ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE
Copyright © 2001, 2000 by Michael
Segers, All
rights reserved
Three American Lives,
Three American
Lessons
Theodore M. Berry,
Vincent
Canby, and Gus Hall: these three Americans have very little in
common except that they died within a few days of each other, and that their
lives provide lessons for us all, lessons that are especially timely as a
presidential campaign winds down, and we look forward to the start of a new
administration and new millennium next year. We are, of course, looking at
three real people, complex, fully-dimensional people, and to reduce their
full, long lives to a sentence or two is to do them an injustice. But, their
deaths give us a chance to reflect upon the complex realities and possibilities
(for good and bad alike) of American life that they remind us of.
Theodore M. Berry, a lawyer, was the first
black mayor of Cincinnati. More and more frequently, on our national obituary
pages, we find references to “the first black” whomever as these
pioneers of our brave new democracy leave us important lessons, that never
again will the United States deprive citizens of their rights on the basis
of accident of birth. We need to be reminded of a time that many of us prefer
to forget, and in fact, many of us have forgotten. A student in one of my
classes once found a photo of drinking fountains labeled “White”
and “Colored,” and the students of both backgrounds could not believe
that it was “for real.”
We have been working for some time to outgrow
discrimination based on race in our society, and leaders like Theodore M.
Berry helped us see that such discrimination hurts us all. Now, we are slowly
and painfully trying to deal with other forms of discrimination. The week
in which I write this, we've seen a sad new milestone along our pathway to
equality—for the first time, American women have died in a naval
action. It is ironic that perhaps the most conservative sector of our
society, the military, has responded the best to the challenges of people
like Theodore M. Barry, as shown by the diversity of names, colors, and
backgrounds of all seventeen of the young Americans killed in the bombing
of the Cole.
Vincent Canby was for many years one of the
most powerful people in the American theater as theater and film critic for
The New York Times. Charting and sometimes chiding the American theatrical
establishment for more than three decades, he demonstrated his considerable
taste and insight as well as his scintillating prose style. But, Canby never
overcame the provincialism so typical of New Yorkers. For Canby as for many
New Yorkers, the American theater was limited to a few blocks of midtown
Manhattan.
The lesson that I take from Vincent Canby's life
and career, aside from the example of his taste and talent, is to celebrate
the richness of American culture today. The National Endowment for the Arts
has been at the center of controversy, not only for some of its decisions
but also for its very existence, with many people questioning, as a relative
of mine once did, whether the “dancing people” (and for that matter,
the drawing people, the singing people, and the writing people) should be
funded by our tax dollars. But the NEA and numerous corporate and individual
donors have fueled a renaissance in our culture.
Growing up in Sylvester, I always looked forward
to Tuesday afternoon, when the Sunday edition of The New York Times
arrived in the library. It was my link to a world wide web of coverage of
the arts, social issues, and international affairs. I knew the names of the
reviewers, I read the reviews, and I felt that what was going on in New York
theater was, as Canby felt, pretty much what was going on in theater in the
United States. Now, we have not only a thriving national theater from coast
to coast but also a thriving, decentralized venue for critics on the Internet.
There can be no more Canby, no one critic with such power as he had.
Finally (in alphabetical order), there is Gus
Hall, who ran for president four times and served eight years in prison
for his beliefs as the leader of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Virtually unknown
in his own country, he was a poster-boy for the genuine American proletariat
throughout the communist world. Unlike the stereotypical pointy-headed radical
academic, Hall, son of a miner and himself a steel-worker and lumberjack,
recalled a time when the labor movement was sparked by radical idealism.
It sometimes surprises people that we have an indigenous
radical tradition, American as apple pie, represented by such folks as Eugene
V. Debs, Joe Hill, and Gus Hall, who even more surprisingly spring from the
Midwest. With apologies to Garrison Keillor (like Hall, a native of Minnesota), they
must be doing more than eating tuna hot-dish out there. It would have been
surprising, and intriguing, if Hall had not so consistently sided with the
communist leadership in Moscow and had spoken out against their excesses
with a distinctively American voice. But, he didn't bite the hand that fed
him and his party the money which he denied receiving.
Hall, like Berry, reminds us of times that we would
rather forget, when good people were divided by sincere but very different
views of Communism, and when people went to jail for their beliefs. The lessons
that I take from Hall's life are many. For one, although it is easy to defend
the rights of those with whom we agree, we must be equally diligent in defending
the rights of those with whom we disagree, no matter how unpleasant their
beliefs may be to us. We need to be careful that the contentious issues of
our day do not scar our society as earlier issues did. And we can reflect
on the irony that a party and a politician with ideas as unpopular as those
of Gus Hall fared much better in this country than such a dissident party
would have fared in the Soviet Union.
This has been a heady week in our country. We lost
these elders, but we also lost some outstanding young people in the bombing
of the Cole. As we've watched the Mid-East peace process collapse
once again, we've been reminded that we have a lot of figuring out to do
about the post-communist world. Hollywood offered us The Contender,
a flawed celebration of the American political process, while in real life,
George W. Bush and Al Gore had their final debate in Missouri, shortly after
the death of Mel Carnahan, its governor. Roger Clemons pitched a one-hitter,
and those New Yorkers for whom New York is synonymous with the world learned
that they could look forward to a New York Series for the first time in more
than four decades, and as I am finishing this article, I learn of the death
of the triple-threat actress/singer/dancer Gwen Verdon. My mind and this
article have been rovin' in strange directions, and perhaps at times I've
almost started ravin'.
Rovin' and Ravin' has been around long enough to
develop quite an R&R-chive, and so, this week, let me refer you to three
earlier raves on themes mentioned in this article. "Black
History Week" proposes a modest exploration of
black history on the Internet. In
“Get
Your Act
Together,”
a guest columnist discusses his busy theatrical
life, far from the concrete canyons of Manhattan.
“Harp-Song
at the Crossroads of America”
is a review of a biography of nineteenth-century
labor leader Eugene V. Debs. And, here's a bonus. Remembering that
October is Hispanic Pride Month, you might want to relive last year's online
fiesta,
“La
Vida (Not So) Loca.”
Lately, I've turned more and more to
Google as my search engine of choice,
and I commend it to you for whatever rovin' you may want to do in cyberspace
this week. Keep your feet dry and your heart full of noble thoughts and sad
memories, and keep your eyes open for all the unimaginable possibilities
of our country, which, as Gertrude Stein said, is the oldest nation on earth,
because it was the first to enter the twentieth century.
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