Cutting Corners..."For the Family"

1/19/2020

People with secrets. (Doesn't Bill Pullman look like Ted Williams?) Photo from The Old Vic,

The other day we saw a gripping American play, about dishonesty.

It made me think about:
--- The current baseball scandal?
--- Boeing?
--- The former representative going away for insider stock selling?
--- “Politics.”
--- All of the above?

The play is “All My Sons,” written by Arthur Miller in 1947 about a Middle American factory that shipped flawed parts for planes during World War Two, with disastrous consequences – first for the pilots, then for the people who ran the factory.

We saw the play on the screen at the Kew Gardens Cinema in my home borough of Queens, part of the National Theatre Live series, at movie houses all over the world.

We caught the play while the baseball scandal continues to unravel, at the cost of dishonored championships, ruined careers and realistic suspicions about other aspects of Major League Baseball – supersonic balls in orbit last season, plus Commissioner Rob Manfred’s threat to blow up the historic network of minor-league baseball.

Baseball’s grubby face was on my mind as we went to see the important American play from the landmark Old Vic in London. The two leads were Americans: Sally Field, as a midwestern Mother Courage trying to keep the lid on her cover story, warning her husband to “be smart,” and Bill Pullman, with his large, open, American male physicality, reminding me of the aging Ted Williams.

The rest of the cast is British -- terrific actors sometimes a tad off in American inflection or body language. The back-yard setting is a bit too folksy, post-war middle class, for a family with a factory that prospered during the war.
But you get into it, way into it.

The older son disappeared in aerial action during the war. The younger son is trying to live in the vacuum of loss. And the family that used to live next door has been broken by the jailing of the other partner for malfeasance with the faulty parts.

As we sat in the movie house in Queens, we thought about Boeing, with its two new planes that crashed recently, killing hundreds of people, followed by superb reporting in The New York Times about wretched management and disgruntled workers who knew the planes were flawed. But the planes had to be delivered so shareholders could have a a new vacation home, a new luxury car, a new wife. How American. How courant.

Money is at the core of the play. The father takes over the stage (all arms and shoulders, like Ted Williams giving batting tips) as he tells his son (returned from combat) that he has held the factory together so he can pass it on to the son, who is known to neighbors as idealistic.
There will be money.

That very day, in upstate New York, former Rep. Chris Collins was sentenced to 26 months for passing along inside information that a stock he had championed was about to fall apart. Collins, in tears, said he broke the law for his son, so there would be money, for the family.

My wife and I sat in our favorite movie house, watching Arthur Miller’s post-war statement take very human form. My eyes teared up as I watched these very real people – the older couple trying to “be smart,” the son trying to make it all right by marrying the girl who used to live next door.

When we left the movie house, in the funky old section of Kew Gardens, it was 2020, not 1947. Impeachment was in the air. People were still sending flawed airplanes into the air, all in the name of family. The American dream.
Arthur Miller would feel right at home.
* * *
National Theatre Live website:
http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Guardian review of "All My Sons."
=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/23/all-my-sons-review-old-vic-london-sally-field-bill-pullman-jenna-coleman

Former Rep. Chris Collins sentenced to 26 months:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/nyregion/chris-collins-sentencing-prison.html?searchResultPosition=3

Tyler Kepner's latest great piece on the Houston Asterisks:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/sports/houston-astros-cheating.html?searchResultPosition=1

Recent article on suspicions by Boeing workers, by Natalie Kitroeff:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/business/boeing-737-messages.html?searchResultPosition=4

Altenir Silva

1/20/2020 07:01:18 am

Dear George,
Thanks for this beautiful text. Arthur Miller wrote about American Life with surgical precision. "Death Of Salesman", "A View From The Bridge" and "All My Sons" are texts built as the modern architecture designed by men like Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. Each line of the dialogue is in perfect tune with the dramatic structure of the script, like those buildings designed by these men, where the geometric shape harmonizes with the environment.
Best/Altenir

George Vecsey

1/20/2020 09:14:38 am

Dear Altenir: Bom dia. It's great to see your name here because you have written movie scripts and know the challenges of telling a story. You describe the "surgical precision" of Miller, comparing him to architects, and the review in The Guardian (see link) says that some of Miller's "joins" are clearly visible. You as a script-writer know the rule about Chekhov's Gun, meaning that if a weapon is displayed, it must be (or will be) used, Miller does a good bit of that...but it makes the viewer think, as well as feel. Here's a curious fact: Bill Pullman, who plays the father, studied carpentry in college in upstate New York, and has designed and built barns in NY, Montana and outside LA. Big dude. One can see him lugging and hammering boards. Great to hear from you. GV

bruce

1/20/2020 12:32:08 pm

george,

i imagine boeing has costs factored into their financial planning for exorbitant costs from successful lawsuits.

a cliche, but the american dream is often a nightmare for large segments of the country.

i imagine the american dream/ideal is going to be soiled again during the senate impeachment farce..

bruce

Alan Rubin link

1/21/2020 06:36:45 pm

Arthur Miller has written many powerful plays including “All My Sons”, “Death of a Salesman”, “The Crucible” and “The Price”, which we saw a reading of this past Sunday.

Harry S. Truman is among my top five presidents. He was noted for The Truman Committee, which investigated WWII military arms production.

https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Truman_Committee.htm

He went to all the major arms factories and notified them that if the quality of their products were sub-standard, they would lose their contracts. Many historians credit Senator Truman as a major factor in the U.S. helping the Allies in winning the war.

As we witness the ongoing fiasco of today’s partisan politics, those of us who can remember when the good of the country was paramount can hope that the pendulum soon swings back to a reassuring norm.

Ed Martin

1/21/2020 08:11:43 pm

This column, but more accurately, the man who wrote it, illustrate why I began reading and value the experience highly. The quality of the humans who follow, illustrated here, affirms my view.

I could not resist sharing this column on my Facebook page as a way of introducing them to GV. Thanks.

Randolph

1/22/2020 10:03:32 am

George,
Once again, I thank you for your thoughtful words.
When you said, “ sending flawed airplanes into the air, all in the name of family” it reminded me of words from the Kentucky farmer, writer and renaissance man, Wendell Berry.
He defined a corporation as,
“essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance”.

Yes my friend many of these humans have sold their moral allegiance.
Yet on this day, I am thankful that there are some humans who have not sold out. Your blog helps me to remember that.
RF

George Vecsey

1/22/2020 12:02:38 pm

Altenir, Bruce, Alan, Ed, Randy: So nice to hear from you -- 3 countries, 2 states, Randy reminds me that one of my great flaws in my two years in Kentucky was not meeting/writing about Wendell Berry, such a literate and moral voice. Thanks for being a presence here, GV

bruce

1/22/2020 12:11:06 pm

george,

mon plaisir.

more fun reading when you're unhindered by the nyt.

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Cutting Corners..."For the Family"

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