What I Learned in the Aftermath

 There’s a new Athens book out, The Crimson and Gold, by Mark Clegg.  A too-easy encapsulation of it would be to say that it is Remember the Titans for my hometown.  It is the story of the merger, in 1969-70, of white Athens High School and black Burney Harris High School into Clarke Central High School, told largely through the emotionally charged process of combining two successful high school football programs that their respective communities treasured.  The AHS Trojans and the BHHS Yellow Jackets became the Clarke Central Gladiators, who went on to  regularly kick the asses of my Cedar Shoals Jaguars.  I've only read a few passages, but I can sense already that the author’s agenda is not necessarily to tell an inspirational story of racial reconciliation.  It's real life, so things are more complicated. We’ll see.  I like what I've read so far.

As was the case when Grace Hale’s Cool Town came out, my first instinct when I get my hands on a book about Athens history is to skim through the index looking for familiar names.

 

Of course there are some big names there you might expect to see in any book about Athens.   MichaelStipe.  Dean William Tate.  There are also some era-specific minor celebrities:  Michael Thurmond.  Pete McCommons.  Horace King.  Andy Johnson.  But I was really looking for names that only a true aficionado might recognize.  The first such name I came across was that of E.T. Roberson.   I remember him as an assistant principal at my high school, Cedar Shoals, Clarke County’s second desegregated high school, opened in 1972 to ease the overcrowding that ensued when AHS and BHHS merged. 

 

Flipping to the pages the index directed me to, I immediately learned something about Mr. Roberson I had not known before: he was the last principal of Burney Harris High School.  His career embodied one of the not-uncommon side effects of desegregation: unmerited demotions for longtime educators who had spent their careers in black schools.

 

My one clear memory of Mr. Roberson is of him coming to chew out a classroom I was in.  We had been disrespecting a substitute teacher – a common enough occurrence in a 1979 public school, and rebuking the likes of us was the sort of necessary but demeaning task that assistant principals found themselves beset with.  In my memory, Mr. Roberson was always dressed impeccably.  He had a stately manner and way of speaking.  I had a class with his daughter.  She was smart and beautiful.  I never knew that her father had been principal of our “separate but equal” black high school.  Had I known, I might have perceived in Mr. Roberson’s manner as he reprimanded us a wearied tone that it wasn’t supposed to have been like this for him.  Desegregation had to happen, but it came with losses.  That's part of what this book is about.

 

In the index I also saw Lyons Middle School. In 7^th and 8^th grade, from 1975-77, I went to Lyons.  Until desegregation a few years before, it had been Clarke County’s black middle school.  I don't recall knowing that.  Someone might have told me and I missed it, but I can’t recall being aware of it when I was a student there.  The repurposed Lyons I attended was a culture shock for me – my classmates were not wall-to-wall faculty brats as they had been at my previous school – and I did not handle the change gracefully.  I was a snob.  There were kids at Lyons, black and white, who could have been great friends to me had I been more open to them and their ways.   I did have some great teachers.  My brother and I fairly worshipped Coach Harris - his anti-smoking lecture, derived from his experiences guarding Japanese POWs during the war, was more effective than any government label on cigarette packages.  As for the physical plant of the school, to me it was just fine.  The classrooms were spacious.  The cafeteria tables were great for playing paper football.  The real tell about what Lyons had once been was its location: a scraggly plot of land between the Athens airport and a quarry.  Clegg writes that the distant, out-of-sight, unappealing placement of Lyons fit a pattern that Athens’ black community noticed and resented.  Black schools were never in attractive places, and Lyons was particularly inaccessible.  Lyons alum Horace King (one of the Jackie Robinsons of UGA football, later a Detroit Lion) recalls bus rides of over an hour. Years after I moved on from Lyons it merged with Burney-Harris into a single middle school.  Today that school is in a big, modern building, and what’s left of the old Lyons building by the airport is a National Guard armory. 

 

I recognized another school name in the index:  West Broad School.  I see that school every day – over my desk there’s a newspaper clipping, a human interest photo of my father and my brother walking down the front steps of West Broad.  The photo was taken on my first day of kindergarten, in 1968 – Rob had come along for the ride.  In that school year the full racial integration of the Clarke County Schools was close to fruition - only the upper grades remained (that's the story Clegg tells).  West Broad was an elementary school, and it had been adopted by the UGA College of Education as a lab school.  I don’t remember much about school that year, but I love the photo and I like having it over my desk at school.  Pop holds Rob’s hand as they navigate the steps.  As a son it is a beautiful reminder to me of the kind of parent my father was, and as an educator it evokes for me my family’s devotion to school and schooling.  These days the photo has an additional meaning for me: it's an artifact of regional history.  Those steps I walked up on my very first day of thirteen years of public school – a short time before they led up to what was known as the West Broad Public School for Negroes.  

Until I was an adult I did not know that two of the schools I attended had once been black schools.  Or, if I ever knew it, I had forgotten, suggesting to me that their origins must have been rarely spoken of, if ever.  The South's collective racial history was not concealed from us, we were taught the big picture story (with the good guys and bad guys correctly identified), but its local manifestations, people and places and stories that would have made it more real, less abstract, went largely unmentioned.  

 

Clegg's book is about the desegregation time itself, and that's the real story, not the aftermath that I passed through.  The black Athenians who pursued justice in that era have the more important recollections to share.  What I want to stress with these tangential, postcripty memories of mine is the peculiar reticence of the community I grew up in about the recent reality of segregation.  As a Southern white man of my generation I know I'm not alone in this perception.   Author Michael Griffith published a wonderful essay in the Oxford American about growing up in Orangeburg, S.C. in about the same era, about playing peewee football on an integrated team coached with verve by students from the local HBCU, South Carolina State College, in 1975.  The team practiced in the shadow of a gymnasium named for the three SCSC students killed in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1968, just a few years before. Griffith's essay is mainly about the shroud of public silence over that tragedy: he learned about it only as an adult, long after he had left Orangeburg, and the lack of acknowledgement mystified him:  "Why had no one mentioned the only historically signifiant event in Orangeburg since Sherman passed through on his way to torch Columbia?"   There was something strange in the willingness of both sides to avoid, to the extent that they could, reckoning together with "the legacy and the burden" of what had transpired, whites for their own comfort, blacks for starkly practical reasons.  A collective, forward-looking "politesse" partially explained the hush.  Griffith's recollection of that vibe in the Orangeburg of his childhood echoes how I experienced the mid-seventies in Athens, and, like him, I'm somewhat perplexed that the people in my orbit could dummy up so thoroughly about something so significant and so recent.  Because, chronologically speaking, that's what the segregation era was: recent.  Only yesterday.  It was in history books, but we lived directly in its wake, up to our necks in the residue of our own apartheid.     

 

I think that willful obliviousness to that recency had some harmful effects, one of them a disinclination to reckon fully with the implications of the Civil Rights era.  The United States is on the verge of celebrating 250 years as a nation.  Our Sesquicentennial.  I remember celebrating the Bicentennial at Lyons.  They brought us into the cafetorium to watch 1776.  I was a history nerd and I really liked that movie.  But as we watched Adams and Jefferson and Franklin sing their way through the founding, I doubt that any of us kids knew that the history of the building we were in testified loudly to the fact that the songs were about unfinished business.  In adulthood I see that in some rather important ways the birthday we were celebrating in 1976 was questionably dated.  Commentators I admire have trenchantly argued that as an authentically multiracial democracy, the United States only dates back to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  From that view (one at least worth incorporating into your conception of U.S. history, if not adopting fully), our nation is not a venerable 250 years old, but a mere 60 years old.  Practically juvenile.  

 

For me, recalling my childhood exposure to the only-yesterday legacy of segregated schooling in my hometown reinforces the perspective that as a polity we're really quite young.  This incarnation of the United States, the closest it has ever come to the egalitarian ideals of its founding, is still a fledgling, still very fragile, and still capable of withering if the forces of retrogression have their way.  This is a critical time.  Make sure you vote.   Make sure you vote like a patriot of this young nation.  

No Hugging, Please

 

I like to assign my students what I call a "persuasive personal essay."  The idea is to practice being a convincing arguer by making a case for which, thanks to personal experience, you have most of the pertinent evidence you'll need already at hand.  They read professional models on food allergies (less coddling, says author) and travel baseball (better than you think, says author).  I tell my students that the topic they choose needn't be controversial - sometimes the case they're making is that some obscure phenomenon is attention-worthy.  Nevertheless, my students sometimes gravitate toward the tiresome usual suspects of persuasive writing topics.  In order the help them see that they can really nerd out on this assignment, I composed a model myself on a topic that cannot matter to more than 100 people in the world: marking violations in youth ultimate.   I concede that I am irrationally worked up about this "issue."   A coaching colleague read this and gave me a kind of concerned, "Good to get that off your chest?" look.  Yes.

“WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY ON YOUR TEAM KNOW WHAT TEN FEET IS?”

Last March I could be heard yelling that (or words to that effect) during a high school Ultimate Frisbee match in Chattanooga.  I was yelling at the coach of the team my team was competing against. In doing so, I was behaving badly by the standards of the sport I coach.   In fact, I think that kind of yelling is frowned upon in youth sports in general.  I’m sorry I did that.  Kind of.  A little.

In fact, I'm not particularly sorry.

My lack of remorse may be seen as a betrayal of a cherished principle of my sport, “Spirit of the Game”, but in a peculiar way I believe that  I may be showing fealty to it.  As many people know, Ultimate, from its inception in the late 1960s, has governed itself in part by what we call “Spirit of the Game”.   It reads like this in the official rules of Ultimate:

Spirit of the Game is a set of principles which places the responsibility for fair play on the player. Highly competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of mutual respect among competitors, adherence to the agreed upon rules, or the basic joy of play.  All players are responsible for knowing, administering, and adhering to the rules. The integrity of ultimate depends on each player’s responsibility to uphold the Spirit of the Game, and this responsibility should remain paramount.

     The aspect of Spirit of the Game that most people seem to focus on involves how players are charged with treating each other – with “mutual respect.”   How that quality shows up (or doesn’t show up) in a match can take many forms, and not everybody agrees on what constitutes mutual respect.  Are we supposed to high five our opponents? Is trash talk OK?  Is spiking the disc after a score disrespectful?  Is it essential that we gather in a circle after the match with our opponent and talk about how things went?   There is not universal agreement on any of these questions. 

As a fifteen-year youth coach I find myself less concerned these days with vibey mutual respect among Ultimate players than I am with what constitutes “knowing, administering, and adhering to the rules.”   In Ultimate we self-officiate – players call their own fouls, sometimes on themselves.   Part of the reason for this practice is necessity, for the same reason that rec league tennis matches and basketball in public parks have self-officiating – even if we wanted referees, we couldn’t afford as many as it would take to call every match.  We have no choice but to do it ourselves.  Beyond this practical consideration, self-officiating is also a concrete expression of the ideals of Spirit of the Game: players are enjoined to hold themselves responsible for fair play, as opposed to doing whatever they can get away with until a referee stops them.  The corps of youth coaches are at the ground level of teaching the fair-play-upholding disposition that, combined with knowledge of the rules, makes sound self-officiating possible.  We have an important job.

But it is a job with built in frustrations that can strain our self-control. Every youth coach in Ultimate knows that learning to self-officiate soundly is as difficult, in its own way, as learning to accurately throw a 30 yard outside-in forehand.  There are many rules to learn, things happen fast in a match, and the protocol of settling rules disputes on the field is difficult for ten-year veterans to uphold, let alone novices.   As such, we anticipate imperfect implementation (to say the least) of the rules in youth Ultimate.  Fouls that aren’t really fouls get called, players who are out of bounds get called in bounds, a false understanding of the rules settles a dispute, the heat of competition erodes a player’s judgment.  That’s how it goes.  We try to roll with it, we try to stay out of what’s happening on the field and let the players settle things, and over time we train our players to improve in self-officiating just as we train them to make good cuts.   

So we youth coaches have to be patient and tolerant about self-officiating fails in our division – they are part of the learning process – but I have lost my ability to be patient with a particular subset of rule violations, those related to marking.  

In Ultimate, the person guarding the thrower is called the marker.  As we often say to markers, “You are the most important defender on the field”, and they are.  They have the role of trying to force throws into areas where the defense has the best chance of making a block.   The marker has some rules to follow, though.  He counts off the ten seconds the thrower has to make a pass – he can’t rush that count.   The marker has to keep the space of a disc between himself and the thrower, and that disc space includes his arms – he can’t wrap them around the thrower and make it impossible for him to pivot.  And the marker cannot be abetted by a second marker.  Any extra defender focused on the thrower has to be at least ten feet away from the person with the disc.   

It was violations of these rules of marking that had me yelling at a fellow coach in Chattanooga.  A couple of months later in Conyers, Georgia, my outrage over a marking violation compelled me to commit another youth coaching sin:  I made a foul call from the sidelines.   

What is it about marking violations that sends this otherwise mild-mannered coach over the edge?  A dubious line call might upset me, but I wouldn’t get into a shouting match over it.   What makes marking violations so appalling to me that I break spirit protocol and feel so little guilt about it?

One way marking violations differ from other kinds of self-officiating disputes is that they have a whiff of deliberate disregard for fair play to them.  Many problems with rule adherence (perhaps most of them) arise at least semi-innocently from the muddle of competition.  Things happen in the maelstrom of a match that defy 100% just resolution - Was that a pick?   Did you bumping in to me prevent me from making that catch?  Did your foot touch the line?  A player can commit a defensive foul without intending to, or honestly believe she caught a disc that may have brushed the ground first.  But marking violations tend to involve making an unethical choice.  Counting fast and double-teaming and wrapping aren’t honest mistakes – they result from decisions made by someone who either doesn’t know the rules (but should) or isn’t really committed to fair play.    

In Chattanooga, the team we were competing against routinely violated the rule against double-teaming the thrower (the ten-foot rule mentioned above – the photo is from that match).  In many instances my throwers found themselves hemmed in in ways the double team rule is meant to prevent. Some defenders even inched closer as the stall count increased, as though a high count somehow nullifies the double team rule.  I urged my team to protest the persistent violations, but it kept happening. I had words with the other team’s coaches. Loud words.  Why couldn’t they keep their second marker outside a ten-foot radius?  Did they need a refresher course on basic units of measurement?  It was mystifying.  The other team seemed well-coached in their execution of a zone defense, so why couldn’t they execute it by the rules?  The responses of the other coaches to my complaints weren’t satisfying. They said they had tried.  I could see them trying, once I complained.  However, considering the deliberate nature of marking violations, I had to wonder how hard they had tried, especially since the violations kept happening.  I don’t believe these coaches wanted their players to cheat, but it appeared to me that in practice they had treated their duty to teach their players to know, administer, and adhere to the rules as an afterthought, and by the time their players were tasked with self-officiating in an actual match, they couldn’t do the job soundly.   

Two months later in Conyers my team was competing against the top team in our division.   We had little chance of winning, but of course I wanted us to put up the best fight we could, and my boys were answering the bell.  At one point we forced a turnover near the other team’s goal line.   This was a good opportunity for us to keep the match competitive. Our player who had picked up the disc and prepared to attempt a scoring pass suddenly found himself nearly embraced by a defender.  He must have felt like he was getting hugged by Buddy the Elf.  It was a classic wrapping violation.   After a few moments our player called “disc space” and finally said “violation” and play stopped so the dispute could get resolved.   All this happened right in front of me.   As our player tried to explain his grievance, I feared that in the spirit of reconciliation this open-and-shut case of rule-breaking was going to get resolved as though it were just a difference of opinion, with some kind of appalling compromise.  So I interrupted.   The protocols of youth Ultimate would allow me explain the operative rule and then let the two players settle the dispute, but instead I went too far:  I played referee.  I physically imitated what the defender had done and said, “You were wrapping him.  You can’t do that. He has to be allowed to pivot.”   In my mind I was adding, “This is obviously your second or third year of playing.   How do you not know this?  What’s the matter with your coach? Doesn’t he know teaching you to mark fairly is part of his job?”   But I didn’t.  I had gone too far as it was making a call from the sideline.  That isn’t done.  

I overstepped my authority in that situation, but that incident illustrates a second major problem I have with marking violations:  the gratuitous burden they place on the thrower.  One of the coaches in Chattanooga responded to my double team complaint by asserting that my players were free to call the violations.  That’s true – they were.  But anyone who has played Ultimate and thinks about it will realize what a big ask that can be.  Getting a wrapper to back off is like having to ask someone to stop tickling you while you drive a car.  Calling a marking violation requires the player who already has the most cognitively demanding job on the field to add needless refereeing to his analytical overload.  At the time my player was getting wrapped in Conyers, he was busy trying to read the downfield defense and pick out a promising target and assess the reset possibilities and speculate about what throws he could execute.  In ten seconds.  Under pressure. That’s a lot for one brain to process without the additional challenge of refereeing.  And, to reiterate, the refereeing challenge should never happen in the first place because wrapping is a violation that doesn’t happen by accident.   My double-teamed throwers in Chattanooga had been presented with the same unfair predicament.   

I don’t think anybody on either coaching staff was happy with me after those incidents, and I confess I didn’t set a good example for any of the players present.  Spirit of the Game obliges us to seek more constructive ways to resolve conflicts than the anger-driven reactions I chose. Fortunately, I don’t believe any grave damage was done in either case.   After each match we had a pleasant spirit circle with the other team.   In Chattanooga the opposition had identified our player who best embodied the “mutual respect among competitors” aspect of spirit of the game and presented him with a quirky little prize, a fun toy, as a token of appreciation.  That side of Spirit of the Game has become passé to some people, but I still enjoy it and I know my players do.  I do love the good vibes.  And yet, I think it would be better for the sport if coaches like the ones I encountered in Chattanooga made sure their teams spent more time learning the double team rule and less time shopping for silly gifts.

Recent Media Consumption Two: Hella Anachronistic Language

     Historical fiction is my preferred genre these days.  Particular favorites are the TV series Mad Men, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, and the novels of E.L. Doctorow (The March in particular).  Maybe the best thing about historical fiction is that even though it partakes of history, it isn't history.  In the postcript of her novel In the Time of the Butterflies (a fictional account of the Trujillo-resisting Mirabal sisters of the Dominican Republic), Julia Alvarez explains that distinction well:  "A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart."  Yes.  To read Doctorow's The March is not to scrutinize Sherman's battle plans but to be a tourist alongside his vinegary soul on the road to Savannah.  

      So creators of historical fiction aren't historians (thank God), but if their work leans on history for its appeal, then they owe something to history, right?  But how much?  As one commentator wrote, historical fiction is frontier territory - nobody knows exactly what the rules are. Any fictional account of the past raises the question of what level of fidelity its creator owes to the historical record.  Readers know what went down, and they expect certain things to happen. Mantel surely knew that her account of the marriage of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII couldn't lead to some kind of heartwarming rapprochement between them - divorce through decapitation had to be on Anne's schedule.  But other than details of that magnitude, what fact-based constraints was Mantel under?  I’m sure she took care not to bend the record too much, but I don't want to dwell on whether she did.  What makes the experience of reading her Thomas Cromwell novels so glorious is not that she maintained a bookkeeper’s adherence to the known factual details but that she used her creative brilliance to infuse new life into those hyperfamiliar characters and their overtold story, giving them depths and nuances and psychological drama they never had before.   

     So I make the complaints below in that spirit. I do not want to be the historical fiction accuracy police, the prig who only flaunts his capacity to miss the point when he whinges, “Actually, there's zero evidence that Cromwell and More ever met when they were kids.”  Who cares? It's plausible, and the story is a thousand times better that way.   

     And yet . . . 

    The last few days I’ve been watching two new TV series set in olden times: Manhunt, about the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination and the search for John Wilkes Booth, and Palm Royale set in Palm Beach’s monied social scene circa 1970. They're both entertaining, and the production designers have gone all out to give these shows an authentically retro look, both in the attire their characters wear and the settings in which they move.  The performers wield swords and wooden tennis rackets as the characters they depict would have.  But the things they say to each other?  The top hats and mod fabrics may be old timey, but the language isn't.  Jarring anachronisms in phrasing abound.  If you have any ear at all you will hear terminology that is not just somewhat unmatched to the times but utterly out of place, making members of Lincoln's cabinet sound like they've just flown in from a corporate seminar in Orlando.  For instance, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton says of assassination that it was part of the “playbook” of the warring sides.  Playbook?  It's supposed to be 1865, man - why are you talking like Joe Namath?  In another scene a Union officer who must be a time traveler from the Vietnam-era CIA tells detectives to find all the "intel" they can on Booth.  In Palm Royale the members of a militant feminist group use “construct” as a noun and “people of color” in an SJW fashion that is about three decades premature.  These aren't isolated instances.  Characters in both series regularly smear conspicuously 21st century terminology all over an otherwise meticulously created period vibe.  

    Yes, creating dialogue that is both era-authentic and engaging to a modern audience may be the trickiest aspect of writing historical fiction.  Read Arthur Miller's The Crucible and try not to wince as his 1692 protagonist claims to have quailed to bring men out of ignorance. Writers who dare to mix archaic vocabulary with contemporary language must feel that they run the risk of sounding silly.  But doesn't it sound sillier to have a Civil War character use NFL lingo? And these deviations from the idiom of the times are so baffling because these shows are at their best when they stay true to their respective eras and get us neck-deep in that foreign country that is the past.  Though separated by 100 years, Manhunt and Palm Royale are closer to each other than to us in that they depict that long gone world where print media ruled.  It is kind of jarring but historically authentic to see characters in 1865 Washington and 1970 Palm Beach alike get worked up about what's in a newspaper, a newspaper they clutch furiously.  In the same vein, characters in both series flex their connections to influential print journalists.  That's really how it used to be. The trouble is, because of the ways these series are written, I half expect these same characters to use the word "flex" the way I just did.  I don't get it.  At times it is as though the writers didn't even try.

Recent Media Consumption One: Institutions Doing a Poor Job of Getting to the Bottom of Something

     I think everyone has a childhood experience of a moment from TV or film that was so startling to their young mind that it became a permanent background feature of their consciousness, like a light in a closet that won't ever go off.   For me one of those moments is an image from an old black and white film that I happened upon on TV.  I don’t remember how old I was or any other context, just that this particular visual posted up in my memory and never left.   There was a man, imprisoned, chained to his bed.  He reached under the bed and pulled out a book.  The book was called Paris, the pages were disintegrating, and it was covered with crawling ants.  That disturbing image became an ur nightmare vision for me, a picture of what it is to be utterly forsaken.  Whether I watched the rest of the film I don’t remember.  The image of the forlorn prisoner clutching an ant-infested book was all that lasted.  And boy did it last.  I used to see it in my mind's eye on a regular basis.   Maybe that was the kind of thing that happened to you when you got expelled from school.

     I didn’t find out until many years later that the film I had been watching was not a horror movie but an inspiring biopic, The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and the chained-up character was Alfred Dreyfus.  The Dreyfus of history was a priggish but capable young officer in the French army.  He was also Jewish.  In 1894, in a case that divided the French nation, a military court convicted Dreyfus of selling classified information to Germany, degraded him in a dramatic public ceremony, and sent him to solitary imprisonment on Devil's Island, off the coast of Guyana.  The trial had been riddled with violations of due process.  Dreyfus defiantly proclaimed his innocence, and while he languished in prison his advocates (mostly members of France's beleaguered Jewish community) worked doggedly to clear his name and bring him home.  One of those advocates was Zola, an all-timer French novelist, champion of the downtrodden.  With a famous newspaper editorial entitled “J’Accuse”, Zola accused the military of railroading Dreyfus, of sheltering the real traitor, and of obstructing exposure of their injustices.  Zola was sentenced to a year in prison for libel, but in the end he was vindicated, along with Dreyfus himself.  It came to light at last that the case against Dreyfus was not just weak but utterly fabricated.  In 1899, in a preposterous attempt at face-saving, a court upheld Dreyfus' conviction but "pardoned" him, liberating him from Devil's Island.  After a few more years passed it became politically viable for the government to drop the pretense of guilt altogether: in 1906, Dreyfus was fully exonerated and restored to his post in the army.

     Zola also happened to be the author of the decomposing novel that TV Dreyfus had under his bed.  Perhaps because of that vivid memory, I'm kind of fascinated by this story.  So when a source I trust recommended Robert Harris’ L'Affaire Dreyfus novel An Officer and a Spy, I put all other reading aside and dove in (but only after thoroughly checking the book for ants).  Harris narrates the story not through the experience of Dreyfus himself but that of Colonel Georges Picquart.  A highly placed internal security officer in the French army, the Picquart of history was the reluctant but tenacious whistleblower who uncovered the injustices that Zola proclaimed in L'Aurore.  Harris chose well in building his novel around Picquart, as he was a player in the Dreyfus Affair from start to finish. We see him first as Dreyfus' military college instructor and a willing participant in his prosecution, later as a canny sleuth and an intrepid foe of corruption, willing to sacrifice his career and go to jail on behalf of a man he doesn't even particularly like (Harris gives his fictional Picquart the same muted anti-semitism as his real life counterpart).  Picquart's animating principle is duty, a conception of duty that puts integrity before self-preservation.  Don't try that "I was just following orders" stuff with Georges Picquart!  And because his investigation features all the classic espionage tropes - covert surveillance, secret meetings, coded letters, elaborately choreographed dropoffs of volatile documents, "Can I trust anybody?" paranoia, snooping for hidden files in a darkened office before time runs out -  An Officer and a Spy works not only as historical fiction but as a spy thriller.  The heart-pounding moment when Picquart realizes that the handwriting in an incriminating letter is not Captain Dreyfus's but that of Major Esterhazy (the real traitor) - it's like something out of an Mi5 drama.  

      Harris' novel entertains, but the story also speaks in a serious way to our times, as the Dreyfus Affair always has.  As Harris depicts it, the ease with which the French military frames Dreyfus owes a lot to straight-up bigotry, widespread and rampant.  The problem isn't just a few well-placed anti-Semites in the army.  Huge swaths of the public are all too ready to believe that Dreyfus' ethnicity alone is a sign of guilt. The case of the Central Park Five comes to mind. But there’s more. I also see a contemporary parallel in the insider nature of Picquart’s story.  He's a prodigy, a rising star in the French high command.  They clearly see him as one of their own and count on his loyalty when they promote him to head of intelligence.  Picquart has no motive other than attentive curiosity in revisiting the now-closed Dreyfus case, but once he smells something fishy there's no possibility of him looking the other way or calling off the dogs.  And when he finds the unpleasant truth he understands very well that to the men he serves it is a damning one.  It will make them look corrupt and incompetent.  But he hopes that when confronted with the facts they will swallow hard and accept that they have to do the right thing - duty and the good of the army demand it.  But they don't.  Instead, they double down on the bogus conviction, conspire to keep Picquart's findings concealed, and run him out of the country and eventually out of the army. Like Alexander Vindman and Liz Cheney, Picquart finds out the hard way that there are so-called leaders among us who may trumpet their patriotism and rectitude but who do not in fact love their country, or its institutions, or honor, or truth. The only thing they value is their own stature.    

     Picquart's ordeal was still very much on my mind when I watched The Teacher’s Lounge, the new German film about a scandal that entangles a passionate young teacher and her sixth grade class and much of the school staff.  Like An Officer and a Spy, The Teacher’s Lounge depicts the multiple blindnesses – some willful - that can afflict institutions as they fumble to resolve crises within their ranks.  In this case, attempts to solve a string of petty thefts expose problems of trust between teachers and students, between teachers and parents, between teachers and each other.  And there are issues of child development and institutional racism and coerced testimony and rogue surveillance and image-consciousness in schools.  There's even a crisis in student publications!  This old student newspaper advisor was really taken with that storyline.  And there were more aspects The Teacher's Lounge to compare with my own professional experiences. In my career I’ve seen multiple cases in which administrators and teachers (myself included) miscalculate in what they’re willing to make a big deal of.  I see that problem in this story.  These people have been to the Captain Queeg School of Prioritizing.   I also recognized in the main character, Carla Nowak, how a kind of professional vanity can be mixed in with what may appear on the surface to be pure teacherly selflessness.  But what struck me most of all is a setting choice the director made, one that evokes how all-consuming this work can be for some of us, some of the time: other than one very brief scene we never see Nowak outside of school.   It is as though she lives there, has no existence apart from her professional self.  There are multiple shots of her standing at her classroom window watching kids come and go, like some imprisoned person watching the world outside.   She's like the Dreyfus of my memory, chained to her desk instead of a bed.