Oppenheimer and McCarthy

I enjoyed Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" very much.  Announcing the film caused a general stir among the movie-going public. This was a subject they were very hungry for.  I think, in some sense, what people wanted from the film, and the film they actually got might be two different things, and this disconnect between expectations might diminish the film's longevity.

Much like what you see in the film, people's main concern before Hiroshima was that, once the bomb became hypothetically possible, it was imperative that the Americans develop it first.  Whatever implications there might be in creating such a device, the only one that mattered was that we do it first.  Keeping in mind that the German team had the universally recognized world's greatest physicist, Werner Heisenberg, leading their team, the concern that the Americans might be second or third to develop such a weapon had serious implications for the history of the world.

After Little Boy was detonated some 600 meters above Hiroshima, and Fat Man, hours later, above Nagasaki, the world's opinion, including our own, about the nature and implication of atomic weapons changed.  If you look at the cinema after the war, doubts about the bomb were making clear inroads into our subconscious.  In the United States, movies started featuring ants made gigantic after exposure to the bomb began eating farmers.  The bomb reanimated monsters of the past.  In Japan, the Bikini bomb revived and mutated a dinosaur, covering it in burned and scarred flesh like the survivors of Hiroshima, and began burning and destroying what parts of Tokyo survived the war.

Audiences expected Nolan's film to address these issues.  We've been discussing them since the war.  Even in the eighties, Sting wrote a song about how to protect his little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy.  The film we got included a lot of that, but it included a lot more of how Lewis Strauss used the panic caused by J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy to try and ruin Oppenheimer's life.

While that's an interesting story, I don't think most people even knew it ever happened, and if they did, they were still much more interested in the bomb itself than attempts to discredit Oppenheimer afterward, although I think it's important that we discuss the fact that the move to discredit and ruin Oppenheimer had more to do with things that ultimately didn't really matter, especially compared to what Oppenheimer actually did.

There are lots of movies about McCarthy and Hoover.  I think it's important to tell that story.  I think it's more important to tell the story of telling everything involved in unlocking some of the secrets of the universe.  I'm not really that interested in some parts of the story that Noland chose to tell.  I've been aware for some time that Oppenheimer had a reputation as a womanizer.  Florence Pugh's presence in the film was interesting, but you never really got to know much about her; other than that, she was pretty unstable psychologically.  I've been in love with psychologically unstable women.  There's always a reason for it, but in this film, we don't see it, and ultimately Tatlock's life, suffering, and death don't make much difference in the final impact of Oppenheimer's life.

In some ways, I still prefer Roland Joffé's 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy.  It doesn't have the visual style of Noland's Oppenheimer, but it deals a lot more with the science behind the project and a lot more discussion of the moral implications.  Roger Ebert hated it, and Rotton Tomatoes gives it a pretty lackluster score, but I still think there's something to the film.

Smith Park Fence

In the original 1820's map for Jackson, roads were set up on a square grid pattern, starting with the intersection of Capitol Street and State Street in front of the old Capitol building and extending west toward Raymond and Clinton.  Livingston Park, the future site of the Battle of Jackson, was on the Western border of the city.   The northern border was the highway we now call Woodrow Wilson, with the farm that became the Jackson College for Negros and then Millsaps College on the very northernmost border.  The state Sanitarium, now UMC, was just outside of the city limits.

In the original plan for the city, every few squares on the grid were left green to beautify the city.  While done with pure intention, this plan irritated business owners because people would use these green patches to pasture their mules and cows.

Just before the Civil War, considering its position near the Methodist Cemetary (now Galloway Sanctuary) and one of the state's only Catholic churches, a furniture dealer named James Smith donated $100 to erect a castiron fence around one of the greenspace parks to keep the mules and cows out, which was later downgraded to a wooden fence when future donations didn't materialize.  In gratitude for this enormous sum of money, the city named the park after him, and it is today still called Smith Park.  

I've tried several times to find photographs of the fence before it was torn down and maybe some information on why it was torn down, without much luck.  Smith Park occupies a significant space in Mississippi history.  Some of it isn't talked about very often because, for some time, it was one of the only places where gay men could meet, more or less in secret, without considerable harassment, although there was some.  

One of the problems I have with the whole "give up on Jackson" crowd is they'll be losing so much remarkable and varied history.  There was about a twenty-year period, starting in the mid-70s, when business leaders in Jackson began tearing down sites that were significant to the civil rights movement, replacing them with modern buildings, and completely repurposing the site.   This is why you have so many "Civil Rights Trail" signs where there is no building.

All of the men who made these decisions are gone now.  Most of them were pretty legendary.  They believed the best way for Jackson to get beyond the racial strife of the sixties was to get beyond it and act, almost like it never happened.  While I respect their efforts and their point of view, I don't believe that's the best course.  The past creates the present, and understanding the past, all of the past, the good and the bad, is our best bet at creating a better future.

You don't see a lot of people grazing mules and cows in downtown Jackson anymore.  Understanding that they once did and that it was something of a problem helps us fill in the blank spaces on our historical portrait and keeps us mindful that this is a living place with a living history that we should keep alive.

The Citizens Council and the Republican Party

 The genius of the Citizens Council, the thing that made them both the most effective and the most evil, was that they equated segregation with good citizenship.  It was in their name.  Fighting to keep our schools segregate equated to patriotism and cultural loyalty.  If you read their literature, that was clearly the message.

The Citizens Council started in the Delta, in areas where the black population outnumbered the white population, areas where the idea of “separate but equal” was as problematic as the idea of integration.  They didn’t see these descendants of slaves as peers or equals or fully citizens and saw the interference from the federal government, both through the Brown Decision and the Civil Rights Act, as an impingement on their sovereignty.  For them, this was the heart of “states’ rights.”  

In Jackson, the Citizens Council was, at first, fully accepted in business and social circles.  Doctors, Lawyers, and Bankers all became members, along with tradesmen of every sort.  The Citizens Council was a great equalizer with regard to the issue of class but the most significant divider with regard to the issue of race.  

By the mid 70’s, the social and economic tides turned against the Citizen’s Council.  The rest of the world began equating the Citizen’s Council with the Klan.  Jackson's business, legal and religious leaders began seeing it the same way.  There were men in Jackson who remained loyal to the Citizens Council, including some prominent physicians, but by 1975 they saw their professional progress hampered by their membership in the CC.  Offers for board memberships and professional advancement started slowing and stopping.  Thompson, who had been Mayor of Jackson, was in the Citizens Council; he was replaced by Davis and then Danks, who were not.  The tide was changing.  

The idea that the federal intervention in our culture, our education, our economics, and our society didn’t go away though, but it did change names.  Mississippi had been a yellow-dog Democratic state ever since the civil war, but by the mid-seventies, a growing number of Mississippians saw the Democratic party as against us, an interference in how we lived.  

When you look at early adapters of the Republican Party in Mississippi, I can just about promise you they never sat down and discussed the “Southern Strategy” as such.  They didn’t have to.  Saying you wanted to get the federal government out of your business, even if your business is oil, banking, insurance, or the like,  Nobody ever had to say, “Boy, we sure would have been better off if they left our damn schools alone.”  Nobody ever had to say it because the great majority of Mississippians believed in their hearts and still do.  

There were guys out there who believed in an evolved Democratic party and believed it was good for Mississippi.  Guys like Charlie Deaton and Bob Fortenberry built their careers trying to apply these new, expansive ideas of the Democratic Party to the boots-on-the-ground situation in Mississippi.  They had some success, but the most successful was William Winter.  Winter and his Boys of Spring were the last great stand for the new Democratic Party in Mississippi.  

Likened to Camelot, both the play and the Kennedy administration, Winter’s tenure as Governor of Mississippi was, and is, seen as a golden age of progressive politics and moves to equalize, at least educationally, the experience of white and black Mississippians.

Ray Maybus rose out of Winter’s team and became governor at a time when a lot of Mississippians thought we were turning over a new page and Mississippi was changing.  It was not.  Toward the end of his term, preparing for his next move, Maybus ran full force into the rising Republican Revolution in Mississippi.  The Young Republicans were becoming more popular than over-starched Oxford shirts at Ole Miss, and at an SEC game in Jackson, Mabus was booed when the announcer asked the crowd to greet him before the game started.   

In my mind, that moment when a bunch of guys my age began to boo a sitting governor at an Ole Miss game loudly was a sea change in Mississippi culture.  I’d seen them cheer Ross Barnett, both before and after his tenure as governor.  I’d seen them cheer Cliff Finch, even knowing that all the stories about Finch were true, but they were booing Ray Mabus–Herman Hine’s son-in-law, a champion of education and public benefit in Mississippi, a genuinely nice guy with a career drive like nothing I’d ever seen before somehow equated to a bad thing among my peers.  To them, being in favor of Mabus and his pro-education platform was unpatriotic.  I still don’t get it.  Not even a little.  In my heart, I will always pin some of that moment on feelings about the Democratic Party forcefully integrating Mississippi.  

Even today, there are people in Mississippi who straight-up blame the Democratic Party for changing the Mississippi State flag, even though every single person involved in pushing that move through our legislature was Republican, and it was signed by a Republican governor.  People don’t want the truth.  They want somebody to blame.  

I was five years old when the Jackson Citizens Council started sending out fliers saying they would accept students into their five different schools.  Council Schools were priced considerably lower than Prep, JA, St. Richards, or St. Andrews.  They were actually priced too low to pay their bills using tuition money.  The Citizens Council promised fund-raising efforts to make up the difference, and for a while, they did, but they couldn’t sustain it.  The business community distanced itself from the Council, limiting its ability to raise money.  Pretty soon, the council schools began closing.  

What happened next is a matter for the history books.  Much of Jackson’s white population did what they must to pay and send their children to Prep, JA, St Andrews, and St. Richards.  That made Jackson Public Schools the majority black.  Dr. Walker, the superintendent, retired almost as soon as integration began.  He was replaced by a series of men who didn’t stay until Bob Fortenberry came back to Mississippi to take the job.  Bob fought for Jackson and for JPS, and he did a great job, but he was ambitious and wouldn’t stay forever.  

By the 90s, with Dr. Fortenberry retired, people who couldn’t afford private school began leaving Jackson for cities in Rankin and Madison counties that still had a majority white population.  This created an avalanche of white flight out of Jackson that we’re still dealing with.  Jackson is still losing population, even though we were at an all-time high in the 80s.  

Life is like a series of domino pieces standing on end.  When you knock one over, it knocks the one next to it over, and that knocks over the one next to it, and so on, and so on, until you get to a space quite a distance away from where you first tipped over a domino, but the causation remains the same.  

A lot of people want to say that what happened in the sixties and seventies has nothing to do with what’s happening now.  That’s just not true.  What’s happening now is a direct result of what happened in the sixties and seventies, even though we had to go through many steps to get here from there.

Troop Zero

 Mckenna Grace is one of the most popular actors under twenty working today.  She has produced at least one major role per year since she was eleven, with Ghostbusters and Young Sheldon being the most famous so far.  Hopefully, she’ll escape the dreaded child star syndrome because I really do enjoy her work.  She plays nerds, particularly science nerds.  While typecasting is never good for an actor, the type of roles she plays can mean a lot to awkward kids dealing with some of the same issues.

The Voyager Space Craft, launched in 1977, did something no other mission in any of the terrestrial space programs did before.  It openly made an effort, no matter how futile, to communicate with intelligent life outside of Earth.  This was the very first time any governmental program admitted to the possibility that we are not alone.

The purpose of Voyager 1 and 2 was to conduct near fly-bys of our gas giant neighbors, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and send back photographic and radiometric data.  Since the devices would continue to function as they left the solar system, physicist Carl Sagan suggested affixing a message to the spaceships in case some distant intelligent life encounter them.

A committee led by Sagan developed the idea that they could make disks to affix to the spacecraft, made of solid gold so it never corroded, with mathematical principles and a map to our solar system on one side and the other side a phonograph, with messages from earth.  One of these messages being a recording of a child (Carl Sagan’s Son) saying, “Hello from the Children Of Earth.”

Playwright Lucy Alibar, most famous for “Beasts of The Southern Wild” and “Where the Crawdad Sings,” wrote a play in 2010 called “ Christmas and Jubilee Behold The Meteor Shower.” which became the basis for the film Troop Zero, which she adapted for the screen.  

In it, Christmas Flint, thirteen years old, spends most of 1976 missing her recently passed mother while living with her earnest but unsuccessful father in a trailer park in Wiggley, Georgia.  Christmas is played by Mckenna Grace.  Christmas spends every night staring at the stars in the Milky Way, hoping for some sign of alien life, believing that her mother is with them, out in space.

A man from NASA comes to her school to announce that a recording to go on the Voyager record will be recorded using the voices of whoever wins the Birdy Scout (Girl Scout) Jamboree in the Spring.  The actual recording was made by Sagan’s young son, a year younger than me, but that’s not important to the movie.   

Obsessed with space and science and the idea of communicating with aliens, Christmas is determined to win the Jamboree and have her voice be the one going out into the universe to welcome the aliens and (she believes) her mother’s spirit.  

Being a socially awkward misfit and living in the trailers, the Birdy Scout troop laughs at Christmas when she says she wants to join.  Undaunted, Christmas gets a copy of the Birdy Scout handbook from the library (her favorite place) and learns that if she can get four more girls to join and an adult sponsor, she can make her own troop to compete in the Birdy Scout Jamboree.

Christmas gathers together other misfit girls living in the trailers and asks her father’s seldom-paid secretary Rayleen (played by Viola Davis), to be the troop's den mother sponsor.   When she approaches the school principal who sponsors the main Birdy Scout Troop that rejected Christmas, she’s resistant to the idea but can’t find anything in the rule book to prevent Christmas from having her own troop.  As rude as the girls in the main Birdy Troop, Miss Massy assigns the new troop the number zero and admits them into Birdy Scouts.  If the members of Troop Zero can earn one merit badge each, then they qualify to enter the Jamboree, where Christmas hopes to win a spot on the Voyager record.

The next two acts of the film follow the misfit members of Troop Zero as they each find the thing that makes them special and uses that to earn their merit badge, despite the efforts of the other girls to prevent it, including constantly calling Christmas a “bed wetter” which she denies, even though she has been having problems with incontinence when she gets nervous since her mother died.

Coming of Age stories are usually a version of Campbell’s monomyth where the hero finds their special ability through a series of mentors, tests, and challenges.  Alibar follows that pattern here pretty closely, with the Viola Davis providing the meeting with the mentor in the narrative.  The scene in the belly of the whale takes place when Christmas is determined to win her wilderness survival badge.

I was attracted to watch this film because the trailer had a shot of the Voyager record, which I recognized.  The fate of the Voyager spacecraft is the subject of a fair amount of science fiction stories, including the first Star Trek film.   

This essentially is a story about misfits finding their place, not a story about science, but there’s enough science in it to keep me interested.  The end of the story has Christmas looking out into space during the Perseid Meteor Shower of 1976, which was exceptionally vivid, with between six and twelve meteors crossing the night sky per hour.  I know this because I was thirteen years old in 1976, sitting in the backyard of my mother’s house, watching the meteors and wondering about aliens.