[October 29th would have been the iconic Bob Ross’ 80th birthday. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ross and four other figures who have helped make PBS the cultural and educational force it is!]
On why
niceness isn’t limiting, but why it’s also not everything.
I greatly enjoyed
the film A Beautiful Day in the
Neighborhood (2019)—not surprisingly, as two of its main stars are two
of my very favorite actors of all time, Matthew Rhys and Chris Cooper—and
was particularly interested in two of its interconnected main points: that Fred
Rogers (a typically wonderful
Tom Hanks) is indeed as fundamentally and genuinely nice as he seems, and
that that niceness is more or less a superpower. Rhys’ cynical journalist Lloyd
Vogel (based loosely on Tom Junod, from whose 1998
article “Can You Say … Hero?” the film was adapted) is constantly looking
for a meanness or darkness beneath Rogers’ niceness, and the film’s ultimate
argument is two-fold: that Rogers is in reality precisely as nice as he seems
on his multi-decade, meta-hit PBS show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, if not somehow
even nicer still; and that his niceness is able to powerfully and vitally
affect even a deeply troubled and disenchanted person like Lloyd. That might
sound profoundly treacly, but while the film occasionally ventures into that
territory, I think the tremendous talents of its performers (and its director Marielle Heller)
keep it on the right side of that equation.
Interestingly
enough, one of the most famous moments from Rogers’ TV show likewise reflects
the genuine and striking power of niceness, on multiple levels. In the episode
which aired May 2nd, 1969, Rogers asked his friend, the Black
policeman Officer Clemmons (played by François Clemmons), if he wanted to dip
his feet in a wading pool on a hot day; when Clemmons did so, his bare feet
next to Rogers’ in the small pool, this simple, kind gesture became an overt
statement against the moment’s continued racial segregation (which included
swimming pools in a central and symbolic way). It was, as Clemmons later
reflected, Rogers’ “way of speaking about race relations in America.” But
Rogers himself apparently also had to learn from that ideal of welcoming kindness,
as he was initially somewhat
less supportive of Clemmons’ identity as a gay man—but when they recreated the scene
in Clemmons’ final appearance in 1993, Rogers extended the kindness yet
further, allowing Clemmons to sing “Many Ways to Say I Love You” and then
drying Clemmons’ feet with his towel.
So
niceness can open a lot of doors, in our own hearts as well as in society. But
it isn’t always enough, nor necessarily the right response to a particular
problem, a reality that Fred Rogers likewise reflected in one of his most famous
public moments. In 1990, Rogers and his team discovered that a Missouri chapter
of the Ku Klux Klan was imitating his voice in phone messages seeking to
convert young people to their racist and hateful messages, and he immediately
took action, successfully
suing to stop the Klan from appropriating him in this way. Of course it
stands to reason that Rogers would oppose the Klan, but my point here is that
he didn’t try to kill them with kindness, nor (for example) just to make an
appeal on air for his audiences (young and old alike) to resist such hate. No,
Rogers swiftly and, I would say at least, aggressively used the power of the
law and of his (by this time) extremely well-connected organization to stop
this hate group. I’ve thought a lot about the limits of inclusion over the last
few years, and I believe Rogers would agree with me that, when it comes to
domestic terrorists like the KKK, we quite simply don’t want them to be our
neighbors.
Next PBS
person tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other PBS people or shows you’d highlight?
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