Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Writers Remember Howard Zinn as "Fierce and Funny"

Shortly before President Obama was to give his State of the Union speech, I read online of Howard Zinn’s death. A group of us were gathered in my living room. In the midst of our disappointment and frustration over Obama giving us his no-longer-relevant campaign stump speech a year after we gave him his victory, I got a Facebook message from Verandah Porche, the beloved poet and writing mentor.

She had addressed it to me, Ray Mungo and Richard Schweid – all of us writers who had been part of our old Boston University posse. Verandah said, “Wish we were together to sit shiva and praise him. Howard set the standard for forceful engagement without ego dreck. While he set and carried this standard for so long, it is now our turn to step up. Glad he made his mark on us. Love, V”

Howard Zinn (1922-2010) began to teach at Boston University (BU) in 1964, having been kicked out of the traditionally Black women’s school Spelman College in 1963 – despite being tenured – for supporting the students’ complaints of gender discrimination by the College. I arrived at BU as an undergraduate the next year and so did the international wave of rebellion. Activism wasn’t new to Zinn, who had been involved in the civil rights movement since the 1950s.

Until I left Boston in 1972, I shared a lot of barricades with Howard Zinn. On my return to Boston in 2001, I joined the National Writers Union (NWU). Zinn was a long-time member of the Boston Chapter and it was cool to be back intertwined in a struggle together after all those years.

Many local union members have great memories of Zinn.

Barbara Beckwith – author of What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism and Boston NWU Co-Chair – notes how Zinn’s experience as an Air Force bomber in WWII, including dropping the first napalm bombs, shaped his attitudes:

“When I think about why Zinn’s important to me, I think a lot about how he describes his own experience, his own war complicity, his own gradual understanding of ‘what's going on’- which is what I do when I speak about racism and white privilege.
 
“In Zinn’s The People's History of the United States, he not only shows that the story of what most of us were doing over our country's history is worthy of documentation, but he also shows people seeking justice, building democracy, resisting warmongering. He was both fierce and funny - and people listened and were moved to action.”

Howard Zinn is the author of many books, but his multi-million best seller The People's History of the United States has spawned versions ranging from a comic book to a young peoples’ version to the star-studded film version of the original documents shown some months ago on the History channel. I was present for one of the main tapings of readings for that film and wrote about the project for Alternet.org in a piece called “Dramatic Voices of Dissent: Celebrities Film Zinn’s ‘The People Speak.’”

I interviewed a number of people involved in the film – from Stacyann Chin to Josh Brolin. I didn’t get a chance to speak to Bob Dylan and Bruce Spingsteen, but they too got on board. When I spoke with Zinn, I asked how it was to work with such big names and he told me:

“Danny Glover, Marisa Tomei, Kerry Washington and Viggo Mortensen all flew the redeye just to spend a day or two with us... The affection, the teamwork and the camaraderie – it becomes less a cast than a social movement, like people on a picket line together. That’s the spirit we felt backstage and throughout the process.”

Charles Coe – author of Picnic on the Moon and NWU Co-Chair – told me he “recently reread a great little book by Howard Zinn called Artists in Times of War, a collection of four essays. Howard’s view was that ‘political power is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect.’ Given the recent Supreme Court ruling that gives corporations carte blanche to pour unlimited cash into political propaganda, now more than ever, writers have to carry on Howard’s commitment to speak truth to power.”

In 2005, NWU member Howard Zinn was the keynote speaker at Boston’s annual Book Party, celebrating those authors who had books published that year. He spoke about the censorship writers were facing in the Bush war environment and urged writers to submit op-eds. The Book Party is a potluck and our table was heaving with nibbles, treats and drinks. But Zinn needed coffee and of this there was none. Jeanne Harnois, a journalist and  NWU officer, offered to run out and get him some. She reveals in her blog:

“Well, a couple of weeks later, I received a letter from none other than Howard Zinn. It was handwritten on white, lined paper in a plain, white envelope. In the letter, he graciously thanked me for the coffee and offered to buy me one in return. We met soon after at a coffee shop in Harvard Square. It was one of the high points of my writing life…”

Howard Zinn never rested, never put aside his commitment to expose the mess of reality and then to try to clean it up. If you want a wide-ranging, long look at Zinn, check out this film of a May 2009 interview with sportscaster Dave Zirin. It is Howard Zinn at his most adorable, relaxed and pointed.

National Enquirer: Pulitzer Prize Contender?

I have a guilty pleasure. I love the National Enquirer. I don’t ever buy it for myself as it is an expensive indulgence, but I have one frequent visitor from London and one local friend who get it for me as an occasional treat. I always make sure to receive the annual “Who’s Gay?” issue and the one after the Academy Awards.

The National Enquirer is not just a pretty supermarket face: it is also the source of many political scoops, especially those laden with scandal. The company that produces the National Enquirer is now submitting for a Pulitzer Prize their relentless work in exposing John Edwards’ personal life.

These mavens of the expose were the ones who first revealed that Edwards was having an affair. They were the first to report that he fathered the child. He scoffed that anyone would take notice of a sleazy tabloid, but he clearly hadn’t done his homework. The Enquirer has blown a lot of covers in its day, according to Wikipedia. Here are some:

They published photos of O.J. Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes that matched the foot print found at the crime scene – although Simpson strongly denied having ever owned such items. Later, despite more denials, they broke news of his book If I Did It.

They produced some dirty details on the Clinton/Lewinsky dalliance.

In 2001, they announced that Rev. Jesse Jackson had a child with someone other than his wife.

The story of Rush Limbaugh’s attachment to pain-killers was their scoop.

It was only after they informed her that they had discovered Bristol was pregnant, that Sarah Palin announced the news to the world.

They were the first to report on Tiger Woods having an affair and have since continued to expand the exposure. In fact, just a day or two ago TheDailyBeast.com “solved” the “mystery” of what went on in Tiger’s household that dramatic Thanksgiving and it turns out the National Enquirer was at the heart of the conflict. Tiger was forced to give “Elin advance warning that the National Enquirer was about to run a story claiming that he had an affair…” Naturally Woods scorned the Enquirer and denied the veracity of their story. Only when Elin “learned some of the Enquirer’s specifics about the purported affair” could she piece together enough details to realize Woods was lying.

The National Enquirer had a long history of being sued until they decided to abandon the “three-headed infant terrorizes neighborhood seeking out puppy blood” flavor of story and begin to apply a judicious amount of fact-checking. I consider them far more reliable than Faux News and far more entertaining than CNN. It is a publication full of color – both literal and figurative.

It’s true that I skip a lot of pages, including the cutest baby of the week, heroic pet and miraculous cure stories. Like all their readers, I devour the peculiar classified ads (fortune telling and lucky charms dominate), amazed that they still have them in a print publication. I almost never agree with their fashion judgments and wish they’d stop doing their part for the anorexia pandemic.

But as their scoops prove, the National Enquirer delivers. Pulitzer Prize Contender? You tell me.

Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come (PBS)

Did anyone else see the illuminating PBS show Sam Cooke: Crossing Over? I found it fascinating to look back at his life / my life and have all that music that was so essential to my developing sexuality, my dancing, my smootching – to have all that music put into its historical context. I was living through it all, but not connecting the dots in this way. I didn’t realize the extent of Cooke’s impact on other music people, including Lou Adler, Herb Alpert, James Brown, Jimmy Carter, Mel Carter, Dick Clark, Sam Moore, Earl Palmer, Billy Preston, Lou Rawls, Smokey Robinson, Jerry Wexler and Bobby Womack – all of whom are interviewed in the show.

For example, I found out that: “Sam Cooke accomplished what no other black performer had ever even attempted, founding his own music publishing and record label, opening doors for and writing material for other artists – mentoring Aretha Franklin and launching Otis Redding.”

Although I remember the first time I heard it, I never knew that:  “With You Send Me in 1957, Cooke became the first African American artist to reach #1 on both the R&B and the pop charts. It was risky for this young gospel performer to alienate his fans by embracing ‘the devil’s music’ – but he proved, with his pop/gospel hybrid, that it was, indeed, possible to win over white teenage listeners and keep his faithful church followers intact.”

Knowing PBS, they’ll be repeating this show – part of the American Masters series – so if you’re in the States and are a fan of Sam Cooke’s genius, check it out.

Here is a preview clip of the show, including an amazing duet with his buddy Mohammed Ali. The preview is followed by a clip I chose of one of Sam Cooke’s most important songs.

PREVIEW CLIP

I dedicate the profound “A Change is Gonna Come” to the people of Haiti.

Oh No! Air America is Closing Down

Air America, the most progressive news source on radio, is filing for bankruptcy. The website has announced the immediate shut-down of the dissident radio programming, begun in 2004 in opposition to Bush. Senator Al Franken was in on the ground floor and MSNBC star Rachel Maddow got her start on Air America radio (the photo is from those days).

Air America has been a voice of sanity and clarity in an otherwise pathetic array of USA news programs. Their website, too, has offered important pieces and it now has only this sad press release.Time Magazine has already produced a pretty interesting obituary, which you can read here.

What “Unrest” and “Risk of Riots”?

As I constantly watch the news, I am seeing a huge increase in American newscasters and reporters talking about potential riots and possible civil unrest. The headlines this morning – from Huffington Post to the UK Guardian – scream of impending violence.

But the images I’m seeing are quite different. In one TV report yesterday, the newscaster was describing desperate people fighting over relief packets. But the camera showed a large crowd of young men grabbing ONE packet each from an open carton. Each guy would jump in, grab a bag (perhaps of high-energy bars) and run out of the way. I didn’t see anyone punch anyone else or grab a handful or in any way display violent behavior. The newscaster’s words didn’t fit the scene as they showed it.

Of course I’m worried about the people who aren’t able to push their way to the front of the line when these sporadic deliveries of supplies arrive. The young men get to the front; the women are often holding children and get squeezed in the crunch; the injured have no chance of reaching the food and water on their own.

Later a reporter talked about vicious fights breaking out in all sorts of places and in fact showed a scene taking place in front of a huge pile of rubble. A group of men were shouting at each other back and forth. Were they about to “foment a riot”? No, they had just finished digging out the body of their pastor, with their bare hands, from the rubble of their church. Some wanted to take his body to the nearby mass grave and some wanted to burn the body. They eventually settled the matter and took the body away. This is civil unrest? No, this is people maintaining their humanity and their caring feelings despite impossible conditions.

And what’s with these reports of “looting”? What does “looting” mean in the context of starvation, thirst and destruction? If someone finds some food in a collapsed store or apartment building and takes it to save lives, is that really looting?

Americans have arrived with their Marines to “keep order” in Haiti. I remember the scenes from New Orleans where the authorities’ first concern too often seemed to be some notion of “law and order” – which seemed more important to them than saving lives. The stories afterwards were of people being forcibly held inside fouled buildings, being stopped at gunpoint from crossing bridges, being treated as criminals instead of as people in need.

There is no question that if the distribution bottleneck continues to delay the delivery of food, water and medical attention, people in Haiti will go mad. I’m sure it won’t take much more to cause people to freak out. But these predictions of upcoming violence should not be the leading headline in all these news outlets. The leading story ought to be the ways in which Haitians are fighting for their community and the need to find ways to deliver all the help being offered from so many countries, agencies and individuals.

What the Hell Is Going on in the Massachusetts Special Election for U.S. Senate?

The Republican candidate for Teddy Kennedy’s Massachusetts senate seat has pulled ahead of the Democratic candidate according to one poll. The election is on Tuesday. I’m not a fan of either party and find electoral politics in the USA to be – how to put this delicately? – a great big cow pie. But I am living in Massachusetts, that most Democratic of states (other than its governors). Like everyone else, I’m curious about how things got this way. After all, the stakes are high, not the least the challenge to Obama’s Senate majority.

Martha Coakley, the Democrat, is the state attorney general. Her face is familiar, she’s well-connected to the powerful Massachusetts political scene and she used to be many points ahead. Coakley’s campaign was complacent from the start: they did little fund-raising or reaching out, giving the impression that they were sure that it was in the bag. She had one ineffective (if not counterproductive) weird, talking head ad that was played endlessly, and little else.

Not, that is, until her opponent Scott Brown and the Republicans realized they could build on Obama's descending approval rates and a poll came out a few days ago saying Brown is ahead. Brown is a right-wing, anti-choice, healthcare reform-hater, who is a former model, including a nude pretty white-boy-centerfold for Cosmo. One of his most important weapons in the fight for women’s votes is his daughter. As the Washington Post points out, Ayla, who “as a basketball star and ‘American Idol’ semifinalist -- was far more famous than her father at the start of the campaign.”

As Brown closed the gap, the Democrats suddenly woke up. Now we’re being flooded with a variety of (mostly negative) ads from Coakley, Clinton is in town today and Obama, says PBS, is arriving on Sunday, despite the pressures of Haiti and health care legislation. John Kerry wrote his email list asking for money, Victoria Kennedy has made joint appearances with Coakley and many of us have received robo-calls from Obama – all this in just the last couple of days since the polls rang the alarm.

The Republican Party too has stepped up with national figures and resources. John McCain did a YouTube endorsement for Brown and Rudy Giuliani was in Boston today.

The failures of Coakley and her team are going to force me to go out and vote for her on Tuesday because I would hate to be that one vote that allowed in this Tea-Bagger to “represent” me – and that does not endear me to her, her party or this system. I already voted for a Democrat last year and what did it get me? A healthcare bill that attacks the health of women, that has no caps on the double/triple premiums the insurance companies can charge people my age, not a single step forward for the queer community, more wars mongering, more unemployment, no Guantanamo shut-down, bans on shoes and underpants on planes (okay, not quite) and the bonus class sucking my class dry. Sigh.

NASA Gives New Meaning to High Flying

Always on the cutting edge of flying high, now NASA staff are experimenting with the energy source known as Cocaine (aka coke, snow, dust, powder etc).

CNN reports: "NASA says it has launched an investigation after finding cocaine in a processing hangar for a space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in Florida." Of course now they are blood-testing all the high(sic)-security staff to try to identify the genius who initiated this experiment.

To me, the best part of the story is how these space scientists with the tightest security known to humans discovered the coke in their hangar. Someone, it seems, stumbled on a bag of it where it had been dropped outside the bathroom door. Talk about Space-y.

Haiti: Remembering Tampons and Bosniak Women

As I watch a BBC report on Haiti that includes footage of a woman giving birth on the sidewalk just feet from a line of earthquake victims’ bodies, I think about the particular needs of women in situations of strife. That takes my thoughts back to the Bosnian War - and I hope my poor memory does service to this story. When I was living in Europe, some British women activists – one of whom was a close friend – put together  a brilliant, unforgettable project to support Bosniak women in the midst of the war in the early/mid 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. That brutal conflict split families and neighbors, killed over 100,000 and displaced nearly two million. Many women were forced into refugee camps, living in wretched conditions.

The Serbian men became experts in using rape as a war weapon and then used it against tens of thousands of Bosniak women. “Bosniak women were specifically targeted as the rapes against the Bosniak women were one of the many ways in which the Serbs could assert their superiority and victory over the Bosniaks. Women were kept in various detention centres known as rape camps where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions and were mistreated in many ways including being repeatedly raped.”

A group of British women got together a convoy of trucks to bring essential hygiene supplies to women. Their main concern was to provide sanitary napkins and tampons and toilet paper, but they knew too that soap, shampoo and creams were needed.

At that time I was working for a charity promoting international youth volunteerism. I was on the road more than I was home, often going to a couple of different countries each month. I had saved up a box full of hotel cosmetics – soaps, creams, shampoos, tiny sewing kits, little mirrors. I put the word out to colleagues and friends to always, always pack away toiletries each night in a hotel so that they would be renewed the next morning. A four-day business trip could potentially give a moment of solace to a half dozen war-ravaged women.

The main convoy effort took many months, maybe a year, to pull together. The logistics of crossing Europe and of reaching the women were a story that ought to be told widely. I had lots of time to build up a stash to which dozens of others contributed bags and bags of those little bottles.

When the convey finally returned to Britain, I met up with my friend who had been key to this amazing effort. They had dropped off the bushels of toiletries at a center working with abused women. She told me of the tears, the excitement, the dazed joy of women getting their hands on nice soap and aromatic hand cream, not to mention the practical benefits of toothbrushes and toothpaste, needle and thread, packets of tissues. It may sound like a small thing, a minor thing, but for these raped women soap was one crucial key to mental health.

I watch the story of Haiti on my TV all day and yet no one has talked about the particular hygiene needs of women. Are there toilets? Clearly, there is no clean water to boil or clean rags for the woman giving birth on the street. I think of the British feminists who took on themselves the provision of supplies that changed the lives of Bosniak women, not the least giving them a sense of the international solidarity of women. “Someone cares, someone understands,” they said to the convoy women. As there’s not much else I can do right now, I wish the Haitians a swift sense of the profound concern of people of good will.

The Peoples Choices Teeter & My Blood Presssure Spikes

I'm a sucker for awards shows, but the other night, to protect my blood pressure, I should have turned off The Peoples Choice Awards. I was enraged from start to finish with a sense that after decades of feminism, we're not getting anywhere. But then, as we saw on the show, it's hard to get anywhere when you're perched on long prongs that threaten to pitch you forward with every step.

So what pissed me off so much about The Peoples Choice Awards? The women were under-fed and over-dressed (except for Ellen, thank gawd for Ellen) in difficult-to-wear gowns with heels so high they prevented the women from walking.

Kate Walsh could not walk down the ramp to the microphone without desperately hanging on with both hands to a railing. She admitted it when she finally arrived at her mic. Mariah Carey's dress and shoes were so crippling that her partner Nick Cannon had to practically carry her up on the stage. She apologized.

And the men? Some were in suits, mostly without ties, and many, like Johnny Depp, were in jeans or other casual wear. The men were comfortably dressed down for hanging out; the women were painted and pinched and wobbling and tottering. And it was quite universal. I didn't see a single woman (other than that quick shot of Ellen backstage) who wasn't lurching on impossibly high heels. And I didn't see a single man who was.

Remember when women could dress in either pants or dresses for these events? Remember when "combat boots" were "in" whether with chiffon or denim? Remember when a range of possible styles were on display? No more. Either skinny down and femme up to an immobilizing degree or look for work elsewhere.

I could tie the lack of progress in women's lives to so many things: from our various ongoing wars (always bad for women) to the continuing economic disaster to the bargaining away of women's health and choice in the name of legislative "compromise."

When we can't even run away from danger, our clothes have become an obstacle. Such clothing cannot be considered a style "choice" when it breaks down so utterly strictly along gender lines. I'll buy that explanation when I see some women in suits and sneakers and some men in stilettos and ruffles at an awards show.

Film Review: A Single Man

I like Colin Firth, who plays the lead character George, and I like the idea of a designer of Tom Ford’s talent trying his hand at directing. I even like this film, although it has a puzzling ending.

George’s lover is killed in a car accident on the way to visit his homophobic family. George only finds out when a cousin calls him a day later, and informs him that the funeral is for family-only. The film has been billed as highlighting the isolation of gays in the early 1960s via this depiction of lonely mourning.

However, as it turns out, George – a college professor – has a close woman friend Charley (played by Julianne Moore) who wants to take care of him and a handsome, blue-eyed young student who seems to have quite the crush on him. One wonders where George’s gay male friends are, especially since in pre-movement times the only reliable social scenes for queers were friendship circles that held dinners and parties in an attempt to build sub-cultural communities.

Firth is a strong actor and he gets to both emote and keep his upper lip stiff in turn, but the mixture of dream and fantasy in a period piece of such impeccable design mutes the impact of his work. The bodies are pretty, the flashbacks to those good times with his lover are strong narrative moments and the whole visual conception is fetching.

As with most films today, I find, a stronger editorial knife would have tightened the film up and kept me from nearly nodding off during one of George’s lengthy exchanges with the young student and his half-baked ideas. The ending is so unlikely that it seems like something a director would introduce who simply wanted to wrap things up. But despite these flaws, I remained engaged throughout and nowadays I don’t ask much more from a mainstream movie.

The Trailer