail, 8.
Lesson: “The battle for the Alamo took place in the context of an illegal land grab by immigrants from the southern United States who didn’t want Mexico to interfere with their expanding slave operations.”
Alternative: “You can’t talk about John Wayne like that!” Source: a tweet or something.
Lesson: “More than a hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery, Black Americans are still poorer than their white fellow citizens, have shorter lifespans, and are much more likely to serve prison time and to suffer from police brutality.”
Alternative: ”What are you, a communist or something?” Source: someone on Facebook I think
Lesson: “Joseph Biden won the 2020 election by a large margin both in terms of the popular vote and the electoral college. Multiple investigations conducted at the Federal and state levels have found no evidence of voter fraud.”
Alternative: “Stolen!” Source: this thing I saw on Breitbart
Lesson: “The Holocaust’ refers to events in Nazi Germany and the countries it occupied in which some 6 million Jews were deliberately murdered, along with many thousands of dissidents, gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and others, as evidenced by millions of recorded victims’ statements, photographs, the physical remains of death camps, and official documents.”
Alternative:*
* When we can think of something funny to say about Holocaust deniers we’ll let you know. (The editors)
(Note: this blog was originally posted in October 2021 and revised in July. I have made occasional revisions as I’ve learned more about Disney and his production of the film.)
A couple of years ago I was reading some short stories by the Italian author Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). Pirandello is known outside of Italy primarily for his ground-breaking plays Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, but he was also the author of important novels and a large (250+) number of short stories, many of which have never been translated into English. I have read quite a few of these stories, and even published translations of a handful.
One of Pirandello’s stories I came across is entitled “Pallino e Mimì” (“Pallino and Mimì”). The title refers to its two canine protagonists. Pallino is an ugly, tough street dog, having been abused and abandoned as a pup by his human family. He’s top dog in his little Italian resort town, taking no guff from anyone or any dog, until one summer he runs into Mimì. Mimì is a pampered fluffball of a lapdog, owned by a well-to-do American woman in town to take the waters. Pallino is utterly smitten by Mimì.
As the relationship between Pallino and Mimì grows, a parallel one develops between Mimì’s owner and an Italian dandy visiting the spa from Rome.
Now as I read this story a suspicion grew in my mind that a certain animated film produced by Walt Disney was based on this story. Did Disney appropriate “Pallino e Mimì” in making Lady and the Tramp?
A recent viewing of the DVD version of the film reinforced my suspicions. The relationship between Lady, a pampered house pet from a well-to-do family who needs protection from the street dogs of the city, and the rough-and-tumble Tramp, who fends off the competition while romancing Lady, perfectly mirrors the one between Pallino and Mimì.
There are other aspects of the film that suggest a tie to “Pallino”: It’s set in the vaguely Edwardian coach-and-horses era of Pirandello’s story rather than the mid-50’s “present” of Lady’s release.
And there’s an odd plot detail. Early in the Pirandello story, a young, hungry Pallino, having run away from his abusive home, is wandering the streets. He is taken in by a kindly (if rather depressive) butcher. When we’re introduced to Tramp, he’s pondering where to find “breakfast.” He considers but passes over a standard greasy-spoon diner and a fancy French pastry shop before settling on…an Italian restaurant, whose cook (a stereotypically jovial and romantic Italian) throws him a bone.
Of course, there are major differences between the two works. The wealthy American woman and her calculating Italian gigolo lover from the story are replaced by a happy young married couple in the film. Dramatic tension is added with the introduction of their newborn baby, whose presence initially appears to threaten Lady’s position in her owners’ house.
But such a change would not be surprising. Lady was intended for children, and Disney had a track record of watering down or sentimentalizing brutal or discomfiting aspects of adapted material, as he did with Mary Poppins and Pinocchio.
So much for the resemblance. Is there any direct evidence that Disney co-opted Pirandello’s story?
First, I looked at the dates. There is no question that “Pallino e Mimì” came first: it was originally published in a magazine in 1905. Lady and the Tramp was released in 1955.
What about credits? According to the film’s opening titles, the script for Lady is “from the story by Ward Greene.” “The story” is not in fact “Lady and the Tramp,” which didn’t exist. Wikipedia and other online sources identify it as Greene’s 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog,” though Wikipedia also claims that the idea for a dog picture based on a spaniel named Lady had been kicking around in Walt Disney’s brain since 1937.
But the notion that Lady is “based on” “Happy Dan the Cynical Dog” is just doggone wrong, or rather contains only the flimsiest shred of truth. I know, because I took the trouble to find that story in the February 1945 issue of Cosmopolitan—with a lot of help from a reference librarian at the University of Texas here in Austin. That story takes up only about half a magazine page (the rest is an illustration and a big ad for Simoniz floor polish). It’s a brief humorous sketch about a sly street dog who fools several humans into believing they’re his only “master,” in order to get extra meals in those wartime days of meat rationing. Nothing about a romance with a pampered pet, or about a human romance, etc.
Now to be fair, the Wikipedia article states that Walt Disney himself conceived of the “Lady” half of the story back in ’37, and that the Greene story inspired him to come up with the canine romance angle by introducing a street-dog foil to the ladylike Lady. In other words, it was Disney who had the original idea of connecting two disparate doggy tales with a romance, which became the backbone of the Lady plot. *
Well…maybe. I wanted to take a peek into any surviving archival material from the Lady production that might confirm this version of events. But I had no luck in finding anyone with Disney who would help me.
And, having no direct evidence to support my hypothesis, I am also left with one gaping hole of plausibility. How would Disney—or perhaps Greene—have come across Pirandello’s story?
The Disney historian Didier Ghez has stated in an interview that Disney, his brother Roy, and their wives made an extended tour of Europe in 1935, during which he “bought hundreds of books, whose stories and illustrations would influence him and his artists for years to come.” If you follow the link to that interview, you will see a photo of Disney standing shoulder to shoulder with…Luigi Pirandello. (The photo was evidently taken in New York, shortly after Disney’s return from his European trip. Pirandello died the following year, 19 years before the release of Lady and the Tramp.)
It is unlikely that Disney or Greene read Italian. But Disney did have Italians on his staff. For example, one of the director/animators on Lady was an Italian-American, Clyde Geronimi, who was born in Italy in 1901 but emigrated as a young child to the U.S.
In any case, barring evidence to the contrary, I will continue to believe that Disney might somehow have stolen the idea for Lady from Pirandello. The parallels between the two stories are too great.
By the way, “Pallino e Mimì” is a wonderful story, darkly funny, and, not surprisingly, much tougher than the Lady story (and free of the arrant racism of the Disney picture). I don’t want to give it away; let’s just say that it doesn’t end with the happy marriage of an adorable young couple, an equally adorable newborn baby girl, two adorable dogs with a comfortable middle-class home, and a litter of frolicking, well-cared-for pups. Nope, sorry. You don’t win a Nobel Prize writing stories like that.
I wish you could read the story for yourself and make up your own mind about a possible Disney-Pirandello connection. And before too long, you will. I plan to publish my translation of Pirandello’s story on the Pirandello Society of America’s website or, if not, elsewhere on the Internet.
See, the deal is that everybody likes to talk trash about mansplaining but they really don’t understand what it is or what it’s for.
I know you know, like, the basic difference between analog and digital, obviously. I’m not explaining it for you, I’m explaining it for me. No, wait, just let me finish, babe.
Let me try to explain it like this. What if you’re like some guy who didn’t get the promotion because Dave is so much better at playing office politics. Or maybe you even like lost your job because they said you spent too much time day-trading on your computer which was supposed to be for work only. Which is unfair because like I explained to Kirsten I did that on my lunch hour mostly. And it’s not like I made a pile of money, if anything it was just the opposite.
But it’s OK babe, we still got your whole like savings account. What was I saying?
So yeah, you’ve like lost your job and living in a crappy apartment and your car’s rear quarter panel is all like bashed in from that time I wasn’t paying close enough attention I guess. What am I supposed to do with all that? I need something to make me feel all empowered and stuff. So that’s what mansplaining is for. Mansplaining is for loser men like what the Confederate flag is for loser white people. It’s all we have left. The Confederate flag lets white people feel superior to Blacks, and mansplaining lets men feel superior to…well, you get the gist, babe.
So when I’m explaining to you the difference between velocity and acceleration I would really appreciate it if you would stop like rolling your eyes and saying shit like, “I know that already,” or, “I don’t need you to explain that to me,” or, “you’re actually wrong about that.” Ouch! My self-esteem just went down like sixty percent! I know you know already, babe, cause you’re a really smart girl! But I just need to feel useful, OK hon?
So when I tell you how a reverse-mortgage works could you just help me out a little and go like, “Wow, that is so interesting! I get it, now that someone who knows took the time to explain it in terms I can understand!” See, it’s easy!
So, your favorite sci-fi movie is Twelve Monkeys? Me too! I can explain the ending…
Many of the most exciting and interesting movies are those made by a director who takes a stale, tired old genre and invests it with new life. To take perhaps the most obvious example: by the mid-sixties no one wanted to see westerns any more. The lantern-jawed lawman, the shifty-eyed villain, the virtuous-maiden schoolteacher…these tropes were hopelessly dull and just downright ridiculous in the age of war protests, civil-rights marches, the sexual revolution, and the jet set.
And then Sergio Leone—an Italian director filming in Spain—remade the Western into something new and exciting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964). He injected a sensibility of playfulness together with ruthless cynicism and technical realism into the story. The hero is no longer a prudish sheriff prone to unconvincing speeches about the virtue of law and order, but a grimy (if shaggily handsome), nameless soldier of fortune (Clint Eastwood) not burdened by the usual haunted past and with no particular hangups about piling up the bodies. The bad guy is no longer a semi-comical loser but a scary, sadistic psychopath (played to perfection by the Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté) who seems to get a sexual charge out of killing. And there’s a vigorous, violent sense of humor: the hero rides into town not on a stallion, but on an ass. (As I write this, I wonder if this was an intentional Biblical allusion. There is a moral core to the story, though it’s barely visible in comparison to the standard Hollywood Western. The hero-with-no-name does turn out to be the savior of an innocent young couple and their baby.) When the local thugs make fun of the donkey and its rider, witty repartee follows. And the thugs all wind up dead.
I could go on…about the technical realism, say, of the rugged scenery and worn-out looking desert village, or the brilliant galloping-guitar soundtrack written by Ennio Morricone. But this elegy for a Spaghetti Western is getting away from me…I simply wanted to appreciate Sergio Leone for his remarkable accomplishment of seeing the exciting elements of the American Western mythology, and using his auteur’s sensibility and craft to wipe away the dust and make it new.
Other directors and the stale genres they rescued? How about Francis Ford Coppola and gangster films, with The Godfather? Stephen Spielberg and the action-adventure movie, with Jaws and above all Raiders of the Lost Ark? Not to mention bringing the war picture into the modern age with Saving Private Ryan? Or Stanley Kubrick, who pulled sci-fi out of the tin-foil and death-ray era with 2001: A Space Odyssey?
These thoughts came to mind recently as I re-watched for the umpteenth time another favorite of mine, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000). This wonderful film brought to mind vague memories I had of watching bits and pieces of old kung-fu movies on TV in the seventies. For a time there was a Sunday-afternoon-movie show on some grainy, poorly-received UHF channel emanating from somewhere in Dallas, called, with blatant pre-woke condescension, “Chop-Socky Theater.” The films it presented seemed to be mainly pretexts for endless, mechanically choreographed fight scenes comprising long sequences of karate chops accompanied by crude dubbed-in sound effects. I assumed at the time that these things were watched mainly by bodybuilding and martial-arts freaks.
And then in 2000 Crouching Tiger came along—a different animal altogether. Rewatching the movie recently, it seemed obvious to me that Lee had refashioned the kung-fu genre. But unlike Westerns, sci-fi and the like, it was a genre I knew nothing about. So I asked my wife about the movies that might have informed Lee.
I asked the right person. My wife grew up in Taiwan, and grew up watching kung fu epics—or wuxia (roughly, “martial arts heroes”), as they’re called in Mandarin. She had also read some of the popular novels from which many of them were adapted. So began a year-plus long voyage on the good ship Living Room Sofa, as we looked up and watched many of these movies, available on Amazon Prime.
The movies we watched were produced in Hong Kong in the late sixties through the early 1980’s by the Shaw brothers. The director whose work we enjoyed most is Chor Yuen, whom we nicknamed “The smoke director” for his habitual use of fog machines to add an air of mystery to the set.
These films are characterized by long, carefully choreographed, highly acrobatic fight scenes, involving all sorts of weapons—swords, knives, darts, spears, halberds, rings, fans, just to name a few. Often one or more combatants will fight only with their hands. Every significant fight scene has some gimmick or innovation that makes it unique, such as a hero who doesn’t bother to get out of his chair to fight off his attackers, or a flexible sword that wraps itself around opponents and stabs them in the back, or a warrior who has learned how to create a gust of wind by waving his hands, strong enough to strip leaves off nearby trees that cut the faces of his opponents. Fights are one-on-one, one against many, group against group, man to man, woman to woman, or mixed doubles.
The basic conflict that typically drives the story is strikingly amoral—having to do with determining who is the most highly skilled fighter and thus the officially recognized master of the kung-fu world (though what that means in practical terms is never shown). Although themes of betrayal and dishonesty versus honesty and courage are involved, in the end the moral code simply seems to be: the best fighter deserves to be on top.
The cinematography is wide-screen and brightly colored (in Shaw Vision, so the credits claim). Chor Yuen in particular likes scenes set at night, with a suspiciously stationary crescent moon hanging in the background, in a fairy-tale-like forest glade or picturesque villa. And fog.
The plots are convoluted and confusing—at least for the Western viewer (and it doesn’t help that the subtitles are typically horrendous). Acting is nearly absent; the movie essentially consists of fight scenes alternating with stretches of expository dialogue in which the actors stand around and bring us up to date on why clan X has a problem with clan Y.
There’s a lot to like in these movies, especially if, like me, you’ve felt burned out by the last thirty odd years of action pictures that get by largely on thundering soundtracks, explosions and digital effects. I enjoy the artistry of the production, which feels both craftsman-like yet homemade, with fancifully constructed scenery and, for establishing shots, papier-mâché mountain-top fortresses. I like the tacit agreement between the filmmaker and his audience to accept absurd conventions and plot twists and just enjoy the ride. The stories have a whimsical, dreamlike progression. In Chor’s Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre (1978) the young hero has been struck by a special kung-fu blow that will kill him over the course of several years. No problem! He wanders into a shack before he can be warned that it’s teetering on the edge of a cliff, his weight causing it to fall halfway down the mountain side, where it comes to rest on a ledge beside a cave that leads to a glade containing a pond with glowing-red frogs which, if eaten…oh, just watch it.
But for all their appeal, I have to admit that these movies are also fundamentally childish in their sensibility, repetitive, and ultimately uninspiring. They are fun to watch, but one doesn’t leave the theater (or couch) feeling really moved by any character’s fate, any more than one would by watching, say, Steve Reeves as Hercules.
In watching Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, it’s clear that Ang Lee used these films as his starting point and kept many of their essential elements. Magical weapons that confer dangerous, deadly powers on their users, which must therefore be kept carefully guarded; carefully constructed fight scenes; kung-fu warriors fighting to prove who is the best. But it’s interesting to see what Lee retained, what he discarded, and what he changed.
Lee brought a technical realism to the film but kept some of the wuxia conventions that are implausible, to say the least: any fighter worth their salt can easily leap onto or over building roofs and jump down without getting hurt, or run up walls and run across the surfaces of ponds and rivers. Anyone can be frozen in place by touching them in the right spot, until they are unfrozen the same way. A young girl can pass for a man simply by putting on some article of men’s clothing.
But Lee makes many changes, all for the better. The plot (still complicated enough) is streamlined, while at the same time the human melodrama is given far more importance with respect to fighting sequences. It’s wuxia for grownups. Those fighting scenes are improved—every bit as imaginative and acrobatic as in Chor’s films, but more naturalistic. And Lee employs four highly skilled actors in the lead roles. One romantic story involves the aging, world-weary kung fu warriors Li Mu Bai and Yu Shu Lien, played by Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh, respectively. The dialogue is spare, the acting expressive. Their relationship is contrasted with the one between the dashing young bandit Dark Cloud (Chang Chen) and the daughter of privilege Jen Yu (Zhang Ziyi), an aspiring fighter who is being forced by her parents into an arranged marriage. Danger is introduced in the form of the elderly witch Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-pei). The abusive treatment of Jade Fox as a young would-be kung fu warrior, at the hands of powerful males in the kung fu hierarchy (sound familiar?), has warped her over the years into a dangerous assassin bent on revenge. When we get to the end of the story, we (or at any rate, I) actually care about what has happened to its characters—something that never happened with the old Shaw brothers’ productions.
An aside: the casting of Cheng Pei-pei in this role is a human tie between Crouching Tiger and the wuxia classics; Cheng herself once played the lead in arguably feminist action pictures such as The Lady Hermit (1971).
Thankfully, the film’s spoken language is still Mandarin, but in contrast to the old Hong Kong movies, the subtitles are excellent.
Lee is one of those directors who seems able to make films of almost any genre and to do them well: American family melodrama (The Ice Storm), rom-com (Eat Drink Man Woman), costume drama (Sense and Sensibility, no less), as well as pictures that defy that kind of categorization (Brokeback Mountain, Life of Pi). (I say almost. We shall not discuss here The Hulk or Ride with the Devil. Nor have I seen Gemini Man…maybe the critics are wrong!) Few artists can tell an old story in a new way. A very few can create a new one. Lee is someone who is able to do both.
Note: Contrary to what you may have learned from media reports, we here in the Garden of Eaton don’t spend all of our time cavorting with Eve, munching on forbidden fruit, hobnobbing with disreputable serpents, and writing self-indulgent blog posts. I am delighted to report that today is the release date of the delightful crime novel A Conspiracy of Talkers (La congiura dei loquaci), by the Italian journalist, screenwriter and novelist Gaetano Savatteri, translated from the Italian by me, and published by Italica Press as part of its Italian Crime series, available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions.
Savatteri, though born in Milan, was raised in the small town of Racalmuto, Sicily. He grew up hearing about the murder of its mayor in November 1944, during the Allied occupation of the island. The justice system quickly apprehended and convicted a culprit, but few if anyone in the town believe that justice was actually served. A Conspiracy of Talkers is Savatteri’s novelistic re-creation of what might have happened, both in terms of the mayor’s assassination and the “investigation” that followed. Along the way, it’s a great read.
“I can’t even think about it, Signor Lieutenant. If we hadn’t been laki, veri laki, we’d be with the souls in purgatory right now.”
The jeep was lurching down the road. Its headlights revealed gaps in the pavement, avoided at the last second with a sudden skid. Lieutenant Adano’s knuckles were white from the effort of hanging onto the vehicle for hours. It was raining. The dust on the windshield had turned into a dark coating of mud.
“Are you sure you can see all right?” the lieutenant asked Semino in Italian.
“Donworri, Lieutenant. Eyes like a cat, Lieutenant.”
Once more Lieutenant Adano leafed through his mental phrasebooks — from the Italian dialect of his grandfather to the Sicilian-American of his aunt Cettina, whom he’d listened to as a child. He came back to Semino’s words, still not trusting in the road. Or the driver.
Sure, veri laki. Extremely laki along a hairpin curve on the mountain road near Vicari, where the jeep had careened sideways on two wheels helplessly skidding, unable to gain traction, spewing rocks and dust. From his side, Adano saw almond trees flying towards him. Semino’s face didn’t change — he had the same silent, focused expression since leaving Palermo. He managed to bring the jeep to a stop, the back half dangling in midair. With the help of some peasants, they’d managed to get back on the road and on their way. But from that moment — he hadn’t said a word before — Semino didn’t stop talking.
courtesy, Library of Congress
He told Lieutenant Adano about his grandfather Calogero Castrenze who emigrated to New York before the Great War, about his years in Brooklyn and then his move to Buffalo, about the fact that he’d been the best shoemaker in his hometown, but there was hunger, not even crustabred to eat, and that’s why he’d left with his wife and four children. Two had died but the girl, his mother, married someone from back home who lived in Buffalo and he, Salvatore, was born in America, but they’d always called him Sam though his mother used to call him Semino, bless her soul, which was surely in heaven, a sainted woman who’d made sacrifices so he and his brother could grow up healthy but she died when Semino was ten, tenny ears, so his father went back home to get married because a man with two kids can’t stay single and even in America there was the Depression so it might’ve been better if his grandfather had emigrated to Americazuela or Argentina cause there you just had to find some piece of open land, build a house on it and say this is mine, maicauntri, but instead his father went back to the old country and married a woman who, with all due respect, Signor Lieutenant, was no good for my father, who’d returned from America and maybe forgot how things worked back home, so she had a son seven months after the wedding, they said he was born premature but even my father knew he was the son of a whore, sonnovibich, he got depressed and didn’t want to go back to America with a son who, realli, wasn’t his son so he stayed in Sicily but Semino and his brother Charlie, his real brother, were always called Americans and then when the war ended and you guys arrived which was the save for la Sicilia, knowing the language, he worked for the Americans in Palermo, so good that once even General Poletti asked for his help on a sensitive matter, a serious thing which he did so well that General Poletti, a true gentleman, told Semino that he was a real american man, it is a great honor to America and to Sicily that we are like brothers, closer, even, duiuandersten, Lieutenant?”
Sure, of course. Adano understood less than half of the speech, that garble of Sicilianized English, of Sicilian in swingamericano. But mostly what he understood was that he had misled Semino from the beginning, when he disclosed that he knew Italian. He’d studied at City College, painstakingly sounding out Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Nights of reading and rereading, savoring the sonorous language, musical and full, “the gentle hue of oriental sapphire,” so different and so distant from the Italian of his aunt Cettina, gloomy and muddled, mournful and drawling. Now that mournfulness, even more unhinged, was churning, churning in Semino’s words, in this November evening, in the driving rain, in the road that twisted and turned, turning away even from the feeble lights of distant towns and plunging again into the blackness of the countryside, and in the shadows of the men on mules who fled to the side of the road at the sight of headlights.
“How much longer, Semino?”
“Innotime, Signor Lieutenant. Past that rock.”
The rock spur rose before them, white in the dark, wet night. “Chi passa dalla rocca e non è rubato, o il brigante dorme o è malato,” Semino chanted. If you get past the rock with no gun to your chest, then the bandit is sick or taking a rest.
“There were bandits around here?”
“There still are, Lieutenant, but donworri, they don’t do anything to the Americans. You’re American, right?”
Semino had asked this question, formulated one way or another, three times now. He just couldn’t believe that Lieutenant Adano was really the American officer whose arrival in Palermo from Naples he’d been informed of five days before, with orders to act as guide and interpreter. This guy here seemed to speak proper mainland Italian, even though he swore that his father and grandfather were Sicilian.
“Why don’t they do anything to the Americans, Semino?”
“Respect, Signor Lieutenant. They respect the Americans, like we all do.”
Beyond the rock, the dim lights of the town came into view — a few lit windows, a row of lights strung along the main road, bobbing in the wind.
Semino drove confidently — he knew the area. He’d been there the year before, when it was a zone of operations a few kilometers from the beaches of Licata and Gela and the confused and deadly landings that Adano had learned about later from accounts of veterans he’d met in Naples.
At the time, Adano was in the Pacific, relegated to a base without name or importance, shuffling papers and stamping documents. A Top Priority mission, they’d told him, just as his emergency transfer to Naples four months ago was Top Priority, pulling him out of the Marines and attaching him to the OSS. A promotion: now the papers he shuffled and the documents he stamped were marked “secret.” Top Priority, that’s also what Major Stafford said as he handed Adano the bundle of documents for his mission in Sicily. His orders were to find out what had happened to eight trucks, originally consigned to the 2nd Armored Division of Patton’s Seventh Army, then to AMGOT (the allied occupational government), and then disappearing, stolen or stripped for parts. Eight vanished trucks: Top Priority.
The jeep stopped in front of the Hotel Roma. Semino honked. The entrance behind the glass door lit up.
The man who came out of the pensione embraced Semino, kissing him on the cheeks. He was missing a hand — a stump stuck out of one sleeve. He stepped forward obsequiously. “Prego, Signor Lieutenant. I speak English.”
“Non si preoccupi, parlo italiano,” Adano replied, and continued in Italian. “Is City Hall nearby? First thing tomorrow morning, I have to see the mayor.”
The man’s eyes opened wide. Surprised and maybe disappointed, thought Adano, by my perfect Italian.
“The mayor?” He tried to catch Semino’s eyes. Then he turned back to Adano. “The mayor, you said?”
“The mayor, Signor Farrauto.” Adano reached for his leather portfolio. He’d read and reread the documents. He was sure. Baldassare Farrauto, appointed in August 1943, was mayor of this town.
The proprietor of the hotel gasped, glancing around at the deserted street. He approached Semino and whispered something incomprehensible, a gesture more than a word.
Semino remained expressionless, with the same blank face he wore while half of the jeep was dangling in midair off a turn on the mountain road near Vicari.
“The mayor had an accident. Two hours ago. They shot him, duiuandersten, Signor Lieutenant? He’s dead.”
When we buy something expensive because we want it, and not because we need it, it makes us happy for a moment or two. But usually the material object of our affection does not age well. Its colors fade, its surfaces become brittle or warped. Perhaps it remains as a living, nagging reminder of a foolish waste of money that will never be recovered. It’s not as much fun as we thought. It didn’t transform our lives as we secretly hoped. Or learning to really use it well requires a new skill that we’re unable or too lazy to acquire. Or it’s superseded all too quickly by a newer version that is brighter, bigger (or smaller) and more capable.
But none of these things are what happened with me and my Beast.
The Beast was a brand new Kawasaki Ninja 650. I purchased it fifteen years ago. It has made me happy for most of the intervening years. It looked beautiful, sleek and sexy. Just the sight of it made me want to hop on and zip out to the winding, hilly roads west of Austin. It made going to work and coming back home fun (though it didn’t help much in the hours in between). And if I am to be honest, it bolstered my fantasy self image: of someone who wasn’t just a middle-aged office-bound technocrat, but actually a pretty cool, almost adventurous middle-aged office-bound technocrat.
Riding it was a delightful sensory experience. One’s body was smoothly integrated with the machine; you could hardly tell where one ended and the other began. Lean a little bit into the curve and the machine follows; twist the wrist a little to go soaring up a hill. It almost felt like the dream you sometimes have of being able to fly.
But a funny thing happened with the Beast and me. It wasn’t the Beast that got faded, frayed and frumpy. No, the Beast is still as beautiful, sleek and sexy–as young–as ever. (I mean…just look at it!) No, it’s the human who’s gotten old. (I never claimed to be beautiful or sleek or sexy. But I promise you that I was young, once.) And for a lot of reasons, riding the Beast just isn’t so important to my happiness any more. The Beast became a burden, taking up space in my garage, and money and time to maintain and insure. And that particular fantasy self-image started to seem hollow a while ago. I’m trying out different ones now.
So now the Beast goes to charity. I’m actually relieved. It no longer silently begs its owner to make use of it, like a reproachful piano sitting neglected in the living room (except a little more dangerous). But I’m sure I’ll have dreams about it once in a while…of gliding swiftly and smoothly through the thick cedar groves and over the clear green streams of western Travis County.
If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he might have remarked, “nothing is certain in life except death and Facebook.” After all, as Leona Helmsley famously remarked, “only little people pay taxes.” Facebook, on the other hand, seems here to stay. And those two remaining certainties are intertwined.
As a child I enjoyed delving into the nooks and crannies of the daily newspaper. It appeared to be a highly codified window into the mysterious world of adulthood. The front section was more or less accessible to the novice, but the further one got into it, the more it seemed designed to be legible only to an exclusive society of grownups. The specialized jargon and tables of the sports page, and likewise the stultifyingly obscure business section. (MS Word doesn’t like ‘stultifyingly.’ Too bad.) What a relief to come upon the “arts” or “living” section with the truly important stuff: horoscopes and advice columns (both of which we sensed were for entertainment purposes only), movie schedules (highly critical in the pre-internet, pre-cable age), puzzles and above all the comics.
The obituary section was of minor interest, and like the business and sports pages, came with its specialized jargon and rituals. And as with the business and sports pages, our parents, who apparently had been to adult school, helped us to decipher it. “A long illness,” for example, was code for cancer. We got a vaguely prurient pleasure out of scanning the small black and white photos of an invariably smiling man in a business suit or uniform, or a smiling woman in a nice dress and carefully arranged hair. What was I looking for? A clue to the meaning of death (or life)? A feeling of satisfaction that they were gone while we were still here? I don’t know.
The text followed a prescribed formula: date of death, the “survived by” list, and a sort of resume of education, career, and charity work. Only the nice stuff made it into the story—everyone who died was a happy saint. In other words, all the really interesting stuff was left out. The ex-Mr. X went to Centerville High where he played right tackle, served in the Army, got a degree in accounting from State U., worked for Acme Insurance, got married, had kids, attended First Methodist, was prominent in the Lion’s Club, and passed on after a long illness. What? Is that all there is? The scariest part of the obituary section for a child was how boring and limited most lives seemed to be.
But one thing was clear and comforting: the death announcements, and their dead, were handled with seriousness and respect. That was the real point of the specialized jargon and ritualized format. How different from the announcements I see today on Facebook.
Whenever my time comes, I would prefer for the event not to be “posted.” The idea of being arbitrarily stuck on your “feed” between a photo of someone’s awesome Margarita and a heartfelt elegy for someone else’s recently passed Labrador, appended with plenty of crying-smiley-face icons, feels…very wrong on several levels. Nothing against Margaritas or Labradors. But I’d be happier with just a little black and white photo of my smiling younger self in the local paper (if there still is one), along with a highly condensed biography. Just the nice bits.
It’s been a long, long year, here in the Garden of Eaton, located somewhere between Athens and Troy.* The walls of our earthly paradise have never seemed so constricting. On the plus side, Adam has learned new skills in the ongoing effort to live civilly with Eve in close quarters. Like Picking Up After Oneself. I’ve attained Level 1 on that and making big strides toward Level 2.
Our personal Year of Covid began on Saturday, March 14. We had embarked on a car trip to explore the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, as a consolation prize to ourselves for cancelling a planned vacation in Taiwan. At the time the red dots used by the New York Times to denote outbreak sites in the US appeared as sparse pimples in a still mostly clear map. Mississippi and Louisiana appeared blemish-free, or nearly. But as we reviewed the headlines on our iPad in a hotel room in Shreveport, the first stop on our journey, we decided it was foolish to go on. The casino buffet we had that night was our last grand meal out, to date. The smoked pork ribs were good. The desserts were brightly colored and inedible. The full, lively crowd appeared completely unconcerned.
After that, of course, the red dots multiplied and expanded feverishly, and we haven’t left The Garden since.
One of the discouraging aspects on this mess here in Texas is that, although there is no end of local heroes and heroines, no one at the state level seems to be in charge of keeping us safe and protected. In a sort of inversion of common sense, we have a governor and state attorney general who have dedicated themselves to protecting us from protecting ourselves—by reopening businesses even while the disease is in full swing, and prohibiting local authorities (like the city of Austin) from imposing safe practices like mask-wearing. And it grates even more to think that they’re using our money to do it.
To the governor’s credit, he boldly declared that if anyone still wants to wear a mask, that’s perfectly OK with him.
It’s enough to make one consider moving to a more enlightened province. Like Alabama. At least they have a governor with spine.
Not that we personally have a right to complain. We did not lose our jobs, we did not get sick (or die, so far as I can tell), and most thankfully by far, we have not lost anyone close to us. We don’t have jobs that require us to constantly expose ourselves to possible infection. The year even resulted in my first book-length literary translation. In short, we have been greatly blessed. Or more accurately, we have enjoyed the benefits of privilege. We’ve tried to acknowledge that privilege in a small way by giving money to our local food back.
It’s been a great year for reading. I’ve discovered John Banville—a great writer. The Sea and Snow. I picked a few books off the NY Times list of best books of 2020. Homeland Elegies: great story; writing: meh. James McBride’s Deacon King Kong: strong story; writing: pretty good, especially the opening chapters—I would call it a One Hundred Years of Solitude meets Brooklyn housing project. How Much of These Hills is Gold: meh. Agent Sonya: fascinating non-fiction. Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad: brilliant alternative history story; writing, meh. Il talento della vittima (in Italian), a great original twist on the standard Italian detective story. Moi, les hommes, je les déteste—an extended essay by Pauline Harmange, in French but available in translation—pretty convincing. By the time I finished it, I detested men too (except for me—I’m different).
No, we haven’t suffered terribly. The worst aspects for us have been the inability to visit friends and relatives, and a grinding sameness in our daily lives. I miss having a beer with a friend after work. I miss riding my bicycle halfway across town and rewarding myself with a beer and a bratwurst before heading back. I miss sitting in on language and literature classes at the university. I miss seeing my family. I’m a little embarrassed at how much I enjoy sitting in a restaurant.
We hope the end is near. But to hijack a paradox, it seems as if we cover half of the remaining distance every day. The finish line keeps getting closer and closer, and never quite arrives. The state recently announced that our age group was eligible for vaccination starting March 15, but the city won’t let us sign up yet…claiming a shortage of vaccines.
So our year of living safely has been a big drag, and it’s not over. And don’t even get us started on the infinite offenses and indignities of the reign of Trump, the horror of January 6th, and the Great Texas Freeze Out, which is still causing some residents of this state to be without clean running water.
But we got our books, our iPads, our Netflix, our Zoom, our lives, and each other. It could be a lot worse.
It must seem to anglophones of every era that the English language of their generation is being horribly cheapened by the next. No doubt the English were appalled by the coarse Gallic smack-talk that began to invade their sturdy Anglo-Saxon dialect along with the Normans themselves in 1066.
Still I can’t help but feel that something truly degrading is happening now to the language of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Baldwin, abetted by an Internet culture that immediately rewards any abbreviation, minimization, and meme-ification of written expression. And perhaps the best (and worst) expression of the new unexpressiveness is the usage of “WTF”.
And what exactly were these incomprehensible, horrifying statements? Obama specifically tied “winning the future” to four policies: government investment in new technology; government investment in transportation and IT infrastructure; public education reform and investment; and cutting the budget deficit through a combination of spending cuts (including a freeze on total domestic spending) and tax increases.
WTF!
One could argue (and many did) against each of these ideas. But “WTF” is no argument—it is the end of argument. It is a smug declaration that one’s opponent is obviously too stupid or radical to deserve arguing with.
A friend of mine—whose political views I would call moderately conservative—recently criticized Texas Senator Ted Cruz for travelling to Cancun in the midst of a severe winter storm that caused millions of his fellow Texans to struggle without some or all of electricity, heat, or water, while still in the midst of a pandemic. “WTF?” was one response to this perfectly reasonable post.
Now, this “WTF” was not an appalled reaction to Cruz’s behavior. No, it was an expression of outrage against criticizing Ted Cruz for what he did. What’s wrong with going to Cancun (commented the commenter)? I would too, if I could! WTF?
So any opinion, any situation, however evidently reasonable or innocuous, would seem to be WTF-worthy. Just look at Yelp. This restaurant charges extra for chips and salsa? WTF?!
The strong language of yesterday is continually turning into the everyday usage of today. I read that the writers of the HBO Western series Deadwood liberally used explicit 21st century obscenities in dialogue because purely authentic speech would have sounded comically mild. What the tarnation!?
But I have to wonder how much room is left for the cheapification process to continue. Once a disagreement over the pettiest issue calls for a WTF, then what is left to describe something truly horrific? “Did you read about that slaughter of innocent villagers by a neighboring clan? WTF!” It already sounds meaningless.
So next time you’re tempted to respond with a WTF, ask yourself, “do I really need to? Wouldn’t it be better to explain why I disagree?”
Imagine that you owned a car that worked most of the time. Nine times out of ten, your vehicle would back down the driveway and take you where you wanted to go. But sometimes, on an average of one trip in ten, you’d back the car down the drive, into the street, check your mirrors, put the transmission into drive and suddenly the car would shoot backwards someplace you didn’t want to go such as your neighbor’s trash bin or mail box. What would you do with that car?
I expect your response would be something like “I’d get another car” or “I’d get the car fixed.” If you responded by saying “Oh, that’s the car for me. I wouldn’t change a thing!” you may have some problems that go deeper than a hypothetical car’s weird transmission. The point of this parable is that it exposes the Electoral College’s behavior and our attachment to it.
Since the U.S constitution was ratified there have been 58 presidential elections. The Electoral College has distorted the results of nearly all of them. On four occasions — twice in the nineteenth century (Hayes in 1876 and Harrison in 1888) and twice in the twenty-first century (Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016) — the Electoral College put the popular vote loser into the White hHouse. That’s a plus nine percent fail rate, but the Electoral College’s overall score is actually lower because it made a total hash of two early elections (1789 and 1800, more details later.) There were no good old days for the Electoral College. It has been a faulty institution since its inception. Not only does it distort our answer to one of the most important questions our country asks us — Who do we wish to be our president? — but it is based on ideas in which very few of us believe.
I harbored suspicions about the Electoral College for some time. To explore them, I built a spreadsheet contrasting the Electoral College’s recent record based on popular votes to check for distortion.
Here’s what our elections since World War II looked like after I applied the data:
Year
Winner
Popular Win Margin
Popular Votes
Electoral Votes
Distortion
as % of vote
as % of total popular vote
as % of total electoral votes
1940
Roosevelt
9.96%
54.70%
83.60%
28.90%
1944
Roosevelt
7.50%
53.30%
81.25%
27.95%
1948
Truman
4.48%
49.40%
57.10%
7.70%
1952
Eisenhower
10.85%
54.90%
83.20%
28.30%
1956
Eisenhower
15.40%
57.40%
86.20%
28.80%
1960
Kennedy
0.17%
49.70%
56.40%
6.70%
1964
Johnson
22.58%
61.10%
90.33%
29.23%
1968
Nixon
0.70%
43.40%
55.94%
12.54%
1972
Nixon
23.15%
60.70%
96.65%
35.95%
1976
Carter
2.06%
50.00%
55.20%
5.20%
1980
Reagan
9.74%
50.40%
90.89%
40.49%
1984
Reagan
18.21%
58.80%
97.58%
38.78%
1988
Bush
7.72%
53.40%
79.18%
25.78%
1992
Clinton
5.56%
43.00%
68.77%
25.77%
1996
Clinton
8.51%
49.20%
70.44%
21.24%
2000
Bush
-0.51%
48.35%
50.37%
-2.02%
2004
Bush
2.46%
50.70%
53.16%
2.46%
2008
Obama
7.27%
52.90%
67.84%
14.94%
2012
Obama
3.86%
50.90%
61.71%
10.81%
2016
Trump
-2.09%
48.89%
56.50%
7.61%
2020
Biden
4.46%
51.30%
56.87%
5.57%
Glancing at the data, you don’t have to be a math major to see two things. When a presidential candidate wins by a comfortable margin, more than a few percentage points, the Electoral College rewards him with a huge win. But in a tight race, when the margin of victory narrows to one point, the system gets very volatile and is capable of transforming a loser into a winner.
Let’s look at some specific outcomes:
In 1948 Harry Truman had to fend off challenges not only from Thomas Dewey, but also Strom Thurmond who ran on a state’s rights platform and a progressive, Henry Wallace. This narrowed Truman’s popular victory to slightly under 50%. The Electoral College amplified this to 57%. That’s a big number, in the elections just before and after 1948, the Electoral College gave Roosevelt and Eisenhower much larger victory margins. John F. Kennedy’s experience in 1960 was almost exactly the same as Truman’s in 1948; JFK barely slipped by. In these cases the Electoral College reflected the popular vote.
The volatility that the Electoral College injects into the political system is very visible in the contrast between the 1976 and 1980 elections. In 1976 Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford by a tiny margin that registers as 50% of the popular vote. In 1980 Ronald Reagan beat Carter by similarly slim margin — 0.04 % of the popular vote– but look how differently the Electoral College reacted. Reagan’s 4/10 of one percent improvement over Carter’s 1976 performance generated an electoral landslide that buried Jimmy Carter under 91% of the electoral votes in 1980. Now that’s a lot of volatility!
Nevertheless, from the second world war to the close of the twentieth century, the Electoral College managed a minimally acceptable performance. In spite of weird numbers, winners won those elections and losers lost. The system worked o.k, until it didn’t.
In 2000 and 2016 democracy got burned. The Electoral College flipped the popular results — thus the negative numbers on my chart. If you are old enough to care about such things, you have already been exposed to a lot discussion about those elections so I’m not going to say anything more about them.
Instead, I want to ask you a question. Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow the Electoral College to add so much volatility into our political decisions?
At this point, essays by political scientists on this subject dive deep into the college’s constitutional origins, and particularly commentaries by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay collected in the Federalist Papers. I encourage you to read them. But my specialty area is writing briefing memos so I will bypass extended quotations in favor of commenting on the mechanics of what is happening and how we can get our electoral car fixed. First I need to come clean about one of my biases. I believe in one-person, one-vote elections. I do not think it is fair to favor or disfavor voters based on who they are or where they live. In other words I’m a small “d” democrat who believes in inclusive popular elections.
The founding fathers, including Hamilton, Madison and Jay, were not small “d“ democrats. They had their reasons. Images of mob rule made them nervous. They sought to insulate politics from quick decisions by popular majorities. They were for the most part small “r” republicans and small “f” federalists who wanted the states to decide the outcome of presidential elections. The states could decide how to feed information about the popular vote into their decisions. The states would send their result to Congress, and Congress would count the electoral votes and register the overall decision. That’s what the founders wanted; that’s how they set it up, and that’s how it works today. I encourage you to explore the bios, backgrounds, motivations and beliefs of the founders on your own time. They were great men who gave us a great and enduring system of government. But now I want to look under the hood.
When you vote, your vote is recorded and counted. Digitalization is making our elections increasingly secure and honest. The mind-numbing numbers of TV ads and internet messages in the runup to presidential elections encourage us to support candidates running in a nationwide contest, but we vote in 50 different elections administered by each state, on a state by state basis. In that sense, there is no national popular election. We speak and think as if there were one national election, and I built my spreadsheet on that basis. But on this point we are indulging ourselves with an illusion. What Congress counts in deciding the winner of the presidential and vice presidential elections is a compilation of state outcomes. And in 48 of the 50 states what the popular vote decides is who wins the state on an up or down, winner takes all of basis. Trump won Texas. All of it. Biden won Michigan. All of it. There are no fractional outcomes.
So what do the candidates win? They win a package of electoral votes equal to each state’s congressional delegation. Each state has two senators and at least one representative in the House of Representatives. State representation in the house is determined by the census every ten years. The number of senators is a constant – two per state. Since 1960, there have been a total of 538 electors in the Electoral College — 100 electors representing the senatorial delegations, 435 electors representing house delegations plus 3 electors representing the District of Columbia. Five hundred thirty eight divided by two equals 269; that’s the source of the magic number of 270 electoral votes to win that we hear so much about before presidential elections. So just to be clear, when Congress tallies the result of presidential elections, it counts the total of each state’s electoral votes for the president and vice president. The states do not split up their results according to the popular vote. The winner at the state level gets all of the electoral votes that a particular state has to offer.
The political result of this tidy, arithmetic system is a complete mess. We’ve already seen how the volatility factor distorts the voters’ will and can actually flip the results. This is driven by a secondary aspect of the system that is particularly unfair and unarguably inequitable. Because the 100 electors representing the states’ senatorial delegations is a mathematical constant, a fixed number that doesn’t change, states with small populations have a greater impact on outcomes than states with large populations. This is not a minor technicality. It’s a very big deal.
Wyoming has a population of 578,759. The District of Columbia’s population is 692,683. California has 39 million folks and Texas has 29 million. In terms of Electoral College representation you can be a gun totin’ Republican from Dallas or a chardonnay sippin’ Democrat from San Francisco, but your vote will be worth only 25% a vote from D.C. — a place that doesn’t even have senators but is represented in the Electoral College as if it did — or 20% of a vote from Wyoming. Your politics won’t make any difference. The current system supersizes voters from lightly populated states and makes pipsqueaks of voters from highly populated states. This “senatorial” aspect of the Electoral College distorts the results for all the states, north or south, red or blue.
In sum, what we have is a national double whammy. First, the Electoral College processes popular election results through a system that turns individual votes into up-or-down, state-by-state results. Secondarily, those decisions are distributed in favor of less populated states. That is a long way from a one-person, one-vote system.
Earlier, I commented that the Electoral College got off to a bad start by making a hash out of two early elections. Here’s what happened. In the original wording of the constitution, the founders forgot to specify that the states would need to report two sets of electoral college results to Congress, one for the President and one for the Vice President. So in 1796 John Adams became our second President and Thomas Jefferson, the runner up, became Adam’s vice president. The problem was that Jefferson had run for president as Adam’s opponent. They were rivals, very different people from different regions and different political parties who respected, but didn’t particularly like, one another. Fortunately, they were able to work together without provoking a constitutional crisis. But can you imagine such a thing in 2016 if Donald Trump were forced to work with Hillary Clinton? Talk about volatility!
By the way, did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826 on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution?
Back on point, the 1796 election foreshadowed a constitutional crisis that occurred in 1800. In that election, Jefferson won the same number of electoral votes as his vice presidential running mate, Aaron Burr. Per the constitution, the matter went to the House where the House decided on Jefferson for the presidency, but only after a painfully protracted 36 ballots. The Twelfth Amendment (1803) patched things up just well enough for the Electoral College to go on inflicting screwy results on us for another 200 years.
Obviously, I’m not a big fan of the Twelfth Amendment, but it is notable that in 1803 the systemic response to an obvious problem was to amend the Constitution. In our era, we too frequently describe the constitution in quasi-religious terms like “God given.” “Originalists” , who sound like ultra-orthodox rabbis, insist we mustn’t tamper with a word of such a “sacred” document. This is not right. The Constitution is not the Bible. It is a wholly man-made political document. As such, its survival depends on its ability to change, to be amended.
Amending the Constitution is a complicated process because it’s an important process, but it can be done. A century ago, my grandparents and their friends were young people who idealistically thought society would be better without booze. After a decade under the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) they realized they were wrong, that the unintended consequences of prohibition outweighed its benefits so they amended the Constitution a second time (1933) to get rid of it. And between those two amendments, they also amended the Constitution twice again to give women the right to vote (1920) and to clear up questions about presidential and congressional terms of office (1933) . Clearly, our grandparents were members of a generation in a hurry and they got things done. They were also blessedly not overly introspective. I don’t remember any excessive hand wringing about whether they had done the right thing. What I do remember is that my maternal grandmother looked forward to enjoying a cocktail before dinner.
I promised that I wouldn’t quote the founding fathers at length, so in closing I will keep my promise by quoting only a fragment of a sentence by Alexander Hamilton on “The Mode of Electing a President” (Federalist Paper No. 69). Hamilton wrote that “that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.”
The Electoral College does not pass Hamilton’s test. Let’s fix it or get rid of it. We can replace the Electoral College with popular national elections for President and Vice President. Or, if we want to continue the tradition of Congress counting electoral votes, we can modify the Electoral College by amending the constitution to eliminate the 100 “senatorial” votes and distribute the remaining votes on the basis of the popular election results. Personally, I don’t think the Electoral College worth another conservation effort. But either way, in its present format, it’s got to go.
The Garden of Eaton 