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B. and I went to see Won't You Be My Neighbor? yesterday. It's a very interesting film in a number of ways, most of which have to do with the fact that Fred Rogers was a very interesting guy--a very peculiar guy, and the film mostly just presents his peculiarities rather than exploring them. The thing is is, he's so bloody nice that it seems rude to press him too much about anything, like, say, his claiming that he weighed 143 pounds every day of his adult life, 143 being his own code for "I love you". This makes it hard to be critical of the film itself in any way at all without being, apparently, a jerk. The reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter says, "It's hard for me to judge Won't You Be My Neighbor? on artistic grounds because mostly it's a documentary you want to hug." But it's also obviously a documentary that wants you to want to hug it, which puts it dangerously close to Lady Bird territory--although I guess what really puts it dangerously close to Lady Bird territory is that it both wants you to want to hug it and also has a message, or messages, it wants you to accept.[1]
Won't You Be My Neighbor?'s messages are of the peace-love-and-understanding variety that some people might like to call "apolitical", because nobody in their right mind is against peace, love, and understanding. In relation to this kind of claim of a-political-ness I always recall an interaction I had once at York with someone who was demonstrating in support of something to do with bringing refugees to Canada. She told me it "wasn't political". I told her that some people say that deciding who is going to make up the country is the most basic political question there is--which is, more or less, something I heard from Howard Adelman. I've always supposed that what she meant was that no one could reasonably oppose what she was advocating--and somebody telling you something like that is, I guess, a pretty good sign you're dealing with an unreasonable person. But she could have just meant that, as it happened, no political party explicitly opposed the position she was advocating, or that supporters of different political parties supported the position she was advocating, such that the position she was advocating was not one that one was called upon to support or oppose on the basis of one's team-sport political allegiances, and such that people of different partisan-political allegiances could manage to "not be political" about it, which simply means that they could manage to not stake out opposed positions about it from which to attack each other. Which seems to be something like the point of mentioning, without discussion, as the film does, that Fred Rogers was a "lifelong Republican". That seems like a calculated maneuver. You know that saying so-and-so was a lifelong Republican will be taken by a large proportion of your audience (a large proportion of which will be totally ignorant of the complicated histories of the Republicans and Democrats) as strong prima facie evidence that so-and-so was evil. But this is Mister Rogers we're talking about here, and also one of the first things the film talks about is King Friday XIII's campaign very early on in Mister Rogers to keep people who are different out of the kingdom--with a wall! Mister Rogers opposes the Vietnam war, Mister Rogers defends public television, Mister Rogers opposes racial segregation, Mister Rogers comes around to being OK with gay people--and ultimately Mister Rogers is attacked by the right-wing media for creating entitled little liberal snowflakes. (I also learned from the Wikipedia yesterday that Fred Rogers became a vegetarian in his 40s, because, he said, "I don't want to eat anything that has a mother."[2]) Politically, the film seems designed to give succor to Republican never-Trumpers, but also to counter the new militancy of those on the Democrat-aligned partisan left who regard "when they go low, we go high" as a horrendously failed strategy and "civility" as capitulation to evil. Politically, it is a plea to take the "politics" out of politics. (It's easy to suppose that Fred Rogers, at some point, had he lived long enough, would have renounced his allegiance to the Republicans. But the gospel of self-esteem and self-empowerment he preaches is reminiscent of someone like Nathaniel Branden, and his ethic of neighbourliness would fit right in at The American Conservative. Those are heretical strains in the contemporary Republican party, but they are still more comfortably at home there than in the Democratic party. You can see someone like Fred Rogers seeing the Democrats as basically standing for a kind of inhuman bureaucratic managerialism to which he might take himself to be fundamentally opposed.)
Anyway, this is all an overlong set-up to saying something about the one thing in particular that stuck in my craw and I spent a long time today digging into: Fred Rogers's testimony in 1969 to a Senate committee deliberating funding for public television. The film portrays the committee chairman as a grumpy curmudgeon who is presumably acting as Richard Nixon's hatchet man in de-funding Lyndon Johnson's public television project; Mister Rogers melts his heart (with a presentation that lots of angry right-wingers today would take as just the kind of liberal snowflake nonsense the government needs to stop paying for), and the grumpy curmudgeon declares that Mister Rogers has just won the money for public television. And it is not only the film that portrays the scene that way; it is very, very difficult to find anything on the internet taking issue in any way with the mythology that Mister Rogers went to Washington and saved PBS from that grumpy senator--who a piece in the Chicago Sun-Times refers to as "Republican Senator John Pastore of New Jersey". In fact, John Pastore was a Democratic senator from Rhode Island; his Wikipedia article mentions just one time that he went to New Jersey, which was to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Lyndon Johnson. Three years later, Lyndon Johnson, in his Remarks Upon Signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, thanked "Senator Pastore, the Chairman of the subcommittee who has spent many days, weeks, and years in this effort". Despite these facts, the only thing I have been able to find disputing the "Mister Rogers saved PBS from the grumpy senator" narrative is this blog post, which claims that "the guy [Rogers] won over, the gruff old senator who got 'goose bumps' from Rogers' reciting his song lyrics, was not an opponent; he was already a fan. Pastore was a Democrat from Rhode Island who orchestrated the hearings as a way to restore the funding Nixon wanted to cut." There are no sources cited in that post, but given the facts on the record, these claims are certainly plausible, and one way or another it is implausible that Fred Rogers's Senate testimony went down the way it is portrayed in the film and virtually everywhere else. The only open questions seem to be whether John Pastore was intentionally playing the heel in that hearing for dramatic effect, and whether he was aware of and went along with the subsequent spin.
Less consequentially, but also giving a distorted impression to its audience, the film omits Fred Rogers's early years in Canada, which I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia after watching the film--while watching it, the thought crossed my mind that some Canadians will be surprised to learn that Mister Rogers was not Canadian--led to the creation of Mr. Dressup: Ernie Coombs, who was also originally American and had worked with Rogers in Pittsburgh, came with him to Toronto in 1963 to work on "Misterogers" for the CBC; a few years later Rogers bought the rights to his show from the CBC and moved it to Pittsburgh, while Coombs stayed in Toronto and became Mr. Dressup.
A funny thing about watching the film for me is that I never really liked Mister Rogers as a kid. It was pretty boring and the puppets were weird. (Watching the film I was struck by the fact that while the puppets mostly seemed weird to me as a kid because their mouths didn't move, Rogers's mouth does move when he puppeteers--he makes no effort at ventriloquism at all, which makes his in-person puppet interactions with people really weird. He talks in the film about how it is easier for him to say some things with a puppet than just as himself--I guess in the way you might give a puppet to an abused child to help the child communicate. The fact that his mouth moves and the puppets' don't seems to reinforce that it is always him talking through the puppet, and the puppet is not an independent character.) It was just what you had to watch as a little Canadian kid when I was a little kid--every day you watched The Friendly Giant, Mister Rogers, Mr. Dressup, Sesame Street, and the Polka Dot Door. The first scene in the film is some kind of early live show where Mister Rogers is talking to an audience of kids with their parents hanging around the back. The kids look unhappy and confused; the parents look enthralled. I imagine that as adults many of those unhappy and confused kids would have looked enthralled by Mister Rogers, too.
More than once it's said in the film that kids have feelings that are just as strong and deep as adults'. This is said as if it is a revelation, possibly revealed to us by child psychologists in the '60s, which on the face of it seems weird, because what it's like to be a kid seems to be something everyone ought to know a lot about, since everyone used to be one. But I do appreciate that somehow, apparently, people by and large forget what it's like to be a kid. Come to think of it, I guess I appreciate that people by and large don't have a very good grip on what it's like to be what they are now, let alone what they used to be. But these are, obviously, things that can be too easy to get self-congratulatory about.
[1] I'm going to say flat-out, for the record, though, that I liked this film quite a bit, even though I felt like it was trying to emotionally manipulate me and set me up to be a jerk if I didn't simply buy into what it was selling. Despite that, it is an effectively enigmatic portrait of a very strange man.
[2] It still makes me twinge to click on a Huffington Post link, let alone to post one--I still regard it as the emblem of the internet's making it virtually impossible to make a living as a writer. But here I am, giving away these pure gold nuggets for free, eh! Crazy world.
Currently at Havelock: 22.6. High today: 31.3. Currently at the back of my shed: 22.1. High today: 31.4. My newly installed weather station gives exactly the same low today, 16.2, as the Havelock Weather Underground station, so that's promising. My station gets too much sun on it in the afternoon, but I've noticed that the Havelock station suffers from some sun-heating in the late afternoon, too. I need to get another sensor to stick under the porch or something. Got a good rain here today for the first time in weeks--14 mm so far, sure hoping for a total of 20 or more. If not for a freak early-morning storm that dropped 13 totally-unforecast millimetres a few weeks ago, we'd be in a drought not unlike two years ago. As it is I just got to the bottom of my 275 gallons worth of rain barrels this morning. Anyway, what we got today should save my first round of zucchinis and other squash.
Won't You Be My Neighbor?'s messages are of the peace-love-and-understanding variety that some people might like to call "apolitical", because nobody in their right mind is against peace, love, and understanding. In relation to this kind of claim of a-political-ness I always recall an interaction I had once at York with someone who was demonstrating in support of something to do with bringing refugees to Canada. She told me it "wasn't political". I told her that some people say that deciding who is going to make up the country is the most basic political question there is--which is, more or less, something I heard from Howard Adelman. I've always supposed that what she meant was that no one could reasonably oppose what she was advocating--and somebody telling you something like that is, I guess, a pretty good sign you're dealing with an unreasonable person. But she could have just meant that, as it happened, no political party explicitly opposed the position she was advocating, or that supporters of different political parties supported the position she was advocating, such that the position she was advocating was not one that one was called upon to support or oppose on the basis of one's team-sport political allegiances, and such that people of different partisan-political allegiances could manage to "not be political" about it, which simply means that they could manage to not stake out opposed positions about it from which to attack each other. Which seems to be something like the point of mentioning, without discussion, as the film does, that Fred Rogers was a "lifelong Republican". That seems like a calculated maneuver. You know that saying so-and-so was a lifelong Republican will be taken by a large proportion of your audience (a large proportion of which will be totally ignorant of the complicated histories of the Republicans and Democrats) as strong prima facie evidence that so-and-so was evil. But this is Mister Rogers we're talking about here, and also one of the first things the film talks about is King Friday XIII's campaign very early on in Mister Rogers to keep people who are different out of the kingdom--with a wall! Mister Rogers opposes the Vietnam war, Mister Rogers defends public television, Mister Rogers opposes racial segregation, Mister Rogers comes around to being OK with gay people--and ultimately Mister Rogers is attacked by the right-wing media for creating entitled little liberal snowflakes. (I also learned from the Wikipedia yesterday that Fred Rogers became a vegetarian in his 40s, because, he said, "I don't want to eat anything that has a mother."[2]) Politically, the film seems designed to give succor to Republican never-Trumpers, but also to counter the new militancy of those on the Democrat-aligned partisan left who regard "when they go low, we go high" as a horrendously failed strategy and "civility" as capitulation to evil. Politically, it is a plea to take the "politics" out of politics. (It's easy to suppose that Fred Rogers, at some point, had he lived long enough, would have renounced his allegiance to the Republicans. But the gospel of self-esteem and self-empowerment he preaches is reminiscent of someone like Nathaniel Branden, and his ethic of neighbourliness would fit right in at The American Conservative. Those are heretical strains in the contemporary Republican party, but they are still more comfortably at home there than in the Democratic party. You can see someone like Fred Rogers seeing the Democrats as basically standing for a kind of inhuman bureaucratic managerialism to which he might take himself to be fundamentally opposed.)
Anyway, this is all an overlong set-up to saying something about the one thing in particular that stuck in my craw and I spent a long time today digging into: Fred Rogers's testimony in 1969 to a Senate committee deliberating funding for public television. The film portrays the committee chairman as a grumpy curmudgeon who is presumably acting as Richard Nixon's hatchet man in de-funding Lyndon Johnson's public television project; Mister Rogers melts his heart (with a presentation that lots of angry right-wingers today would take as just the kind of liberal snowflake nonsense the government needs to stop paying for), and the grumpy curmudgeon declares that Mister Rogers has just won the money for public television. And it is not only the film that portrays the scene that way; it is very, very difficult to find anything on the internet taking issue in any way with the mythology that Mister Rogers went to Washington and saved PBS from that grumpy senator--who a piece in the Chicago Sun-Times refers to as "Republican Senator John Pastore of New Jersey". In fact, John Pastore was a Democratic senator from Rhode Island; his Wikipedia article mentions just one time that he went to New Jersey, which was to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Lyndon Johnson. Three years later, Lyndon Johnson, in his Remarks Upon Signing the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, thanked "Senator Pastore, the Chairman of the subcommittee who has spent many days, weeks, and years in this effort". Despite these facts, the only thing I have been able to find disputing the "Mister Rogers saved PBS from the grumpy senator" narrative is this blog post, which claims that "the guy [Rogers] won over, the gruff old senator who got 'goose bumps' from Rogers' reciting his song lyrics, was not an opponent; he was already a fan. Pastore was a Democrat from Rhode Island who orchestrated the hearings as a way to restore the funding Nixon wanted to cut." There are no sources cited in that post, but given the facts on the record, these claims are certainly plausible, and one way or another it is implausible that Fred Rogers's Senate testimony went down the way it is portrayed in the film and virtually everywhere else. The only open questions seem to be whether John Pastore was intentionally playing the heel in that hearing for dramatic effect, and whether he was aware of and went along with the subsequent spin.
Less consequentially, but also giving a distorted impression to its audience, the film omits Fred Rogers's early years in Canada, which I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia after watching the film--while watching it, the thought crossed my mind that some Canadians will be surprised to learn that Mister Rogers was not Canadian--led to the creation of Mr. Dressup: Ernie Coombs, who was also originally American and had worked with Rogers in Pittsburgh, came with him to Toronto in 1963 to work on "Misterogers" for the CBC; a few years later Rogers bought the rights to his show from the CBC and moved it to Pittsburgh, while Coombs stayed in Toronto and became Mr. Dressup.
A funny thing about watching the film for me is that I never really liked Mister Rogers as a kid. It was pretty boring and the puppets were weird. (Watching the film I was struck by the fact that while the puppets mostly seemed weird to me as a kid because their mouths didn't move, Rogers's mouth does move when he puppeteers--he makes no effort at ventriloquism at all, which makes his in-person puppet interactions with people really weird. He talks in the film about how it is easier for him to say some things with a puppet than just as himself--I guess in the way you might give a puppet to an abused child to help the child communicate. The fact that his mouth moves and the puppets' don't seems to reinforce that it is always him talking through the puppet, and the puppet is not an independent character.) It was just what you had to watch as a little Canadian kid when I was a little kid--every day you watched The Friendly Giant, Mister Rogers, Mr. Dressup, Sesame Street, and the Polka Dot Door. The first scene in the film is some kind of early live show where Mister Rogers is talking to an audience of kids with their parents hanging around the back. The kids look unhappy and confused; the parents look enthralled. I imagine that as adults many of those unhappy and confused kids would have looked enthralled by Mister Rogers, too.
More than once it's said in the film that kids have feelings that are just as strong and deep as adults'. This is said as if it is a revelation, possibly revealed to us by child psychologists in the '60s, which on the face of it seems weird, because what it's like to be a kid seems to be something everyone ought to know a lot about, since everyone used to be one. But I do appreciate that somehow, apparently, people by and large forget what it's like to be a kid. Come to think of it, I guess I appreciate that people by and large don't have a very good grip on what it's like to be what they are now, let alone what they used to be. But these are, obviously, things that can be too easy to get self-congratulatory about.
[1] I'm going to say flat-out, for the record, though, that I liked this film quite a bit, even though I felt like it was trying to emotionally manipulate me and set me up to be a jerk if I didn't simply buy into what it was selling. Despite that, it is an effectively enigmatic portrait of a very strange man.
[2] It still makes me twinge to click on a Huffington Post link, let alone to post one--I still regard it as the emblem of the internet's making it virtually impossible to make a living as a writer. But here I am, giving away these pure gold nuggets for free, eh! Crazy world.
Currently at Havelock: 22.6. High today: 31.3. Currently at the back of my shed: 22.1. High today: 31.4. My newly installed weather station gives exactly the same low today, 16.2, as the Havelock Weather Underground station, so that's promising. My station gets too much sun on it in the afternoon, but I've noticed that the Havelock station suffers from some sun-heating in the late afternoon, too. I need to get another sensor to stick under the porch or something. Got a good rain here today for the first time in weeks--14 mm so far, sure hoping for a total of 20 or more. If not for a freak early-morning storm that dropped 13 totally-unforecast millimetres a few weeks ago, we'd be in a drought not unlike two years ago. As it is I just got to the bottom of my 275 gallons worth of rain barrels this morning. Anyway, what we got today should save my first round of zucchinis and other squash.
