The Terrible Myth

Attica

Disturbing the Universe will be broadcast TONIGHT in Los Angeles and Albuquerque!

If your city is not listed below please watch Disturbing the Universe streaming free on line through POV here or look up your local broadcast schedule here.
Los Angeles, KCET
TONIGHT, Thursday, 7/1/10, 9:30:00 PM PT

Albuquerque, KNMD
TONIGHT, Thursday, 7/1/10, 9:00:00 PM MT

Durham NH / Boston, New Hampshire PTV
TOMORROW, Friday, 7/2/10, 11:30:00 PM ET

West Palm, WXEL
TOMORROW, Friday, 7/2/10, 9:30:00 PM ET

Las Vegas, KLVX
Sunday, 7/4/10, 11:00:00 PM PT

Durham NH / Boston, New Hampshire PTV
Sunday, 7/4/10, 11:00:00 PM ET

Syracuse, WCNY
Sunday, 7/4/10, 10:30:00 PM ET

St. Louis, KETC
Sunday, 7/11/10, 11:00:00 PM CT

Baltimore, MPT – Digital 2
Sunday, 7/11/10, 4:00:00 PMET

Pittsburgh, WQED
Friday, 7/16/10, 10:00:00 PM ET

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The other evening, two sisters sat in the back yard of their Park Slope brownstone and talked about their childhoods.
“We never felt safe,” Emily, a blue-eyed thirty-one-year-old with dark-blond hair, said.

“Our father was always sharing with us his distrust of government,” Sarah, a thirty-three-year-old brunette with brown eyes, added.

“Some kids fear ghosts and monsters,” said Emily, who had on flip-flops and red toenail polish. “I feared the police, the President, and the F.B.I.”

Sarah (flip-flops, gray toenail polish) said, “All our father’s stories about Attica, about Wounded Knee—”

“Those were our bedtime stories,” Emily interrupted. “Singing songs with Dr. King in the South, with the lights out, so they wouldn’t be shot. You hear these as a child, they give you the sense that at any moment everything can be taken from you. I never slept through a night in childhood. I’d jump into bed with Sarah.”

Their father was William Kunstler, the civil-rights lawyer, who died in 1995, and whose clients ranged from Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Chicago Seven to El Sayyid Nosair, who was accused of assassinating the militant Jewish leader Rabbi Meir Kahane, and the drug dealer Larry Davis. (Nosair and Davis, who was charged with shooting six cops, were both acquitted.) In 1993, while defending a terror suspect charged in the first bombing of the World Trade Center, Kunstler boasted to the Times, “I’m more loved and more hated than I ever was.”

“The day he died, I picked up the phone and someone said, ‘Is it true, is Kunstler really dead?’ ” Emily recalled. “And I said, ‘Yes.’ And they said, ‘Good riddance,’ and hung up.”

The sisters, who are filmmakers (Sarah also works as a criminal-defense attorney) premièred “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe” at Sundance last year. It will be shown on PBS this week.

The Brooklyn brownstone became home to the extended Kunstler family last year, after Kunstler’s widow, the equally radical lawyer Margaret Ratner Kunstler, moved out of the couple’s town house in the Village. While the sisters set the table out back for dinner (Emily had made watercress soup and spinach-pesto pasta salad), they talked about life with their father.

“He was a hugely embarrassing person,” Emily said.

“We died a million deaths standing next to him on the street,” Sarah said. “When I first got my period, he announced it to the ticket-holder line outside the Waverly Theatre, exclaiming, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, my daughter is now a woman. She has just gotten her comma.’ ”

“Whenever a gentleman caller came to the house,” Emily said, “my father would open the door, make some sort of joke, and then let the door close in the man’s face.”

In the kitchen, Sarah’s husband, Jesse Ferguson, a musician, was keeping an eye on their toddler. Emily is expecting a baby in November, and her partner, a documentary filmmaker named Sebastian Doggart, arrived. The house is also home to a family friend, two dogs, three cats, and a rotating cast of house guests.

Last month, the sisters signed a full-page ad in The New York Review of Books, headlined “CRIMES ARE CRIMES NO MATTER WHO DOES THEM,” which attacked President Obama for authorizing the C.I.A. to kill the Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen hiding in Yemen.

“Our father would talk about the long list of terrible things that have been done in the name of law,” Sarah said.

“People ask us how he would have felt now that we have a black President, and we know he would have been ecstatic,” Emily said. “But the day after the Inauguration he would have been taking Obama to task, because that’s what he felt all of our jobs are, as citizens.”

“We were in Sundance with our film during the Inauguration,” Sarah said. “There was a parade up Main Street, and we were so disturbed by what we were hearing.”

“People were saying that racism no longer exists in this country,” Emily said. “That America had transcended race.”

She described a film clip of her father that they found, an interview he gave after Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, was killed by the Chicago police. “This piece of footage brought home to us what our father meant when he taught us that all white people are racist,” she said. “Our father is looking directly into the camera, and he says, ‘I killed him, I killed him.’ That made us realize the ways in which we all are responsible, and that, unless you are doing something against it, you are participating in it.”

It was getting dark. Ferguson came outside holding a beer and a baby monitor. In the back yard, someone had tied one end of a hammock to a tree.

“I think I’m anti-hammock,” Sarah said. “Hammocks are kind of like rocking chairs on porches, this vision of serenity people want their lives to embody.”

“That no one ever actually uses,” Emily said.

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While studying law at the University of Pittsburgh in March 1970, Paul Boas joined a peaceful nighttime protest against the military draft by picketing outside the Squirrel Hill home of Irwin Steinsapir, a member of the local draft board. Police arrested Mr. Boas and seven other men, who spent the night in jail.

The next day, supporters arrived at a hearing for the men before City Magistrate Robert E. Dauer. A police officer guarding the courtroom yanked the ponytail of one of the defendants who was not facing the judge. A disturbance broke out in the courtroom, and Mr. Dauer ordered the room cleared.

Then a riot broke out in the court’s anteroom. Police made five arrests. “The protesters blamed it on the police. The police blamed it on the protesters,” Mr. Boas recalled.

Enter William Kunstler, who argued that the state’s prosecution of draft protesters was done in bad faith and was “designed to chill and deter First Amendment expression.”

Eventually, the protesters’ convictions were reduced to minor offenses, such as disorderly conduct. Mr. Boas was found not guilty of disorderly conduct related to the Squirrel Hill protest.

Mr. Kunstler “was a brilliant lawyer, a great guy,” said Mr. Boas, who graduated from the Pitt Law School in 1972 and now is a Pittsburgh criminal defense lawyer. “He had boundless energy and fight in him until the end. Just when you were feeling blue and defeated, he’d come in and inspire you.”

When we look at our tribal nations, we are confident when we say Native people are constantly progressing and doing their best to make a better future. A cornerstone of these efforts often goes unnoticed. They are the silent backers or personal cheerleaders for our initiatives and efforts – and they’re not even Native. They are the non-Natives who stand at our side and at times offer their help to keep Native nations strong or help us to get ahead. Would you like to say thanks to a non-Native advocate?

Ellen DeGeneres’ new cable comedy special, Eric Clapton at the Crossroads Guitar Festival in Chicago, lawyer William Kunstler as the subject of a PBS documentary, and more top picks.

June 18, 2010
Comedienne in her element
Ellen DeGeneres stars in her fourth cable variety/comedy special on TBS, “Ellen’s Somewhat Special Special,” featuring music and magic as well as her own slyly gentle comic routines. Acts include: Grammy-winning country trio Lady Antebellum; top Australian magician James Galea; The Catwalk Acrobats; and the Japanese group Kabuki Expert, appearing in the United States for the first time to perform the viral-video sensation Matrix Ping Pong. The show tapes live at a Chicago comedy festival June 16 and will air on TBS June 27 at 9 p.m.

Otis Redding’s legend is on full display on ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’ (Concord/Stax), a special two-CD set documenting the singer’s three live shows from 1966 at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles.

Cosmopolitan country
Everyone in Nashville knows the go-to guy for impeccable harmony vocals and tasteful guitar stylings is Jim Lauderdale. The cosmopolitan country singer and songwriter is a linchpin for ballyhooed albums by Lucinda Williams, Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, and countless others, but his own albums are where the real gold lies. “Patchwork River” (Thirty Tigers), a collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, features Lauderdale’s strengths – soul-drenched vocals, steely guitar riffs, and even a detour into Memphis R&B.

Guitar heroes
Guitar lovers take note: Rock icon Eric Clapton returns with the third Crossroads Guitar Festival, a one-day blowout event June 26 being held this year in Chicago that will live on as a subsequent DVD. The legendary musician taps the top talent across all genres to join him onstage, from R&B to jazz rock and blues with such headliners as the Allman Brothers Band, B.B. King, and John Mayer. Tickets are available on Ticketmaster. All proceeds go to the Crossroads Center in Antigua, a facility for chemical-dependence treatment.

A lawyer’s life
Civil rights lawyer William Kunstler may be one of the mid-20th century’s most iconic legal names. He gained fame from his role in events that rocked the country, from the uprising at New York’s Attica Prison to the Indian takeover at Wounded Knee, S.D. But he was also a father. His two daughters have made a film, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” an attempt to both frame a family story and capture a larger legacy. Tune in to the PBS “POV” film series on June 22 at 10 p.m.

Free books for the young and bookish
Barnes & Noble’s summer reading program entices kids to read by offering a free book once they have finished eight on their own.

Otis live
Otis Redding’s legend is on full display on “Live on the Sunset Strip” (Concord/Stax), a special two-CD set documenting the singer’s three live shows from 1966 at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. Only 24 years old, Redding is just coming into his own and he doesn’t take his star power for granted. Covers of “Satisfaction” and “A Hard Day’s Night” become exercises in ecstatic soul deliverance, and in these performances you can hear the blueprint of future showmen like Prince who owe a serious debt to nights like these.

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