Soundings, June, 2005

Anne Bancroft, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Helen Keller’s teacher in The Miracle Worker (1962), died on June 6, 2005. In 1960, she won a Tony award for creating the role of  Annie Sullivan on Broadway. 

In “Kant Versus Sullivan,” (The Objectivist, March 1970), Ayn Rand wrote: “If you want to grasp ... the origin of concepts and their dependence on sensory evidence, I will refer you to a famous play. One might think that such a subject cannot be dramatized, but it has been—simply, eloquently, heart-breakingly—and it is not a work of fiction, but a dramatization of historical facts. It is The Miracle Worker by William Gibson and it tells the story of how Annie Sullivan brought Helen Keller to grasp the nature of language....

“Annie Sullivan, [Helen Keller's] young teacher (superlatively portrayed by Anne Bancroft), is fiercely determined to transform this creature into a human being, and she knows the only means that can do it: language, i.e., the development of the conceptual faculty. But how does one communicate the nature and function of language to a blind-deaf-mute? The entire action of the play is concerned with this single central issue: Annie's struggle to make Helen's mind grasp a word—not a signal, but a word....

“To my knowledge, The Miracle Worker is the only epistemological play ever written. It holds the viewer in tensely mounting suspense, not over a chase or a bank robbery, but over the question of whether a human mind will come to life. Its climax is magnificent: after Annie's crushing disappointment at Helen's seeming retrogression, water from a pump spills over Helen's hand, while Annie is automatically spelling ‘W-A-T-E-R’ into her palm, and suddenly Helen understands. The two great moments of that climax are incommunicable except through the art of acting: one is the look on Patty Duke's face when she grasps that the signals mean the liquid—the other is the sound of Anne Bancroft's voice when she calls Helen's mother and cries: ‘She knows!’

Unfortunately, as a “sounding” of American culture, a report on the death of Anne Bancroft cannot end with Ayn Rand’s magnificent tribute to her performance in The Miracle Worker. As the Washington Post’s obituary noted: “Bancroft lamented that The Miracle Worker had become overshadowed in recent years by her role as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate” (June 8, 2005). In 2003, Bancroft said to an interviewer: “I am quite surprised that with all my work—and some of it is very, very good—that nobody talks about The Miracle Worker. We're talking about Mrs. Robinson. I understand the world.... I'm just a little dismayed” (Associated Press). So are we all.
 
“A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.

“The decision angered Italy's justice minister but delighted Muslim activists, who accused Fallaci of inciting religious hatred in her 2004 work La Forza della Ragione (The Force of Reason).

“Fallaci lives in New York and has regularly provoked the wrath of Muslims with her outspoken criticism of Islam following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. cities.

“In La Forza della Ragione, Fallaci wrote that terrorists had killed 6,000 people over the past 20 years in the name of the Koran and said the Islamic faith ‘sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.’

“State prosecutors originally dismissed accusations of defamation from an Italian Muslim organization, and said Fallaci should not stand trial because she was merely exercising her right to freedom of speech.

“But a preliminary judge in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, Armando Grasso, rejected the prosecutors’ advice at a hearing on Tuesday and said Fallaci should be indicted.

“Grasso's ruling homed in on 18 sentences in the book, saying some of Fallaci's words were ‘without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith’” (Reuters, May 25, 2005).
 
Philosophy comes to the criminal class: “A Michigan man who threatened to blow up his van near the White House two days before President Bush's second inauguration stunned a court yesterday by saying he couldn't promise that he wouldn't do it again. Lowell W. Timmers made the remarks as he was about to be sentenced for making false threats in a Jan. 18 standoff with police. . . .

“The hearing was supposed to be uneventful: Timmers, 54, pleaded guilty in March, and his plea agreement called for a likely 34-month prison term. But when U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan asked a routine question about whether he had learned his lesson, the proceedings went awry. ‘What are the chances of you doing this again?’ the judge asked. Timmers—dressed in an orange jail jumpsuit, his long, white hair flowing down his back—paused a moment before speaking up. ‘There's always a chance of anything, Your Honor,’ he said. The judge's jaw dropped. He pressed Timmers to be clear.

“‘The odds of that happening are 800 million billion to one,’ Timmers said, ‘but I can't ever rule anything out completely, Sir.’ Sullivan, who has heard thousands of cases in more than two decades on the bench, said he was ‘astonished.’ ‘I don't think in my entire judicial career anyone's ever told me, “Yeah, I might do this again."’ ‘I didn't mean to upset you,’ Timmers told the judge at one point.

“Defense attorney Tony Axam . . . tried to explain that Timmers, a self-employed woodcutter, is a ‘deeply, deeply philosophical person’ -- for whom there were no absolutes. ‘If you asked him if anything is absolute in this world,’ Axam said, ‘he may tell you he's not sure he's standing here.’ The judge said that only added to his concerns. ‘If he's not sure about whether he's standing here, maybe we need to send him to Butner for a little while for evaluation,’ the judge said, referring to the federal psychiatric prison facility in North Carolina. Timmers said nothing in this world is for certain. ‘I could be dreaming right now,’ he said”  (Washington Post, July 1, 2005).
 
British prime minister, Tony Blair, recently said to the European Parliament: “Tell me: what type of social model is it that has 20 million unemployed in Europe [and] productivity rates falling behind those of the USA?” Well, it is this type of social model: “A group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of ‘an act of unfair and parasitical competition.’ The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated” “Bus Firm Takes Car-Sharers to Court,” (The Guardian, July 11, 2005).