Grim Reader, April 16, 2010: Lech Kaczynski, Dixie Carter and George Nissen
by Michael Schaffer
APRIL 16, 2010 TAGS:
When an aging Soviet-built jetliner crashed in the Russian fog last weekend, killing much of Poland’s political elite, it created a major news story, a national tragedy — and a glut of obituaries.
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How did the Obitosphere respond? It depends who you read. President Lech Kaczynski drew significant obits nearly everywhere. The Los Angeles Times’ piece remembers the late leader as “a fervent Catholic who battled communism during the Cold War and matured into a staunchly conservative politician.” Happily for Grim Reader, the obits’ reporting seems unswayed by the trauma of the crash, with most pieces noting that he “polarized his country” at home (the Wall Street Journal) while repeatedly putting it on a “collision course” with neighbors abroad (the New York Times).
Though the Independent explains that Kaczynski’s “populist right-wing views” endeared him “to many Poles – particularly the large Roman Catholic population, traditionalists and rural voters,” in office he acquired a reputation as “narrow-minded, provincial and overzealous” (the Associated Press) thanks to battles with gays and intellectuals, among others. Neighbors, meanwhile, were wary of Kaczynski’s hostile take on Russia and the European Union — and his close alliance with George W. Bush, who was deeply unpopular in most of Europe. Kaczynski’s brother was ousted as prime minister in 2007; the obits imply that the president would have faced the same fate this year.
Of course, Kaczynski wasn’t the only prominent figure to die in the crash. In the United States, there are also a good number of obits for Anna Walentynowicz, whose 1980 firing from the Gdansk shipyard prompted the Solidarity uprising. Walentynowicz became “a heroic symbol of freedom,” the Washington Post reports. “Repeatedly jailed, reinstated to her job and jailed again, Ms. Walentynowicz became known as the ‘mother of Solidarity.’” (Oddly, the Post has a staff-written obit for Walentynowicz but relies on wire copy for Kaczynski.) The kicker also undercuts some of the post-communist celebration in the Kaczynski coverage: “‘We wanted better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back,’ Ms. Walentynowicz said in 1999, reflecting on the early days of Solidarity. ‘Nobody wanted a revolution. And when I see what the so-called revolution has brought — mass poverty, homelessness, self-styled capitalists selling off our plants and pocketing the money — I think we were right.’”
As for the rest of the flight manifest, U.S. readers are mostly out of luck. The British Obitosphere, on the other hand, appears to have room for all sorts of Polish history. Both the Guardian and the Times run obits for Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last of Poland’s Cold War presidents-in-exile. The Guardian remembers Deputy Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the ex-communist who likely would have challenged Kaczynski in the next election. A Telegraph opinion piece lauds Central Bank chief Slawomir Skrzypek, saying the country’s resilient economy is a major legacy. The Times writes up General Franciszek Gagor, who led Poland into NATO. (How deep a bench do British papers have when it comes to Polish obit coverage? The Times this week also makes room for Jakub Bargielowski, a fighter ace for the RAF’s WWII Polish division, who died in February.)
***
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Back home, there are plentiful obits for Designing Women actress Dixie Carter, “whose Southern charm and natural beauty led to dozens of roles on the screen and stage,” according to Variety. Many of the obits just stick to Carter’s CV (small town Tennessee, Carousel in Memphis, Broadway musicals, Desperate Housewives) but some corners of the Obitosphere offer more personal takes: It turns out that Carter’s sassy interior-decorator character made her a gay icon, something Metro Weekly highlights in a nice reminiscence — a contrast to Beliefnet, which notes that Carter “was often outspoken on behalf of conservative Christian political ideals.” What gives? The Washington Post explains that Carter’s own politics were well to the right of her character Julia Sugarbaker’s — but she struck a deal whereby every time she said something antithetical to her own beliefs, she got to sing on air. Eventually, Carter supported Bill Clinton’s presidency, and by 1998 gave an interview where she said some very empathetic things about gay marriage.
Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the obits note, wanted to be Zimbabwe’s Nelson Mandela. “He failed,” deadpans the lead of an otherwise nuanced Guardian obit. Muzorewa is remembered for seeking peace with the white-run government that was battling the guerillas of Robert Mugabe. Eventually, they made him prime minister. But when free elections were finally approved, his party was crushed by Mugabe’s. Noting that he’d been branded a “puppet,” the Zimbabwean is nonetheless charitable: “He was perhaps an unsuspecting bridge from the old Rhodesia to the new Zimbabwe. The trouble with bridges is that people trod on them or drive over them.”
Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington for 24 years, gets the week’s best backhanded compliment when the New York Times remembers him as “no more duplicitous than he had to be.” The obits actually serve as a pretty good instruction manual for how to effectively represent your country abroad: U.S. leaders had confidence that messages conveyed through Dobrynin would reach the bosses back in Moscow, Moscow knew their man in Washington was such an insider that he played chess with Jimmy Carter, and the American public witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a Cold War adversary who was happy to go fishing in Florida or visit the Kentucky Derby. “His gregarious manner and westernized ways led some to think Mr. Dobrynin might have been a crypto-liberal or even an American supporter,” the Washington Post notes, before quoting a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow saying that “At no time was he a friend of ours. He’s a Soviet ideologue.”
Rev. Benjamin Hooks’ tenure as leader of the NAACP gets top obit billing — he returned the organization to economic health even as he led it through the Reagan/Bush era of executive-branch indifference to civil rights. But the New York Daily News’ obit, among others, actually delivers a more interesting story: Hooks had previously been “the first black judge in a southern trial court since Reconstruction” and the first black FCC member; he became an activist after guarding POWs during WWII and seeing “whites-only” clubs admit enemy prisoners but not black U.S. troops. Grim Reader does, however, quibble with a lead in the Detroit Free Press: “African Americans in metro Detroit are mourning today the death of Rev. Benjamin Hooks,” it opens. Don’t all citizens owe a debt of gratitude to the civil rights movement?
Also this week, obits remember pioneering black businessman Bruce Llewellyn, who amassed a fortune of $160 million via banking, groceries, Coca-Cola bottling, and broadcasting. The New York Times’ obit paints a picture of a striving, creative businessman (he was an early employer of the leveraged buyout) while the Root’s take reflects a preternaturally connected member of an overachieving family (Colin Powell is a cousin; Tom Clancy a son-in-law).
In science, there are obits for Helen Ranney, who discovered the genetic basis of sickle cell disease … Guyford Stever, chief science advisor to two presidents and leader of a commission looking into the Challenger space shuttle aftermath ... and Mortimer Sackler, a psychobiologist whose company invented OxyContin. (Sackler, like his late brother Arthur, was more famous for his work as an arts philanthropist.)
The woman who developed public opinion polling in postwar Germany, meanwhile, is remembered for a remarkable career trajectory: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann started out as a Nazi propagandist before emerging as a dispassionate West German researcher. When details of her Nazi activities emerged, the Times of London notes, she lost a U.S. visiting-professor gig. She claimed that anti-Semitic writings had been an “alibi” designed to throw the regime off her scent and noted that she’d been fired from Das Reich after Joseph Goebbels decided that a picture of Franklin Roosevelt accompanying one of her stories was “insufficiently repulsive.”
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How dirty was the Dirty Dozen. Here’s the United Kingdom’s Telegraph on Jack Agnew, one of the last survivors of the unit that inspired the 1967 film: “Its soldiers refused to salute officers, or mop barracks, and were famed for brawling, drinking and spending time in the stockade.” But here’s Agnew in his hometown Philadelphia Inquirer: “We were a rough-and-tumble group of guys, and we had some run-ins with the MPs.… But there were some things in the film that have no relation to us.” Hollywood notwithstanding, the obits all note that Agnew will be buried with full military honors.
The Wall Street Journal’s obit for the inventor of the trampoline wins Grim Reader’s nod for the week’s favorite lead: “Although some wags held that the modern trampoline was the brainchild of a personal-injury lawyer, it was invented by George Nissen.” A teenage gymnast, Nissen was inspired by the sight of trapeze artists doing flips on the protective netting beneath them; he lived long enough to see Olympic trampoline competitions. Along the way, his brainchild was briefly a consumer fad. The obit includes an improbable list of early buyers: then-Vice President Richard Nixon, Yul Brynner and King Farouk of Egypt.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday on Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
How did the Obitosphere respond? It depends who you read. President Lech Kaczynski drew significant obits nearly everywhere. The Los Angeles Times’ piece remembers the late leader as “a fervent Catholic who battled communism during the Cold War and matured into a staunchly conservative politician.” Happily for Grim Reader, the obits’ reporting seems unswayed by the trauma of the crash, with most pieces noting that he “polarized his country” at home (the Wall Street Journal) while repeatedly putting it on a “collision course” with neighbors abroad (the New York Times).Though the Independent explains that Kaczynski’s “populist right-wing views” endeared him “to many Poles – particularly the large Roman Catholic population, traditionalists and rural voters,” in office he acquired a reputation as “narrow-minded, provincial and overzealous” (the Associated Press) thanks to battles with gays and intellectuals, among others. Neighbors, meanwhile, were wary of Kaczynski’s hostile take on Russia and the European Union — and his close alliance with George W. Bush, who was deeply unpopular in most of Europe. Kaczynski’s brother was ousted as prime minister in 2007; the obits imply that the president would have faced the same fate this year.
Of course, Kaczynski wasn’t the only prominent figure to die in the crash. In the United States, there are also a good number of obits for Anna Walentynowicz, whose 1980 firing from the Gdansk shipyard prompted the Solidarity uprising. Walentynowicz became “a heroic symbol of freedom,” the Washington Post reports. “Repeatedly jailed, reinstated to her job and jailed again, Ms. Walentynowicz became known as the ‘mother of Solidarity.’” (Oddly, the Post has a staff-written obit for Walentynowicz but relies on wire copy for Kaczynski.) The kicker also undercuts some of the post-communist celebration in the Kaczynski coverage: “‘We wanted better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back,’ Ms. Walentynowicz said in 1999, reflecting on the early days of Solidarity. ‘Nobody wanted a revolution. And when I see what the so-called revolution has brought — mass poverty, homelessness, self-styled capitalists selling off our plants and pocketing the money — I think we were right.’”
As for the rest of the flight manifest, U.S. readers are mostly out of luck. The British Obitosphere, on the other hand, appears to have room for all sorts of Polish history. Both the Guardian and the Times run obits for Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last of Poland’s Cold War presidents-in-exile. The Guardian remembers Deputy Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the ex-communist who likely would have challenged Kaczynski in the next election. A Telegraph opinion piece lauds Central Bank chief Slawomir Skrzypek, saying the country’s resilient economy is a major legacy. The Times writes up General Franciszek Gagor, who led Poland into NATO. (How deep a bench do British papers have when it comes to Polish obit coverage? The Times this week also makes room for Jakub Bargielowski, a fighter ace for the RAF’s WWII Polish division, who died in February.)
***
Back home, there are plentiful obits for Designing Women actress Dixie Carter, “whose Southern charm and natural beauty led to dozens of roles on the screen and stage,” according to Variety. Many of the obits just stick to Carter’s CV (small town Tennessee, Carousel in Memphis, Broadway musicals, Desperate Housewives) but some corners of the Obitosphere offer more personal takes: It turns out that Carter’s sassy interior-decorator character made her a gay icon, something Metro Weekly highlights in a nice reminiscence — a contrast to Beliefnet, which notes that Carter “was often outspoken on behalf of conservative Christian political ideals.” What gives? The Washington Post explains that Carter’s own politics were well to the right of her character Julia Sugarbaker’s — but she struck a deal whereby every time she said something antithetical to her own beliefs, she got to sing on air. Eventually, Carter supported Bill Clinton’s presidency, and by 1998 gave an interview where she said some very empathetic things about gay marriage. Bishop Abel Muzorewa, the obits note, wanted to be Zimbabwe’s Nelson Mandela. “He failed,” deadpans the lead of an otherwise nuanced Guardian obit. Muzorewa is remembered for seeking peace with the white-run government that was battling the guerillas of Robert Mugabe. Eventually, they made him prime minister. But when free elections were finally approved, his party was crushed by Mugabe’s. Noting that he’d been branded a “puppet,” the Zimbabwean is nonetheless charitable: “He was perhaps an unsuspecting bridge from the old Rhodesia to the new Zimbabwe. The trouble with bridges is that people trod on them or drive over them.”
Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to Washington for 24 years, gets the week’s best backhanded compliment when the New York Times remembers him as “no more duplicitous than he had to be.” The obits actually serve as a pretty good instruction manual for how to effectively represent your country abroad: U.S. leaders had confidence that messages conveyed through Dobrynin would reach the bosses back in Moscow, Moscow knew their man in Washington was such an insider that he played chess with Jimmy Carter, and the American public witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a Cold War adversary who was happy to go fishing in Florida or visit the Kentucky Derby. “His gregarious manner and westernized ways led some to think Mr. Dobrynin might have been a crypto-liberal or even an American supporter,” the Washington Post notes, before quoting a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow saying that “At no time was he a friend of ours. He’s a Soviet ideologue.”
Rev. Benjamin Hooks’ tenure as leader of the NAACP gets top obit billing — he returned the organization to economic health even as he led it through the Reagan/Bush era of executive-branch indifference to civil rights. But the New York Daily News’ obit, among others, actually delivers a more interesting story: Hooks had previously been “the first black judge in a southern trial court since Reconstruction” and the first black FCC member; he became an activist after guarding POWs during WWII and seeing “whites-only” clubs admit enemy prisoners but not black U.S. troops. Grim Reader does, however, quibble with a lead in the Detroit Free Press: “African Americans in metro Detroit are mourning today the death of Rev. Benjamin Hooks,” it opens. Don’t all citizens owe a debt of gratitude to the civil rights movement?
Also this week, obits remember pioneering black businessman Bruce Llewellyn, who amassed a fortune of $160 million via banking, groceries, Coca-Cola bottling, and broadcasting. The New York Times’ obit paints a picture of a striving, creative businessman (he was an early employer of the leveraged buyout) while the Root’s take reflects a preternaturally connected member of an overachieving family (Colin Powell is a cousin; Tom Clancy a son-in-law).
In science, there are obits for Helen Ranney, who discovered the genetic basis of sickle cell disease … Guyford Stever, chief science advisor to two presidents and leader of a commission looking into the Challenger space shuttle aftermath ... and Mortimer Sackler, a psychobiologist whose company invented OxyContin. (Sackler, like his late brother Arthur, was more famous for his work as an arts philanthropist.)
The woman who developed public opinion polling in postwar Germany, meanwhile, is remembered for a remarkable career trajectory: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann started out as a Nazi propagandist before emerging as a dispassionate West German researcher. When details of her Nazi activities emerged, the Times of London notes, she lost a U.S. visiting-professor gig. She claimed that anti-Semitic writings had been an “alibi” designed to throw the regime off her scent and noted that she’d been fired from Das Reich after Joseph Goebbels decided that a picture of Franklin Roosevelt accompanying one of her stories was “insufficiently repulsive.”
How dirty was the Dirty Dozen. Here’s the United Kingdom’s Telegraph on Jack Agnew, one of the last survivors of the unit that inspired the 1967 film: “Its soldiers refused to salute officers, or mop barracks, and were famed for brawling, drinking and spending time in the stockade.” But here’s Agnew in his hometown Philadelphia Inquirer: “We were a rough-and-tumble group of guys, and we had some run-ins with the MPs.… But there were some things in the film that have no relation to us.” Hollywood notwithstanding, the obits all note that Agnew will be buried with full military honors. The Wall Street Journal’s obit for the inventor of the trampoline wins Grim Reader’s nod for the week’s favorite lead: “Although some wags held that the modern trampoline was the brainchild of a personal-injury lawyer, it was invented by George Nissen.” A teenage gymnast, Nissen was inspired by the sight of trapeze artists doing flips on the protective netting beneath them; he lived long enough to see Olympic trampoline competitions. Along the way, his brainchild was briefly a consumer fad. The obit includes an improbable list of early buyers: then-Vice President Richard Nixon, Yul Brynner and King Farouk of Egypt.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday on Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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