Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

Back in the 70s my Red Diaper Baby boyfriend Bob taught me all six verses of “ The Internationale ”. He also took me to see the Depression-era indie classic Our Daily Bread at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Praised by The New York Times when it was released in 1934, the movie’s portrayal of Soviet-style farm collectivism embraced by desperate city dwellers actually looks like a viable alternative these days. What still speaks to us in Our Daily Bread is the spirit of group effort , and the ideal of economic self-sustainability —two messages consumerist Americans need to hear now more than ever. Not to mention it’s a great story, beautifully directed. The last five minutes—about building an irrigation system, for heaven’s sake—are as thrilling as any big-movie car chase. This is how powerful a film can be.

As we’re both Capricorns (my birthday being yesterday, thank you Facebook friends), I thought I’d observe The King’s own natal day with a few reminiscences. The day Elvis died (16 August 1977) I was in Paris, crashing in the 4th arrondissement apartment of a reporter on the old Paris Metro , the English-language weekly newspaper I used to hawk on the streets just like Jean Seberg did with the Herald Tribune in Breathless . Radio Luxembourg was playing Elvis tunes all day. How come? I asked my reporter friend. Didn’t you hear? Elvis just died, he said, and I laughed. Rich, famous and only forty-four! Had to be a joke. In an earlier post I mentioned that Michael and I were part of the family dinner Stephen threw at Balthazar in Soho to celebrate his debut as a poet . His brothers and their families were there and so were Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie (very pregnant), Naomi Foner, Devourer of Men’s Souls , and Naomi’s Aunt Frieda—you know, the elderly relative with the apartment in t...

You ever wonder how history makes it into the textbooks? If you’re like me a child of the ’60s I'll bet you never realized that the story you learned in high school of one of the most important eras in American history was the handiwork of one questionable academician and his cronies, called collectively the Dunning School. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: [The Dunning School] was named after Columbia University professor William Archibald Dunning (1857-1922), whose works and teachings in the early 20th century on Reconstruction were influential. He supported the idea that the South had been ruined by Reconstruction. He contended that freedmen had proved incapable of self-government and thus had made segregation necessary. Dunning believed that allowing blacks to vote and hold office had been “a serious error”. As a professor, he taught generations of scholars, many of whom expanded his views of the evils of Reconstruction. The Dunning School and similar historia...