Works for Me

It is my current opinion that in all matters of faith, including religion, politics and medicine, the limit of avowal should be "it works for me."  Beyond that comes pressure, coercion, violence and war, serious over-reactions for systems that after all include large impacts of the psychological.  In other words, maybe most, possibly all of the evidence for deeply held beliefs is the effect of placebo.

My daughter Lauren was about six months old in March 1965 and we lived in Philadelphia.  There were a lot of awful things happening then  — kind of a storm of shit that battered us those years: including civil rights, Vietnam.  That winter, on March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old housewife and voter registration worker from Detroit, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan on an Alabama highway.  She was registering black voters in Selma with Martin Luther King and she driving a car with a black passenger.  That was her offense.

It’s not that any of us knew her personally.  But we knew who she was: part of the volunteer cadre of civil rights workers in Mississippi and Alabama who challenged racism, America’s great Original Sin.  You probably know that just fifty years ago — my adult lifetime —  our country was still segregated racially.  It was thoughtlessly, simply, legally, the way things were, and not just in the South.

Anyway, a couple of weeks before the Liuzzo murder Selma police conscripted and deputized all the young white men and town and led them to attack civil rights marchers at the Pettus bridge. the whole world watched and it was a huge outrage. 

The New York paper (specifically our friend Carol Pogash) today reports that the people who run the Golden Gate Bridge will finally for heaven’s sake, install a suicide barrier.  The average last year of about one successful and two foiled jumpers per week is apparently, at last, too many.  So good.  And about darn time.

And here’s a story about a jumper not so widely known.  

Charles Rudnick introduced me to the late Nate Cohn, a wonderful old-school criminal defense lawyer in San Francisco. He was of the Mel Belli - Jake Erlich school of colorful courtroom artists, just the guy you want if you’ve done something stupid and want not to go to the gas chamber for it.  

He, Nate, told us that for a time he represented Show People of America which was the guild of movie stunt people, one of whom (I've got the name here someplace) needed to raise money to pay off an amiable divorce. Naturally, being a stunt person, he thought of making some money with a grand, attention-getting trick and convinced himself he could jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and live, have the stunt filmed, and make money selling the movie.  Nate represented the widow in the murder case that followed. 

Here is her picture, with Nate the balding guy on her left. 

Nate told us the DA charged the divorcing wife because she was to be the beneficiary of the stunt, had it worked; the money to be made selling the movie of the jump was for her. The reason the trick didn’t work, in spite of careful preparation and practice, is that a Highway Patrol Officer grabbed at the performer as he jumped and threw him into an uncontrolled spin. So, you know, he was killed.... not that he wouldn't have been anyway.  Nate got the widow off, during the inquest as I recall, by demonstrating that the 'murder' was really an accident.

PS.  the film of the fatal stunt may still exist, a possibility that sometimes entertains me late at night.

And PPS.  there's a whole book of Nate's stories -- although maybe not this one, I think.  It's called Murder He Liked and was written by Rory McGahan.  Lovely book.