There is nothing political in this one. I promise.

There is a moment in Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" where it seems like everything is about to come undone. 

You know the song,  especially if you come from the Rust Belt.  There's Springsteen and Miami Steve on guitars, of course, Steve's rhythm line chugging like a 1968 Camaro. Gary Tallent pounds out this river of fat, deep bass notes, while Ernest "Boom" Carter keeps pace on drums. David Sancious gives his grand piano everything it can handle, staccato riffs urgent and insistent, while above it all floats Danny Federici's strange and wonderful glockenspiel, which should sound out of place, but somehow fits perfectly.

Springsteen's voice is raw, not quite cracking, singing like his soul depends on it.  "I wanna die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight, in an everlasting kiss," he pleads, and behind him, you hear the band, shaking and sliding like an out of control muscle car.  You steel yourself for impact, fully expecting the whole thing to crash in a hail of blood and glass and Clarence Clemmon's splintered saxophone reed, when, from somewhere way in back, Springsteen counts down, "One, two, three, four," and somehow, it rights itself, it comes around stronger, faster, even more powerful than before.  It's a beautiful moment, a miracle that the tapes were rolling when this explosion of creative spontaneity occurred.

 

Except it wasn't a live take.


Don't it me wrong: it's great, maybe the greatest rock and roll song ever.  No matter the hit and miss quality of the last twenty years, Bruce Springsteen between 1973 and 1982 was at the height of his powers, and this may well be his crowning achievement.  But "Born to Run" wasn't a one-off, one-take, live performance masterpiece, despite what it sounds like.  Springsteen and his engineers, producers and fellow musicians worked for months on that song.  There were hundreds of takes, dozens of versions.  At one point, the chorus -- "Tramps like us, baby we were born to run" -- was sung by an all Black gospel choir.  Briefly, an overdub track featured streetcar bells.  Springsteen calls the song "My shot at the title," and he spared no effort, no expense (for studio time is ridiculously expesive, and the record company was less than pleased with the song's swollen budget) to make it perfect.

That doesn't ruin the song for me.  It enhances it.  



Everything great takes time, and effort, and thought.  F. Scott Fitzgerald was fond of telling people that his masterwork The Great Gatsby was completed in one draft.  That was a lie.  Sometime after his death, family members found a trunk, filled with earlier drafts of the work, more than a dozen of them, each one secret evidence of the artist's care in crafting his finished product.  Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of landscape architecture and the creator of Central Park, agonized over the placement of every tree, every rock in his designs.  His goal was to craft something that looked natural, uncrafted, a place where even the bridges, walkways and buildings would be so carefully placed, so integrated into their surrounds that they appear to have simply sprung up, like wildflowers.  

Even Claude Monet's famous "Waterlilies" paintings are staged.  Monet did indeed have a garden pond, and waterlilies did indeed grow there, and he did indeed paint them.  He did not simply wake up, throw on a smock and grab and easel, and traipse over to the ol' fishin' hole.  Monet employed gardeners, who carefully tended the pond.  Dead lilies were removed.  Plants were pruned, moved, adjusted, to enhance the aesthetic beauty of the scene.  Every single petal was there by design, the whole thing carefully staged.  It was a contrivance, but one that led to some of the greatest art of the expressionist era.

My friend Joel is a barbecue maven, a careful student of the fine art of smoking meat.  He frequently tells me that there's nothing fast about slow-smoking: rush the process, and you end up with a mess.  It takes time, Joel says.  You have to be patient.


Time, care, thoughtfulness.  Patience with the process.  Patience with ourselves.  Whatever we choose to do --  creating great music or literature, painting waterlilies, building parks, cooking brisket, or becoming even as He is -- we have to be patient.  We have to be willing to work, to hone, to fail, and then try again.  


We are children of God, not bags of microwave popcorn.  We aren't finished in two minutes.

Why Woodrow Wilson Needs a Swirly

In his History of the American People, published in 1901, Wilson decried the mass influx of southern and eastern Europeans.  Between 1880 and 1890, the U.S. population increased by 12 million people, evidence, writes Wilson, that the nation was being overwhelmed by unwelcome, unproductive foreigners.  The huddled masses from Italy and Galicia and Hungary and the untold masses of Russian Jews were simply too much to bear.  America was choking on excess immigration.


In fact, between 1820 and 1870, years when immigrants were mostly from western Europe, the US population grew from 9.6 million to 38 million, an increase of about 295 per cent.  From 1870 to 1920, considered the peak period of southern and eastern European immigration to America, US population rose from 38 million to 106 million, an increase of 179 per cent.  Couple this with physical expansion of the United States during the 19th century -- eleven of the fifty states were admitted to the Union between 1876 and 1912, representing an addition of 1,411,041 square miles of land, an area larger than France, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and present-day Poland combined -- and not only did US population growth actually slow during these years, but the available land dramatically increased.  There was more than enough space to hold the newcomers.

Wilson's complaint wasn't just the numbers of immigrants arriving on American soil; it was where they came from.  In the early part of the 19th century,  Wilson wrote, "men of sturdy stocks of the north of Europe had made up the main strain of foreign blood which was every year added to the vital working force of the country...."  These new immigrants were something else altogether, "multitudes of men of the lowest class from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland," possessing “neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”  Europe was turning the United States into a dumping ground for their halt, their lame, their imbecilic, Wilson added, and they came in such numbers that it seemed the countries of the south and east of Europe “were disburdening themselves of the more sordid and hapless elements of their population.”


Wilson later apologized for these remarks, when it became clear that he could not win the US presidency without the support of Polish and Hungarian voters.  


There are three mind-boggling aspects to this story.  First, it subtly teaches us the dangers of relying on the wisdom of the day.  Wilson, the former president of Princeton University, was a learned man, and the learned men of the day embraced eugenics as a valid and enlightened way of understanding human behavior.  Some strains of humanity were simply weaker, lazier, less trustworthy, than others.  The only way to correct the weakness, was to prevent those weak strains from reproducing.  Thirty years after Wilson's history was published, Adolf Hitler used those same notions to provide a pseudo-scientific rationale for his policy of race purity.  We have an obligation to learn, to expand our knowledge, but to rely solely on our own understanding, on the wisdom of the day, is a perilous excursion:  Today's geniuses are tomorrow's crackpots.


Second, it teaches us much about the great ignorance, and the great amnesia that marks political discourse.  Wilson never formally repudiated these beliefs.  Though he did offer an apology to Polish and Hungarian voters groups, and he did agree to veto a Congressional act requiring a literacy test at Ellis Island, the closest he ever came to correcting his contentions was to say something like, "The Eastern and Southern Europeans proved to have strong backs and a willingness to work hard, menial jobs, thus helping to build this country."  Just in my family, those Slav workhorses begat progeny that includes three attorneys, a theatre owner, a small businessman, a college instructor, a school teacher, a nationally recognized composer, the chairman of a college English department, several people in the medical professions, and by my count, more than 50 individuals with college degrees.  Of course, today, Woodrow Wilson is remembered, if he is remembered at all, not as a classist or a racist, but as a delicate flower, a thoughtful and sickly fellow, feebly waving his Fourteen Points at Versailles, urging the great heads of Europe to just get along, pleading for a League of Nations.  There is no one, no matter how egregious his crimes or outrageous his sentiments, who won't, with time, not enjoy full expiation by the American people.  Except O.J.


Third, Wilson's comments underscore the viciousness and the depth of separation that marks America.  We are not a melting pot.  We're not even a stew. We're more like one of those Hungry Man Dinners, each constituent part segregated from the others in its own little aluminum trough.  When things mix -- a little gravy ends up on the corn, say, or some of the brownie's sprinkles slip over onto the slab of pressed turkey -- there's the Devil to pay!  Multiculturalism is no problem, I once heard a longtime Houstonian say, unless we have to live together.  Two of my sisters-in-law are Asian.  One of my brothers-in-law is Tongan.  All of them have stories of being shunned, mistreated, and disrespected here in the United States.  A few years ago, my brother, his wife and I were eating in a popular restaurant in upstate New York.  We found a place to sit; the adjoining table was occupied by two men dressed in construction clothes.  They looked at us, shook their heads, got up and walked away, making comments about how "those people" were taking over the world, and wondering why "yellows" were eating in their favorite restaurant.  This happened in 2006.  So much for the New Millennium.


This separatist mindset, so clear in Wilson, is in evidence when Sean Hannity bloviates on immigration, or when Rush Limbaugh smirks at relief efforts in Haiti, or when Keith Olbermann declares someone the Worst Person in the World.  It's destructive, and wrong.


I hope that somewhere in that Great Elsewhere, Piotr Litwin gets to meet Woodrow Wilson.  And I hope Piotr gives him a swirly.  If I ever meet Rush Limbaugh, I promise I will do the same.

Morons

I'm reading a remarkable book, Vincent Cannato's American Passage, a history of Ellis Island, its predecessor, Castle Garden, and the evolution of immigration policy in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Cannato is a fine writer, a dogged researcher, and he has put together a compelling narrative.

One of the oldest traditions in American politics is the demonization of immigrants.  I've written about this at great length elsewhere in this blog: first the Irish were hated and mistrusted; then the southern and eastern Europeans were scorned and ostracized; today, we treat the Mexicans and Central Americans like pariahs.  Cannato goes to great lengths to document this sad tradition, spending a considerable amount of time on the work of William Williams, longtime director of Ellis Island, and on the research, conducted during Williams's tenure, of Dr. Henry Goddard, a psychologist.

Williams, a Wall Street attorney of old New England stock, saw it as his duty to keep America free of undesirables.  Ellis Island examiners would bar admission to anyone thought to be likely to end up "a public charge."  The bar to entry was set impossibly high: a skilled tailor with a crippled leg was sent back to Russia, despite his arguments that his deformity did not inhibit his ability to sew a suit of clothes.  Men were denied entry for having "sunken chests" and "dull eyes."  Many Jewish immigrants were turned away, their only crime being that they were "excessively short in stature."  Young French women traveling alone were almost universally assumed to be prostitutes, barred for "suspicion of moral turpitude." One young woman, so shamed and traumatized by the invasive examination frequently administered to young single women to determine their virginity, committed suicide. It was a cruel process.

Williams had good intentions.  It was a difficult job, safeguarding America's border.  Williams confessed that saying "no" was often difficult: it was one thing to espouse a theory of exclusion, it was another, altogether agonizing thing to look into the eyes of a hopeful immigrant, and tell him he must return to his homeland.  And Williams was a product of his time, the full flowering of the Scientific Age, when electricity lit homes and street lamps, and wonders like the telephone, the aeroplane, and the motorcar were bursting into the national consciousness.  When Dr. Goddard proposed to Williams that there was an objective, scientific means of determining fitness for immigration, a foolproof way to make a dispassionate and indisputable assessment of every candidate, the Ellis Island director jumped.

Goddard was a eugenist, convinced that human strengths and weaknesses were solely the result of genetics.  Strong parents begat strong children, weak parents begat weak children, and the more weak people allowed to parent, the more imperiled the nation.  He developed a intelligence test, based on the work of French psychologist Alfred Binet, that was designed to gauge the mental acuity of the immigrants.  To his shock, Goddard found that more than 80 percent of those tested failed.  Goddard even coined a term to describe these feeble-minded masses.  They were "morons," derived from the Greek word meaning "dull."   On the basis of Goddard's tests, thousands of lives were altered, thousands were denied entry to America.

The problem is, the test was deeply flawed.  Immigrants were asked the day of the week and the date.  After days, even weeks of travel, most were tired and disoriented, and had no idea of the day or date.  (It wasn't like steerage on the immigrant ships was equipped with Wi-Fi access.)  They were shown a painting of a little boy, a little girl, and a dead rabbit.  The children were weeping; the rabbit had been their pet, and they were preparing for his burial.  The immigrants were asked to interpret the work.  For most poor Europeans, the notion of a pet was beyond comprehension, and rabbits were raised for food and fur, not companionship.  The painting befuddled them.  Goddard misinterpreted cultural misunderstandings and situational disorientation for lack of intelligence.  Other medical experts at Ellis Island used cranial shape, finger length, posture, and quantity of body hair as justifications for deportation.  One Finnish immigrant, lantern jawed and stubby fingered, was actually held up as a possible descendant of the Missing Link.

Goddard rose to fame with his 1912 book, The Kalikak Family: A Study In The Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness.  Modern researchers dismiss the book as filled with factual errors and false conclusions, but in Goddard's day, it was heralded as proof that allowing the feeble-minded to procreate would only bring more feeble-minded people into the world.  Goddard became a leading advocate for birth control among the poor, to protect the human race from further intellectual dilution.  He also advocated the segregation of the feeble-minded in humane, controlled colonies, to protect them from themselves, and prevent them from commingling with the intellectually healthy.  In 1933, the book received a new printing in Germany, where it was favorably received by Nazi leadership.

To his credit, Goddard repudiated much of his work, arguing by the late 1920s, "It may still be objected that moron parents are likely to have imbecile or idiot children. There is not much evidence that this is the case. The danger is probably negligible," and frequently speaking out against eugenics in general, and the Nazi version of eugenics in particular.

But you can't change history.  

My great grandfather, Piotr Litwin, was less than five feet tall when he arrived at Ellis Island.  On the wrong day, with the wrong inspector, that might have been enough to make him "physically unfit" to enter this country.  Some of my ancestors arrived here illiterate.  That was enough to classify them as "morons," and earn them passage back to Europe.  Somehow, my people got through.  They were the blessed ones, the lucky ones.

It's hard for me, when I think about this, about how close we came to not being Americans, to not being at all, to countenance the lies, the innuendoes, the rancor directed at those coming to America from Mexico and the nations of Central America and the troubled lands of Africa.  Open the borders.  We have work enough to do, room enough to spare.  We are too good to be Goddards, too wise to be Willamses.

Next time, I hurl invective at an American president.  Sorry, all you residents of Greater Glennbeckistan, it ain't the one you're thinking of.

News From the Lockport Bureau

I just received an e-mail from the intrepid Rick Heenan, my first cousin, once removed.  He's the guy who provided the photo of James Ocean McMurray, dressed in his Royal Horse Artillery dress uniform.

He's sent along some amazing photos.

First, his parents, John and Myrtle McMurray Heenan, on their honeymoon in 1936:

It's just a wonderful, joyful snapshot!  And you can tell that Myrtle is a McMurray -- I can see at least two of my siblings in her features.


Next, it's the eldest McMurray child, Edward, posing with his England-made Ford coupe:

What's not to like?  I love that one of my great uncles was enough of a free spirit that he tooled around the Eastern seaboard in a car sporting a steering wheel mounted on the right side.  Plus, the car is a lovely shade of sky blue, Manchester City's color, and that is never a bad thing. 


The best comes last.  This is Charlotte Squib Hanson.  I don't know much about my great-grandmother: she married in her teens, moved from London to Toronto to Buffalo to North Tonawanda, raising a family along the way.  Her husband died young; she died in her daughter's home, on Linwood Avenue in North Tonawanda, when she was 74.  Her father, James Hanson, was a bookbinder; the family lived in the Islington area of north central London.  Until about half an hour ago, I had never seen a photograph of her.  This image had to have been taken in London, when she was in her early teens:

A quick scan of Mr. Wikipedia's page turned up the following nuggets: Camden Town was the home of the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol; the record shop in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity was set there (N.B. I like Nick Hornby, but the protagonist of High Fidelity is, well, a git.  I like Fever Pitch and A Long Way Down and Juliet, Naked -- which is not about a nude woman named Juliet; it's about what all of Hornby's books are about, love and loss and trivia and music -- a whole lot more).  Today, Camden Town is sort of a hipster/hippie hangout.  Amy Winehouse has mentioned it in a song.  So have The Clash.  MTV's London offices are there.


Take a long look at that photo.  We can identify with politicians and pop stars, divide ourselves and align ourselves and tell us that we are self-actualized, free agents, but the truth is, this is us, this little girl with the solemn eyes and the elegant chapeau, holding the parasol.  We are the young man in the military uniform, too, and the little steely fellow enigmatically clutching the baseball in that old wedding photo.  We're the exhausted kid, sitting in a classroom by day, stocking grocery shelves by night, running like a madman in a Springtime half-mile race.  We're the little Polish lady with the big wig and the stack of crossword puzzle books, and the laughing old man with the fiddle, dispensing scratchy kisses.  Whomever we claim to be, however we choose to separate from one another, we are the sum of all who came before us.


And however we may deny it, that binds us in bonds unbreakable.

A New Way Of Looking At Leaders

Some years ago, sociologist Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone caused a minor stir.  Putnam observed that by the mid-1990's, the number of Americans identifying themselves as recreational bowlers had reached an all-time high, but the number of people bowling in organized leagues had dropped to record lows.  Bowling alone, argues Putnam, is a metaphor for Balkanized America, each of us pursuing his or her own path, no one willing to be part of a team, to work for a common good.

I don't really want to talk about his conclusions.  Suffice to say that I concur.

(Sort of on this subject, I had my first encounter with Reform Mormonism this week.  Sheesh!  Talk about depressing.  They reject organized religion in general and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in particular; they deny that ANY scripture is anything more than interesting writing; they assert that Priesthood authority is non-existent and the notion of a Final Judgment foolishness;  they reject the ordinances of the Temple and deny the necessity of performing those ordinances on behalf of the dead; and they claim that the only proper place for worship is at home, with your own family.  On the other hand, they have some vague good feeling about the culture they grew up in, so they assert their right to call themselves Mormons.  

T.S. Elliott writes that Hell is oneself, Hell is Alone, the other people there merely projections.  The Reformed Mormon's navel gazing spiritual narcissism, all this sitting in your La-Z-Boy, sending good thoughts to the Universe stuff, seems pretty Hellish to me.  It seems like a pretty elaborate way to get out of teaching Primary, or accepting a home teaching assignment.  Shine on, you crazy diamonds!)

Anyway, bowling is what's on my mind.  I have been keeping a photo collection of World Leaders Bowling.  Herewith, my analysis:

Harry Truman.  This photo is very clearly posed, much like old baseball card photos were posed.  His body isn't squared to the lane, and given his stance, he should be releasing the ball.  And he's wearing a suit!  A three-piece suit! With wingtips!  Who wants to bowl with a guy in a three-piece suit?  Not me.  On the other hand, Harry looks determined: he wins points for the ol' raised eyebrow grimace.  CONCLUSION:  This is a tough old bird, the kind of guy who has the bomb, and is not afraid to use it.

George W. Bush.  Form: Excellent.  Visage: Steely and Determined.  Clothing: Bowling Appropriate.  CONCLUSION:  This man is a fraud, a cheat.  He's not bowling; he's playing candlepins.  That's a game for old people and New Englanders, and while they claim it takes a special skill set to master it, true bowlers know that's the bunk.  This guy is throwing a two pound ball and making us think it's a 16 pounder.  This is the kind of dude who would lie about WMDs, just so he could blow up Iraq.  If only we had seen the warning signs!

Vladimir Putin, defacto Tsar of Russia.  Again with the business clothes -- what is with these guys?  He's got an interesting thing going with the variegated ball, but it appears he's slinging it sidearm, like a German solider tossing one of those "potato masher" grenades.  CONCLUSION: Brute power, as befits the former head of the KGB.  Unfortunately, it's far more likely that he uses his ball to smash truculent Chechens, than to do any serious kegling.

Barack Obama.  Yes, I know.  He plays basketball (against hand-chosen opponents).  He runs.  He shimmers with charisma and optimism.  I see him bowl, and all I think is, "Revenge of the Nerds, baby.  Revenge of the Nerds."


Which leads us to at once the most troubling and the most fascinating of our Bowling World Leaders:

Richard Milhous Nixon.  The form?  Impeccable.  The clothes?  Magnificent.  The ball? Bold, yet tasteful.  This is it, folks, the complete package.  If fitness for leadership were based solely on bowling technique, this man would be King of The World.  


Dick, what went wrong?

  

Easter

 North Tonawanda Botanical Gardens, Spring, circa 1976

Easter is a big deal in western New York.  A large part of that is the influence of the tens of thousands of Polish and Irish and Italian Catholics who live there, their sacred celebrations filled with color and light and groaning boards of breads and meats and all manner of deliciousness:

 Easter Sunday Dinner, Houston, 2007.  Ah, ham and asparagus -- why do you fill us with such bliss?

It's more than than.  Winter is over, and that is a relief, no matter how much you profess love for the snow and cold.  It is a long, hard slog, winter in Buffalo, moody and grey and mercurial, rainy one day, bitter cold and snowing the next, with the odd sleet storm thrown in like a hard punch to the kidneys.  When March arrives, muddy and wet, and those first crocuses and daffodils sprout from under the sooty remainders of the last snows, it feels like a resurrection.

I don't know that people who live in a place where it is perpetually warm and sunny appreciate the Biblical account of that first Easter the way that northern people do.  When you see those first green shoots, a thrill runs through you, lightens you, energizes you: what was once dead is now alive again.  We feel, in some small way, what Mary felt at the garden tomb, when she heard Him call her name.  Our hearts pound like Peter's, when he understood that his Friend, his Brother, was not dead, but risen.  Easter in Buffalo is a wonderful thing.


Anyway, less talk, more rock!  On to the photos:

E

Easter, Houston, 2005.  Eggs on the Boil, taken with my first digital camera.  I thought I was Man-Ray, or something.

More of the same.  I should probably be writing about how I used a Sakitome filter and had the f stop on full or something, but basically, I hit the ball first time, and there it was in the back of the net.  I'm opening a boutique (an obscure Monty Python reference for you).  Easter, Houston, 2005.

 Two of my favorite photos.  Above, on the Red Line, just south of the 18th St Station, Manhattan.  Below, Penn Station, Manhattan.  Easter Week, 2008.

 Easter Morning, Niagara Falls, 2008  - still plenty of snow on the ground...

Enzo, Noah, and Liam, Easter Sunday, 2008.
At the white house on Sweeney...

Mary and Judy Siedlecki, Easter, circa 1952

 Peter and Judy Siedlecki, circa 1953

Mary and Judy Siedlecki, Easter, circa 1956

Judy and Peter Siedlecki, Easter, circa 1956. Look at those glasses, that dour expression, the manly physique: Is it any wonder that I spent the first 18 years of my life explaining to old Polish women that I wasn't Peter's kid?

Mary Beth.  I cannot remember the white house on Sweeney ever being the green and white house on Sweeney, but there it is.  It's a nice shade of green, too.  Given the faint traces of snow and the absence of buds on the shrubs, coupled with what appears to be a new hat and jacket, I am guessing that this was taken at Easter.  This is a great photo, partly because it shows the ol' homestead in an interesting, bygone setting, partly because MB's chapeau looks a lot like a riding hat, and it's fun to imagine that just off camera, she's holding the reins to a noble steed, but mostly because this is the way I always think of my sister: she Gets Things Done.  I don't know where this lovely little girl was heading, but rest assured, she Took Care Of Business when she got there.

Finally, I give you the unofficial mascot of our family Easter holiday festivities, circa 1977:

Yes, it's Nathan, prowling for colored eggs...

Teaser

Tomorrow, a small collection of Easter photos, including one that that is mighty amusing.

Stay tuned...