SOLTuesday: Traveling, Movie-Going, and Not Quite Getting Lost in Hawaii

-->

            Two weeks ago I flew to Hawaii to get away from New York City’s cold weather. The two Tuesdays I was there, I went to the movies.

            The Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Academy of Art was showing the three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts – live action, documentary, and animation – and that first Tuesday my friend and I went to see the live action shorts. I wrote a Slice about the film I liked the best, Enemies Within, last week, but it doesn’t seem to be available online, and neither are Timecode, a peek into the secret dancing life of parking garage security guards in Spain, or Silent Nights, about a volunteer working with immigrants in Copenhagen who falls in love with one of them, without knowing all the facts of his life. The winner, Sing, can be watched here.  And The Woman and the High-speed Train, a fable about a baker in Switzerland who waves to the train that passes her house every day for 30 years and begins to correspond with the conductor, can be purchased for $2.99 on iTunes.

            The following Tuesday I saw Hidden Figures, which I loved and now have the book to see what else I can learn about these remarkable women.

            This film I went to on my own. I had no problem finding the mall theater, but returning, I took one wrong turn after another. The first time I turned right instead of left, and almost immediately knew it was wrong. But the highway here was two lanes with no place to pull over and make a U-turn. I had to go more than a mile before the next intersection, where I could get turned around. But then there was the three-highway crossing, and again, I followed the wrong signs. It took me a bit longer to realize I was on the wrong highway, and again, I had to travel almost 10 miles before I reached a turning point.

            Oahu is divided by a range of volcanic mountains; the friend I was staying with and the mall showing Hidden Figures  were on the windward side, while Honolulu is on the leeward side. When I reached the long tunnel going through the mountains, I knew I was on my way to Honolulu. Eventually, I reached an intersection and could get back to the other side and the town of Kailua.  And I was passing beautiful vistas, which, since I was driving, I couldn’t take pictures of.

            The whole enterprise made me rethink the value of letting Google Maps tell me how to get from one strange place to another, and I used it on my new iPhone a few days later when I had to get to the airport with my rental car. Hurray for technology!

Essay #7: Another Movie Commentary

Last week I saw the Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts, five films ranging from 15 to 30 minutes long, from Hungary, Denmark, Spain, France, and Switzerland. They were all very good, and here is the one I thought was the best.

WARNING: I hope I don't reveal any SPOILERS, but if you're concerned about that, read no further.

       What I think is the best film is not likely to win, because it isn't a safe choice. The French film, "Internal Enemies," consists almost entirely of two characters: a 56-year-old man seeking citizenship, and a French official interrogating him over his application. Everything the applicant says is heard by the official as suspicious, and you, as the viewer, can see how even the most innocent answer can sound suspicious to someone whose job is to distrust everyone he questions.
The applicant was brought from Algeria in 1959, when he was 5, by his father. The official says, "You were born in Algeria?" The applicant says, "No." The official looks surprised; this is clearly the wrong answer. The applicant explains: "It was France when I was born. It did not become Algeria until after I left." The official is not satisfied. "Why did your father choose Algerian citizenship?" The applicant shrugs and tries to establish commonality with the official. "I never asked him. Did you ask your father why he did anything?" The official refuses to acknowledge any connection between himself and the applicant, and moves on to the next question.
Eventually, the official zeroes in on what really concerns him: the names of anyone the applicant met at "meetings" he attended. The official calls "meetings" any gathering that the applicant was part of. The applicant thinks a meeting is something formal, called for a purpose, and he was just sitting down with a group of men from the mosque to talk, be sociable, eat pastries and drink tea. Why shouldn't he say the names of these men? Because years ago, someone giving the police some names caused the applicant a huge amount of trouble, and he doesn't want to cause anyone else such trouble.
      Watching the interrogation is excruciating. I felt most empathy for the applicant and had to force myself to get inside the official, whose facial expression and questions display so much arrogance and certainty that he is right, and by extension that the applicant is wrong. It's possible that the official's attitude is simply part of a technique, put on for his job and not representing his true person. The official's job is to protect France and the French people. The applicant believes himself part of "the French people" already, and wants to make that official, for his own safety. But the official's job is to force the applicant to prove that he has a right to become part of "the French people," and how is that to be done? I also felt that if the applicant was not already hostile to France, the official's treatment could well make him hostile. Does the official ever think of that, and does he care?
       And what if someone at those gatherings the applicant went to was a recruiter for violent jihad? Could that be why he stopped going? Or was it something more subtle that made the applicant uneasy after a period of time, but nothing so clear-cut that he feels he can safely tell the official, "yes, this man could be dangerous"?
       Throughout the film I kept thinking of Trump's executive order on immigration and how U.S. customs officials treat immigrants and refugees seeking visas or arriving in the United States. Visa applicants to the U.S. already go through a lengthy vetting process. Does Trump's "extreme vetting" envision something like the interrogation in this film? Of course, we want to be safe; we don't want men like those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center coming here. But do we gain safety by assuming that every Muslim -- men, women, children -- is a violent jihadi unless they can prove they aren't? Is this a test anyone can ever pass?
#52essays2017

SOL Tuesday (2 days late): A Short Film from France

(I was getting ready to write a Slice Tuesday night, but my laptop wouldn't let me, freezing and repeatedly giving me the Whirling Beachball of Death. Yesterday I was lulled into a false sense of security when it worked fine for about 20 minutes. But in the afternoon, it no longer showed me what percentage of power I had left, the battery icon showing an X, even though the charger lit up green as though the laptop was fully charged. I didn't believe it. So I rented a car and found a computer repair shop and left it the hopefully competent hands of Cinematic Computers. I have it back now, sort of. We'll see how it behaves when it has a new battery next week.)

                 What I wanted to write about was seeing the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts at the Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Academy of Art. Five films, each 15 to 30 minutes in length, from Hungary, Denmark, Spain, France, and Switzerland, ranged from fable to intensely political. WARNING: I hope I don't reveal any SPOILERS, but if you're concerned about that, read no further.

                 The best film, in my opinion, is not likely to win because it isn't a safe choice. The French film, "Internal Enemies," consists almost entirely of two characters: a 56-year-old man seeking citizenship, and a French official interrogating him over his application. Everything the applicant says is heard by the official as suspicious, and you, as the viewer, can see how even the most innocent answer can sound suspicious to someone whose job is to distrust everyone he questions.

                 The applicant was brought from Algeria in 1959, when he was 5, by his father. The official says, "You were born in Algeria?" The applicant says, "No." The official looks surprised; this is clearly the wrong answer. The applicant explains: "It was France when I was born. It did not become Algeria until after I left." The official is not satisfied. "Why did your father choose Algerian citizenship?" The applicant shrugs and tries to establish commonality with the official. "I never asked him. Did you ask your father why he did anything?" The official refuses to acknowledge any connection between himself and the applicant, and moves on to the next question.

                 Eventually, the official zeroes in on what really concerns him: the names of anyone the applicant met at "meetings" he attended. The official calls "meetings" any gathering that the applicant was part of. The applicant thinks a meeting is something formal, called for a purpose, and he was just sitting down with a group of men from the mosque to talk, be sociable, eat pastries and drink tea. Why shouldn't he say the names of these men? Because years ago, someone giving the police some names caused the applicant a huge amount of trouble, and he doesn't want to cause anyone else such trouble.

                 Watching the interrogation is excruciating. I felt most empathy for the applicant and had to force myself to get inside the official, whose facial expression and questions display so much arrogance and certainty that he is right, and by extension that the applicant is wrong. It's possible that the official's attitude is simply part of a technique, put on for his job and not representing his true person. The official's job is to protect France and the French people. The applicant believes himself part of "the French people" already, and wants to make that official, for his own safety. But the official's job is to force the applicant to prove that he has a right to become part of "the French people," and how is that to be done? I also felt that if the applicant was not already hostile to France, the official's treatment could well make him hostile. Does the official ever think of that, and does he care?

                 And what if someone at those gatherings the applicant went to was a recruiter for violent jihad? Could that be why he stopped going? Or was it something more subtle that made the applicant uneasy after a period of time, but nothing so clear-cut that he feels he can safely tell the official, "yes, this man could be dangerous"?

                 Throughout the film I kept thinking of Trump's executive order on immigration and how U.S. customs officials treat immigrants and refugees seeking visas or arriving in the United States. Visa applicants to the U.S. already go through a lengthy vetting process. Does Trump's "extreme vetting" envision something like the interrogation in this film? Of course, we want to be safe; we don't want men like those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center coming here. But do we gain safety by assuming that every Muslim -- men, women, children -- is a violent jihadi unless they can prove they aren't? Is this a test anyone can ever pass?

Essay #6: Marches, part 3

Fall Mobilization, 1965; me on left, and Jack behind.
Of course, we are smoking. Everyone did.

            Political marches and demonstrations are exhilarating. Being among a group of people who agree on an issue, even if you don’t know all or any of them, is exciting. I suppose those who disagree with us might think we are like a mob – but we are not dangerous. We are not threatening to harm anyone. I personally don’t like the current group of young men (I think they are all men) who call themselves the Black Bloc, wear masks to cover their faces, and throw rocks at stores and offices. They’re not changing anyone’s mind, they’re not making an argument. Perhaps they think they’re being revolutionary. They’re not.

            My first big protest, even before I joined that picket line in October 1963, was the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August that year. You know the one, where Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech. There were lots more speeches that day. People were mostly worried about how radical John Lewis, representing SNCC, was going to be. A recent history of the March on Washington and the movement that preceded it (The March on Washington, by William P. Jones. 2013) says few knew about the intense debate over what Lewis would say, but I was aware of it, and I was hardly close to any of the march’s organizers.

            One of my co-workers and I met and mingled with the crowds streaming along Independence Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial. (My roommate did not come along; she’d heard rumors of rampant burglaries while residents were out being goody-goody. I thought that was ridiculous, and that was no uptick in crime that day.)

            Walking along, we met a teenage African-American girl (white liberals still said Negro in those days) from North Carolina who’d come up on a bus. I felt so tolerant, proving, I thought, I wasn’t one of those hateful, bigoted white people in the South. It was exciting being among so many peaceful people for such a pure cause. It was hot, and toward the end of the afternoon, I decided it was time to go. The speeches were too speechifying. My co-worker had left, the teenager had found the rest of her bus mates. I was nearing the trees on the north side of the Mall when Martin Luther King’s voice  stopped me. It was more the cadence than the words that stopped me at first, but then I focused on his words: 

“... one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood....” 

I stopped under the trees and stayed to the very end of his speech, 

“We will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last, Free at last, Great God a-mighty, We are free at last.'”

That speech has been replayed so often that it’s hard to disentangle memory from its reinforcement, but I know the thrill I feel now is what I felt then. What he wanted was what I wanted. Harmony, friendship, unity. What I feel I’ve been searching for all my life.

            Antiwar marches were something else altogether. I had been reading about Vietnam in the papers since 1962. What did I know about Vietnam? Well, my seventh-grade got a weekly newsmagazine for schoolchildren, and in the fall of 1954 the two lead stories were Brown v. Board of Education, and the division of Vietnam into two countries after the end of French occupation. I remember reading about Catholics fleeing the Communists in North Vietnam, and as a red-diaper baby, I wondered why people would be fleeing Communists. “Vietnam” must have stuck in my head, because when I dropped out of college in Washington, D.C., in 1962 and was reading the Washington Post, I noticed news stories about Vietnam and its neighbor Laos, and kept on reading. 

            1965 saw the first big demonstrations against the Vietnam War. There was the Spring Mobilization in Washington, the Fall Mobilization in New York. In the spring we rode down to Washington with friends and stayed at an apartment my college roommate found for us. On a sunny day, we gathered in front of the White House and walked back and forth. As more and more people joined in, were there police guiding us further along Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Old Executive Office Building? I don’t think so. What I do remember was our starting to move down 17th Street and then turning east.

            Our goal was to encircle the White House. The only official presence was Park Rangers, who patrolled the environs of the White House. The heavy security now just didn’t exist. Only two or three Park Rangers tried to halt us and point us further south, but there were so many of us. (25,000 was one later estimate.) We formed a long horizontal line, and as the Park Rangers moved to one end to block us, we surged forward at the other end. And as they rushed toward our end of the line, the other end surged forward. In this flanking maneuver, we managed to get almost all the way across the South Lawn. I loved the feeling of outsmarting the authorities. It felt revolutionary – and without guns.

            In the fall, there was a big march down Fifth Avenue. Jack was a copy boy at the (Dorothy Schiff/pre-Murdoch) New York Post. One of his fellow copy boys belonged to some Trotskyist sect (I think it was Youth Against War and Fascism), which was one of the organizers of the fall march. He prevailed upon Jack to be a marshal, too. Marshals were supposed to keep marchers in line, tell them when to stop, when to go.  Although we both instinctively resisted being in a position of telling other people what to do, being a marshal meant we got to wear armbands; we’d walk along the outside of the march; we wouldn’t be hemmed in the middle of the crowd or behind or in front of a sign we might not agree with. We didn’t yet have a coterie of compatriots to march with, though we probably met friends at a bar afterwards. We were always ending up at bar in those days.

Marching, to be continued.

SOL Tuesday: Eyes

            My annual visit to the ophthalmologist was today, three months after his colleague had done cataract surgery on my right eye.

            The surgery has had its upside (I’m not wearing glasses most of the time) and its downside (the glasses I wear for computer use don’t focus very well). I wanted to ask Dr. O., why? Were the glasses fitted improperly? Was there a problem with the surgery?

            Dr. O. checked my glasses, then checked my vision reading the eye chart. After the surgery, my right eye is close to 20/20 for distance, while my left eye is still myopic, but I can read with it at about an eight-inch distance. Wearing the glasses got me to 20/20 with each eye, but, I explained to Dr. O., when I looked at the chart with both eyes, I saw two images and had to move my head around to just one spot to focus properly.

            He gave me an explanation about diopters, which made no sense to me, and when I asked him to explain, at first he said, you don’t need to know that. What I needed to know, he said, was the before the surgery, each of my eyes had a different diopter, and the difference was quite great. Now the difference was less, so it was supposed to be better.

            But it wasn’t.

            I pressed Dr. O. to explain more thoroughly, and he came up with an explanation that I now understood. The diopter measurement refers to where each eye focuses, and in theory it determines what your correction should be to focus properly. When I wore contact lenses (for 40 years), the contact lenses fixed the focus problem, I think because the lens fits right onto the lens of my eye. When I could no longer wear the contacts because my eyes were too dry, I didn’t notice the focus problem because, apparently, my brain was accommodating by relying only on my left eye because of the cataract in the right. Now that the cataract was gone, what hadn’t been perceived by my brain as a problem had become apparent as a problem.

            So a problem I hadn’t been aware of – the cataract – became a problem I was aware of after fixing the problem I wasn’t aware of. At least I don’t have to wear glasses all the time, a net gain, as far as I’m concerned. Ain’t science grand?

Essay #5: Marching, part 2

Marching in the streets. I’ve been going to protests for more than 53 years. A sign I saw at the women’s march on January 21 said something like “Why am I still having to fight for this shit?” I feel that way myself, but I can’t sit home and pretend the current events don’t affect me, even if they don’t all specifically address me. Here’s how I got this way.

            In the fall of 1963, while Kennedy was still president, Madame Nhu, sister-in-law to South Vietnam’s president, came to Washington, D.C., where she gave a talk to the National Press Club, attempting to shore up support for her brother-in-law. I was living in a commune of like-minded lefty students and other young people. Some of them organized a protest in front of the National Press Club at noon on a Friday afternoon in October.

            The organization where I worked, United World Federalists, was just a few blocks away, so I thought I would walk down on my lunch hour and join them. When I arrived, the “picket” was across the street from the Press Club, not where I’d expected it. And among the dozen or so people walking around in a circle with signs (“Madame Nhu must go”) were none of the people I knew. What to do?

            I had never joined a picket line. Even though I had lefty parents, they had never involved me or my younger siblings in any political activity. In fact, their political activity largely consisted of working for Democratic candidates.

            When I was 16, I’d heard about a march against nuclear bombs from New York to Washington, D.C., in August, to culminate on Hiroshima Day, August 8. The march was scheduled to pass near our home in Levittown, Pa., and I wanted to join in. My mother said, “no.” My father had recently started a new job, and if anything happened to me, if I got into the newspapers, it might damage him. But this is something we believe in, I argued. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t stand up for my beliefs. But it was 1958. I knew about McCarthy, but he’d been out of the Senate for a few years. Because my parents didn’t connect their politics and their personal lives, I didn’t understand until many years later how fearful they were.

            A year or so later, there were pickets of the local Woolworth’s in sympathy with civil rights sit-ins in the South. I wanted to join those too. But no one I knew in my new high school were part of those protests, and I didn’t know how to become part of a group where I knew no one. I never even asked my parents.

            Now, watching a group of people I didn’t know walking around with signs expressing thoughts I agreed with, I didn’t know what to do. People going by looked at the picketers or ignored them. No one joined them. I wanted to, but didn’t know how to take that first step.

            Then I noticed, down the street, another group of protesters. They were wearing brown uniforms and carrying signs the proclaimed them as the American Nazi Party. I knew such a thing existed and its headquarters were not far away, in Arlington, Va.

            I watched the Nazis in support of Madame Nhu, then the picketers in front of me, then the people walking by, oblivious to both groups. Thoughts and feelings began to clarify. If I continued to stand by, I was basically saying, there’s no difference between these two groups of people expressing their political thoughts. Maybe this is what happened in Germany in the 1930s, ordinary people not able to see a difference between Nazis, Communists, Socialists, and other political parties. Here were two opposing views right in front of me, and I knew who I thought was right, and that I had to make that clear with my body.

            Still feeling nervous, I stepped into the walking line where a space appeared. A woman smiled at me. I smiled back. We walked and walked, until it was time for me to go back to work. I had gotten my political feet wet and didn’t drown. 

#52essays2017