The Al Franken Conundrum

I find myself on the horns of a dilemma with respect to the burgeoning list of men, now including Minnesota Senator Al Franken, who have, to put it bluntly (but in printable terms) screwed up royally, and to the women who, in virtually every case, have borne the burden of silence far too long.

My dilemma is not whether the women are to be, or not to be, believed; in my mind, they are totally credible and deserve much credit for unloading their emotional burdens on their victimizers’ doorsteps. I am not a conspiracy theorist: The Earth is a sphere; Oswald shot Kennedy; the Big Bang is a thing; the Moon landings happened; Obama is an American by birth; and women have been (and continue to be) groped, raped, abused, and put down and silenced by men of high, middle, and low status. This is not a media creation; men have to own it.

My dilemma is that I am a man in my late 60s who grew up in a culture that elevated, celebrated, and exploited female objectification in music, film, magazines, and in daily life—both in the workplace and in the home. I was lucky to have a strong, moral, and self-confident mother, and a sensitive, moral, and conscience-driven father. But those “right-thinking” attributes did not serve as shields against the music I listened to, the movies I saw, or the magazines I read.

Pop music of my pre-teen and teen years, the 50s and 60s, filled as it often was with teenage angst, longing, betrayal, and dreams of bliss (Since I Don’t Have You, The Great Pretender, Bye Bye Love, Johnny Angel), also highlighted girls and women who were either sexually aggressive (Great Balls of Fire, Gloria [Shadows of Night version]), sadly pliable (It’s My Party, Leader of the Pack), cheating (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Delilah, Ruby), or even predatory (Neil Diamond’s Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon), with lyrics like these:

Girl, you'll be a woman soon 

Please come take my hand 

Girl, you'll be a woman soon 

Soon you'll need a man…

The thesis about that era’s influence on kids like me is well-presented in at least 3,600 books (Amazon search for “History of Rock and Roll”) and millions of columns, but the bottom line is the music was not always kind in its treatment of girls and women, and no one cared to question it. It was just fun, it was just music. Right?

The movies that objectified girls and women during that same period are simply too numerous to list, but from the Beach Blanket and Gidget series to the James Bond movies, to something as silly as One Million Years BC or as overtly sexual (and insipid) as Barbarella, there was an accepted atmosphere of highly-charged sexuality aimed unashamedly at strengthening the male-centric view of women as a gender to be manipulated.

Enter Playboy and the weedy-mat of much lower-life men’s magazines that plugged into the still-being-wired brains of young boys in the 50s and 60s. I admit to “reading” Playboy’s gate-folds and photo spreads, and I was also exposed to the most salacious breed of bottom-feeding magazines that I cannot even mention here (my father had no part in that, to his credit—I managed to find them all on my own). The girls and women featured in these publications became the hoped-for-but-ultimately-unattainable models of women adorning my pubescent, post-pubescent, and early-teen years.

As for society’s expectations of women, mothers (at least in my sphere), were all supposed to be Donna Reed by day, and…well…Sophia Loren by night: pearls, heels, kitchens and compliant vs. smoky, steamy, sexual…and compliant.

There were millions and millions of boys all across the country, Baby-Boomer males just like me. Millions. And we all got older (though not all of us grew up), with faulty wiring informing us of what we thought we should expect from the women who would move through our lives. For many of us—I like to think the majority of my peers, but I could be sadly mistaken—we were able to grow beyond the unreasonable gender-biased expectations that nurtured our youth. But the vestigial tails of those cruel expectations still linger on the rear-ends of too many men.

It is a good thing we are beginning to see those remnant appendages exposed for what they are—inept, hurtful, and illegal moral and ethical attitudes that had no place yesterday, and have no place in today’s world. The women who are coming forward have within their power the ability to excise those ancient and inglorious vestigial remains. And I don’t mind lending a hand in that operation.

But I don’t always know when to cut and when to stay the hand of criticism. I can’t, for example, press the knife to Al Franken’s inappropriate behavior as deeply as I would gladly press it through Harvey Weinstein’s horrid tail. I know too many men of Franken’s age and background who were jackasses in high school and college (and in the halls of Congress where I once worked), who are today capable of sincere humility and apology, and who are, in many other respects, champions for women.

How do I reconcile this…this dilemma? Hate the sin, forgive some of the the sinners? Are Franken’s apologies and his self-flagellating actions sufficiently exculpatory to redeem him in the long run? I don’t know. I hope so, because I do think there has to be some gray in this discussion—some margin for retreat, enlightenment, and subsequent reconciliation.

Fathers and mothers who do know better, must begin imprinting the rules of behavior, respect, and decency toward women before their sons’ wiring goes awry and follows leads and channels made by poor examples and ersatz role models. There is simply no one better to apply a corrective than a dedicated parent. Their window of opportunity may be narrow, but a vote to litigate, censure, or expel comes far too late for too many women.

For Narrators, Non-Fiction Can Be The New Fiction

The headset is a land-line link to the Metropolitan Washington Ear's recording system. Not my usual studio mic.

I had an enjoyable conversation yesterday with Sean Allen Pratt, a master of the non-fiction genre, and a teacher extraordinaire of the art and business of audiobook production. In the course of our conversation, I mentioned to Sean that I’ve been a non-fiction narrator for more than ten years, not with audiobooks (though I o have four non-fictions on Audible), but through a twice-weekly volunteer job as a reader for the Metropolitan Washington Ear, a non-profit organization here in the Washington D.C., area. The Ear provides on-radio and by-phone narration for visually-impaired or blind listeners. Ear readers narrate all the stories in the Washington Post and several other news dailies and weekly news publications. Many audiobook narrators I know here in D.C. either got their start with the Ear, or are still Ear volunteers.

My particular narration niche (starting at 6 a.m) is the Thursday front page stories—read from beginning to end, with all the photos described, and charts and graphs explained—and either Saturday or Sunday editorials or the Sunday Outlook section, which includes book reviews and long opinions or feature articles. I’d estimate my time-on-task is about two hours per morning, or four hours per week, for an approximate 200 hours per year of recording time. Sean seemed a bit surprised that this was just volunteer time, but there is value in that, and I am one of a few hundred Ear readers who wouldn’t have it any other way.

My conversation with Sean about the importance of non-fiction narration as opposed to the fun and freedom we can have with fiction, can be summed up in what I did this morning when I was reading the Post’s Outlook section, specifically four stories about Martin Luther and the 500th anniversary of his 95 Theses (I also read a fun and, for me, very informative piece about the history of home runs in baseball, “How baseball came to accept—and love—the home run,” by Rich Cohen, and a chart-heavy article, “Can we talk about the gender pay gap,” by Xaquin G.V.).

If you are a hard-over fiction narrator and/or producer who shies away from non-fiction, I’d like to share with you passages from the four Martin Luther stories I recorded this morning (Sunday, Outlook, October 29) in order to elevate the perception of non-fiction dullness to the higher level of enjoyable reading it deserves.

From today’s Outlook article “When Catholics and evangelicals cooperate in politics, Christianity loses,” by Elizabeth Bruenig, a narrator gets a bit of a tongue-twisting challenge in this passage:

“In July, the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a close confidant of Pope Francis and a top Vatican official, indicted such evangelical-Catholic collaboration in an article published with a Protestant co-author in La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal reviewed by the Vatican before publication. 

The essay, “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism: A Surprising Ecumenism,” offered this thesis: “Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals,” Spadaro wrote."

In her Post Outlook article, “For Christian voters, rejecting elites means ignoring the clergy,” Lydia Bea writes,

“Most evangelicals look to partisan sources and their social networks to tell them how to vote as a Christian. They don’t look to religious authorities to help them deliberate about politics through the eyes of faith.

Before 2008, partisanship was not so tightly fused with religious identity for white Catholics. That year, they split down the middle between Barack Obama and John McCain, and only 41 percent identified or leaned Republican. But between 2008 and 2012, Republican identification of white Catholics jumped eight points. By 2016, 58 percent of white Catholics identified or leaned Republican.”

Jonathan Kay writes about the oddly logical advantage of the mass media/slow delivery technology of Martin Luther’s time, 500 years ago this month, in his Post Outlook article, ‘It took years for Luther’s ideas to spread. That’s why he succeeded.” 

In a stark comparison between the mass media technology of Johannes Guttenberg’s printing press, and today’s high-speed, on-your-phone-now ability to move a message globally at the speed of light (nearly), Kay adds some illumination with this:

“There’s a lesson here that transcends religious doctrine. Modern professional culture encourages collaboration through instant communication and globalized networks. But Luther’s legacy as one of history’s most influential thinkers shows us that there are certain epic projects — such as the systematic rethinking of foundational dogmas — that require time to mature and space to germinate before they are safe for universal exposure. Without that window, they die.

Luther’s struggle against the Vatican began as a struggle against himself. He started his career as a tortured German academic whose spiritual neuroses were tangled up with biblical exegesis — a state of constant agitation that members of the religious classes then referred to as the “bath of hell” — according to Craig Harline’s outstanding new history, “A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation.”

And, finally, in the Post Outlook article, “The talented, heedless man who changed the direction of history,” a review of two new books about Martin Luther, Andrew Pettegree writes about Eric Metaxas’ book, “Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World,”

“Luther was now a man with a movement, which brought new responsibilities and challenges, not least the growing body of acolytes in Wittenberg. He had to cope with ominous signs of disorder as newly empowered citizens sought the authority of the Gospel in their hope for a better life — and, more parochially, the arrival in Wittenberg of a cartload of runaway nuns. One of these stowaways would become Luther’s wife.

“This ultimately happy union came in an impossibly challenging year, as Luther fended off criticism from Erasmus, dealt with the death of his protector Frederick the Wise and faced down a revolt that threatened to destroy his young movement. As peasant armies roamed the German countryside, claiming Luther’s Gospel message as their inspiration, portraits of the reformer in this year show Luther as a man on the verge of collapse. Yet he weathered the storm, decisively throwing in his lot with the state authorities. The course of the Reformation was set.”

In all these related stories—a non-fiction collection related in theme—there is intrigue, sweeping historical arc, statistics, plot-twists, socially-relevant discussion, in-depth profile/biography, opinion, and fascinating detail explaining the importance of this 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s world-changing social media posting on Wittenberg’s Castle Church door.

Narrating fiction is often fun, and we get to play with characters and chew the scenery, and raise and lower the stories’ temperatures often with wild abandon. But, that doesn’t mean that a good non-fiction narrator cannot have the same experience. We can, and do; we just have to find ways to take down the volume while enhancing the learning and enjoyment value of the articles or books. The material is all there—in the best of non-fiction books, certainly—and we can bring it to life even without chewing the scenery.