I am working on a book about nice people. Unfortunately, I am having some difficulty finding women and minorities who are known particularly for being nice. I’ve been reading and watching a lot of stuff about the modern civil rights movement, looking for people who can flesh out what one friend has taken to calling, “Frank’s Nice Guys.” But it is hard to find the niceness of people’s personality when they are in the middle of a struggle for their very lives—in the middle of a war.

I just got a video Free At Least: Civil Rights Heroes—Part 1 Emmett Till / Medgar Evers. I think this title is incorrect, because Till was not a hero: he was just one of many casualties.[1] He was brutally murdered for whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Or was it that he said, “Bye, baby”? Or did he ask for a date? Or did he do nothing all? Based upon the video, he seems like he was a nice kid. Certainly, his “crime” seems to have been one of niceness.[2] So I’m not inclined to think of niceness as that great a thing just now. And that is the whole problem. Those without power very often are nice. It is when the powerful act like human beings that we take note.

On a more positive note, the more I learn about Medgar Evers, the more I think he was a nice guy in the best possible sense. I think he is going to be one of my nice guys. But it was very hard to watch the video. Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar’s wife, spoke very beautifully about their final days together. I can’t imagine knowing that my death (or that of my spouse) was about to happen and being so calm. They are built of better stuff than I. By the end, I was a mess—sobbing uncontrollably. But at least I was that much closer to my goal.

[1] I am inclined to take this back. Perhaps we need to distinguish between Emmett Till the boy and Emmett Till the symbol. Regardless, this is what Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (who was a hero—there is no doubt of that), said, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me, and if the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world, then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died.” Indeed.

[2] I can understand that someone can find a sexual advance threatening. Just the same, mating rituals for humans are generally ones of charm rather than coercion. Clearly, Mrs. Bryant felt threatened: she went to her car and got a gun. But that in itself showed the level of control she had. And after the fact, she did not mention it to her husband. Given that, I suspect that after it was over, even she saw that she had over-reacted. And so I don’t imagine that Till was aggressive in any way. Bryant was just hopped up on racist stories of the over-sexed black man and his insatiable desire for white women.

Update

I am watching PBS’s excellent Eyes on the Prize. Because I am an iconoclast, I have always tended to minimize Martin Luther King, Jr. And I still do think that his role in the modern civil rights movement is generally over-stated, in the same way that George Washington’s is in the American revolution. But King as amazingly eloquent. This is especially true when he is speaking extemporaneously. Truly amazing. Watch Eyes on the Prize and see what I mean.

I love potato pancakes, and I consider myself something of an expert on them. Most people are not aware that there are two kinds of potato pancakes. First, there are the traditional—What will we do with these left-over mashed potatoes?—and then there are those we make from scratch as an exquisite touch to any meal. I will present you with recipes of both.

Left-Over Potato Pancakes

You can’t just plop some mashed potatoes into a frying pan and expect to get something like a pancake. A binding agent is necessary. In the case of potato pancakes, this is egg and flour. So for each cup of mashed potatoes, add two small eggs and and one and a half tablespoons of flour. To this, add about a quarter cup of finely grated onions, a half teaspoon of salt, and a quarter teaspoon of pepper. Mix it all together. Then, in a skillet of oil (about one-quarter inch in depth), fry small patties of about three-eighths inch thick and two to three inches around. Use a high temperature oil like corn or peanut. Cook until the bottom of the patty is browned, flip it over (Don’t splash the oil and burn yourself!), and cook until the other side is browned. Soak up extra oil with paper towels and then serve.

Some people don’t like pepper in their potato pancakes, so feel free to skip that. Also, it isn’t necessary to add onions to this recipe, but I wouldn’t think of having potato pancakes without them.

Specially Prepared Potato Pancakes

Grate about two cups of potatoes. There is no need to peel them. Before putting the grated potatoes in your mixing bowl, squeeze as much of the water out of them as you can. This is very important! Chop up a half cup of onion. Squeeze what little water you can out of these and add them to the potatoes. Add three medium eggs, two tablespoons of flour, a teaspoon of salt, and a half teaspoon of pepper. Mix it up and fry as stated above. If the mixture is too soupy (or becomes so), just add more flour. Contrary to many sources, you aren’t going to ruin your potato pancakes with too much flour (within reason).

Potato pancakes are no big mystery. Making them is more a knack than anything else. As long as you minimize your mixture’s liquid content, you should be fine. There are few things in the universe better.

The Edmonton Public Library produced this delightful puppet show as a public service announcement. It is very effective and funny.

I have always been a poor speller, although I’ve improved greatly over the last decade. However, because I am a careful writer, I am less likely than most to write an incorrect homonym like “beat red.” This must be a point of pride to many intelligent bad spellers. In general, spelling is arbitrary. As Geoffrey Numberg says in the way we talk now:

Thus we bad spellers can brush off good spellers as freaks like professional basketball players and American Idol contestants. But knowing the difference between there, their, and they’re: that takes intelligence.

Bearing this in mind, I had a very uncomfortable experience a couple of days ago when I was writing Reduced Shakespeare. Reading through my first draft, I noticed that I spelled “their” as “there”—three times! This was very embarrassing, even if I was the only one around to notice it.

Having thought about it a few days, I now wonder what the big deal is. In truth, the following sentence is completely clear, “There horses were not their.” It makes me wonder if my concern is not just a reflex to please grammar pedants who I despise anyway. These people are, after all, the greatest impediments to the reform and simplification of the language that I greatly desire.

On the other hand, no one wishes to look stupid. Such grammatical niceties are the best way that we have to prove we are educated. That is something, sadly, that matters to me. Except, of course, when writing about grammar.

I am working on a short article about Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape and so this reminded me of a short play I had written about a year ago that I called Acclimation. This is because my friend Kristen McHenry had mentioned that it reminded her of this play. I disagree completely, but she must have been perceptive or I clear, because I did write it after having discovered Beckett’s Act Without Words both I and II, but especially I. In this play, a man is playfully tortured by the universe. He is hot, so a carafe of water is hung down, just out of reach. But the universe provides! A box is lowered. He climbs upon the box, but the carafe is only raised farther up. The play ends with the man giving up, regardless of the hope that the universe tempts him with.

When I discovered the play, I read it again and again. To me, it is as truthful of the human condition as Waiting for Godot. But frankly, far harder to shake. As I thought more and more about it, I got the idea for a similar play that deals with my own very personal battle with the universe: acclimation. It seems I am forever putting on and taking off clothes in order to attain the right temperature. In my case, this is likely due to my misspent youth and its negative effects on my Hypothalamus. But I’m sure at least that there are many menopausal women who relate. The play, of course, is deeper than this. Or not. In some ways it is just a romp: a silly theater piece for a comedic actor. I hope someone enjoys it.

How to Read a Play

I have found that most people have difficulty reading a play, and this one is more difficult than most. A play cannot be read the way a novel is. You must convert every stage direction into an image. So when I write that the man removes his cap with his right hand, you must imagine the man in your head removing the cap with his right hand (which would be on his left as you see him in the theater). Otherwise, you won’t experience the play.

I was listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning. It was the first time I had heard it in some time. It was interesting to compare it to another form of mainstream news: Fox. Although NPR is hardly perfect, I noticed that the stories were presented in as non-judgmental a manner as possible. Interpretation was left to the listener. On Fox News, in contrast, everything is judgement. Regardless of the ideological content of their programming, the point of any program is not the communication of ideas but rather of feelings—particularly outrage.

Rather than the pernicious ideas that underlie all Fox News content, what really matters is this emotional approach to information. Since NPR presents ideas, one can agree or disagree with it. The Fox News viewer is given no such option. Instead, he is caught in a stimulus-response loop that gratifies his basest feelings of in-group superiority and out-group degeneracy. “Look at that person who is so vile as to not live up to my moral standards!” Given that this is the end result of any Fox News story, there can be no broadening of minds—no increased understanding.

Such an approach to news could conceivably be used by the left as well as the right. In fact, it would seem easier for the left. The atrocities of an increasingly unequal society seem ripe for the kind of emotional appeals as we saw during the robber baron days in newspapers and books. And yet, we don’t. The emotional appeal comes almost exclusively from the right.

I think this is due to the fact that the political center of gravity in this country has moved so far to the right. As a result, there are only two kinds of people who can continue to consider themselves conservative. First, there are the super rich for whom conservatism justifies their unjustifiable standards of living.[1] Second, there are those for whom facts and argument mean nothing. These are people who have only their anger and the belief that they belong to an in-group[2] to find any purpose in life. This leaves just about any person who is open to fact and argument on the left in the American political spectrum. However, I think the day is coming when the have-nots will begin to see their situation in less intellectual terms. I can’t see this as an entirely bad thing, even though I do not relish the idea. I am tired of all the modern-day Howard Beales mad as hell that the rich are taxed too much.

In the end, I will always side with ideas and thus NPR. I need no help in determining what to believe. And I think this is true of most people. Left to themselves, they will reach reasonable conclusions—even the Fox News viewers. Unfortunately, the Fox News viewers are not left to themselves. As a group, they are the least able to protect themselves from demagoguery, and yet most attracted to it.

[1] I cannot get my head around the idea that one person is a thousand times more valuable than another. Even Jonas Salk depended upon millions of people in order to do his most honorific work. So it really fries my brain to believe that some hedge fund manager is a hundred million times more valuable than a subsistence farmer.

[2] Whether they really are part of that in-group is highly questionable. For example, many such people believe themselves to be entrepreneurs or the “potentially rich” when they are, in fact, just working stiffs who, if luck turns sour, will be rolled over like Sherman tank tracks by the very group they consider themselves to be “in.” I see this from time to time, like the ENRON engineer who lost his retirement after the top executives—the real in-group members—had sold off theirs early (and illegally) for hundreds of millions in profits.

Earlier today, I was listening to Elvis Presley’s The Top Ten Hits. This collection included his number one hit, “Don’t Be Cruel,” of course. I have never been able to sing the refrain of this song anyway but, “Don’t be cruel to a heart that truel.” This is not just a matter of my usual silliness. The fact is that true doesn’t really rhyme with cruel. They are assonantal, but in an extremely awkward way that sends shivers down my spine. So my choices are to pronounce “cruel” as “crew,” which makes the whole line dull, or to create a new word: truel. So it will always be: don’t be cruel to a heart that’s truel.