Massacre at the Field of Dreams

Senator James Flake: Field of Nightmares

          

            The mass shooting of Republican Congressional baseball players is, of course, just the latest in the series of such acts, mostly, it seems by loners of every stripe with axes—mostly irrational—to grind.  It looks as if anybody could be a target, no matter what age, race, sexual orientation, political ideology, being a school student or whatever the shooter’s issue du jour is.

            Maybe it’s because I’m a baseball fan, but this one strikes me as the most heinous of all.  Sports should be where we fight mock battles—with a beer afterwards—not real ones.  If baseball is no longer “America’s Pastime,” and football or basketball is, that’s fine with me.  But I think that baseball is still the national sport in people’s nostalgia, maybe best expressed by   James Earl Jones in the character of Terence Mann in Field of Dreams:

“The one constant through all the years Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”

Compared with the continuous excitement of basketball, or the lurching physical pileups in football, baseball is slow, except for a few seconds of action now and then, giving girls like me time to gossip between plays, or, if I’m at a game alone or watching one in TV, time to let my mind wander.  The action is certainly physical, but, except for some controversial plays or “bench clearers,” it is elegant, and slow enough that you can see all the action of a play or a hit pretty clearly.  It can extend an awfully long time, if a game is tied and extra innings are needed, and, as George Carlin famously put it:

 “The object in football is to march downfield and penetrate enemy territory, and get

into the end zone; in baseball, the object is to go home! "I'm going home!" 

A 19th-century baseball at the end of a game

It’s not that the game isn’t sometimes weird, crazy, or that its past wasn’t violent.  If you want to read a good account of what it was like in its 19^th century infancy, take a taste of Robert Achorn’s terrific book, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, which chronicles baseball mainly in St. Louis and Cincinnati in a big rivalry in 1883.  Those were the days when pitchers pitched whole games—maybe forty or more in a season, sometimes day after day, when one ball would last a whole game, and spectators would actually line the outfield and the ballpark roof to watch.

I’m old, but not that old.  Still, I was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan as a little girl, and actually saw Jackie Robinson, Peewee Reese, Roy Campanella et. al in Ebbets Field; and later, until most of my

Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese

New York family died off, a Mets fan through good and bad.  Here in San Antonio I hold a quarter-season subscription for the Missions, our AA team.

To watch AA baseball, you really have to love the game: not only do good players leave for AAA or even Major League ball early in the season, but over the years, even the sponsoring teams have changed: in San Antonio, from L.A. to Seattle to San Diego.  In a way, at this level, you don’t root for the team so much as for the game itself, and (maybe) our mascot, Henry–The-Puffy-Taco.  The park is pretty small too, and so watching minor league ball lacks the real thrill factor of watching the Rangers or the Astros.  Sometimes, college teams play better. On the other hand, it’s a sort of compromise transition between amateur ball and the Show, and so it retains a lot of the old Field of Dreams character.

 

Several contemporary S.A. Missions

I think my feeling of outrage about the Congressional ball team’s tragedy stems from Baseball’s origin and popularity as America’s Pastime-mythological heroes rather than the high-tech, speed-gun, instant replay and billionaire big league players of the Majors now.  Even with all of this, Mythical Baseball is still the nostalgic ideal out there as something that Americans play (and that includes Latin America too), and to attack it is cowardly and very UnAmerican!  The Republicans and Democrats will play their game today, all wearing the same LSU uniform in memory of one of the men wounded yesterday. Maybe it’s the memory of this myth that will start the partisan healing process.  Maybe it’s the memory and example of baseball that will Make America Great Again!

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Edward Achorn, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants, and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game, Public Affairs, 2013 (and available on Kindle)

George Carlin’s monologue on Baseball vs. Football can be watched at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhN1ExFCXNA

James Earl Jones’s Field of Dreams monologue can be watched at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SB16il97yw   

Holocaust and Genocide II -- The Promise

Poster for "The Promise" (I don't think the tagline does the film justice

            Humans are a weird and invasive species.  Not only have we taken over the world, but we have this recurring urge to for segments of us to gang up on other segments, and laminate them out of existence.  The number of genocides, not to mention mere wars over our long history is ridiculously large, and one generation never seems to learn from the last.  We must be hard-wired for periodic slaughter.

            It’s interesting that the Jewish Yom Ha Shoah and Armenian Genocide Commemorations happened on the same day this year, April 24^th.   The flood of Holocaust memory films and shows continue, but this April saw the general release in the U.S. of the first epic film to treat the Armenian tragedy: The Promise. Directed by Terry George, it stars Oscar Isaac as an Armenian medical student, Charlotte le Bon as an Armenian-French girl who has returned to Turkey with her American reporter-boyfriend (Christian Bale), and Marwin Kenwari as a righteous Gentile (i.e. Turk).

            The plotline follows the meeting of these four characters in pre-World War I Istanbul, and tracks their fortunes during the genocidal year 1915, as the systematic persecution and killing of Armenians escalates, culminating in the siege against Armenian holdouts atop Musa Dagh, and the rescue of its surviving defenders by the French navy. There’s a love triangle among three of them (the girl, the Armenian student and the reporter). Two, the righteous Gentile and the French girl, die, while the other two live. 

Franz Werfel

            Because of political pressures, little has come out in mass media film or television about the Armenian slaughter, principally because the Turkish government has always refused to use the G word, and has effectively stonewalled any attempts to depict this particular holocaust in public media.  In the 1930’s the Czech-German-Jewish novelist (and Holocaust escapee) Franz Werfel published a sprawling novel entitled The Forty Days of Musa Dagh about the Armenian defense on the    

eponymous mountaintop (which actually lasted 53 days). The book did not fare well in Germany in 1933 and onwards given Hitler and his famous quote: “who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” as he began his rampage in Poland, but it was translated into English in 1934, and widely read after that.  Not surprisingly, it became extremely popular in Polish and Lithuanian Ghettoes among young Jewish resistance groups. 

            There had been various attempts over the years, principally by MGM, to make a Musa Dagh movie, initially with Clark Gable as the hero, but political pressure saw that none of these plans ever came to pass, nor did subsequent projects by Sylvester Stallone or Mel Gibson.

Contemporary Newspaper Advertisement for "Ravished Armenia"

            I know there were a few other films that dealt, at least tangentially, with this Genocide topic. I’ve seen three: firstly, there was Ravished Armenia, from Aurora Mardiginian’s harrowing memoir as a survivor, in which she herself starred as a reenactor; I’ve already written about this bizarre project (6/6/2015).  Maybe the Turks didn’t protest this one, which came out in 1919 because the country was in such turmoil after world War I.

DVD Cover for "Ararat"

            The second was made by the Canadian-Armenian film director Atom Egoyan in 2002.  Ararat, the name of the Iconic Armenian mountain, as well as the resting place of Noah’s ark, is its title.  This film is fascinating, and at times very powerful, but gets drowned by its complex plot that takes up too many issues to comfortably resolve in a two-hour timespan. They include a movie being made about the Armenian Genocide, a much-fictionalized icon in the person of Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, homosexuality, drug-smuggling—or not, and multiple fragile familial relationships.  For non-Armenians, a least, the polemics become strident, and just as the viewer becomes involved in one plot-thread, another deflects attention. For this outsider, the most powerful scenes involved the filming of the movie, with past and present effectively blurred, and the enigma of whether Raffi, the young protagonist was actually smuggling drugs in his film cans, and if this was the price he had to pay for actually visiting and filming ruined Armenian sites in Turkey.

The Promise is the third.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the only one that has had a wider distribution.  The driving force behind its making was the late Kirk Kerkorian, billionaire, entrepreneur, and movie mogul, whose family origins were Armenian, and who, in his later years, funneled substantial funds to charities and aid for the country of his forbearers.  I guess it took a billionaire to both stand up to the Turkish government and finance the project.  Terry George, the director, already had a track record for genocide-themed films: he directed the award-winning Hotel Rwanda (2004), that dealt with the saving of more than a thousand refugees by a hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina during the lethal Hutu-Tutsi war in 1994. Perhaps because so much of Hotel Rwanda was tightly focused on the Schindler-like story of one man who was able to save all the refugees holed up in his hotel, as well as the fact that the events had occurred only ten years before the film was released, made it a sort of moral cliffhanger.

The Promise, though it doesn’t have all the conflicting plotlines of Ararat, aims more at being an epic recounting that horrible year of 1915.  By giving a sweeping view, and having one or two of the four protagonists present during the key episodes, it becomes the sort of Armenian version of the miniseries Holocaust, which basically uses the same device in its telling of two Germen families, one Jewish, the other eventually Nazi, whose varying members managed to have been everywhere awful, from Babi Yar to Buchenwald, and from the euthanizing of a mentally impaired family member early on to the mass gassings at Auschwitz.  The thing is, though, Holocaust, was a miniseries, allowing plenty of time for all the horrors to have their own focus, it was much publicized, and it was only 35 years later than the event.  This put it relatively early in the Holocaust film game, and it was shown on German television, with great impact.

The Promise is, at least, a good start.  The Armenian Genocide is a nearly forgotten event here, except among those of Armenian heritage.  I knew about it because I had Armenian friends in college, read Franz Werfel’s novel in college, included Ararat, along with Hotel Rwanda in a class I taught on Holocaust and Genocide film and so took the time to read up on it, a visit to Armenia, and being in Yerevan two weeks after the commemoration of the Genocide centenary.

Maybe, The Promise will be the act of defiance against the boogeymen perpetrators that will open the door to more movies about this particular episode of mass murder.  The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is prime miniseries material.  The life of Aurora Mardaginian from Turkey to Hollywood would make a fascinating biopic, and I wish someone would film Chris Bohjalian’s wonderful and thoughtful novel, The Sandcastle Girls, published in 2012.

View of Ararat from Yerevan:  You can't get there from here

 There are some very documentaries on the Armenian slaughter, equal to any on the Holocaust, but you have to look for them.  I give a link to one of them on YouTube below.

As it rests now, the Armenians still have to live with a million and a half MIAs. You can see Mount Ararat from Yerevan, but you can’t go there.

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You have to see "The Promise" in a movie theater; it's worth the admission price.

"Ararat" is available on DVD, but you have to buy it.

Surviving footage from "Ravished Armenia," heavily edited, is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTnCaW-Uo_s&t=71s 

There is a very good article on "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh in Wikipedia:

(you can google it).

There is also a recent translation of the Franz Werfel novel: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh (translated by Geoffrey Dunlap), Vera Mundi Press, 2012

An article by Paul Salopek on the Armenia and the events of 1915 is at 

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/04/armenia-massacre-turkey-kurds-history/ (this is part of his wonderful, ongoing series, entitled "Out of Eden."  Its homepage is: http://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/#section-0

For a very graphic documentary on the Armenian tragedy, see: 1915 AGHET - The Armenian Genocide.  It is very graphic, made up of eyewitness quotes and footage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLyrpaTKCCE&t=1088s