Grim Reader, Feb. 5, 2010: Ngawang Jigme Ngabo, David Brown and Stephen Huneck
by Michael Schaffer
FEBRUARY 5, 2010 TAGS:
Ngawang Jigme Ngabo “dithered” as Chinese troops invaded his native Tibet, then “sowed divisions” among the mountain region’s defenders before he “again let his nation down” by improperly signing away its sovereignty — for which he was subsequently “rewarded by the Chinese” with a series of senior posts. No wonder that “to most Tibetans he was a traitor and Chinese puppet.”
That’s the take in the Times of London, anyway. The paper, one of the few major Western publications to report on Ngabo’s life, arrives more than a month late to the funeral this week. But it might as well be writing about a different person than the one described in the local press — either in China or, more interestingly, in the Tibetan government-in-exile. “Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, a great patriot, famous social activist and son of Tibetan people passed away due to illness in Beijing,” declared China Tibet Online, using the Chinese version of his name. The Dalai Lama’s administration was less effusive, but complimentary all the same: “Honest and patriotic,” he “made great efforts to preserve and promote Tibetan language,” an official statement declared.
Oh, yeah? “Although on occasion he supported the rights of his people he never did so on any occasion that might result in inconvenience,” the Times sniffs back. Grim Reader spends a lot of his time reading obits closely, looking for omissions and thinking about how important people are able to spin the media from beyond the grave. But it’s not so often that you’ll find such black-and-white disagreement. It’s a pity only one of the sides is an actual, independent journalistic outlet.
The Tibetan dust-up was about the most interesting piece in a slow week in death. Back home, astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge may have been responsible for “one of the most important papers of all time in astrophysics,” according to a Los Angeles Times obit, but in most outlets that particular breakthrough — he described the origin of the elements — has to share top billing with something more controversial: The British-born UCSD scientist was one of the last dissenters from the Big Bang Theory. In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Miller notes that, at mid-century, the competing Steady State Theory had about as many scholarly adherents. But later research brought most scientists into the Big Bang camp. When Burbidge published a book-length dissent in 2000, “a reviewer for the journal Science,” Miller writes, “spoke for the majority in dismissing it out of hand.”
Also in science, there are lots of obituaries for Lawrence Garfinkel, whose story also involves a tenet so basic that it seems baffling that anyone ever could have disagreed: He designed some of the first studies that linked cigarette smoking to cancer. The obits offer fascinating glimpses into the past. “Before 1930, lung cancer was a rare disease never encountered by most physicians,” the Los Angeles Times explains. “But World War I had turned many American men into smokers, and the consequences began to become apparent in the 1940s.” The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times obits also offer hope to non-overachievers: Garfinkel was neither an M.D. nor a Ph.D., but he ultimately published 147 scientific journal articles. Garfinkel, incidentally, practiced what he preached: A son tells the New York Times that “when he was 10 his father gave him a deceased smoker’s blackened, cancerous lung in a jar of formaldehyde.” The kid never took up smoking.
Everyone remembers Earl Wild, “the elder statesman of American piano virtuosos,” according to the Los Angeles Times. A particularly effusive Guardian obit talks up his powers — “gregarious, omnivorous engagement with the piano’s literature, a palpable delight in his own athleticism” — before preemptively knocking Wild’s detractors. Holding him in esteem “is a view that will not be shared by those who judge the merits of a pianist on the relentless repetition of a small number of works by central-European composers of the 18th and 19th centuries.” Fun fact: Wild “remains the only pianist to be invited to play at the White House before six consecutive presidents (beginning with Herbert Hoover).”
Stuffy devotees of Mitteleuropean classics would find even more to disapprove of in John Storm Roberts, the British-born globetrotter who brought back and popularized recordings from distant corners of Africa and Latin America — setting the stage for what we now call “world music.”… Also not on the invite list for the Opera Ball: Jane Jarvis, Muzak employee by day and organist for the New York Mets by night, “performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s ‘Scrapple From the Apple’ with more conventional fare like ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’” explains the New York Times’ Peter Keepnews. Pronouncing her a “New York icon,” the New York Daily News notes that Jarvis was also known as the “Melody Queen of Shea Stadium,” a position Grim Reader did not know existed.
On the business side of the arts, there are obits this week for Aaron Ruben, who produced The Andy Griffith Show and Sanford and Son. The Los Angeles Times obit scores a quote from Ron Howard — Opie on Griffith, and now a major director — recalling that Ruben bought him his first movie camera. … And everyone runs obits for David Brown, producer of Jaws, Cocoon, and The Verdict, among other films. A writer and publishing-industry vet, Brown, according to Hollywood’s Variety, was able to drive content while partner Richard Zanuck focused on dealmaking. All the obits note that Brown is survived by his wife, magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown.
Elsewhere in arts and letters, dog-oriented artist Stephen Huneck’s death makes the Associated Press Wire and the New York Times, among others. “Huneck’s talent was to depict everyday concepts using dogs as the players,” writes Kelly Modzelewski of The Bark, a dog magazine. He was also the creator of Vermont’s Dog Chapel — a rare religious space where pet people are able to mourn their animals. Huneck shot himself, the obits all say, because he was despondent over having to lay off staffers. … And there are also obits for Louis Harlan, a biographer of Booker T. Washington. Harlan is remembered for having reshaped Washington’s historical reputation, which during the Civil Rights era was as a timid leader unwilling to challenge Jim Crow.
In sports — broadly defined — the Obitosphere this week reminds us that, for many athletes, the key to immortality isn’t just on-field performance. Sure, former NFL standout Tom Brookshier is remembered in his hometown Philadelphia Inquirer as a ferocious tackler, but the reason he gets nationwide obits and hometown-legend status is that he went on to be one of America’s best-loved football broadcasters during the 1970s. … Ditto Dick McGuire, whose feats for basketball’s New York Knicks garner equal time in his obits with the decades he spent helping the team in his retirement. … And while there are lots of obits for Jack Brisco, the two-time wrestling champion of the Big Eight conference, it’s a good bet he wouldn’t have gotten that attention without pursuing what he did after leaving Oklahoma State: a two-decade career in pro wrestling.
But the biggest Obitosphere news of the week involves a controversy over one of last week’s most notable deaths. National Public Radio’s obituary for Howard Zinn quoted two sources who spoke highly of the left-wing historian and one who didn’t: David Horowitz, the professional critic of liberal academia. Neither a working historian nor an acquaintance of Zinn, Horowitz weighed in with a sweeping, general denunciation: “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect.” The passage was picked up by the liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which sent out an “action alert” headlined “NPR Finds Right-Wing Crank to Spit on Zinn’s Grave.” The notice contrasted the Zinn obit with the network’s obit for conservative luminary William F. Buckley, which didn’t feature any condemnatory voices. Some 1,600 e-mails to NPR ensued, such as this one from Colorado listener Laura Paskus: “Typical of the ‘liberal’ media’s desire to seek legitimacy by giving credence to hateful right-wingers.”
Yesterday, NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepherd weighed in, determining that “it would have been better to wait a day and find a more nuanced critic.” Shepherd also reaches out to experts who agree that it was over the top. “I would have looked to less controversial figures for comments. [Quoting] historians, who are not considered political activists, would have been more appropriate,” says Alana Baranick, author of an obituary handbook. Grim Reader, who wrote a respectfully critical take on Zinn but has also mocked the kid-gloves major-media obits of conservatives like Buckley and televangelist Oral Roberts, isn’t so sure. The essence of Zinn was that he wasn’t just a historian. If that were the case, it would be fine to let scholars assess how his take on Columbus fits into contemporary scholarship. But Zinn also considered himself an activist, meaning that quotes from fellow members of that rougher profession are fair game. It’s just that they should be fair game when a right-wing activist dies, too.
That’s the take in the Times of London, anyway. The paper, one of the few major Western publications to report on Ngabo’s life, arrives more than a month late to the funeral this week. But it might as well be writing about a different person than the one described in the local press — either in China or, more interestingly, in the Tibetan government-in-exile. “Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme, a great patriot, famous social activist and son of Tibetan people passed away due to illness in Beijing,” declared China Tibet Online, using the Chinese version of his name. The Dalai Lama’s administration was less effusive, but complimentary all the same: “Honest and patriotic,” he “made great efforts to preserve and promote Tibetan language,” an official statement declared. Oh, yeah? “Although on occasion he supported the rights of his people he never did so on any occasion that might result in inconvenience,” the Times sniffs back. Grim Reader spends a lot of his time reading obits closely, looking for omissions and thinking about how important people are able to spin the media from beyond the grave. But it’s not so often that you’ll find such black-and-white disagreement. It’s a pity only one of the sides is an actual, independent journalistic outlet.
The Tibetan dust-up was about the most interesting piece in a slow week in death. Back home, astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge may have been responsible for “one of the most important papers of all time in astrophysics,” according to a Los Angeles Times obit, but in most outlets that particular breakthrough — he described the origin of the elements — has to share top billing with something more controversial: The British-born UCSD scientist was one of the last dissenters from the Big Bang Theory. In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Miller notes that, at mid-century, the competing Steady State Theory had about as many scholarly adherents. But later research brought most scientists into the Big Bang camp. When Burbidge published a book-length dissent in 2000, “a reviewer for the journal Science,” Miller writes, “spoke for the majority in dismissing it out of hand.”
Also in science, there are lots of obituaries for Lawrence Garfinkel, whose story also involves a tenet so basic that it seems baffling that anyone ever could have disagreed: He designed some of the first studies that linked cigarette smoking to cancer. The obits offer fascinating glimpses into the past. “Before 1930, lung cancer was a rare disease never encountered by most physicians,” the Los Angeles Times explains. “But World War I had turned many American men into smokers, and the consequences began to become apparent in the 1940s.” The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times obits also offer hope to non-overachievers: Garfinkel was neither an M.D. nor a Ph.D., but he ultimately published 147 scientific journal articles. Garfinkel, incidentally, practiced what he preached: A son tells the New York Times that “when he was 10 his father gave him a deceased smoker’s blackened, cancerous lung in a jar of formaldehyde.” The kid never took up smoking.
Everyone remembers Earl Wild, “the elder statesman of American piano virtuosos,” according to the Los Angeles Times. A particularly effusive Guardian obit talks up his powers — “gregarious, omnivorous engagement with the piano’s literature, a palpable delight in his own athleticism” — before preemptively knocking Wild’s detractors. Holding him in esteem “is a view that will not be shared by those who judge the merits of a pianist on the relentless repetition of a small number of works by central-European composers of the 18th and 19th centuries.” Fun fact: Wild “remains the only pianist to be invited to play at the White House before six consecutive presidents (beginning with Herbert Hoover).”
Stuffy devotees of Mitteleuropean classics would find even more to disapprove of in John Storm Roberts, the British-born globetrotter who brought back and popularized recordings from distant corners of Africa and Latin America — setting the stage for what we now call “world music.”… Also not on the invite list for the Opera Ball: Jane Jarvis, Muzak employee by day and organist for the New York Mets by night, “performing a repertory that mixed jazz staples like Charlie Parker’s ‘Scrapple From the Apple’ with more conventional fare like ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’” explains the New York Times’ Peter Keepnews. Pronouncing her a “New York icon,” the New York Daily News notes that Jarvis was also known as the “Melody Queen of Shea Stadium,” a position Grim Reader did not know existed. On the business side of the arts, there are obits this week for Aaron Ruben, who produced The Andy Griffith Show and Sanford and Son. The Los Angeles Times obit scores a quote from Ron Howard — Opie on Griffith, and now a major director — recalling that Ruben bought him his first movie camera. … And everyone runs obits for David Brown, producer of Jaws, Cocoon, and The Verdict, among other films. A writer and publishing-industry vet, Brown, according to Hollywood’s Variety, was able to drive content while partner Richard Zanuck focused on dealmaking. All the obits note that Brown is survived by his wife, magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown.
Elsewhere in arts and letters, dog-oriented artist Stephen Huneck’s death makes the Associated Press Wire and the New York Times, among others. “Huneck’s talent was to depict everyday concepts using dogs as the players,” writes Kelly Modzelewski of The Bark, a dog magazine. He was also the creator of Vermont’s Dog Chapel — a rare religious space where pet people are able to mourn their animals. Huneck shot himself, the obits all say, because he was despondent over having to lay off staffers. … And there are also obits for Louis Harlan, a biographer of Booker T. Washington. Harlan is remembered for having reshaped Washington’s historical reputation, which during the Civil Rights era was as a timid leader unwilling to challenge Jim Crow.
In sports — broadly defined — the Obitosphere this week reminds us that, for many athletes, the key to immortality isn’t just on-field performance. Sure, former NFL standout Tom Brookshier is remembered in his hometown Philadelphia Inquirer as a ferocious tackler, but the reason he gets nationwide obits and hometown-legend status is that he went on to be one of America’s best-loved football broadcasters during the 1970s. … Ditto Dick McGuire, whose feats for basketball’s New York Knicks garner equal time in his obits with the decades he spent helping the team in his retirement. … And while there are lots of obits for Jack Brisco, the two-time wrestling champion of the Big Eight conference, it’s a good bet he wouldn’t have gotten that attention without pursuing what he did after leaving Oklahoma State: a two-decade career in pro wrestling.
But the biggest Obitosphere news of the week involves a controversy over one of last week’s most notable deaths. National Public Radio’s obituary for Howard Zinn quoted two sources who spoke highly of the left-wing historian and one who didn’t: David Horowitz, the professional critic of liberal academia. Neither a working historian nor an acquaintance of Zinn, Horowitz weighed in with a sweeping, general denunciation: “There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn’s intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect.” The passage was picked up by the liberal group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which sent out an “action alert” headlined “NPR Finds Right-Wing Crank to Spit on Zinn’s Grave.” The notice contrasted the Zinn obit with the network’s obit for conservative luminary William F. Buckley, which didn’t feature any condemnatory voices. Some 1,600 e-mails to NPR ensued, such as this one from Colorado listener Laura Paskus: “Typical of the ‘liberal’ media’s desire to seek legitimacy by giving credence to hateful right-wingers.” Yesterday, NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepherd weighed in, determining that “it would have been better to wait a day and find a more nuanced critic.” Shepherd also reaches out to experts who agree that it was over the top. “I would have looked to less controversial figures for comments. [Quoting] historians, who are not considered political activists, would have been more appropriate,” says Alana Baranick, author of an obituary handbook. Grim Reader, who wrote a respectfully critical take on Zinn but has also mocked the kid-gloves major-media obits of conservatives like Buckley and televangelist Oral Roberts, isn’t so sure. The essence of Zinn was that he wasn’t just a historian. If that were the case, it would be fine to let scholars assess how his take on Columbus fits into contemporary scholarship. But Zinn also considered himself an activist, meaning that quotes from fellow members of that rougher profession are fair game. It’s just that they should be fair game when a right-wing activist dies, too.
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