Editorials
Gottwald's cap History is fragile. Never more so then when its retelling falls into the hands of those who have interests other than telling the story the way it happened. In the opening tale of...
...His darkest hour...
...No warnings here...
...Little surprise then that blacks and whites have such contrasting perceptions of how relations between the races are faring almost twenty-five years after Mississippi Summer...
...And when he did not please the voters-which, to our mind, happened entirely too infrequently-he found it difficult to regain his bearings...
...but unfortunately not because he realized he had been derelict in his duties, had committed significant failures in judgment, or had neglected his constitutional pledge to uphold the law of the land...
...Sacks then discusses the ability of aphasiacs to understand the "tone-color" of language-that quality of speech which communicates the inner meaning of words rather than just the assemblage of words themselves-and to know unerringly the verisimilitude of a speaker's voice.' 'Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice which rang false for these immensely sensitive patients....That is why they laughed at the president's speech...
...All in all, not bad...
...of 1989 is not Mississippi in 1964, that it is not segregationist...
...Not only are whites more politically and economic cally powerful, they are also more culturally powerful...
...Where Clementis once stood, therejs only bare palace wall...
...The president was, as always, moving-but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter...
...Justice Thurgood Marshall remembers...
...What is needed after eight years of Ronald Reagan and the Reagan inversion is not a gentle breeze, but a fierce and cleansing wind...
...While we normals were fooled, "only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived...
...not only do whites1 run the government, and the banks, and the hospitals, and the schools, they also wrftethe laws, the regulations, and-witness Mississippi Burning-the stories...
...Nothing about the global environment...
...Ditto the U. S. Navy, which found in a recent self-assessment that while open racial conflict has died down since the 1970s, blacks and Hispanics are still less likely than whites to be recruited, to be promoted, or to receive the kind of technical education that would allow them to advance in the aviation or submarine branches-all of which means they are not rising in the ranks of the navy...
...Nothing about racism...
...Organized forgetting...
...So are whites who think a couple of decades should have been enough to fix things up, who failed to anticipate failure...
...That means race remains an important factor in how doctors and the health-care systems treat blacks, certainly in high-tech medical care...
...Mississippi Burning opens with a scene depicting the murders of three civil rights workers, who may or may not be Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, but who bear a close resemblance...
...For after eight years as president, Ronald Reagan is no closer to answering his most famous dramatic line ("Where's the rest of me?'' King's Row) than he was when he took office...
...all implying that the U.S...
...The crime committed, the movie goes on to tell the tale of two indefatigable FBI agents and their efforts to solve the murders, bring the killers to justice, and, by the way, bring justice and the right to vote to black Mississippians...
...A number of medical journals have recently published reports showing that blacks are less likely than whites, especially white males, to have coronary by-pass surgery or to receive kidney transplants, even when factors such as income, insurance status, age, and other variables are controlled...
...Attitudes (including their own) changed...
...This is what he observed: "There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practiced rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal-and all the patients were convulsed with laughter...
...In a poll recently conducted for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Lou Harris and Associates found wide differences between whites and blacks on questions covering equal pay for equal work, treatment by the police, the consequences of congressional actions, and the effects of the Reagan administration...
...Organized forgetting," as Kundera names the process through which the powerful obliterate the memories of the weaker by erasing their history and language and literature, has its analogy in the relation of whites and blacks in this country...
...That would have entailed a more prominent role for blacks, a supporting role for white civil rights workers, and possibly a more nuanced treatment of white Mississippians, not all of whom, after all, could have been members of the Ku Klux Klan...
...Legal barriers fell, legal protections were put in place, remedial plans were, adopted...
...Whites strongly register the successes of the Civil Rights Revolution...
...Amend the obvious answer with a complicating footnote...
...By large majorities, whites think blacks are better off in all these respects than blacks think they are...
...Joining in dissent, Justice Harry Blackmun writes: "[T]his Court, the supposed bastion of equality, strikes down Richmond's efforts as though discrimination had never existed or was not demonstrated...
...What could they be thinking...
...In his dissent to the Richmond decision he asks who better than Richmond-the capital of the Confederacy- knows what racial discrimination is and who better than they know how appropriate is their set-aside program for minorities...
...And certainly nothing about corruption in government or the growing gap between rich and poor...
...GONE WITH THE WIND Before Former President Reagan (yes, we've been waiting a long time to write that) left Washington for Bel Air, he was crowned King of the Polls...
...In the opening tale of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera recalls how a 1948 photo of a triumphant group of Czechoslovak Communists was altered to fit later events: "Clementis was charged with treason and hanged...
...Those events included the murders of civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, and the search for their bodies and their killers...
...In truth, these are alibis and not excuses...
...Lots of moviegoers and reviewers haven't seen it that way, finding a vivid reminder-in the film's depiction of fire bombings, lynchings* beatings-of the fear and oppression that segregation once fostered and created...
...He ought to be remembered for it...
...Their day-to-day experience of racial prejudice and racial disdain does not allow them "organized forgetting...
...He knew how to please: please his directors, his viewers, his voters...
...or the sheer sentimentality ("Just once more [again!] for the Gipper...
...He never forgave the "harsh" critics of his movies or the negative voices raised in the press over his political decisions...
...True, blacks who use these conditions as reasons to opt out or give up are failing themselves and society...
...If whites think blacks are being treated equally, how is it that blacks think they are being discriminated against in subtle and unsubtle ways...
...Organized forgetting...
...One thing is certain: The future we hoped for isn't here yet...
...we have not yet reached the time when "race-conscious" affirmative action programs can be abandoned or enfeebled- pace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion declaring unconstitutional the Minority Business Utilization Plan of Richmond's city council...
...the praise for those who lied to Congress and destroyed government documents (Poindexter and North...
...No mention of crises that face the republic...
...Race is the great fault line in our history...
...the thinly concealed meanness (Governor Dukakis's "mental problems...
...the UN bashing...
...There are some people-and we count ourselves among them-who will not shed a tear over Bel Air's recent gain...
...Both blacks and whites have to keep trying to imagine a different future and searching for roads to get there...
...Openness to real history tells us that we have ended dejure segregation but the housing ghettos remain, schools are by and large still separate and scandalously unequal, incentives for self-improvement weak, occasions for despair plentiful...
...That consciousness of virtue and progress, some think, excuses exasperation: "We've tried everything," from the welfare liberalism of the Democrats to the trickle-down solutions of the Republicans, and yet there is cause for fear and disappointment in the rampant crime and violence in black neighborhoods, the crack epidemic, the numbers of single mothers, the school dropout rate...
...According to those who collect public opinion, no one has come away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue smelling better...
...He admitted that it was his darkest hour in the White House...
...We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world...
...Agreed...
...In a remarkable collection of what Oliver Sacks calls "clinical tales" (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Summit, 1985), the neurophysiologist draws special attention to the perceptual gifts of certain individuals society generally considers as neurologically impaired...
...Until it is bridged, we cannot be a just society...
...Nothing about national addictiveness, nuclear mismanagement, homelessness, the financial IOU's we are leaving to our children...
...And when he did not please, he was hurt...
...The propaganda section immediately airbrushed him out of history and, obviously, out of all the photographs as well...
...They call it the Reagan revolution," he brimmed...
...Or take more esoteric examples...
...The recent film Mississippi Burning has something of that airbrushed quality for those who were alive and alert during the momentous and galvanizing events of Mississippi Summer (1964...
...But these examples raise once again the all-important question of perception and truth- telling...
...The secret of Ronald Reagan's success-both as an actor and as a politician-was his ability to play to his audience...
...These examples as reported are all hedged-not necessarily incorrectly with a variety of possibly extenuating explanations...
...And the FBI itself has admitted discrimination toward its own black agents...
...Airbrushing history...
...Not bad at all...
...And,if Alan Parker is right, we get the kind of stories whites want to see and hear-the story that "good whites" in the FBI outsmarted the "bad whites" in Mississippi while fearful blacks kept their distance from both...
...the flouting of international law (walking out of the World Court after mining Nicaragua's harbors...
...Nonetheless, we are inclined to see in the film an ominous resemblance to the residual cap on Gottwald's head...
...But having won the battle, he has not finally won the war...
...The black struggle for equality did not end in 1964 or with the Civil Rights Act-and two FBI agents did not set matters right...
...The President's Speech," Sacks reports that he happened to walk into an aphasia ward one evening just as the president began an address over national television...
...If proof of Ronald Reagan's lack of self-comprehension is wanted, we need go no further than his farewell address...
...We will not miss the lies of the Reagan presidency (the purposeful disinformation campaigns, the misspeaks, calling the contras the equivalent of our founding fathers and the homeless the beneficiaries of their own choice...
...Recall his bewilderment after the Iran-contra revelations when his popularity took such a beating...
...Ever since, Gottwald has stood on that balcony alone...
...Reagan's fortunes reversed with the INFTreaty...
...We've done our part...
...Who else could have offered so much Self-praise, so many half-truths, and so much sentimentality so effectively...
...No, it was Ronald Reagan's darkest hour simply because the American people had come to question his veracity and the unreserved trust they had placed in-him For Ronald Reagan, approval was the bottom line...
...There is an obvious answer: blacks are discriminated against and, in addition, they continue to suffer the effects of past discrimination in housing, schooling, and jobs...
...All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head...
...The solicitous Clementis had placed the cap there to fend off the cold...
...The director, Alan Parker, has defended his fictionalized account on the grounds that he could have never raised the money to make a movie that told the "real" story...
...the moral lassitude of dealing with Edwin Meese...
...And the analogy to Kundera's work notwithstanding, it is also not Czechoslovakia...
...The FBI would have been deep in the background, if it had appeared in the movie at all...
...Blacks all too painfully remember that history...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 3
