Joy

This, the 27th day of September, 2021, the second year of the Great Covids Plague, marks the 250th day of Joe Biden's presidency.  The disgraced, twice-impeached, former so-called "president" Agent Orange has been out of office for 250 days now.

Today is the day we abandon all unpleasant things.  Today is the day for joy.

On this day in 2012, both actor Herbert Lom and administrator John Silber died. Impermanence is swift. I really have nothing to say about Herbert Lom, but Silber was president of Boston University from 1971 to 1996, including the years (1976 to 1980) that I attended school there.

To set the tone, in September 1977, my sophomore year, Esquire Magazine ran a profile of Silber written by Nora Ephron, titled The Meanest S.O.B. On Campus.  "B.U. That's the name of the place," Ephron began her article.  "Boston University, but everyone calls it B.U. It's a terrible name, really.  Sounds as if it hasn't had a bath in years.  Looks like it, too."  The piece turned negative from there.  

In response to what they perceived as tyrannical rule by Silber, the B.U. faculty organized a union in 1974 in affiliation with the American Association of University Professors. The conservative Silber would not negotiate with the union, and in 1976, two-thirds of the faculty and deans demanded the board of trustees fire him. The board refused. The faculty conducted a brief strike in 1979, which was followed by a clerical workers' walkout in which several faculty members refused to cross the picket line. Classes were cancelled, even in my generally apolitical Geology Department, and 60 Minutes sent Mike Wallace to B.U. for a profile on Silber and to cover the strike.

In the course of my life, I have had some tangential knowledge or involvement in three stories that were covered by 60 Minutes, and each time they seemed to get the story completely wrong, at least from my perspective.  The B.U. faculty strike was the second of the three.

In the late 1960s, while I was in the 8th Grade, my school took in a Montagnard student from Vietnam.  "Montagnard" is the French term for a member of any one of the various indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands of Vietnam.  The Montagnard had a long history of tensions with the Vietnamese majority.  Ha Kin was rather shy - he didn't speak English very well - and he was exceedingly gentle.  He identified as Christian but seemed more Buddhist in temperament than anything.  60 Minutes came by to interview him, and cast the story as "boy from stone-age mountain tribe who fought the Viet Cong with bows-and-arrows now enrolled in suburban school."  They made him sound like Mowgli from The Jungle Book.  The story included a brief interview with him speaking in his broken English, and with several of my classmates (I wasn't included in the interviews, for some reason).  Amazingly, I still have my yearbook from that class and it includes a photo of Ha Kin wearing a sports jacket and tie, and looking completely comfortable in Western civilization.  Watching the television broadcast, I felt at age 14 that 60 Minutes had completely mischaracterized the situation.

Could their own predisposition have colored their interpretation of the story?

Fast forward a couple decades to the mid-1980s, and I was very marginally involved as a paid hydrogeologic consultant to a large-scale development on the Caribbean island of Barbuda.  Barbuda was a largely undeveloped island, part of the Commonwealth of Antigua and Barbuda.  The back story on the development was admittedly quite colorful, containing European nobles of the lost kingdom of Aragon, actor Rossano Brazzi and the Broadway musical South Pacific, the architect John Portman, and an undiscovered tropical paradise.  It's a long, shaggy-dog story and quite amusing in its own right, but far, far too long to get into here.  60 Minutes sent Ed Bradley to Antigua, twice, to cover the story, but seemingly couldn't take it seriously. They had a "get-a-load-of-this" attitude, and for comedic effect the segment frequently cut away to a videoclip of the song Bali H'ai from South Pacific.  But since 60 Minutes had a reputation as muckraking investigative journalists, they also accused one of the developers of past tax-avoidance scams.  Even if he was guilty (admittedly, he wound up doing a little time in jail), it wasn't unlike the tax-avoidance schemes of any number of other developers, and had little to nothing to do with the Barbuda development.  But that was the way 60 Minutes chose to cover the story - a comedy of colorful characters with a criminal past - and at age 30 I felt like I had at 14, that 60 Minutes had mischaracterized the situation.

But had their own predisposition colored their interpretation of the story - or had mine? I was a paid consultant, and if your livelihood depends on your not seeing a problem, you will have a very hard time perceiving it.

Between those two endpoints, I also felt at age 25 that 60 Minutes had misread the John Silber/B.U. situation.  The strike was first called by the academic faculty of the University, and then spread to the clerical staff, but 60 Minutes covered it as if it were a student strike.  During that post-Vietnam, post-Watergate period of the late 70s, when student protests and demonstrations were largely a thing of the past, 60 Minutes derogatorily proposed that the faculty strike was a sign that the 60s were anachronistically alive and well at B.U.  "Where have all the flowers gone?," they asked.  Alive and kicking, apparently, on the campus of B.U.  They interviewed some of the wooliest-looking student Bolsheviks they could find on campus, barely-articulate, acid-fried stoners, and held them up as representatives of the movement.  I don't recall any interviews with faculty members. Watching the segment, one would get the impression that the unrest at B.U. was simply due to disaffected students living out their nostalgia for the 1960s, and not sober professors protesting in favor of academic freedom. The whole segment was cast to make Silber look good and the University undeserving of his beneficent presence. 

Once again, had their own predisposition colored their interpretation of the story? Or had mine? 

Anyway, Silber's dead now and I'm still alive.  Herbert Lom died peacefully in his sleep at age 95 in London.  Rossano Brazzi died from a neural virus at age 78 on Christmas Eve, 1994.  I googled Ha Kin and found recent photos of him as an adult, dressed in Patagonia fleece and now a married U.S. citizen. He'll probably outlive all of us.