Anita Tedaldi, military wife and parent of five daughters, who has made a name for herself blogging about motherhood, gave up her adopted 18-month-old son when she realized she just didn't feel all that close to him. She told her story to Lisa Belkin of The New York Times, who also appeared with her when Tedaldi was interviewed on The Today Show. Apparently encouraged by her exposure to the world of journalism to be even-handed, Tedaldi gently informed her audience that the failure to bond "really went both ways." Well I'm all for holding kids accountable, certainly.
There is the awkward matter of Tedaldi having outspokenly criticized another adoptive couple, in print, for doing pretty much the same thing just last year, but, as Lincoln once observed, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present." Meanwhile, the U.S. Military, who owns the web site on which Tedaldi's earlier article appeared, is obligingly treating the matter about like they did the death of Pat Tillman; the text is no longer there.
I read a couple of years ago the troubling story of a single mom in England who adopted an African girl about the same age as the mom's biological 7-year-old daughter. If her account is to be believed, she did everything she could to welcome the adopted child and blend her into the family, to no avail. Eventually, the adopted girl's hostility, not only toward the mother, but even more so against her adoptive sister, reached a point at which the mother feared for her biological daughter's safety. With tremendous reluctance and chagrin, she made the decision to give up the adopted child. Perhaps there was nothing else she could do.
I certainly don't wish for little "Baby D," as Tedaldi refers to her adopted son, to grow up in a house where his closest caregiver is continually judging his bonding skills and finding them wanting; he deserves better, and I hope he is placed in an emotionally healthy home. I could even respect Tedaldi if, chastened by her experience, she took time off from blogging about motherhood for a period of reflection. But we must be realistic; book deals and appearances on Oprah wait for no one. Who knows but that one day the little tyke may pen his own book about "Mommy T" and the strange mismatch between her blogging skills and her nurturing abilities.
This week's other poster child for forgiving one's own mistakes and blowing off the stodgy critics is Roman Polanski, on whose behalf over 100 luminaries of the entertainment world have signed a petition demanding his immediate release from custody, following his recent arrest in Switzerland. These include Woody Allen, whose nude photos of his adopted stepdaughter broke up his long-time partnership with Mia Farrow, and the noted moral philosopher Harvey Weinstein, who can see more clearly than most of us that Polanski was sufficiently punished for his "so-called crime" with a 30-year inability to attend Hollywood parties.
As is well known, Polanski accepted an unchaperoned visit from aspiring 13-year-old model Samantha Gailey at the home of Jack Nicholson (never mind!) in 1977, photographed her nude, plied her with champagne and quaaludes, and then sexually assaulted her, ignoring her repeated protests and requests to leave.
No one but Hollywood libertines are in serious doubt as to the hideous nature of Polanski's actions that night. Yes, I know future Chief Justice John Marshall started courting his future wife when she was 14 and Marshall was 26, but that was in a day when Marshall would have been shot by her outraged father had he so much as kissed her and not followed through shortly after with a trip to the church to make good. And it may be that 15-year-old Nastassia Kinski acted with perfectly free choice upon beginning a sexual liaison with Polanski; frankly, if I had a maniac like Klaus Kinski for a father, I too might find even Polanski's company a desirable alternative.
Polanski's actions with Gailey, in any case, were completely beyond the pale, and he was rightly convicted. The moral issue is clear. What is tangled is the legal issue, an entanglement caused by the egregious misconduct of the late judge Laurence Rittenband, who first approved, and then gave every indication of intending to renege on, a plea bargain supported by the victim's own family. Rittenband seems to have done this, moreover, on the advice of a District Attorney who wasn't even involved in the case, itself an instance of judicial misbehavior. In desperation, Polanski fled the court's jurisdiction and then went abroad, which was another crime added to the one for which he had already been convicted.
If Polanski's celebrity status should not win him special treatment, neither should it have made him the special victim of a judge's personal pique, in violation not only of judicial ethics but of an agreement that the victim and her family had acknowledged was in her best interests. The larger legal issue is whether, having reached a court-approved plea bargain, a defendant for any crime, at any level of wealth or social prominence, should have to wonder if the court will honor its own agreement or decide, on a whim, to suddenly "get tough."
Polanski is apparently an unrepentant reprobate, and one could wish to see him humiliated and abused as his victim was that night all those years ago. But the law should serve justice, not become an instrument of popular revenge. If they wanted his hide, the court should have rejected the plea bargain and insisted on imposing the maximum sentence to begin with. If a foolish, publicity-hungry judge can do this to a celebrity, what might he do to any of us? Polanski's original sentence was for time previously served; to this, a reasonable penalty of additional time should be added for having fled legal jurisdiction.
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
Showing posts with label Lincoln. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lincoln. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
It was the minor moments that counted
One of the very best things about today's inaugural ceremony was the closing prayer by Rev. Joseph Lowery, a veteran of the civil rights struggles of 40 years ago. Lowery, who has more gravitas in his little finger than the simpering Rick Warren does in his entire body, gave an eloquent benediction that made one mercifully forget the clumsy "poem" by Elizabeth Alexander that preceded it, gave the most honorable and dignified presentation possible of the new President's commitment to govern the nation by the ideals of his faith, and, at the end, erased Warren's comically condescending attempt to be inclusive to Jews and Muslims.
As to dignity, I don't know what possessed the Chief Justice of the United States, who is my age, to act in a way that was just this side of the president of a local high school student council, overwhelmed at the opportunity to be at a grand event and misquoting the oath of office to the point that Obama, self-possessed as always, was reduced to staring at him in dignified, waiting silence, until he got it right. I can only hope that Roberts, who seems to have a well-deserved reputation as a distinguished jurist, admired by right and left alike, is better at conducting sessions of the Supreme Court. Speaking of the Supreme Court, it was interesting, as Aretha Franklin ascended the podium, to see the brutish mug of Antonin Scalia right behind, her, staring out at the world with his customary look of belligerence and self-complacency.
Warren, who doesn't belong within 10 miles of any occasion to which the words "grand" or "solemn" might be attached, reminds me of someone who intends to sign me up for a multi-level marketing plan and, when he learns that I prefer reading, assures me, with a wink and a nudge, that he can probably get me a good deal on a set of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (so you can get through them faster!). His prayer did, indeed, contain some good things about the hopes and struggles of the American people, but it was destroyed by the cringe-inducing climax, in which he said "I pray this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus," etc. Technically, one can't fault a Christian minister for offering a prayer in the name of Jesus, which is all but a formal theological requirement (although fellow-Protestant Lowery simply ended with "Amen"), but to assume, as Warren must have, that he would somehow make Jews and Muslims feel better by including Jesus's Jewish name or the name by which he is referred to in the Koran (where, of course, he is referred to as a prophet only and not worshipped as divine) was astonishing in its fatuousness. There are times, as Warren perhaps has yet to learn, that the best way to show awareness of something is a prudent silence.
Obama himself gave a competent and workmanlike speech, as he always does, though little in it rose to the level of anything that could be called inspirational, and I can only assume that he had let Al Gore's speechwriter contribute a phrase or two when he ran into that clumsily worded patch in which he said "These things are subject to data, statistics, and analysis"—good God! It's probably a good thing the statue of Lincoln sitting in the Memorial down the Mall could not come alive at that point, or he might have uttered something hardly in keeping with the decorum of the occasion—or, better still, spat a marble gob of tobacco juice into the Reflecting Pool to give that part of the speech a fitting response. I turned the TV off after about 12 minutes, reflecting that watching Obama speak reminds me of what Emerson said about the elder William Pitt: "It was said of the Earl of Chatham that there was something finer in the man, than in anything he said." Obama inspires, all right, but it is by the impression he makes, more than by what he says. There was more applause when he appeared than there was during the speech itself (indeed, the camera caught his brother-in-law suppressing a yawn as he sat behind him!). Nevertheless, he said one thing, at least, that was extremely important: that we as a nation repudiate the belief that we must sacrifice our ideals for the sake of security.
Aretha Franklin's appearance was symbolically important, but the measured, majestic 18th-century musical phrasing of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" hardly suited her rather informal performance style. For my money, one of the best parts of the ceremony was the brief instrumental ensemble that included Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, a female pianist, and a black clarinetist, performing an arrangement by famous movie composer John Williams of themes from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Once again, today's arrangement wasn't exactly right—Williams had a fine opportunity, which he seems to have missed, to have also included a theme built on a black spiritual—but the performance seemed to be a musical reflection of how our new President seeks to present himself and his proposed government: cool, simple, elegant, direct, drawing from history but arranging the themes in new ways, a blending of different voices, a performance executed without flaw. It seemed to me that it was that performance, as much as his own inaugural address, that set the standard by which he will be judged.
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
As to dignity, I don't know what possessed the Chief Justice of the United States, who is my age, to act in a way that was just this side of the president of a local high school student council, overwhelmed at the opportunity to be at a grand event and misquoting the oath of office to the point that Obama, self-possessed as always, was reduced to staring at him in dignified, waiting silence, until he got it right. I can only hope that Roberts, who seems to have a well-deserved reputation as a distinguished jurist, admired by right and left alike, is better at conducting sessions of the Supreme Court. Speaking of the Supreme Court, it was interesting, as Aretha Franklin ascended the podium, to see the brutish mug of Antonin Scalia right behind, her, staring out at the world with his customary look of belligerence and self-complacency.
Warren, who doesn't belong within 10 miles of any occasion to which the words "grand" or "solemn" might be attached, reminds me of someone who intends to sign me up for a multi-level marketing plan and, when he learns that I prefer reading, assures me, with a wink and a nudge, that he can probably get me a good deal on a set of Reader's Digest Condensed Books (so you can get through them faster!). His prayer did, indeed, contain some good things about the hopes and struggles of the American people, but it was destroyed by the cringe-inducing climax, in which he said "I pray this in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus," etc. Technically, one can't fault a Christian minister for offering a prayer in the name of Jesus, which is all but a formal theological requirement (although fellow-Protestant Lowery simply ended with "Amen"), but to assume, as Warren must have, that he would somehow make Jews and Muslims feel better by including Jesus's Jewish name or the name by which he is referred to in the Koran (where, of course, he is referred to as a prophet only and not worshipped as divine) was astonishing in its fatuousness. There are times, as Warren perhaps has yet to learn, that the best way to show awareness of something is a prudent silence.
Obama himself gave a competent and workmanlike speech, as he always does, though little in it rose to the level of anything that could be called inspirational, and I can only assume that he had let Al Gore's speechwriter contribute a phrase or two when he ran into that clumsily worded patch in which he said "These things are subject to data, statistics, and analysis"—good God! It's probably a good thing the statue of Lincoln sitting in the Memorial down the Mall could not come alive at that point, or he might have uttered something hardly in keeping with the decorum of the occasion—or, better still, spat a marble gob of tobacco juice into the Reflecting Pool to give that part of the speech a fitting response. I turned the TV off after about 12 minutes, reflecting that watching Obama speak reminds me of what Emerson said about the elder William Pitt: "It was said of the Earl of Chatham that there was something finer in the man, than in anything he said." Obama inspires, all right, but it is by the impression he makes, more than by what he says. There was more applause when he appeared than there was during the speech itself (indeed, the camera caught his brother-in-law suppressing a yawn as he sat behind him!). Nevertheless, he said one thing, at least, that was extremely important: that we as a nation repudiate the belief that we must sacrifice our ideals for the sake of security.
Aretha Franklin's appearance was symbolically important, but the measured, majestic 18th-century musical phrasing of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" hardly suited her rather informal performance style. For my money, one of the best parts of the ceremony was the brief instrumental ensemble that included Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, a female pianist, and a black clarinetist, performing an arrangement by famous movie composer John Williams of themes from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Once again, today's arrangement wasn't exactly right—Williams had a fine opportunity, which he seems to have missed, to have also included a theme built on a black spiritual—but the performance seemed to be a musical reflection of how our new President seeks to present himself and his proposed government: cool, simple, elegant, direct, drawing from history but arranging the themes in new ways, a blending of different voices, a performance executed without flaw. It seemed to me that it was that performance, as much as his own inaugural address, that set the standard by which he will be judged.
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
Monday, January 19, 2009
If not now...
For years, I never thought I would live to see the day when Leningrad would be called St. Petersburg once more. If my expectations of an African-American President were not quite so dismal as my hopes for the fall of Communism, they were at least projected into an ever-receding future of perhaps 30 to 50 years. The last time I watched a Presidential inauguration on television, in 1961, the Civil Rights Act had not been passed, and the University of Mississippi had not been integrated. Many adults I knew regarded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a dangerous radical.
I remember that in 1988, George F. Will suggested that the Republican Party nominate Colin Powell for Vice-President and steal a march from the Democrats, but that opportunity was forfeited by both parties. (Senator, you were no Colin Powell!)
Tomorrow's inauguration comes 200 years after the birth of the Great Emancipator, 120 years after the death of a sad and unrepentant Jefferson Davis, 100 years after the founding of the NAACP, about 70 years after FDR nominated Benjamin O. Davis as the first African-American general in the U.S. military (his son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., later became the first black Air Force general), and roughly 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt outraged many Southerners by having Booker T. Washington to the White House as his dinner guest. When Roosevelt had visited Memphis, in 1902, he had spoken at Church Auditorium, built several years earlier by millionaire black Memphis businessman Robert Church Sr., since local laws forbade him and his fellow blacks to use city parks and other facilities.
Writing in today's New York Times, Henry Louis Gates and John Stauffer argue, quite plausibly, that Lincoln himself, a man of his own time, would likely have been horrified by the thought of the government of the United States being entrusted to a black man. I agree. As the article points out, Lincoln casually used such terms as "Sambo," "Cuffee," and "nigger," and addressed Sojourner Truth as "Aunty." On the eve of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he invited black leaders to meet with him and discuss the possibility of founding a black republic in Central America to which freed slaves would be urged to emigrate. Like the author of the words "All men are created equal," Lincoln saw no possibility of racial equality as consistent with a stable system of government.
Having said that, Lincoln should be honored, not only for political measures, but for his own efforts to transcend the attitudes of his day and stretch his understanding of the possibilities between whites and blacks, as he did, for instance, in cultivating a personal friendship with his contemporary, the charismatic black spokesman Frederick Douglass. Nor was he alone; even former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had became notorious for the slaughter of black troops at Fort Pillow, attended an Independence Day picnic in Memphis as the invited guest of black organizers in 1875, 2 years before his death. Admitting privately after the event that he had been quite uncomfortable, the former slave trader addressed the gathering and said that he was ready to offer the hand of friendship and assist the black man in achieving any station in life to which his talents entitled him. For the founder of the Ku Klux Klan to utter such words was like walking a thousand miles, and I doubt that any of us today, having been raised in this more inclusive age, have progressed as far in our own attitudes about race.
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
I remember that in 1988, George F. Will suggested that the Republican Party nominate Colin Powell for Vice-President and steal a march from the Democrats, but that opportunity was forfeited by both parties. (Senator, you were no Colin Powell!)
Tomorrow's inauguration comes 200 years after the birth of the Great Emancipator, 120 years after the death of a sad and unrepentant Jefferson Davis, 100 years after the founding of the NAACP, about 70 years after FDR nominated Benjamin O. Davis as the first African-American general in the U.S. military (his son, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., later became the first black Air Force general), and roughly 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt outraged many Southerners by having Booker T. Washington to the White House as his dinner guest. When Roosevelt had visited Memphis, in 1902, he had spoken at Church Auditorium, built several years earlier by millionaire black Memphis businessman Robert Church Sr., since local laws forbade him and his fellow blacks to use city parks and other facilities.
Writing in today's New York Times, Henry Louis Gates and John Stauffer argue, quite plausibly, that Lincoln himself, a man of his own time, would likely have been horrified by the thought of the government of the United States being entrusted to a black man. I agree. As the article points out, Lincoln casually used such terms as "Sambo," "Cuffee," and "nigger," and addressed Sojourner Truth as "Aunty." On the eve of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, he invited black leaders to meet with him and discuss the possibility of founding a black republic in Central America to which freed slaves would be urged to emigrate. Like the author of the words "All men are created equal," Lincoln saw no possibility of racial equality as consistent with a stable system of government.
Having said that, Lincoln should be honored, not only for political measures, but for his own efforts to transcend the attitudes of his day and stretch his understanding of the possibilities between whites and blacks, as he did, for instance, in cultivating a personal friendship with his contemporary, the charismatic black spokesman Frederick Douglass. Nor was he alone; even former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had became notorious for the slaughter of black troops at Fort Pillow, attended an Independence Day picnic in Memphis as the invited guest of black organizers in 1875, 2 years before his death. Admitting privately after the event that he had been quite uncomfortable, the former slave trader addressed the gathering and said that he was ready to offer the hand of friendship and assist the black man in achieving any station in life to which his talents entitled him. For the founder of the Ku Klux Klan to utter such words was like walking a thousand miles, and I doubt that any of us today, having been raised in this more inclusive age, have progressed as far in our own attitudes about race.
© Michael Huggins, 2009. All rights reserved.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Those who do not understand history are doomed to misquote it
In Oliver Stone's W, the 43rd President responds to his wife's comments on John Adams and John Quincy Adams by interjecting, "But wasn't that about 300 years ago?" (For an interesting round table on whether Stone's film got Bush right, see this article in Slate. I for one have never wondered whether it was important to Stone to get things right to begin with, but in any case, the discussion is enlightening.) Now, presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminds us that LBJ, who started life as a schoolteacher, can be heard on tape telling an associate that Lincoln returned to Springfield, Missouri—after he was President(!) I think my daughter's grasp of history was on firmer ground when, after I took her and her little brother to see the 1871 Woodruff-Fontaine house when they were small, summed up the experience by saying "Daddy, the people who lived in that house lived in the old-fashioned times, but today we use the right potties and we know everything."
As to the 16th President, someone else who apparently falls short in his grasp of the essential Lincoln is the director of the Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, who was caught shoplifting DVD collections of House and Seinfeld from a local Target. A year earlier, he had been convicted of shoplifting ties from Macy's. Since the man made $200,000 a year, he would not have qualified for the President-elect's proposed tax cuts, so one can only hope that he learns the value of a little belt-tightening. I, too, would be tempted to shoplift if Target or anyone would stock a DVD copy of John Huston's 1970 Cold War thriller, The Kremlin Letter, with Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Patrick O'Neal, George Sanders, and Max Von Sydow. It was derided by critics, but I have certainly appreciated it on the 3 occasions since 1971 when I have been able to catch it on TV at 2 in the morning.
AdSense is still having trouble figuring out what ads to place here; it is displaying the same offer to post for $10,000 a week, or something to that effect, and I have no idea how that relates to anything I've said so far. Perhaps if I had quoted the Epistle of Jude—"Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints"—it might be understandable. Apparently picking up on my references to church, AdSense posted this message of comfort last night—"Are Gays Going to Hell?"—and about an hour ago, an ad for Dianetics® invited the reader to ponder the origins of irrational behavior, strangely fitting after two guards at the Church of Scientology were forced to shoot a man to death in self-defense after he appeared on the property brandishing two samurai swords. Otherwise, AdSense is reduced to advertising itself, inviting bloggers to "monetize" their ads by using this service. I wish I could say that making a noun a verb by attaching -ize to it was peculiar to our day, but I learn from William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur that the general's father, himself a famous soldier of the 19th century, was fond of using "mediatize," a word he had invented.
Speaking of Presidents and their place in history, the BBC reports that former President Carter—the same man who assured the world in 1994 that the nuclear threat from North Korea was at an end—is shocked that things are as bad as they are in Zimbabwe. The former President is distinguished for his personal decency; he taught the men's Bible class at the Washington, D.C. Baptist church he attended as President and has volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, but his career as a statesman inclines one to believe the claims of some cosmologists that there are parallel universes and forces one to wonder if the gentleman from Plains inhabits one of them.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
As to the 16th President, someone else who apparently falls short in his grasp of the essential Lincoln is the director of the Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, who was caught shoplifting DVD collections of House and Seinfeld from a local Target. A year earlier, he had been convicted of shoplifting ties from Macy's. Since the man made $200,000 a year, he would not have qualified for the President-elect's proposed tax cuts, so one can only hope that he learns the value of a little belt-tightening. I, too, would be tempted to shoplift if Target or anyone would stock a DVD copy of John Huston's 1970 Cold War thriller, The Kremlin Letter, with Richard Boone, Orson Welles, Patrick O'Neal, George Sanders, and Max Von Sydow. It was derided by critics, but I have certainly appreciated it on the 3 occasions since 1971 when I have been able to catch it on TV at 2 in the morning.
AdSense is still having trouble figuring out what ads to place here; it is displaying the same offer to post for $10,000 a week, or something to that effect, and I have no idea how that relates to anything I've said so far. Perhaps if I had quoted the Epistle of Jude—"Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints"—it might be understandable. Apparently picking up on my references to church, AdSense posted this message of comfort last night—"Are Gays Going to Hell?"—and about an hour ago, an ad for Dianetics® invited the reader to ponder the origins of irrational behavior, strangely fitting after two guards at the Church of Scientology were forced to shoot a man to death in self-defense after he appeared on the property brandishing two samurai swords. Otherwise, AdSense is reduced to advertising itself, inviting bloggers to "monetize" their ads by using this service. I wish I could say that making a noun a verb by attaching -ize to it was peculiar to our day, but I learn from William Manchester's biography of Douglas MacArthur that the general's father, himself a famous soldier of the 19th century, was fond of using "mediatize," a word he had invented.
Speaking of Presidents and their place in history, the BBC reports that former President Carter—the same man who assured the world in 1994 that the nuclear threat from North Korea was at an end—is shocked that things are as bad as they are in Zimbabwe. The former President is distinguished for his personal decency; he taught the men's Bible class at the Washington, D.C. Baptist church he attended as President and has volunteered with Habitat for Humanity, but his career as a statesman inclines one to believe the claims of some cosmologists that there are parallel universes and forces one to wonder if the gentleman from Plains inhabits one of them.
© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.
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