The Passing Parade

Posted on by

As each year comes to a close, newspapers, magazines and TV shows spend some time remembering noteworthy people that have shuffled off their mortal coil in the last twelve months. I’m a fan of the practice but have noticed something surprising. 

If you peruse the dates of those who passed on each year’s calendar, there often seems to be a flurry of celebrated deaths in December and January. This may be mere happenstance, but it may also suggest that some of those who were lost were intentionally or subconsciously trying to hang on until a new year rolled around. 

In 2023, notable deaths in December included NASCAR star Cale Yarborough on the last day or the year, stage and screen actor Tom Wilkinson familiar from “In the Bedroom,” “The Full Monty,” “Michael Clayton,” and many more roles, two more familiar actors — Andre Braugher and Ryan O’Neill, Tom Smothers, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. 

If my notion of people hanging on until a new year is true, we shall have to wait and see if January is equally full of notable obituaries. But the rest of 2023 was surely filled with losses of memorable people. Of course, many of these worthies who had long production lives may be unfamiliar to younger generations. But for people of my cohort those who have now departed were part of our lived experience for decades.

Rosalynn Carter, who remade the role of First Lady, joined the roll call of those who whose contributions involved government service and politics. Henry Kissinger was an admired scholar and diplomat but his involvement with the brutality of the Vietnam War also earned him enmity. Another scholar, economist Daniel Elllsberg, who served as a nuclear strategy maven at the RAND Corporation, believed policies being promoted were both amoral and dangerous. He raised an alarm by leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers, for which he was branded a traitor.  

Many outstanding figures from the world of sports also left us in 2023 including coaches Bud Grant and Bob Knight, Football hall of famers Jim Brown and Dick Butkus, baseball stars Brooks Robinson, Frank Howard, and Vida Blue. So did astronauts Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman who were among the few earthlings who visited the moon.

Many actors from big screen and small took their final bows last year including Mathew Perry from “Friends,” Raquel Welch, two fine British stars Michael Gambon and Josh Ackland, Robert Blake memorable in the iconic “In Cold Blood,” the versatile Alan Arkin who could be terrifying as a murderous criminal in “Wait Until Dark,” tragic in “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” and hilarious in “The In-Laws,” “The Russians Are Coming,” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” and Paul Reubens aka Pee-wee Herman. And we can’t forget the prolific producer of TV amusements with a point of view, Norman Lear.

And then there was the fearless force of nature Glenda Jackson. She began on stage in classic and contemporary plays ranging from “Hamlet” and “Lear” to “Marat/Sade.” She was a memorable Queen Elizabeth for the BBC, won Academy Awards for “Women in Love” and the comedy “A Touch of Class,” not to mention Tony, Bafta, Golden Globe, and Emmy awards. Then in 1992 she ran as a socialist and won a seat in Parliament where she was an outspoken  presence until 2015.

The world of music also had its share of losses last year. Singers Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, and Bossa Nova’s Astrid Gilberto, jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Ahmad Jamal, rocking Tina Turner, laid back Jimmy Buffet, and hippie icon David Crosby. 

Authors from around the world also joined the honor roll — A.S. Byatt, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, and Milan Kundera. And to add a touch of science to the arts, it is worth noting the passing of John Goodenough, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for what became the long-lasting, rechargeable lithium-ion battery now found everywhere from your laptop, and phone to your auto. 

Clever people, these humans. Their creativity enriched our lives and is a reminder that, though the makers may be gone, often what they made lingers on and won’t be forgotten.

Vaccine Folly

Posted on by

Those who grew up in the polio era remember the alarm when swimming pools and lakes closed for fear of infection, and the classmates who died or were permanently crippled by contracting it. Parents were haunted by the plague, contributed to the March of Dimes, and every day feared their child’s risk of exposure to the germ. 

Then suddenly the terror was replaced with a sigh of relief beginning in 1955 as kids lined up in school halls to get the polio vaccine. Many of those who experienced that miracle have happily lined up ever since to get every new vaccine offered. 

They represent one of the greatest triumphs in the history of science. Vaccines began saving lives as long ago as 1796 with smallpox, followed by measles, whooping cough, yellow fever, rabies, meningitis, hepatitis, malaria, ebola, tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, influenza, rubella, mumps, chickenpox, anthrax, shingles, dengue, and covid. 

It is estimated that four million children’s lives are saved a year by vaccines, and many more could be saved worldwide if vaccines were more widely available.There is also a new reason for concern in the form of climate change. As temperatures rise and rainfall increases the number of cases of diseases are rising too, particularly those spread by mosquitos — outbreaks of dengue fever in Peru and malaria in Ethiopia, for example.

And yet, today we are confronted with an even more alarming danger — the antivax lunacy that denies the efficacy of life-saving shots and that can put those who fall for the lies that the deniers peddle at risk of contracting deadly diseases from which vaccines could have protected them. 

There’s nothing new about the misguided luddite distrust of vaccines. In England in the 1800s, smallpox vaccines were met with hostility and fear, denounced as unnatural, unsanitary, and unchristian. Many died needlessly as a result. And when an act made vaccination mandatory in 1855 anti-vaxers organized protests claiming government had no right to control their bodily freedom. 

Sound familiar? It should. Similar antivax movements appeared in America in the 1880s and by 1905 an antivax appeal to the Supreme Court sought to deny the state the power to protect the public from contagious diseases. Anti-vaxers lost, vaccination won.

But fake vaccine news never rests. In the 1970s, a myth circulated that claimed the DTP vaccine against Diphtheria, Tetanus and Whooping Cough caused Sudden Infant Death syndrome. It was shown to be untrue but many parents still refused to allow their children to get the vaccine. 

An even more harmful fantasy claimed the MMR vaccine against Measles, Mumps, and Rubella caused autism. No evidence for the myth was ever found but that didn’t stop frightened, gullible parents from refusing to protect their children from diseases that killed 2.6 million children a year before the vaccines were available. 

The most recent antivax mythology resulted from the Covid outbreak. It was especially toxic since it was politicized by President Trump who began by calling it a hoax, proposed curing it by drinking bleach, mocked people for wearing masks, and repeated the myth that the MMR vaccine caused autism. 

His enablers at Fox News included Tucker Carlson who told his listeners vaccines didn’t work, killed people, and likened vaccine mandates to Nazi experiments which led to Dr. Fauci being compared to war criminal Josef Mengale. As a result, voters in Trump-leaning red states were less likely to get vaccinated and more likely to get covid.  

Today, the Republican Party continues to spread disinformation that can poison not just minds but also bodies. The Washington Post reports a continued backlash against pandemic restrictions in Trump leaning states where anti-vaxers are winning elections. 

In Louisiana 29 candidates endorsed a group called Stand For Health Freedom that is dedicated to defeating state requirements for mandatory vaccinations. In Tennessee vaccine requirements have been dropped for home schooled children. In Iowa, Republicans passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that students be educated about the HPV vaccine. And Florida has barred schools from requiring covid vaccines. 

Unfortunately, this demand for personal health freedom can become a death wish if it exposes children and the population at large to epidemic diseases and dissuades them from getting the vaccines that can protect them from infection. Live Free Or Die was a fine slogan for revolutionaries but Live Free and Get a Deadly Disease is what anti-vaxers are likely to get and spread to others.

Days Gone By

Posted on by

Here we are once again. Another Christmas, Another New Year, An old year ends, a new year begins. When you’re young, the holidays are about stuff you hope to get. The older you become the more the holidays are about the things that are long gone. Most notably the grandparents and parents who first introduced us to the idea of a jolly St. Nick and the bittersweet memories of times long past, also known as Auld Lang Syne.

Not surprisingly, as time goes by you realize there’s a subtext of loneliness and loss to the season. It is echoed in many of the lyrics of the season’s melodies. “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”or “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas just like the ones I used to know.”

The aging Mark Twain, rich and famous around the world, once admitted that “all the me in me” was from the little river town of Hannibal, Missouri where he grew up. In this big, busy country, many of us probably feel the same way about the time and place of our origins. 

Especially at the holidays, I suspect there lurks the feeling in us that the me in me is from a remembered time and place where we grew up. No matter how distant, the memories still remain. But despite the sentimental attachment to the long ago and far away, in many cases if we return to our point of origin we find that it is changed utterly and lost to us. And so are most of the people who lived there with us. Like us, they are scattered to the four winds.

Moving on is the American way, of course. Everyone here descends from people who came from elsewhere. And once they landed on our shores, they or their offspring moved on again and again. It is a theme not just in our history and lives, but in our literature. Thomas Woolf wrote repeatedly about his home place, but one of his books admitted “You Can’t Go Home Again,” and Dawn Powell’s  wonderful novel about growing up is called “My Home Is Far Away.” 

The dramas we return to year after year during the holidays are also often stories of returning home or finding one. How does “Miracle on 34th Street” end? With a department store Santa

seeming to have delivered to a young child exactly what he wanted — a new home in the suburbs and a father. In “Remember the Night,” a woman who experienced a cruel childhood and faces jail for shoplifting improbably learns from her prosecutor’s family what a kind and loving home looks like. 

In “The Family Stone” a large family and invited companions gather together, but the joy is tempered by sorrow caused by the matriarch’s terminal cancer diagnosis. And many holiday films are concerned with lonely people who find one another again or at last: “You’ve Got Mail,” “An Affair to Remember,” “Home for the Holidays.” And in both “The Apartment” and “When Harry Met Sally” the final scene is of a pair that should have been together all along running to embrace on New Year’s Eve.

Of course, the holidays are also a time of charitable giving which is a reminder that for many people in need the season is not so much joyful as desperate. It is impossible to ignore that truth if only because of the endless streaming of versions of “A Christmas Carol” starring a long list of stars playing Scrooge. They include Alastair Sim, Michael Caine, Patrick Stewart, Albert Finney, Basil Rathbone, George C. Scott, Bill Murray, and even Mister Magoo. 

One of my happiest Christmas memories is from junior high school when our math teacher, who was torturing us with an attempt to make us understand the so-called new math, surprised us by using the last class before the Christmas break to read aloud “A Christmas Carol” and doing so with a surprisingly good imitation of Scrooge transformed from miserly grouch to charitable mensch. God Bless Us Every One.