I’m gonna wait till the stars come out

Here is your open thread for March 18, 2020.

Wilson Pickett was born 79 years ago today:

On March 18, 1741, a fire at the home of New York Gov. George Clarke started a mass panic in which white Protestant New Yorkers became convinced that there was a slave uprising orchestrated by Jesuits. Although some slaves were tortured into “confessing” such a plot, no such revolt was happening. It was just the fever-dream of oppressors. The oppressors’ panic led to more than 100 people being hanged or burned at the stake on no evidence — a deadly frenzy so shameful that New Englanders mocked New York for one-upping the infamous witch trials of a generation earlier.

I’ve written about the White Panic of 1741 several times, including:

• Slaves in the hands of an angry white God
• Empathy turned to fear and resentment
• Some people punch down when they get scared. True.
• When we flinch at empathy, it curdles into fear and resentment
• We try to control forgiveness because we know we need it
• ‘It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell’

Late at night, 30 years ago today, somebody broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and made off with art works worth half a billion dollars. If you have any information about the case or the whereabouts of the stolen paintings, the case is still open.

Charlotte Elliott was born 231 years ago today. She wrote dozens of hymns, including “Just As I Am,” which my church growing up sang at least twice a month, always with every head bowed, every eye closed. Elliott’s lyrics weren’t easy to reconcile with the ultra-Reformed doctrines of our church, but then it’s hard to imagine what an ultra-Reformed altar call would look like anyway.

Today is the birthday of the 22nd president, Grover Cleveland, and also of the 24th president, also Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, who served two non-consecutive terms, was a Bourbon Democrat who won bipartisan support from Mugwumps. If you’re wondering what those terms mean, they mean that 19th-century political factions had more colorful names than the ones we use now.

Inventor Rudolph Diesel was born 162 years ago today. He disappeared mysteriously at sea in 1913 and we may never know whether he died by suicide or was murdered. March 18 is a big day for unsolved mysteries.

There’s no mystery surrounding Edgar Cayce, who was born 143 years ago today. Cayce was a spiritualist, a psychic, and a clairvoyant — which is to say he was a con-man and a grifter. Cayce spent the last decades of his life in Virginia Beach, establishing a tradition there of welcoming pseudo-spiritual grifters and their institutions.

Civil-rights champion Fred Shuttlesworth, who helped to found the SCLC, was born 98 years ago today. If you’re not up on American history, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was pretty much the opposite of what you might imagine based on that name.

Today is John Kander’s 93rd birthday. From “Wilkommen” to “New York, New York,” nobody wrote a vamp like Kander. Since today is also the 50th birthday of Queen Latifah, let’s celebrate both of them with this:

Country singer Charley Pride turns 86. Irene Cara turns 61. James McMurtry turns 58. Here he is doing “Too Long in the Wasteland.”

Vanessa Williams celebrates her 57th birthday today. She’s one of the few former Miss Americas whose résumé lists that as a footnote rather than as the headline.

Dane Cook and Reince Priebus were born on the same day 48 years ago. No matter what you think of movies like Employee of the Month, Cook can surely be prouder of his career than Priebus ever could be.

Adam Levine turns 41 today. Lykke Li turns 34.

Finally, it’s the 127th anniversary of the birth of Wilfred Owen, poet of the trenches of World War I. Here is Owen, bearing witness:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Yes, yes, I see that hand. Now, as the organ softly plays the chorus one more time … Talk amongst yourselves.