Dreaming things that never were, and asking why not
Politics is very much in my mind these days. Barack Obama is the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton has just given her concession speech, and the 40-year anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination has just passed. On a personal note, I’m dealing with the painful awareness of not being a full member of this community, while I’m waiting for my pending citizenship case to be decided.
On June 5, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot, I was 7 years old and living in Italy. I remember that the news made me very sad. Something about him had touched me deeply, as it had touched millions of Americans who saw in RFK the personification of the hope for a better world for everybody: the blacks, the poor, the immigrants, the minimum-wage workers, and the young people fighting to stop the Vietnam war. Just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the America that desperately needed change was mourning again. It was not just the loss of a man, as extraordinary as RFK was; it was the attempted murder of the belief that progress, peace, equality, and human dignity are possible here and now.
That June of forty years ago, Paul Fusco captured the mourning of the Country: a million people standing by the tracks as RFK’s body made its 8-hour last trip from New York to Washington DC. (video; more about the death of RFK and what he meant for this country in The End of an American Dream: The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy).
Roberto Saviano in NYC
Roberto Saviano, author of the best selling book Gomorrah, spoke last Thursday at the Festival of International Literature in NYC. Gomorrah, a chilling account of the Camorra’s deep connections with the “legal” Italian economy, sold more one million copy in Italy and has been translated in 33 languages.
Alexander Stille, professor at Columbia University and author of Excellent Cadavers, an analysis of the Sicilian Mafia, says about Gomorrah:
What the book does so well is to remind people, as if it needed reminding, that a third of the country is essentially condemned to a state of permanent underdevelopment because of the persistent, and in many ways increasing, dominance of organized crime.
Roberto Saviano is 29 years old and has received repeated threats by the Camorra. He has no regular home and lives under police protection.
Well-behaved women seldom make history
I’ve been tagged by Nick Barrowman at Log base 2, with the historical figure meme. My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to pick a historical figure and list 5 random/weird things about this person.
I had to think really hard to pick my favorite historical figure. I don’t think I can name my favorite ice-cream flavor, let alone a favorite historical figure. I thought about William James, because when he was at Harvard he was a buddy of Charles Pierce, which is the historical figure chosen by Nick.
But–sorry Bill–it ought to be a woman. A crowd of bad-behaved women came to mind:
- Emmeline Pankhurst (”Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.”)
- Rosa Parks (”When they stood up and I stayed where I was, he asked me if I was going to stand and I told him that ‘no, I wasn’t,’ and he told me if I did not stand up he was going to have me arrested. And I told him to go on and have me arrested.”)
- Anaïs Nin (”I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy.”)
- Josephine Baker (”I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.”), and
- Rachel Carson (”The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.”)
I wonder why I thought of them. I suspect that it’s because women need to be good to the point of sanctitude or quite bad to become historically famous. And bad girls tend to be more interesting.
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So I picked the baddest woman on the block, Mary Jane West, know to the world as Mae West. I’m pretty sure she counts as an historical figure. She was born two centuries ago–exactly on August 17, 1893. And everybody who is still famous after so many years deserves her place in History, wouldn’t you say? [or shall I say Herstory?].
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara at the premiere of War Made Easy
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara listen to Norman Solomon, founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Solomons’s documentary, War Made Easy, premiered tonight at the Quad and will be playing through March 20.
Can Dance a Little
Do you feel discouraged? Do you think that your life is a failure? Are you ready to give up?
Some people buy motivational books and read motivational quotes when they feel demoralized. I’m glad they can find solace in those books and quotes. I can’t. I’ve always found motivational stuff depressing and unhelpful, but I’ve found something that works much better for me: I love reading about famous people’s failures.
I found an inspiring collection of notable failures browsing the Self-Efficacy page created by a group of Emory’s researchers (self-efficacy is a concept developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, which describes our belief in our own ability to reach a desired outcome; it turns out that self-efficacy perception is a good predictor of our success).
This quote, in particular, made me laugh aloud:
After Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, read, “Can’t act. Can’t sing. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”
And you may also be interested to know that Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because ‘he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.’ Charles Schultz “had every cartoon he submitted rejected by his high school yearbook staff “and Walt Disney wouldn’t hire him.” Lucille Ball was told by the head instructor of the John Murray Anderson Drama School, “Try any other profession.” Robin Williams was voted “least likely to succeed” in high school. August Rodin’s father once said, “I have an idiot for a son;” he was described as the worst pupil in the school and rejected three times admittance to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. And, of course:
Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was “sub-normal,” and one of his teachers described him as “mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.”
Don’t you feel better already?
The point is: perhaps what keeps us from succeeding is our fear of failing or a false believe that if we were really good we would succeed sooner, faster, and most of the times. And our belief that if somebody tells us we are bad, we must be bad.
So, if you feel a failure, rejoice: perhaps you are on the 999th step of the 1000-step invention of the light-bulb.
Congratulations to Al and to the Environment
Today, Al Gore and a United Nations panel shared the Nobel prize for Peace for their work on global warming. Thank you, Al.
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