The virus
Posted: May 31, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
from the wikipedia page for virus
There are names I could write here of people you’re probably heard of who are professional trolls. They say things which are designed to offend and provoke and irritate and outrage. Then those things (and the person’s name) are spread by people outraged and irritated and provoked and offended.
The Twitter-era disease of spreading bad stuff in order to roast/be outraged by it. It’s like a virus that spreads every time you complain you are sick.
This is not really a profound or insightful observation. But every day I see smart people who I like filling my Twitter timeline or my Internet with sickness and poison in their effort to combat sickness and poison.
Hey, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. (Feels like even discussing this could form part of the problem). The President himself is one of these characters, which makes this problem almost too baffling to contemplate.
There are many lesser demons however where I don’t understand why I’m constantly being exposed to their bad takes, even if it’s in the context of making fun of them or “destroying” them.
It seems like an Internet specific problem. I don’t feel like people used to seek out unusually dumb editorials just to light them up. Maybe they did. Harder, though. The free instant worldwide publishing era was bound to have diseases as well as benefits.
Cable news is a whole other category of this, one big sewer of this disease, far as I can tell.
An unhealthy sitch! I don’t know what the solution is, except some self-discipline to ignore and keep moving.
Tom Wolfe observation
Posted: May 18, 2018 Filed under: America, America Since 1945, writing Leave a comment
There are, of course, all sorts of gradations of status, of power, of wealth, influence and comfort, but it is impossible to break America down into classes in the old European sense. “But there is a … dividing line, and above that line are those who have bachelor degrees or better from a four-year college or university. Below that are the people who don’t. That line is becoming a gulf that grows wider and wider. “Like the rest of the West, we live in a highly bureaucratic world and it’s impossible today to advance to the heights of ambition without that bachelor’s degree, without being a part of what Vance Packard used to call ‘the diploma elite.'”
Had to go looking for the source of that one, it was in a 2005 Duke commencement speech. How about this?:
For the last four years, you have been trained to be the leaders of an extraordinary nation. There has never been anything like it. … It is the only country I know of in which immigrants with a totally different culture, a totally different language, can in one-half of a generation, if they have the numbers and a modicum of organization, take over politically a metropolis as large as, say, Miami.
As a Tom Wolfe (Ph.d) superfan, kind of disappointed by the tributes and obituaries. Most of them seemed pretty limp. Maybe because so many journalists were so in awe of him, they seemed to sputter on about the same stuff and barely touch on the vastness of Wolfe’s interests and insights.
Best one imo was Louis Menand. (Update: lol whoops hadn’t seen Friend of Helytimes’ Graeme Wood’s.)
Felt literary world scoffed at
but how many 74 year olds would take on a seven hundred page book about college, rap, hookup culture, basketball, and attempts to get in the head of (among others) a nineteen year old female virgin? A little crazy but I thought it was cool! Also came pretty close to predicting the Duke lacrosse scandal.
If you hunger for Wolfe at full Wolfeness might I recommend his 2006 Jefferson Lecture?:
According to Korean War lore, a Navy fighter pilot began shouting out over the combat radio network, “I’ve got a Mig at zero! A Mig at zero! I’ve got a Mig at zero!” A Mig at zero meant a Soviet supersonic fighter plane was squarely on his tail and could blow him out of the sky at any moment. Another voice, according to legend, broke in and said, “Shut up and die like an aviator.” Such “chatter,” such useless talk on the radio during combat, was forbidden. The term “aviator” was the final, exquisite touch of status sensitivity. Navy pilots always called themselves aviators. Marine and Air Force fliers were merely pilots. The reward for reaching the top of the ziggurat was not money, not power, not even military rank. The reward was status honor, the reputation of being a warrior with ultimate skill and courage–a word, by the way, strictly taboo among the pilots themselves. The same notion of status honor motivates virtually every police and fire fighting force in the world.
Wolfe wrote about what was amusing. Even in say crime or war he found the amusement. A serious writer who was also funny. Not enough of those.
Gotta see if I can find this somewhere:
Advances in Cormac studies
Posted: April 9, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Texas, writing Leave a comment
Morrow quotes McCarthy as saying that “even people who write well can’t write novels… They assume another sort of voice and a weird, affected kind of style. They think, ‘O now I’m writing a novel,’ and something happens. They write really good essays… but goddamn, the minute they start writing a novel they go crazy“
In early 2008 Texas State University announced they’d acquired Cormac McCarthy’s papers. The next year they made them available to scholars. Now two books based on rummaging around in these notes have appeared.
This one, by Michael Lynn Crews, explores the literary influences McCarthy drew on, which authors and books he had quotes from buried in his papers.
The quote about novelists going crazy is from a letter exchange McCarthy was having re: Ron Hanson’s novel Desperadoes, which McCarthy admired.
This one, by Daniel Robert King, takes more of a semi-biographical approach, tracing out what we can learn about McCarthy from his correspondence with agents and editors. A sample:
Bought these books because it gives confidence to observe that somebody whose writing sounds like it emerged pronounced from the cliffs like some kind of Texas Quran had to work and revise and toss stuff and chisel to get there.
From these books it is clear:
- McCarthy is a meticulous and patient rewriter
- it took decades for his work to gain any significant recognition
- he was helped with seeming love and care by editor Albert Erskine.
- he was patient, open, yet confident in editorial correspondence
These books are not necessary for the casual personal library, but if you enjoy gnawing on literary scraps, recommend them both. From King:
However, in this same letter, he acknowledges that “the truth is that the historical material is really – to me – little more than a framework upon which to hang a dramatic inquiry into the nature of destiny and history and the uses of reason and knowledge and the nature of evil and all these sorts of things which have plagued folks since there were folks.”
Mississippi Mound Trail
Posted: April 1, 2018 Filed under: America, America Since 1945, art Leave a comment
On one of the episodes of Theme Time Radio Hour Bob Dylan himself says that the actual highway 61 is boring now, nothing but ads for riverboat casinos. That may be true south of Vicksburg but north of the Biedenharn Coca-Cola Museum and the Catfish Row Art Park, I found the road compelling.
Mississippi Fred McDowell was born of course in Rossville, Tennessee.
It was Dave [David L. Cohn] in God Shakes Creation who said, “The Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” He was always welcome at the Peabody; they were glad to see him – he stayed there whenever he was in Memphis – but they never even gave him a cup of coffee, and he thought it was rather amusing that they had so little appreciation of this publicity.
So says Uncle Shelby, of Greenville and Memphis:
Since we’d been to Memphis we steered towards Oxford Miss to visit Faulkner’s house:
On Highway 61 lots of blues type sites, Muddy Waters’ birthplace for instance:
marked by signs for the Mississippi Blues Trail. But many signs tell you you are also on the Mississippi Mound Trail.
Mounds make a thousand or more years ago by some lost culture, perhaps connected to the people who built Cahokia:
And where in the beginning the predecessors crept with their simple artifacts, and built the mounds and vanished, bequeathing only the mounds in which the succeeding recordable Muskhogean stock would leave the skulls of their warriors and chiefs and babies and slain bears, and the shards of pots, and hammer- and arrow-heads and now and then a heavy silver Spanish spur.
So says Faulkner in his essay Mississippi. In Sanctuary he says:
The sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music- stores. Before these doors a throng stood all day, listening. The pieces which moved them were ballads simple in melody and theme, of bereavement and retribution and repentance metallically sung, blurred, emphasised by static or needle – disembodied voices blaring from imitation wood cabinets or pebble-grain horn-mouths above the rapt faces, the gnarled slow hands long shaped to the imperious earth, lugubrious, harsh, and sad.
You can only listen to so much of that though; when I pulled over for Dunn Mounds I was listening to Maron interview Jennifer Lawrence.
The Raven map tells the story of the Delta. Another flooding bottomland is the Nile delta:
where they also kept slaves, and built mounds.
source: Ricardo Liberato on Wikipedia
great tour of the Blues Trail sites here on Wiki by Chillin662.
Pretty Clear-Eyed About Power
Posted: March 27, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Horwitt says that, when Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: “You want to organize for power!“
This anecdote had stuck in my mind from whenever I had first read it. Found it in a March 2017 New Republic piece about then-Senator and candidate Obama.
Hillary wrote her college thesis on Alinsky. Both the last two Democratic nominees for president found the same man in Chicago to study. (And think of how many Bushies were said to learn from Leo Strauss? And Milton Friedman! Chicago, dude).
How should the candidate approach his job?:
This is a tough, realistic worldview:
The Rules
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“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
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“Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
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“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
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“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
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“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
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“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
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“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
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“Keep the pressure on.”
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“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
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“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
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“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside”
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“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
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“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
Using the world enemy is a little dangerous for me, unless you have a Zen-like transcendent understanding of the meaning of enemy and the mutability of enemies.
That TNR piece by the way written Ryan Lizza.
Three Candidates
Posted: March 23, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
From an article about how Clarke’s been working on paid maternity leave for state employees in the Arkansas State House
My friend Clarke Tucker is running for Congress as a Democrat in Arkansas’ 2nd district. He’s just the kind of guy you want doing legislative work. A solid citizen.
In his gentle and careful yet warm manner Clarke reminds me of another Southern state legislator:
John Grisham.
Meanwhile, out in the desert and the Eastern Sierra, they’re trying to put Marge in charge.
Marge Doyle that is. I saw her speak on Sunday and was really impressed. Her passion to run stems from her frustration with current Congressman Paul Cook and his Republican party-line votes that would’ve hurt the health care people in the district depend on.
Had the chance to hear Marge give her message and came away real impressed. She came to her campaign through hard, slow work on health care issues in the district, and spoke of her belief in her ability to find solutions through common values.
Happened to meet Katie Hill when she turned up at a meeting of the SELAH (Silver Lake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, Atwater, Hollywood) Homeless Coalition.
She grew up in California’s 25th district, and seemed like just the person to knock off the distasteful Steve Knight and represent the people of Lancaster, Palmdale, Pearblossom, Acton, Santa Clarita, and the rest.
(oh and none of them are paying me or nothing. This is just my own Take!)
JAB Holdings
Posted: February 8, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, business Leave a comment
and soon:
and
are all controlled by JAB Holdings.
Owned by Germany’s Reimann family, 95% of JAB Holding belongs to four of the late Albert Reimann Jr.’s nine adopted children. They are descendants of chemist Ludwig Reimann, who, in 1828, joined with Johann Adam Benckiser (founder of the namesake chemical company).
Allegedly, the heirs take an oath never to discuss their business publicly?
Quincy
Posted: February 8, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, music Leave a comment
Devouring this Quincy Jones Vulture interview like everyone else on my feed. Graeme Wood has a good take:
There was also, as Icecubetray points out, an interview in GQ recently where QJ goes similarly wild:
Drop the mic!
Posted: February 2, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics 1 Comment
from Politico
Machiavelli
Posted: January 27, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
That’s from this study in the Swiss Journal of Psychology. Happened to see that on Twitter somehow.
Was struck when I actually read The Prince and realized Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney either hadn’t read it or hadn’t taken some of its blunter advice.
foxes, being foxlike
from the piles of Rumsefeld memos you can read online.
On about page six of this book (haven’t finished) he says don’t invade countries where you don’t know the language.
Maybe a new rule should be that when we invade a country, the President or at least the Secretary of Defense should have to live there:
The Crown’s JFK
Posted: January 24, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Peggy Noonan raises concern about the depiction of JFK on episode 8, season 2 of The Crown on Netflix:
There is nothing—literally nothing—to support the assertion in “The Crown” that after the trip JFK, in a rage at being upstaged by his wife, drank, threw things and lunged at her. There is no historical evidence that he ever got rapey with his wife.
(what a sentence!)
Also he didn’t smoke cigarettes.
All of this, and more, is so vulgar, dumb and careless. It is disrespectful not only of real human beings but of history itself.
Interesting points. JFK did at least sometimes smoke small stubby cigarillo things, as we can see in Primary.
He famously got himself a bunch of Cuban cigars before announcing the embargo (a story that’s told as a funny, cute anecdote rather than an example of small but representative corruption).
JFK was rapey with other young women in his employ, if we believe Mimi Alford.
Caitlin Flanagan points to more evidence.
I loved The Crown’s version of JFK. His psychopathic side. A worthwhile distinction: the way the story is told in The Crown, what we see is Jackie’s perception of JFK. That could be different than like historical truth.
Consider what Errol Morris says here (talking Wormwood) about “reenactments”:
Well, I noticed that even with the scripted elements of Wormwood, people call them “reenactments,” but they’re not reenacting anything, properly speaking. I got so tired of it that. First of all, reenactments came out of a sort of see-and-say type of stuff. You’d have an interview, the person would go, “Blah blah blah,” and then you’d illustrate them with the subsequent reenactment.
“On the night of June 4, 1973, I went to the store and bought a pack of cigarettes,” and you cut to an actor in a wide-lapel shirt and bell bottoms walking into a store and buying a pack of cigarettes.
That’s correct. So I pointed out like, “What exactly am I reenacting?” Am I reenacting truth? No. Am I reenacting belief? More often than not, I’m reenacting claims of what people saw or didn’t see. A version of events, a belief about what transpired, rather than what actually transpired. And I got in the habit — out of annoyance, I would say — of pointing out how consciousness is a reenactment of reality inside of our skulls. This idea that we have some immediate and privileged access to the world around us? Excuuuse me! We do not!
If we’re seeing Jackie’s reality, as imagined by The Crown, is that wrong?
But I’m a sucker for this kinda thing. I loved Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship. I felt he showed the alpha dog side of Bill Clinton that must be present.
Hope Davis as Hillary also. Chilling.
To see the past in all its complexity is impossible and compelling. A key theme of Helytimes.
Mary Anne Trump
Posted: January 6, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Ireland, Irish traditional music, mothers Leave a comment
One of our most popular posts is on Fred Trump, outrageous, villainous, smiling agent of chaos much like his son.
But we never really thought about Trump’s mother. Mothers should be off limits maybe? Even Trumps have mothers. A hasty misreading of this Kellyanne Conway quote:
Got us to look into it.
Stunned to find Trump’s mother was a Gaelic-speaking immigrant from a remote Scottish island.
Hailing from the Outer Hebrides
Mary Anne MacLeod was born in Tong, on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, United Kingdom, in a pebbledashcroft house numbered “5 Tong”
Tong
She was raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household with her second language being English, which she learned at Tong school where it was reported she was a star pupil. Mary attended the school up until the eighth grade. Her father was a crofter, fisherman and compulsory officer (truancy officer). According to one profile, she was “brought up in an environment marked by isolation, privation and gloom.”
Wow. She’s pretty much from the Iron Islands.
You can see her interviewed in 1994 on Irish television, RTé, here. She has an interesting accent. She speaks of her love of Irish and Scottish music.
She claims Trump is meeting Steven Spielberg?
Training Literature Field Unit No. 1
Posted: December 24, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, the ocean, Wonder Trail 1 Comment
Helytimes began in 2012. Our idea was
- become good at writing for the Internet
- a writer should have a website
- have a space to collect, digest and share items of interest.
We’ve tried to come up with a mission statement or guiding purpose, but the truth is, this is stuff we had to get out of our head.
The healthiest thing to do was share it.
The best way to put it might be a place to share crazy interesting things we’ve come across.
Since then we’ve published over 1,050 posts. We’re just now starting to get good at it, in our opinion.
Here are the twenty-one most popular posts:
The moral here is probably that we should start a local LA news-and-takes site written by other people.
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Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot (1974)
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Mountaineering Movies on Netflix Instant, Ranked
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Fred Trump
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Cinderella and Interrogation Technique
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The Great Debates
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Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Fascinated by: Ray Dalio
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How Big Was Mexico City in 1519?
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American Historical Figure Who Reminds Me Of Trump
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Losing The War by Lee Sandlin
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Conversations With Kennedy
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Oil Wells In National Parks
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THE WONDER TRAIL
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Gay Hobo Slang
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Vertigo Sucks
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Jackie Smoking Pregnant
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The story of Cahokia
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Ireland should take in two million refugees
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Twenty Greatest Australian Artistic Accomplishments of All Time
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The White House Pool
One lesson here might be to have more local LA journalism written by other people. Keep meaning to start a whole site for that but I do have a full-time job plus several other projects.
In our opinion the most successful post on Helytimes was
Record Group 80: Series: General Photographic File Of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958
although it didn’t crack the top 21, just felt like a time where we added something of value to the Internet and readers responded.
It’s about the work of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, also known as the Training Literature Field Unit No. 1, assembled by the great photographer Edward Steichen.
One thread of Helytimes is attempts to reach into the past and find the sources that give us understanding of the past.
Two personal favorites:
Everything is something.
and
Special Snowflakes
This has been the annual performance review and address to the Helytimes readership:
That photo taken by one of Steichen’s guys, Wayne Miller:
Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, and The Pow Wow Chow Cookbook
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, Boston, native america, New England, politics, presidents 1 Comment
What is the deal here when Trump calls Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas?
At Helytimes, we like to go back to the source.
Sometime between 1987 and 1992 Elizabeth Warren put down on a faculty directory that she was Native American. Says Snopes:
it is true that while Warren was at U. Penn. Law School she put herself on the “Minority Law Teacher” list as Native American) in the faculty directory of the Association of American Law Schools
This became a story in 2012, when Elizabeth Warren was running for Senate against Scott Brown. In late April of that year, The Boston Herald, a NY Post style tabloid, dug up a 1996 article in the Harvard Crimson by Theresa J. Chung that says this:
Of 71 current Law School professors and assistant professors, 11 are women, five are black, one is Native American and one is Hispanic, said Mike Chmura, spokesperson for the Law School.
Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.
Asked about it, here’s what Elizabeth Warren said:
From there the story kinda spun out of control. It came up in the Senate debate, and there were ads about it on both sides.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4oIVinDXzOw
A genealogist looked into it, and determined that Warren was 1/32nd Cherokee, or about as Cherokee as Helytimes is West African. But then even that was disputed.
Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he’d found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate.
Well, Elizabeth Warren won. Now Scott Brown is Donald Trump’s Ambassador to New Zealand, where he’s doing an amazing job.
source: The Guardian
The part of the story that lit me up was this:
The best argument she’s got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn’t appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
“I like my corn with olives!” source
What is the best way to handle it, the best strategy, when the President is treating you like a third grade bully, repeatedly and publicly calling you a mean name?
Best advice to someone getting bullied? I googled:
We would amend “don’t show your feelings” to stay calm. We would urge any kid to put “tell an adult” as a last resort.
A suggestion:
- if the problem persists, hit back as hard as possible, calmly but forcefully, at the bully’s weakest, tenderest points.
Such a Lisa Simpson / Nelson vibe to Warren / Trump. Are all our elections gonna be Lisa vs. Nelson for awhile?
from this 2003 episode:
Lisa easily wins the election. Worried by her determination and popularity, the faculty discusses how to control her.
McPeak vs Earthman
Posted: December 5, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, war Leave a comment
Have we entered a new way of war in which air power isn’t as important? That this is America’s asymmetric challenge and air power isn’t as wanted?
If so, how do we overcome that? How do we get past that, the fact that our adversaries have figured out how we fight?
Merrill McPeak: Well, it’s not so much that the adversaries figured out how we fight.
That’s dead easy. Everybody can see it. I mean, we don’t make any mystery of it.
What we’ve done is taken the risk out of the kind of operations that we do now with officers.
I mean, we’ve got stealth airplanes. So I’m sitting in a stealth airplane and I’m on super-cruise. In the F-22, you’re cruising at 1.7 to 1.8 (mach) in a stealthy machine.
Who’s going to touch you?
I mean, I never felt vulnerable when I was flying an airplane. Period. Not against any kind of earthman.
Got a lot out of this looooong interview with former Air Force chief of staff and Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War star Merrill McPeak in the San Diego Union Tribune, (ht Tom Ricks of course).
McPeak on Boyd, whom we have discussed:
So they got the argument a little bit wrong. But then along comes Boyd with the OODA Loop and some philosophy kind of concepts and people said, ‘Wow, a fighter pilot with a brain!’
They tended to listen to him when in many respects he was a failed officer and even a failed human being in some ways.
Carl Prine: There’s an entire cottage industry built around him now.
Merrill McPeak: I was at Nellis the night he jumped out of an F-100. I was a student there and he was an instructor in the Weapons School. He had a bet that he could get anybody from his 6 o’clock to his 12 o’clock in 40 seconds, or whatever it was.
He tried his special little trick and the airplane quit on him. It overstretched the hydraulic system, the plumbing, the flight controls, and the airplane went crazy and he had to jump out.
Here he is coming back to Nellis and they went out to pick him up in a chopper. And he’s dragging his parachute back to Nellis. He didn’t look so good that night.
The general likes Mozart:
Carl Prine: I had this image of you, as a general, appreciating the grand, comprehensive, overwhelming symphony and yet you prefer the smaller pieces? The elegant and tiny works?
Merrill McPeak: Well, you know the big G minor symphony? Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. That’s the famous one, the 40. It’s in there with Jupiter and the later symphonies.
But Symphony 25 has that crystal clear quality to it. If it were a stream, you could look clear through it to the bottom.
There’s something magical about it.
April Ryan
Posted: November 22, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents Leave a commenthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8CJcnvXcbk
Ice cold response to demeaning patronizing by Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Ryan has been a member of the White House press corps for American Urban Radio Networks since January 1997 and has long been the only black female reporter among the White House correspondents.
Is it ok to have this calendar up in my office?
Posted: November 20, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, surfing, the California Condition Leave a comment
got it for free at Laguna Beach Surf and Sport.
Asked a female colleague her opinion, she didn’t care, but how much can we weigh that? here it is in some more context.
Another surf shop in Laguna is Thalia
Thalia as we all know is the muse of comedy
Thalia by Nattier
Here’s today’s surf report from Thalia via magicseaweed:
Is it interesting?
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
source
that William F. Buckley and Ayn Rand kind of look alike?
The story of Profumo
Posted: November 12, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, heroes Leave a comment
Shortly after his resignation Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, and continued to work there for the rest of his life. Peter Hitchens has written that Profumo “vanished into London’s East End for 40 years, doing quiet good works”. Profumo “had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place”, eventually becoming Toynbee Hall’s chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, also devoted herself to charity until her death in 1998. In the eyes of most commentators, Profumo’s charity work redeemed his reputation. His friend, social reform campaigner Lord Longford said he “felt more admiration [for Profumo] than [for] all the men I’ve known in my lifetime”.
Profumo’s dedication and dignity won him enormous admiration from people in all walks of life. The author Peter Hennessy, a fellow trustee at a charitable foundation associated with Toynbee Hall, described him as “one of the nicest and most exemplary people I have met in public or political life; full of the old, decent Tory virtues”. Margaret Thatcher called him “one of our national heroes”. “Everybody here worships him”, a helper at Toynbee Hall was once quoted as saying. “We think he’s a bloody saint.”
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