Review, Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man (Dutton, 1992)

Columbia Missourian, August 15, 1993

In 1956, television’s most successful writer, Rod Serling, wrote a teleplay for CBS’s United States Steel Hour based on the lynching of a 14-year-old black boy in Mississippi. The network balked, forcing Serling to make changes. As he later said, “the black [man] was changed to suggest ‘an unnamed foreigner,’ the locale was moved from the South to New England—I’m convinced they would have gone to Alaska or the North Pole and used Eskimos except that the costume problem was of sufficient severity not to attempt it. But it became a lukewarm, emasculated, vitiated kind of a show.”

The paradox of Serling’s career rests on the fact that he was committed to writing topical, controversial material, yet his talent was best suited for television, the most censored and regulated mass medium. As biographer Gordon Sander shows, Serling engaged in an ongoing battle with network censors, earning him the label “television’s last angry man.” Thus while Serling was winning six Emmy awards, the president of his own network was determined to drive him off the air.

Serling’s stroke of genius, what allowed him a respite from the censors, was his series The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). When he first announced his intention to do a fantasy series, many accused him of selling out. But The Twilight Zone allowed Serling to tackle issues like nuclear war, racism, blacklisting and lynching in allegorical fashion. As his wife, Carol, said, “Rod felt that drama should be an assertion of social conscience. He found that in The Twilight Zone, through parable and suggestion, he could make the same point that he wanted to make with straight drama.”

Sander traces Serling’s journey to The Twilight Zone in a way that highlights the major influences on his career. Except for a cloying, pretentious introduction in which, in New Journalism fashion, Sander reads himself into Serling’s thoughts at a certain point in his career, the author presents Serling’s life in a straightforward manner. He devotes chapters to Serling’s childhood in Binghampton, New York, his service as a paratrooper in World War II, his years at the liberal arts Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and his early career in radio and television in Cincinnati, showing how these experiences shaped Serling’s art and world view.

In an excellent chapter on television’s short-lived “Golden Age,” Sander recreates the excitement surrounding the era when people were beginning to grasp the medium’s possibilities. At the center of this creativity were talented screenwriters such as Gore Vidal, Paddy Chayefsky, Earl Hamner, and Reginald Rose. According to director Arthur Penn, the principle for television’s success was to “get the good writers, and the good writers will bring the good actors, and the good actors will bring the good directors. And there we were, that’s how we became a circle. Each one of us would stimulate the other.”

Through the early years of television’s “Golden Age” Serling had built up a reputation as a talented screenwriter, but a success on the scale of Chayefsky’s 1953 drama Marty eluded him until 1955 when Kraft Television Theater presented his teleplay Patterns. The script was about the psychological underside of the era’s celebrated “man in the gray flannel suit.” Most effective was what critic Andrew Sarris called the play’s “anti-cliché ending to end all anti-cliché endings,” in which the idealistic younger executive confronts the company’s ruthless head. The boss refuses to atone for his viciousness, offers the younger man a chance to stay, and the honorable man accepts.

Patterns catapulted Serling into prominence as television’s leading writer. He followed it with other excellent plays, most notably Requiem for a Heavyweight for Playhouse 90 in 1956. But while Serling was at the top of his profession, many of the medium’s other leading writers were leaving the business, incensed by sponsor interference with the content of the shows. Advertisers wanted upbeat programs, reasoning these would sell more products. By 1959, CBS was under the dominion of network president James Aubrey whose business philosophy was “The more interesting the programming content of a television show is, the more it interferes with the commercial message.”

In this atmosphere it is amazing that CBS accepted The Twilight Zone. The network brass probably were relieved Serling would be preoccupied with his fantasy series. But the show remained topical. It was, for instance, the first time television portrayed a nuclear war in the 1959 episode Time Enough at Last. As Carol Serling said, “The TV censors left him alone, either because they didn’t understand what he was doing or believed that he was truly in outer space.” But Serling earned the enmity of Aubrey, who was determined to rid CBS of The Twilight Zone.

After the show’s cancellation in 1964, Serling never recaptured the form that had made him the top in his profession. Sander traces his last years until his death in 1975, where Serling was reduced to shilling products like Anacin, Crest and Echo Floor Wax, as well as hosting such insipid game shows as Rod Serling’s Liar’s Club. In a Twilight Zone-style twist, Serling seemed caught in one of his own plays, like Mountain McClintock, the former boxing champion reduced to working as a professional wrestler in Requiem for a Heavyweight. Or, as one character warns the successful television writer in Serling’s 1959 play The Velvet Alley, “You know how they do it? They give you a thousand dollars a week, and they keep giving it to you until you can’t live without it. Then they start to talk about taking it away, and there isn’t anything you won’t do to keep that thousand dollars a week.”

Serling ranks in importance with such people as Edward R. Murrow, Lucille Ball and Ernie Kovacs as a television pioneer. Sander provides a useful introduction to Serling’s legacy, as well as the growth of the medium that has revolutionized virtually every facet of American life in the past 50 years.

Review, Nat Hentoff, Listen to the Stories: Nat Hentoff on Jazz and Country Music (HarperCollins, 1995)

Columbia Missourian, September 17, 1995

The great bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker liked to go into his favorite tavern and play country music on the jukebox. Astounded by his taste for what they considered a clearly inferior musical form, Parker’s fellow jazz musicians asked him, “How can you stand that stuff?”

“The stories, man,” Parker replied. “Listen to the stories!”

Nat Hentoff has been listening to the stories for more than a half century from his boyhood in Boston to his long tenure as jazz critic for the Village Voice. His musical interests, though, extend beyond even the elastic term “jazz”; this book collects many of his writings over the past decade on folk and country music as well as jazz.

But, as Hentoff argues, such categories are arbitrary. The music transcends artificial boundaries, with the great performers drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources. Thus jazz pianist Fats Waller used to warm up for his performances by playing Debussy. Similarly, Parker not only enjoyed country, but also was a knowledgeable fan of classical music. As he once said about listening to Bartok’s “Second Piano Concerto,” “I heard things in it I never heard before. You never know what’s going to happen when you listen to music. All kinds of things can suddenly open up.” Similarly, country singer Merle Haggard not only is a walking encyclopedia of almost every style of country music, but also claims as an influence the jazz of such performers as Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt.

This multiculturalism often transcends racial lines, pointing up that much of the best American culture is a mulatto hybrid. The King of Texas Swing, Bob Wills, was heavily influenced by the songs of black sharecroppers he heard as a youth in west Texas, and as a boy he once traveled 50 miles by horseback to see a performance by the great blues singer Bessie Smith. When Hentoff once commented to country banjo player Earl Scruggs that he heard a strong Irish influence in Scruggs’s playing, the musician responded, “A lot more than Irish. There’s black in there, too. No musician with ears can leave out the black.” As Dizzy Gillespie once said, “All of music is out there in the first place, all of it. From the beginning of time the music was there. All you have to do is try to get a little piece of it. I don’t care how great you are, you only get a little piece of it.”

Most of the articles are short (two-three pages); Hentoff has developed a knack for brief, memorable descriptions of a performer’s abilities. About vocalist Carmen McRae, he comments, “You could hear the commas in the lyrics,” while for trumpeter Buck Clayton, “In his solos even the silences pulsated.” Other descriptions are less kind: Dave Brubeck “played the piano as if he were clearing a lifelong trail through a forest of giant sequoias,” while vocalist Mary McHugh “sang with all the passion and dynamics of Justice William Rehnquist.” Occasionally the opinions border on the heretical, as when Hentoff defends Bing Crosby as one of the most underrated jazz singers.

While Hentoff celebrates the music’s heritage, he expresses concern for its future. Ironically, much of the crisis in jazz has been brought about by its success in infiltrating academia, with the establishment of jazz programs at several major universities. This higher musical education has imbued a generation of performers with phenomenal technique and an encyclopedic knowledge of the form, but also often makes listening to the music as exciting as reading a phone book. Hentoff complains that an album by saxophonist Anthony Braxton, one of the young lions of jazz, has liner notes, written by Braxton, that are mainly mathematical equations. Often lost, Hentoff says, are the indefinable ability to swing as well as the development of a personal style. As multi-instrumentalist Benny Carter comments, “The kids are fantastically endowed with technique. They do more today than I would have thought possible fifty and sixty years ago. But they sacrifice a lot of emotional content for technique. And skilled as they are, I can’t tell one from another.”

Hentoff also worries that children are not being introduced to the rich musical legacy Americans have created. How many black students, he wonders, “have the slightest idea that [Duke] Ellington was the most abundantly original composer in the history of the country? And a composer who in his work . . . wrote of the black experience in America, from its beginnings, with extraordinary depth, wit, tenderness, and strength. How many schoolkids of any color anywhere in the United States know anything about Ellington? Or Lester Young? Or Charles Mingus? Or Bessie Smith? Or Jo Jones? They have been deprived of the richest, most distinctive strain of their own cultural heritage. And most of them stay culturally deprived for the rest of their lives.”

Review, Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, May 1, 1994

On November 1, 1961, in cities across the nation, 50,000 women marched under the slogan Women Strike for Peace to protest the American and Soviet governments’ testing of nuclear weapons. Defining themselves as mothers concerned for the welfare of their children, the demonstrators carried signs proclaiming “Save the Children.” Defending their unprecedented entrance onto the Cold War political stage in terms of their traditional maternal role, the women had little idea that they were changing the nature of American politics. But, as Amy Swerdlow argues, WSP itself was transformed as its members confronted the limitations of justifying their political participation on the basis of traditional gender roles.

For mothers in the post-World War II era, the culturally prescribed role was to remain home and provide a nurturing setting for the children of the baby boom and the working men in gray flannel suits. But many women felt increasingly stifled in suburban homes that Betty Friedan labeled “comfortable concentration camps.” Thus the opportunity to escape the home and participate in a meaningful way in a current political debate struck a responsive chord. By defending their politicization in terms of their maternal role, WSP members circumvented charges that they had no business in politics.

The spectacle of so many female demonstrators baffled both the media and public officials, Swerdlow says. “Because the marchers seemed to belong to no unifying organizations and because their language was so maternal and nonideological, their sudden appearance on the political stage seemed to be totally apolitical and spontaneous.”

But the image, largely self-cultivated, that a group of political naïfs conceived and executed WSP is deceiving, Swerdlow says. In fact, a group of Washington, D.C., homemakers, led by the children’s book illustrator Dagmar Wilson, had called the strike five weeks earlier. Like a significant number of other women in WSP, Wilson was a successful career woman, though in light of the period’s emphasis on home and family, she chose to present herself as a concerned mother and homemaker.

Angered by other peace organizations’ unwillingness to speak out on the dangers of nuclear testing, Wilson and other women issued a call for women across the country to take a day off from their usual routine to draw attention to the dangers confronting themselves and their children. Specifically, Wilson saw the importance of injecting women’s voices into the political discourse. “You know how men are,” she said. “They talk in abstractions and prestige and the technicalities of the bomb, almost as if this were all a game of chess. Well, it isn’t. There are times, it seems to me, when the only thing to do is let out a loud scream. . . . Just women raising a hue and cry against nuclear weapons for all of them to cut it out.”

Originally, WSP was conceived as a one-time event, but the success of the November 1 demonstration encouraged the women to maintain their organization. At the same time, though, they were resolved not to form another hierarchically-structured organization with power concentrated in the hands of a few at the top. WSP, then came to be marked by a “structurelessness” that emphasized participation and democracy. As Swerdlow says, this structure, which the WSPers self-deprecatingly referred to as “unorganization,” became one of the groups most important legacies for the later women’s movement.

In the anti-Communist atmosphere of the early 1960s, even a group defending its activism along traditional gender lines, could not escape public attack forever. In December 1962, several WSP leaders were called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee to testify about alleged Communist domination of the group. Throughout the Cold War period, an appearance before the committee carried with it the threat of social, political, and economic reprisals if the witness did not cooperate fully. But the WSPers refused to be intimidated by the committee, packing the room with supporters and handing out bouquets. The witnesses, even when refusing to cooperate, presented themselves as unwilling to play by traditional political rules. When a congressman demanded of one witness, “Did you wear a colored paper daisy to identify yourself as a member of the Women Strike for Peace?” she replied, “It sounds like such a far cry from communism it is impossible not to be amused. I still invoke the Fifth Amendment.”

Swerdlow traces the history of WSP through the rest of the 1960s, showing how the organization played an important role in the movement against the Vietnam War. She also portrays the paradoxical relationship between WSP and the growing women’s movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The younger feminists frequently denounced WSP for accepting and even reinforcing traditional gender patterns. But as Swerdlow points out, the feminists failed to recognize how WSP had paved the way for their own success. For under the guise of defending stereotypical women’s roles, WSP had undermined the hegemony of those roles by building a women’s organization and challenging the traditional male bastion of politics. With a keen understanding of the complexities and ironies of historical change, Swerdlow argues that the story of WSP “reveals that maternal rhetoric can be an inspirational organizing tool, a source of energy, commitment, and passion. . . . It can mobilize a deeply felt woman’s critique, and project an alternative vision of international relations and social interaction, along with fresh forms of dissent and direct action.”

Review, David W. Levy, The Debate Over Vietnam (The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991)

The Maryland Historian, Spring/Summer 1992

In his memoir A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo comments that the U.S. Marine Corps trained for Vietnam by imitating tactics used by the British during the Malayan uprising of the 1950s, a conflict which bore only superficial resemblance to the one in Vietnam. “So, as always sees to be the case in the service,” Caputo wrote, “we were trained by the wrong war.” As David Levy, a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, argues, American policymakers were similarly “trained by the wrong war.” The United States entered Vietnam on the basis of an intellectual consensus that had been worked out in the late 1930s to justify American entry into World War II. But the consensus unraveled as the differences between the two wars—both moral and political—became apparent to increasing numbers of Americans.

Proponents of a more active American role in world affairs during the late 1930s based their arguments on two major foundations. First, they said, the United States possessed vital interests throughout the world that were threatened by the policies of Germany and Japan. Second, the internationalists contended, in the present struggle there could be no question of which side represented good and which side evil. But, as Levy says, in the minds of those advocating greater international involvement, “the two propositions were almost inextricably joined, combined so intimately, so unconsciously, that it was hard to see that the blend was, in fact, composed of two ingredients.”

This combination of arguments survived World War II to become the basis of the Cold War ideological consensus, with the Soviet Union supplanting the Axis Powers. Americans supported this consensus for a variety of reasons, but, Levy says, throughout the 1950s no one questioned what might happen if the two fundamental principles ever diverged. “The debate over Vietnam,” according to Levy, “occurred when this venerable blend of ideas seemed, to large numbers of Americans, to divide into its component parts, the parts each drawing the nation toward differing courses of action.”

For advocates of the war, the two basic ideas of the consensus—that U.S. national security was endangered and the enemy was immoral—were tied together by the “demonic specter” of communism. The perception of a threat to national security took several forms, but was seen most significantly in the “domino theory,” the idea that if one country in Southeast Asia fell to the Communists, the rest would follow in rapid succession. It was further argued that the United States needed to show the Communists the futility of undertaking wars of national liberation, and that failure to do so would result in other, similar insurgencies. But, Levy says, the “mere use of the word [communism] was often thought sufficient, by advocates of American participation, to excuse themselves from embarking upon laborious elaborations of why the fight was necessary.” For the war’s supporters, the lesson to be learned from the debate of the 1930s was clear—the United States must not engage in a policy of appeasement toward aggression as the Allies had toward Hitler at the 1938 Munich conference.

Opponents of U.S. policies in Vietnam argued on several bases that the war did not meet the criteria outlined by the consensus view. They claimed that national security would not be adversely affected by American withdrawal. But most importantly, Levy says, they attacked the war on a variety of moral fronts. First, antiwar spokespeople said the war was not really a response to an invasion of South Vietnam, but rather the United States was interfering in a civil war to prop up an unpopular government. This argument, Levy says, was the most vigorously contested of the entire debate, because both sides saw that the war’s morality was based on this question of whether the United States was responding to outside aggression. Finally, opponents decried the nature of the war itself. In Vietnam, Americans saw their country using its vast technological superiority to devastate a country in the name of saving it. The brutality of American policy in Vietnam numbed the moral sensibilities of those who fought there and the people back home who watched the war unfold on their television sets. If advocates of the war viewed Munich as the appropriate analogy, opponents drew upon another symbol from World War II—the Nuremberg trials for war crimes.

The debate over Vietnam came to include an extremely broad cross-section of the American people. But, as Levy points out, this debate was really a series of smaller debates taking place within the context of a wide variety of particular subcommunities. Levy looks at how the debate unfolded within several of these subcommunities. Within the Republican party, for example, the debate was relatively muted as the party managed to maintain a general consensus throughout the war. But the war shattered the Democratic party as several prominent Democratic senators and congressmen openly challenged the policies of President Lyndon Johnson. Among the relatively small but extremely influential subcommunity of public policy intellectuals, the issue of the war shattered the ideological consensus they had shared throughout the 1950s, as an increasing number of intellectuals grew outspokenly critical of the war while others moved rightward and demanded the administration take a harder line in Vietnam. The debate over the war also took place within most major religious denominations. And among African Americans, the issue found articulate spokespersons on both sides. Many blacks felt a personal sense of loyalty to President Johnson for his civil rights and antipoverty programs, while others, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., condemned the war for diverting attention away from these programs.

Levy’s book is most valuable in outlining the parameters of the debate within these various subcommunities. But by eschewing a chronological approach in favor of a thematic one, he fails to make clear the process by which the debate came to dominate American politics in the late 1960s. The consensus which Levy describes so effectively dominated the major social, political, educational and media institutions in the early part of the decade that the antiwar movement had to emerge from outside these institutions. It first grew out of the New Left, a loose coalition of mainly white college students, strongly influenced by the Civil Rights movement, who emphasized such vaguely-defined principles as anti-imperialism, “participatory democracy,” “authenticity” and “personal politics.” For New Leftists, Vietnam focused all these concepts on a single issue. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a major New Left group, organized the first major antiwar demonstration in April 1965. Only slowly did antiwar sentiment work its way into the major American institutions and become “respectable.” But as the antiwar movement became gradually domesticated, the New Left grew increasingly isolated from the movement it had done so much to create, as radical activists began using more revolutionary rhetoric and tactics. Levy fails to explain this process of the growth of the antiwar movement, the way in which it developed outside the political mainstream, and how it was gradually integrated into it.

Review, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, Not So Simple: The ‘Simple’ Stories of Langston Hughes (University of Missouri Press, 1995)

Columbia Missourian, November 19, 1995

“Few people have enjoyed being Negro,” Arna Bontemps once commented, “as much as Langston Hughes.” In his poetry, fiction, drama, criticism and journalism, Hughes delighted in expressing the realities of African-American consciousness and existence in a variety of voices, from educated members of the black bourgeoisie to the working-class residents of Harlem. With an excellent ear for the vernacular, and integrating various popular sources (such as jazz and blues) into his writing, Hughes captured the everyday rhythms and the diversity of African-American life. “Being colored myself,” he once wrote, “I find us terrible subjects for all kinds of writing, full of drama and humor and power and entertainment and evil and love and all sorts of things.”

Because of his success as a poet, though, the virtues of Hughes’ other writings often are overlooked. In this valuable study, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper provides an in-depth study of Hughes’ “Simple” stories which he wrote from the early-1940s until the mid-1960s. The story line was built on a common theme: Two men from different economic backgrounds meet in the democratic environment of a bar, where they discuss a variety of topics. In this setting, the less-educated character offers opinions that are often humorous, though his plain-spoken common sense frequently cuts through the fog of the educated character’s intellectual rationalizing to get to the heart of the matter. Thus Simple stands in a long American tradition, from Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley to Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik to Norm and Cliff on Cheers.

In Hughes’ stories, an educated foil, base on Hughes himself, though eventually given the name Ananias Boyd, regularly meets the working-class character, originally referred to as his “simple-minded friend” (later given the name Jesse B. Simple), in a Harlem bar. As Sullivan writes, “The premise of the Simple stories appeals as the primary step in the human quest for peace, understanding, and common ground: two men from different educational and cultural backgrounds meet on an equal plane, exchange ideas, develop a friendship, and bridge the gap between them.” But, as Sullivan points out, despite their many differences, Boyd and Simple share one crucial characteristic: They “both are black in a racially unbalanced society.” This shared racial consciousness provides common ground for the two. In Boyd’s view, Simple’s opinions might occasionally be ridiculous, but they cannot compare with the absurdity of Jim Crow.

Much of Sullivan’s focus is on reconstructing the sociopolitical context in which Hughes wrote. She argues, for instance, that the origin of the Simple stories cannot be understood apart from African-Americans’ ambivalent response to American participation in World War II. “Simple began his dialogues during the years when African Americans struggled with their own mixed feeling about the United States and its hypocrisy regarding democracy.” Black Americans resented being enlisted in a war against Hitler’s racism while the United States maintained an official policy of racism in the military and defense industries as well as in large portions of society in general. Civil rights activists used the war as an opportunity to force concessions from the government regarding integration and employment. As Sullivan comments, “From this climate of acute race consciousness sprang Simple.”

But Hughes refused to portray his characters as simply victims of racism. Rather, he understood that blacks responded to prejudice with a complex mixture of anger, sorrow, humor, resignation, resistance and withdrawal. As Sullivan shows, essential to Hughes’ nuanced portrait of Simple was the fact that the series originated in the black press, beginning as part of a weekly column he began writing for the Chicago Defender in 1942. Within this context, Hughes did not need to explain his various references to prominent black personalities and aspects of black culture. He could take for granted that his audience would understand his allusions. In the black press, Sullivan says, “Simple never needed to defend his anger about the travesties of American ‘justice’ or to explain his excitement about Lena Horne and Nat King Cole. Hughes knew that in the Defender he was free to select topics and use language—including slang—that he surely would not have chosen for a predominately white audience.” As Sullivan discusses, the writing of the Simple stories became more complicated when Hughes began collecting them into book form for a wider audience.

Hughes continued writing about Simple for more than two decades, eventually creating a play, Simply Heavenly, and being syndicated in the mainstream New York Post. But by the mid-1960s, Hughes’ gentle satire seemed an anachronism and he retired Simple in 1965. As he would comment two years later, “so ‘out of joint’ are the times, and currently so confusing is the racial situation, that were Simple to attempt to express the opinions of the average Harlem ‘man in the streets’ right now, he wouldn’t be considered as amiable as he used to be, nor the dialogue as balanced. I am afraid that tolerance is running downhill at a rapid rate and the situation is a difficult one to kid. And irony, satire, and humor are so easily taken amiss these days, both uptown and down.”

Yet, as Sullivan argues, Simple remains a universally recognized character type, still popular in this changed racial climate. With her detailed examination of the processes Hughes used to create and maintain his genial barfly, Sullivan demonstrates how, in Hughes’ words, “a fictional character can be ever so ethnic, ever so local and regional, and still be universal in terms of humanity.”

Review, Howard Zinn, Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian (Common Courage Press, 1993)

Columbia Missourian, September 5, 1993

During the past forty years, few people have combined the roles of scholar and activist as effectively as Howard Zinn. As a professor at Spelman College—a black women’s college in Atlanta—during the 1950s, Zinn worked with his students in the struggle for civil rights, later writing a history of the movement. As a professor at Boston University in the 1960s, he was a leading intellectual in the anti-war movement. More recently, he was an outspoken critic of the Persian Gulf War.

Zinn never has seen his roles as being in conflict, but rather as reinforcing each other. Using as a guide George Orwell’s dictum, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” Zinn has sought to open American history to powerless groups as the fist step to empowerment. Most notably in his myth-debunking A People’s History of the United States (1980), Zinn has sketched history from the bottom up, reinterpreting such staples of American mythology as the European “discovery” of America by viewing it from the perspective of the American Indians (and thus transforming the “discovery” into an “invasion”).

Failure to Quit, which collects some of Zinn’s articles and lectures from the past 20 years, draws lessons from history for contemporary activists. “As this century draws to a close,” he writes, “a century packed with history, what leaps out from that history is its utter unpredictability.” Although this uncertainty might be disconcerting, it also can offer solace to activists battling against great odds. Pointing to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of democracy movements in many Eastern European countries, Zinn says the first lesson one might draw from the history of the twentieth century is “that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it.”

A second lesson to be drawn from this history of ambiguity, Zinn says, is that no justification for war is adequate. “Massive violence, whether in war or internal upheaval, cannot be justified by any end, however noble, because no outcome is sure. . . . If the ends, however desirable, are uncertain, and the means are horrible and certain, those means must not be employed.”

Repeatedly, Zinn argues that the impetus for social change throughout American history usually has come not from government, but from ordinary people. The Bill of Rights, for instance, has been enforced and expanded only because common people have insisted on taking its words literally, while government officials normally have felt little compunction about violating the stated rights. “If it were left to the institutions of government,” Zinn comments, “the Bill of Rights would be left for dead. But someone breathed life into the Bill of Rights. Ordinary people did it, by doing extraordinary things. The editors and speakers who in spite of the Sedition Act of 1798 continued to criticize the government. The black and white abolitionists who defied the Fugitive Slave Law, defied the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, who insisted that black people were human beings, not property, and broke into courtrooms and police stations to rescue them, to prevent their return to slavery.”

Democracy, in Zinn’s view, is not the result of Congressional debates, Supreme Court decisions or presidential directives. Democracy originates with grass-roots movements that force those in power into changing the status quo. Pointing to the sit-ins in the early years of the civil rights movement, Zinn argues that had the students stayed within the law, no fundamental change would have occurred. Only by violating the law on a mass scale could demonstrators marshal enough power—moral, economic and political—to change the law. “Because what the movement did,” Zinn says, “was to create a countervailing power to the policeman with a club and a gun. That’s essentially what movements do: They create countervailing powers to counter the power which is much more important than what is written down in the Constitution or the laws.”

An understanding of history is essential, Zinn says, for Americans to assess the actions and rationales of their government. The government controls the present and future by controlling the images most Americans form of the nation’s past. This notion of American history is crucial, for instance, in justifying U.S. involvement in war. As Zinn argues, “one of the elements that goes into this process of persuasion is the starting point that the U.S. is a good society. Since we’re a good society, our wars are good. If we’re a good society, we’re going to do good things. We do good things at home. We have a Bill of Rights and color television. There are lots of good things you can say if you leave out enough.”

With a firm grasp of history, though, Americans can see through claims such as the one former President Bush made to justify war against Iraq. Bush sought to establish America’s claim to the moral high ground by arguing that the United States stood against aggression. But as Zinn says, “The record of the U.S. in dealing with naked aggression in the world . . . is so shocking, so abysmal, that nobody with any sense of history could possibly accept the argument that we were now sending troops into the Middle East because the U.S. government is morally outraged at the invasion of another country.” Pointing out that American history is filled with instances of military aggression, from the white settlers’ first encounter with Native Americans to the history of U.S. relations with Latin America and more recent acts of aggression committed by the United States and its allies during the Cold War period, Zinn effectively argues that official U.S. outrage against military aggression is applied only selectively.

Zinn is one of the handful of scholars who write primarily not for other academics, but for a wider audience. His conviction that history offers necessary lessons for the present and enables people to see through the official falsification that constitutes so much of our current political culture should inspire teachers, students, activists and others with a healthy sense of skepticism toward those in power. If my own view of the uncertainty of history is, as my students complain, more pessimistic than Zinn’s, I am nonetheless glad Zinn is there with his optimistic vision. As he says, “The future is not certain, but it is possible.”

Review, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds: Race and Class in Conflict, 1919-1980 (Michigan State University Press, 1995)

Columbia Missourian, 1995, July 2, 1995

In August 1950, William Patterson, a prominent African-American member of the American Communist Party, testified before the House Committee on Lobbying Activities, which ordered him to turn over all records and membership lists of the Communist-front Civil Rights Congress. Patterson not only refused, but began to castigate Representative Henderson Lovelace Lanham on the evils of segregation in the congressman’s home state of Georgia. Infuriated, Lanham leaped from his seat and charged Patterson, calling him a “black son-of-a-bitch,” only to be restrained by two policemen. Lanham’s remarks were stricken from the record.

The committee cited Patterson for contempt and a grand jury ordered him to turn over the CRC records. While the case dragged on for eight months, eventually to end in a hung jury, a coalition of black church leaders and newspaper editors campaigned in support of Patterson. For many African-Americans, even those unsympathetic to communism, Patterson stood as a heroic figure for his willingness to confront American racism publicly.

The courage of American Communists, both black and white, in attacking Jim Crow policies placed them at the forefront of the struggle for integration throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Because of the party’s commitment to civil rights, an impressive array of black intellectuals, including Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Harold Cruse and W.E.B. DuBois, were at one time either members or closely aligned with the party.

But as Earl Ofari Hutchinson argues, for the majority of African Americans, Communist doctrine held little appeal because it denied the racial basis of American society. According to Marxist theory, black workers had the same fundamental interests as did the white working class. Party leader William Z. Foster, for instance, could dismiss the Ku Klux Klan as “a class instrument for the oppression of the working class, of whatever race.”

“Foster’s opinion was certainly news,” Hutchinson comments, “to the thousands of blacks who felt the rope, torch and bullets of night riders. The Klan was an instrument of racial terror aimed not just at ‘whatever race’ but at blacks. If he had been completely honest, he would have admitted that lynch mobs were not just made up of capitalists but workers, too.”

For American Communists, though, when theory and reality were out of sync, the solution was to follow the theory and ignore reality. Thus, white Communist writer Mike Gold could criticize Hughes for not writing about proper “Negro themes,” just as the party would accuse Wright of “petty bourgeois nationalism” for writing about the psychological impact of American racism.

Despite this basic misunderstanding, the CP gained widespread sympathy among some sectors of the African-American community for its willingness to speak up on black issues. The party played a prominent role in efforts to free the Scottsboro boys, nine black men accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931; in agitating for anti-lynching legislation; and in ending legal segregation. During the Depression, in such places as Chicago and Harlem, the party led the fight against tenant evictions.

Within the party, several blacks rose to positions of influence. James Ford was a star athlete at Fisk University and a decorated veteran of World War I before joining the party and gaining prominence as a speaker, eventually serving as the CP’s vice-presidential candidate in 1932 and 1936. During one campaign stop in Durham, North Carolina, the local American Legion threatened to attack Ford if he spoke. Unintimidated, Ford mounted the rostrum wearing his Army ribbons and discussed his experiences serving in a segregated unit in the war. After the speech, a group of sympathetic white students from Duke University surrounded Ford and safely escorted him to the train station.

Hutchinson relates the stories of several other African Americans who played important roles in the CP. Patterson, for instance, was an attorney with extensive experience in the labor movement. In the late 1940s, he used his position as head of the party-backed CRC to present a petition to the United Nations charging the U.S. government with genocide against African Americans. The petition was based on principles derived from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, which defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, or religious group.” Although the white press and government officials dismissed the petition, it gained at least limited support from some black leaders, including Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for raising the issue of American racism in an international context and focusing world opinion on civil rights abuses in the United States.

Hutchinson’s book focuses primarily on the response of the black bourgeoisie, especially civil rights leaders and newspaper publishers, toward the CP, and occasionally one wishes for a clearer idea of how the black rank-and-file viewed the issue. For instance, in his book Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990), Robin Kelley states that blacks in Alabama used the party as a vehicle for organizing while basing their militancy more on African-American folk culture than on Communist doctrine. More generally, though, Hutchinson is persuasive in arguing that while black workers might have supported the CP on specific issues, their fundamentally different understanding of the nature of American racism precluded any large-scale success in attracting African Americans to communism.

The relationship between the CP and African Americans is a complex mixture of cynicism and good intentions. Hutchinson subtly traces that history with an appreciation for its nuances and paradoxes.

Review, Scott Freeman, Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band (Little, Brown and Co., 1995)

Columbia Missourian, 1995, May 21, 1995

The Allman Brothers Band symbolized one of the great triumphs of the civil rights movement. An interracial group of Southerners, the band emerged in the late 1960s as one of the best blues bands in America. Fueled by two brilliant guitarists, Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, the smoky vocals and organ playing of Gregg Allman, and the outstanding rhythm section of bassist Berry Oakley and drummers Jaimoe Johanson and Butch Trucks, the Allman Brothers reached a pinnacle with the 1971 two-record set, Live From the Fillmore East, perhaps the greatest live album in rock ‘n’ roll history.

But just as the group established itself as one of the most popular bands in America, it fell victim to a series of misfortunes. First, band leader Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident. A year later, Oakley also died in an eerily similar motorcycle accident. Gamely, the band continued but found itself constantly beset by financial, personnel and drug problems. With Gregg Allman’s move to Los Angeles and highly publicized marriage to Cher, the group fell apart amidst bitter recriminations. Scott Freeman, a former reporter for the Macon, Georgia, Telegraph and News, relates the whole story in often painful detail.

The sensationalism of the Allman Brothers’ later years often tends to overshadow the brilliance of their early work. The band’s genius derived from its fusion of a variety of musical sources, primarily blues, jazz and country. Its mixture of racial and cultural styles stands as an exemplar of what jazz critic Albert Murray has described as the “incontestably mulatto nature of American culture.”

As teenagers growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the early 1960s, Duane and Gregg rebelled against the current vogue of surf music. Instead, they developed a fascination with the rhythm and blues of Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles and Bobby “Blue” Bland and formed friendships with black youths, something virtually unthinkable in the pre-civil rights South. Soon the brothers were playing in local bands, with Duane on lead guitar and Gregg on rhythm guitar. As a vocalist, however, Gregg still had room for development; as he later would comment, he sounded “like a cross between Hank Williams with the croup and James Brown with no lips.”

After a couple of failed attempts at forming a band together, first as the Allman Joys and later as Hour Glass, Duane went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he established himself as the top session guitarist at Atlantic Records Studio. There he recorded with soul stars such as Wilson Pickett, King Curtis and Aretha Franklin, as well as on the debut album of Boz Skaggs. Eventually, Duane would play on albums as diverse as jazz flutist Herbie Mann’s Push Push and a classic pairing with Eric Clapton on Derek and the Dominoes’ Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. During this period, Duane honed his skills on the slide, or bottleneck, guitar, in which the guitarist uses the neck of a broken bottle or, in Duane’s case, a medicine bottle on the left ring finger and slides it along the guitar neck, creating a vibrato sound. As Freeman comments, “Duane took the bottleneck guitar to places it had never been before.”

But Duane was not satisfied with his success as a session musician, wanting to lead his own band. In early 1969, after jamming with Trucks, Johanson, Oakley and Betts, Duane barred the door, announcing, “Anybody in this room who’s not going to play in my band, you’ve got to fight your way out.” Before the other band members even had heard Gregg, Duane insisted that his brother be lead singer, telling the others: “My brother is the blues-singingest white boy in the world. If there’s another, I ain’t heard him.”

The band soared to popularity on the basis of its superb blues playing and extended instrumental jams on such songs as “Whipping Post” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” whose complex harmonic and rhythmic structures reflected the influence of jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

After Duane’s and Oakley’s deaths, the band maintained its popularity for a few years with Betts’ country-influenced guitar playing and songwriting assuming a more dominant role in songs such as “Ramblin’ Man” and “Jessica.” But the group became a victim of its own success as the members consumed a mind-staggering amount of drugs and increasingly fought over artistic and financial matters, leading to its breakup in the mid-1970s.

Like the band’s music, Freeman’s book is most interesting in its discussion of the period before Duane’s death. After that, the book grows increasingly depressing, a tragic story of talent wasted. Although the band’s recent reunion produced some fine music, it mainly serves as a reminder that it its prime, the Allman Brothers Band was a model of the potential greatness of America’s multicultural society.

Review, George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (Temple University Press, 1988)

Missouri Historical Review, January 1990

Most histories of the civil rights struggle focus on a handful of major leaders and a few crucial events. This approach minimizes the grass-roots nature of the movement and overlooks the way many of the changes that most fundamentally affected people’s daily lives through countless conflicts in cities around the country. In this study of Ivory Perry, an active participant in the fight for civil rights in St. Louis for more than thirty years, George Lipsitz carries the history of the movement beyond a national emphasis and concentrates on indigenous leadership at the local level.

Lipsitz characterizes Perry as an “organic intellectual.” According to the author, “organic intellectuals learn about the world by trying to change it, and they change the world by learning about it from the perspective of the needs and aspirations of their social group.” According to Lipsitz, Perry fit this bill; though he never held an official leadership position in any civil rights organizations, Perry became an active member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and earned widespread respect within the black community for his role in organizing and leading several direct-action protests.

While recognizing the unique aspects of Perry’s career, Lipsitz also places him in context of several of the broader social trends his life illustrates. Born in 1930 in rural Arkansas, the son of sharecroppers, Perry moved to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1943. His childhood reflects the large-scale movement of blacks from rural to urban areas during World War II. His military services during the Korean War shows the importance of that experience on the lives of many blacks. In journeying to Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1965 to help with voter registration and desegregation and to Chicago in 1966 to help the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organize tenant groups, he demonstrates how activists traveled to help the movement elsewhere, and then brought new strategies they learned back to their local struggles. When he took a job in 1965 as community organizer with the Human Development Corporation (HDC), a St. Louis antipoverty program, it represented part of a broader trend of the bureaucratization of the civil rights movement in federal programs. In this role, Perry and other activists faced contradictory forces as they gained greater financial and institutional backing while sacrificing some of their autonomy. As housing coordinator for HDC in the late-1960s and 1970s, Perry’s career represents the changing nature of the civil rights struggle, as he played an active role in a rent strike by tenants in federal housing projects and led the fight to end lead poisoning among ghetto children.

Lipsitz makes effective use of oral history to convincingly demonstrate the important role Perry played in the St. Louis civil rights movement. Yet he does so without romanticizing his subject. Lipsitz deals honestly with Perry’s shortcomings—his string of failed relationships with women, his estrangement from his children, his periodic hospitalizations for nervous exhaustion. Lipsitz portrays these failing as a result of personal causes as well as the “unremitting pressure and tensions” of his activism. Using Perry as an example of local leadership, Lipsitz has advanced the study of the civil rights movement to another level, emphasizing the crucial part played by long-forgotten participants in events that never captured national headlines.

Review, John A. Williams and Dennis Williams, If I Stop I’ll Die: The Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, 1991, December 1, 1991

“You all know how black humor started,” Richard Pryor begins his classic routine “Bicentennial Nigger.” “It started on the slave ships. Cat was on his way over here rowing. Dude say, ‘What you laughing about?’ He says, ‘Yesterday I was a king.’”

This line captures the underlying tension of much African-American humor. Laughing at their situation provides blacks an outlet for emotions that otherwise might surface as rage and bitterness. No one represents this tendency better than Pryor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when expressions of black anger supplanted the earlier civil rights rhetoric of integration and riots ripped through the ghettos of cities across the country, Pryor emerged as a young comedian who somehow accomplished the impossible—he voiced the anger of black Americans while making all Americans, black and white, laugh. As John Williams says in his preface to this biography, “Whatever his topic, Pryor spoke the unspeakable. When he said what we were thinking, he lifted our burden of murderously vengeful thoughts we’d buried without laughter deep within ourselves to his own shoulders for preciously few moments that seemed a lifetime. He gave us motive for feeling and behaving the way we did. That created laughter.”

Williams, an African-American novelist, and his son Dennis, a journalist and novelist, trace Pryor’s career from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois. The dominant influence in Pryor’s early years was his maternal grandmother, Marie Carter Bryant, a strong matriarch who, according to Pryor, managed three houses of prostitution. Pryor’s youth provided the basis for many of his comedy routines. Like Bill Cosby’s characters such as Fat Albert and Weird Harold, the authors say, “Pryor’s people allowed us a look-in at boyhood peers, heroes, neighborhoods; however, there was not the undercurrent of fear and violence in Cosby’s life that we find in Pryor’s.”

Unlike Cosby, and most other black comedians who appealed to white audiences, Pryor spoke the language of the street. His characters were winos, junkies and street-smart raconteurs whose outward bravado masked a fundamental vulnerability. He unabashedly spoke black English, replete with double negatives and peppered with four-letter words. He reflected a tolerant and open view of sex. His ultimate compliment was that something or someone made his penis erect; his ultimate insult was that someone could not have an orgasm (as when he said that Ronald Reagan “looks like a dick. . . . Not even a hard-on”). As Cosby once said, “Richard Pryor is perhaps the only comedian that I know of today who has captured the total character of the ghetto.”

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Pryor’s ghetto persona was his excessive use of the term “nigger.” The word appeared in Pryor’s album titles, such as That Nigger’s Crazy and Bicentennial Nigger, and repeatedly in his routines. In the skit “Have Your Ass Home by Eleven,” the Williamses say, the father calls his son “nigger” approximately every fifth word. Though the term was common in street parlance among blacks, its public use by Pryor in front of white audiences made many blacks uncomfortable.

Pryor’s use of the term reflected long-term historical trends and the growing radicalization of blacks in the 1960s. As the African-American author and civil rights activist Julius Lester has written, “The slave owner profaned the Portuguese word for black, ‘Negro,’ and made it ‘nigger.’ It was a brutal violent word that stung the soul of the slave more than the whip did his back. But the slaves took this ugly word and . . . made it their own. In their mouths it became an affectionate, endearing word. As much as was possible they robbed it of its ability to spiritually maim them.” In the 1960s, blacks hesitantly began using the term in racially-mixed company. Comedian Dick Gregory titled his 1964 autobiography Nigger, writing in his dedication, “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if ever you hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.” Similarly the young African-American author Cecil Brown, a friend of Pryor’s, titled his 1970 novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Pryor’s use of the term, the Williamses say, “exposed the word, pried open its nuances as used between black husband and wife, between white and black (male, female), and between black and black (male).”

The authors say that “the acceptance of Pryor’s comedy by large numbers of contemporary Americans of all colors and creeds indicated that we are capable of understanding, empathy and maybe action that might lead to something better than we now have.” Such a view seems overly optimistic given the human capacity for cognitive dissonance—the ability to simultaneously hold contradictory views. Pryor’s acceptance by white audiences did not necessarily indicate increasing racial tolerance. Spike Lee expressed a more realistic view in his 1989 film Do the Right Thing in which the black character, Mookie, confronts the white racist, Pino, asking who his favorite athlete, movie star and musician are. When Pino responds that they are Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy and Prince, Mookie says, “Sounds funny to me. As much as you say ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that,’ all your favorite people are ‘niggers.’”

It may have been recognition of this cognitive dissonance that led Pryor to drop the term “nigger” from his routines in the early 1980s. The Williamses fail to recognize this possibility, unquestioningly accepting instead Pryor’s own explanation that upon traveling to Africa he had seen that “there were no ‘niggers’ there.”

The book’s major weakness is its failure to place Pryor’s humor in the context of broader African-American history and culture. The authors mention that Pryor is part of a long line of black comedians going back to the vaudeville performer Bert Williams, but they don’t explain the nature of this continuity. For example, they attribute Pryor’s penchant for playing hunted animals to the fact that he enjoyed hunting as a teenager, but fail to point out that weak animals have been a staple of black folk culture at least since the slave tales of Brer Rabbit.

Similarly, the Williamses state that ministers have always played a central role in many black communities and that Pryor frequently parodied black preachers. But the authors go no further in explaining how Pryor’s routines delineated the relationship between ministers and the black community. As the sketch “Bicentennial Prayer” shows, Pryor understands the enormous complexity of this relationship. His black preacher is, by turns, lecherous, greedy, profane and devoted to the needs of his community. Though he frequently is a figure of ridicule, the preacher also serves as the chief interpreter of the black experience to his community, as seen in his refrain, “How long will this bullshit go on?”

The authors tend to focus on the most sensational aspects of Pryor’s career and private life. Considering the subject, it would be difficult not to, since Pryor regularly integrates his most personal experiences into his routines, as in his searingly honest and funny description of his cocaine addiction and freebasing accident in the film Live on the Sunset Strip. As Dennis Williams says in his afterword, “Other comedians play What If; they think of something funny, something that would be absurd or outrageous, and tell the story. Pryor, like a great blues singer, had lived it—at least some of it, we knew—enough to give all his stories the credibility of a survivor bearing witness.”

True war stories: Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'

Southern Illinoisan, June 1, 2016

For years in teaching the Vietnam War, I've used Tim O'Brien's 1990 classic The Things They Carried, based loosely on O'Brien's own tour in 1969-1970. More than a collection of short stories, but something less than a full novel, the book recounts the experiences of O'Brien and the men in his platoon, with a time frame shifting from the war, to their lives both after and before their service.  

The book is a meditation on the art of storytelling. Characters constantly spin tales, often incredible, desperately wanting to be believed. Or they bemoan the fact that they will never be able to place their experiences in a comprehensible narrative, or that their audience will never grasp their point.  

The war represents the most significant event in these men's lives. They find themselves yanked out of their normal lives and deposited in a chaotic and surreal environment, dominated by the omnipresence of death. And then, when their tours are finished—if they survive—they are returned stateside with the idea they can resume their lives. And telling stories might help make sense of their experiences.

But as O'Brien says, there are problems inherent in telling war stories. "In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.... The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."

I warn students beforehand about the book's brutality, telling them they might need to set it aside on occasion to watch kitten videos on Youtube. But even warned, students often recoil at the savagery of some of the stories: a soldier loses his best friend and takes his hurt out by shooting to death a nearby baby water buffalo; a wholesome-looking teenage girls sneaks into Vietnam to visit her boyfriend, only to be sucked into the war's heart of darkness, spending nights on patrol with the Green Berets, and ends up wearing a necklace of human tongues, telling her boyfriend, "Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country—the dirt, the death—I just want to eat it and have it there inside me," before disappearing into the mountains never to be seen again.

As O'Brien reminds us, in war certainties are undermined and common assumptions overturned. "For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity."

The central story—told multiple times from various points of view—concerns a young lieutenant ordered to set up in a low-lying field. Uneasy about the location and warned away by locals, the lieutenant decides to obey orders despite his hesitation. That night it begins to rain and the men discover they are camped in the middle of the village latrine. Struggling to keep from being sucked under, they come under enemy fire and the one soldier who had served as the conscience of the platoon is hit and sinks into the muck as the others struggle vainly to pull him out. 

The story serves as a metaphor of the entire American experience in Vietnam—troops ordered into a land by leaders who have no understanding of the region's history, under fire by an enemy they never see, watching in horror as America's moral values get sucked into a quagmire of human waste.

Today, as American forces remain caught in another quagmire, this time in the Middle East, sent by leaders who refuse to understand the ambiguities of the fog of war—who, in the words of George W. Bush, "don't do nuance"—I tell my students we need to listen to these stories, even if they make us sick. Perhaps especially if they make us sick. 

In a cogent reminder for an election year, O'Brien observes, "You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty."