A Lesson from Bill Russell

Gun control hearings began in the Senate today. Gabby Giffords led off, speaking briefly before her speech impairment became so evident she had to stop. Her speech was undoubtedly meant to be short. A little later,Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association testified, giving much the same speech he has been giving for the last weeks, months, and years.

It was all so predictable that I switched it off, and am looking at an old BBC production of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" as I write this.

The hearings made me think of a story Bill Russell told in his autobiography, Second Wind, subtitled "The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man." Russell was for a decade the center on the Boston Celtics, who won NBA titles almost all the years he was with them. He went on to coach the Celtics and the Seattle SuperSonics. This is my memory of one of his stories.

Russell was born in Louisiana, I guess about 1932. His mother worked as a secretary and his father did, I think, manual labor. This father was a big powerful man, known  to Bill and his brother as "Mister Charlie." Charles Russell was strong enough and in love enough to meet his wife coming home from work a mile or so from their house and carry her, along with Bill and his brother, the rest of the way home.

One day, Mister Charlie was driving his car with the two boys, and pulled into the local gas station for a fill-up. In those days there was no self-service. The customer was expected to wait for an attendant to fill the tank. There was a white customer being helped and Charlie Russell sat and waited his turn. Before the white customer was done, another car pulled in behind him, also driven by a white man. Ignoring the Russells, the attendant filled the later arrival's tank. Then the process was repeated while Mister Charlie was ignored and his anger built. Finally, he climbed out of the car, took an idle gas hose, and began filling his tank himself.

The attendant approached and angrily demanded that Mister Charlie stop what he was doing. "Don't ever do anything like that again, boy," he exclaimed.

Now, Mister Charlie was in his thirties, married, a father twice over, employed, taking care of his family. By any reasonable measure, he had left boyhood behind and was a man. But in 1930's Louisiana, any white man would call a black man "boy" as a way of humiliating him, and reminding him about segregation and white supremacy.

Mister Charlie walked around to the back of his car and grabbed a tire iron from the trunk, then advanced on the pump jockey, who fled around the side of the gas station with Mister Charlie in pursuit. A few seconds later, Charles Russell returned alone.

The two boys in the car were ecstatic. "Ha ha, Mister Charlie showed him, he won't do us that way anymore!" they shouted to each other.

Charles Russell put the tire iron back and began trembling uncontrollably. After a short time he pulled himself together enough to tell the boys, "Here's a lesson for you. Don't ever lose your temper. I could have ended that man's life and ruined my own, because I lost my temper."

As they pulled away from the station, Bill happened to glance in the front window and saw a shotgun leaning against it. If the attendant had run in there instead of around back, it might have been Mister Charlie's life that ended that day.

And I'm repeating this story today as a way of reminding all my good readers that whatever comes of the gun hearings, we must all do much much more to counsel each other that a gun, or even a tire iron, is lethal and we must drive home the point about keeping our tempers.

(A few years later, Mrs. Russell's boss began making advances towards her, and as big and strong as Mister Charlie was, he couldn't risk confronting the man. Instead, he moved the family to California, where Bill grew up.)

Downton Abbey

SPOILER ALERT! WHAT FOLLOWS CONTAINS A SYNOPSIS AND COMMENTS ABOUT LAST NIGHT'S EPISODE. IF YOU MISSED IT OR TIVOED IT, AND DON'T WANT TO BE TIPPED OFF, STOP READING NOW!

This paragraph is mostly filler, so people who glanced downward before reading the spoiler alert won't get any clues about the show before watching it. One of the things about "Downton Abbey" that I've wondered about is the name of the property. Why Downton Abbey?  Why not "Downton Manor" or "Downton Estates" or something like that? Then I remembered English history enough to recall that in the 1540's - just recently in English history - King Henry VIII suppressed all the Catholic monasteries and convents in England, confiscated the lands and buildings, tossed the monks and nuns onto the roadside, then sold off the properties at bargain prices to political pals and opportunists. He thus replenished the royal treasury, destroyed Catholic influence in England, and cemented lots of political alliances all in one brilliant, ruthless act.

One of Earl Robert Grantham's ancestors was undoubtedly a beneficiary of Henry's "largess."

Well, that should be enough background to fill a screen and prevent anyone from accidentally discovering the plot of last night's program. On to the plot and the commentary.

We'll start with the downstairs cast. Bates is still in prison after being convicted of murdering his wife - on weak evidence. Now in prison for life, he's run afoul of his gangster cellmate and the two of them are planting evidence in each other's bunks. Bates got the better of the cellmate last night, but the villain is in cahoots with one of the guards and they're hatching new skullduggery to get even with our boy, probably by next week. Meanwhile, good-hearted Anna, Bates new wife, is trying in every way she can to re-open his case, and has a promising bit of evidence almost in hand. If she can get a certain witness to say what she actually saw, Bates will be exonerated, but the witness doesn't like Bates and will not volunteer the information.

Speaking of bunks, it's more and more obvious that Thomas Barrows, the cowardly opportunistic valet to the earl, would like to get the new footman Jimmy - no, call him James at Downton Abbey, where we observe the formalities - into his bunk. Jimmy James (It sounds like a sandwich shop, doesn't it?) isn't fully aware of Thomas' advances, though he is getting the idea. The lady's maid, Sarah O'Brien, is encouraging the two men to be together as much as possible. Once Thomas' ally on the staff, O'Brien now strongly dislikes Thomas because he has been dismissive of her nephew, the new footman, Alfred. One suspects that Thomas will fall into O'Brien's trap, make a pass at Jimmy, and bring scandal on himself.

Otherwise, Ethel, once a maid at Downton, fell into prostitution after bearing a child out of wedlock with an army officer who had the bad luck to be killed in action shortly afterwards. Dismissed from domestic service by Mrs. Hughes, and scorned by the soldier's parents - at least his father - Ethel had little recourse. Now she has agreed to give her toddler son to his grandparents to raise.

Mrs. Isobel Crawley, feeling sympathetic and trying to help, hired Ethel as a maid at her home near the
Abbey, which caused her other maid, Mrs. Bird, to resign in disgust. Mrs. Bird then went on to write a letter to Mr. Carson, the Downton butler, telling him what happened, and he forbade anyone on the Downton staff to enter Mrs. Crawley's home. I guess he thinks prostitution is catching, or Ethel is so alluring the male staff would not be able to resist her. Meanwhile, Ethel failed to distinguish herself as a cook for Mrs. Crawley.

One more bit of downstairs news. Daisy, impatient for a promotion to assistant cook, is attracted to  Alfred, but every time she works up the nerve to make a play for him, Mrs. Patmore, the cook, interrupts. Now Mrs Patmore has hired a new scullery maid, allowing her to promote Daisy, but the girl's happiness is crushed when Alfred shows an interest in the new employee, named Ivy. So Daisy is consistently bossy and rude to the new girl.

The main events of the evening were upstairs, however. Edith, middle daughter of the Earl Robert and Lady Cora, wrote a letter to the London "Tines" advocating women's suffrage and now has been asked to do a weekly column for the paper. The earl is not pleased. Edith needed an ego boost after being jilted last week.

Meanwhile, after consenting to invest in the property last week, Matthew Crawley, son-in-law and heir to the earl, finally takes a look at the estate accounts and has concluded that the earl doesn't  seem to know anything about management. The estate is going broke because he can't seem to make any economies or develop his properties. The earl is emerging more and more as a kind of pinhead frankly, a nice enough man, but incapable and wrong about almost everything. More about that in a minute.

The main event, and the tragedy of the episode, was the death of Lady Sybil Crawley Branson, shortly after giving birth to a daughter. Tom Branson, for those who missed previous episodes, was once the family chauffeur, and an Irish nationalist, who married Sybil much to her family's distress. Now he is a wanted man in Ireland, a fugitive after participating in the arson of an estate house there.

With Sybil about to deliver her baby, the earl sent for a renowned obstetrician from London, who refused to acknowledge anything abnormal, even when the family doctor insisted she might have eclampsia, and must have a caesarian section to save her life. With Tom paralyzed by indecision about which doctor to trust, Robert entrusted matters to the specialist and Sybil died in agony. The death scene was harrowing. The actress's throat seemed to swell as her airway closed. I don't know how they did that, but  it was very graphic.

In the aftermath, there were tears and a good deal of bitterness. The London doctor quickly departed.
Tom Branson was left with a newborn daughter to raise and a wife to mourn. Lady Cora communicated through the staff that she was no longer willing to share a bed with the earl. And the surviving sisters, Mary and Edith, were temporarily reconciled.

If all this sounds very melodramatic, that's because it is. What sets "Downton Abbey" apart from the afternoon soap operas is the setting, the passage of time in the stories, and Julian Fellowes' willingness to actually kill is characters. Call it a high tone soap opera if you wish. I'd say it's a kind of guilty pleasure. Perhaps we know we shouldn't be intrigued by this amount of angst, but we are anyway.

And look at that. I've gone through  the entire plot without once mentioning the dowager countess, Lady Violet, played by the wonderful  Maggie Smith.

Fifty Shades of Drech

A few months ago, I  borrowed a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey from the local library, intrigued by all the press coverage it was getting. I read most of it before throwing it down in disgust.

Now please don't get me wrong. I'm not a prude, I think there's a definite place for erotica and even for out and out pornography in our lives and in our culture.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, or who have been absorbed with politics or football, or both, for the last half year, Fifty Shades tells the story of Ana Steele, recent college graduate and neophyte reporter, who meets and becomes enamored with Christian Grey, wealthy beyond belief, handsome, and utterly self-assured. But Christian has a peculiarity - okay, call it a perversion - he enjoys inflicting pain on women as a part of his sexual repertoire.

Should Ana run for her very life? No, of course not, or there wouldn't be any book. Instead she decides to explore the dark side of sex with the enigmatic gazillionaire. There is an almost interminable series of emails between the two, punctuated by encounters in which Christian hurts Ana in mutually agreed on ways, and Ana endures the pain in order to stay with Christian.

As I remember, the novel never quite says whether she enjoys being abused.

Critics have made much of what they call the bad writing in the book. Personally, I didn't think the prose was all that bad. Certainly it's a cut above some of the other stuff available out there. In addition, of course, there has been a great deal of attention on the sexually explicit parts of the book. A colleague at the library where I work says she doesn't think Fifty Shades is any more graphic than the numerous "bodice rippers" in circulation. Perhaps not.

I'm not in much of a position to argue that point, having studiously avoided romance novels all my life. What bothers me so much about Fifty Shades and the spate of  imitators now flooding libraries and e-publishers is the presumption that sado-masochistic behavior is in any way normal, and that women should endure whatever pain a man might want to put them through in order to hang onto the guy.

Helping people with their check-outs at the library and logging in transfers from other branches, it has become clear that most of the readership for this book is composed of young and middle-aged women. Possibly they are reading the book for amusement, but I worry that impressionable people will take away the idea that it's okay for a man to hurt a woman and that it's a woman's lot to suffer silently for the sake of his pleasure.

The whole thing seems to me to be a complete refutation of everything the feminist movement has accomplished in the last fifty years. What a great pity.

What It Was, Was Football

Years ago,  Andy Griffith did a whole comedy routine with this title.  In the story he told, he was a southern rube, on his way to a prayer meeting, when he was somehow shunted into a football game which he said the object of was, "To run across a little pasture without gettin' knocked down or steppin' in something."

When I taught US history, I did tell the students that it  was the Puritans who brought what became football to America, and the game in those days actually sounds like what Andy described.

I first started following football when I was about eight years old. The game was different back then in the 1950's than it is now, and I'd like to talk about some of those differences.

First of all, football back then meant college football. There were pro teams, of course, all in the big cities of the east and in Los Angeles, but outside of those metropolises the college game reigned supreme. Television covered football, and on Sundays there was a choice between the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Browns games. The Redskins were truly awful in the late 1950's and watching them was simply painful. The Browns were led by the great Jim Brown, and they had a quarterback with the unlikely name of Milt Plum. The Browns attack was basically, "Brown to the left, Brown to the right, Brown  up the middle, and throw a pass if you absolutely must." I admit I didn't appreciate Jim Brown, and wanted much more passing.

Oklahoma, coached by Bud Wilkinson, was undefeated in 47 straight games in the middle 1950's. The string was broken when the Sooners lost to Notre Dame 7-0, I think in 1958. The game was on tv and I was rooting for the Irish.

The service academies had good teams back then. Army was excellent in 1958, I think it was, behind the Heisman Trophy winner that year, Pete Dawkins.  A few years later, Navy produced Heisman winners in Joe Bellino and Roger "the Dodger" Staubach. Navy played in the Orange Bowl game of 1961, I think, losing to Missouri.

There was no Bowl Championship game back then. The big four bowls, the Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange, had agreements with the various football conferences. The Rose Bowl was always between the champions of the Big Ten and the Pacific Coast Conference, the Southwest Conference champ hosted the Cotton Bowl, the Southeast winner played in the Sugar Bowl, and the winner of the Big Eight played in the Orange Bowl.

There were more independent colleges back then. Penn State often was in one of the big bowls, usually the Orange. Notre Dame was much sought after, but the Irish did not accept bowl invitations, believing their student athletes would miss too much class time if they went to a bowl. That seems charmingly quaint now.

There were lesser bowls, of course, but they weren't named after corporate sponsors. (And by the way, why doesn't Tidy Bowl sponsor a game? They'd be a natural, I think.) Instead, I recall the Bluebonnet Bowl, the Gotham Bowl, and the Bluegrass Bowl. All are gone now. The Liberty Bowl was still being played in Philadelphia.

The football  season was shorter. In northern climes, it ended by about mid-November. It stretched out a bit longer in the south, but there was always a hiatus between the regular schedule and the bowls. New Years Day was the finale, and those bowls were all in southern cities.

Most colleges played a ten game schedule. Ohio State coach Woody Hayes insisted that nine games was enough, and so that's all the Buckeyes played. That also seems quaint nowadays.

The pro season ended in mid-December. The NFL had twelve teams in two divisions and there was a league championship between the two top teams. There were no playoffs.

Living two doors down from my family in the late '50's was the Laurie family, who were from Baltimore and whose son Jackie, just my age, was a big Colts fan. I watched the 1958 NFL championship game with him and his father at his house. That was the famous sudden death game between the Colts and the New York Giants, played at Yankee Stadium. For younger readers, the Colts led most of the game but the Giants scored two quick touchdowns in the fourth quarter and only a last second field goal by Steve Mira forced overtime. It had never happened before. In the extra period, Johnny Unitas guided the Colts to the winning touchdown. It was the game that really put the NFL on the sporting map.

Now, a few things about the players. Sports medicine is far superior to what it was like half a century ago, so players are much more apt to return from injuries now. Greater care is taken to be sure they are fully recovered from injury now than back then. Players in those days were almost guaranteed to ave health problems later in life.

The equipment is better now too. Better helmets, face masks and clear shields keep players from some of the head injuries so many suffered from then.

On the other hand, playing more games there's a greater chance of injury. Finally, I wouldn't say the players are bigger now, but they're definitely heavier. A big lineman back then weighed about 270. The Detroit Lions had a defensive tackle who  topped 300 pounds, but he was the heaviest player in the league, I think. Now, a lineman below that weight is undersized. The heavier players means more violent collisions, I think, and carrying that much weight just has to be bad for their health.

Well, that's what I remember about football. The shorter season did leave Jackie and me much more time to argue about boxers and horse races.

(They were the Baltimore Colts then, not the Indianapolis Colts!)

Guns, Guns, and More Guns

• 
  

  This exchange was posted today by two Facebook friends. To me, it's part of the dialog that needs to happen as we consider what, if anything, we can do to reduce the terrible carnage that guns wreak in our country.

  
  

  Keith Luc Oster

  I had a thought while I was walking the dog: Why do I get my name and address recorded and sign my life away to purchase my regulated amount of Decongestant? But I can, in the very same day, buy an entire shelf-full of ammunition and not be asked a single question? Odd? Good? Bad? Over-regulation? Under-regulation? Dunno. Personally, in a Post-"it-is-normal-for-the-government-to-overstep-its-bounds" World, it would seem not entirely unacceptable to document bullet purchases not unlike Pseudoephedrine and set some reasonable volume a normal human can purchase in a month. Or a week. Or something.

  Like · · 3 hours ago near Fredericksburg, VA ·
  

  • Jennifer Baril Kenney likes this.
  • 

    Jennifer Baril Kenney it wouldn't seem unacceptable, but serious shooters load their own, there's plenty of reloader presses available, it's such a simple device that it's virtually impossible to regulate, and if you restrict commercial bullet loads, homemade ones will only get more prevalent.

    about an hour ago · Like
  • 

    Keith Luc Oster My next door neighbor is a huge reloader. Not as a matter of conspiracy theories...a simple matter of economics. He goes to the range a few times a week as a hobby and if he didn't reload, his ammunition bill would approach his home mortgage! Awesome life skill. I'll take a stab in the dark that the purveyors of terror in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Colorado, and others weren't reloaders, though...

    about an hour ago · Like
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    Jennifer Baril Kenney As you said, simple matter of economics. If you move the price of ready-made ammo high enough, the next Columbine, Sandy Hook, Colorado, etc, will reload.

    about an hour ago · Like

    
    

    Two people making a very reasonable point about gun control. Here are a couple more.

    
    

    Guns are durable things. A hundred year old gun can still  be fired as if it was new. 

    
    

    There are an enormous number of guns in private ownership already. A ban on new sales of some guns, for example assault rifles, would do nothing to eliminate the large number of guns already among the populace. Also, semi-automatic guns can be converted to fully automatic rather easily.

    
    

    Many people do enjoy target shooting. I find it boring myself, and haven't been on a range since I stopped being a law enforcement officer, but to each his or her own. In addition, many people hunt - again, not me -  and I have no problem with hunting, where and when it's legal and within established game limits. Finally, many people think a gun will protect them in their homes, or when they're in public. Statistically, this is foolish. The gun owner is in greater danger for possessing the weapon than would be the case if there was no gun. More on that in a minute. But there are legitimate reasons why a person might want to have a firearm. 

    
    

    The Supreme Court has ruled pretty definitively that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not one restricted to armories and the militia. But does this mean any American can possess any weapon at all? We strictly regulate possession of explosives and bombs, and certain knives are prohibited by law. Some places are closed to what is called "open carry" here in Colorado - schools, airports, libraries, courts. (It's kind of ironic that we'd be arrested if we tried to bring a gun into the Supreme Court building where the individual right decision was made.)

    
    

    Now, on to practical considerations. Personally, I haven't seen the monthly magazine of the National Rifle Association for many years, but I remember there was always a column there about people who used guns to prevent crime. Stories such as, "A grandmother in (name of town) was accosted in a parking lot by three punks, drew her gun and frightened them away," or "A convenience store clerk drew his gun on an armed robber and wounded the man before he fled."

    
    

    I'm sure their stories are true, but for every life protected by a gun, I'll bet there's more than one like, "A man returned home from work early and found his wife with another guy. He shot them both and then committed suicide," or "Losing a bar fight, a man drew his gun and killed his adversary," or "A five-year-old found her father's gun in a dresser drawer and was playing with it when he found her and took it away from her." (This actually happened to my grandmother.)

    
    

    So, guns don't save lives in the aggregate. Gun rights advocates cite the New Life Church here in Colorado Springs as an occasion in which an armed security monitor shot and disabled a mass murderer, and they're right, but we pay a very heavy price in other murders, suicides, and accidental shootings for that benefit. The argument that, "The way to confront a bad guy with a gun is to be sure there are good guys with guns," strikes me as preposterous. How are we to identify the good guys? Do they all wear nametags? Also, the argument that video games, violence on television and at the movies is somehow responsible for the tragedies we have witnessed is just silly. Heck, as a child I saw enormous numbers of shootouts on television. "Gunsmoke" started every week with Marshall Dillon shooting someone.
    
    There will continue to be guns in America for as long as any of us is living. As regrettable as it is to say, law enforcement can only be reactive to gun violence when so many guns are already in anonymous hands and a significant part of the population is determined to resist any law that would restrict gun ownership.
    
    What could help, and what must be done, is a persistent public education effort to persuade people that a gun is not the solution to anyone's personal problems. That's s challenge the National Rifle Association and all other gun rights advocates bear a special responsibility to meet. But it doesn't excuse the rest of us from our moral commandment to make certain that human life is sacred and everyone knows it.

January 6

It's January 6, an important day for several reasons.

First of all, traditionally January 6 marks the day when the three magi supposedly arrived in Bethlehem with their gifts and worshiped the baby Jesus, still wrapped in swaddling clothes in a manger. Let's hope they weren't the same swaddling clothes he had been swadddled in since Christmas!

Being wise men, the magi brought wise gifts. (O. Henry reminds us of this in his wonderful Christmas short story, The Gift of the Magi.) Long tradition holds that they arrived with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. My impression is that frankincense is a room freshener, and burning it would chase away or at least mask the many odors that houses and stables of two thousand years ago had in abundance. It probably  also was thought to have medicinal value, since breathing bad air was considered a major cause of disease back then. Myrrh is an unguent, useful for reducing the inflammation and pain of cuts and burns. Both were literally worth their weight in gold. So the wise men were offering wealth and  good health to the baby.

January 6 marks the traditional end of the Christmas season, the twelfth day of Christmas. It's the time when Christmas decorations are put away and we face winter in earnest. For European people, it was time to tighten the belts and try to survive until spring. Animals that were slaughtered in fall had been consumed by this time and families subsisted on whatever grains, vegetables, and fruits they had managed to put by. Hours of daylight were short, and people had only candles and lanterns to illuminate the long cold winter nights. It was a time of madness, and a time when the old pagan beliefs in witches and other magical creatures seemed much more credible.

In our house, on this January 6, the Christmas tree is still here, mostly because I haven't found time to take it down, and Kris is still partially immobilized from surgery. But we both know it's time and we will put Christmas behind us in the next day or two.

Finally, January 6 is my brother's birthday, a big one this year as he turns seventy. In Scandinavia there's  a lovely tradition of making a big deal  out of a seventieth birthday, with dinners and speeches, in the expectation that the honoree won't be celebrating many more birthdays. It's kind of a valedictory on a life. My siblings are all in Florida today to mark the occasion, but Kris and I are not. She couldn't fly so soon after her operation, and there is the matter of a strained budget, but mostly we were complying with Larry's wish not to make a fuss over his special day. Instead we'll go to Denver to visit Kris' mother and take down her Christmas decorations.

So happy Epiphany everyone. And keep Christmas with you, all through the year.