Let’s tell the truth about lies: Almost everyone tells them. Except maybe Jimmy Carter, our 94-year-old former president who promised, “I will never tell a lie to the American people.” And he apparently has not.
Carter once even admitted in an interview in Playboy that he had “committed adultery in his heart” by lusting after women other than his wife. That’s pretty honest even for an evangelical Christian, which he is. We rewarded him for that scrupulous honesty by throwing him out of office after one term.
I suppose you could say another president, George Washington, was first to declare, “I cannot tell a lie,” even though, as the story goes, he said that as a child. But that story about cutting down the cherry tree has itself been found to be a lie. A white lie, I suppose, or a myth, but untrue nonetheless.
So, is our current president the exception, or is he the rule? Donald Trump regularly earns The Washington Post Fact Checker’s award of 3 Pinnochios (a significant factual error) or 4 Pinnochios (a whopper), meaning that, like Geppetto’s wooden puppet whose nose grew longer every time he fibbed, our current president is a liar.
But every other president in my lifetime (except Carter) has been a liar, as well. Just listen to them:
■ Barack Obama: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
■ George W. Bush: “Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction.”
■ Bill Clinton: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
■ George H.W. Bush: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
■ Ronald Reagan: “We did not, repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages — nor will we.”
■ Gerald Ford: “There was no deal, period, under no circumstances,” after issuing a pardon to Richard Nixon, later disputed by the reporting of Seymour Hersh.
■ Richard Nixon: “I had no knowledge of the ... break-in, that’s for sure, no knowledge of the ... cover-up. Oh no.”
■ Lyndon Johnson: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
■ John F. Kennedy: We have no intention of military intervention in Cuba.
■ Dwight Eisenhower: The American U-2 spy plane that was shot down over the USSR was merely a weather plane that had flown off course.
■ Harry Truman: “We wished in the first (atomic bomb) attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.”
■ Franklin Roosevelt: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
And that is just in my lifetime. Why would we expect anything different of Trump? At least his lies have not caused thousands of war deaths. So far. We can’t say the same of the Bushes, Nixon, Johnson, Truman or Roosevelt.
By the way, except for the prohibition against bearing false witness against thy neighbor, lying is not one of the transgressions forbidden by the Ten Commandments. That’s pretty limited. You can’t lie about your neighbor, but you can lie about your family, you can lie about people who aren’t your neighbors and, incidentally, you can lie about “the failing New York Times.”
Even U.S. libel and slander laws are more strict than the Ten Commandments. You can’t tell a lie about anyone out loud or in writing. If you do, you can be sued for damages. Unless you are a politician. In that case, the courts say, stretching the truth can be acceptable. As U.S. District Judge S. James Otero ruled last month, Trump’s reference to porn star Stormy Daniels’ accusations as a “con job” was protected by the First Amendment as the kind of “rhetorical hyperbole normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States.”
So what are we to do? Are we all swimming in presidential Pinnochios from Roosevelt to Trump? The Washington Post reports that Trump has told about 6,000 lies since he was inaugurated two years ago. That’s a whole lot of big wooden noses.
If we can’t look to presidents for guidance about truth, what about Jesus? Did he lie?
We will never know because all the witnesses are dead and all the documents are disputed. There is even a whole field of scholarly debate called the “ipsissima verba jesu,” the very words of Jesus.
In 1976, when I was a religion student, only 26 words in the Bible were accepted by scholars as being “the very words of Jesus.” Now, in 2018, that number has grown to more than 1,000.
But there is a catch: The attribution of those words to Jesus is largely based on the argument that they are written in Aramaic in translations of the original texts, not in Greek or Latin. Aramaic was the language that a Palestinian carpenter would have spoken in 32 A.D. Therefore, those Aramaic words might have actually been spoken by Jesus.
That’s pretty soupy scholarly evidence I’d say, and opens up another problem: If you believe something that cannot be verified with witnesses or documents, does that make it true? Consider American history, which does have witnesses and documents.
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” said Abraham Lincoln in his first debate with Stephen Douglas on Aug. 21, 1858. Witnesses heard Honest Abe say it.
Five years later, as president, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
________________________________________
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.
Some exciting news! Your Churchill cigar will be featuring in a BBC Radio documentary about Prime Minister’s props. The relevant episode will air on Wed 22 Aug at 9:30am (BST). See attachment.
Recently I have been watching re-runs of popular TV
shows I grew up with and I’m surprisedto find that little flowers of fairness popped up and flourished in that
wasteland of sexism and racism and homophobia that was the black and white
popular TV of the 1950s.
Take the black and
white TV western Dick Powell’s ZaneGreyTheater.
One episode called “The Promise” has a new doctor in town who is mocked for
taking care of people who were called the “squatters” or Mexican immigrants who
farm land on the outskirts of that town. When the racist mayor of the town asks
one immigrant farmer his name, the doctor says, under his breath, “Twenty
years, 20 years and you still don’t know how to ask a man his name in his own
language.”
Wow. That’s advanced
thinking for the late 1950s.
Is this a harbinger
of the modern imperative for bi-lingualism? Remember George Bush running for
president and giving speeches in Spanish?
A “Death Valley Days”
episode called “The Lady Doctor” has a husband who is frustrated because his
wife uses her medical knowledge as the daughter of a doctor to heal local town
folk.
At one point she
treats a local ailing Native American chief for food poisoning, risking her
life and her husband’s farm if the chief doesn’t recover.
Her husband demands
that she spend more time as a homemaker and less time as a healer, until the
day that he turns up with a broken leg himself, which she is able to set
properly.
Suddenly, the husband
appreciates the value of “the lady doctor” in a very personal way, and the
episode ends with her husband cooking supper on one leg ( and burning it) while
she runs off to deliver a local farmer’s baby.
Is this the first
house husband in no less than the 1950s Death Valley Days?
Another Death Valley
Days episode has an Army officer in 1875 shot by the arrow of a Native American
for trespassing on land agreed in a treaty that white men will not enter.
He is brought to the
Native American camp for a trial by the chief who will decide if he is to live
or die. The tribe members who captured him want him killed.
When he enters the
chief’s dwelling, the chief stands alone with his back to the camera and the
man.
Turning to face the
camera, the chief is revealed to have black, not red, skin.
He escaped from
slavery in 1857, and knew nothing of the Civil War or the Emancipation
Proclamation. To save the Army officer from being killed if he is released on
treaty land, the chief offers to escort him back to land protected by the U.S. law, even
though he erroneously thinks he risks being captured as an escaped slave
himself.
The episode ends,
with the wounded Army officer asking the chief what year he escaped from
slavery and realizing that the escaped slave-turned-chief did not know he was a
free man, thanks to Abraham Lincoln.
The Army soldier asks
to shake the hand of the free man saying, “Nobody can take your freedom from
you ever again” or similar words.
In retrospect it
confronts surprisingly two sad realities in American history: treaty violations
in agreements with Native Americans by whites and the plight of people who
escaped enslavement.
It is worth noting
here, that in another Death Valley Days episode, Sammy Davis Jr. appears as a
black Union soldier. This was the 1950s, long before Davis was famous, long
before TV tried to make amends for its predominantly white view of American
culture by including blacks as central to television plots.
Am I trying to clean
up 1950s TV’s wasteland of sexism, racism and homophobia?
No.
I’m just surprised to
discover in these re-runs a few flowers blooming that predict the revolution of
the flower children of the 1960s and 70s.
Even the comedy “I
Love Lucy,” which refused to use the word “pregnant” on camera and insisted
that Ricky and Lucy sleep in separate twin beds rather than a single marriage
bed, has its moments of liberation.
Don’t ignore the
elephant in the Ricardo’s apartment: I Love Lucy was multi-cultural.
Ricky was Cuban. He
spoke Spanish, and he was successful. And the dizzy Lucy of TV was Lucille Ball
, the brains behind the highly successful Hollywood
production company DesiLu, which grew from their “I Love Lucy” TV show.
And there’s an
elephant in Dick Powell’s of ZaneGreyTheater,
a radioactive one.
Powell died of cancer
at age 59 and may have contracted that cancer directing the movie “The
Conqueror” at St. George, Utah
near the U.S.
nuclear testing site of the 1950s. Actors John Wayne and Susan Hayworth were
also in that movie and also died of cancer.
And let’s not forget
the other TV series where racial and sexist inequalities had brief moments in
the sun, Death Valley Days.
It had as a narrator
a future president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, who appointed the first
woman to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor, and tried to end nuclear
proliferation, surely a danger that threatens all races.
What’s my point?
American TV was
trying. It didn’t give birth to the gender and racial revolutions of the 1960s
and 70s , but it may have seeded them.
Here and there.
Paul
Keane grew up in the Mt.Carmel section of Hamden. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching
English for 25 years.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer sculpture with the painted red nose,
which Paul Keane created from the Hoffman tailor's press.
Paul
Keane: Beauty is there
when we look for it
By Paul Keane
Published
1:42 pm, Tuesday, August 22, 2017
•
The Ugly Duckling, Dumbo, Rudolph — three stories about young’uns who
got bullied because of their looks: black feathers, big ears, a red nose
.Bullying extends to inanimate objects too. I have had a 500-pound cast iron
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for 56 years that has been picked on all that
time as a red nosed pile of junk.
I bought this Rudolph when I was 16. And it was then
indeed in a junk-heap in front of the feed store next to my church.
But I saw something in it which nobody else did. I saw
a sculpture.
It was being sold as a machine. It had been a dry
cleaning tailor’s press made by the Hoffman Company and it had five pedals that
were used to run the machine. Its dry cleaning “pads” were missing.
Nobody wanted the machine because it was manually operated
and in 1960, when I was 16, the rage was for everything to be electric.
Poor old Hoffman.
In fact, with its five pedals I called this machine
“The Tails of Hoffman” (for the opera The Tales of Hoffman).
My parents thought I had lost my mind. I’d even paid my
entire week’s salary of $15 from Stop and Shop ,where I worked as a bagger
after school. That’s how much I wanted that crazy object.
As I said, my parents thought I was nuts until I
painted the Hoffman tailor’s press “deer” tan and white and gave it a big red
nose.
Suddenly my parents saw what I saw: It was Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer, a 500-pound cast iron version, but Rudolph nonetheless.
Keep in mind, the carol says, “All the other reindeer
wouldn’t let poor Rudolph play in any reindeer games.” In other words, he got
picked on.
My parents didn’t pick on him exactly, but they didn’t
“see” him till I painted his nose red.
Others did pick on him.
He stood in my parents’ yard in Mt.Carmel
from 1960 to 1992, when my father died.
I had Rudolph moved to my Vermont house that year along with my
parents’ furniture and he has been here ever since.
That’s 32 years outdoors in Connecticut
weather and 25 years outdoors in Vermont
weather for a total of 57 years outside in the elements. The snow has actually
reached up to his chin in Vermont.
I said my Rudolph got picked on. The moving company
charged me $75 extra to add him to the moving van. The driver called Rudolph
“that thing” and dropped him, breaking one of his “antlers” ( made from a cast
iron arm for the dry cleaning “pad”.)
The real estate agent in Vermont who sold me my house called him
“Rudolph the red nosed junk heap” and over the years many passers by have asked
me what is that “thing” in your yard?
Like my parents 57 years ago, the minute I say
“Rudolph” they “get it”.
It’s ironic isn’t it?
Rudolph in the Christmas story was picked on for having
a red nose. My sculpture is picked on until his “red nose” is pointed out and
unlocks his identity.
Like those three children’s stories, The Ugly Duckling,
Dumbo, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, my sculpture has been picked on for
his looks for his entire existence since I created him.
And let that be another children’s story with a lesson:
If you appreciate art, you will see reindeer when others do not .
Paul Keane grew up in the Mt.Carmel section of Hamden. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching
English for 25 years.
I have had a recurring thought ever since June 2, 1953, when I was 8 years old and saw the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on my black and white TV in my parents’ home in Mt. Carmel, Conn.
When I saw a queen step out of that golden carriage, I realized without having the adult words to say so, that there were two kinds of people in the world: those who are taken care of and those who have to take care of themselves.
This thought about royal people became especially irritating six years later when I was 14 and Queen Elizabeth’s son, Prince Charles, was 10.
That was the year my father took me to the hardware store, bought a Toro lawn mower and told me I had to go out and line up lawns to mow and pay him back the $88 he spent.
I got about 12 lawns and slowly paid him back over the summer. It was so long ago that the lawn mower he bought didn’t even have a retractable pull cord. It was just a rope with a knot on one end and a pull handle on the other.
I hated that work, especially since my father had simply laid it on me like a straightjacket.
It was then that my observation about royals became the first of a lifetime of repeated thoughts: “I’ll bet Prince Charles has never had to push a lawn mower in his life.”
Ever since then, I would notice Prince Charles in the news: as a teenager relaxing on the royal yacht; on a royal beach; when he went off to college; when he married Lady Diana riding in that same golden carriage his mother had used for her coronation; when he became a father; when he divorced; when he remarried; and now, as the Duke of Edinburgh, his 96-year-old father, retires.
Every single time I have seen a photo of Prince Charles over the decades, my teenage thought returned to me: “I’ll bet that guy never had to push a lawn mower in his life.” And by “had to” I meant that if he didn’t, the lawn wouldn’t grow out of control and the world wouldn’t know he was lazy and undependable, as it would about me if my lawn(s) were left to go to seed.
This recurring thought may sound petty and childish, and, yes, obsessive. (Psychiatrists, feel free to weigh in.)
But in my opinion, something else is going on here.
When my father bought me that lawn mower in 1959 and set me up in business, he was creating an adulthood ritual for me to undergo (a kind of capitalistic bar mitzvah) in which I had to prove to him, to the neighbors and myself, that I could be reliable, accomplish adult work and make money to pay debts.
Every time I saw Prince Charles from that point on, I was reminded of that ritual and grudgingly acknowledged my father’s wisdom in making me grow up and take care of myself.
I was reminded too that my father knew there weren’t any princes in America. That in this country, our wonderful democracy where every boy and girl can create a self-made business, I couldn’t grow up to smell the roses, unless I first grew up and mowed the lawn.
______________________________
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.
Column: An Invitation That Opened (Some)
Minds
•A 1989 photo of British actor and author
QuentIn Crisp. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
Paul Keane For the Valley News
Saturday, July 29, 2017
Bruce Jenner won Olympic gold for America and was
celebrated as the greatest male athlete in the world in 1976. Caitlyn Jenner
was not even a twinkle in the public imagination 40 years ago. The complex
issues of gender identity were hardly recognized.
That same year, I entered YaleDivinitySchool,
and during that school year, the most famous transvestite in the world gave a
one-man show nearby in New Haven’s
Long Wharf Theatre. Quentin Crisp, 71, had turned his autobiography The Naked Civil
Servant about his life as a cross-dresser in Britain into an
hour and a half monologue of the same title.
It ran for weeks at Long Wharf Theater; I attended the production with another
divinity student, Carol Brock (who later became a Unitarian minister), and we
both were impressed by Crisp’s wit and articulateness.
We invited him to speak about transvestitism at the divinity
school and to our surprise, he accepted. I later learned that one of his
guiding principles was, “Never turn down an invitation.”
Brock and I put up posters around the school and on the Yale
campus in downtown New Haven,
and reserved the auditorium at the divinity school, which had at least 200
seats.
We had no idea if anyone would attend, especially since
transvestitism wasn’t exactly a household word then.
The day arrived (I believe it was a 2 p.m. event), and about 30
people showed up.
Zero faculty from the divinity school attended, and most of the
students were from other departments.
Surprisingly, to Brock and myself, several faculty from the Yale
Department of Psychology attended, which made Crisps’ opening remark, spoken
with his British accent, all the more notable.
Let me set the scene. Crisp had white hair dyed purple, as was
the fashion of older American women at the time — by intention or through bad
hair coloring. His fingernails were painted red and he wore lipsstick and
makeup. He wore a black velvet fedora hat and spoke in impeccable, elegant
sentences. He said he spoke in “Crisperanto.”
(Note: I have created a blog detailing his appearance at the
divinity school and listing many of his quotes:
http://crisperanto.blogspot.com.)
Here is the first sentence he uttered: “Are we all agreed, then:
Psychology was a mistake?”
Like Oscar Wilde before him, he spoke epigrammatically, all the
better to imprint his words on others’ minds. Like Wilde, too, he was
heretical. When asked questions about God, he said he preferred to refer to him
as “You know who,” fostering the impression that no one in truth exactly knows
who God is or isn’t, anyway.
This was definitely not what divinity school folk wanted to
hear.
Since they had mostly ignored the event and were not in
attendance, they got their wish — they did not hear heresy. Their
non-attendance was an Ivy-league way of putting their hands over their ears. As
religious intellectuals and academics, they were much too polite to protest
Crisp’s speech on their campus, but made their feelings clear by their absence.
The faculty from the Psychology Department, on the other hand,
did exactly the opposite (despite his opening quip). They made their
professional interest in transvestitism clear by their presence at what was
certainly a controversial speech.
They were tactful but forthright in asking Crisp questions about
what it was like to be a transvestite. They even invited him to participate in
future interviews at their department to help them better understand the
phenomenon. Adhering to his guiding principle, Crisp accepted their invitation.
Forty years later, society is only just beginning to acknowledge the reality of
gender fluidity.
Crisp performed his one-man play in New York, where he took up residence in the
Hotel Chelsea in one of its famous one-room accommodations, for the next 20
years.
He wrote several books and was a columnist for the Village Voice
and other publications. He was still accepting every invitation offered him
until he died a month before his 91st birthday in 1999.
I am proud that I had the foresight to invite Crisp to Yale. He
told Brock and me that he was surprised by the invitation. He did not think a
divinity school would be interested in what he had to say.
It wasn’t.
But maybe psychology wasn’t such a mistake after all. ______________________________________
The “healing hand” is a famous ancient symbol associated with the shaman’s “touch”, which heals the sick.
My doctor for the last 15 years is a true healer, and also the author of a well known Vermont book: “Bag Balm and Duct Tape, Tales of a Vermont Doctor” (1989).
It’s the story of a young city-trained doctor who came to Vermont and how his country patients, in a town the author calls “Dumster”, taught him to be the kind of countrified doctor his patients were used to, and wanted to keep around.
His real name is Dr. Beach Conger and he’s about to turn 77. He retired three years ago from a practice in Ascutney, Vermont near my home, but he kept a second practice in Burlington where he lives.
I asked if I could follow him there, even though it’s a 90 minute drive, and he said “yes.”
I didn’t want to lose a doctor who speaks in down-to-earth images. Bag balm and duct tape are just the kind of medicine I understand. But the larger lesson in Beach Conger’s book is that a good doctor in many ways becomes the doctor his patients teach him to be.
Even a 77, Dr. Conger keeps this lesson fresh.
I communicate with him through email between our semi-annual visits, and he has willingly obliged me as a digital doctor, often saving me the drive to Burlington by dashing off an email reassurance or admonition.
He even gave me his personal email address when I told him I was having difficulty getting through to him at his office email address.
In the last five years there have been two other digital doctors in my life.
One is 59 and a cardiologist. He is amazingly responsive to email questions and always answers me within 24 hours, even though he is head honcho of his department, in other words, a big shot.
He, like the semi-fictional doctor in Bag Balm and Duct Tape, is letting his patients teach him what they want in a doctor, and digital interaction is definitely part of the modern patient’s expectations. When I first went to him a dozen years ago, email communication was not part of his repertoire
(Not that I’m a “modern” patient at age 72 , but I am a digital devotee.).
The third digital doctor just got his medical degree two years ago at nearby Dartmouth College. He is definitely a member of the digital generation.
He lives next door to me in Hartford Village, Vermont and even though he has not been my official doctor, he was coincidentally on duty in the emergency room a couple of years ago when I walked in having a heart attack.
He and I already had a digital relationship as neighbors because his dog kept escaping his electric fence and I would text him at the ER that the dog was loose and I was bringing him home.
But back to the heart attack.
The ER folks put me on a gurney with an intravenous drip and hooked me up to electrical patches to monitor my heart.
I was prisoner, tied down electrically in a tiny room behind a curtain at 4 a.m., text messaging a woman friend about my situation.
All of a sudden my neighbor doctor stuck his head through the curtain and asked, “What are you doing here, Paul?.”
“Having a heart attack, I think,” I replied.
Although he wasn’t assigned to my case, we had already established a long text message thread over his dog and he told me, “I’m on duty all day so text me and let me know how you are doing.”
I texted him throughout the day, even when I had a stent inserted surgically in my cardiac artery, and his digital hand-holding cheered me enormously, especially since he was a doctor and knew exactly what was happening to my body.
In three different ways these doctors from three different generations (77, 59, about 28) --- Dr. Bag Balm, Dr. Cardiac, and Dr. Neighbor --- all represent a new kind of medical hand-holding: pressing the flesh through a keyboard --- a 21st century kind of healing hand. Paul Keane grew up in Mt. Carmel. He lives in Vermont where he retired after teaching English for 25 years.
Yale shouldn’t simply change the name of Calhoun College to that of an alumnus who is not a white supremacist. It should re-examine the mission of the Divinity School (where I received a Master of Divinity degree in 1980) which treats eschatology like a benign academic theological category, instead of the dangerous and incendiary belief-system that it is, in whatever religion it appears.
It is not Christianity or Islam which is responsible for many of the mass killings we have seen in my lifetime. It is the unchallenged belief in eschatology (end time; final judgment; apocalypse) which has produced Jim Jones, David Koresh, the Tsarnaev brothers, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, and the San Bernandino husband and wife shooters, all in the last half-century.
It is time for President Peter Salovey’s challenge for Yale to engage in soul searching to be expanded to include the Divinity School on a topic equally as poisonous as institutional racism: the belief that God will punish mankind for not obeying his sacred word, by imposing a final judgment in an end-time of hellfire and torment or of eternal bliss.
Five thousand people attended the Teach-in on Racism at Cornell’s Barton Hall in 1969. The university shut down for a week to accommodate that teach-in after members of Black United Students ended their armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall — memorialized in a shocking front-page photo in the New York Times of black students with upraised rifles leaving Willard Straight.
I was there, having graduated from Ithaca College the year before. I had remained at Ithaca to teach three freshman English courses at the college and so had a flexible schedule to attend the teach-in.
I persuaded Ithaca College’s president, Howard Dillingham, to endorse holding a similar teach-in at IC. The entire town had been shaken by a student protest that involved students armed with guns and rifles, and so even tranquil Ithaca College went along with the idea that we needed to learn about this new grievance — racism.
I invited Cornell history professor Andrew Hacker, who had spoken eloquently to the Barton Hall teach-in, to speak at our smaller teach-in at Ithaca College, which at the time had about 2,000 students total.
Unlike Cornell, Ithaca did not shut down classes. Anyone attending the teach-in had to use one of the three excused “cuts” they were allowed per class. After three, at Ithaca College in 1969, students lost credit for the course, no matter what the excuse, illness included.
We were stunned and gratified when more than a third of the student body — 825 students — showed up at the student union ballroom for the teach-in, many willingly using one of their three “cuts” to attend. Most of us were white and had never heard of the word “racism.”
Sadly, 46 years later, Ithaca College is hearing the word “racism” ring in their ears these days, with students even staging a “no confidence” vote in their youthful, white president, Tom Rochon.
This is profoundly ironic, since the steps he has taken to respond to their complaints of institutional racism are almost as dramatic as Cornell shutting down classes for its five-day Teach-in on Racism 46 years ago. Rochon has called for students, faculty and staff to engage in institutional soul-searching about racial and cultural bias, and has put administrative projects on hold to allow the college to do so.
If only college presidents had been so flexible and responsive in the 1970s.
I left Ithaca in 1969 for a graduate school English program at a midwestern university I had never heard of before 1969, a school which paid my room, board and tuition and a small salary to be a graduate counselor in its dorms. The school’s name? Kent State University.
Paul Keane is a 1968 graduate of Ithaca College and taught freshman English courses there in 1969. Along with Peter Davies, author of “The Truth About Kent State,” he established the Kent State Collection at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library in 1977, preserving documents related to the 1970 killing of Kent State students by Ohio National Guardsmen.
From 1974-76, I served on the mayor of Hamden’s Bicentennial Commission. When Hamden resident Thornton Wilder, author of the play “Our Town,” died in 1975, we arranged with his sister, Miss Isabel Wilder, to acquire the famed author’s desk and chair and significant books from his study, with the promise that we would preserve them in a reconstructed version of the author’s study.
That effort took longer than the Bicentennial Commission’s 1976 charge, so we became the “Reconstituted Bicentennial Commission” and after nine years and two more mayors we finally arranged with an architect to construct a portion of Wilder’s study in a nook in the lobby of the then new Miller Memorial Library building. It was dedicated in May 1985 with Miss Wilder attending, at age 85. She would live ten more years and endow a scholarship for an annual Thornton Wilder essay contest at the Miller Library for high school students.
Last November, the Miller Library announced a major renovation of its facility. In a world in which memorials come and go when renovations and building projects occur, I am pleased to discover that the renovation did not alter the Bicentennial Commission’s promise to Miss Wilder that if she donated her brother’s desk and memorabilia to the Town of Hamden, we would put it on permanent display.
Citizens can still view that memorial to America’s most honored writer (and Hamden resident), Thornton Wilder, in the lobby of Hamden’s Miller Memorial Library, diagonally across from the Hamden Town Hall on Dixwell Avenue. I trust that that memorial — and our promise to Miss Wilder — will long endure.
Forty-five years ago, on May 4, 1970, at half past noon, I was watching pints of blood flow out of Jeffrey Miller’s head onto the asphalt parking lot of Kent State University. He had been shot by Ohio National Guardsmen during a student protest, not over the Vietnam war, but over the presence of guardsmen who had taken over the Kent State campus because of anti-Vietnam War protests. It’s a small distinction — anti-war vs. anti-guardsmen protest — but a telling one because history gets changed in the telling.
I didn’t know Jeffrey Miller’s name at that moment, although I would work with his mother and the parents of the other three students killed. We tried to get President Nixon to reverse Attorney Gen. John Mitchell, who refused to convene a federal grand jury to investigate the shootings. We would eventually get it convened in 1973, when Nixon took his eyes off Kent State to deal with Watergate and an acting attorney general was in place for three months. The administration had panicked when the duly appointed attorney general at the time, Elliot Richardson, and the assistant attorney general both jumped ship in protest (“The Saturday Night Massacre”) over Nixon’s dismissal of an independent special prosecutor, and they had to have someone run the Justice ship. Sounds confusing and it was. History can turn course forever in a simple three months, or in a tiny 13 seconds, the time it took guardsmen to shoot 67 rounds into 13 students at Kent State.
Without that three-month temporary attorney general, Robert Bork, no federal grand jury would ever have been convened to investigate the Kent State killings. After a month of testimony, the trial resulting from that grand jury was disbanded by the judge for what he called “insufficient evidence”: a failure to prove there was a conspiracy to deprive the Kent State students of their civil rights before the gunshots were fired. You could be dead after you were shot by Ohio National Guardsmen, but your civil rights were intact, unless the guardsmen had “agreed beforehand” (i.e., “conspired”) to take your civil rights away. No guardsman has ever spent a millisecond behind bars for killing those students.
I remember watching a national news show the day after the killings, and a mother of a college-age boy was being interviewed. Here are her exact words, which I will never forget: “If my son had long hair and sandals he should have been shot too.” Those vicious words from a mother about her son pinpoints the quality of fear and hatred between the generations in 1970. The healing humor of redneck Archie Bunker and his hippie son-in-law, Meathead, in the television series All in the Family had not been invented yet. “Never trust anyone over 30” was the mantra of a generation of kids whose fathers were sending them off to die in Vietnam.
Allison Krause
I didn’t know Jeffrey Miller. But I did know one of the three other students who were dead near my feet in that parking lot: Allison Krause. She ate in the cafeteria of the dorm where I was a 25-year-old graduate counselor, and she was conspicuous at 5-foot-10, and conspicuous as a striking brunette beauty with long hair.
She and her boyfriend were the Romeo and Juliet of our dorm complex, always together, always embracing each other. She was dying in his arms while Jeffrey Miller lay dead at my feet, part of his skull blown off. The guardsman’s bullet that hit her exploded on impact and ripped through several vital organs.
Alan Canfora
Alan Canfora was one of the nine wounded survivors, shot in the wrist. He had been wearing a headband like Jeffrey Miller, and had given the guardsmen an upraised middle finger while waving a black flag, a clear target. He is 65 now, and will become a father for the very first time, around this year’s forty-fifth anniversary, his Facebook page proudly proclaims. He has kept the annual memorial services at Kent State going for all these years. Sometimes history needs to stand still, if only for a candle to burn in remembrance.
Dean Kahler
Dean Kahler, the most seriously wounded of the nine survivors, has been in a wheelchair for 45 years. He and I and two other Kent State students drove from Ohio to the Nixon White House for the second time since the shootings, during the Watergate scandal in 1973, to present Nixon with 10,000 signatures from Kent State asking for a federal grand jury — petitions the president clearly did not want. Nixon was “busy Watergating” to quote his aide, Leonard Garment, who promised us he would “pass along the petitions to the president.”
Little did we know that, because Nixon had taken his eye off the Kent State ball to deal with Watergate, we would actually get a grand jury convened. Dean Kahler held the heavy cardboard box with those 10,000 signatures in his lap that day in the White House Executive Office Building. It is the closest a Kent State victim ever got to President Nixon. Nixon’s own words after the shooting were bloodless in their coldness: “When dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.”
The day before the shootings, Allison Krause put a flower in a National Guardsman’s rifle and said, “Flowers are better than bullets.” The Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko would write a poem dedicated to Krause: He titled it Flowers and Bullets.
When I last saw Dean Kahler in Boston, where we shared a hotel room for the 25th anniversary of the shootings at a memorial held by Emerson College, I became fully aware of the daily difficulties a paraplegic endures, despite the passage of the Americans for Disabilities Act, which Kahler worked to have made law after his own disability was thrust upon him by guardsmen’s bullets. He still had both his legs at that 25th anniversary, albeit paralyzed. His Facebook page today reveals that they have since been amputated; but it also reveals that he still competes in wheelchair races. He, too, is in his 60s now.
When Time Stopped
When I was watching the blood flow out of Jeffrey Miller’s head, time stopped for me, or rather it seemed to slow down. I suppose that was PTSD, although that term hadn’t been invented in 1970. There was an eerie silence among the crowd. A faculty marshal was shouting at students to leave the area lest they all be killed.
I was there as an observer, in my role as a graduate dorm counselor. My eyes were so riveted on Jeffrey Miller’s ashen face and the flowing blood that I failed to notice a girl on her knees screaming near the body with her hands upraised. That image became the most famous photo of the anti-war protest movement. It inspired the musical group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young to create what became the rock anthem for that movement, Four Dead in Ohio, whose line Tin soldiers and Nixon comin’ rang frighteningly true.
All I could see was death, not the future photo that would imprint itself on the country’s conscience. There was no way anyone could lose this much blood and not be dead, I thought.
I walked calmly, almost in a daze, back to my dorm to call my parents in Connecticut to tell them I was alive. When I found that the phones were dead, I thought, “I am trapped,” and I got in my car and drove out of town with only the clothes on my back. (Cell phones had not yet been invented.)
I noticed telephone lines on the ground as I drove out of Kent, being “repaired.” Or were they being disconnected to cut off students from the “outside agitators,” which Ohio’s governor, James A. Rhodes, claimed were coming to the Kent campus. That fear-mongering was the governor’s pretext for having sent in the National Guard two days before. “They’re worse than the Brownshirts, and the Communist element, and also the Night Riders, and the vigilantes. They’re the worst type of people that we harbor in America and we’re not going to let them take over campus,” Gov. Rhodes had declared. He was running for the U.S. Senate and this rhetoric made him look tough. I did not find a working phone for 10 miles.
The National Guard and the FBI took over the campus immediately after the shootings and ordered 18,000 resident students to leave at once; buses were brought in to ferry them away. The campus had been emptied by nightfall on May 4, 1970. I was a bit sick to my stomach. I drove to Cleveland where a family I had met only once took me in.
Every room on campus was searched for “weapons.” One of my RAs (resident advisors) was a geology major in Manchester Hall, a dorm where I was a counselor. His geology rock collection was confiscated by the FBI and later appeared as evidence on a display table set up by the local Portage County special grand jury for the press to photograph, evidence that students had been harboring “weapons” in their dorms to injure the National Guardsmen. Authorities (including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) were desperate to prove that the guardsmen had acted in self-defense in killing four ivory-tower young people on an Ohio campus. Officials first reported that a sniper may have fired at the guardsman, but no evidence was ever produced of one.
That Portage County grand jury exonerated the guardsmen for the killings and indicted students and faculty for creating an atmosphere of violence leading to the shootings. One of the students indicted was Craig Morgan, president of the Kent State student body. He was also an ROTC cadet. History is often made up of absurdities, and this was one of them: The students caused themselves to be shot, according to the local grand jury.
While hippies and yippies chanted “Seig heil, Judge Jones,” I stood outside the Portage County courthouse in 30-degree weather carrying a homemade sign saying “$137,000 of your tax money is being WASTED.” I wore a three-piece suit to show the public I was respectable, even if I did have a beard — a symbol of protest and rebellion in 1970. It snowed while I stood there, so I built a snowman to hold my sign. Of the 25 persons indicted (23 students, two faculty members), charges against 20 were dropped. One was found guilty of interfering with fire equipment. Several pled guilty to “inciting to riot.” Judge Jones imposed a gag order forbidding anyone participating in the trial to discuss the verdict, including Kent State’s president. One courageous faculty member, Glenn Frank, defied that order.
The Distance
The closest student killed was 265 feet from a guardsman. Let’s assume he or she had a rock as a weapon. Major League outfielders can throw that far, but your average college student cannot. It is worth noting here that Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, himself a lawyer, is on record as saying that in his opinion the Kent State killings were “at least second-degree murder” if the guardsmen were not fired upon or gave no warning to the protesters. Dead were Jeffrey Miller, 265 feet from the guardsmen, Allison Krause, 343 feet, William Schroeder, 382 feet, and Sandy Scheuer, 390 feet.
I am sorry to report that two years before the Kent State killings, three male students were shot in the back and killed by state troopers at South Carolina State University at Orangeburg during anti-segregation protests. The students were black, and were soon forgotten.
And 11 days after the Kent State killings, three students were killed by local and state police at Jackson State College in Jackson, Miss., in an anti-war student protest. They too were black, and they too were soon forgotten.
The Kent State students were white and were remembered vividly for decades. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young saw to that. So did the famous photo of Jeffrey Miller with the screaming girl kneeling beside him.
Not the bigotry of Orangeburg or Jackson State, but the passage of time, has finally diluted Kent State, a name that sounds to modern ears like Iwo Jima sounded to my ears 50 years ago, a distant event, inked on the pages of a history book. There is no blood left in the words “Kent State” at all.
And I suppose that is a blessing. How could we live in a world where over 60 million people were killed in a single World War, if we carried their blood on our hands throughout our lives? The amnesia of history, its ability to white-out guilt and shame, is probably a psychological necessity.
I wish I could tell you the American system worked and justice was done for the dead and wounded who lay bleeding around my feet on the parking lot at Kent State 45 years ago.
Nixon took his eye off his acting attorney general, who somehow allowed a federal grand jury to squeak through the Justice Department. Did he intend it — did he even know it? That three-month “temp,” Robert Bork, was later rejected as being too conservative when nominated for the Supreme Court. One wonders about his motives. Or perhaps he was a real lawyer, simply following the law.
Seeking Answers
I left Kent State late in 1973 and went on to Yale University Divinity School to try to understand what kind of divine power would allow unarmed students to be maimed and killed by armed, uniformed officers in America. I never found an answer.
In 1977, seven years after the killings, I arranged for the largest collection of Kent State archives related to the shootings to be donated, but not to Kent State Library, which refused to guarantee to protect them. Remember, Kent State was funded by the state of Ohio, which was being sued by the parents of the dead students in a civil lawsuit (later settled for $675,000) after the federal trial was dismissed by the judge, so it was absurd to think Kent State would agree in writing to protect documents that might be used in evidence against their own funding source.
No, the archives would go not to Kent State — where they rightfully belonged, historically speaking — but to Yale University instead, which not only guaranteed to protect them but to put them in their Manuscripts and Archives Division at Sterling Memorial Library. Yale has one of the great libraries of the world with over 15 million volumes. The donation is called the Kent State Collection at Yale and can be found on the Internet.
I have often said since then that getting the archives donated to Yale instead of to Kent State was the only justice the parents of the dead would ever receive: poetic justice.
There has not even been the slim satisfaction of a poetic justice for those slain black students at Orangeburg and Jackson State during these 45 years of honoring the white Kent State dead.
How long will it be before Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Tamir Rice are lost to such white-outs of history? Or as demography changes, and people of color become the American majority, are such white-outs on their way out ?
I suspect sadly, that, black or white, history will continue to be written in blood, not in ink.
Except mine.
Paul Keane is a resident of Hartford and a retired high school English teacher. He and author Peter Davies established the Kent State Collection at Yale.
J.D. Salinger: New England residents swap tales about encounters with the author
A Vermont teacher heard many stories about Salinger, from a student who often watched "Jeopardy!" with him to the author's love of church suppers.
ByPaul Keane
'The Catcher in the Rye' author J.D. Salinger lived in Cornish, N.H. for many years.
Little, Brown & Co./AP
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Author J.D. Salinger hid away for decades in plain sight in Cornish, N.H., a feeding town for the high school where I taught English in Vermont for 25 years.
As such, I had access to all kinds of folklore and harmless gossip about the reclusive writer for years.
One of my students was his next-door neighbor and used to go over to his house every night and watch "Jeopardy!" with him, a game show which apparently Saliinger "loved."
She told me that on Halloween, Salinger would not give out candy. Instead he handed out pencils. This must have been a huge disappointment to sugarized kids, but if their parents had an ounce of literary sense, they would have realized their child had just been given the equivalent of Excaliber by King Arthur himself.
A pencil from Salinger! Imagine what that would bring on "Antiques Roadshow." Or better, imagine how it might energize a fledgling writer, perhaps King Arthur's intent?
Rumor had it that Salinger's second wife (who was half his age) volunteered in our school for years, but I was too polite to try to find out, although other teachers confirmed it. Privacy is privacy, after all.
One of my students was running a cash register at Price Chopper (or a similar grocery store five minutes from my school) in West Lebanon, N.H. one day and noticed that the white-haired man behind the middle-aged woman at the register looked just like J.D. Salinger.
When the woman handed her a credit card with the last name Salinger, my student flashed the woman a look, and the woman flashed her a look back which said, "That's him, yes, but don't say anything."
For years, one of my colleagues and his wife would attend local church suppers. J.D. Salinger loved church suppers and was always first in line at them. My colleague and his wife would often eat with him but learned from observation that he would get up and leave if anyone approached him about his identity as a writer. He wanted to be "just Jerry," not J.D. Salinger.
In later years, after infirmity set in, Jerry would still be first in line at church suppers, but he would stand there using a ski pole as a cane to steady himself. That's snow country class.
I know of one exception to this rule of public anonymity: Another one of my colleagues was the son of one of the owner's of Lou's, a famous Dartmouth breakfast joint in Hanover, where Salinger (and Robert Frost!) ate regularly.
One day, he asked Jerry if he would sign a copy of "The Catcher in the Rye" for his son (now my colleague), and Jerry complied. That signature on "Catcher" today is worth $10,000, according to a recent estimate.
Another one of my students had an aunt who bought the home owned by J. D. Salinger in his first marriage. The aunt describes a tunnel between the house and the garage which Jerry had built "to avoid journalists" and paparazzi. At one point in his career, a national magazine sent a photographer to stake him out until he got Salinger's photo. After three days, he got it, not at his tunnel-equipped home, but at the Windsor post office.
Another one of my colleagues has a brother who is a local mechanic and repaired "Jerry's" car for years. He too asserts it was "just Jerry."
Perhaps most fascinating, for me, is the story of a local N.H. volunteer firefighter, a story which adds credence to the report that, beginning in 2015, five more Salinger manuscripts will be published by the estate of "just Jerry."
The fireman recounts that one day, his department was called to put out a fire at the Salingers' Cornish home. The fire was in the basement where Salinger had his study and at one end of the study was a wall safe.
Salinger was so grateful that the fire had been extinguished without destroying his study that the next day he appeared at the volunteer fire company and handed them "a check for $18,000," said the firefighter.
The firefighter looked at me and said, "There was something in that safe he was very grateful we saved." And then he added, in case I didn't get it, "Manuscripts."
What his authority was for such a conjecture, I know not.
But I trust local gossip. Especially when it's just about Jerry. Paul Keane, M.A.,M.Div.,M.Ed, is a Monitor contributor and blogs at The Anti-Yale.
Thanks for the photos of Sir Winston's cigar and its final resting place.
It is a beautiful presentation.
Donating it to you is one of the best decisions I ever made. Your (Allen's) statement that "the cigar now goes down a storm with visiting school groups" is a true gift to this retired teacher.
It's been a totally rewarding experience from beginning to end ---all 52 years of it !
Best,
Paul
Paul Keane
Dear Paul
I attach a couple of pictures of the cigar in its specially made box! It is sitting on a piece of smooth Japanese paper in a 'trough' made from archival card and is held in there by 3 straps of inert polyethylene. All totally and easily reversible.
Hope you like it!
Best wishes
Sarah
From: Allen Packwood Sent: 11 September 2013 10:09 To: 'Paul Keane' Cc: Sarah Lewery Subject: RE: Tom Friedman article and inquiry
Thanks Paul, am copying to Sarah. The box has certainly been completed, and I am sure she will be able to send you a photo. The cigar now goes down a storm with visiting school groups.
A YaleDivinitySchool
graduate has offered the Tsarnaev family one of his burial plots.
On Monday, Paul Keane published a post on his blog, “The Anti-Yale,” that said he is offering the family of the
Boston bombing suspect a plot next to his mother at the Mt. Carmel Burying
Ground in Hamden, Conn.
“The only condition is that I do it in memory of my mother
who taught Sunday School at the Mt. Carmel Congregational Church for twenty
years and taught me to ’love thine enemy,’” he writes.
“I own the plot. No one can refuse me access,” he
adds.
The 68-year-old retired public school teacher owns four burial plots in the cemetery, the New Haven Register
reports. Two of the plots remain vacant. Keane, who lives in Vermont, says he has no use for them since
purchasing ones there.
“This person, I don’t care what a pariah he is, everybody
deserves a burial, so I’m willing to make this offer,” Keane said.
More than two weeks after his death, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s
family is struggling to find a place to bury him. City officials in Cambridge, Mass.,
said the city cemetery would reject Tsarnaev’s body, so would a Boston-area mosque and other private cemeteries.
Peter Stefan, the funeral director stuck with the
controversial corpse, said he has received offers from out-of-state cemeteries,
AP reports. He refused to give details out of concern that
other funeral home would become targets of protests like his.
"Once the neighbors find out who's coming, they're
going to come out," he said.
Mayor Scott Jackson hopes the offer will be free from the publicity
the issue has garnered.
“I certainly hope if this offer is legitimate, and is
legitimately being offered in the spirit of whom it claims to be, then I would
guess it would actually be done in a different way — in a quiet way, in a
Christian way, that requested or required no additional comment,” he told the
New Haven Register.
Keane says he believes his decision is the right thing to
do.
“I’ve only got one life to lead, and I’m going to be the guy
who speaks up for the pariah, for the leper, for the hated person — and for the
family in despair,” he said.
