Remembering Jan Palach

Twelve years ago Don and I spent three wonderful days in Prague; we visited Vienna and Salzburg too, as well as the charming alpine town of St. Wolfgang on the beautiful Wolfgangsee lake. There were wonders and delights in all those places, but my favorite, without doubt, was Prague. In fact I have never been so enchanted by a new city. From Ron’s Rainbow Guesthouse (!) where we spent our nights, to the spectacular St. Vitus Cathedral high above the river, to the packed-with-activity fifteenth century Charles Bridge that takes you to the cathedral, to the rathskellars selling great sausages and beer, to the warmth of the people – it was all just perfect. I even heard a concert version of Porgy and Bess played by the great Czech Philharmonic in the exquisite Rudolfinum.

Prague was not always such a warm and welcoming place. In late summer of 1968, responding to Alexander Dubček’s attempts at liberalizing the government, the Soviet Union invaded the country, closing its armed fist around the throat of progress. On 16 January 1969 Jan Palach, a student of history and political economy at Charles University, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion and the complacency of the population. He urged them in a letter sent to several prominent leaders to rise up and throw off their oppressors.  He died from his burns three days later.

The international press picked up the story and that’s how I, an idealistic VISTA volunteer in Aurora, IL, came to know of it. I did not read the papers everyday but somehow I saw this story and I have never forgotten it. I wrote in my journal, "Just thinking about the courage of his convictions, and the sad state of the world that made him do it -- it's so depressing but, then, also optimistic -- for the hope of the world is with people like him." I've lost most (all?) of that idealism, but when I finally made that trip to Prague I visited Jan’s grave and cried all over again for his bravery and conviction.

Now, all these years later, HBO Europe has released a film about Palach, the reaction to his self-immolation and the government's attempts to quash the story and deny the country its hero. Titled Burning Bush, it was originally a Czech mini-series which has been made into a three-part film; it is available from Netflix.

I have watched the first two parts and am eagerly awaiting the third. I cried three times so far. I don’t know that most Americans watching it would have my reaction, but, as I said, I’ve known of Jan Palach since 1969 and his story has haunted me. He was almost exactly my age at the time he took his life and I have repeatedly asked myself if I have ever believed in anything so strongly. During the Vietnam War I said I would go to jail rather than be drafted, but would I?

I don’t know – and I’m talking about only being willing to go to jail, not setting myself on fire. Watching this docudrama forces me to realize I have never truly been threatened. Tanks have never roared through my town; my life has been easy compared to Jan Palach’s and the Czechs who lived through the late sixties and into the seventies.

His sacrifice did not end the Soviet takeover at the time, but the resentments he fanned smoldered for twenty years, finally erupting in the Velvet Revoluition of 1989, ending the Communist control of Czechoslovakia and freeing the people from Soviet control.

Like the Czech people, I will never forget him and will always be emboldened by his courage. Thank you, HBO, for letting me remember his power.

The memorial in front of the National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square, Prague,

to Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, another student who burned himself to death a month after Palach,

NOT a message I enjoyed reading

As you may have learned from reports in the media, one of the doctoral students who returned recently from a research mission to Liberia was hospitalized in isolation on Wednesday night after developing a low-grade fever.

I understand that this situation may be worrying to some of you, to your families and friends, and to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. 

-President Peter Salovey, Yale University, 16 Oct 2014 

First South Africa, then Texas and Spain and now New Haven.

I am not an alarmist, but things tend to get worse before they get better and now Ebola may have landed in my back yard. MAY have. We don’t know yet and I am not losing any sleep over it. Still, I take little comfort from all the comforting words when I see that, notwithstanding all the protocols we thought were in place in Texas, we learned of another sick health care worker, and of her travels on a commercial plane.

Forgive me if I have my doubts and if I think this is how so many disaster movies started. Everything’s calm and normal and then slowly one thing goes wrong and before you know it the monkeys and apes have taken over the planet and the Statue of Liberty is lying on a beach.

Does art imitate life or is it in fact the other way around?

Stay tuned.

Update: Yale New Haven Hospital has confirmed the patient does NOT have Ebola.

A bullet dodged.

Honoring the Vietnam War?

I read a piece in the NY Times yesterday about anti-protesters in Hong Kong. These are the people who are protesting the protests — those being led by students in the city, demanding more freedom from the Chinese authorities.

I was taken back to May of 1970. Four days after the Kent State and Jackson State murders the AFL-CIO organized a bunch of construction workers to protest an anti-war march filled with high school and college students in lower Manhattan. (Picture below). Some seventy people were injured and there were six arrests. Compared to Tiananmen Square or to the current situation in Hong Kong, this was a small event, but the image filled newspapers across the country and fanned the already blazing flames as the country tore itself apart over the disastrous war in Vietnam.

Yet another article in the Times took me back to Vietnam days. This one, Paying Respects, Pentagon Revives Vietnam, and War Over Truth discusses the website the Pentagon has launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war.

According to the Times

the extensive website, which has been up for months, largely describes a war of valor and honor that would be unrecognizable to many of the Americans who fought in and against it. 

Leading Vietnam historians complain that it focuses on dozens of medal-winning soldiers while giving scant mention to mistakes by generals and the years of violent protests and anguished debate at home.

I haven’t spent much time on the site, but I did look up May 4, 1970, the day that the words "Kent State" came not to mean a college but, rather, a date — things were either “before Kent State” or after. The picture below shows the scant account the Pentagon gives to that momentous event.

As I click through the timeline, the long list of soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor makes the whole enterprise seem like a glorious battle where truth and the American Way fought against the red hoards from the North. That’s not what I remember. I remember endless deaths, endless broken promises, endless broken lives. I remember My Lai and street executions and naked children running from napalmed villages. I remember being proud of Walter Cronkite when, on February 27, 1968, he told the truth to the American people, saying "it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."

The Times report includes the following:

The glossy view of history has now prompted more than 500 scholars, veterans and activists — including the civil rights leader Julian Bond; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the top-secret Pentagon Papers; Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan; and Peter Yarrow of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary — to join Mr. Hayden in demanding the ability to correct the Pentagon’s version of history and a place for the old antiwar activists in the anniversary events. 

This week, in a move that has drawn the battle lines all over again, the group sent a petition to Lt. Gen. Claude M. Kicklighter, the retired Vietnam veteran who is overseeing the commemoration, to ask that the effort not be a “one-sided” look at a war that tore a generation apart. 

General Kicklighter declined to be interviewed, but a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Tom Crosson, said in an email that the mission of the commemoration, as directed by Congress, is to “assist a grateful nation” in thanking veterans and their families. He said that the Pentagon was willing to make corrections “when factual errors or potential mischaracterizations are brought to our attention,” and that “there is no attempt to whitewash the history of the Vietnam War.

A grateful nation thanking veterans? Come on! I am a patriotic son of a career military man, but the Vietnam War was a mistake from day one, we were never a grateful nation as far as Vietnam was concerned and we have no reason to thank the Pentagon. As for the veterans, I honor their sacrifice and I mourn their loss, but the war was wrong. The honorable thing to do at the time was to resist the draft, resist the war and kick the generals in the balls.

Perhaps the second two are still honorable in 2014.

She killed her children!

It was in June 2001, that Andrea Yates drowned all five of her children, claiming that she was saving them from hell. Marybeth Tinning apparently killed nine of her children, though not in one fell swoop. She enjoyed doing it for over fourteen years. (Bad habits are hard to break). You may remember Susan Smith; she strapped her two boys in a car and pushed it into a lake, claiming at first that a man had abducted them – “a black man,” said the racist murderer.

Deena Schlosser, a true believer, used a knife to amputate both arms of her eleven-month old, who then bled to death. Cops found her singing to Jesus. Robin Lee Row proved that lightning can strike twice; she collected on a life insurance policy in 1980 when her son died from a fire and then twelve years later turned off the smoke alarm and burned her husband, son and daughter alive. The lightning struck twice; the insurance company didn’t.

Frances Newton can’t tell us why she did what she did: the state of Texas executed her in 2005 for shooting to death her husband, her seven year-old son and twenty-one month-old daughter in 1987. Susan Eubanks out shot Newton: she killed four sons, execution style, blaming her alcoholic parents.

In 2005 China Arnold did the poodle-in-a-microwave urban legend one better: she stuffed her four week-old daughter in a microwave oven and zapped her to death.

In an average year over two hundred (200!) mothers kill their children. Last night I went to see the story of perhaps the first maternal filicide, Euripides’s Medea, as performed by London’s National Theatre and shown in auditoriums around the country in High-Def. It was a brilliant production and still packs a wallop 2,500 years later, even though the oncoming murders are telegraphed throughout the play. You know what’s coming but are still horrified by it when it arrives.


A friend of mine used to come to New York annually and was in the habit of asking me to recommend THE show she should see. One year I told her that the current Medea was getting rave reviews; she went.

And hated it. She said, as above, “She killed her children!” Well, yes, I thought, she’s Medea, while asking, “Wasn’t it a great performance?”

My friend couldn’t get past the murders. She never again asked me for a recommendation.

For my part I thoroughly enjoyed last night’s brilliantly staged, locomotive-fast Medea. And you know, I can’t get it out of my head as I read about Tom Cutinella, a 16-year-old Long Island high-school football player killed on the field this week. Another sixteen year-old, this one from Staten Island, and a twelve year-old from New Jersey also died during football practice recently.

Is it a stretch to say that mothers who allow their teenage sons to play football are killing them? Maybe. Maybe not.

RIP Tom