Alice's Restaurant

Last night I watched Alice's Restaurant for the third time.

The film was made in 1969, and in a way was a kind of epilogue on the 1960s.

The plot is fairly simple. Two funerals and a wedding.

Ray buys an old deconsecrated church and Alice opens a restaurant in it. Arlo goes to see Alice for Thanksgivng and as a favour takes her trash to the dump. When the dump is closed, he drops it on top of another pile of garbage at the bottom of a ravine. When the local sheriff finds out a major manhunt begins. Arlo manages to survive the courtroom experience but when he is to be inducted into the army via the draft and is asked whether he has ever been arrested, he has to say yes. Has he been convicted of a crime? Yes. Even through the crime was littering, he is sent to the group with major criminals.

One reviewer at the IMDb site says

Alice's Restaurant is about life and loss, and the traps we allow ourselves to get caught up in. It's about addiction, youth, anarchy, death, and aimlessness. It's a celebration and a lament for all those things.

As we were watching it, there is a scene with a tent evangelist, and they are singing Amazing Grace. Val remarked that that must be one of the overplayed hymns ever, like Kum-ba-ya. And I recalled that when I first saw the film, in Windhoek on 15 December 1970, it was the first time I had ever heard Amazing Grace, so it came to me as fresh and new then. I heard it quite a lot thereafter, and I wondered it it was the film that was responsible for its subsequent popularity. Certainly in my mind that song was always associated with the film, and in 2006, when the family asked what I wanted as a birthday present, one of the things I mentioned was the DVD of Alice's Restaurant, so I could remind myself of where I first heard that song.

A couple of years later, when I was living in Durban, staying with Larry and Carol Gilley and their family, they had an old hymn book with Amazing Grace in it, and I used it a few times in church services, and at that time, too, I had never heard it anywhere else but in the film. And a couple of years later it was heard everywhere, though in a slightly different version, with different music for the third line.

When I first saw Alice's Restaurant I was living in a Christian commune in Windhoek and that was one of the dreams of the 1960s that didn't quite come true. And at the end of the film Ray and Alice get married, and they have a big celebration with lots of friends in their church-cum-restaurant. Then one by one the friends leave, and Ray and Alice urge them to stay. Ray says they will move to a farm in the country, where they can all live together and see each other whenever they want. They go to the door, and see of the last of their friends. and Ray talks some more about that, in the same way that we often talked about such things in those days. Then he goes inside, and Alice is left, alone and lonely, at the door. And that seems to sum up the 1960s.

In the same year that the film was released, a book was published, The Lonely Crowd, and the visions of communal living expressed by Ray in the film were intended to be a solution to that, but at the end Alice is left alone on the steps of a deconsecrated church, the symbol of a failed Christian community.

And so it calls to mind another song, not in the film, released a couple of years later, about dreams of freedom:

Yesterday's dream didn't quite come true
We fought for our freedom, and what did it do?
Now no one can see where they stand.

Crisis teams

The following account of a teenager being killed in a road accident highlights some strange (to me) US cultural practices, which seem to be spreading to other places, and I wonder if anthropologists or sociologists have studied them. It also illustrates one of the effects of secularisation on modern (or is it postmodern) society.

Orland girl, 16, hit by plow truck dies — Maine News — Bangor Daily News:

A paramedic who lived nearby performed CPR on the teenager until an ambulance arrived. Hayes was taken to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor where she was pronounced dead at 11 p.m., police said.

According to Roy, speed and alcohol were not factors in the crash, and no charges were filed against Malenfant.

Hayes had been a student at Bucksport High School last year, but was being home-schooled this year. The school’s crisis team was activated and teachers informed students of the accident during an extended homeroom period Friday. School counselors were available during the school day and were busy meeting with students throughout the morning, according to Assistant Principal Dan Clifford.

What seems strange to me is that the school activated "crisis teams" and that "counselors" spent many hours meeting with students.

I could understand such activities if this were one of those incidents where a pupil went berserk and shot and killed many pupils and teachers at the school, as has happened from time to time. In such a case one could understand the need for trauma counselling for the classmates of the killers and the killed. I can understand it in a case where a mine dump falls on a school and a large proportion of the pupils are killed, and those who survive had a narrow escape.

But this accident involved an ex-pupil, and didn't even take place at the school. Why the need for the school's "crisis team" to be "activated" and for "counselors" to spend many hours with pupils?

I wonder if some of this is media-driven. In news reports of such incidents, one sometimes sees reporters asking school officials whether such counselling is being provided, and asking in a way that seems calculated to make the school authorities feel guilty if it isn't.

The report was posted on the alt.obituaries newsgroup on Usenet, and most of the people there, even the Americans, could remember no such "crisis teams" when classmates were killed in road accidents in their school days in the 1970s and 1980s.

In my own school days in the 1940s and 1950s I can remember three fellow pupils being killed in road accidents.

One, when I was in Standard I (Grade 3) at Fairmount School in Johannesburg, was a girl called Valerie, who was killed when going to Vereeniging over the weekend. I learnt about it from fellow-pupils. Her empty desk was a reminder for some days afterwards, and then the teacher rearranged the class seating. Another, Keith Littleton, a couple of classes below me, was killed when going home from school on his light motorbike. The third, George Jefferay, was in my class at school, and a friend, and he was killed a few months after we had left school, also riding a light motorbike. Crash helmets were not compulsory in those days.

In the last two cases, we went to the funerals. Keith Littleton died after a day or two in emergency care in hospital, and so the school had special prayer meetings for him. In the case of George Jefferay, I made prints of photos I had taken of him at school, and took them to his parents, whom I had not met before.

In all these cases, the concern at the school was with those who had died and their families. Instead of the school providing "counselling" for the pupils, the pupils were focusing on ways of comforting the families of those who had been killed. And also in the last two cases, a memorial service was held at the school. OK, that was a church school, and American schools are not allowed to have prayer meetings and memorial services, because of their idea of "separation of church and state".

But what happened in the case described as happening in Maine looks very much like the "establishment" of the secular religion of psychotherapy.

My own children, who went to school in the 1980s and 1990s, also experienced the loss of school mates. One was electrocuted when he was playing with some electrical appliance. Another was also killed in a road accident. My son, who was 12 at the time, was in the same Boy Scout troop, was a pallbearer at his funeral, along with the other scouts.

And why is it that "counselling" is given such priority? There seems to be a tendency to promote "victim counselling" for crime victims. I can't help feeling that a more urgent task of a "crisis team" would be to organise a collection to help be bereaved family with funeral expenses, or to help crime victims to replace what has been stolen by robbers, and in the case of death, showing solidarity by attending the funeral.

It is surely not the job of the school to provide counselling, unless, perhaps, for something that happened at the school itself.

But I get the impression that if a family lost their home in a fire or flood or some other disaster, possibly with some members of the family being killed, these schools would not seek to collect food and clothes and find shelter for the survivors, but would concentrate instead on counselling those who ought rather to have been helping. And the media will not ask whether their "crisis teams" provided those things, but rather whether they provided counselling for the other pupils. Instead of spending huge sums of money on "crisis teams", rather help the family with the medical and funeral bills. Help the victims, not the spectators.

If my computer was nicked, I'd really appreciate help from someone who would help me to recover my data. But counselling me on my loss would thrill me as much as a time-share sales talk.

That may seem like a banal note to end on, but the whole thing seems to epitomise the banality of modernity.