My, How Dorm Life Has Changed

 Everyone who lives in the Bay Area knows that U.C. Berkeley doesn't have enough dorm space for its enrolled students.  They especially know this in Berkeley, and parts of north Oakland, where all the students are looking for someplace to live.  

August 21, 2024 was move-in day at Helen Diller Anchor House, a new dorm for transfer students.  The S.F. Chronicle wrote up the event - on that date, but good luck finding the article, sadly, it's behind a paywall.  The dorm, which cost $300 million, is 14 stories, 3 blocks from BART, across the street from campus, and will house 772 students.  The "dorm rooms" have:  full kitchens, with dishwashers and stacked washer/dryers.  Of course, they cost $2,000 a month; but the building includes an indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio and a rooftop vegetable garden.  $2,000 is about what a small apartment costs today in Berkeley anyhow, and the fee includes an off-site meal plan if you'd rather not cook.

Now the voice from the past.  I attended Berkeley in the middle 60s ('63 to '68 including my master's degree) and I was a "dormie" for the first 3 years.  And boy, have dorms changed.

I lived in Peixotto Hall, which was part of the Smyth-Fernwald dorms.  These dorms were built for student housing immediately after World War II, and were recently demolished after some years as married student housing.  When I lived there, starting in fall 1963, it had 2 women's dorms (I can't recall the name of the other) and a larger men's dorm, which was either called "Smyth" or "Smyth-Fernwald."  I remember a single dorm as a long, one-story building with student rooms (2 students each) on either side of a central hallway.  The whole setup, including a central dining hall and kitchen (separate building), was about as far from campus as you could get - it was at the extreme top of Dwight Way!  I believe I recall bus service down to campus, but I also remember an awful lot of walking down hill, and then walking back up!  Google Maps says it was .9 miles one way to where Telegraph hits the campus.

What was my dorm room like?  Well, it didn't have a kitchen - in fact, it didn't have a bathroom.  It had 2 single beds, 2 student desks, and some closet space.  The bathroom, with showers, was down the hall.  This led to the occasional women's dorm call of "Man on the floor!" when a relative or a repairman had to come in for some reason.  And we ate in the central dining hall, unless we decided to go out and forage on our own.  But the dining hall was where the free food was, and we were a long way up the hill from anything resembling a restaurant, or even a fast food joint.

And nobody had a stacked washer/dryer!  If you wanted your laundry done, you either went and found a laundromat, or you took the laundry home to mama, if mama lived close enough.

It was a rather limited living arrangement.  On the other hand, it didn't cost $2,000 a month.  Frankly, I don't think I ever knew what it cost to live in the dorm; my folks paid it.  I didn't get into living costs until my senior year, when I moved into an apartment with 2 other women on North Side.  At which point I learned the joys of running into your roommate's boyfriend at 3 AM - but that's another post.

If you lived in the Smyth-Fernwald dorms in the '60s and remember stuff I've forgotten, I'm interested to hear it.

Labor Issues are Still With Us

 On May 19, as a member of the Oakland Symphony Chorus, I participated in the spectacular (if I may brag!) world premiere of Bodies on the Line, an oratorio commissioned by the Symphony's late director Michael Morgan, about the 1937 auto workers sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.  I've been rehearsing that for almost 6 months.  It's full of facts about what happened in the old GM auto plants, and what the strikers wanted, and every time I turn around these days, I hear echoes of those lyrics.  

For example, the first of the strikers' eight demands was the end of piecework pay, to be replaced by a daily salary.  A few weeks before performance, there was an article on NPR about the law, passed by California in 2022, banning piecework pay in the garment industry in California!  In 2022 they were still paying garment workers piecework!  And of course we regularly hear that Starbucks workers are trying to form a union, and the workers at Trader Joe's in Rockridge (a little over half a mile from my house in north Oakland) are trying to organize a union.  And on and on.

Today I heard another story on NPR that brought the oratorio lyrics back to me with a bang.  It was a story about a ceremony in (I think) Stratton, Ohio, where the W. H. Sammis coal plant will shut down in mid-July.  It sounded kind of like a memorial, if not a funeral, for the plant, which has operated in the area since 1959.  The plant had employed the people of Stratton (population under 300) for most of their lives.  And listening to this story, another lyric came back to me.  Late in the oratorio, during the strike, the chorus sings about it, and everyone but the altos was in favor of the strike (I sing alto).  The altos sang, "What would we do without GM?  It's GM who feeds us, who feeds the people of Flint."  And you know, I listened to the story of the memorial to a dying coal plant in Stratton, Ohio, and those words ran through my mind; and I cried.  I'm crying now.  These are stories about human beings, and sometimes we're not as much in control as we think.

Education in Texas

 One of the people I follow on Facebook is Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian who writes interesting posts about current events.  She wrote one yesterday (10-16-21) on a new Texas law which requires teachers to "present opposing views on controversial subjects." Like racism. And the Holocaust. That's right, Texas teachers may be expected to present "both sides" of the Holocaust. I didn't think the Holocaust had another side, unless you are a Nazi who believes in Aryan superiority - aka white superiority.

Worse, Texas has passed a bill on Critical Race Theory (S.B. 3), which will go into effect in December, laying out exactly what should be taught about what we used to call civics: "the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.” This new law essentially limits the study of these things to certain specific documents and people.

I don't want to quote her entire essay, it's quite long, but if you are on Facebook, look it up. We should all read it.

What blew me away were the items and people who may not be taught: the writings of George Washington! Anything about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings! The history of Native Americans and of "founding mothers and other founding persons!" Frederick Douglass! I could go on. It essentially restricts the history of the U.S. and its government to the brilliant deeds of a few white men, leaving out anything that might make white men look bad. Like systemic racism, and genocide of Native Americans, and the fact that until the 20th century, married women were essentially their husbands' property.

I stewed about this all morning - really. History is important to me. If we don't know how we got here, how do we know where we're going? And facts are important to me - if you don't know all the facts, you make wrong decisions. But as I stewed, something occurred to me.

These legislators have forgotten the Internet. (Based on observation of various elected bodies, many of the people elected barely know how to send email.) Many of the kids whose education they want to warp have access to the Internet, and know how to use Google, especially after the last year and a half of virtual learning. If you know how to ask the questions, the Internet will tell you anything you want to know, whether the State of Texas likes it or not. I encourage myself that at least some Texas kids may start wondering about what was left out, and asking the questions.

Remembering 9/11

Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attack.  I didn't start blogging until several years later, so I don't have a contemporary record, but I remember it.  Boy, do I remember it.  Living in California, I was getting dressed to go to work when I found out about it - I was working at the Bank of America's Concord data center, in the email support team.  

I usually listen to the news on NPR while I'm doing things like that, and I kept hearing some very strange things.  I remember going downstairs to get some breakfast and calling out to my husband, "What the hell is going on?"  Back in 2001 we had a television that we occasionally turned on, and he had it turned on, and I got a look.

The attack happened at 08:45 EDT, which was 05:45 PDT, so by the time I got up and got moving it had been going on for some time.  (I'm not a morning person.)  By 07:00 PDT or so, which is my guess on the time I came downstairs, the attack had been going on for an hour and a quarter.  Both towers and the Pentagon had been hit, the south tower had collapsed, and hijacked Flight 93 was within 10 minutes of crashing in the field near Shanksville, PA.  

The flight 93 hijacking seems to have begun around 09:31 EDT.  At 09:57 EDT, the passengers took a vote and decided to attack the hijackers, so during that period of a little over 10 minutes from 09:57 to 10:10 EDT when the hijackers crashed the plane, there was an active fight going on for control.  This is about when I came downstairs to have breakfast.

Well, I still had to go to work, so I ate breakfast.  And since this was during the period after my right knee went bad and before I got it replaced, I drove to Concord for work.  Everyone in my department was trying to follow what was going on back East.  I remember someone taking one of the TVs they used for video training and faking up an antenna with a wire coat hanger.  They trundled it, on its wheeled trolley, over to one of the windows where it would pick up a signal, and managed to get a news broadcast covering the attack.  In fact I think they hooked up antennas to two TV monitors.  After that, everybody wandered past there regularly to see what was going on.  I remember thinking, at one point that afternoon, I have projects to work on, and nothing I can do here will affect that.  So I went into my cube, away from the TV, and tried to get some work done.  I don't recall what I was working on or whether I succeeded in getting anything done.  

I don't have any other particular memories of the day, although I'm sure I had the news on the car radio as I drove home, because I always do.

This is hardly great history, but it's what I remember of an event that changed our world, so I thought I'd share it.

The 1918 Flu and Shakespeare

If that sounds odd, it was in fact the subject of On the Media's Thanksgiving podcast, which I listen to today while on my exercise bike.  The name of the podcast was No Ado about Much, but  you can listen to the segments individually at the links below; the whole thing is about 50 minutes long.

The first half of the podcast,  Why the Press Downplayed the 1918 Flu, covered an interview with John Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, and explained in detail that leaders on both sides in World War I refused to admit the existence of the flu after it hit the battlefields, for fear of admitting weakness.  (Does this sound familiar??)  Worse, in the U.S., wartime censorship and an attempt to "boost morale" essentially forbid any mention of the ongoing public health emergency in the press.  The Sedition Act of 1918 made it a criminal offense to publish (or say!) anything that offended the government, cast it in a bad light, or interfered with the sale of government bonds!  I was amused that the only U.S. newspaper mentioned as writing about the 1918 'flu was in San Francisco, which published a front page headline "Wear a mask - save a life"!  San Francisco was very far away; a Pennsylvania paper was coerced into not mentioning the flu!

The net result of this - unless you have (or had) a relative who lived through the 1918 pandemic, you may never have heard of it, until you grew up and began to read the history they didn't teach you in school!  That's how I learned about it.  My parents were born in 1907 and 1912, so they were children when it happened; but they never mentioned it.  The  U.S. lost an estimated 675,000 people to the 1918 flu, out of a population of about 103.2 million.

It wasn't just the U.S. that forbade discussion of the 1918 pandemic.  One of my favorite detective authors is the great Dorothy Sayers, whose first novel, Whose Body?, came out in 1923.  Lord Peter Wimsey, her detective hero, was an officer in World War I.  He came home with a case of "shell shock" - we call it PTSD today.  In Whose Body? and a couple of other early novels, Lord Peter had shell shock attacks that essentially incapacitated him for a short time.  But I never heard any mention of the 1918 flu in her novels.  She must have lived through it; she was born in 1893.  But the English didn't mention it, and so she didn't.

So what about Shakespeare?  The second half of the podcast was How Shakespeare Became an American Hero, was an extended interview with James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.  As Mr. Shapiro points out, the plays touch some very sensitive subjects for Americans:  Othello, in particular - a white woman married to a black man!  Listen to hear the story of the world's worst dinner party, where John Quincy Adams sat next to Fanny Kemble, the great British actress, and mansplained to her why Othello was so disgusting!  Romeo and Juliet became an issue because there are places where Romeo expresses emotion.  The 19th century American insistence that a man should never show emotion actually meant that American actors had trouble playing Romeo - in at least one case, Romeo was played by a lesbian!  And The Merchant of Venice - how awful to see a Jew insisting on his pound of flesh from a Christian!  And let's not even get into the issue of who is allowed to play Hamlet!

Seriously, the discussion goes into why we Americans never did, and don't now, talk much about some subjects - I think we're slowly beginning to, but it doesn't hurt us now and then to be reminded of where we've been and why it wasn't a great idea.

Pandemics

 The pandemic is on everyone's mind these days, as it should be.  So far there are 54,318,841 cases world wide, and 1,318,044 deaths to date.  (Worldometer).  In the U.S. we have 11,226,038 cases and, so far 251,256 deaths.  (Worldometer - U.S.)    This is terrible.  And the restrictions placed on us to try to control it are irksome, and it's spiraling out of control because we're getting tired of them.

But in a historical context, how bad is it really?  A little over a million dead worldwide, out of a population of 7.8 billion.  That's one in 6,000 people, world wide, roughly .017% of world population.  In the U.S., with a population of 331,740,396, it's one in about 1,320 people, or .76% - worse than the worldwide stats, but then we are the number one hotspot these days.  Population statistics from the World Population  Review for the U.S..

A recent Candorville cartoon claimed that the 1918 flu killed 1 person in 75.  This is a little simplistic, because estimates of the total number of deaths range from 17.4 million (.95% of world population) to 50 million (2.7%) to 100 million (5.4%).  World population at the time was estimated at 1.8 billion.  (Numbers from the Our World in Data article on the Spanish flu.)

Compare that to our estimate for the coronavirus of .017% of world population and .76% of U.S. population.

For an even more horrific example, consider the Black Death (bubonic plague) which devastated Europe in the mid-14th century.  Wikipedia says it "is estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population." That's between 1 in 3 and 1 in 6 people.  It took until 1500 to reach the population Europe had in 1300.  And at that period, medical knowledge was rudimentary and hospitals were run by religious orders. We now know it was caused by a virus carried by rats and fleas; the actual cause of the bubonic plague wasn't identified until the mid-19th century. So people died from a nameless disease and didn't know where it came from.

I'm not saying we have it easy right now.  I'm just suggesting it could be worse.  We're also flooded with news about our pandemic, every day, all day, on general media sources and social media.  We've also come to believe that modern medicine can cure everything, because up till now it's done a pretty good job overall.  So we have trouble believing it can't cure this.  It may yet, there are promising vaccines on the way.  Until they get here, mask up and remember - it could be worse.

Did my ancestors own slaves?

I've been interested in genealogy for some time, and with the help of Ancestry.com I've traced my father's family back to the early 19th century. In fact, I recently turned up an ancestor who was born in 1777.

I find several things interesting.  I have yet to find an ancestor in my father's line who wasn't born on this continent.  My mother's family came to the U.S. in 1921 (from Canada), but the Ivy line, and the associated Moody line (my paternal grandmother's people) all seem to have been here from quite early.  Even the guy born in 1777 came from North Carolina; he moved his family to Tennessee between 1805 and 1810.  They all seem to have lived, before the Civil War, in the "border states" - Tennessee and Kentucky. Based on census and other records, they all seem to have relocated to Missouri sometime after the Civil war.

Literary Racism

As a reaction to the closure of libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, I've been re-reading some of my extensive collection of classic detective stories, collected over most of my adult life.  Specifically, I've been re-reading Ellery Queen novels, which I've read off and on for most of my adult life.  In recent years I've been exploring new mystery writers at the local library, but that stopped with the shutdown, so I returned to what I had.

The Ellery Queen novels debuted in 1929 with The Roman Hat Mystery and continued into the early 1960s, after which the authors, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, also allowed other writers to create Ellery Queen novels which didn't feature their detective, Ellery Queen, as a character.  Most of the novels and stories I've been reading were written in the 1930s.

Given the Black Lives Matter protests over the last few weeks, I'm unusually sensitive to racism.  I didn't think of Ellery Queen novels as racist, but I notice that while the Ellery Queen character almost never uses racial slurs, the New York City cops who feature in many stories do.  This includes the character Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery's father.  I especially noticed the use of the phrase "the shine" to refer to what a more educated person would probably have called "the Negro."  This was well before the use of phrases like black, African American, or people of color.  I also noticed that even when not using racist slang, descriptions of Negro characters, such as hotel maids, were condescending at best.

You can't go back and change history, or classic novels.  In fact I've seen much worse racism in "tough guy" detective novels by Raymond Chandler and  Mickey Spillane.  I think the explanation has to be that some people in the 1930s talked that way, and the authors put it in for realistic effects.  I still think the Ellery Queen novels are worth reading for the amazing logical puzzles they present.  I've always preferred puzzle mysteries to the shoot-em-up types.

Changing Names

There is a current trend that if a public monument or building is named after someone who we learn was actually a racist, that we should rename it after some more current "good" person.  San Francisco has renamed several streets and a couple of high schools on this basis, and it's related to the urge in parts of the southeastern U.S. to remove statues memorializing the Confederacy.

This is a mistake, and it's stupid.  Frankly, many of our ancestors (yes, I include mine) were racist, and bigoted.  This country was founded economically on racism - the rich economy of the Old South was based on the labor of African slaves, which was justified by a misreading of the Bible.  If you doubt me that it was based on the Bible, read the secession statements of several Confederate states, especially Texas, which make it brutally clear.  Further, this country was expanded on the backs of all the Native Americans we murdered, or gave syphilis or measles to (probably not deliberately); and the transcontinental railroad which tied the country together was built by immigrant Chinese laborers, whom we later prohibited from living here by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

I won't say the racism wasn't our ancestors' fault; I will say they came by it honestly.  Most of the original white settlers in the U.S. came from the British Isles - now the United Kingdom.  Before the 20th century (and for that matter during much of it), Europeans (including the British) honestly believed that people of color were generally inferior to the "white race;" there was a formal hierarchy of races, and some actually believed that they derived genetically from separate origins than white people (see Wikipedia on Scientific Racism, which says that scientific racism was only formally denounced, by UNESCO, after World War II).

So our bigoted ancestors were honored by naming things after them because during their time, bigotry was normal.  Why, then, is renaming buildings and taking down Confederate monuments a mistake?  The Confederate monuments, especially, represent the Old South's cry of victory in establishing the Jim Crow regime.  Why should we memorialize that?

All this renaming allows us to blind ourselves to where we came from.  It lets us pretend, as our schools largely do pretend to our children, that America is a wonderful place with opportunity for all, and that we wouldn't discriminate against anybody.

That is a lie.  America over its history has been a wonderful place with opportunity for some white men; in the beginning, only for white men who owned property.  Over the intervening two and a half centuries, we've gradually expanded the opportunities to other white men (poor men, Irish men, southern European men, Catholic men), to African slaves (Reconstruction tried to do that but was summarily squashed for another 50 years until the Civil Rights movement, see my comments about the Confederate monuments), eventually to the Chinese.  Oh, and to women, who slowly stopped being their husbands' property, and became able to own property themselves, but who couldn't vote until 1920.

If we let ourselves forget how nasty our forebears were, we risk falling back into the same ways.  If you don't know where you came from, how can you focus on where you want to go?  I've written before about tribalism (Hating the Other, Sept. 2010); I see racial bigotry as an outgrowth of tribal attitudes, where "the other" is a threat to the tribe's hunting grounds and other food sources, going back millennia, before agriculture.

We must remember that we have these tendencies, so we can fight to overcome them, especially in the midst of a major recurrence of bigotry and intolerance.  So we should leave Boalt Hall named after the man who backed the Chinese Exclusion Act, but also put up a plaque explaining about his racism.  (The linked article may be behind a paywall, but this one isn't.)  And we should leave up the Confederate monuments, but add a plaque explaining that they represent, not victory in the Civil War, but a successful movement to reduce the South's African-American residents to a state as close to actual slavery as possible.

If we are continually reminded of our bigoted past, we may some day be able to decide, collectively, that racism is a waste of time and energy.  Science tells us that there are no significant genetic differences among the races.  Do we really want to keep arguing about skin color??

I Miss the America I Thought I Knew

As we get older and read more history, we learn that the story of the United States which we learned in school was, let us say, whitewashed.  The genocide of the original inhabitants, the appalling blot of slavery and the later development of Jim Crow, the hatred of almost every immigrant group which ever tried to come here (starting with the Germans who helped us win the Revolutionary War) - we learn all these things later. Yes, we passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, yes, we refused the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, yes, we incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans because they looked like the people who had attacked us; but we also accepted many other immigrants (including, by the way, my mother), and more recently accepted refugees from natural disasters and wars.  And I don't even include the fact that until the mid-20th century, women were legally inferior to men and couldn't vote or in some places even own property.

I was born after the second World War, and as I became an adolescent, the Civil Rights movement was going on; later, the feminist movement began and flourished, President Reagan allowed amnesty to the undocumented immigrants here at the time.  I've been troubled recently by the police wars on people of color, but I allowed myself to hope that over time we were becoming more civil to each other and more open to the world.

And no matter what Americans did historically , the language of the Declaration of Independence blazes across history like a torch:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Yes, I know the man who wrote that was a slave owner, who carried on an affair with one of his chattels, and that when he said "men" he meant property-owning white males.  I know that isn't what he meant.  But it's what he said.  And somehow over the intervening centuries, people of color have gained the vote, women have gained the vote, it became less socially acceptable to use certain words and do certain things, and even people who prefer to love others of the same sex have moved toward acceptance. I allowed myself to hope that we were moving closer to what Jefferson said, and might actually become the beacon of freedom he wrote about.

Since the 2016 presidential election that hope has died.  The 45th president has enabled and encouraged every form of bigoted, abusive behavior by his largely white, Christian supporters against everyone else.  We've reverted to a world in which people of color are publicly insulted and assaulted by white citizens, where women and people of non-standard sexual preference can be publicly attacked, where immigrants are regarded and attacked as evil animals.  We briefly separated children from their parents at the border, who came here for no worse reason than that they were fleeing danger in their own poorly governed countries.  We are at odds with our former allies.  We have begun a trade war, which could easily throw the entire world into another great depression - tariffs were what caused the first one.  And on top of all this, his people are systematically destroying all the protections against dishonest, rapacious, polluting big business which the country has built up over the last hundred years.

We elected a stupid, self-centered, ignorant and dishonest man, who is convinced that his "gut" is always correct and he doesn't need advice.  If this goes on much longer he will destroy us. He already thinks he'd like to be "president for life,"  which God forbid.  And Congress, which the founders meant to be a check on the president, licks his boots and does whatever he wants.  I didn't vote for him.  I will never vote for anyone who supports him.  But unless everyone who thinks like me rises up and votes to turn over control of Congress in the fall, we'll be stuck with him for 4 or possibly even 8 years.  By which time the America we thought we knew will be dead.

Is that what we want?  If it isn't, we'd better act.

Within Our Gates

I had an amazing experience last night.  I attended a showing, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, of Within Our Gates, a 1920 silent film directed by Oscar Micheaux.  I don't normally go to any movies these days, although I've always had a soft spot for the great silents.  I went to this one because the film was accompanied by members of the Oakland Symphony and the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Maestro Michael Morgan.  I've sung with the Symphony Chorus since 2000, although I don't sing in the Chamber Chorus that performed last night; I knew all the singers and some of the musicians.

If you've never seen a silent film accompanied by an orchestra, with or without chorus, you may not realize that the performers are seated with their backs to the screen.  In fact, a chorus member told me they weren't allowed to see the film.  Only the conductor can see the screen, and Maestro Morgan had to coordinate the action in the movie with the composer's score.  I might add that it was black as the inside of your hat in that theater, except for light from the screen; and silent movies don't generate the light that modern movies do.  As far as I know, the singers had memorized the score; I didn't see many music lights except for the orchestra.  The score they performed was a world premiere, composed by Adolphus Hailstork of Rochester, New York, who attended the performance.

Within Our Gates is the oldest surviving film made by an African-American director.  You can see a plot summary on the Wikipedia article I linked.  The film was released only 5 years after Birth of a Nation. Wikipedia suggests that "critics have considered Micheaux's project as a response to Griffith."

 I never thought I would see a movie, with an all-Negro cast (to use the period term), describing the lives of African Americans in 1920.  The main character, Sylvia Landry, seems "middle class."  She can read and write, she has nice clothes, she can afford to travel.  She lives in a nice house, she visits people and they visit her.  But in a flashback, we learn that she grew up on a plantation, where her illiterate father worked for the owner, and was lynched after someone else shot the owner and he was blamed for it.  Yes, there is a lynching scene, and an attempted rape. 

It's one thing to know, from reading, that people lived and thought a certain way, and that certain things happened.  Seeing it in a movie is a whole different experience.  It was jarring to see these things: 

• A Southern woman tells a northern philanthropist, who was considering supporting a school to educate black children, that there was no point in educating Negroes, they were just good for "porters and field hands," and "they just want to go up to Heaven."  
• A Negro preacher tells his congregation they will go to Heaven because they are poor and uneducated, while all the white people will go to Hell because they are rich and educated.  
• The plantation owner complains to his servant that Sylvia (the daughter of his fieldworker) is educated and can work out what her father's debts really are, instead of what the owner wants them to be.  
• And then, of course, there is the lynching.  No, they didn't show the actual hanging.

And on top of all this, it was a good movie.  The acting was as good as silents ever got, and better than some I've seen.  For instance, I've seen Metropolis, a great classic, but frankly the acting is awful; this was much better, more like you were watching real people.  The characters were presented fairly, there were good and bad Negroes, and good and bad white people.  It was another world, that I never expected to see.  I will remember it.

Unobtanium

I heard an absolutely fascinating interview the other day (Nov. 24) on Terri Gross' Fresh Air.  She was talking to a New York Times reporter, C. J. Chivers, about his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled The Doomsday Scam.

The subject of this article, and about the first half of the interview, is a substance I'd never heard of:  red mercury.  What?  I'm not kidding when I say that my first mental response to the discussion of red mercury was, "What's its atomic weight?"  Red mercury has been discussed, publicly and privately, since the Cold War - the Soviets were reputed to have it.  Mr. Chivers was unable to find anyone who had ever seen it.  I recommend you to take the time and read The Doomsday Scam - it's absolutely fascinating and Mr. Chivers writes very well.

The theory of red mercury is that it can be used to build very small nuclear weapons.  The following description (excerpted from the article) was written, I'm sorry to say, by an American nuclear physicist who should have known better:

In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury was manufactured by ‘‘mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam.’’ The result, he said, ‘‘is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive’’ that, when detonated, becomes ‘‘extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb.’’ Here was a proliferation threat of an order never before seen.

The author of this bilgewater is named in the article, so that's your incentive to read it.

But my second response was:  I've heard this legend before.  Not red mercury itself, but the legend of the rare and difficult to find substance that can confer unheard-of powers on the owner.  It was called the Philosopher's Stone, and it was the goal of every alchemist the ancient world, and the Middle Ages, ever produced.  Here is the invaluable Wikipedia on alchemy:

Alchemy is a philosophical and protoscientific tradition practiced throughout Egypt and Eurasia which aimed to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects.^{[1] [2][n 1]} Common aims were chrysopoeia, the transmutation of "base metals" (e.g., lead) into "noble" ones (particularly gold); the creation of an elixir of immortality; the creation of panaceas able to cure any disease; and the development of an alkahest, a universal solvent.^[3]

 Red mercury sounds like a form of Philosopher's Stone to me, although sadly one which is only used to destroy.  We tend to look down our noses at our ancestors, as ignorant and uneducated.  At least their rare and powerful Philosopher's Stone was used to cure and create.  Red mercury is apparently only intended to destroy.  How fortunate we all are that it doesn't exist.

But what is it in the human race that makes us believe in the Philosopher's Stone, or red mercury, or snake oil, or any other substance, just because someone we don't know tells us it exists and we only have to find it.

The Other "Trail of Tears"

Talk about the things they didn't teach you in school.  I went through the California public school system back in the day when it actually taught you (well, me, anyway) to read and think about things.  And I don't recall ever hearing one single mention of this.  But let's start with a question it probably never occurred to you to ask.  Say you are a slaveholder in the pre-civil war South, and you have more slaves than you want.  How do you sell them?

In this article, in the October 2015 Smithsonian Magazine, I found the appalling answer.

Retracing Slavery's Trail of Tears

It's longer than the usual Smithsonian article, but I read all of it. It was horrifying but extremely educational. I recommend we all read it, and remember, so we can not do that ever again.

As I regularly post, if we as a people don't understand who we were, and what we did, how can we possibly avoid doing it again?