What If No One Bothers to Stop a Disaster?

What if everyone in authority knew a preventable disaster was coming, and none of them did a thing to stop it?

For the penultimate show in his “The Seven Lively Arts” live series on CBS in 1957, John Houseman chose “The Blast in Centralia Number Five,” a drama about the Illinois mine disaster of a decade before.

'Coal Miner's Easter' by Dick Crispo

“This was a property I had known and loved for years,” Houseman wrote. “I had bought it from John Bartlow Martin, its author, shortly after it appeared in Harper’s magazine and I had come close to making it into a film with Fred Zinneman in 1950 just before I went to work for MGM. It was the true story of an Illinois mine disaster which everyone knew was coming and no one — neither management nor the union nor the Bureau of Mines — made one move to prevent.”

Starring Jason Robards and Maureen Stapleton, the drama was directed by George Roy Hill, and included the reading of a March 1947 letter to the governor of Illinois from miners pleading for him to save their lives from the dust explosion they were sure was coming at the Centralia Coal Company mine.

Nothing was done, and at 3:26 p.m. on March 25, 1947, the mine blew up. A total of 24 men escaped, eight were rescued, and 111 were killed.

“The show’s most moving moments were not taken from the official files,” Houseman said. “They showed Martin (played by Robards) visiting the widow of one of the dead men some months after the blast. Seated under a framed hand-tinted photograph of her late husband, Mrs. Colfax (Stapleton) reads what her man scrawled as he lay dying of gas poisoning in the darkened mine.”

“It is due in large part to (Hill’s) creative energy that the terrible irony of the disaster, with its revelations of human weakness and fortitude, came through with such overwhelming and tragic force,” Houseman wrote.

Unfortunately, CBS also lacked foresight. The program is lost, along with most of the rest of “The Seven Lively Arts” — a series that CBS cancelled just as it won an Emmy for best new show. Houseman, properly pissed off, refused to attend the ceremony.

Source: “Final Dress” by John Houseman

Shedding Sunlight on Sundown Towns

Driving to my former job as editor of the News-Progress in Sullivan, IL, one Tuesday morning in 2005, I heard Jim Loewen talking about a past that many central Illinois residents would prefer to forget.

Loewen, an Illinois native with a doctorate from Harvard, is the author of “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism,” (W.W. Norton & Co.) and he was being interviewed on WILL Radio's morning show in Urbana.

Art by SamiShain

In his book, Loewen noted that up until the 1960s, many towns adopted policies designed to maintain all-white communities.

You've heard the old rural legend — this or that town had a sign that told blacks they'd better be gone by the time the sun set.

Well, it’s more than a legend.

"While African Americans never lost the right to vote in the North... they did lose the right to live in town after town, county after county," Loewen said.

In other words, blacks ended up concentrated in a Decatur or a Chicago not so much out of choice, but because when they tried to live elsewhere, they were cruelly driven out.

“Located mostly outside the traditional South, these towns employed legal formalities, race riots, policemen, bricks, fires and guns to produce homogeneously Caucasian communities,” Publishers Weekly said in its review of Loewen's book.

Loewen documented data on hundreds of such towns. Radio listeners heard such a tale from Arcola, IL. One woman recalled that when she was a child, a black family was told by the school district that their children's records had been “lost in the mails.”

The girl watched as the mother and her children approached a grocery store in the middle of the day, only to be confronted by a “closed” sign on the door. There they stood, perplexed and hungry, in a parking lot full of shoppers' cars.

Monticello had a particularly infamous reputation, Loewen said. And so, unfortunately, did my hometown of Effingham. Blacks there were permitted to travel only one narrow route — from the bus station to the train station and vice versa. I wasn't told any of this as a child, although I might have gotten a clue from the uniformly pale faces I saw while growing up there.

Interestingly, Mattoon, as a railroad town, had a better reputation than most for racial tolerance. But as many as 480 of the 650 Illinois towns Loewen investigated were “sundown towns,” formally or informally.

Naturally, I wanted to know about the towns in Moultrie County, so I contacted Loewen. He said he had no information on Bethany or Lovington “...except census statistics, which show them to be all-white for decade after decade, so I therefore suspect them as having been sundown towns but list them as unconfirmed.”

But Loewen had corresponded with residents of Sullivan, and was generous enough to share what he'd learned.

“I don't have any specific anecdotes on Sullivan, except to say that it was always just 'one of those things you knew' - blacks were not permitted there,” one person told him.

A former resident now living in London said, “I remember growing up in Sullivan where all outsiders were made to feel unwelcome. Sullivan was, and probably still is, a town with many small-minded people living in it.

"I love where I grew up, but yes, this unrealistic living situation had its implications when those of us who lived there grew up and moved away," the London dweller said.

“I remember being afraid of all the different people when I was 17 and a freshman at college. There were over 30,000 students representing a huge variety of people — this fact is what made my education complete. I now live in London, England, and have been fortunate enough to travel all over Europe and Africa. Americans in general are very small-minded when it comes to accepting differences in other people, or perhaps I notice this because I grew up in Sullivan."

Whatever Sullivan's sundown status, it ended in the early 1960s, thanks to one family's courage, according to a former resident.

“I hope that my response will not be taken as gospel, but I clearly remember the issue of blacks spending the night in Sullivan due to my association with The Little Theatre on the Square,” the person said.

“Such prohibitions were termed 'Sunset Laws' and did not allow blacks to stay in Sullivan in such a way that they would have to or be allowed to sleep there. I really doubt that such prohibitions were statute, as this prohibition was by-passed in approximately1963, although I am unsure as to the specific year.

“Guy S. Little, Jr. made a decision to have the musical 'Showboat' as one of the summer offerings at The Little Theatre. As such, one or two black principal Equity actors were part of the summer cast for the entire season, in addition to one or two black apprentices. Also, the role of the actor who sang 'Old Man River' was filled by a black professor from the U of I, Champaign.

“Casts were filled and rooms rented, and one man summarily turned his back on 'Sunset Laws.'”

"As an aside, I was so incredibly proud of the Little family and its decision to tum its back on the prejudices that had been formally or informally enforced in the town. I am further proud of the quiet courage and dignity that it took to achieve such an action quietly and effectively!"

By the Martin Luther King holiday 2014, we've come pretty far along the path of racial tolerance — far enough that we can no longer see, or sometimes even remember, the distant point where the journey began. And that's a problem, because we need to remember.

We need to remember in part because it's a useful corrective to our tendency toward fatuous ancestor worship. Our forebears didn't have all the answers, and they weren't any better than they should have been. And we also need to remember the racist past in order to avert a racist future.

After Hurricane Katrina and the election of President Obama, I heard some mutterings of gutter racism that surprised and saddened me. I am caught off-guard when something as primitively tribal and as viciously, blindly moronic as racism reemerges, blinking, into the light of modem civilization.

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“The test of courage comes when we are in the minority.  The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.”

— Ralph W. Sackman

The Stoics in the September Sky

Painting by Jen Kim

I didn’t realize how the events of 9-11 had gut-punched me until I was stopped by a passer­by in the parking lot that terrible morning.

He’d been in court and hadn't heard the latest news, so I told him.

“The World Trade Center has been destro ... yed,” I said, surprised to find my voice reduced to a ragged gasp and moisture springing into my eyes out of nowhere.

What was this, what was this? Get a grip, Dan.

That night, I slept fitfully, dreaming of pursuit, awakening after midnight to switch on CNN and watch the hypnotic orange flames dancing at ground zero.

That was the worst. Your fears are always magnified after midnight, and jitterbug on the walls like giant shadows cast by those hellish flames. Civilization seemed to be burning in that fire, and, for all I knew, maybe it was.

Better, then, that next afternoon, sitting on the steps of our deck, but still feeling as if an asteroid had knocked the planet off its axis.

I'd have been chain-smoking if I hadn't given up the blasted things three years before.

Instead I just sat and looked at the yard, and was quietly surprised.

The birds weren't migrating in panic, they were just singing. The sky was an untroubled clarion blue. The trees nodded and murmured regally, as usual. The dark green of their late­ summer leaves shifted and swayed to form patterns of dappled sunlight, as rhythmically soothing as waves on the ocean.

The world was as it always was. Nothing had changed it. Nothing could. And I thought it was trying to tell me something, if I had the wit to understand.

This juxtaposition — the calm, measured solidity of the natural world standing in contrast to the mad panic of human events — tugged at something in my memory. What was it?

I recalled my ethics class with Frank Taylor at Eastern Illinois University. It was long before, in 1973 or 1974. Young and eager to know what the greatest human minds had discovered, I'd been particularly impressed by Taylor's discussion of the practical philosophy of the Stoics, people like Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

Art Nouveau stoic face from Prague

The Stoics were keenly aware that it isn't events themselves that ordinarily affect us — it is our emotional reaction to events that rules us.

Emotional reactions, grounded in past traumatic associations, are automatic and often inappropriate responses to new and changing circumstances. If we could govern our reflexive emotional reactions to situations we regard as adverse, we could be calmer, happier. Our psychological and philosophical standard of living would rise.

Epictetus knew something about adverse circumstances - he was a Roman slave. He taught himself that while his body might be enslaved, his mind could roam free. Contemporary expressions of his Stoic philosophy can be found in Tom Wolfe's  novel “A Man in Full” and in the central character of the film “The Shawshank Redemption.”

“When disease and death overtake me, I would fain be found engaged in the task of liberating mine own will from the assaults of passion, from hindrance, from resentment, from slavery,” Epictetus said.

“Externals are not under my control; moral choice is under my control. Where am I to look for the good and the evil? Within me, in that which is my own.”

His advice stays ever relevant for us. Let's sample a few topics:

• Rulers who boast constantly about their great resolve. “There is nothing more intractable — ‘My resolve is fixed!’ Why, so madmen say too; but the more firmly they believe in their delusions, the more they stand in need of treatment."

• The nature of wealth. “Asked 'Who is the rich man?' Epictetus replied, 'He who is content.'"

• The fear of death. "If you wish your children, and your wife, and your friends to live forever, you are stupid; for you wish to be in control of things which you cannot."

"It is not the things themselves which disturb men, but their judgments about these things. For example, death is nothing dreadful, or else Socrates too would have thought so, but the judgment that death is dreadful, this is the dreadful thing."

“I am not eternal, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is part of a day. I must come on as the hour and like an hour pass away.”

• The practical necessity of courage. “As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets. Thus do they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies,” Epictetus said. "Reflect that the chief source of all evils to man, and of baseness and cowardice, is not death but the fear of death."

• Sadness. “The origin of sorrow is this: To wish for something that does not come to pass.”

• Pleasure. “When we say that pleasure is the end, we do not mean the pleasure of the profligate or that which depends on physical enjoyment — as some think who do not understand our teachings, disagree with them, or give them an evil interpretation - but by pleasure we mean the state wherein the body is free from pain and the mind from anxiety.”

• Changing your behavior. “If you want to do something, make a habit of it; if you want not to do something, refrain from doing it, and accustom yourself to something else instead.”

Sounds childishly simple, yet that is, in fact, how I stopped smoking.

• The acceptance of loss.“Have this thought ever present with thee, when thou losest any outward thing, what thou gainest in its stead; and if this be the more precious, say not, I have suffered loss.”

• The unimportance of blame. “It is the part of an uneducated person to blame others where he himself fares ill; to blame himself is the part of one whose education has begun; to blame neither another nor his own self is the part of one whose education is already complete.”

• The power of reason. “Knowest thou what a speck thou art in comparison with the universe? That is, with respect to the body; since with respect to reason thou art not inferior to the gods, nor less than they. For the greatness of reason is not measured by length of height, but by the resolves of the mind. Place then thy happiness in that wherein thou art equal to the gods.”

The Passive-Aggressive Raven

lo, as they say, l

Bonjour Brando

Brando and friend

Young Françoise Sagan’s novel, “Bonjour Tristesse,” was an international sensation in 1954 when she toured America. Friends wanted to introduce her to French-speaking denizens of Hollywood, and two of those were MGM producer John Houseman and his wife, Joan.

“We liked her and decided to combine our house-warming with a party for her,” Houseman recalled. He asked Sagan whom she particularly wanted to meet, and the 19-year-old novelist had only one request: Marlon Brando.

For Houseman, who had cast Brando controversially and with great success as Mark Antony in the film version of “Julius Caesar,” that was no problem.

“Brando arrived early in a white shirt and neat dark-blue suit — embarrassed that he did not possess a tie. Joan took him upstairs and loaned him one of mine. He met Miss Sagan and they became friends, but he bitterly disappointed those who had expected to encounter an American primitive with bulging biceps and a torn t-shirt.

“Among those who telephoned the next morning was Salka Viertel, who enjoyed the party but regretted that Marlon Brando had not shown up. It was difficult to convince her that the quiet, civil, well-spoken, intelligent and rather small young man in the blue suit with whom she had had such an interesting conversation was none other than Stanley Kowalski.”

Source: “Front and Center” by John Houseman

When the Baby Fell from the Fire Escape

Cristina Torre practices mindfulness, and thinks that sort of intuition is what enabled her to catch a baby who fell from a fire escape two and a half stories high.

“The reality of saving someone's life is intense,” she said of that summer day in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. “I think it has changed me. I am calm and more at ease with things.”

“Apparently he had slipped through pieces of cardboard placed next to an air-conditioning unit in the window, and without bars to protect him he'd crawled out and up the fire escape towards the next storey,” Torre recalled. “He was clearly a physically capable child, but he was only 16 months old. For him to even climb up and balance in that position was incredible.

“Then he slipped. Instinctively, he grabbed on as he fell, so he was gripping the railing, hanging by his arms,” she said “I knew he couldn't hold on, 25 feet above the street, for long.

“I sensed people had gathered behind, but my attention was purely focused on my intention to catch the baby. I made sure I was positioned to save him.”

You can read the full story in the Guardian here.

What's Wrong With Fox News, Vol. 3, Part 6,824

And on a Dec. 4, 2009, episode of Fox & Friends, a graphic was displayed with the question heading: "Did scientists falsify research to support their own theories on global warming?" The results shown below indicated that 59 percent of people believed this was "somewhat likely," while 35 percent thought it was "very likely" and 26 percent considered it "not very likely."

No wonder Fox News can't understand science. That's 120 percent.

This is what happen when you're a "news organization" that has contempt for facts.