High Tide in Tuscon -- a book review

High Tide in Tuscon
Essays from Now or Never

 

Barbara Kinsolver is, in my opinion, the best writer of fiction working today. And I'm glad to report that she excels at nonfiction as well. 

This collection of essays, some previously published in magazines is wonderful. And I'm glad to promote just such collections. 

Perhaps you're old enough to remember Reader's Digest. I don't know if their even still in publicastion. But many years ago, my Grandma kept the last issue of it in the bathroom. It was filled with condensed versions of articles and essays that you could read some of in just a few minutes. I did love the fillers -- short bits of humor contributed by anybody and used to fill out a page. 

Anyway, I used to read the newspaper like that, just individual articles or letters to the editor or what have you, but with the news the way it is nowadays, the newspaper is just too upsetting. Unless you focus on the sports sections, but I'm not particularly into sports sooo, I've started reading just such collections as High Tide. You don't have to read the book all the way through, front to back. You can read just individual essays in any order.

Most collections do have some order to them, and this one does, but you don't have to stick to the order.

And it doesn't hurt that Kingsolver writes with the eye of an artist and the ear of a poet. And in reading her, I feel like I know her. She and I have so much in common.

The title of this book is from her coming home to Tuscon, Arizona, in America's Desert Southwest, from the Bahamas. While in that Caribbean paradise, she had wished her ",,, daughter could see those sparkling blue bays and sandy coves, I did exactly what she would have done: I collected shells." Arriving home in the middle of the night, she couldn't wait to show her daughter the collecion.

Her daughter's "...face glowed, in the way of antique stories about children and treasure. With perfect delicacy she laid the shells out on the table, counting, sorting, designating scientific categories like yellow-sriped pinky, Barnacle Bill's pocketbook...Yeek! She let loose a sudden yelp, dropped her booty, and ran to the far end of the room. The largest, knottiest whelk had begun to move around. First it extended one long red talon of a leg, tap-tap-tapping like a blind man's cane. Then came half a dozen more red legs, plus a pair of eyes on stalks, and a purple claw that snapped open and shut in a way that could not mean We Come in Friendship."

When my brother and I were in elementary school in land-locked Oklahoma, our family took a vacation to Galveston, Texas, an Island in the Gulf of Mexico. We didn't know anything about the ocean and sea shells. We found an abundance of tiny, pastel colored sea shells, more like very smooth stones, than anything we would have identified even as sea shells. We gather up a bag full of them and took them back to the motel, intending to take them home with us. During the night there began such a clatter of clicking and movement in that bag. We had no idea that they were alive! Needless to say, we took them back to the beach and carefully chose obviously empty sea shells to take home as souvenirs.

Kingsolver's attitude toward the hermit-crab stowaway was "...when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."

Or in the middle of the day. Isn't that how we acquire new friends and pets?

Her interests and knowledge reflect her educational background. According to Wikipedia, after growing up in rural Kentucky, she attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. She says she changed her major to biology after realizing that "classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby." She went on to get a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona."

Sometimes, with the way things are it's good to read somebody like her.

She writes things like this, beautiful things:

"Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to thin at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living."

And

"To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another -- that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty, If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers."

This is a fairly little book, just 288 pages in the print edition, but it's full of the kinds of observations that remind me how good life can be. And, sometimes, it's good to be able to pick up a book and turn to almost any page and get just such a reminder.

After the Fall

 

The View from my chair

This is my world.

Yep, since Wednesday, January 15, I've been on crutches. I spend a lot of time sitting in a recliner in the great room. 

That big painting on the west wall is an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico (acrylic on canvas). It is one of my brother Matt's last paintings after he retired from captaining a crew boat. Following his death last summer, I brought it to my home from his home near the Texas gulf coast. 

He also painted the one on the north wall (to the right). In the late 1960s while he was studying at Central State College (now the University of Central Oklahoma) a classroom assignment was to paint something in the style of a famous artist. Here it is, oil on canvas, titled "Van Gogh Oil, Well." (said with a pause after "oil." He had a great sense of humor.) 

Above the TV you can see my husband's decorative metal work of an Eagle soaring above the Rocky Mountains.

                             

And a bookshelf with some of my treasures and books -- teapots I've been gifted over the years, a salt and pepper set by my son John Hill the potter, Mardi Gras memorabilia, and grandbabies' toys. There behind me on the east wall is Matt's "Logan County Unicorn" (acrylic on canvas).

Add to these, my daughter's craft work and her husband's photography and I have a very pleasant environment in which to think and read. I especially appreciate it during this extended period of time when not much else is available to me -- no walking and going to coffee, no driving, no exercise classes, not even much in the way of household chores.

That Wednesday evening, a week and a day ago, I fell coming out of my office. Tripped on the cat's scratching box. Yep, Kočka, that bad cat I've posted about before.

Scared me. At my age, falling is a serious no-no. I've had both knees repaced, and I was really afraid I had messed up the left one. Being able to go up and down the stairs, left right left right, to the laundry room in the basement is a big deal. A very big deal. Just sayin'.

My husband Scott helped me up and I got to the couch just fine, but within an hour, there was a lot of  swelling and pain and I knew I needed to go to the ER. Scott called 911 and the fire department sent an ambulance and firetruck to my house. Complete with paramedics. (If they roll the ambulance, they roll a firetruck, too. Standard protocol.) So there were five men filling up the great room. They were all big and fit and, of course, good lookin'.

They strapped me onto a "stair chair," told me to cross my arms across my chest, and carried me out the front door, down the front steps, and to our van for the ride to the hospital. It's been a very long time since I was "carried" anywhere. Actually that was the scarriest part of the whole ordeal. But they didn't drop me. They didn't even stumble or groan under my weight. 

At the hospital, they prepared to x-ray my right leg, but I pointed out it was my left leg that was hurt. It took a little while to get the corrected written order. They found no obvious damage to the implant or the bones in my left knee. That was good. But they also did a CT scan of my head. I hit it during the fall, not badly enough to even raise a bump. Still, better to check. I do, however, take exception to the result of the scan of my head -- "unremarkable."

Being house-bound hasn't been much of a hardship. Plenty of time to read because it's been cold and snowy this whole time. And Scott has been feeding me like royalty -- not to mention fetching and carrying. One does not carry a cup of coffee while on crutches. 

Been reading Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tuscon: Essays from Now or Never. I think she is the best writer working in the United States today. Her use of the English language and content is first rate. I've added several books she mentions to my To Read list. 

AND I learned a new word -- allelopathy. It means "the chemical inhibition of one plant (or other organism) by another, due to the release into the environment of substances acting as germination or growth inhibitors." I don't remember ever seeing or hearing that word. Kingsolver has a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Arizona, so, of course, she would use it.

Yesterday was yet one more day that the walking group had no walk planned because of the weather --  temp below freezing and windy, snow covered ground. But we did have coffee planned at The Great Harvest Bread Company. Scott dropped me off. They always have good music there. Today, it was Fleetwood Mac, Stevie Wonder, Heart, etc.  I had a snickerdoodle cookie and coffee.  And Sue and Marchelle were, as always, great company.

Me, Sue, and Marchelle at Great Harvest Bread Store

(and the crutches!)

Maneuvering in snow with the crutches, I was very careful and intentional. And slow. It was great!

And tomorrow is the January meeting of our Books and More Salon. Scott's going to drive me there. 

My life is definitely getting back on the road!

The Disappearing Spoon -- a book review

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean is a history of the development of the Periodic Table of Elements, the basic map chemists use to understand the makeup of all things in our univers.

I know. I know. Some people find history and science boring. The complete title of this book is The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Element. It's anything but "boring."

Take the German chemist Robert Bunsen. You remember the Bunsen burner in your high school chemistry class. This book clarifies that although Herr Bunsen didn’t invent the Bunsen Burner. He did improve it by adding a valve that controlled oxygen flow which made a more efficient flame. That allowed him to heat elements causing them to emit unique bands of colored light. Take a disused cigar box and two telescope eye pieces and, voilà! He had a spectroscope. He was also into experimenting with cyanide and building working models of geysers in the middle of his lab.

Speaking of Bunsen Burners, when I was a high school sophomore in chemistry class, I discovered that you could use a Bunsen Burner to heat a test tube topped with a cork and shoot that cork with great accuracy at anyone within about eight feet.

Chemistry class! Ah, yes, I remember Mr. Rice’s high school chemistry class. It was the fall of 1963 and I was new to the town, to the school, and definitely to Mr. Rice. He was a very big man, over six feet tall and over 300 pounds, no hair. That first day, he set out the following facts about himself and his class. He declared the United States may be a democracy but his class was not. His rules were the rules and students had no say. He could swear in six languages. He was qualified to teach every class available at our high school except Home Economics and Girls P.E.

He announced that he was required by the State of Oklahoma to issue the approved text book, which he promptly did. Then he said we would not be using said book and he recommended that we turn them back in before that day’s class ended rather than keeping them in our lockers and risking damage or loss for which we would be responsible for the replacement cost.

If he mentioned the very large Periodic Table hanging on the wall, I don’t remember it.

He passed out a list of the 103 elements on the table at that time complete with its one- or two-letter chemical symbol, atomic number, and valence which we would then be tested on. In order to pass the class, we must pass the test. We would have as many chances to pass the test as we needed. We could miss three elements the first time we took the test and pass. The second time, we could miss two. The third and any succeeding attempts would require perfection. Yes, you guessed it. I passed on the third attempt.

This whole process was to help us do equations quickly using the information we’d memorized. Until I read The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean, I didn’t understand that all this information was readily available on the Periodic Table of Elements which was there on the wall of that classroom. Not that that would have helped. As big as it was, I sat too far from it to easily read it. And you had to know where to look on it to find any particular element. Not to mention that the one- and two-letter chemical symbols were printed large while the name of the element was a smaller font and the rest of the information was even smaller.

Many of those symbols had seemingly nothing to do with the element they stood for. I mean, okay. “H” for hydrogen. “Li” for Lithium. But “Na” for Sodium? “K” for Potassium? “Au” for Gold for heaven’s sake! And they were not organized alphabetically by symbol or name.

I don’t remember if Mr. Rice explained how to use the Periodic Table of Elements. Perhaps he did, but I was too overwhelmed to hear him, much less, process and use that information. So it was memorization for me!

I should have read this book before I had that chemistry class!

Reading Kean’s descriptions of some of the elements and how they could effect a human’s physical self was, if not frightening, certainly sobering.

During that year in chemistry class, we had a unit on “unknowns.” Mr. Rice would give us a sample to be identified – a powder, a liquid, a solid. He handed out instructions for a series of tests we were use to identify the element. Rather like recipes. I quickly discovered that I could just taste whatever it was and identify it. Of course I first tested the sample for arsenic, arsenous, cyanide, and acetate. The first three sounded dangerous to me. And one taste of acetate taught me not to taste it again. (If you taste acetate, you won’t be able to spit for a week. Think biting into a green persimmon.)

Apparently I wasn't the first to think I could identify an element by taste. Kean specifically says: “A live body is so complicated … that if you inject a random element into your bloodstream or liver or pancreas, there’s almost no telling what will happen. 
...when it comes to the periodic table, it’s best to keep our mouths shut. ”

When Mr. Rice discovered some of us were using this unsafe method of testing, he took steps to dissuade us from continuing to use it. He said he put urine in some of the samples of unknowns. Now we didn’t know if he actually did, but I for one discontinued that particular method of testing.

My favorite story in The Disappearing Spoon is a cautionary tale about a Detroit high school student who, in the 1990s, for an Eagle Scout project, built a nuclear reactor in the potting shed in his mother’s backyard.

No spoilers here.

There are so many good stories about scientists and, shall we say, science enthusiasts in this book. It’s definitely worth a read.

 

Will and Harper -- a Movie Review

 

In her car heading west

Will and Harper is a Netflix documentary about Will Ferrell and Harper Steele on a road trip from New York to Califoria. Will, a comedian, and Harper, a TV writer, met when they both went to work on Saturday Night Live, back in the day, and have been good friends since.

Will had always known Harper as a man named Andrew. Then he got an email explaining that Andrew had transitioned to a woman named Harper. Harper's email expressed concern that Will would accept her and still be her friend. Will not only chose to accept her and be her friend but suggested a road trip. I think to better understand this person who had been his very close friend for more than 30 years, whom he now discovered he had not known as trully as he thought.

Will suggested a road trip across America to places Harper had gone as a man named Andrew. Now she would experience America as herself.

Their first stop is breakfast with Harper's daughters. Their primary concern about the trip is for Harper's safety. As I watched the girls' obvious worry, I didn't really understand why they would be afraid for her. I was thinking nobody would know she was trans unless she said.

Admittedly she was not very feminine. She walked like a man, albeit in heels. She starts the film always wearing dresses even if pants would have been more appropriate. And she holds her beer like a man. But she looks like a woman. Maybe not a Hugh Hefner style woman, but certainly like many 60-year-old women.

Then I think about it.

Those daughters are right to be afraid for her because Harper is now a woman. She doesn't yet know how to be a woman. Apparently she has a history of going into shady places -- dive bars and such -- wherever she wants. But she's always gone into them as a man named Andrew. As long as a man watches his mouth and doesn't come on to or insult some guy's woman, he'll pretty much be safe in even the worst of bars. However, there are places that are not safe for a woman -- especially, if she seems insecure at all. And Harper is insecure for all kinds of reasons. She's just learning who she is as a person in this new self. She's just learning how to be a woman.

Speaking of dive bars, Harper goes into a bar in the small, rural town of  Meeker, Oklahoma. I won't say how that goes, but I will say it was not unlike what I think would have happened in my brother's favorite neighborhood bar in Oyster Creek, Texas.

As the documentary goes on, Harper seems to become more comfortable being a woman and dresses in pants and flats and even a swim suit.

I know, better late than never. But something I want to say, as an old woman myself -- I'm sorry that she transitioned so late in life. She missed the times she could have been the "Barbie" woman. Those times have their own traumas, but they also have their "Princess" moments when she and all the world would have seen her as movie-star glamorous.

Fall of Giants -- a Book Review

    So, I was on a walk with my walking group. We're lucky enough to live in a town where there are little free libraries scattered through the parks and neighborhoods.

    If you know me, you know I always stop to see what's on offer. And on this walk I saw Winter of the World by Ken Follett, one of his I'd never read. So, of course it came home with me. 

   Wikipedia identifies Follett as a Welsh novelist working in the genres of "thriller, spy  novel, and historical fiction." Years ago I read his Eye of the Needle, a spy novel, and then The Key to Rebecca, also a spy novel but with some historical underpinnings. Neither actually my cup of tea, but both well-written.

    Then I read Pillars of the Earth, the first of his Kingsbridge series. And I was hooked. It is set in the 12th Century. Then World without End with descendents of some of the Pillars characters, and then A Colume of Fire set in 1558 through 1605. (After doing a bit of research to write this review I see that I've got a couple more of them to read -- a prequel and the fourth in the Kingsbridge series.)

   

    On closer examination of the book from the Little Library, I discovered that World in Winter is the second in a trilogy.

    

        The Century Trilogy

    Of course it is, and I can't read it without having read the first, so, I went online to my local public library and downloaded the first book in the trilogy to my eReader -- The Fall of Giants. 

     

The Fall of Giants

    The Fall of Giants follows families from five cultures -- Welsh, English, German, Russian, and American -- actually more if you count the ruling and working classes.These families travel their intersecting paths from pre-World War I, the holdover days of feudal Europe through the struggle for rights for women and the working classes complicated by World War I and the Russian Revolution to what they hoped would be a fairer and freer world without war. 

    It begins in 1911 in Aberowen, a small, Welsh mining town. Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams, son of a union leader, goes to work down in a coal mine on land owned by the Fitzherberts, an aristocratic English family. Billy and his sister Ethel carry the Welsh common people's arc. 

    

    The Earl Fitzherbert and his sister Maud are the main characters in the English arc of the story. He the traditional capitalist/patriarch. She the entitled but modern woman suffragist.

    

    Fitz's friend from school, a proper upper class English school, Walter von Ulrich is a German nobleman, albeit the modern son of a traditionalist father.

    

    Fitz's wife Bea is a Russian princess, by blood and attitude. And the two Peshkov brothers were orphaned by Bea's brutal father.

    

    And Fitz's friend Gus Dewar is a wealthy, well-educated, son of a U.S. Senator. Dewar is a close aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, an American-style upper class, white Southerner. Dewar is the modern American amid a traditionalist family and society.

    

Follett not only writes easily recognizable characters, he also writes vivid scenes of the times and places. His Lady Maud Fitzherbert gives us the venue of the war-ending Treaty of Versailles.

In The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles:

    "This was one of the most grandiose rooms in the world. It was the size of three
    tennis courts in a line. Along one side, seventeen long windows overlooked the
    garden; on the opposite wall, the windows were reflected by seventeen mirrored
    arches. More important, this was the room where in 1871, at the end of the
    Franco-Prussian War, the victorious Germans had crowned their first emperor
    and forced the French to sign away Alsace and Lorraine. Now the Germans
    were to be humiliated under the same barrel-vaulted ceiling. And no doubt some
    among them would be dreaming of the time in the future when they in turn
    would take their revenge. The degradation to which you subject others comes
    back, sooner or later, to haunt you," Maud thought. "Would that reflection occur
    to men on either side at today's ceremony? Probably not."

The Fall of Giants continues a few months after The Treaty of Versailles is signed.

    A few months after the peace treaty is signed? In June of 1919 communications were not so difficult as to delay the end of the war. No. Follett gives us the reason. The Russian Revolution. The Allies, especially the European Allies, felt threatened by the Bolsheviks. The English Government secretly, without telling Parliament, sent troops to Russia to aid the White Russians (the Royalists) against the Bolsheviks who were being celebrated in England by working-class Brits. 

   

     Follett's characters Billy Willams and his fellow soldiers from Aberowen, Wales, without being told where they were being sent, found themselves delivered by ship to Vladivostok, the major Pacific port in Russia, to fight in the Russian civil war. They were there even after World War I itself was over. 

    Billy observed, "People took little notice of the Aberowen Pals marching through the town. There were already thousands of soldiers in uniform there. Most were Japanese but there were also Americans and Czechs and others." 

    (Since reading this, I have not been able to find information about whether or not the United States Congress approved sending U.S. troops to fight in the Russian Civil War.) 

    This was especially interesting to me. My maternal grandmother's brother and my paternal grandfather's brother-in-law told stories about fighting in Siberia during World
War I. I could never understand why. Now, thanks to Fall of Giants, I do.

    

    Something else I learned (and I did fact check it) from Follett's Fall of Giants through his character Lady Maud Fitzherbert: 

"The Mail [a London newspaper owned by Lord  Northcliffe] had conducted a hate campaign against the thirty thousand Germans who had been living in Britain at the outbreak of war—most of them longterm residents who thought of [England] as their home. In consequence families had been broken up and thousands of harmless people had spent years in British concentration camps."

    

"[Northcliffe’s] talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper," she observed."

It seems The United States did not fall far from its British parent tree.

    Follett ends Fall of Giants perfectly. The Earl Fitzherbert meets Ethel, a woman, his former housekeeper from Aberowen, the daughter of a labor union officer at his mine, now a Member of the House of Commons, and her son on the stairs at Parliament.

    

    "Fitz’s expression was thunderous. Reluctantly he stood aside, with his son [and heir, the Viscount Aberowen] and they waited, backs to the wall, as Ethel and Lloyd walked past them and on up the stairs.”

    

    

Oath and Honor by Liz Cheney -- a book review

    This is a very hard review to write. Not because the book is not well-written. It is. It is very well-written. The language is direct and clear. The content is presented in a coherent, easy to follow way. Despite the great quantity of information presented, it is actually a pretty quick read. 

    And not because I think the book is unimportant. It is. In fact, it is so important for people in this country to read and read right now that I do not want to do anything that might cause  anyone NOT to read it.

    Today, as I write this, it is the 6th day of the year 2024. An election year. A year that very well may determine if my country, if this democracy, if this "government of the people, by the people, for the people," as Abraham Lincoln prayed "shall not perish from the earth."

    Let me say, right here. There are few policies that Cheney and I agree on. 

    Wikipedia quotes Lawrence R. Jacobs as saying "Cheney is an arch-conservative. She's a hard-edged, small government, lower taxes figure and a leading voice on national defense." And Jake Bernstein, "Liz Cheney is a true conservative in every sense of the word and she's only a moderate in relation to the radicalism that has seized the Republican party."

    Both Cheney and her husband, Philip Richard Perry, are attorneys with extensive experience in the government, which stood them in good stead for their work with the The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. They have five children, ages 17 down to 7. Which I think I can safely infer has given them some insight on time management. (Also there is one thing I can say that she and I have in common, we each have a daughter named Grace.)

     By accepting the position of Vice Chair of the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Cheney put her life, the lives of her family, and of her staff in jeopardy.

     Cheney begins her book with the opening paragraph: "This is the story of the moment when American democracy began to unravel. It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize. It is the story of the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office and of the many steps he took to subvert our Constitution."

    The first part of the book is about the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol while Congress was meeting in joint session in the House Chamber to officially count the Electoral votes as certified by the states. Cheney gives details about what she was seeing inside the Capitol while it was happening. Of course she couldn't know what was going on outside, but they all knew they were in serious danger.

This was the view of the United States Capitol 

                    on January 6th, 2021.

And this.

                                                                                    And this.                                         

    I watched this in real time on television. On our PBS channel. Keeping in mind that I am a regular watcher of PBS's News Hour and feel like I know personally, which, of course I do not, the news people who were on the ground at the Capitol that day. It was terrifying. The crowd was so angry and violent, I truly feared for all the reporters there.

     I also watched the January 6th Congressional Hearings on TV. They presented information through video and testimony that I had not previously seen and heard. On the part of the panel, it was presented dispassionately, not as personal experience.

    But this book gives us, from Cheney's point of view, what Senators and Representatives and their staffs were experiencing without the emotional distance of the hearings.

    And after the Capitol was cleared of the mob, she describes walking through Statuary Hall,
     "the original chamber of the House of Representatives ... a room full of the
     history of our republic. Brass plaques on the floor mark the locations of the
     desks of presidents who served in the House, including Abraham Lincoln and
     John Quincy Adams. Statues of prominent Americans line the outer walls
     of the room. ...law enforcement officers in tactical gear were seated on the floor,
     leaning up against every statue and all around the walls of the room, exhausted
     from the battle they had fought to defend the Capitol. I walked around the room
     thanking them for what they had done.

     "One said to me, "Ma'am, I fought in Iraq and I have never encountered the
     violence I did out there today."

     Describing the actual assault is the hardest part of the book to read -- not because the words are big or fancy but because it hurts to realize this was perpetrated by Americans. 

     It was not the first time I experienced the danger to our democracy that can come from within.

     President John F. Kennedy was murdered on November 22, 1963, my 16th birthday.The assassin was an American. 

     The Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people, including employees of my credit union where I had gone with
my 5-year-old daughter the week before to take care of some business. We could
easily have been there when Americans bombed it.

     Most of the rest of the book is about the Congressional investigation and hearings. It has the benefit of Cheney's law background and her determination to Honor and Defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

     She does name names. 

     Cheney ends her book with this warning:
     "In the era of Trump, certain members of Congress and other Trump enablers
      -- many of whom carry the Constitution in their pocket but seem
     to have never read it -- have attempted to hijack this phrase [we the
     people] to claim it gives them authority to subvert the rule of law or
     overturn the results of elections. They have preyed on the patriotism
     of millions of Americans. They are working to return to office the man
     responsible for January 6."

     Cheney exhorts us all:

     "We the people must stop them. We are the only thing that
     can stop them. This is more important than partisan politics. Every
     one of us -- Republicans, Democrates, Independents -- must work
     to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled,
     and collaborated with him are defeated.

     "This is the cause of our times."

 

Killers of the Flower Moon -- A Movie Review

 

 

     So do these two pictures look like they're of the same guy to you? I mean, I know the hairstyles are different and one has a mustache and the other doesn't. But really?! 

     Truth be told, the first photo is of Leonardo diCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, and the other is of Matt Damon in Oppenheimer. So, okay, I don't go to the movies often, and I don't follow Hollywood news about which actor is feuding or sleeping with whom or who is now, will be, or once was married to whom. So I got confused. I actually watched all of Killers of the Flower Moon thinking I was seeing Matt Damon as the male lead and thinking he was doing such a good job. Actually I thought he did a good job in Oppenheimer, too. Which he did, but it was diCaprio who did a good job in Killers of the Flower Moon.

    

     This fall I was so excited about Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon that I could hardly wait for them to come out. 

     Both films are about real people and real events. Oppenheimer, of course, hit the theaters first and I hated it. I'm not a fan of comic-book-superhero-movies. I don't go to see them. I had no idea who Christopher Nolan is, but now I certainly do. Had I known back then, I probably would have understood the 4th of July fireworks and sex and flashback sex not to mention, the chaotic visuals and noise that were suposed to be going on in the scientist's mind. It was a fantasy/adventure story for juvenile males instead of a serious film about one of the two most life-on-Earth-altering developments of World War II.

     I had been waiting for Killers of the Flower Moon since the book came out in 2017. (Read my book review of it here.) But after seeing Oppenheimer, I decided not to see Killers of the Flower Moon in the theater. I would wait until it went to streaming, then if Hollywood screwed it up to the point that I needed to rant and rave and throw things, I could. Without legal ramifications.

     Last week a family member sent me a link to a Rolling Stone (October 18, 2023) article about a 2019 meeting between Scorcese with members of his production team and leaders of the Osage Nation held in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. Then I checked to see who the screen writers were. Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese, and David Grann. Yes, David Grann who wrote the book in the first place. And an excellent book it is.

    So when the movie opened Friday, I went to my local theater -- ALONE. Just in case I needed to leave before it was over. 

     It was the 4:25 showing and the theater was fuller than I expected. Mostly older people. They were a noisy group before the film started and I dreaded being in the theater with a bunch of people in party mode for what I considered (and hoped) would be a serious film about a time in our country's history when corrupt people in high places spread terror and death among the Osage people in my native state of Oklahoma. By the end of the movie, the theater was quiet.

     

     Rather than taking on the whole Osage Nation's story of terror and death at the hands of certain rich and powerful white men as Grann's book does, and its focus on the FBI's investigation, Scorsese focused on one family -- Mollie and Ernest Burkhart, her three sisters Anna, Minnie, and Rita, and their mother Lizzie Q. They were full-blood Osage with headrights. The Osage were already rich from leasing their grazing lands, then oil was discovered. The Osage, as a nation, became the wealthiest people in the world.

      Some background to explain Osage headrights, from Osage Nation Lands and Minerals Fact Sheet:  "Because the Osage had purchased their own reservation land, they were exempt from the individual allotments under the Dawes Act. Under the wise leadership of Chief James Bigheart, the Osage insisted on the following unique provisions in their Osage Allotment Act of 1906:

(1) Instead of allotting just 160 acres to each person and selling the rest, as other tribes had been forced to do, the Osage allotted all their reservation land to their people. This gave 657 acres each to the 2,229 registered Osage (Grann 52). 

(2) Reserved Communal Mineral rights:

(a) They “reserved” - held back from allotment - their mineral rights: the right to mine or produce oil and gas, rocks, and minerals from under the ground was not allotted, and so was

never lost.

(b) They retained communal ownership of these reserved mineral rights, so all subsurface

minerals belonged to the entire tribe instead of individuals. Instead of leaving to chance who

might get rich later from oil and gas being found on their particular allotment, all tribespeople share equally in any mineral wealth (Wilson 62).

Each received a “headright” - right to a share of the whole mineral interest (oil) income - which could be passed on from generation to generation."

     The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) continues to be responsible for collection and dispersal of the income from Osage lands. From 1906 to 1978 the BIA allowed non-Osage to inherit headrights and to receive the income that goes along with them. 

     Add to that: "On March 3, 1921, Congress passed a law requiring the Osage to pass a measure of competency proving they could manage their funds responsibly. If they couldn’t, they would be appointed a guardian until a legal age. This immediately opened the door for con artists, unscrupulous businessmen, and corrupt lawyers and bankers to siphon off funds from annual royalties. Several Osage people were swindled out of their individual headrights without knowing the full value of their contracts. Many Whites even married their way into rich Osage families to exert their legal rights as spouses and obtain guardianship that way.
     ".... As with any appointed guardianship, if the ward died before the legal age of competency, the guardian could petition to inherit their estate." [From the National Archives]

     And that, friends and neighbors, was the impetus for the Reign of Terror against the Osage Nation which was the basis for Grann's book and Scorsese's film Killers of the Flower Moon.

     These are the real people on whom Scorsese focused his film:

 

           The sisters Rita, Anna, Mollie, and Minnie               Their mother, Lizzie Q

      Ernest Burkhart              William King Hale             FBI Agent Tom White

Rita and her husband Bill Smith's home after it was blown up.

     The movie starts off with a scene of the rolling grasslands of Osage County. It is still, to this day, beautiful country, where you can see as far as you can look. 

     The film treats Mollie and her family like people, not stereotypes. Lily Gladstone as Mollie and Tanttoo Cardinal are excellent. Leonardo diCaprio portrays Ernest Burkhart with a depth of emotion appropriate to a man who knows the difference between right and wrong. And Robert DeNiro plays William King Hale from Hunt County, Texas, without ever betraying his own personal history as a New Yorker and an ethical man.

Some of the dialog is actually in Osage. Keeping in mind these events happened in the  Roaring 20's when every Osage County town was a boomtown, so the costumes, forms of transportation, and rowdiness are representative of the times.

(Just a couple of side notes: oil doesn't come spouting out of the ground. It may pool or puddle. And if a well is being drilled it may be a blow-out. But a spindly little geyser? No. I guess Hollywood just had to have its kitsch. Just pretend you don't see that. Same with the weird inclusion of a radio play with Scorsese's cameo at the end. A radio play? Well, actually, yes. Grann explains in his book -- the radio play not Scorsese, he's not THAT old -- actually happened. "In 1932, the FBI began working with radio program “The Lucky Strike Hour” to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the Osage Nation murders.")

It's a good movie. I definitely recommend it with the caveat that it is a serious movie about real people and real events. A terrible time on our history that we must not allow to happen again.