Grim Reader, April 1, 2011: Geraldine Ferraro, Paul Baran and Dorothea Puente
by Michael Schaffer
APRIL 1, 2011 TAGS:
With this week’s death of Geraldine Ferraro, the obit writers break out the trailblazer metaphors. Ferraro “shattered political barriers” (Washington Post) and was “embraced as a symbol of equality” (Los Angeles Times) as the woman “who strode onto a podium in 1984 to accept the Democratic nomination for vice president and to take her place in American history” (New York Times) and thereby “emboldened women across the country to seek public office and helped lay the groundwork for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential candidacy in 2008 and John McCain's choice of his running mate, Sarah Palin, that year” (Associated Press). All the obits note that Ferraro’s veep run was notably unsuccessful: She and Walter Mondale lost 49 states and 55 percent of women voters to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But the coverage generally chalks that up to an unwinnable election against a popular incumbent -- though few of them note that the choice, at the time, was dismissed as a gimmick. “It was the ultimate breaking of the glass ceiling,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney tells Politico, in just a bit of an overstatement. For one, the ceiling may well be in place; for another, Grim Reader suspects the likes of Clinton and Palin would be on the scene with or without the legacy of 1984.
.jpg)
In a way, it’s a pity that so much energy is devoted to Ferraro’s first-of-a-kind status, because other aspects of her career are fascinating. As the Congresswoman from Archie Bunker’s home district, Ferraro represented one specific side of the Democratic party’s identity crisis: Her first campaign slogan was “finally, a tough Democrat.” She voted against busing. Though her feminist credentials remained unimpeachable, Ferraro showed a willingness to play post-1960s backlash politics that goes largely unmentioned in the coverage. The one hint of it is her notorious 2008 comment that Barack Obama was only popular because he was African-American, something that prompted her departure from a position in Clinton’s campaign. All the obits mention that -- and include Obama’s praise for her -- but only the Wall Street Journal does so relatively high in the piece. This history may be one extra reason why so many conservative pols offer praise for her in the obits and in online comments rounded up by Politico. Or the answer may be simpler: A disproportionate number of the conservative mourners recall getting to know her while working together as Fox News commentators.
Ferraro isn’t the Obitosphere’s only example this week of a pioneer who didn’t have great luck on election day. the Washington Post, among others, writes up John Cashin, who won 15 percent of the vote against George Wallace when he was the first African-American to run for governor of Alabama. Cashin’s efforts to force an independent, non-racist Democratic party onto state ballots paid off even as he went down to defeat; the state, with a smaller black population than neighbors like Mississippi, soon had the highest number of black local officials in Dixie. The write-up also makes him sound like fun: A dentist, Cashin integrated his suburban nieghbohood, tooling around it in a Rolls-Royce. … And Ellen McCormack is remembered by the New York Daily News as “part of a group of Long Island housewives who founded the state's Right to Life Party.” She twice ran for president under the party’s banner, “doing well enough to become the first woman to qualify as a candidate for federal financing and Secret Service protection,” according to the New York Times. Unlike with Ferraro, though, the obits don’t give her credit as a groundbreaker -- which is perhaps the right move, since the mainstreaming of an abortion-centric brand of politics could have happened with or without her. But it does make Grim Reader wonder about the eligibility standards for groundbreaker status.
Here’s the lede of a Chicago Tribune obit for Lanford Wilson, as it appears on the Washington Post’s website: “Lanford Wilson, who wrote of urban desperation and small-town struggles and was among the first playwrights who dealt directly with homosexuality in his emotionally rich dramas, died March 23.” And here’s the version Grim Reader was able to find via the Trib’s own website: “Playwright Lanford Wilson, a gentle writer from Missouri who wrote of urban desperation but most revealed his heart through rich and emotional dramas centered on the struggles of small-town Midwestern life, died Thursday.” Notice a difference? The groundbreaking gay characters get dramatically different levels of attention, from the Post’s lede to extensive coverage in the New York Times to a single, puny mention in Missouri’s Kansas City Star, which notes that “‘Burn This’ is searing drama set in a lower Manhattan loft as friends and relatives gather to mourn the drowning death of a young gay dancer.”
Indeed, uncertainty over sexual identity politics seems to be an obit theme of the week. Farley Granger was “a handsome leading man … best known for his starring roles in the Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers ’Strangers on a Train’ and ‘Rope,’” says the Los Angeles Times. Or was he? Other obits give more prominent play to personal-life details, which the Los Angeles Times mentions low in the piece: Granger, as the Wall Street Journal’s first paragraph explains, “flouted Hollywood convention by dating stars of either sex,” something he would go on to write about in a 2007 memoir cowritten with his longtime male partner. USA Today, meanwhile, has an odd piece that focuses entirely on Granger’s sexual identity, with scarcely any mention of the big-screen career he bafflingly abandoned at its peak in favor of stage acting. “Bisexual screen idol Farley Granger dies at age 85,” the headline reads.
Other cultural figures in the obits: George Tooker is remembered in the New York Times as “a painter whose haunting images of trapped clerical workers and forbidding government offices expressed a peculiarly 20th-century brand of anxiety and alienation.” … Opera composer Lee Hoiby is remembered by NPR as “an unapologetic champion of lyricism at a time when hummable melodies were considered old-fashioned.” Kudos where they’re due: Grim Reader has chided obit writers for ignoring or just being weird about subjects’ sexual identities. But in these two pieces, both about gay men, their lives and loves are depicted like those of any other deceased person.
Paul Baran, who devised a technology known as packet-switching, really did invent the Internet. In the early 1960s, the Polish-born scientist was working at the RAND corporation and worrying over what would become of U.S. telecommunications in the event of a nuclear exchange. His answer was something he was able to sell to the military, which used it as the foundation for Arpanet, the progenitor of the web. “By splitting up messages into individual packets, each containing their destination, and allowing the network to choose their routes on a case-by-case basis, his proposed system could provide reliable data transfer over unreliable links,” explains the tech Website ZDnet. Not everyone grasped the possibilities: AT&T repeatedly derided the idea as unworkable and refused to buy it. The New York Times quotes Baran eschewing credit for the Internet, which he likened to a cathedral. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’”
Speaking of inventors, there’s plenty of coverage of the death of Harry Coover, the man behind Super Glue. A scientist with Eastman Kodak, Coover discovered the adhesive qualities of the chemicals known as cyanoacrylates by accident, while working on developing gunsights during World War II. The compound was eventually used by army medics in Vietnam, by detectives out to recover fingeprints, and by the cheesy marketers of KrazyGlue. “Coover never actually financially capitalized on Super Glue,” a Time aggregated obit says; the patents expired before it became a commercial hit, let alone a pop-culture phenomenon. All the obits note that Coover held a whopping 460 patents.
Also this week, documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, according to the Associated Press, was “a pioneer of the unobtrusive camera technique cinema verite,” best known for a piece on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Though he’s hailed as a documentary titan, the obit also affords him a more dubious honor: He’s called “the grandfather of reality television,” which uses many of the you-are-there conventions Leacock first developed. … Leonard Weinglass, lawyer for the Abbie Hoffman, Angela Davis, and Daniel Ellsberg, is variously remembered as a “radical,” “progressive,” or “activist” attorney. Grim Reader thinks Weinglass would have preferred the headline on this UPI obit: “Defender of rebels.” … And nobody, on the other hand, would want to be remembered with the headline the New York Times places atop an Associated Press story about the woman convicted of an infamous series of crimes against residents of her boarding house: “Dorothea Puente, Murderous Landlady.”
Finally, the Telegraph has a great obituary for Anthony Brooke, heir to a family that for three generations ruled Borneo’s Sarawak as the jungle kingdom’s “White Rajahs.” The dynasty was founded by a great-great uncle who reached the island in 1839. It ruled with relative popularity until Sarawak became the British Empire’s final acquisition, just after World War II -- a move that was unpopular with locals, who preferred Brooke’s family. His own tale has all sorts of family skulduggery and political intrigue, not to mention years of exiled-monarch dissipation.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
In a way, it’s a pity that so much energy is devoted to Ferraro’s first-of-a-kind status, because other aspects of her career are fascinating. As the Congresswoman from Archie Bunker’s home district, Ferraro represented one specific side of the Democratic party’s identity crisis: Her first campaign slogan was “finally, a tough Democrat.” She voted against busing. Though her feminist credentials remained unimpeachable, Ferraro showed a willingness to play post-1960s backlash politics that goes largely unmentioned in the coverage. The one hint of it is her notorious 2008 comment that Barack Obama was only popular because he was African-American, something that prompted her departure from a position in Clinton’s campaign. All the obits mention that -- and include Obama’s praise for her -- but only the Wall Street Journal does so relatively high in the piece. This history may be one extra reason why so many conservative pols offer praise for her in the obits and in online comments rounded up by Politico. Or the answer may be simpler: A disproportionate number of the conservative mourners recall getting to know her while working together as Fox News commentators.Ferraro isn’t the Obitosphere’s only example this week of a pioneer who didn’t have great luck on election day. the Washington Post, among others, writes up John Cashin, who won 15 percent of the vote against George Wallace when he was the first African-American to run for governor of Alabama. Cashin’s efforts to force an independent, non-racist Democratic party onto state ballots paid off even as he went down to defeat; the state, with a smaller black population than neighbors like Mississippi, soon had the highest number of black local officials in Dixie. The write-up also makes him sound like fun: A dentist, Cashin integrated his suburban nieghbohood, tooling around it in a Rolls-Royce. … And Ellen McCormack is remembered by the New York Daily News as “part of a group of Long Island housewives who founded the state's Right to Life Party.” She twice ran for president under the party’s banner, “doing well enough to become the first woman to qualify as a candidate for federal financing and Secret Service protection,” according to the New York Times. Unlike with Ferraro, though, the obits don’t give her credit as a groundbreaker -- which is perhaps the right move, since the mainstreaming of an abortion-centric brand of politics could have happened with or without her. But it does make Grim Reader wonder about the eligibility standards for groundbreaker status.
Here’s the lede of a Chicago Tribune obit for Lanford Wilson, as it appears on the Washington Post’s website: “Lanford Wilson, who wrote of urban desperation and small-town struggles and was among the first playwrights who dealt directly with homosexuality in his emotionally rich dramas, died March 23.” And here’s the version Grim Reader was able to find via the Trib’s own website: “Playwright Lanford Wilson, a gentle writer from Missouri who wrote of urban desperation but most revealed his heart through rich and emotional dramas centered on the struggles of small-town Midwestern life, died Thursday.” Notice a difference? The groundbreaking gay characters get dramatically different levels of attention, from the Post’s lede to extensive coverage in the New York Times to a single, puny mention in Missouri’s Kansas City Star, which notes that “‘Burn This’ is searing drama set in a lower Manhattan loft as friends and relatives gather to mourn the drowning death of a young gay dancer.”
Indeed, uncertainty over sexual identity politics seems to be an obit theme of the week. Farley Granger was “a handsome leading man … best known for his starring roles in the Alfred Hitchcock suspense thrillers ’Strangers on a Train’ and ‘Rope,’” says the Los Angeles Times. Or was he? Other obits give more prominent play to personal-life details, which the Los Angeles Times mentions low in the piece: Granger, as the Wall Street Journal’s first paragraph explains, “flouted Hollywood convention by dating stars of either sex,” something he would go on to write about in a 2007 memoir cowritten with his longtime male partner. USA Today, meanwhile, has an odd piece that focuses entirely on Granger’s sexual identity, with scarcely any mention of the big-screen career he bafflingly abandoned at its peak in favor of stage acting. “Bisexual screen idol Farley Granger dies at age 85,” the headline reads.Other cultural figures in the obits: George Tooker is remembered in the New York Times as “a painter whose haunting images of trapped clerical workers and forbidding government offices expressed a peculiarly 20th-century brand of anxiety and alienation.” … Opera composer Lee Hoiby is remembered by NPR as “an unapologetic champion of lyricism at a time when hummable melodies were considered old-fashioned.” Kudos where they’re due: Grim Reader has chided obit writers for ignoring or just being weird about subjects’ sexual identities. But in these two pieces, both about gay men, their lives and loves are depicted like those of any other deceased person.
Paul Baran, who devised a technology known as packet-switching, really did invent the Internet. In the early 1960s, the Polish-born scientist was working at the RAND corporation and worrying over what would become of U.S. telecommunications in the event of a nuclear exchange. His answer was something he was able to sell to the military, which used it as the foundation for Arpanet, the progenitor of the web. “By splitting up messages into individual packets, each containing their destination, and allowing the network to choose their routes on a case-by-case basis, his proposed system could provide reliable data transfer over unreliable links,” explains the tech Website ZDnet. Not everyone grasped the possibilities: AT&T repeatedly derided the idea as unworkable and refused to buy it. The New York Times quotes Baran eschewing credit for the Internet, which he likened to a cathedral. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’”
Speaking of inventors, there’s plenty of coverage of the death of Harry Coover, the man behind Super Glue. A scientist with Eastman Kodak, Coover discovered the adhesive qualities of the chemicals known as cyanoacrylates by accident, while working on developing gunsights during World War II. The compound was eventually used by army medics in Vietnam, by detectives out to recover fingeprints, and by the cheesy marketers of KrazyGlue. “Coover never actually financially capitalized on Super Glue,” a Time aggregated obit says; the patents expired before it became a commercial hit, let alone a pop-culture phenomenon. All the obits note that Coover held a whopping 460 patents.
Also this week, documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, according to the Associated Press, was “a pioneer of the unobtrusive camera technique cinema verite,” best known for a piece on John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Though he’s hailed as a documentary titan, the obit also affords him a more dubious honor: He’s called “the grandfather of reality television,” which uses many of the you-are-there conventions Leacock first developed. … Leonard Weinglass, lawyer for the Abbie Hoffman, Angela Davis, and Daniel Ellsberg, is variously remembered as a “radical,” “progressive,” or “activist” attorney. Grim Reader thinks Weinglass would have preferred the headline on this UPI obit: “Defender of rebels.” … And nobody, on the other hand, would want to be remembered with the headline the New York Times places atop an Associated Press story about the woman convicted of an infamous series of crimes against residents of her boarding house: “Dorothea Puente, Murderous Landlady.”Finally, the Telegraph has a great obituary for Anthony Brooke, heir to a family that for three generations ruled Borneo’s Sarawak as the jungle kingdom’s “White Rajahs.” The dynasty was founded by a great-great uncle who reached the island in 1839. It ruled with relative popularity until Sarawak became the British Empire’s final acquisition, just after World War II -- a move that was unpopular with locals, who preferred Brooke’s family. His own tale has all sorts of family skulduggery and political intrigue, not to mention years of exiled-monarch dissipation.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
RELATED CONTENT
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
