By Diane Petryk
Hospital green. Children's ward. The 6-year-old boy with a tracheotomy tube lay motionless. Medical staff couldn't lift his despondency. Kathy Lord and Susan Weber tip-toe in.
A parent nods. Softly, they begin to sing. It was the holiday season, so they chose “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
At first, said Laurel Whitaker of the Brooklyn Children’s Medical Center, the boy watched listlessly.
“But before long one hand came up and he began to snap it to the music, then his other hand came up and he began to clap," she said. "By the time they finished he had both hands over his head and was mouthing words to the song." When the musicians were about to leave, he clasped his hands together and reverently bowed his head and mouthed ‘thank-you.’”
The boy’s reaction wasn’t unusual. Hospitals across the city have seen music’s almost magical power for triggering metamorphosis. Moods lift. Blood pressure falls. Will to live can be brought back. Music -- especially the gentle and loving Lord and Weber style -- can often trump medicine.
Musicians Kathy Lord and Susan Weber, who play guitar and electric bass respectively, had been performing together for more than a dozen years when, one day in 1997, Weber experienced a numbness in her left hand. Her doctor referred her to “the best,” Beth Israel Medical Center’s chief neurosurgeon, Dr. Fred J. Epstein. It turned out that Weber’s problem was transitory, but she sought some way to repay Epstein for his kindness and expertise.
Epstein was also head of the Pediatrics Department at the Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery at Beth Israel and therein lay the answer. Lord and Weber would donate a performance for the hospitalized children. That day, as they sang and strummed for children gathered in the ward’s playroom, miracles began to happen. Depressed kids brightened. Unresponsive faces soon beamed. Some children forgot their pain and picked up tambourines. They sang, they laughed; they were swept from their cares by melodies and harmonies. And the effect lasted long after the duo had gone. Epstein was thrilled with the residual positive effects of the performance. It had actually helped the children heal! He insisted Kathy and Susan return, and soon. The rest is history.
“A fire got lit under us,” said Lord. Before long, they had formed Music That Heals, a non-profit organization to raise money and provide performances for hospitals, nursing homes, homeless shelters, hospices and other groups of people needing their spirits lifted. Lord and Weber, with and without their band of 4 to 6 others, already had a full bookings schedule. They were in demand at colleges, for weddings and church groups, and on cruises. They soon found, however, their Music That Heals gigs were the most satisfying.
Kathy, who grew up in Gravesend, said, when she was young, she couldn’t go near a hospital because seeing sick and suffering people upset her. Now, a rare week will go by when she doesn’t make the rounds in one hospital or another.
“It’s not like I don’t see the tragedy,” she said. “I just don’t take it in. I focus on the gift we have to give.” Sometimes it’s more than music. At the Brooklyn Hospital Center recently, Susan had to catch up with Kathy after being delayed with a 3-year-boy. He had a big IV needle in his arm. “He said it felt better if I held his hand,” she said. At the hospital, Weber, a Bronx native, now of Valley Stream, and Lord, now of Bensonhurst, are familiar faces. They stroll the hall in pediatrics and peek into each room.
“Would you like a song?” Kathy asks. Sometimes the child is alone and the music also alleviates loneliness. When parents are present, they are often surprised at the request and shrug an indifferent “okay.” Then they see how their child perks up and hope the women will sing another.
"How about that Lion King song, or a little Bob Marley?" Kathy strums her guitar and sings. Susan sings and shakes a small egg with little pellets inside that make a soft maracas-like sound. She keeps a supply of the eggs in her bag and gives one to each child so he or she can shake it in time to the music, too, and they get to keep it. In the intensive care unit, a nurse is washing her hands with a weary look on her face. She turns and sees Kathy and Susan and her lips curl upward.
“Listen,” she says to a young boy as the women begin with some Kenny Loggins lyrics: “Christopher Robin and I walked along Under branches lit up by the moon Posing our questions to Owl and Eyeore . . .” The atmosphere in the ICU changes for doctors, parents and patients. A young boy talks about his school and learning to play the guitar himself. In another room, Kathy finds out the young girl would like a sad song. They play Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.”
“You have to respect what the child wants,” Susan explains. “But nobody is too sick,” she adds. “Some will decline. Often it’s because they’re unfamiliar -- culturally they’ve never seen someone playing in a hospital. We make sure they realize it’s free.” She’s quick to point out she and Kathy are artists and not clinical musical therapists. Where a clinical therapist is limited to certain textbook methodologies, they are free to adapt to the dynamics of each situation.
“Kathy and Susan are so soft in terms of their playfulness that kids let them in even when they won’t let others in,” says Honey Shields, Beth Israel’s director of Child Life Therapy. “Sometimes they’ll follow them down the hall. It’s a form of empowerment for them.” “We use our intuition and our sensitivities,” Kathy says. “We express feeling in song.” That’s important, even in situations where it’s clear that neither medicine nor music will cure.
At Beth Israel once, they encountered a child with a brain tumor, near death. Many of her family members were gathered in her room. None of them spoke English, but Susan, with her perfect Spanish, was able to learn that the family did want them to play. Softly, they launched into Guantanamera, LaBamba, Cielito Lindo and more. Susan learned that the dying girl loved music. As they played, her family began to sing to her.
“Suddenly there were about 20 people singing and crying and it was beautiful,” Kathy said. “It was a bonding experience for the family and a poignant send off. And I think the girl heard it. I think she got it on some level, the love they had for her they were able to transmit in vibrations of sound. I think she got it.”
Another time they were in a neo-natal unit where a physician was working on a baby the size of one’s palm,” Kathy recalled. The baby was just a few days old. The doctor nodded for them to sing and they did, with several family members around the tiny bed. After awhile, the baby stopped breathing. “The doctor said to us, ‘At least she got to hear a song before she died.’”
In another type of venue, Lord and Weber can reveal more of their rock ’n roll roots. Recently they played for a group of about 30 autistic and developmentally challenged youngsters and young adults at Holy Name Church’s basement rectory in Prospect Park. Able to forget their handicaps for a while, the youths danced exuberantly for more than hour to tunes like “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hot, Hot, Hot,” and “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.” They had a great time, but it was Susan and Kathy who were grateful.
“We were born to do this. We are grateful to be able to give them our gifts,” Weber said. “That’s the satisfaction. If I died today I would feel my life had been worthwhile.” Now in its 10th year, Music That Heals has grown to include about 15 additional musicians who tour the same types of venues. But the organization is still small.
“I’m a musician, not a fundraiser,” Kathy says. Still, she’s also a runner and that led her to arrange an annual 5K Run to help raise funds. The event is held in Prospect Park each Fall. It has grown from about 80 participants the first year to about 200 in 2004. Last year it raised $8,000. Matty Heavey, owner of Circles Restaurant, always donates his restaurant space for a party after race day.
Some of the children who heard Lord and Weber when they were ill, inevitably turn up for the race, giving testimonials to the power of music in general and Lord and Weber in particular. ”Chase all the clouds from the sky Back to the days of Christopher Robin Back to the ways of Christopher Robin and Pooh.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
"Come By the Fire"
by Diane Petryk-Bloom
Winter comes early to
It was only early November, but we had our first serious snow storm already.
They say it’s a sign of good insulation if snow doesn’t quickly melt off your roof, but I had no cause to be pleased with my new 2-bedroom A-Frame on that account .
I was about to have a hole cut in the roof and for some reason the man set to come up from Cheboygan to do the job on my St. Ignace dwelling was on the phone asking me if there was ice up there.
On examination, one side of the steeply pitched roof was fairly dry. The other side looked like a giant splattered snow cone.
“Not much,” I said. The sun will probably burn it all off by the time you get here. Was there ever sunshine in northern
In a word: Imprinting
We are all indelibly imprinted with certain image and experiences from our childhood -- those that stick and dictate our lifelong preferences.
Back in 1950-something, I’m in second grade at
On a morning that didn’t even hint at a need for leggings, I set off for school. But by
Two things about this era: Many moms didn’t drive, mine among them, and girls weren’t allowed to wear slacks or jeans to school—even little ones. That wouldn’t change in my district until 1968.
So on that afternoon – no bus, no car, no long pants, I turned my newly 7-year-old self into the wind and pushed for home. The sharp, icy gusts bit into my bare legs. I was only halfway home when they started to numb.
My mom had no means to rescue me. She did the next best thing. She started a fire in the fireplace.
When she saw me tumble in red-cheeked and red-kneed, she looked relieved and said, “Hurry, come by the fire.”
I still see her kneeling there before the fireplace rolling newspapers into paper logs to put under the grate to help ignite the wood above.
In choosing a floor plan in this post World War II suburb, I knew my parents had sacrificed the third bedroom for the larger living room with fireplace. Considering they had a boy and a girl who would soon outgrow sharing the same bedroom, you can see the importance they placed on that.
It might have been the wisest choice. Through the fifties and sixties and into the seventies that fireplace warmed us while we read or watched TV, its amber aliveness welcomed relatives and guests and it pitched in for the furnace in a crunch.
I learned the importance of opening the flue before building a fire by smoking up the entire house a few times.
Every Christmas my mom would tuck the red ribbon bow of her pine cone cluster in the same gap in the fireplace fieldstone. I knew the fold-out Hallmark Christmas card train would be on the long mantle to display the greetings that would come in the mail. And the little candle carolers and a gum-drop tree from the dime store would be up there as well.
At college in
When I got my first job, I rented for awhile and always missed the hearth part of making a home. So when I was offered a deal on my first house my first question was “Does it have a fireplace?”
Nevermind that it was
My memories of that fireplace include two glasses of wine and conversation that lasted well into the morning.
Apartment hunting in
Does it work?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said. “But you have to sweep the ashes out – there’s no chute.”
In
A baby son and a new life took me to
When we decided to return to our home state of
There was a cute 2-bedroom that had everything but.
Then someone leaned into my ear, and, in the manner of the man who whispered “plastic” to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, said "Vermont Castings."
I bought the fireplaceless house with the pitched roof. From the loft bedroom you could see
After the closing, I headed south across the
Which brings us back to the man on the icy roof. He survived. We had a fireplace in time for Santa.
The night my 7 year-old and I strung some holiday lights around the porch railing we made a snowman, frolicked in the snow, and studied the brilliant constellations visible on a northern
Then, after
Night after night that winter we read in front of that glowing, glossy robot with the very tall, crimped stove pipe hat.
Will my son remember me chopping the icy logs free on the porch or lighting the kindling as I remember my mother rolling newspaper logs and wielding the poker under the grate? And know that “come by the fire” means “I love you.”
Pakistan's Nuke Submarine Threat Credible
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
The cold white illumination of the computer screen was the only light in the bedroom.
It overlooked our bed like a wide-mouthed monster that never slept.
It was the
“Here it is,” he said.
I had long gone to sleep, but not really. I got up on my knees behind him and put my chin on his left shoulder as he clicked open the email he had been waiting for.
Former top CIA agent Robert D. Steele had responded in just four words:
“Your scenario is credible.”I know emails don’t flash. But whenever I remember that moment I see the words flashing in my mind.
There would be no more sleep that night.
Among these, Howard discovered
- Each can carry 16 Harpoon Stand-Off Land Attack cruise missiles
- Those are nuclear missiles
- Since
- The Agosta 90-Bs have a range of 12,000 miles
“According to the Pakistani Navy Captain Iftikhar Riaz Qureshi, who commanded both of these subs in their test phases,” Howard wrote, “
“The
Steele confirmed Howard’s fears that we’d need intuition like The Hunt for Red October’s fictional heroes – every time out.
Then, Islamic extremists will have control of the country and its military hardware – including the Agosta B’s.
The nuclear devastation is enough to bring other nations to their knees.
What facts add crcdibilty to this scenario:
*
*Today Osama bin Laden is one of
*Many a Pakistani militant fundamentalist cell identifies itself as an Osama ally. One of the strongest among these Osama-loyalists is arguably
According to Syed Adeeb, head of Information Times, a militant Pakistani press outlet based in the National Press Building in Washington DC, "an Urdu-language letter written by Pakistan Army officers on a Pakistan Army letterhead and sent to many members of the Pakistan Parliament" calls, "'Pervez Musharaff and his clique…a band of thieves and looters…imposed on this nation'" by the United States.
And what bin Laden, in a January 2004 speech broadcast on Al Jazeera, called, "a surprising blow…one that…due to its magnitude…will change the international balances of powers…."
“Here's what I strongly suspect is Osama's dream endgame,” Howard told Steele : “Nuke a few key cities in the“Your scenario is credible.”
It didn’t flash, but it does.
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Halifax Explosion 90 Years Ago Still Teaches
Ninety years ago today, a blast that set off 400,000 tons of TNT -- the strongest explosion known until the atomic bomb -- obliterated Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia. It happened because a World War I French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in a waterway known as The Narrows. It was an accident, but 2,000 people died and about 9,000 were maimed. The accident taught the Red Cross and other emergency workers a lot about dealing with major catastrophe. This article first appeared in The Press Republican in Plattsburgh, New York.
Horrendous Tragedy Met With Quiet Heroism
At 9:05 a.m. December 6, 1917. Dishes rattle in the cupboards of the MacDougall home in Nova Scotia. Family members don’t know it yet, but the tremors are from a blast a hundred miles away in Halifax. An accident has set off 400,000 pounds of TNT fueled by other volatile substances. In time, it would be known as the most powerful man-made explosion before the nuclear age. Its devastation perhaps exceeds that of more famous civic calamities — the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake or Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — with more than 2,000 fatalities, 9,000 maimed and wounded and two square kilometers of buildings leveled. The MacDougalls, who one day became the grandparents of Jeanie Roberts, an upstate New York Red Cross director, find telegraph and telephone communication severed. Train service, too, is canceled, but William MacDougall, a crane operator for Canadian National Railroad, is asked to report to work. He is issued two bottles of brandy to help him cope with what he is about to see ...
It was an accident linked to a war on another continent. A loaded French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel setting off for New York to pick up World War I relief supplies.
At 7:30 a.m. on a cold, clear December morning, the French ship Mont Blanc crept into Halifax’s Bedford Basin to wait for her convoy. To do so, it had to pass through a tight neck of water between Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, known as The Narrows. The relief ship Imo sailed out of the harbor at a fast clip.
Although proceeding slowly, the Mont Blanc had not been flying a regulation red warning flag indicating her dangerous cargo. The ships’ crews failed to understand each other’s signals and intents several times. Finally, the Imo’s panic reversal of engines caused its bow to swing right and strike the Mont Blanc.
The collision cut a hole in the ship’s side, missing the TNT, but hitting picric acid stored directly beneath drums of benzol. Sparks from the collision started a fire.
In addition to the 200 tons of TNT, the ship carried 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 10 tons of gun cotton and benzol that weighed in at 35 tons, an extraordinary explosive cocktail.
Well aware of the potential of its ship’s cargo, the crew of the Mont Blanc immediately abandoned ship. As they rowed toward Dartmouth in lifeboats they waved frantically and screamed warnings toward those on shore. They were not understood.
One woman looking out on the bay with her baby in her arms was astonished when one of the sailors clambered up the shoreline hill, grabbed her child and ran for the bushes. His action probably saved their lives.
Propelled toward Halifax by the impact of the collision, the ship drifted to rest at busy Pier 6. Its flames grew. People, including many children on their way to school, continued to come down to the pier to watch. Others stood at the windows of their homes overlooking the bay.
The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, but was just positioning an engine at a hydrant when the Mont Blanc disintegrated in a blinding white flash. It was 9:05 a.m.
Three hundred twenty five acres of the city’s industrial north end was laid waste. More than 1,900 people died instantly. Among the 9,000 or so injured, eye damage was horrifyingly widespread. Shattering glass — hardly a pane remained intact anywhere in Halifax or Dartmouth — pierced and cut with astonishing severity. Two hundred fifty eyes were so damaged they would need to be removed. Thirty seven people were left completely blind. Twenty-five limbs had to be amputatedand bewilderment prevailed in the city as survivors began to try to cope in the aftermath. Parents and children were separated.
According to the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, 1,600 homes were destroyed and 6,000 people left without shelter.
Since the area used wood and coal as heat, many furnaces continued to burn after homes were gone.
Oily soot got into wounds.
There were rows and rows of babies in emergency shelters that nobody claimed.
And the next day, 16 inches of snow came down on the devastation.
For Jeanie Roberts of Plattsburgh, New York, a native of Halifax, the World War I-era tragedy has both a personal and professional connection.
She is proud to know that her grandfather MacDougall helped with the relief effort. He never talked about it, but she knows the gentle man who used to give her great big peppermints on Sunday and fill a well in her porridge with molasses, did his part with quiet dedication.
As a crane operator, he very likely helped in excavations that turned up some grisly sights.
His daughter, Roberts’s Aunt Sheila, believes the experience traumatized him, but, like those who never talk about their combat duty, he didn’t come home with the gory details.
Stories of the explosion were inevitable, however, as Roberts grew up.
Her friend, Ann, told of her grandmother, only 8 or 9 at the time of the explosion. She was watching from her home’s French doors and windows overlooking Bedford Basin. Part of the hull of the exploding ship hit the front of her house, breaking all the glass. Like so many, she lost an eye.
***
As executive director of the North Country Chapter of the American Red Cross, Roberts has studied how the community administered disaster relief and how Halifax coped.
The disaster gave rise to triage, the method of sorting victims by the intensity of their medical need.
***
Word of the explosion reached Boston the same morning. By nightfall, a train loaded with relief supplies, medical personnel and members of the city’s Public Safety Committee, left for Halifax.
The American Red Cross pitched in with it’s first international relief effort, Roberts said. It sent a train-load of first-aid supplies and living necessities.
Help poured in from all over the world.
Nearby areas in Nova Scotia responded with astonishing speed. When they heard of overcrowded hospitals and shelter, they opened all possible buildings to the disaster refugees. Some were put on trains to other cities.
"Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly into the night for days and days," Roberts said.
The MacDougall family lived in Stellarton, where Roberts’s father, aunts and an uncle lived as children. Aunt Shelia grew up to be a nurse, Roberts said, and told her she remembers the first time she gave an antibiotic — many years after the tragedy.
"I realized then why so many people died," Roberts said. “They didn’t have drugs to fight infection.”
Within two months, 1,500 victims had been buried, many unidentified. Other victims were discovered in the spring, when excavation was easier.
Some 3,000 homes were repaired in the first seven weeks. In the following cold month of January, the construction of temporary apartments went up at the rate of one every hour. A relief committee provided clothing, money and furniture, and it continued in existence for nearly 59 years.
The Canadian government sent $18 million immediately; Britain contributed $5 million.
But that Massachusetts relief train, with its unstinting volunteers — and $750,000 in donated money and goods — remains a generosity that still touches the hearts of Halifax residents, survivors and their children and grandchildren.
Each Christmas, a huge tree glitters in Boston’s Prudential Plaza — a gift from the people of Halifax.
sees her native city, a city she lived in for 20 years, as setting a brave example of human tenacity. It rebuilt. It recovered. And it changed.
The community came together — in much the same way Plattsburgh reacted during a recent Ice Storm; the way New York City pulled together after 9/11. “Positive things come from that,” she said. “It changes the way you move forward."
In rebuilding 328 houses closest to the explosion, Halifax designed forward-thinking, living space.
The houses were built from cement blocks known as hydrostones and had gardens with trees in front and modern plumbing and electricity. The area, known as the Hydrostone, is considered one of the more attractive and desirable residential areas in the city. There is a lesson here, Roberts says.
The quality of life we have here is not an accident. It’s something we all work at. Fifty years from now, the quality of life will be what we made it today."
***
In 1951, William MacDougall died. Aunt Sheila found the two bottles of brandy, dated 1917, in the back of his closet. He never opened them.
###
Horrendous Tragedy Met With Quiet Heroism
At 9:05 a.m. December 6, 1917. Dishes rattle in the cupboards of the MacDougall home in Nova Scotia. Family members don’t know it yet, but the tremors are from a blast a hundred miles away in Halifax. An accident has set off 400,000 pounds of TNT fueled by other volatile substances. In time, it would be known as the most powerful man-made explosion before the nuclear age. Its devastation perhaps exceeds that of more famous civic calamities — the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake or Great Chicago Fire of 1871 — with more than 2,000 fatalities, 9,000 maimed and wounded and two square kilometers of buildings leveled. The MacDougalls, who one day became the grandparents of Jeanie Roberts, an upstate New York Red Cross director, find telegraph and telephone communication severed. Train service, too, is canceled, but William MacDougall, a crane operator for Canadian National Railroad, is asked to report to work. He is issued two bottles of brandy to help him cope with what he is about to see ...
It was an accident linked to a war on another continent. A loaded French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel setting off for New York to pick up World War I relief supplies.
At 7:30 a.m. on a cold, clear December morning, the French ship Mont Blanc crept into Halifax’s Bedford Basin to wait for her convoy. To do so, it had to pass through a tight neck of water between Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, known as The Narrows. The relief ship Imo sailed out of the harbor at a fast clip.
Although proceeding slowly, the Mont Blanc had not been flying a regulation red warning flag indicating her dangerous cargo. The ships’ crews failed to understand each other’s signals and intents several times. Finally, the Imo’s panic reversal of engines caused its bow to swing right and strike the Mont Blanc.
The collision cut a hole in the ship’s side, missing the TNT, but hitting picric acid stored directly beneath drums of benzol. Sparks from the collision started a fire.
In addition to the 200 tons of TNT, the ship carried 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 10 tons of gun cotton and benzol that weighed in at 35 tons, an extraordinary explosive cocktail.
Well aware of the potential of its ship’s cargo, the crew of the Mont Blanc immediately abandoned ship. As they rowed toward Dartmouth in lifeboats they waved frantically and screamed warnings toward those on shore. They were not understood.
One woman looking out on the bay with her baby in her arms was astonished when one of the sailors clambered up the shoreline hill, grabbed her child and ran for the bushes. His action probably saved their lives.
Propelled toward Halifax by the impact of the collision, the ship drifted to rest at busy Pier 6. Its flames grew. People, including many children on their way to school, continued to come down to the pier to watch. Others stood at the windows of their homes overlooking the bay.
The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, but was just positioning an engine at a hydrant when the Mont Blanc disintegrated in a blinding white flash. It was 9:05 a.m.
Three hundred twenty five acres of the city’s industrial north end was laid waste. More than 1,900 people died instantly. Among the 9,000 or so injured, eye damage was horrifyingly widespread. Shattering glass — hardly a pane remained intact anywhere in Halifax or Dartmouth — pierced and cut with astonishing severity. Two hundred fifty eyes were so damaged they would need to be removed. Thirty seven people were left completely blind. Twenty-five limbs had to be amputatedand bewilderment prevailed in the city as survivors began to try to cope in the aftermath. Parents and children were separated.
According to the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax, 1,600 homes were destroyed and 6,000 people left without shelter.
Since the area used wood and coal as heat, many furnaces continued to burn after homes were gone.
Oily soot got into wounds.
There were rows and rows of babies in emergency shelters that nobody claimed.
And the next day, 16 inches of snow came down on the devastation.
For Jeanie Roberts of Plattsburgh, New York, a native of Halifax, the World War I-era tragedy has both a personal and professional connection.
She is proud to know that her grandfather MacDougall helped with the relief effort. He never talked about it, but she knows the gentle man who used to give her great big peppermints on Sunday and fill a well in her porridge with molasses, did his part with quiet dedication.
As a crane operator, he very likely helped in excavations that turned up some grisly sights.
His daughter, Roberts’s Aunt Sheila, believes the experience traumatized him, but, like those who never talk about their combat duty, he didn’t come home with the gory details.
Stories of the explosion were inevitable, however, as Roberts grew up.
Her friend, Ann, told of her grandmother, only 8 or 9 at the time of the explosion. She was watching from her home’s French doors and windows overlooking Bedford Basin. Part of the hull of the exploding ship hit the front of her house, breaking all the glass. Like so many, she lost an eye.
***
As executive director of the North Country Chapter of the American Red Cross, Roberts has studied how the community administered disaster relief and how Halifax coped.
The disaster gave rise to triage, the method of sorting victims by the intensity of their medical need.
***
Word of the explosion reached Boston the same morning. By nightfall, a train loaded with relief supplies, medical personnel and members of the city’s Public Safety Committee, left for Halifax.
The American Red Cross pitched in with it’s first international relief effort, Roberts said. It sent a train-load of first-aid supplies and living necessities.
Help poured in from all over the world.
Nearby areas in Nova Scotia responded with astonishing speed. When they heard of overcrowded hospitals and shelter, they opened all possible buildings to the disaster refugees. Some were put on trains to other cities.
"Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly into the night for days and days," Roberts said.
The MacDougall family lived in Stellarton, where Roberts’s father, aunts and an uncle lived as children. Aunt Shelia grew up to be a nurse, Roberts said, and told her she remembers the first time she gave an antibiotic — many years after the tragedy.
"I realized then why so many people died," Roberts said. “They didn’t have drugs to fight infection.”
Within two months, 1,500 victims had been buried, many unidentified. Other victims were discovered in the spring, when excavation was easier.
Some 3,000 homes were repaired in the first seven weeks. In the following cold month of January, the construction of temporary apartments went up at the rate of one every hour. A relief committee provided clothing, money and furniture, and it continued in existence for nearly 59 years.
The Canadian government sent $18 million immediately; Britain contributed $5 million.
But that Massachusetts relief train, with its unstinting volunteers — and $750,000 in donated money and goods — remains a generosity that still touches the hearts of Halifax residents, survivors and their children and grandchildren.
Each Christmas, a huge tree glitters in Boston’s Prudential Plaza — a gift from the people of Halifax.
sees her native city, a city she lived in for 20 years, as setting a brave example of human tenacity. It rebuilt. It recovered. And it changed.
The community came together — in much the same way Plattsburgh reacted during a recent Ice Storm; the way New York City pulled together after 9/11. “Positive things come from that,” she said. “It changes the way you move forward."
In rebuilding 328 houses closest to the explosion, Halifax designed forward-thinking, living space.
The houses were built from cement blocks known as hydrostones and had gardens with trees in front and modern plumbing and electricity. The area, known as the Hydrostone, is considered one of the more attractive and desirable residential areas in the city. There is a lesson here, Roberts says.
The quality of life we have here is not an accident. It’s something we all work at. Fifty years from now, the quality of life will be what we made it today."
***
In 1951, William MacDougall died. Aunt Sheila found the two bottles of brandy, dated 1917, in the back of his closet. He never opened them.
###
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Heil Humor
Comedy expresses "a stubborn refusal
to give tragedy…the final say.” (1)
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
The morning after Halloween every television network except Al Jazeera had a news crew either staked out on my stoop or calling the house.
By noon, they had all congregated outside my son’s high school, Leon M. Goldstein in Sheepshead Bay.
The news, that would be played on top of John Kerry’s gaff about poor study habits being the fast track to Iraq, was my son’s Halloween costume of the previous day.
Months earlier, in much the same way Charlie Chaplin noticed in 1937 that, with his little mustache, he could play Hitler, my son, Walter Petryk, 16, looked as his mustache and decided, with a little trimming, he could play both.
In the weeks before Halloween, he assiduously planned for the dual role.
Why? Creating a nifty costume has been a competitive sport for us since Walter’s first Halloweens in western North Carolina, near the Pisgah National Forest, in a county appropriately named Transylvania. Bearing the name that was also that of Dracula’s stomping grounds gave the county impetus to do Halloween in grand style and so it did. It’s a city-wide festival in Brevard, the county seat, including a downtown parade and costume competition for the kids and families.
At age 3, Walter won a ribbon in the “TV or storybook character” category for his Davy Crockett outfit and the next year took a prize for his Zorro. The year a little combat soldier edged out his Mr. Spock was seriously upsetting – to us both. I had almost had to go to outer space to find those ears!
His 5th grade Sherlock Holmes developed as serendipitously as the others. Costumes always suggested themselves by what we had on hand or stumbled upon. Then we sought out the iconic elements. It was the fringed shirt my mother made out of a burlap bag that my brother wore in 1955, billowing out of a trunk, that suggested a new age Davy. It set us off on a hunt for the coonskin cap. Zorro’s hat appeared in a garage sale and then we looked for a black cape, black mask and plastic sword. The “Don Diego” shirt from a western wear store made it special.
Likewise, the Sherlock Holmesian deerstalker cap we found at a thrift shop set us off on a hunt for the characteristic drop-step pipe. We had a seamstress make the cape out of an old houndstooth-pattern wrap skirt I happened to have.
Even that off-the-rack Spiderman the next year needed web-shooters, red gloves and matching shoes with web lines carefully applied.
In this respect, “Hitler” was no different. Once you get three iconic elements, you’re recognizable. With Hitler, it’s obviously the toothbrush mustache, swastika armband and an Iron Cross medal. Believe it or not, you only need to Google “swastika arm band” and you find this store in Wisconsin…. Add jodpurs, belt and boots. I spent the Saturday before Halloween mixing fabric dye and testing swatches preparing to turn an old beige coat into what we thought approximated Hitler’s mustard-colored blazer, but it really wasn’t essential to the costume.
Of course we knew it was a leap from fictional heroes to world-class, villain out of history. When my son announced his intention, my first response was, flat-out, “no.”
My husband said “Oi.”
We knew it was possible someone would jump to the mistaken conclusion that the costume was worn out of adoration rather than mock-the-villian intent, but we decided to allow Walter his artistic freedom. As my son explained to the news media at the time, he was influenced by Mel Brooks not Mein Kampf.
On Halloween he traveled to school in bowler hat, black coat and carried a cane, as Charlie Chaplin. The Hitler costume was never intended for the world at large. It was for his friends within the somewhat cloistered environment of his school. When he got there, he pealed off Chaplin and unveiled Hitler. His friends were waiting for him, for they knew what he had planned. They all thought it turned out great and a female friend was so delighted, he said, she hugged him. A Jewish girl.
At the school he would have been seen by a few hundred students at most and caused little stir, not worldwide headlines, probably, if Marilyn Horan, his English teacher 2nd hour, had not seen fit to have him removed from her class.
It is my understanding the school may take steps if they have palpable evidence someone’s attire might cause a disturbance. But the first hour of the day had passed with no sign of disturbance. Horan, apparently, acted out of personal prejudice rather than any such concern. Dean Paul Puglia told Walter that Horan said the costume made her sick to her stomach. This is not evidence of pending melee in the halls.
Freedom of expression as we know it in America, gives us a right to express ourselves in ways that may revolt others. It wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t. What’s revolting to someone one day – gays out of the closet, say – can become socially acceptable in short order. Or, foreign concepts, like the desirability of cooking dogs or female genital mutilation, will remain taboo. Society decides – but only after it hears the debate.
Some might say we heard more than enough of Hitler by 1945. But when talk is taboo, myth tends to overtake reality. In Germany, the post-war perception grew that Hitler was a god-like genius. About ten years ago a Turkish immigrant named Serdar Somuncu burst that myth by performing “Hitler.” Some thought he was inconceivably offensive and immoral. But it is pretty well-established now that his performances have torn apart the erroneous image of Hitler that had made him up to be something he wasn’t.
Somuncu will read from Mein Kampf, which is still banned in Germany, and some of the passages, he says, “are so weird, so stupid, that simply reading them straight will burst audiences into prolonged laughter.
“Here was a book that was supposed to be so evil, so seductive, yet it was ridiculous.”
By showing up the banality of Hitler and the absurdity of his writing style, Somuncu put post-war healing in fast forward for Germany and not only that. He has dialogued with those young Germans who have far-right, neo-Nazi tendencies. Some of them have learned to laugh at themselves. One told him to call his next show “Hitler Kebab” and he did.
Here, The New York Post reported on our student Hitler getting “das boot” on its front page the next morning and then everybody wanted a piece of the story.
It became a textbook case of American pack journalism. Not only ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and Channel 11, but Inside Edition and The O’Reilly Factor followed the Post. The Associated Press sent the story around the world and it appeared from the LA Times to the Jerusalem Post. The neighborhood newspapers jumped on the bandwagon as well.
Not even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, could have done a better job than the herd mentality here-- the very point I tried to make on Bill O’Reilly’s program. Was there really anything important to report in this incident, or was it a case of media wallowing in its own reflection? Hitler didn’t kill people first hand – he whipped up mass emotion so other people killed people for him.
Mass emotion was being whipped up here to protest something that didn’t need to be protested – a kid in a Halloween costume. Offensive to some, maybe. A local story, maybe. But how do you balance one 16-year-old in a Hitler costume on Halloween, with Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad stating his very real desire to lob a nuke into Tel Aviv? Or with Al Qaeda’s rising star Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir’s expressing thirst for much more American blood? In the costume one may find a sorrowful echo of a past holocaust; the others blare out determination to surpass it with a ghastliness yet unseen.
Walter’s object was to create a good costume and lampoon that ridiculous, perverted little man.
The Post photographer asked Walter to pose and act out expressions. They were theatrical, in no way reflecting his own personality or beliefs. Of course, the Post published the most inflammatory looking expression on their front page. Aren’t people sophisticated enough to know that?
They also had to search hard for the “angry” students and then wrote headlines that led the uncritical reader to believe there was a whole school up in arms. No reporter tried to quantify the “anger” or objectors. How many students were angry versus how many students though it was funny or just had no problem with it? My guess is it was 98 percent of the student body approved or had no problem with the costume and maybe 2 percent objected. I may be wrong, but if so, show me some numbers.
Then remember, our heritage is to fight for a person’s right of expression even if we deplore what they say. In this case, wear. For that reason, Joel Levy of the New York office of the Anti-Defamation League, was 180 degrees wrong when he said Walter’s costume was “anti the values of Western democracy” (as he was quoted in the Courier newspapers). It is precisely the values of Western democracy that allow speech and demonstration, and art, whatever anybody thinks about their offensive or erroneous nature.
Phillipa Strum explains these values in her brilliant book, When the Nazis Came to Skokie. You would think Levy would have read that one.
As this goes to press, Bangladesh journalist Salah Choudhury is on trial for his life. His “crime” is for suggesting that Jews and Christians might not be “pigs” and “monkeys” after all. So when TV reporter Ellen Marks asked me how I felt, after passerby Michael Loweth angrily chided my son for his choice of costume, I said I was delighted. I was delighted that the man could have his say, and my son could stand there and have his, without either of them coming to harm. That’s the wisdom of the West.
Of course Hitler’s image still evokes strong emotion. It should. But it’s going to be inescapable – maybe forever. On November 18 my son and I went to a performance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan. The Sky Maul sketch involved a catalog of imaginary products. The Hitler nightlight-that-turns-into-a-werewolf for children’s rooms was one of them.
Being mocked, historians write, is one thing Hitler feared most. He had a horror of being laughed at and viciously punished those who did. Between 1933 and 1945, five thousand death sentences were handed down by his “People’s Court” for treason, a large number of them for anti-Nazi humor, according to scholar John Morreall.
Maybe that’s why the 1960s sit-com Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, was acceptable, and why we laughed at it. Because they made the bumbling Colonel Klink (portrayed by Jewish actor Werner Klemperer) and the goofy Sergeant Schultz into buffoons. This fiction does not take away from the horrors that took place. But it puts the enemy in their place. It tells them we know they’re bumblers and we defeated them and we can do it again.
Sixty-six years ago fans mobbed Charlie Chaplin at the premier of The Great Dictator in Manhattan, a movie he had to fight to get made. It was a box office smash. “I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race,” he said.
May Hitler ever remain an icon of evil against which we can direct humorous pot shots. If he is surpassed, it may be that western civilization’s vigilance was far too distracted by trivialities.
On the Monday after Halloween, the phone rang at our house – again. This time it wasn’t another network news team or talk show recruiter. The voice was far more sinister.
Throaty and threatening, the caller elongated his words: “H e l l o…. this is Dr. Josef Mengele…”
I paused.
“Oh, Hi Bruce,” I said after a second, recognizing even the disguised voice of my husband’s childhood friend, Bruce Volat, now of Silver Springs, MD. Bruce used to beat up on my husband when they were little boys growing up on a middle class block in Buffalo, New York. A little later, Bruce became his mensch.
“I saw you on TV,” he said, referring to my appearance on the O’Reilly Factor with Walter. “Some people can’t take a joke.”
What, I wondered later, separates Bruce, who would playfully imitate Auschwitz’ Angel of Death – the evil Dr. Mengele who carried out hideous experiments on concentration camp prisoners -- and those who yelled insults, spouted epithets, and uttered denunciations at a kid in a Halloween costume? What separates Walter’s classmates, who laughed and enjoyed the artistry of the costume, the vast majority of them, and the Goldstein’s PTA president, Penny Berman, who vowed to lead a march to denounce him? (It was later changed to a march of “respect and tolerance” when cooler heads prevailed).
What separates them isn’t having personally experienced a tragedy linked to the Nazis or not. My husband’s family lost a hundred members or more in the Holocaust. Bruce’s relatives did, too. One of our relatives lost all her family and survived only because she was hidden in a Catholic home.
It isn’t knowledge of history, either. These kids studied World War II in 10th grade. Walter and I made a trip to England the following summer and toured Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms in London and he absorbed everything about Britain during the Blitz. But that also included the British sense of humor.
In one of my favorite movies of all time – Pimpernel Smith – which was made during World War II – a Nazi General, a Reichminister, is depicted pooring over a book. “Know your enemy,” he tells an underling. “I am told the English have a secret weapon, their sense of humor, and I am determined to find out all about it.” He then reads passages from P.G. Wodehouse, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and the humor Magazine Punch and declares them all “painful rubbish.”
“They have no sense of humor,” he says. He looks forward to the day he is put in charge of German-occupied London, when, he says, “he will see to it there is no talk of sense of humor.”
Now that’s funny. But the Reichminister would never get it. There is, writes Josh Schonwald in his essay on Somuncu, a tradition for Germans to disdain humor in response to their history.
For the British, the ancient Greek and Shakespearian humor legacy provides a perspective on the real world. No subject was off-limits, even the gods.
“In the Anglo tradition, later embraced by the Americans,” Schonwald writes, “comedy, even in the 1700s, was irreverent, zany, a source of anxiety relief.” German humor tended to ridicule the disturber of social order, not embrace the agitator seeking relief.
Even in Dachau, a play satirizing the Nazis was performed for six weeks in 1943, with SS Officers as front row guests. A camp survivor, wrote Morreall, said many prisoners who laughed with a full heart never lived to see freedom again. But the actors gave them strength to endure what they had to endure while they lived.
In short, three things separate those who can laugh at a Hitler costume and those who are insulted, offended, and say they are hurt:
The ability to separate fiction and reality, the ability to maintain sense of proportion; and an understanding of western values of free speech and artistic expression.
Surprisingly, American citizens often can’t separate their TV characters from reality. They ask actors who play doctors to diagnose their medical ills. Klemperer (Col. Klink) was once dis-invited to lead a parade in California after locals objected to a “Nazi” taking part. Realty was, his family had to flee the Nazis.
Likewise, a Halloween costume is not a reality. It espouses no views. If it did, we wouldn’t allow those staples of the holiday, witches and devils, to trick or treat at our doorsteps. Likewise, monsters with rats crawling out of their bloody eyesockets or grim reapers. But these are fictional , you say? Well check your Bible or Torah or Koran. Do they not indicate the Devil or Satan is real? Those who believe such teachings, they must be offended.
At a Tennessee High School a couple years ago, a student who came dressed as Jesus was ejected while the Hitler and Satan-attired were virtually ignored. Jesus was “blasphemy,” but Hitler was just another costume there. Are we going to start drawing up lists of banned costumes? If Hitler is out, what about Osama Bin Laden? There was at least one of him in my neighborhood this year. The little suicide bomber outfits okay? While we’re at it, I really don’t approve of Marie Antoinette… Whoa.
Clowns and Princesses not withstanding, what is the primary adjective for Halloween? It’s “scary” isn’t it? Nothing about dressing as a witch or devil or any other goblin is a testament to adoration of that goblin, is it? A child does not sign a paper somewhere saying: “I am Susie Jones and I approve of this character.”
Secondly, a good sense of proportion wouldn’t allow a Halloween matter to trump urgent geopolitical issues, where missteps could cost the lives of millions. My husband, Howard Bloom, tried to approach PTA leader Berman, both by email and at the march, about channeling her energies and those of her constituents, toward stopping the holocaust Amadinejad and his compatriots have planned. She preferred jousting with phantoms and thus gave students a lesson in fiddling while Rome burns.
Her respect was absent, her tolerance forced upon her. Worst of all, she showed disdain for one of our most cherished rights -- free speech.
The third thing that separates those who could laugh and those who couldn’t is the belief in -- and understanding of -- free speech. If you waiver on the Hitler costume, I submit that the day someone doesn’t have the right to wear that get-up is the day you won’t be able to go to the church of your choice or not go; the day you won’t be able to read what you want, watch what you want, study what you want, or report on your research if you do. Not unless it’s politically correct. The day my son doesn’t have the right to wear a Hitler costume is the day you take the first steps toward creating a new facist state.
It may be ironic, but his right to dress up as Hitler helps insure there never will be another Hitler – here anyway.
Why shouldn’t people be protected from insult, offense, blasphemy, what-ever speech they don’t like? Because, as people like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson have said in words similar, “In a free marketplace of ideas, the truth will win out.” That means, if someone speaks for Nazism, the people to whom it is repugnant can also speak. People can choose and will usually opt for justice and good sense, but only if they can hear all the debate.
My flipside of the Voltaire/Jefferson idea is: “In a closed market of ideas, false notions stick forever.” Stop and think of what would happen to science if researchers and thinkers were not allowed to discuss their ideas and theories without fear. Legitimate l science would come to a stop.
So there are those who laugh at a mock Hitler and those who don’t. Each has his right to his or her attitude. But the laughers have the advantage. Here’s why:
First, humor can focus attention on what is wrong. As it did during the dark days of the Holocaust, Morreall points out, humor can create solidarity among those fighting oppression. And it can help the oppressed get through their trials without going insane.
Despite the efforts of rare Islamic comedians like Shazia Mirza, we know Muslims don’t laugh much. They are counting on our short-range thinking, our scruples and our freedoms to defeat us. But we have that secret weapon the Reichminister in Pimpernel Smith couldn’t understand: laughter. Laughter, even in the face of terror and gore. It really bugs them.
The essence of all humor appears to be incongruity. To find something funny is to spot the incongruity, as Morreall explains in his essay “Humor in the Holocaust: Its critical, Cohesive and Coping Functions,” 1997.
“Jokes, for example,” he says, “typically lead our minds along path A, and then at the punch line, send them off onto path B. Our train of thought is derailed, and if we enjoy the mental jolt, we laugh.”
My son’s “Hitler” was very incongruous in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, at a school named after a Jewish educator. And as we saw, not everyone enjoys incongruity.
“Enjoying incongruity rather than reacting with fear, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions, requires a certain playfulness and motional disengagement, Morreall writes.
“To see humor in situations, especially our own problems, we have to adopt a higher, more rational perspective. Humans are the only species that laughs because we are the only animals whose minds can rise above the here and now…”
Walter’s friends at Leon M. Goldstein are very smart kids, indeed.
###
(footnote for opening quote:)
M. Conrad Hyers, “The Dialectic of the Sacred and the Comic,” in M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), p. 232.
to give tragedy…the final say.” (1)
By Diane Petryk-Bloom
The morning after Halloween every television network except Al Jazeera had a news crew either staked out on my stoop or calling the house.
By noon, they had all congregated outside my son’s high school, Leon M. Goldstein in Sheepshead Bay.
The news, that would be played on top of John Kerry’s gaff about poor study habits being the fast track to Iraq, was my son’s Halloween costume of the previous day.
Months earlier, in much the same way Charlie Chaplin noticed in 1937 that, with his little mustache, he could play Hitler, my son, Walter Petryk, 16, looked as his mustache and decided, with a little trimming, he could play both.
In the weeks before Halloween, he assiduously planned for the dual role.
Why? Creating a nifty costume has been a competitive sport for us since Walter’s first Halloweens in western North Carolina, near the Pisgah National Forest, in a county appropriately named Transylvania. Bearing the name that was also that of Dracula’s stomping grounds gave the county impetus to do Halloween in grand style and so it did. It’s a city-wide festival in Brevard, the county seat, including a downtown parade and costume competition for the kids and families.
At age 3, Walter won a ribbon in the “TV or storybook character” category for his Davy Crockett outfit and the next year took a prize for his Zorro. The year a little combat soldier edged out his Mr. Spock was seriously upsetting – to us both. I had almost had to go to outer space to find those ears!
His 5th grade Sherlock Holmes developed as serendipitously as the others. Costumes always suggested themselves by what we had on hand or stumbled upon. Then we sought out the iconic elements. It was the fringed shirt my mother made out of a burlap bag that my brother wore in 1955, billowing out of a trunk, that suggested a new age Davy. It set us off on a hunt for the coonskin cap. Zorro’s hat appeared in a garage sale and then we looked for a black cape, black mask and plastic sword. The “Don Diego” shirt from a western wear store made it special.
Likewise, the Sherlock Holmesian deerstalker cap we found at a thrift shop set us off on a hunt for the characteristic drop-step pipe. We had a seamstress make the cape out of an old houndstooth-pattern wrap skirt I happened to have.
Even that off-the-rack Spiderman the next year needed web-shooters, red gloves and matching shoes with web lines carefully applied.
In this respect, “Hitler” was no different. Once you get three iconic elements, you’re recognizable. With Hitler, it’s obviously the toothbrush mustache, swastika armband and an Iron Cross medal. Believe it or not, you only need to Google “swastika arm band” and you find this store in Wisconsin…. Add jodpurs, belt and boots. I spent the Saturday before Halloween mixing fabric dye and testing swatches preparing to turn an old beige coat into what we thought approximated Hitler’s mustard-colored blazer, but it really wasn’t essential to the costume.
Of course we knew it was a leap from fictional heroes to world-class, villain out of history. When my son announced his intention, my first response was, flat-out, “no.”
My husband said “Oi.”
We knew it was possible someone would jump to the mistaken conclusion that the costume was worn out of adoration rather than mock-the-villian intent, but we decided to allow Walter his artistic freedom. As my son explained to the news media at the time, he was influenced by Mel Brooks not Mein Kampf.
On Halloween he traveled to school in bowler hat, black coat and carried a cane, as Charlie Chaplin. The Hitler costume was never intended for the world at large. It was for his friends within the somewhat cloistered environment of his school. When he got there, he pealed off Chaplin and unveiled Hitler. His friends were waiting for him, for they knew what he had planned. They all thought it turned out great and a female friend was so delighted, he said, she hugged him. A Jewish girl.
At the school he would have been seen by a few hundred students at most and caused little stir, not worldwide headlines, probably, if Marilyn Horan, his English teacher 2nd hour, had not seen fit to have him removed from her class.
It is my understanding the school may take steps if they have palpable evidence someone’s attire might cause a disturbance. But the first hour of the day had passed with no sign of disturbance. Horan, apparently, acted out of personal prejudice rather than any such concern. Dean Paul Puglia told Walter that Horan said the costume made her sick to her stomach. This is not evidence of pending melee in the halls.
Freedom of expression as we know it in America, gives us a right to express ourselves in ways that may revolt others. It wouldn’t be much good if it didn’t. What’s revolting to someone one day – gays out of the closet, say – can become socially acceptable in short order. Or, foreign concepts, like the desirability of cooking dogs or female genital mutilation, will remain taboo. Society decides – but only after it hears the debate.
Some might say we heard more than enough of Hitler by 1945. But when talk is taboo, myth tends to overtake reality. In Germany, the post-war perception grew that Hitler was a god-like genius. About ten years ago a Turkish immigrant named Serdar Somuncu burst that myth by performing “Hitler.” Some thought he was inconceivably offensive and immoral. But it is pretty well-established now that his performances have torn apart the erroneous image of Hitler that had made him up to be something he wasn’t.
Somuncu will read from Mein Kampf, which is still banned in Germany, and some of the passages, he says, “are so weird, so stupid, that simply reading them straight will burst audiences into prolonged laughter.
“Here was a book that was supposed to be so evil, so seductive, yet it was ridiculous.”
By showing up the banality of Hitler and the absurdity of his writing style, Somuncu put post-war healing in fast forward for Germany and not only that. He has dialogued with those young Germans who have far-right, neo-Nazi tendencies. Some of them have learned to laugh at themselves. One told him to call his next show “Hitler Kebab” and he did.
Here, The New York Post reported on our student Hitler getting “das boot” on its front page the next morning and then everybody wanted a piece of the story.
It became a textbook case of American pack journalism. Not only ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and Channel 11, but Inside Edition and The O’Reilly Factor followed the Post. The Associated Press sent the story around the world and it appeared from the LA Times to the Jerusalem Post. The neighborhood newspapers jumped on the bandwagon as well.
Not even Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, could have done a better job than the herd mentality here-- the very point I tried to make on Bill O’Reilly’s program. Was there really anything important to report in this incident, or was it a case of media wallowing in its own reflection? Hitler didn’t kill people first hand – he whipped up mass emotion so other people killed people for him.
Mass emotion was being whipped up here to protest something that didn’t need to be protested – a kid in a Halloween costume. Offensive to some, maybe. A local story, maybe. But how do you balance one 16-year-old in a Hitler costume on Halloween, with Iran’s President Mahmoud Amadinejad stating his very real desire to lob a nuke into Tel Aviv? Or with Al Qaeda’s rising star Abu Hamza Al-Muhajir’s expressing thirst for much more American blood? In the costume one may find a sorrowful echo of a past holocaust; the others blare out determination to surpass it with a ghastliness yet unseen.
Walter’s object was to create a good costume and lampoon that ridiculous, perverted little man.
The Post photographer asked Walter to pose and act out expressions. They were theatrical, in no way reflecting his own personality or beliefs. Of course, the Post published the most inflammatory looking expression on their front page. Aren’t people sophisticated enough to know that?
They also had to search hard for the “angry” students and then wrote headlines that led the uncritical reader to believe there was a whole school up in arms. No reporter tried to quantify the “anger” or objectors. How many students were angry versus how many students though it was funny or just had no problem with it? My guess is it was 98 percent of the student body approved or had no problem with the costume and maybe 2 percent objected. I may be wrong, but if so, show me some numbers.
Then remember, our heritage is to fight for a person’s right of expression even if we deplore what they say. In this case, wear. For that reason, Joel Levy of the New York office of the Anti-Defamation League, was 180 degrees wrong when he said Walter’s costume was “anti the values of Western democracy” (as he was quoted in the Courier newspapers). It is precisely the values of Western democracy that allow speech and demonstration, and art, whatever anybody thinks about their offensive or erroneous nature.
Phillipa Strum explains these values in her brilliant book, When the Nazis Came to Skokie. You would think Levy would have read that one.
As this goes to press, Bangladesh journalist Salah Choudhury is on trial for his life. His “crime” is for suggesting that Jews and Christians might not be “pigs” and “monkeys” after all. So when TV reporter Ellen Marks asked me how I felt, after passerby Michael Loweth angrily chided my son for his choice of costume, I said I was delighted. I was delighted that the man could have his say, and my son could stand there and have his, without either of them coming to harm. That’s the wisdom of the West.
Of course Hitler’s image still evokes strong emotion. It should. But it’s going to be inescapable – maybe forever. On November 18 my son and I went to a performance of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan. The Sky Maul sketch involved a catalog of imaginary products. The Hitler nightlight-that-turns-into-a-werewolf for children’s rooms was one of them.
Being mocked, historians write, is one thing Hitler feared most. He had a horror of being laughed at and viciously punished those who did. Between 1933 and 1945, five thousand death sentences were handed down by his “People’s Court” for treason, a large number of them for anti-Nazi humor, according to scholar John Morreall.
Maybe that’s why the 1960s sit-com Hogan’s Heroes, set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, was acceptable, and why we laughed at it. Because they made the bumbling Colonel Klink (portrayed by Jewish actor Werner Klemperer) and the goofy Sergeant Schultz into buffoons. This fiction does not take away from the horrors that took place. But it puts the enemy in their place. It tells them we know they’re bumblers and we defeated them and we can do it again.
Sixty-six years ago fans mobbed Charlie Chaplin at the premier of The Great Dictator in Manhattan, a movie he had to fight to get made. It was a box office smash. “I wanted to ridicule their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race,” he said.
May Hitler ever remain an icon of evil against which we can direct humorous pot shots. If he is surpassed, it may be that western civilization’s vigilance was far too distracted by trivialities.
On the Monday after Halloween, the phone rang at our house – again. This time it wasn’t another network news team or talk show recruiter. The voice was far more sinister.
Throaty and threatening, the caller elongated his words: “H e l l o…. this is Dr. Josef Mengele…”
I paused.
“Oh, Hi Bruce,” I said after a second, recognizing even the disguised voice of my husband’s childhood friend, Bruce Volat, now of Silver Springs, MD. Bruce used to beat up on my husband when they were little boys growing up on a middle class block in Buffalo, New York. A little later, Bruce became his mensch.
“I saw you on TV,” he said, referring to my appearance on the O’Reilly Factor with Walter. “Some people can’t take a joke.”
What, I wondered later, separates Bruce, who would playfully imitate Auschwitz’ Angel of Death – the evil Dr. Mengele who carried out hideous experiments on concentration camp prisoners -- and those who yelled insults, spouted epithets, and uttered denunciations at a kid in a Halloween costume? What separates Walter’s classmates, who laughed and enjoyed the artistry of the costume, the vast majority of them, and the Goldstein’s PTA president, Penny Berman, who vowed to lead a march to denounce him? (It was later changed to a march of “respect and tolerance” when cooler heads prevailed).
What separates them isn’t having personally experienced a tragedy linked to the Nazis or not. My husband’s family lost a hundred members or more in the Holocaust. Bruce’s relatives did, too. One of our relatives lost all her family and survived only because she was hidden in a Catholic home.
It isn’t knowledge of history, either. These kids studied World War II in 10th grade. Walter and I made a trip to England the following summer and toured Winston Churchill’s underground Cabinet War Rooms in London and he absorbed everything about Britain during the Blitz. But that also included the British sense of humor.
In one of my favorite movies of all time – Pimpernel Smith – which was made during World War II – a Nazi General, a Reichminister, is depicted pooring over a book. “Know your enemy,” he tells an underling. “I am told the English have a secret weapon, their sense of humor, and I am determined to find out all about it.” He then reads passages from P.G. Wodehouse, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and the humor Magazine Punch and declares them all “painful rubbish.”
“They have no sense of humor,” he says. He looks forward to the day he is put in charge of German-occupied London, when, he says, “he will see to it there is no talk of sense of humor.”
Now that’s funny. But the Reichminister would never get it. There is, writes Josh Schonwald in his essay on Somuncu, a tradition for Germans to disdain humor in response to their history.
For the British, the ancient Greek and Shakespearian humor legacy provides a perspective on the real world. No subject was off-limits, even the gods.
“In the Anglo tradition, later embraced by the Americans,” Schonwald writes, “comedy, even in the 1700s, was irreverent, zany, a source of anxiety relief.” German humor tended to ridicule the disturber of social order, not embrace the agitator seeking relief.
Even in Dachau, a play satirizing the Nazis was performed for six weeks in 1943, with SS Officers as front row guests. A camp survivor, wrote Morreall, said many prisoners who laughed with a full heart never lived to see freedom again. But the actors gave them strength to endure what they had to endure while they lived.
In short, three things separate those who can laugh at a Hitler costume and those who are insulted, offended, and say they are hurt:
The ability to separate fiction and reality, the ability to maintain sense of proportion; and an understanding of western values of free speech and artistic expression.
Surprisingly, American citizens often can’t separate their TV characters from reality. They ask actors who play doctors to diagnose their medical ills. Klemperer (Col. Klink) was once dis-invited to lead a parade in California after locals objected to a “Nazi” taking part. Realty was, his family had to flee the Nazis.
Likewise, a Halloween costume is not a reality. It espouses no views. If it did, we wouldn’t allow those staples of the holiday, witches and devils, to trick or treat at our doorsteps. Likewise, monsters with rats crawling out of their bloody eyesockets or grim reapers. But these are fictional , you say? Well check your Bible or Torah or Koran. Do they not indicate the Devil or Satan is real? Those who believe such teachings, they must be offended.
At a Tennessee High School a couple years ago, a student who came dressed as Jesus was ejected while the Hitler and Satan-attired were virtually ignored. Jesus was “blasphemy,” but Hitler was just another costume there. Are we going to start drawing up lists of banned costumes? If Hitler is out, what about Osama Bin Laden? There was at least one of him in my neighborhood this year. The little suicide bomber outfits okay? While we’re at it, I really don’t approve of Marie Antoinette… Whoa.
Clowns and Princesses not withstanding, what is the primary adjective for Halloween? It’s “scary” isn’t it? Nothing about dressing as a witch or devil or any other goblin is a testament to adoration of that goblin, is it? A child does not sign a paper somewhere saying: “I am Susie Jones and I approve of this character.”
Secondly, a good sense of proportion wouldn’t allow a Halloween matter to trump urgent geopolitical issues, where missteps could cost the lives of millions. My husband, Howard Bloom, tried to approach PTA leader Berman, both by email and at the march, about channeling her energies and those of her constituents, toward stopping the holocaust Amadinejad and his compatriots have planned. She preferred jousting with phantoms and thus gave students a lesson in fiddling while Rome burns.
Her respect was absent, her tolerance forced upon her. Worst of all, she showed disdain for one of our most cherished rights -- free speech.
The third thing that separates those who could laugh and those who couldn’t is the belief in -- and understanding of -- free speech. If you waiver on the Hitler costume, I submit that the day someone doesn’t have the right to wear that get-up is the day you won’t be able to go to the church of your choice or not go; the day you won’t be able to read what you want, watch what you want, study what you want, or report on your research if you do. Not unless it’s politically correct. The day my son doesn’t have the right to wear a Hitler costume is the day you take the first steps toward creating a new facist state.
It may be ironic, but his right to dress up as Hitler helps insure there never will be another Hitler – here anyway.
Why shouldn’t people be protected from insult, offense, blasphemy, what-ever speech they don’t like? Because, as people like Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson have said in words similar, “In a free marketplace of ideas, the truth will win out.” That means, if someone speaks for Nazism, the people to whom it is repugnant can also speak. People can choose and will usually opt for justice and good sense, but only if they can hear all the debate.
My flipside of the Voltaire/Jefferson idea is: “In a closed market of ideas, false notions stick forever.” Stop and think of what would happen to science if researchers and thinkers were not allowed to discuss their ideas and theories without fear. Legitimate l science would come to a stop.
So there are those who laugh at a mock Hitler and those who don’t. Each has his right to his or her attitude. But the laughers have the advantage. Here’s why:
First, humor can focus attention on what is wrong. As it did during the dark days of the Holocaust, Morreall points out, humor can create solidarity among those fighting oppression. And it can help the oppressed get through their trials without going insane.
Despite the efforts of rare Islamic comedians like Shazia Mirza, we know Muslims don’t laugh much. They are counting on our short-range thinking, our scruples and our freedoms to defeat us. But we have that secret weapon the Reichminister in Pimpernel Smith couldn’t understand: laughter. Laughter, even in the face of terror and gore. It really bugs them.
The essence of all humor appears to be incongruity. To find something funny is to spot the incongruity, as Morreall explains in his essay “Humor in the Holocaust: Its critical, Cohesive and Coping Functions,” 1997.
“Jokes, for example,” he says, “typically lead our minds along path A, and then at the punch line, send them off onto path B. Our train of thought is derailed, and if we enjoy the mental jolt, we laugh.”
My son’s “Hitler” was very incongruous in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, at a school named after a Jewish educator. And as we saw, not everyone enjoys incongruity.
“Enjoying incongruity rather than reacting with fear, anger, sadness, or other negative emotions, requires a certain playfulness and motional disengagement, Morreall writes.
“To see humor in situations, especially our own problems, we have to adopt a higher, more rational perspective. Humans are the only species that laughs because we are the only animals whose minds can rise above the here and now…”
Walter’s friends at Leon M. Goldstein are very smart kids, indeed.
###
(footnote for opening quote:)
M. Conrad Hyers, “The Dialectic of the Sacred and the Comic,” in M. Conrad Hyers, ed., Holy Laughter: Essays on Religion in the Comic Perspective (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), p. 232.
The Great Muckrakers
Tuesday November 28, 2006
This blog is created in memory of journalism's great and heroic muckrakers:
Ida Tarbell; Lincoln Steffens; Ray Stannard Baker (from my alma mater -- Michigan State University); Nellie Bly, Ida Wells; Upton Sinclair; Charles Edward Russell; Edward R. Murrow; Eric Sevareid; Drew Pearson; Jack Anderson; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; Oriana Fallaci; Greg Palast; Christopher Hitchens, and those yet to make their name and save us from the folly of our peers.
This blog is created in memory of journalism's great and heroic muckrakers:
Ida Tarbell; Lincoln Steffens; Ray Stannard Baker (from my alma mater -- Michigan State University); Nellie Bly, Ida Wells; Upton Sinclair; Charles Edward Russell; Edward R. Murrow; Eric Sevareid; Drew Pearson; Jack Anderson; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; Oriana Fallaci; Greg Palast; Christopher Hitchens, and those yet to make their name and save us from the folly of our peers.
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