In the baseball tome, The Glory of Their Times, Willie Mays is, I think, the one modern player most often mentioned by past greats as someone who embodied the game of baseball, in his mind, in his body, and in his personality.

Now without further ado, here, for your viewing pleasure and inspiration, is some archival footage of Willie Mays who, after being knocked down by a Don Drysdale pitch up at his head, proceeds to hit the next one out of the park (footage starts at 0:50):

VIA FIRST CLASS MAIL

Mr. Saxby Chambliss
United States Senate
416 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Mr. Johnny Isakson
United States Senate
131 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Senators Chambliss and Isakson:

I live in Atlanta, Georgia and write to express my disappointment in your recent vote to block passage of gun control legislation.  I am not a gun owner, but I am a father.  And when I first learned of the mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, I wept.  I wept for the children who had their lives – so full of vigor and promise – senselessly ended, and I wept for the parents of these children who, in a way, also had their lives ended that day – for what else is a parent than someone whose entire life is devoted to ensuring the well-being of his or her child.  In the days and weeks following the Newtown shootings, individuals from all political and personal persuasions voiced their support for laws that would prevent another tragedy like the one in Newtown from taking place.  I do not know if you were one of these individuals, and frankly, I do not care.  You know as well any anyone that, as a United States Senator, your convictions and your beliefs are, for better or worse, reflected in the votes that you cast on the Senate floor.  As Daniel Webster once put it: “Inconsistencies of opinion arising from changes of circumstances are often justifiable.  But there is one sort of inconsistency that is culpable; it is the inconsistency between a man’s conviction and his vote.”  I assume that when you voted to block consideration of gun control, you did so because your conscience told you it was the right thing to do.  If that is in fact the case, then I am sorry to say that this country is in much greater peril than can be addressed by any one piece of legislation.

To be sure, you have a political career to consider.  And many of your constituents may very well harbor the same antipathy to gun control initiatives that others have to the current regime of loophole-laden gun laws.  Some of these constituents may even have sound reasons in feeling the way they do: the Second Amendment is, after all, a foundational part of the Constitution, and guns, like other inherently dangerous objects – cars some to mind – may serve a purpose that is legitimate, unrelated to the indiscriminate killing of adults and children.  But unlike cars, guns – whether they be pistols or military-style rifles – are designed with the sole aim of ending, not preserving, life.  Yet they receive a fraction of the regulation that cars do – in the way they are sold, taxed, operated, and yes, tracked.  This is simply incomprehensible, especially for a country like ours which so often and so vocally prides itself on the high value it places on the sanctity of human life.

I write this letter to you not because I think it will persuade you to reconsider your position on whether and how to regulate firearms in this country.  I have little expectation that it will; if there were a time and place for such reflection it would have been before you voted the way you did on April 17, 2013.  Instead, I write because I do not want to consider the prospect that the 27 individuals who died in Newtown did so in vain.  I think it reasonable to believe that their lives, and the memories they have left behind, will outlast the career of anyone who voted on the Senate floor that day.  And this will continue to be the case as long as those in Congress continue to act and vote in a way that has made it the dysfunctional and irrelevant institution that it is today.

Sincerely yours,

Albert Wan
Attorney at Law

CC:

Senator Richard Blumenthal
Senator Chris Murphy

But something troubles me about the game, and at times, it makes me feel like I would be better off just forgetting about baseball altogether.  But then what would my wife and I listen to as we puttered around the kitchen on many a summer night with the day’s heat then dissipating and our conversations turning to who is hitting what and why isn’t he doing better.  In any event, my concerns are no different from those that a lot of other people now have, and, probably have had since the inception of modern baseball: overpriced players, overpriced tickets, interminably long games, lackadaisical play, too many strikeouts, and ballparks that are called PETCO Park and U.S. Cellular Field.

But I do wish things were different.  For example, I wish that a player that you never heard of (assuming you follow baseball, of course) did not make millions of dollars each year where the average joe makes a fraction of that and then has to suffer the indignity of having to pay a part of that player’s salary if he or she wanted to watch him in-person, and increasingly, on a screen.  I also wish that baseball organizations were less concerned about their bottom line and more about what could be done to make the game more fan-friendly (hint: shrinking the confines of a ballpark so the home team can hit more home runs is not one of them); the two, it seems to me, never appear compatible in theory or in practice.

Despite all this, I think the integrity of the game is still intact.  Players still play because they love being on the field and not because its just a way to make a lot of money without really working (another great American pastime).  Managers still get peeved when players don’t hustle to first base on a sure-out grounder.  And fans still recognize and respect players who play the game with passion and heart rather than those who simply show up to collect a paycheck.  So I look forward to the baseball season.  At the very least, it will allow me to realize a dream I have long had: taking my son to his very first baseball game.

In any event, the Supreme Court docket for the case indicates that the defendant is now being represented by attorneys from Northwestern University and Sidley Austin.  Perhaps this plus the relist is a sign of good things to come for Mr. Reeves.  If anyone has a copy of the cert. petition in Reeves, I would really like to read it.  In the meantime, the Seventh Circuit’s decision can be downloaded here.

UPDATE: The Supreme Court denied Mr. Reeves’ cert. petition on March 18, 2013.

Photo of Ralph Ellison courtesy of California Newsreel

On March 1, 1913, Ida Millsap gave birth to Ralph Ellison whom she and her husband named after Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Ellison would go on to become a notable figure in his own right after writing and publishing The Invisible Man, in which he chronicled the journey of a young black man much like Ellison himself who left the Jim Crow South for New York’s Harlem only to find disillusionment wherever he went.  The title of this blog belongs, of course, to Ellison’s novel and the difficult theme it sought to explore on how the history of an “invisible” minority  is dealt with and reflected in modern American life.  In tribute to the Ellison centennial, The New York Review of Books has posted some pieces about Ellison which have appeared in the publication.  The tribute begins with the following quote from Ellison:

Perhaps more than any other people, Americans have been locked in a deadly struggle with time, with history. We’ve fled the past and trained ourselves to suppress, if not forget, troublesome details of the national memory, and a great part of our optimism, like our progress, has been bought at the cost of ignoring the processes through which we’ve arrived at any given moment in our national existence.

Those interested can read more of NYRB’s tribute to Ellison here.

On Monday, Justice Sotomayor issued a “statement” in a case, Bongani Calhoun v. United States, No. 12-6142, involving the racist remarks of a federal prosecutor in Texas. The statement came as the Court declined to hear the case for mostly procedural considerations, but Justice Sotomayor felt it necessary to write separately so she could “dispel any doubt” that the Court’s decision “be understood to signal [the Court's] tolerance of” the “racially charged remark.” “It should not,” Sotomayor bluntly stated. After taking the Government to task for its conduct, both with respect to the remarks and to the way it approached the case as it wound its way to the Court, Sotomayor ended her statement by warning or perhaps lamenting that she “hope[s] never to see a case like this again.” Only Justice Breyer joined Sotomayor in her statement.

That Sotomayor decided to issue such a statement at this particular time in the Court’s sitting is not, I submit, a coincidence. Instead, Sotomayor’s brief yet emphatic statement may have been her way of alerting her colleagues on the bench that now is not the time to be tinkering with or, worse yet, altogether scrapping the prophylactic measures that have been enacted to protect minorities from the kind of racism that, to Sotomayor, is as much a part of America as baseball, apple pie and barbecued ribs. And she did so in vivid almost picturesque fashion, none of which can really be captured in the raw data and statistics that will be thrust at the Court as it considers whether to overturn the Voting Rights Act, or at least a key part of it.

True, Sotomayor’s colleagues may decline to heed her warning or disagree with her view that things are still as they were back when Congress first passed, and then continued to renew, the Voting Rights Act. But even in pure temporal terms, we are only a mere 50 years removed from a time (1963; the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965) when many thought that the country could not survive as a democracy without measures like the Voting Rights Act — a time when George Wallace, Alabama’s then Governor refused to de-segregate the University of Alabama, in direct defiance of President Kennedy and and a time when an owner of a segregated restaurant in Maryland felt fit to physically humiliate individuals who knelt in front of his restaurant to call attention to their message of integration. (These pictures are from a series of 50 photos taken in 1963 that was recently posted on the website for The Atlantic.) To argue that such racism, or more appropriately, its remnants has been purged from the fabric of this country is at best inaccurate and at worst irresponsible. Knowing that this view will probably not hold sway with the majority of the Court, however, my thoughts turn to those, like the Maryland protestors, who through their dedication and sacrifice helped put on the books laws like the Voting Rights Act, and without whom our country would be even more segregated than it was in 1963.

As to my hypothesis as to why Kagan ended up writing the Chaidez opinion,  I think that the debate between say, Roberts and Alito, on the one hand, and Breyer and Kennedy, on the other, centered not on whether Padilla could be applied retroactively — the majority’s opinion makes clear that there was never much doubt there — but on how Padilla and now Chaidez might be used to expand the scope of Strickland to encompass advice on other so-called collateral matters, an outcome which presumably Roberts and Alito, to say nothing of Scalia and Thomas, would have disfavored.  At the same time, the more liberal members of the bench, did not want Chaidez written in a way that would have narrowed or weakened the mandate in Padilla (I wonder if Stevens’ presence at the Court — he apparently still maintains an office there — and generally as an observer of the Court,  might have had some influence as well).  So the task of authorship was given to Kagan who was willing to say no to retroacivity but do so in a way that was respectful of the Padilla decision.

*****

The Way It Is

by Ralph Ellison

The boy looked at me through the cracked door and stood staring with his large eyes until his mother came and invited me in.  It was an average Harlem apartment, cool now with the shift in the fall weather.  The room was clear and furnished with the old-fashioned furniture found so often up our way: two old upholstered chairs and a divan upon a faded blue and red rug.  It was painfully clean, and the furniture crowded the narrow room.

“Sit right there, sir,” the woman said.  ”It’s where Wilbur use to sit before he went to camp; it’s pretty comfortable.”

I watched her ease herself tiredly upon the divan, the light from the large red lamp reflected upon her face from the top of a mirrored side table.

She must have been fifty, her hair slightly graying.  The portrait of a young solider smiled back from the top of a radio cabinet beside her.

She pointed.  ”That’s my boy Wilbur right there,” she said proudly.  ”He’s a sergeant.”

“Wilbur’s got a medal for shooting so good,” the boy said.

“You just be quiet and go eat your supper,” she said.  ”All you can think about is guns and shooting.”  She spoke with the harsh tenderness so often used by Negro mothers.

The boy went, reluctantly opening the door.  The oder of peas and rice and pork chops drifted through.

“Who was it, Tommy?” shrilled a voice on the other side.

“You two be quiet in there and eat your supper now,” Mrs. Jackson called.  ”them two just keeps my hands full.  They just get into something all the time.  I was coming up the street the other day and like to got the fright of my life.  There was Tommy hanging on the back of a streetcar!  But didn’t I tan his bottom!  I bet he won’t even look at a streetcar for a long, long time.  It ain’t really that he’s a bad child; it’s just that he tries to do what he sees the other boys do.  I wanted to send both him and his sister away to camp for the summer, but things was so tight this year that I couldn’t do it.  Raising kids in Harlem nowadays is more than a notion.”

As is true so often in Negro American life, Mrs. Jackson, the mother, is the head of her family.  Her husband had died several years ago; the smaller children were babies.  She had kept going by doing domestic work, and had kept the family together with the help of the older boy.

There is quiet courage about Mrs. Jackson, and yet now and then the clenching and unclenching of her work-hardened fingers betray an anxiety that does not register in her face.  I offer to wait until after she has eaten, but she says no, that she is too tired right now and would rather talk than eat.

“You finding the writing business any better since the way?” she asked.

“I’m afraid no,” I said.

“Is that so?  Well, I don’t know nothing about the writing business.  I just know that don’t many colored go in for it.  But I guess like everything else, some folks is doing good while others ain’t.  The other day I was over on 126th Street and saw them dispossessing a lawyer!  Yes, sir, it was like back in the thirties.  Things piled all over the sidewalk, the Negroes a-hanging out of the windows, and the poor man rushing around trying to get his stuff off the streets before it got dark and everything.”

I remembered the incident myself, having passed through the street that afternoon.  Files, chest of drawers, bedsteads, tables and barrels had been piled along the sidewalk with pink, blue and white mattresses and bundles of table linen and bedclothing piled on top.  And the crowd had been as she described: some indignant, some curious, and all talking in subdued tones so as not to offend the evicted family.  Law books had been piled upon the sidewalk near where a black and white kitten — and these are no writer’s details — played games with itself in the coils of an upright bedspring.  I told her I had seen the incident.

“Lord,” she said.  ”And did you see all those law books he had?  Looks like to me that anybody with all those books of law oughtn’t to never get dispossessed.

“I was dispossessed myself, back in thirty-seven, when we were all out of work.  And they threatened me once since Wilbur’s been in the Army.  But I stood up for my rights, and when the government sent the check we pulled through.  Anybody’s liable to get dispossessed though.”  She said it defensively.

“Just how do you find it otherwise?” I asked.

“Things is mighty tight, son . . . You’ll have to excuse me for calling you ‘son,’ because I suspect you must be just about Wilbur’s age.”  She sat back abruptly.  ”How come you not in the Army?” she asked.

“I’ve a wife and dependents,” I said.

“I see.”  She pondered.  ”Wilbur would have got married too, but he was helping me with the kids.”

“That’s the way it goes,” I said.

“Things is tight,” she said again.  ”With food so high and everything.  I sometimes don’t know what’s going to happen.  Then, too, with Wilbur in the Army we naturally misses the money he use to bring in.”  She regarded me shrewdly.  ”So you want to know about how we’re doing?  Don’t you live in Harlem?”

“Oh, yes, but I want to know what you think about it.”

“So’s you can write it up?”

“Some of it, sure, but I won’t use your name.”

“Oh, I don’t care ’bout that.  I want them to know how I feel.”

She became silent.  Then, “You didn’t tell me where you live, you know, ” she said cagily.  I had to laugh and she laughed too.

“I live up near Amsterdam Avenue,” I said.

“You telling me the truth?”

“Honest.”

“And is your place a nice one?”

“Just average.  You know how they go,” I said.

“I bet you live up there on Sugar Hill.”

“Not me,” I said.

“And you’re sure you’re not one of these investigators?”

“Of course not.”

“I bet you are too.” She smiled.

I shook my head and she laughed.

“They always starting something new,” she said. “You can’t keep up with them.”

But now she seemed reassured and settled down to talk, her hands clasped loosely in her lap against the checkered design of her dress.

“Well, we’re carrying on somehow. I’m still working and I manage to keep the young uns in school, and I pays the rent too.  I guess maybe it would be a little better if the government would send the checks on time . . .”

She paused and pointed across the room to the picture of a young woman.  ”And it would be even better if Mary, that’s my oldest after Wilbur — if she could get some of that defense training so she could get a job what pays decent money.  But it don’t look like she’s going to get anything.  She was out to the Western Electric plant in Kearney, New Jersey, the other day and they give her some kind of test, but that was the end of that.”

“Did she pass the test?” I asked.

“Sure she passed.  But they just put her name down on a card and told her they would keep her in mind.  They always do that.  They ask her a lot of questions; then they want to know if she ever had any experience in running machines, and when she says she ain’t, they just take down her name.  Now where is a colored girl going to get any experience in running all these kinds of machines they never even seen before?”

When I could not answer she threw up her hands.

“Well, there you have it, they got you any which way you turn.  A few gets jobs, but most don’t.”

“Things are much better outside of New York,” I said.

“So I hear,” she said. “Guess if I was younger I’d take the kids and move to Jersey or up to Connecticut, where I hear there’s some jobs for colored.  Or even down South.  Only I keep hearing about the trouble they’re having down there, and I don’t want the kids to grow up down there nohow.  Had enough of that when I was a kid . . .”

“Have any of your friends gotten work through the F.E.P.C.?” [editor's note: F.E.P.C. stands for Fair Employment Practices Commission; created by FDR, it sought to prevent companies with government contracts from discriminating on the basis of race of religion]

She thought for a moment.

“No, son.  It seems to me that that committee is doing something everywhere but here in New York.  Maybe that’s why it’s so bad for us — and you know it’s bad ’cause you’re colored yourself.”

As I heard the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen, her face suddenly assumed an outraged expression.

“Now you take my sister’s boy, William. God bless his poor soul. William sent to the trade schools and learned all about machines. He got so he could take any kind of machine apart and fix it and put it together again. He was machine-crazy! But he was a smart boy and a good boy. He got good marks in school too. But when he went to get a job in one of those factories where they make war machines of some kind, they wouldn’t take him ’cause he was colored – and they told him so!”

She paused for breath, a red flush dyeing her skin. The tinted portrait of a brown mother holding a brown, shiny-haired baby posed madonna-like from a calendar above her head.

“Well, when they wouldn’t take him some of the folks over to the church told him to take his case to the F.E.P.C. , and he did. But they had so many cases and it took so long that William got discouraged and joined up in the Merchant Marine. That poor boy was just so disgusted that he said that he would have enlisted in the Army, only that his mamma’s got two little ones like I have. So he went out on that boat ’cause it paid good money and a good bonus. It was real good money and he helped his mamma a head. But it didn’t last long before one of those submarines sunk the boat.”

Her eyes strayed to the window, where a line of potted plants crowded the sill, a profusion of green things slowly becoming silhouettes in the fading light. Snake plants, English ivy, and others, a potato plan in a glass jar, its vines twining around a cross of wood and its thousand thread-fine roots pushing hungrily against the wall of glass. A single red bloom pushed above the rest, and in one corner a corn plant threatened to touch the ceiling from the floor with its blade-like leaves.

The light was fading and her voice had slipped into the intense detachment of recent grief. “It was just about four months yesterday,” she said. “He was such a fine boy. Everybody liked William.”

She shook her head silently, her fingers gripped her folded arms as she swallowed tensely.

“It hurts to think about it,” she said, getting up and snapping on another light, revealing a child’s airplane model beneath the table. “Well, the folks from his union is being very nice to my sister, the whites as well as the colored. And you know,” she added, leaning toward me, “it really makes you feel a little better when they come round — the white ones, I mean — and really tries to help. Like some of these ole relief investigators who come in wanting to run your life for you, but really like they interested in you. Something like colored folks, in a way. We used to get after William for being with white folks so much, but these sure have shown themselves to be real friends.”

She stared at me as though it was a fact which she deeply feared to accept.

“Some of them is going to try and see that my sister gets some sort of defense work. But what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s a sin and a shame that a fine boy like William had to go fooling round on them ships when ever since he was a little ‘ole boy he’d been crazy about machines.”

“But don’t you think that the Merchant Marine is helping to win the war?” I said. “It takes brave men to go out there, and they’ve done a lot.”

“Sure they have,” she said. “Sure they have. But I’m not talking about that. Anybody could do what they had him doing on that boat. Anybody can wait table who’s got sense enough to keep his fingernails clean! Waiting tables, when he could make things on a machine!

“You see that radio there? Well, William made that radio. It ain’t no store set, no, sir, even though it looks like one. William made it for the kids. Made everything but the cabinet and you can hear way down to Cuba and Mexico with it. And to think of that boy! Oh, it makes me so mad I don’t know what to do! He ought to be here right now helping his mamma and lil brother and sister. But what can you do? You educated, son, you one of our educated Negroes that’s been to college and everything. Now you tell me, what can we do?” She paused. “I’m a colored woman, and colored women can take it. I can hit the chillies to the subway every morning and stand in the white folks’ kitchen all day long, but so much is happening in the world that I don’t know which way to turn. First it’s my sister’s boy, and then they sends my own boy down to Fort Bragg. I tells you I’m even afraid to open Wilbur’s letters that the government sends sometimes about his insurance or something like that ’cause I’m afraid it might be a message that Wilbur’s been beaten up or killed by some of those white folks down there. Then I gets so mad I don’t know what to do. I use to pray, but praying don’t do no good. And too, like the union folks was telling us when we was so broken up about William, we got to fight the big Hitler over yonder even with all the little Hitlers over here. I wish they’d burry up and send Wilbur on out of the country ’cause then maybe my mind would know some ease. Lord!” she sighed. “If it wasn’t so serious I’d break down and laugh at my ownself.”

She smiled now and the tension eased from her face and she leaned back against the divan and laughed. Then she became serious again.

“But son, you really can’t laugh about it. Not honestly laugh like you can about some things. It reminds me of that crazy man that’s always running up and down the streets up here. You know, the one who’s always hollering at the cars and making out like he’s throwing bombs?”

“Of course, I’ve seen him often,” I said.

“Sure you have. Well, I use to laugh at that poor man when he’d start acting the fool — you know how it is, you feel sorry for him but you can’t help but laugh. They say he got that way in the last war. Well, I can understand him better now. ‘Course I ain’t had no bombs bursting in my ears like he had. But yet and still, with things pulling me thisaway and that away, I sometimes feel that I’m going to go screaming up and down the streets like that poor fellow does.”

“He’s shell-shocked,” I said. “Sometimes I’ve seen him talking and acting just as normal as anyone.”

“Is that so?” she said. “I always though it was funny he never got hit by a car. I’ve seen them almost hit him, but he goes right back. One day I heard a man say, ‘Lord, if that crazy fellow really had some bombs he’d get rid of every car in Harlem!’ “

We laughed and I prepared to go.

“Sorry you found me so gloomy today, son. But you know, things have a way of just piling up these days and I just had to talk about them. Anyway, you asked for me to tell you what I thought.”

She walked with me to the door. Streetlamps glowed on the avenue, lighting the early dark. The after-school cries of children drifted dimly in from the sidewalk.

She shivered close beside me. “It’s getting chilly already,” she said. “I’m wondering what’s going to happen this winter about the oil and coal situation. The ole holes we have to live in can get mighty cold. Now can’t they though?”

I agreed.

“A friend of mine that moved up on Amsterdam Avenue about a month ago wanted to know why I don’t move out of Harlem. So I told her it wouldn’t do no good to move ’cause anywhere they let us go gets to be Harlem right on. I done moved round too much not to know that. Oh yes!”

She shook her head knowingly.

“Harlem’s like that old song says:

It’s so high you can’t get over it

So low, you can’t get under it,

And so wide, you can’t get round it . . .

“That’s the way it really is,” she said. “Well, good-bye, son.”

And as I went down the dimmed-out street the verse completed itself in my mind, You must come through by the living gate . . .

So there you have Mrs. Jackson. And that’s the way “it really is” for her and many like her who are searching for that gate of freedom. In the very texture of their lives there is confusion, war-made confusion, and the problem is to get around, over, under and through this confusion. They do not ask for a lighter share of necessary war sacrifices than other Americans have to hear. But they do ask for equal reasons to believe that their sacrifices are worthwhile, and they do want to be rid of the heavy resentment and bitterness which has been theirs for long before the war.

Forced in normal times to live at standards much lower than those the war has brought to the United States generally, they find it emotionally difficult to give their attention to the war. The struggle for existence constitutes a war in itself. The Mrs. Jackson of Harlem offers one of the best arguments for the stabilization of prices and the freezing of rents. Twenty-five percent of those still on relief come from our give percent of New York’s population. Mrs. Jackson finds it increasingly difficult to feed her children. She must pay six cents more on the dollar for food than do the mothers of similar-income sections elsewhere in the city. With the prospect of a heatless winter, Harlem, with its poor housing and high tuberculosis death rate, will know an increase of hardship.

It is an old story. Touch any phase of urban living in our democracy , and its worst aspects are to be found in Harlem. Our housing is the poorest, and our rents the highest. Our people are the sickest and Harlem Hospital the most overcrowded and understaffed. Our unemployment is the greatest, and our cost of food the most exorbitant. Our crime the most understandable and easily corrected, but the policemen sent among us the most brutal. Our desire to rid the world of fascism the most burning, and the obstacles placed in our way the most frustrating. Our need to see the war as a struggle between democracy and fascism the most intense, and our temptation to interpret it as a “color” war the most compelling. Our need to believe in the age of the “common man” the most hope-inspiring, and our reasons to doubt that it will include us the most disheartening. (This is no Whitmanesque catalogue of democratic exultations, while more than anything else we wish that it could be.”) And that’s the way it is.

Many of Mrs. Jackson’s neighbors are joining in the fight to freeze rents and for the broadening of the F.E.C.P. for Negroes and all other Americans. Their very lives demand that they back the President’s stabilization program. That they must be victorious is one of the necessities upon which our democratic freedom rests. The Mrs. Jacksons cannot make the sacrifices necessary to participate in a total war if the conditions under which they live, the very ground on which they must fight, continues its offensive against them. Nor is this something to be solved by propaganda. Morale grows out of realities, not out of words alone. Only concrete action will be effective, lest irritation and confusion turn into exasperation, and exasperation change to disgust and finally into anti-war sentiment (and there is such a danger). Mrs. Jackson’s reality must be democratized so that she may clarify her thinking and her emotions. And that’s the way it really is.

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