Persons – Page 26 – GEORGE ROTHERT

Fifty Years Ago

That notorious decade, the Sixties, began January 20, 1961 with the inauguration of John F. Kennedy; or November 22, 1963, when he was shot to death in Dallas; or February 9, 1964 when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan’s Sunday show. (On Monday morning, February 10, millions of teenage boys combed their hair down over their foreheads, precipitating a major disciplinary crisis in the nation’s high schools. Before the week was over, thousands of them had started rock ‘n’ roll bands.) The British Invasion morphed into the Age of Aquarius and the sixties promised a youth revolution.

And then came 1968. From the New Yorker:

On December 6th, less than a month after [Trump’s] election, Vice-President Joe Biden, who was in New York to receive the Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award, for his decades of public service, used the occasion to urge Americans not to despair. “I remind people, ’68 was really a bad year,” he said, and “America didn’t break.” He added, “It’s as bad now, but I’m hopeful.” And bad it was. The man for whom Biden’s award was named was assassinated in 1968. So was Martin Luther King, Jr. Riots erupted in more than a hundred cities, and violence broke out at the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago. The year closed with the hairbreadth victory of a law-and-order Presidential nominee whose Southern strategy of racial politicking remade the electoral map. Whatever innocence had survived the tumult of the five years since the murder of John F. Kennedy was gone.

If 1968 hadn’t mortally wounded the sixties, the 1969 free concert at Altamont Raceway, southeast of Oakland, killed it for sure. Wanting to stay relevant with their fan base in changing times, the Rolling Stones decided a free concert would improve their “bad-boys” image. After all, the Grateful Dead were famous for, among other things, putting on free shows. Someone had the bright idea of hiring the Hell’s Angels for security. Payment was $500 worth of beer. After all, it had worked for the Grateful Dead. And since the publication of “Gonzo” journalist Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs in 1966, the Angels had become cool.

The Woodstock Music Festival earlier that year was already legendary because 400,000 people came together on a muddy field and nobody was killed. Proof that this generation’s peace and love was winning. Altamont matched Woodstock for traffic gridlock, but came up short in peace and love. The Hell’s Angels beat and stabbed to death an eighteen-year-old kid in front of the stage while the Stones performed.

The sixties were not just over, they were dead.

And today, I-580 over the Altamont Pass is as miserable piece of highway as one can travel.

Charles Portis and Katrina Whalen Talk Service

The Oxford American magazine recently celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the publication of True Grit. The novel is Charles Portis’s best-known work, due in no small part to the film versions released in 1969 (John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby) and 2010 (Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Hailee Steinfeld). The weekend event took place in Little Rock Arkansas, the author’s home town. The agenda included screenings of both movies, readings by writers who are also Portis fans, panel discussions with critics, educators and film experts, and seminars about the novel’s settings: Fort Smith AR and Oklahoma “Indian Territory.” A variety show, featuring singer Iris DeMent, rounded out the entertainment.

One of the panels included filmmaker Katrina Whalen who discussed the challenges of translating Portis’s work to the screen. Whalen’s short film, an adaptation of a Portis short story, was shown.

“I Don’t Talk Service No More” was published in 1996. The story is narrated by the resident of a “nut house.” He tells of his late-night phone calls trying to reconnect with his buddies in the combat unit he served with decades earlier in Korea. Katrina Whalen wrote the screenplay and directed the nine-minute picture. The film captures the mood of Portis’s story and brings alive the narrator’s dialog.

Enjoy!

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – Revisited

The vast collection of garbage, mostly plastic, floating in the earth’s oceans is growing even faster than expected. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is more than twice the size of Texas. It could take centuries – 80,000 years, by one estimate – to clean it up. Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old college drop-out, thinks he has a better idea.

Six years ago, the teen-aged Slat presented a TED talk outlining his plan to collect the debris. He says he can gather up half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. Putting money where his mouth is, he crowdfunded $2.2 million and is now the CEO of the non-profit firm Ocean Cleanup. Slat has subsequently raised more than $30 million from other investors, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. (Perhaps as repentance for Salesforce’s giant ~~dildo~~ office tower that now dominates the San Francisco skyline.)

Ocean Cleanup is launching its initial project, a 2,000 foot long floating tube. The giant tube was assembled at a former naval air station in Alameda, on the San Francisco Bay. The tube is flexible enough to ride with the waves and bend into a U shape, but also rigid enough to stop floating plastic. Attached below is a nylon screen to catch submerged plastic debris, without entangling marine life. Heavy anchors make it move more slowly in the ocean’s current than the plastic it’s gathering. Ocean Cleanup expects this pilot project to entrap and bring ashore five tons of plastic trash per month… a good start on the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the oceans.

Why this instead of taking his talents to some Internet whiz-bang start-up? “I think if you work on something that’s truly exciting and bold and complicated, then you will attract the kind of people that are really smart and talented. People that like solving complicated problems.”

Memphis Unfriends Nathan Bedford Forrest

Not wanting to be left out of the furor about statues and other monuments honoring Confederate heroes, the Tennessee legislature in 2016 passed the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, requiring a two-thirds majority of the Tennessee Historical Commission to “rename, remove, or relocate any public statue, monument, or memorial.” This would include the removal of statues honoring those who committed treason in their effort to preserve slavery.

The Nathan Bedford Forrest Monument, a statue in Forrest Park of Nathan Bedford Forrest mounted on a horse, celebrated a Confederate cavalry leader, best known for the “Fort Pillow Massacre” of captured Union – mostly black – troops. After the War, he became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Memphis is a blue dot on the deep red map of Tennessee. In 2013, the City Council had voted to change the name of Forrest Park to Health Sciences Park. (They also renamed Confederate Park to Memphis Park and Jefferson Davis Park to Mississippi River Park.) After the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, became law, they sold the parks to a non-profit organization, who then removed the statues of Forrest and Jefferson Davis.

As if to prove there is nothing too petty for a Republican-controlled body, the Tennessee legislature voted to rescind its previous authorization of $250,000 granted to the city of Memphis for its bicentennial celebration in 2019.

When Antonio Parkinson, a representative from Memphis – a Democrat and African-American – called the vote vile and racist, he was cut off by boos from fellow lawmakers.

Searching for Grit in Little Rock

Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross traveled by train from Dardanelle to Fort Smith, on the western border of Arkansas. She was searching for a man with grit, someone to help her track down Tom Chaney, the lowlife who had robbed and murdered her father. She hired Rueben Cogburn, a deputy U.S. marshal known as “Rooster.” A Texas Ranger is also looking for the killer, for an unrelated murder in Texas. He joins up with them and they head off into the “Indian Territory” of what is now Oklahoma.

Charles Portis’s novel, True Grit, was published in 1968. To celebrate its fifty-year anniversary, the Oxford American magazine is hosting a celebration in Little Rock, Portis’s hometown. The weekend event includes a screening on Friday of the 1969 film starring John Wayne, in his only Oscar-winning performance, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby and Robert Duvall. The 2010 Coen Brothers version of True Grit, featuring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Hailee Steinfeld, will be shown the next day. The weekend event includes speakers Roy Blount Jr. and Calvin Trillin and entertainment by Iris DeMent. (Garrison Keillor was originally scheduled to be the featured speaker, but he was quietly dropped from the agenda.)

Little Rock is also home to the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport. The Clinton Presidential Library sits on the bank of the Arkansas River, at the end of President Clinton Avenue.

Central High School, made famous by the “Little Rock Nine,” who with the help of the 101st Airborne, integrated the school in 1957, is now a National Historic Site.

Now that’s some true grit.

Beginning of Trump’s End?

Veteran reporter Adam Davidson sees similarities with the Iraq invasion, the 2008 financial meltdown and the Trump presidency. The New Yorker published this just before the Sean Hannity news.

“I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.”

Read the whole thing here.