Coincidentally Yours

 Within our little lives, there are mysteries.  Why things happen can have an obvious causality, or at least a logic.  Or the causality can elude us.  Our usual ways of thinking don't quite work.

I'm a big fan of coincidences (and coincidentally, someone in college nicknamed me Big Coincidence, playing off the syllables in my name.)  I've always maintained that as the kind of writer I was professionally, serendipity--useful coincidence--was my most valuable research tool.  So I think about these things, and notice them.

 I have a few recent examples to ponder.  One of them involves George Orwell.  For a forgotten reason--if there was a reason--I had a sudden hankering to read an Orwell essay, and I knew I had a book of Orwell essays.  But when I looked in the Orwell section on one of my bookshelves, it wasn't there.  I kept looking everywhere I could think of it might be but could not find it.  And as I browsed I would wander back to the shelf where other Orwell books resided.  One title I did have was Coming Up for Air.  I realized that I'd never read it and knew nothing about it.

Shortly thereafter, perhaps that same day, I was browsing the latest additions to the Arts and Letters Daily, an online selection of current articles with links, just to see what was new that might interest me.  Near the top was an article on Orwell.  The Daily, like a lot of Internet sites now, is not as useful as it once was, since many of the publications it links to keep their articles behind a pay wall or otherwise restrict them.  But I found I could read this one, and it dealt largely with Orwell's early and neglected novel, Coming Up For Air.

This is an authentic coincidence, seemingly made more strange because the novel is so obscure.  It is a personal coincidence--that is, a coincidence only to me.  It's difficult to judge the extent of the coincidence: that is, just how unlikely it is, with the strong implication that the less likely, the more meaningful.  Another such coincidence happened to me since.  I had finished reading a contemporary novel that I found admirable, until the end jolted me with a troubling and seemingly artificial but terrible fate to an endearing character.  I felt betrayed, and especially given my age and the times, this is not something I want to encounter in my reading anymore.  

So I sought out a story to clear my emotions--the kind much less likely to offer such a gut punch.  I got down my volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, and happened on one I'd never read before, called "The Adventure of the Yellow Face."  Watson starts off noting that most of his stories are about Holmes' triumphs of deduction, but he's also been wrong.  In this case his theory is completely wrong.  In the end it is revealed that a wife was trying to conceal something from her husband that turned out to be a child from a former marriage--a marriage to a black man that resulted in a black child.  Much to her astonishment, her husband immediately accepts the child.  It is a very short and singular Holmes story that I've never seen dramatized (and I've seen pretty much all) or heard referred to, or knew anything about.

The next evening I was looking at a YouTube video interview of Nicholas Meyer, writer and director of several Star Trek projects, the proximate reason for checking out the video, though I also liked hearing him talk, as he is an intelligent talker.  He also has written several Sherlock Holmes novels (I knew of only his first, and didn't consciously remember it), and this interview seemed to be on the occasion of his latest.  He was commenting on instances of casual stereotyping of Jews and non-white races in the Conan Doyle Holmes stories, typical of his times.  But there was an exception he said, a little story called "The Yellow Face."

That I picked out a video from everything on YouTube that mentioned the obscure story I'd read the night before is certainly a coincidence.  But coincidence, like serendipity, is about attention.  Had I really never heard of that story before?  Perhaps I had, but it meant nothing to me at the time.  It might not have meant much to me this time, had I not just read it. (I also recall a shiver when I anticipated Meyer was going to mention it just before he did.)  

Serendipity, at least as a research technique, is also like that: it's about attention.  Perhaps it is remarkable that a book pertinent to research on my latest project is sitting there on a sale table in front of the Harvard Bookstore--a book (in the case I'm thinking of, a kind of anthology) I didn't know existed, with authors I did not know.  But had I not been paying attention to books that could be relevant to my research, it might have escaped my notice entirely.  It was the convergence of my interest and attention, and the presence of the book (and then later, how useful it became--I contacted several of its authors), that made it serendipitous.  It may also be akin to Jung's theory of synchronicity, summarized in a song by Sting as: "if you act as you think/the missing link/synchronicity."

But that doesn't explain everything about coincidence or related phenomena. And my Orwell story isn't over. 

Eventually I concluded that my book of Orwell essays had been among the books I sold in Pittsburgh before I trekked to California.  But since I had became so obsessed with the idea of reading Orwell essays, I went on Amazon to buy a collection.  I paused over a definitive and expensive collection, but after more research I honed in on what seemed to be a more than adequate selection in a fairly affordable volume.  I chose it for my shopping cart and was about to complete the purchase when I just stopped, for no particular reason except that I didn't want to complete it at that moment.

Within the next few days my eyes strayed from my computer to the bookshelves on my right--and there it was.  Not only was it my book of Orwell essays, it was an earlier edition of precisely the selection I was going to buy. 

So what do we call this?  An intuition of some kind in one part of my brain telling my fingers not to press the purchase button?  Or a simple coincidence?  I'd certainly made that particular error before--of buying a new copy of a book I couldn't find, and then finding the copy I already had. Had that subconsciously influenced my hesitation to not risk doing it again, at least not yet? Or should we just call it luck?

The final odd event seems to be in a class by itself.  One evening at dinner my partner Margaret told me about a strange dream she'd had.  All she remembered was an image: of brightly colored bowls of different sizes, nested in one another.  She remembered this image because she had no associations for these bowls--they weren't from her childhood or had she ever had them herself.

But as soon as she said it, a memory was awakened in me.  Even though I'd recently written about the home of my childhood and its contents in the 1950s, including our Fiestaware and 1950s aluminum tumblers, I had completely forgotten the bowls of various sizes, each a single bright primary color (brighter in memory than these contemporary photos), that my mother used in our kitchen in the 1950s, with at least some of them in use for decades more. As soon as Margaret said the words, I saw them, I remembered them right down to which size bowl was which color.  That night, I looked them up on the Internet, and sure enough, there were photos of these early Pyrex bowls, sets of which are now collectors items.

So Margaret had a dream, not of her childhood, but of mine.  I wonder what to call that? 

TV and Me: Disney (Part 2) The Crockett Grin

 TV and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Eighth in a series.

Once he’d made several animated feature films, Walt Disney wanted to try live action features.  World War II intervened, but at the same time, unexpectedly gave him the impetus and means to make his first live action films immediately after the war.

 The financial success of Disney animated films depended on the addition of international audiences, particularly in Europe.  Once the war started, his movies couldn’t be shown in the battlefield that was western Europe, except in England, where they became a cherished relief from the war. But the British government impounded the profits until war’s end, and even then, Disney could spend that money only in the UK. 

Richard Todd, Glynis John in Rob Roy

So the Disney Studios used those funds to make their first live action films in England.  Just as his animated features mostly adapted well-known fairy tales and other existing stories, Disney chose classic British adventures for these movies.  His first was a live action version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, released in 1950.  It was followed by The Story of Robin Hood (1952), and in 1953, The Sword and the Rose (an Arthurian era story about knights) and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue.

 These theatrical films all were presented on Disneyland, as Disney’s anthology TV show was called in 1954. They were all divided into two hour-long shows (with Walt Disney providing historical and other background) on consecutive weeks.

  Treasure Island appeared in two parts in January 1955, during the show’s first season.  Robin Hood was  shown in the second season, during November 1955.  The following January (1956), The Sword and the Rose appeared under the original title of its source book, “When Knighthood Was In Flower.”  Rob Roy got the two successive episodes treatment that October, early in the third season.

 I remember Robin Hood the best. Richard Todd played Robin as a young energetic upstart (a yeoman rather than a noble.) This Disney movie has the distinction of being the only version of Robin Hood to have filmed in the actual Sherwood Forest.  I may have seen it before I saw the Richard Greene TV series.

 Knighthood and Rob Roy kind of blended into Robin Hood, since they also starred Richard Todd.  I remember his romantic interest in Knighthood, Glynis Johns –I’m now surprised to see she wasn’t Maid Marian. She was however, the female lead in Rob Roy. With her distinctive voice and gaze, she had a long career in British and Hollywood films. 

On the other hand, I didn’t take to Treasure Island.  I found Long John Silver (memorably played by Robert Newton) uncomfortably scary, especially in his relationship with Jim Hawkins, a boy more or less my age (Bobby Driscoll again.)  (For reference, I was eight when Disneyland went on the air in 1954.)

 With these modest successes accomplished, Disney began his first big budget Hollywood live action film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, based on the novel by Jules Verne.  He assembled a Hollywood cast, though lesser stars who were also good actors: James Mason, Peter Lorre and the up-and-coming young Kirk Douglas.  Except for Douglas, the cast and production had a European flair, perhaps a transition from the English films.

It turned out to be a highly ambitious film, with Disney facing technical challenges as he did with his first animated features.  This one required underwater photography in only the second Cinemascope movie ever made.  Even the diving equipment necessitated technical innovations.  Disney built a live action studio for this movie, and with the special effects and location shoots, it quickly became the most expensive movie in Hollywood history to that time. 

 Financially stretched, the Disney Studios went all in to make this film a success with a massive ad campaign. Not by coincidence, scenes from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea were the focal point for the seventh episode of the Disneyland TV show in December 1954, just weeks before the movie’s release.

 The most dramatic scene in the movie was a fight on the deck of the Nautilus submarine with a mammoth Giant Squid.  Fragments of it were featured in the TV hour.  I recall Walt Disney explaining on this show what a giant squid is, especially in contrast to an octopus; how it squirts ink, and how it may have been the source of perennial tales about sea serpents.

 Like most Disneyland episodes, this one was repeated many times over the years. But it wasn’t until 1976 that the full movie (in color) was shown on TV, after Disneyland moved to NBC and after a few name changes to The Wonderful World of Disney.

 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea did become a major international hit.  It was innovative and influential, yet it is curiously forgotten.  Part of the reason may be that it was immediately obscured by a phenomenon unparalleled in television history—and in Hollywood history-- which began the very next week after this seventh Disneyland episode, when the eighth was broadcast on December 15, 1954: the first Frontierland show called “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.”

 Back for a moment to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  Creating a working model for that giant squid, with working tentacles and mouth, was a huge technical challenge. In fact the first version failed so badly that a new model had to be designed and built, and the elaborate scene re-shot at huge expense, forcing Disney to go begging to the banks so he could finish the movie.

 So when Walt Disney heard that a new movie was opening that featured giant ants with articulated limbs and mouth, he went to see it. (He may also have been taking a look at one of the film’s leads, James Arness—not yet the star of TV’s Gunsmoke.)

   The giant ants in the sci-fi horror film Them!—one of the first atomic monster movies—didn’t impress him, and apparently neither did James Arness. But another actor with one scene did.  The studio was preparing their first live action film specifically for Disneyland, the TV show.  It was based on the life and legends of an early 19^th century American folk hero, Davy Crockett.  But so far they didn’t have anyone to play Crockett.  

In Them! Fess Parker played the pilot of a small airplane who saw two winged giant queen ants flying along with him, and was confined by officials, ostensibly as a psycho, but really because scientists and the military (who at that point knew about the radiation-enlarged ants) were on the lookout for such reports.  It’s a single scene, but Parker—tall, rangy, folksy and personable-- delivered lines and a performance with conviction and humor.  Disney had found his frontier hero.

 

In his first leading role, Fess Parker was paired with Hollywood veteran Buddy Ebsen (starting out as a loose-limbed dancer, he was cast as the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz until the makeup made him seriously ill) as Crockett’s companion, Georgie Russel.  It was a quick, low budget television production, except that Disney paid extra to film it in Technicolor, as he did most of his shows, looking forward to color TV. (Which is why Walt almost always appeared in a blue suit—it filmed best for both black and white and for color.) 

The first episode was shot on location in Tennessee, far from Hollywood and its professional support, so both Parker and Ebsen had to do most of their own stunts.  Each day’s filming was sent back to Disney Studios, so no one on the production knew how it looked.

 The Davy Crockett saga appeared in three hour-long Disneyland shows, about a month apart, starting in December 1954.  By the time the last episode aired in February 1955, it was the biggest television phenomenon in history.  Initial audience was estimated at 50 million.  Disney repeated these episodes in April and May.  Eventually some 90 million viewers had watched it.  

The Davy Crockett craze revved up with the show’s signature song, “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” one version of which was the number one record in America for 13 straight weeks.  This Bill Hayes recording ended up as the #6 song of 1955, and two other versions (by Fess Parker and by Tennessee Ernie Ford) were also in the year’s top 30, logging in at #22 and #26 respectively.

 Just two months after the third episode was first re-run, a movie edited from the TV episodes opened in theatres—in color (paying off Disney’s gamble earlier than even he could expect.)  It, too, was a hit—perhaps some solace to the perplexed in Hollywood: TV could subtract from their week-to-week audiences, but in certain cases it could also multiply. 

 The Crockett craze is also measured—and remembered-- in merchandise.  Disney, who pioneered the merchandizing of characters with Mickey Mouse in the 1930s, was up to the challenge, but since Davy Crockett was an historical character who couldn’t be trademarked, a lot of others got in on the goldrush.  It’s estimated that in just the first six months after the first episode, $100 million in merchandise was sold (and this was in an era in which the average annual wage in the US was under $5,000.) 

What was this all about?  Clearly, a lot of kids were already watching the Disneyland TV show, and their enthusiasm spread.  As part of that initial audience of postwar Baby Boom kids—our numbers swelling with each passing year until peaking later in the mid-1950s—I’m guessing we were first attracted to the Crockett charm.  The first Crockett episode was also the first under the Frontierland banner, which the narrator described as “tall tales and true from the legendary past.”  Crockett was a perfect blend of “tall tales and true.”  In our first glimpse of him he emerges from some bushes where he had been experimenting on subduing a bear by grinning at it.  You wouldn’t catch John Wayne trying something like that.

 The rollicking theme tune added to that sense of fun. As Davy, Fess Parker was a soft-spoken showman, who would soon prove to be an unusual hero: after fighting a band of Creek Indians, he makes peace with them in agreeing to guarantee they could live on their land.  In the second episode he defends other Indians from European-American predators, and storms out of Congress in protest against a bill that broke the treaty he helped forge and took away Indian land.  

 We’d seen buckskins and fringe jackets in westerns before, but not coonskin caps, and they became the rage. We all had to have one, and I recall it was one of my first lessons in socio-economics: I understood that it was the rich kids who wore the caps completely made of fur.  The rest of us got leather-topped (or more likely, leathery plastic) caps with some fur on the sides, and something like a tail, probably the $1.95 version from a five-and-ten. 

 The only other merchandise I remember having was a set of socks with Davy Crockett on them.  The best part was that they came in a package with a cardboard backing, upon which was printed all the lyrics to the Ballad of Davy Crockett—I believe it was twelve verses.  (Eventually I got a record of the song—which I still have. Not the cap, though.)

 I also was bold enough to stride out of the bright sunshine into the dim tiny showroom at the nearby Behner’s Garage on the West Newton Road, and timidly request the photograph I’d read that American Motors dealers  (sponsors of Disneyland) were giving away.  Much to my surprise, they gave me one.  It was Fess Parker in full costume, with printed autograph: “When you’re out to win, try the Crockett grin…your friend, Davy Crockett/Fess Parker.”

 Otherwise, that spring and summer we had the woods across the road in green Pennsylvania to play Davy Crockett, and we could improvise an Alamo out of a suitably shaped garage roof down on Maryland Avenue. We wore our caps and whatever else we had that looked leathery.  We cradled our long sticks meant to be rifles across our chests like Davy did.  I did what I felt was a fair imitation of Fess Parker, starting every thoughtful sentence with, “Wellp…”

 It was easy to play Crockett partly because the violence on the shows looked like play.  There was no blood and no bullet holes or visible knife wounds.  The fights were more like the roughhouse and wrestling we did anyway, and the “bang, you’re dead.”  At the same time, Disney’s stories always included death and its consequences, however gently.

  At some point in our play we would likely sing the song:

 Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee

 Greenest state in the land of the free

Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree

 Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three-

-Davy Davy Crockett

 King of the Wild Frontier

 And so we inducted ourselves into a ritual of fantasy, history and grace.  We’d seen Davy at the helpless cause of the Alamo, in the final act of going down fighting. Then the next year there were two more episodes, billed as “legends” about Davy Crockett, and the spectre of idealistic death was overcome by living on in story, in myth that could encompass our own invented adventures. 

 Live-action adventures on Disneyland—particularly under the Frontierland banner that ranged over 18^th and 19^th century American history—gradually increased in number until they dominated the hours in the late 1950s.  This nicely paralleled my growing out of the prime age for animated fantasy and into live action interests.   

I remember three characters in particular.  In fifth and sixth grades I developed a keen interest in the American Revolution and the early formation of the United States.  This may have started in school—my fifth grade history textbook was titled “Builders of Our Country”—but it was given impetus, as well as flesh and blood, by Disney’s Johnny Tremain.  

 Disney adapted Esther Forbes’ novel Johnny Tremain, about a young apprentice silversmith in colonial Boston, beginning just before protest against Britain’s “taxation without representation” that quickly led to the Revolutionary War.  Tremain interacted with real historical figures, including Paul Revere, Samuel Adams and James Otis, and the real events of the Boston Tea Party, and the battles of Lexington and Concord.   

 Disney made a movie for theatres from the book, and previewed it on a Disneyland episode in May 1957 called “The Liberty Story.”  Disney made insightful use of footage of his film version of Robin Hood, because the King John opposed by the mythical Robin Hood was the same King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta, renowned as the first acknowledgement of rights that led centuries later to the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution.   

But the centerpiece of the episode was Johnny becoming acquainted with the Sons of Liberty, and participating in the Boston Tea Party.  I couldn’t wait to see the movie, and I didn’t have to wait long—I saw it in a theatre (in color) that summer.  Then I saw it again in November 1958, when it was presented in two parts on Disneyland. 

I was taken with the story of Johnny’s silversmithing accident that burned his hand, rendering it useless for awhile, but other parts of the story were less compelling than the talk about the reasons for independence, and especially the thrilling parts, augmented as usual by catchy tunes and rousing musical staging: 

It’s a tall old tree and a strong old tree—

And we are the sons, yes we are the sons

The Sons of Liberty… 

 My enthusiasm went as far as acquiring a Johnny Tremain tricorner hat, and paying closer attention to the founding documents.  In sixth grade I was especially taken with the Declaration of Independence.  I saw a facsimile of Thomas Jefferson’s first draft in a text book, and copied it out in my notebook, trying as best I could to imitate Jefferson’s handwriting.  Later I acquired (was given or more likely sent away for) fake yellowed parchment copies of the Declaration, Preamble and Bill of Rights, and for good measure the Gettysburg Address, and tacked them all on my bedroom wall.  By the time I was in high school I knew these texts pretty well.

 

The second figure was Elfago Baca, a character at the center of ten one-hour stories in the 6^th and 7^th seasons, from October 1958 (when the show’s name had changed to Walt Disney Presents) to March 1960, the longest series within the series.  There was a real Elfago Baca, a Mexican American lawman and lawyer in New Mexico and Texas in the late 19^th century, and at least some of the stories (especially the first few) were based on historical accounts. The Disney Elfago Baca was more clearly a hero, and a champion of Mexican Americans and minorities in general.

 He was one of the few Latino (or Hispanic or Latinx) TV heroes, though not the first—not even the first that Disney produced.  He was preceded by the Cisco Kid and by Disney’s Zorro, for example.  Zorro was the only other television series Walt Disney made, besides this anthology series and the Mickey Mouse Club. He introduced it on Disneyland’s fourth anniversary show, and it ran from October 1957 to the summer of 1959.  We watched this series, too.  This was so much our Zorro that when its popularity brought the 1940 Tyrone Power flick, The Mark of Zorro, back to one of our Saturday matinees, I’m afraid it was laughed off the screen.  For one thing, his “Z” was way too sloppy.

 Though Guy Williams (Zorro) and Robert Loggia (Elfago Baca) both had Italian parents, Loggia (in his first major role) effectively played Baca as a hero who emerged from the Mexican American community.  

Because he survived an onslaught of gunfire while besieged in a crumbling sod house, Baca got the reputation as indestructible.  The inevitable Disney theme song emphasized the “nine lives” aspect as it played with the Spanish names Elfago El Gato (the cat.) 

I was drawn to Loggia as Elfago Baca partly because although he was slim he used cat-like quickness to his advantage.  I was a skinny kid, and my self-consciousness increased with age (by this time I was 11 and 12), so Baca was a kind of model.   

 But he was a model also in other ways.  In the Disney version, as a lawyer he champions the rule of law over violence, and the principle of equal justice under the law.  This extends not only to his Mexican American community but to, for example, the Anglo settlers who arrive to farm in what was until then cattle country.

 They are called Mustangers, apparently poor whites from the Blue Ridge Mountains.  They are the subject of violence by cattle ranchers and prejudice in town, where they are derided and prevented from buying goods they need.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see the mid-1950s parallels to the Freedom Riders, sit-ins and children attacked for going to schools because of their race.

 Veteran TV writer Maurice Tombragel, who wrote for most of the westerns I watched in the early to mid 1950s, provided some startling dialogue towards the end of the story.  Fearing the fate of their lawyer, Elfago Baca, and the sheriff in confrontation with the ranchers who burned their farms, the Mustangers and their wagons are occupying the main street of the town, and preventing anyone from trading at the general store. 

 The storekeeper (played by DeForrest Kelly) appeals to the Mustanger elder.  “It’s not right to make innocent people suffer,” he says, meaning his usual customers.

 “Those who think themselves better than others are not innocent,” the elder says.

 “But you don’t understand,” the storekeeper pleads.  “I was forced to do what I did.”

 “Cowards are even less innocent than hypocrites.”

 Good thing only children were watching.  A political statement like that could get you blacklisted.

 The third figure was another character from the Revolutionary War, but this time a real person: Francis Marion, known as the Swamp Fox.

  Though no battles in that war were fought near where I lived (as were several in the preceding, so-called French and Indian War), that period was important in the history of my hometown.  The city of Greensburg was named after Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene.  Though he’d never been there, several notable town fathers had been officers serving in his command.  So this added a certain texture to my interest.

 General Francis Marion was also under Greene’s command later in the war, but his fame was established in the swamps of South Carolina as Colonel Marion, leading a band of irregulars on guerilla missions. 

 Disney dramatized him as the Robin Hood of the American Revolution, and the catchy theme song emphasizes that, even stealing a line from the ITV Robin Hood series:

 Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail in his hat

Nobody knows where they Swamp Fox at.

Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, hiding in the glen,

He runs away to fight again.

 Leslie Neilson played the Swamp Fox in eight episodes: two in October 1959, four in January 1960 (taking up the entire month of shows), and two in January 1961.

 By the late 1950s, Disney’s live action TV shows were not only giving new talent the spotlight, they were employing some of the best character actors in Hollywood, as well as experienced film directors, writers and cinematographers.  Television provided these Hollywood veterans with something movies couldn’t anymore: regular work, and growing audiences. 

 So long-time Hollywood western director Harry Keller directed the Swamp Fox shows, which were written by Lewis R. Foster, a veteran writer who began with Laurel and Hardy silents and later contributed to the famous Jimmy Stewart feature Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

 There were many movie veterans in the cast, and some relative newcomers, like star Leslie Neilsen (fresh from playing the intrepid captain of the first cinema starship in Forbidden Planet), and actors Patrick Macnee (star of the 1960s British spy spoof series The Avengers) and Slim Pickens (Doctor Strangelove.) 

Beverly Garland, Brian Keith in Elfago Baca

Appearing in Elfago Baca were such future movie and TV stars as James Coburn, Brian Keith and the aforementioned Doctor McCoy.  1950s sci-fi scream queen, Beverly Garland, got to act a different kind of role.  By then at least some of Hollywood knew it couldn’t beat TV, so it was hurriedly joining it.

 By the time Leslie Neilsen was riding across the screen, I was in eighth and ninth grades, and too old to be playing Swamp Fox with neighborhood friends. (We mostly played baseball and football, until we drifted apart, caught in the pressure-cookers of separate high schools.) It was also near the end of my regularly watching the Disney show. I don’t recognize many episodes after 1960, though I recall the teasers for the Fred MacMurray movie comedy, The Absent-Minded Professor. 

 Disney used many of the same story techniques in his live action films as he had in his animations, particularly the use of established characters, music and catchy songs, and the mood of fantasy.  His stories about storybook characters easily edged into his treatment of actual historical figures.  Some if not most historians will suggest that the real Davy Crockett or Elfago Baca or Francis Marion were not so unambiguously admirable as the Disney versions, but the emphasis in Disney was on the story as a model. 

But if the live action stories of Frontierland used fact to augment fantasy, Disney Studios made use of the tools of fantasy to illuminate fact (or at least educated conjecture) in episodes under the banner of Adventureland and Tomorrowland.  These will be the subject of my third and final Disney installment.

 That installment will also include thoughts on Disney, television and reading.  This might be especially appropriate as we try to deal with another alleged barrier to the pace and concentration of reading, represented by social media and the Internet.

No, it's not Karl Rove watching GW and Cheney---or is it?

Say Kids, What Time Is It?


Winter solstice is icumen in. Story time.

Have I said this before? You know at my age...at my age we repeat ourselves. Sure, short-term memory. But at my age repeating it until you get it right seems more important than something else new and goony.

Yes you start out being Howdy Doody and you end up looking like Mr. Bluster. And if Clarabell is your hero the whole time---you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you? Gather the kids around for another story by the Old Ranger. (No, not the Lone Ranger. I know the difference, thanks. Do you? )

It's nice to fill this with allusions almost nobody will get. Or is that the cynicism of age? Yeah, the good old days. They had Joyce and Pound. We had Neil Simon and that King fella. Sherman King was it? Bernard? I can't remember. Wrote those long spooky books I never read. Liked a couple of the movies though. That one with Anthony Hopkins. No, not that one. Hearts in Atlantis, yeah, that was it. Where was I? Was I rambling?

Stephen, that's it. Stephen King.

So, kids, let me pass on the fruits of my experience. Ready? It won't take long, believe me.

1. To stay warm in the cold, wear a scarf and a hat. Coats are good, but the essentials to feeling warm are a scarf and a hat. The French have been on to this for some time.

2. The best thing you can do for your day is to drink a full glass of water first thing in the morning. You'll live longer.

3. The best thing you can do for your car is to let it warm up a few minutes before you drive it. Your car will live longer.

4. Now we're in the neighborhood of bitter lessons. Let's not stay here too long, okay? Success in the world entirely depends on the enthusiasm of others. Especially others with power, which means either the right other at the right time, or lots and lots of others voting for you with money (or I suppose votes, if that's your thing.) A very hard lesson, I assure you. For an introvert, even harder.

That's about it. Or anyway, all that I can remember at the moment.

So now is the winter of our discontent, or to quote that other poet, it's not dark yet, but it's getting there. I suppose this so-called civilization has been simultaneously falling apart and reaching for new heights for a long time, but the reaching part seems to be losing out to the falling apart part. This last election may signal the fast stage decline, like a falling object looks to be floating down until it's a few feet off the ground and then, whoosh, womp. I'm trying not to project my personal prospects on the world, but as bad as they might be, they don't look so bad alongside this country's. At least it's unlikely I'll wind up killing a lot of innocent people.

Just before I left Pittsburgh---I've told you this one, right?---well, listen to it again. Just before I left Pittsburgh I was selling about half of my record collection to a used record dealer (probably should have sold the other half, too. My record player doesn't work, and new ones are now luxury items.) The dealer was about my age. One of those 60s type rock albums must have inspired some mention of global heating, the environment going to hell, fundamentalist fascism, nuclear annihilation or maybe all of them. Anyway he said something like, well, looks like by the time the shit hits the fan we'll be gone.

I laughed. I'd made the same damn calculation. Yeah, the world is ending but probably not till mid 21st century, by which time I will have lived my life in relative freedom and prosperity, with fish still in the ocean,a few trees left in a few forests and some air somewhat fit to breath.

Well, thanks to GW Bush and his hypnotic evil laying a numb pall of "partial-birth abortion" and "reality TV" (two expressions that are as completely nonsensical as privatized social security) upon the land, which in my worst nightmare I couldn't have imagined in 1996, it's all speeding up. (Actually that's not quite true. I imagined it in 1989, in a novel that not only predicted somebody very much like Bush in the White House, but also a national siege protected by something I called Homeguard. An unpublished novel naturally.)

The apocalypse coming up fast, by design apparently, so no time for horsing around. Time to pony up. Time for horseshit until the cows come home, and the chickens come home to roost. Funny about those farm metaphors and barnyard epithets, or epitaphs as my spell check wants me to say, when none of us have been on a farm since childhood. Because there aren't any. But then, they're in the Bible, so very contemporary. The earth is 6,000 years old, haven't you heard? What I don't understand is why they don't also insist it's flat and the center of the universe, which is also in the Bible.

Where was I? I've got one more thing to say to you kids. What the hell are you doing? You've got an insane immoral war going on! You've got this toxic moron in the White House who is sinking you into terminal debt to profit his fat ass pals. Now you've got voting rights being taken away from African Americans, as well as others, right out there in the broad daylight of Ohio, not to mention Florida and Pennsylvania and so on, and not a peep.

I'd like to think My Generation would have made all the noise we did even if we weren't being drafted. Some of us were marching for Civil Rights before the draft entered into the equation on the war. But maybe we would have given up before we did, which was when we were exhausted. Then the world got disco and it's been downhill from there. Anyway, we only made so much noise because we were a big big generation. The noisemakers were a small percentage, at least until the early 70s, but impressive in numbers.

But you guys. All I see on the political blogs is, why isn't Kerry doing something about this! Why isn't Clinton! What would Oprah do? And I tell them: forget about daddy. Everybody's looking for daddy to do it for them, and daddy can never do enough. Daddy Kerry issues a statement, then why doesn't he sue in court? Daddy Kerry sues in court, then why doesn't he go on TV?

You can't count on daddy politician or mommy officeholder or daddy media star or mommy talk show host. The kids have to do it themselves. Again. We did.

If there is a grassroots effort, then leaders have to take notice. Political leaders are never the first to commit. JFK knew the Democrats would lose the South for generations if they supported Civil Rights. It took 300,000 of us marching on Washington in 1963 to provide political cover and to convince the world that the time had truly come.

It was a test of leadership. LBJ failed it in 1968 when we marched on the Pentagon. Nixon failed it in 1971 when we marched behind John Kerry and Nixon circled the buses around the White House. But JFK invited the leaders of the 1962 march to the White House that very day. Then he took the chance.

New leaders emerge from that kind of movement. If you've got smart people who can talk, new media voices emerge, too. There's so much on these blogs about people power and net power. But they're still looking for daddy.

I said some of this on one of those political blogs. Somebody's comment agreed with me, said taking it to the streets is the thing to do, now if only somebody like Jesse Jackson would get behind it... Uh huh. I think I'll go back to talking to myself on my own blog.

All those marches against the war in Iraq didn't stop anything, but they did change the debate in the Democratic primaries. But since the election a shell-shocked quiescence has settled over the land. Maybe it's finals week, I don't know. But daddy isn't going to do it for you. And by the way, neither is granddad. Although being one sounds like it could be fun.