TV Review of 'Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America' by Paul Nathanson

For a few years in the 1990s, I was roving correspondent, sometime co-anchor, and book reviewer for Gay Fairfax, a weekly television magazine series telecast over Channel 10 in Fairfax County, Virginia, and bicycled to other cable-access TV channels in the Washington, D.C., area and elsewhere around the United States.

On episode 47 of Gay Fairfax, I reviewed Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Paul Nathanson for the regular "gay book beat" segment. What follows is a transcript of that review, delivered orally on a program that first aired on Fairfax Channel 10 on December 30, 1991.

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I'm Rick Sincere with the gay book beat.

Today will be looking at a book about culture, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America by Professor Paul Nathanson.

There are many famous movies. There are many movies that are considered great by critics and by film scholars. There are many movies that are popular but there are few movies that have inserted themselves into the collective consciousness of America.

One movie like that is The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming's 1939 classic version of L. Frank Baum's turn-of-the-century novel.

Who's not familiar with the characters like Dorothy Gale of Kansas, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, Glinda the Good Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, and, of course, the Wizard himself.

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”

There: Didn't you recognize that line automatically?

Nathanson is a Canadian scholar who's written a multi-disciplinary analysis of The Wizard of Oz -- the movie, the book, the music, the lyrics, the actors, and the way the movie has inserted itself into American culture.

Americans have been fascinated by The Wizard of Oz for more than fifty years and this is a fascinating book in its own way but it has one serious shortcoming.

For the gay community, especially for gay men, The Wizard of Oz is a defining myth that helps us come to terms with our identity. It's a coming-of-age myth in its own way.

For many years the question, “Are you a friend of Dorothy?” was a coded way of asking if someone was gay

“Over the Rainbow” has become a gay anthem of love and desire and Judy Garland is a gay icon.

So the Wizard is important for for much of gay America, yet Professor Nathanson in this book only mentions the gay community – gay subculture – once, in a single footnote on page 354.

Can he be serious?

Even with this unfortunate missing link, Over the Rainbow it is a fascinating book and anyone who has loved Dorothy Gale or liked the music of The Wizard of Oz should take a look at it

Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth in America from State University of New York Press -- it's just been published. It's by Professor Paul Nathanson.

On the gay book beat, I'm Rick Sincere.

'A History of South Africa' by Leonard Thompson

This review appeared in Volume 1, Number 1, of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Is Past Really Prologue? South Africa’s New Era
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
A History of South Africaby Leonard Thompson. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 288 pp., illustrated, $29.95 cloth.

The apartheid era of South African history has ended and the post-apartheid era has begun. It remains for future historians, however, to assign a date to the point of demarcation.

Was it June 16, 1976, when black students in Soweto rioted over Afrikaans-language instruction in their schools, leaving dozens dead and forcing hundreds of others into exile, many linking up with external anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress (ANC)?

Was it September 1983, when white voters approved a new constitution calling for a multiracial parliament, simultaneously unleashing unprecedented reform and revitalized unrest and activism among blacks, who remained excluded from the political structures?

Was it August 1989, when F. W. De Klerk replaced an ailing P. W. Botha as president, visibly signifying the start of a new era in white politics?

Was it February 2, 1990, when De Klerk announced the legalization of the long-banned ANC, the South African Communist Party, and the Pan-Africanist Congress, revivifying moribund political discussions? Or was it ten days later, February 12, 1990, when Nelson Mandela, more myth than man, was released from prison after serving twenty-seven years of a life sentence for conspiracy to commit sabotage?

Was it June 17, 1991, when the Population Registration Act, the last pillar of apartheid, was repealed by South Africa’s parliament, ending generations of classifying people by their skin color and ethnicity?

As the accelerating pace of the foregoing dates indicates, South African history is moving at a rate undreamed of fifteen years ago. After years— decades—of laconic acceptance of the doomed apartheid system, a groundswell of energy from both the rulers and the ruled has stimulated movement toward fuller democracy. This energy brings in its wake both breathtaking political debate (of a peaceful and intellectual sort) and bloody black-on-black violence, with threats of white-on-white violence looming ever closer.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his much-discussed article “The End of History” in The National Interest two summers ago, he had in mind mostly the historical struggle between East and West, between Marxist totalitarians and liberal democrats. However, his thesis can also be applied, with modifications, to South African history. There, too, an ultimately unworkable ideology—apartheid—is being discarded. It is unclear, and unfortunately so, whether this ideology will be replaced by liberal democracy or by the discredited Marxist communism now rejected by the people of Eastern Europe. Thus Leonard Thompson’s most recent book, A History of South Africa, could hardly come at a more appropriate time.

Seldom in the history of any country can one observe what has come before and say that it points inexorably to a specific event or set of events that will come. Yet in South Africa’s case, despite backsliding and suffering, despite incompetent and intransigent leaders (both black and white), it has seemed for a long time that apartheid must end and that it must be replaced by a better system. This has not been simply a normative question; the injustices of apartheid were clear from the outset. It has been a pragmatic, practical question as well: the internal contradictions of apartheid, its uncompromising worldview, its non-adaptable interface with demographic and economic realities—all these ensured its demise.

In this book, his second comprehensive history of his native land (the first was the Oxford History of South Africa, published in 1976), Thompson, director of the Yale University Southern African Research Program, traces historical developments from pre-history through the earliest European explorations of the long-isolated subcontinent of southern Africa, and further through the 17th century Dutch settlement and subsequent conquests and colonizations by the British. This colonial era ended in 1910 when the Union of South Africa was formed by an act of the British Parliament.

The next eighty years make up the history of South Africa most familiar to Americans. This is the history that resonates with the American civil rights movement. It is the history that led to intense American involvement in South African affairs, culminating in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 and Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s triumphal tour of the United States during the summer of 1990. in which they raised more than $7 million for the ANC.

The Mandela tour and subsequent events would no doubt have surprised Thompson even as he completed his book, which ends on a warily optimistic note. He reports De Kierk’s accession to the presidency, his freeing of ANC leaders who had been imprisoned at the same time as Mandela, and his diplomatic efforts that included trips to Britain, West Germany, Portugal, and Zambia. He casts doubt, however, on De Klerk’s intentions to negotiate a democratic system with his ANC interlocutors. De Klerk, Thompson writes, “intended to maintain white ascendancy in South Africa by using fixed racial categories and group rights.” He ends this sweeping look at the past by asking two questions about the future:

“Was a process starting that would lead to negotiations and the relatively peaceful elimination of racism? Or would the deadlock continue until, some day, revolutionary forces would overwhelm the apartheid state?” Despite continued threats of violence, it appears to most observers that the answer to the second question is, fortunately, no, while the answer to the first is a qualified yes. A process of negotiation has begun, even as it is tainted by unrest and violence. The basic laws that have undergirded the apartheid system—the Land Acts, the Group Areas Act, and the Population Registration Act—have been repealed. Urban areas are in the process of establishing multiracial, regional governments that will end generations of separation, acknowledging the fundamental unity of places like Johannesburg and Soweto.

On the international scene, economic sanctions have begun to be lifted— first the European Community, then even some African nations. De Klerk has started a diplomatic initiative to reinvigorate the African continent through South African involvement with its neighbors. His initiative features four countries as keystones: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. These four, he believes, representing the four points of the compass and the strongest economic powers on the continent, can together bring Africa into the 21st century.

It seems clear—despite the pessimism of so many in the past and the cautious optimism of Leonard Thompson—that a long period of deadlock and isolation has ended; the post-apartheid era has haltingly but manifestly begun.

Mr. Sincere, author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa,is Director of African Affairs at IFF and Books Editor of terra nova.

'Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays'

This article appeared originally in the International Freedom Review, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1991. This is the first time it has been made available on line or in digital format.

Book Review
LIFE IN FREEDOM
Breathing Under Water and Other European Essays 
by Stanislaw Baranczak
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 258 pages; cloth, no price given.)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

What follows is a sort of trompe d’oeil of a book review, as Stanislaw Baranczak’s Breathing Under Wateris essentially a collection of book reviews. Perhaps if this present essay is someday published in a collection, and another reviewer tries his hand at a critique... but enough! The mind boggles, which is precisely the effect Baranczak achieves in his description of life in Eastern Europe under totalitarian communism.

Baranczak is a remarkably fluid writer in English, considering that he only came to the United States in 1982, in the aftermath of Polish General Wojciech Jaruzelski’s martial law crackdown on the Solidarity trade union. In this he shares a heritage with other Central Europeans who chose to express themselves in English, such as the Pole, Joseph Conrad, and the Czech, Tom Stoppard.

Baranczak is a finely-honed and witty stylist who writes with a clear understanding of his audience. He can make an obscure Polish essayist of the early twentieth century come alive for American readers who have never encountered a single one of the books under discussion. This is a rare talent.

Baranczak is at his best in the first few essays in this collection, in which he describes the culture shock that awaits Eastern Europeans (“E.E.”) who arrive in the West. Given current circumstances in Central and Eastern Europe—where not only travel but emigration is easier than ever before—these chapters are especially pertinent today.

His biting wit targets both East and West. He lists some “things American which E.E. will never be able to come to terms with” like Barbara Walters, Wonder Bread, stand-up parties, baseball, and small talk, among others. Ms. Walters, he says, reminds E.E. “of the superficiality and pretentious blah-blah of Eastern Europe’s own TV anchors” and television commercials, which “though basically unknown as a genre in the Communist bloc, have much in common with the general mindlessness and bad taste of what serves as mass culture there.”

Baranczak is not always lighthearted In his approach. The themes and subjects he takes up include some that are quite serious. He reviews biographies of Lech Walesa and Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski; he analyzes the prison letters of Václav Havel; and he searches the collected poems and plays of Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) for an underlying philosophy currently guiding the Pontiff. He takes on important but neglected Polish writers who perished during the Holocaust or who spent their entire careers in exile, avoiding Nazi and communist persecution. He reveals the secrets of totalitarian censorship and how the oppressed are able to be creative and truthful despite it all.

In the book’s title essay, originally delivered as an address in Boston in 1982, he points out that in totalitarian countries, “the so-called dissidents. . . may of course constitute a minority, and they usually do; but on the other hand, they are the only normal people around.”

More precisely, he writes, the dissidents are the people who most actively seek to “live like human beings.” Poland, he said, though it may be a country under occupation (this was the period of martial law, when totalitarian repression was brought out in the open), is a country “of free people who know exactly what they want and who most certainly will continue their struggle to achieve it.”

Despite the efforts of apologists and merely ignorant people in the West who try to understand the totalitarian regime or explain away its oppression using Western paradigms, “the only people who still behave abnormally and who constitute the minority — in other words, the only real dissidents in today’s Poland—are its Communist rulers.”

This lesson must be learned and remembered by all of us. It is too early to take for granted the emerging democracies of Central Europe. Ethnic tensions simmer beneath the surface. Yugoslavia is ready to fall apart. Romania and Bulgaria, despite changes in regime, still suffer under communist rule. In Poland itself, Solidarity’s once indivisible solidarity was riven by disputes between Walesa and Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, representatives of just two of many factions.

In Hungary, the free-market-oriented ruling party has lost seats to the (former) Communists in a number of local election contests. Only in Czechoslovakia and what used to be East Germany do the transitions to democracy seem to be going relatively smoothly. Yet in Czechoslovakia there have been disputes over what the name of the country should be — “the Czech and Slovak Federated Republic” seems to have won the battle for compromises, seeking to satisfy the historically dissatisfied Slovaks in a federation dominated by Czechs — while In eastern Germany, strikes among the industrial proletariat began soon after reunification, a signal of the deep-felt fears of economic upheaval after years of impoverished certainty.

The bottom line is that we have not yet reached Fukuyama’s proclaimed “End of History.” Communism is not yet a museum piece. It still exists in Albania, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and in nascent forms in various so-called Third World countries. It still earns the allegiance of a few recalcitrant American academics who continue to plead, “True Marxism has simply never been tried.” We must, therefore, still worry about totalitarianism and its effects on the human soul.

In this collection of essays, devoted primarily to explorations of the human spirit, Stanislaw Baranczak ultimately spins a cautionary tale of many threads, warning us to be aware that our own human frailties too often lead to the totalitarian temptation. Baranczak uses two terms to praise another author that apply equally to himself: “perspicacity of vision” and “lucidity of prose.” These make Breathing Under Water a compelling read.

Richard Sincere is author of several books, including Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (Washington: International Freedom Foundation, 1990) and a frequent contributor to the book pages of the International Freedom Review. Currently, Mr. Sincere is editor of CSIS News at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.