SHERMAN'S BLOG

Spitzer Agonisties

2008-03-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

One hates to degrade the word tragedy, but if the rise and fall of Eliot Spitzer doesn’t qualify as a modern one, what does? The hounding press helicopters are flying over the Fifth Avenue apartment house in which the Spitzers live, their children are being photographed and humiliated by the swarms of paparazzi as they leave for to school, and his smart and attractive wife is grieving upstairs in her room as her husband tries to cut a deal with the prosecutors, his career and possibly his marriage, surely his life in ruins. By the time I write this Spitzer will have probably resigned his governorship, indeed, he may well be indicted and heading towards imprisonment shortly. And damn if I don’t feel sorry for him, arrogant putz that he was, and probably still is.

No man should be brought down by his sexual life, unless he commits rape, incest or some other form of non-consensual sexual violence. The antiquated sex laws that still govern this country need to be overhauled, and quickly, or we will lose a generation of highly charged sexual men and women who want to commit their lives to public service and still get happily laid in the dirtiest possible way from time to time. There can be no FDR’s, no JFK’s, no LBJ’s, and no WJC’s in America’s future if sexual purity becomes the new standard for electability. I’ll grant you that all except Clinton lived in an age when the press kept a closed eye, or at least a wink towards the sexual lives of American leaders, but if these leaders couldn’t keep it in their pants, at least they kept it among obliging and discreet friends. God help America if the faithful W and Library Laura are what we will get as a result of our demand for sexual purity, men and women who can order up and make war, committing violence against multitudes but manage to remain scandal free in their marriages. America was quite prepared to forgive W his old coke spoon, as long as he spouted his bible and remained faithful to his wife.

Spitzer’s penchant for fancy pros and reckless money laundering was his undoing. We will never know if he went that route because he thought it was safer and more discreet than an affair, dumb-dumb- dumb, or if he just got turned on more by paying for it, giving him a greater sense of control and dominance, as he ordered his sex from the expensive a la carte menu of the five star hotel. Ah, if he had only found an obliging young intern – something WJC could survive, the story would be different. An affair, or multiple affairs, did nothing to harm Rudy G during his Mayoral days, except perhaps amongst his Republican base. But then he had his 9/11 moment that made people forget his disgusting marital behavior, and his total personal selfishness. An ambitious mistress whom a married politico eventually marries appears to be higher in the moral hierarchy than a hooker, or a pay for play escort. No, I don’t believe that prostitution is a victimless crime, but I do think it should be regulated, not criminalized, in order to protect the real victims, the young women who ply that dangerous trade.

I will not be the first to note that it is the cover-up and the hypocrisy, both falling under the category of all out arrogance that brought Spitzer low. Also, there is a suspicion on my part of extra zealous government action, the very kind of action that Spitzer himself took in his Attorney General days, an action that has hounded him and brought him down. Yes, it is the spite in the Spitzer name that helped destroy him. America hates a hypocrite, unless that hypocrite finds Jesus and spouts homilies. One must also be suspicious of a federal judiciary run by the Bush administration. Spitzer was one of the shining lights of the Democratic Party, and we have a Republican government which will stop at nothing to destroy the opposition. Rove may be gone but Rovian behavior remains the gold standard in this administration. But even suspecting an ambitious Republican AJ and others as being extra zealous in bringing Spitzer low, it is Spitzer himself who has undoubtedly done so. I feel sorrow for his wife, his kids, and his elderly parents, and hope that they all somehow get through this alive and begin to repair the terrible damage done so that they can go on to new lives. And I would feel better if a moralizing MSM would cut the crap, and start blowing some kisses to Spitzer for giving them such a juicy scandal to exploit and profit from.

Gus and Us: Part 5 - In the end is the beginning

2008-03-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

GUS AND US: Part V: In the end is the beginning

I have a restless mind, one that often rushes ahead anticipating catastrophe in the midst of great happiness, so the presence of my dog Gus was a blessing. Such an animal demonstrates that life is best lived in the here and now, something he teaches by example. Dogs like small children are mercifully denied a sense of the future; they live in the moment. Yes; they can know fear, joy, sorrow, but not doubt or worry. Worry is what we humans do so well, and causes us such grief. That’s why the visits of dogs to nursing homes and hospitals helps to relieve the fears of the old and the ailing, fears that come when every passing day threatens some new infirmity or another loss. It is not just the endearing appearance of a dog that does it. Cute alone won’t cut it. What matters is that the animal is so present in the world it calms just by being there to be petted, talked to; and responding with unalloyed delight. Actors often speak of staying in the moment, but few of us can do it in our offstage lives, especially actors who always worry about their next job, or worse, how they look. They say that Yoga and religion can help, but I could never bend my legs into pretzels or my mind into miracles. I had my dog Gus to help me get through the good and the bad times.

Thirty years ago I had to admit to myself that my life and my career were going well. I had, and thankfully still have, a splendid wife, Joan, and two fine sons, Nick and Chris. My bread and butter work writing episodes for such half hour episodic TV shows as The Man from Uncle and Twelve O’clock High was behind me, and I was now writing dramatic adaptations of literary classics, many of which were filmed in England. Some of these shows were charmers; my version of Beauty and the Beast with George C. Scott was nominated for an Emmy. I had written the pilot and first three episodes of The Adams Chronicles, a notable PBS series about the world of John Adams which swept the Emmy Awards and won a Peabody. Others projects were clinkers, like a musical version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with Kirk Douglas, the collision of a good actor who couldn’t sing with a score that attempted to turn Foul Gentleman into Fair Lady. I had a real career, one that required an agent, an accountant, a prescription for Atavan, and a very patient family. Better still I was now considered a writer who could take on contemporary issues and put a human face on them.

Among my writing commissions for the year was a mini-series for network TV about the televangelists who were raking in fortunes through their appeals to credulous believers. It was a new national phenomenon that had sin, sex, quackery, corruption and salvation: an irresistible mix, a sure ratings winner. I relished the idea of writing this series. My provisional title for it was “Love Offerings,” a play on what the televangelists called the money they extracted from their listeners, and a reflection on some of their randy lives. This was before the Jim Baker and Jessica Hahn scandal, and well before Jimmy Swaggert and others were exposed for their crimes and misdemeanors. It was the heyday of Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and the ministry of Jerry Falwell, politically powerful men who helped turn down the lights for the dark ages of the George W. Bush presidency.

I spent weeks doing research for this project, driving with Gus seated beside me on the bench seat of my old Ford wagon, the one with the decal of wood on the doors that was half scraped away, interviewing theologians up and down the East coast, trying to get a fix on the exact nature of the religion promulgated by these televangelists with their prayer clubs, their vapid Pat Boone and Anita Bryant cheerleaders, and their Disney inspired Bible Lands.

Gus’s head would be resting on my lap as I drove map in hand to my appointments with academic theologians. I often got lost, stopped to check the map in a gas station, cursed New Jersey or Pennsylvania for being so damned big and full of baffling highways that intersected without warning, all designed to lure me into the land of the head-scratching lost. Then I would start up again with a lurch of the old wagon, one that perfected fish tailing as it wiggled its way over the highway, one that was to make me a convert to prayer. Every time I turned the key in the ignition and pumped my foot on the gas I was obliged to utter, “Good God, please!” in order to get it started and to keep it going.

One afternoon I had an appointment with the Dean of the Theology Department of an Ivy League University. I had taken special care to look respectable, indeed I was playing the young professor in a proper tweed jacket, button down shirt, rep tie, and grey woolen trousers. Just as I parked my old station wagon and was about to leave the car to enter the office of the Dean, Gus opened his mouth, and vomited the contents of his stomach into my lap, neatly, and completely, covering the lap, my shirt, and the tip of my necktie as well. That volcanic upheaval emerged as a large, well shaped meat pie, and Gus looked up at me with sad surprise at what had come forth. Clearly all those herky-jerky stops and starts of mine in that old wagon had made him carsick.

I kept an old dishtowel and a bottle of water for Gus in the rear of the wagon for emergencies. But the more I tried to clean up the mess on my lap, the worse it looked. I couldn’t conceal the crime scene on my lap. Gus looked more surprised by what he had given forth than guilty, and I could hardly reprimand him for it. I walked Gus for a little while to help him regain his land legs, but what could I do about mine? There was no way to enter the great man’s office with a large wet stain on the front of my trousers, one that now ran down to my knees, one that made me look incontinent, or worse, wearing clothes that smelled of regurgitated pet food. I got back into the wagon with a revitalized Gus and drove to the center of that university town, located an Army Navy store, bought a new shirt, a crisp, new pair of khaki trousers, and removed the offending tie. In less than ten minutes and twenty dollars I entered the Dean’s office, now Mr. Respectable, though a bit more the casual undergraduate that young professor with Gus in tow. Only later was I to realize that I had a price tag hanging from the back of the shirt collar.

The Dean himself was wearing a denim work-shirt and khakis, so Gus had a better instinct about how to dress for this meeting than I did, and took that drastic measure to see that I changed my clothes. And the Dean admired him; and thereby me for having such a fine traveling companion. I had earlier discovered that a beguiling dog is the perfect ice-breaker, and nobody ever objected to his being there during an interview. In fact, I think it was more Gus’s appealing looks than my probing questions that got people to open up to me.

My research now confirmed what I instinctively knew, that the Jim Bakers and the other TV ministries had strip mined the bible to build financial empires that combined old time religion, right wing politics, and snake oil skullduggery. There were several cases of elderly men and women, fearful and critically ill, giving all their life savings to the televangelists for a promise of healing, only to die abandoned in sickness and poverty. I came to despise these hucksters who were building fortunes for themselves on the backs of the simple, the poor and the suffering. Love Offerings became a hard headed look at the present day descendants of Billy Sunday, Amie Semple McPherson, and the fictional Elmer Gantry. Despite my disgust for these theocratic crooks, my script was not unsympathetic to those evangelicals who took their mission from the bible seriously in serving the sick and the poor.

I was proud of what I had created. I tried to make the scripts so compelling and so fair minded that no network could afford to shelve this project. Tried, and failed.

The trouble came when some televangelists heard of my mini-series shortly before it was to be filmed by the network. Perhaps they had been alerted to it by someone I had interviewed for my research. I’ll never know. A network censor had reviewed the completed scripts and sent me his shocked comments, together with a letter from one particularly powerful televangelist that the network had received. If I recall properly it was Jerry Falwell. It was clearly passed along to me in error. I now knew from that threatening letter that these ministers were threatening a boycott of the network by millions of their followers, and a boycott of the sponsors of this series should it ever see the light of day. It didn’t. Plans to film and air the show were postponed. Very soon it was removed from the broadcast schedule; forgotten by all but me. I had been paid well for my work and any smart writer would have let the matter end there. But smart professional moves are not among the claims I make for myself.

That summer a local Long Island newspaper was interviewing me as a Bridgehampton resident, and I mentioned my experience with my televangelist mini-series to the reporter. Strangely, I had almost no hard feelings towards the televangelists. They were what they were, self-righteous bullies protecting their turf, and their threats were to be expected. All my anger was now directed at the cowardice of the network. I said that the network was chicken-shit and had buckled under to the pressure of theocratic crooks, blackmailers and fools. This was published locally and picked up nationally by Variety.

My literary agent informed me that I would never again work in television, my primary source of income, unless I apologized to the network heads privately; and publicly in the newspapers. “Tell ‘em you misspoke. Tell ‘em that you were misquoted. Tell ‘em that they’re planning to do it next season. Nobody’s gonna remember it next season. All you gotta do is just tell ‘em.”

I refused to do so. I lost that agent and I didn’t work for the networks for several years. I had been too young for the McCarthy era blacklist, but I had managed in my own way to blacklist myself as an indiscreet maverick; a guy who would not play by the rules. The good news was that it offered me the chance to work in the theatre, the work I loved, and to spend more time in Bridgehampton with Joan, our new son, Nick, and Gus.

Joan didn’t question my decision to go public with my televangelist experience, but I knew that I had put our family income in serious jeopardy. It was my vanity, my sense of myself as being a special person exempt from the rules of the world, something that my doting parents had probably instilled in my young mind, something that should have been expunged from it years before by my own hard won life experience. The truth was that my indiscretions were a luxury we could ill afford; caution and tact, not public outrage, were required to make a living in the world of television, a commercial world where the bottom line is always the top line. I had played a fool’s role, the proverbial virgin in the whore-house, foolish because I knew how the networks worked, and that they usually caved in to pressure groups. I was allowing myself moral outrage in a world where there were few morals and no room for outrage. The networks continued to thrive as did the televangelists. Clearly I wasn’t Sherman the Giant Killer, I was Sherman the Career Killer.

All through this trauma Gus continued to behave as if I was still the most fascinating, lovable fellow in the world. Our long walks together were better than any therapist’s advice; better yet I didn’t have to explain myself to him. It was Gus who didn’t give a damn if I was cowardly or courageous, cautious, or just plain dumb; if I talked too much, or too little. Gus loved me simply for being there and being me, whoever I was at the time. All he asked of me is what every dog asks of its owner, food, love, and company. I gave him that, but since I could be moody and changeable, one day feeling great joy in being alive, the next wallowing in some fascinating new despair, I could be a challenge to those who lived with me. Hell, I could be a challenge to myself. Despite my shift in moods, I knew that I could never betray Gus’s love, even at my dopiest and most irresponsible he would love me, and that he would be the mirror that reflected the person I wished to be, not the imperfect, very flawed man I knew myself to be. It is the genius of dogs to offer us a view of ourselves, not as we are, but as we would like to be. Having a dog does the most amazing and contradictory thing – it forces us to grow up and to be a child at the same time, and so it was with Gus and me.

Gus was ten years old when our first son, Nicholas was born, an event that Gus did not regard with unalloyed joy. As Nick grew into a boisterous toddler, Gus showed remarkable forbearance in allowing the child to pull his ears and attempt to ride him like a pony but we called a halt to such activities as soon as we saw them. As Gus grew older, indeed, old, Gus avoided the snow that he had once loved, in the city the salt that melted the snow burned his pads and he refused the indignity of rubber dog booties. In the country the icy cold ground now sent shivers through him. But he was still capable of joyful indoor romps with his now ancient friend, the Rockwell’s cat Tiber. Although the gorgeous Maine Coon was also getting on in years and was annoyed by too much noisy canine company, Gus’s own age forced him to moderate his enthusiasms during their encounters. I knew that time was against us. I just didn’t realize that time was upon us.

I had been totally occupied by my career writing for the theatre, enjoying the success of the notorious late 70’s erotic revue “Oh Calcutta!” where I had a well reviewed sketch, and a Broadway musical; ”The Rothschilds,” for which I was nominated for a Tony; so busy that I wasn’t paying much mind to what was going on around me. My work as a screenwriter of TV and film scripts was flourishing again, a career that often took me to London, Berlin, and Budapest. I was far too busy and self absorbed to notice the changes that were taking place in Gus when I returned. One day Gus seemed listless, he refused his food; later that afternoon I heard him whimpering. He had trouble sitting. He had trouble standing. He had trouble. Gus was reluctant to go outside for his walk, but I was able to rationalize what I saw. “He’s just getting old,” I told Joan. “It’s probably only arthritis.” But when I picked him up in my arms to carry him into the street, he was shockingly light. And when I placed him on the ground he refused to move.

We brought him to the vet immediately. After a few tests the vet told us that Gus was suffering from an incurable cancer. He advised us to put him down that very day, the most merciful way to deal with this disease which was encroaching on all his vital organs. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And, Gus forgive me, I didn’t.

I convinced myself that it was a big medical mistake. Doctors misdiagnose illness often enough – why not a vet? “Just look at him and you can see he’ll be okay,” I said to Joan, who bought into my fantasy, the will to believe in a good outcome for one we love being stronger than the facts before us. “The dog isn’t moaning now, he’s simply listless, in a few days, in a few weeks”--- but two weeks passed without any change for the better, and Joan was determined that something be done. He grew weaker, stopped eating, no plate of my mother’s renowned chopped chicken liver could tempt him off his place on the rug, near my slipper. We squirted into the corners of his mouth drops of a concentrated cola recommend by a vet to give him energy after some illness he had years before, a remedy that did nothing for him now. I cleaned up any mess he made on the floor without complaint; indeed, I tried to conceal it from Joan, anxious to hide any new evidence of his rapid decline. Gus had been such a fastidious animal that my father-in-law named him “Gentleman Gus” and the loss of control seemed to shock and shame him. Without quite realizing it our home was turning into a hospice for a dying Gus.

During those two weeks I rarely left his side, I found it difficult to distract myself with work, and I decided that I could somehow pull Gus through this malaise by the strength of my own will, which, being my mother’s son, could be formidable. I would convince him by my proximity that it was his obligation to get well because I needed him and he could not abandon me. It was a conceit born of desperation. Then one day I awoke to find him lying in a pool of blood which had issued from his mouth, blood that stained the dark green blanket on which he slept a cruel black, blood that could not be ignored. I now knew that I had failed him abysmally by letting him live on, that I had violated the trust that existed between us. I called to him, “Hey Gus, come here Pal.” He picked up a bit, wagged his tale, and hobbled over to me for a head rub. I took him up in my arms, wrapped him in one of Nick’s old baby blankets, and carried him to the vet at once. The decision to release him from his pain was now out of my hands. It was the only way.

For a moment the lurking coward in me emerged as I was about to witness the death of Gus. Standing up for my beliefs was always a challenge for me, but one I enjoyed, it filled me with pride, because I found it easy to stand up to the powerful and the wrong-headed. But Gus’s death was altogether different. I felt hollow and helpless in the face of it. And that coward inside me whom I had pushed out of sight my whole life, emerged with a terrible force of its own. I wanted to leave him there with the vet, not to bear witness to the life going out of him. But I knew that I had failed him by letting him live on too long in pain, I could not again fail him by letting him die alone. His last sight of this world could not be the vet’s examining room he always feared, held down by a stranger on a cold metal table. His life of loyalty could not be repaid with such betrayal.

I stayed in the examining room with Gus, stroking his head, as the vet injected him with whatever it is that releases the canine soul from its body. I heard the deepest sigh, and finally, looking up at me, he died in my arms. As long as I live I will never forget that sigh, nor will I be able to tell whose sigh that was, Gus’s or mine.

At the time of his death Gus was seventeen years old, a good dog’s age they say, but to me cruelly short. The awful fact about loving a dog as we did is that one refuses to accept the seven times one human year as the arithmetic of his lifespan. Joan and I had indulged in a folie au dieu, convincing ourselves that he would be with us forever. Some might say that I had anthropomorphized him, that I had imposed a whole lot of human emotions on what was just an ordinary little dog who had trained us to live with him. But there is one perfect answer for that. They didn’t know Gus.

My wife, my young son, and our parents grieved for Gus with me. He was so loved by all who knew him that he started a small vogue for miniature schnauzers among my friends and family, and was the inspiration for at least two needlepoint portraits made by Gus lovers, pillows that sit upon my sofa today, gentle reminders of the Gus that was. I’ve loved many dogs since that time, among them a great little schnauzer named Max, but none of them could inspire the joy I found in Gus, and the loss that I felt when he died. I know that Joan shared my feelings, but we had a young son we adored, life would force us to move on, so at the end I would go forward. But on the day Gus died, I lost not just the best of dogs, but the boy who long ago read those thrilling dog stories while lying ill in his bed, dreaming of a friendship and a love that could withstand all his imperfections and the test of time. In Gus I found that love and that friendship if only for a little while.

In the end is the beginning the mystics say, suggesting a reincarnation, a rebirth in a new form that follows death. I don’t know that I’d like that. What’s the value of coming back as a new creature without our old consciousness, the store of memories that have perplexed us and nourished us throughout our lives? What I do know is that death places a frame around a life, and we can see it whole, from start to finish. The dead are reborn as memory, and that’s enough for me. Mercifully, the mind is a great editor; it can remove much of the pain of the past, and leave us with those memories that help us get through a hard present.

As I look back on Gus’s life with me, I can’t truthfully say if I didn’t read my own great needs and deepest feelings into Gus’s adoring looks and loyal presence. For much of our lives we read and misread the feelings and motives of the humans we love, based on our personal needs, so how can it be different in reading a dog’s emotions? Truth is, it doesn’t matter at all. Who gives a damn about the why of love? What matters is the fact of it, the feel of it; the delicious wonder of it. There is no way to rationalize or explain such love; it is felt in the flesh and in the bone.

All I do know is that for those seventeen short years Gus shared my life I was one hell of a lucky guy*

Abridged from Sherman Yellen’s memoir, Spotless, a work in progress. Copyright 2008. The preceding parts of Gus and Us can be found in Sherman Yellen’s blog file on The Huffington Post.

Let's face it: Bush isn't lying to us, he's nuts!

2007-12-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

This has been a week in which Washington and the political world has been turned upside down by the US government’s revelation that Iran is not now making nuclear weapons, and had abandoned that program years ago. This contradicted all that our President has been saying these past weeks, as he kept beating the drum for war with Iran. Now comes the old question, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” It looks like 1970’s show time in America. But is it really? We so want to believe that George W. Bush was lying to us, that he is Richard Nixon Redux; it would make us feel so comfortable, fill our heads with dreams of impeachment and a shining new government as the helicopter takes him back to Crawford, Texas, while Cheney eternally defibrillates in the lobby of Walter Reid Hospital, and the ever startled but resolute Nancy Pelosi is our first woman president.

Unfortunately, Bush’s lying won’t accomplish this. Look at this man in his press conferences. Listen to him carefully. Every word he says rings with conviction. This is no actor delivering Cheney’s lines; this is a truth teller, a fellow who speaks from his own heavy heart, a man who follows his own script, a guy who says what he means and means what he says The fact that he speaks his fantasies and believes all of them is what makes him so dangerous. He is clearly insane and that’s something few wish to face because insanity is harder to deal with than the worst kind of prevarication. Liars get exposed, madmen get re-elected.

I am no psychologist but it is clear to me that Bush lives in a world of alternate reality in which it is necessary to create new enemies daily even though our world provides enough real ones to keep this country alert for years. He must keep putting us in harms way in order to keep saving us. Enemies, for him, as with Giuliani, give him the strength he needs to wake up in the morning, and in Bush’s case, never to think of the irreparable damage he has done to this country and to the lives of millions. Unfortunately, armed with his fantasies this madman can send armies out to die, blow up whole civilizations, and there is little resolve in the Congress to stop him. One reason is that we Americans are so suspicious of psychological mumbo jumbo; we have been so overdosed to psycho-babble by our Dr. Phils and all those other TV explainers who can’t accept the messiness of the human condition that we are reluctant to recognize a lunatic when the real one comes along. The old news is that all families, even the best of them, are dysfunctional, and all of us are plagued by our own desires and disappointments during our lifetimes. That’s okay. It’s called real life. This is what our forefathers knew and managed to live with. Life can’t often be cured, sometimes it must be endured. But how do we endure a madman at the head of our government? What can we do about it? Very little in the way of a solution comes to mind. Nancy Pelosi will not be fitting this President with the straight-jacket he needs, nor will his doctor dare prescribe the anti-psychotic medication that might restore him to reality and the country to peace again. In all probability we will be obliged to wait out this year, hoping that Freddy Kreuger POTUS doesn’t decide to strike again.

Some wayward thoughts of a GOM* on a December morning

2007-12-05T05:56:00.000-08:00

1. I know I should see "No Country for Old Men" - the much raved about new film, but the thought of going to see a film that is so relentlessly violent keeps me out of the theatre these winter days. Maybe the title should be "No Picture for Old Men." Not that I need a diet of sweets, although I am a dark chocolate lover long before science told us it was good for us, but "Juno" was my kind of picture - funky, funny, and endearingly honest, although it went on far too long, and the girl in it was too smarty-cute by far. Of course every film out there goes on too long. I don't suggest we return to the pablum of some of the pre-seventies films, but the old studios knew that ninety minutes was golden for films.

2. The older I get the more I need and love my friends and family. They both seem to get better and smarter with time.

3. I used to be so bored and impatient with other people's stories about their grandchildren, now that I have one of my own I am the bore who can't stop boasting of her brilliance, her beauty, and her loving-kindness, all of which she has in the most remarkable degree. When she visits, which is fortunately often, the world lights up for me, everything takes on a different look as I see the ordinary become extraordinary through the eyes of a marvelous child. Live and learn.

*GOM stands for Grumpy Old Man.

ON BEING HUCKABEGUILED AND RUDEFILED

2007-12-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

There’s no doubt that Governor Huckabee has whipped the competition in the charm department of the GOP, at least to this viewer of the Republican contest. Ron Paul may have the honest old country doctor market cornered, but Huckabee is the charmer on stage, the Republican Ruby Keeler backed up by a chorus of wannabe starlets. He is clearly at ease with himself, he can actually smile and laugh without it appearing that he has rehearsed being winsome before two consultants, a powder-puff and a mirror. Yes, that’s a show of real self-ease, one gets his ease right away although one cannot always be sure what his self is. Is it his old time religion, so strong a brew that it would leak over the Constitution, staining it permanently? Is it his anti-choice position, his lunatic anti-income tax proposals, or remarkable for a Republican candidate, his clear stance against torture that represents the real Huckabee self? Friends, I just ran this through spell-check and poor Huckabee keeps coming up as Chickadee, as in the immortal W.C. Field’s “My Little Chickadee.” This bring up the great question, can a man with an odd name become President? That’s for the people to decide, something that keeps the Obama fans on edge.

Why torture is so hard for the GOP to get its arms around is remarkable to me. Romney doesn’t want to discuss it for fear of giving our secrets away to the enemy, although having to watch Romney weasel about for the next four years as President might qualify as a form or land-boarding for America, being beaten over the head by the heaviest GOP clichés for four more years of foreign policy fumbling and domestic economic despair. If there is an unacceptable level of dullness and caution for a candidate Romney has long ago reached it. McCain who has actually experienced torture is against it, but he favors so many policies that promise more war and less economic justice that he is irrelevant in the moral competition. This brings up the ever fascinating Rudy whom so many Republicans outside of NYC, together with wife Judi, seem to love beyond all human understanding.

Rudy appears to be the Republican Father Christmas who will bring the hard core GOP voters the gift of impregnable national security, flex American muscle and stare down the world, why his very smile – that remarkable dental armor - the very Humvee of teeth that will provide an insurmountable border that will keep out the illegal aliens who threaten to weed their gardens. Trouble is, those of us who have lived through the NYC reign of Ragin’ Rudy know that this smiling Santa wants to take away your civil liberties in exchange for this so-called protection. He will get rid of the squeegee guys who annoy you at stoplights by offering to wash your already clean windows, but he will want to order about museums – telling them what they can and cannot display – and he will be at odds with every minority figure who stands up to him. This Santa Rudy constantly lies about his accomplishments, the gifts he brings to the GOP children are not security and a restoration of America’s reputation, he only offers the promise of an Emperor Giuliani, not just for his sexual morals which show a juicy bit of Ancient Rome, but for his hatred for all opposition to his will, his refusal to compromise with – hell, pay attention to reality. He is a moral disaster that has so far been confined to one city. He could become a national disaster. He claims to have made NYC safe, although it cannot be said too often that his arrogant refusal to heed warnings by placing the communications center for police and fire-fighters inside the World Trade Center after it had been attacked previously, together with his failure to provide the firefighters with good communications equipment was responsible for so many deaths. He was not the savior of 9/11; he was another survivor of a great American tragedy, but one he viewed as a means for personal aggrandizement as he paraded before the television cameras, and made himself rich and famous. He is a very bad man, America. He is not America’s Mayor, he is America’s nightmare. He is the only candidate who robbed a corpse to gain power and wealth.

The trouble with the GOP for unabashed old liberals like me is that those guys force me to get into the good and evil business – their turf - something I have spent a lifetime trying to avoid. The young man I was loved nothing more than shades of grey, saving the inky black tones for fascism, Stalinism, toothaches and bad movies. Now, thanks to the Bush/Cheney years of remorseless lying that has led to myriad deaths and American moral decline I have gotten into the good and bad mode and it’s hard to shake it. It’s my hope that a Democratic victory might bring back some of those shades of gray that our Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution. Or at least give me the illusion that we can regain the lost ground of the past eight years with some dignity and a great deal of old fashioned humanity.

Remembrance of Strikes Past

2007-11-07T06:23:00.000-08:00

These past weeks two seemingly disconnected events occurred in my life. First, I had the mother of all viral colds keeping me in bed for days that stretched into weeks. Between sneezes and coughing, and attempting to read – I would finally reach for the remote to turn on the TV and give in to whatever appeared on the screen be it Judge Judy or a rerun of some CSI show. After a week or watching the tube I was amazed at what passes for television drama these days. Forget your “Sopranos.” There are works of genius in the worst of times, but what fills most screens are burned corpses, CSI blonds with perfect makeup and squeaky voices speaking autopsy dialogue as they wait for the DNA results, in shows as ritualistic and formulaic as Kabuki plays in old Japan. What passes for evening entertainment is bloody junk – a perfect reflection of the Bush era which has given us bloody war in the form of junk government.

Second event, the WGA struck. This strike is about writers getting a fair share of residuals from the new technologies, the DVD’s and the internet. It’s an old story. The networks and the producers who express liberal and progressive views about politics and government, these men and women who contribute to Obama and Hillary, in their working life they are as greedy and repressive as any robber baron in the 19th century when it comes to sharing the pie. They want it all. It is what happens when one gets a great fortune for making a few good choices and many bad choices, and when one comes to believe in the divine right of kings – be they Louis the Fourteenth or Barry the Diller. Getting them to give others a fair share of the financial rewards is going against nature – their nature. The ruthlessness that it took to become President of X network is not something that can be put aside when negotiating with the writers who from the beginning of time have been regarded (in the immortal words of some Louis B. Mayer) as “a shmuck with an Underwood.”

This shmuck with a Smith Corona started writing for television in the late fifties so I have lived through several strikes. But the one that remains clearest in my mind was the strike of 1988 when we struck for comparable reasons to the current strike – a fairer share of the current and future pie. Some of it was fun. Writing is such a solitary business it was good for awhile to walk on a picket line with ones fellows, to hear their dreams and their grievances, to claim that we were all spending our free time writing brilliant spec scripts, and to pretend that a better world for writers would result from our actions. I also recall those five months of unemployment wrecking many a writer’s financial life, marriages broke up under the strain, college tuitions and mortgages went unpaid, and few made up for their losses with future earnings. 1988 was not a time of great rewards, even for the most successful of writers. Still, it was worth it if one took a long view and the small gains made helped writers in the future. That strike brought a 9 percent loss of audience to the networks and introduced cable to the world. It also toughened the WGA. The networks who thought they were cutting talent down to size ended up cutting themselves down to size by losing their old share of the audience. What the public does not realize is that most writers have the financial life span of a fashion runway model – a few good years of flash and glory – followed by diminishing careers that retreat into the shadows. Future rewards for current work is not about greed, it is about survival. Ageism is a basic reality in the entertainment business. After two Emmy Awards and various honors bestowed upon me by the industry I learned that at fifty I was considered old news. I had to go to Europe to find work. No, I wasn’t blacklisted, I was grey-listed. And that continues to this day. I am fortunate to draw my pension from the WGA, and spend my working life writing a memoir, writing songs, working in regional theatres and developing plays, but even if that was not the case, my heart if not my legs would be out there marching with my fellow writers. The shmuck with the Underwood is now the shmuck with the laptop, but the characterization of the writer remains the same in the minds of the executives.

The viewing public is surprised, almost shocked, that the Jon Stuarts and the David Lettermans do not write their wonderful quips and actually need writers. Anyone who has watched Jerry Seinfeld recently stumble through an interview with a minimum of wit and a maximum of ego is reminded of the role of the writer in comedy as well as drama. The writer is the invisible man. I can recall standing in a theatre lobby hearing the audience discuss one of my plays, and praising the actors for being so witty. Not a word about the writer of that dialogue. Some notable critics have made that same error. But we endure that. It is a small price to pay for being allowed to work at a trade we love. The old days in which I first flourished produced Studio One and Playhouse 90 – vehicles for writers to do their best with nary a CSI blond in sight to deliver computer driven dialogue. It was the era of Horton Foote, Reggie Rose and Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote television plays that dealt with social issues that did not need to be dressed in a murder to be accepted by an audience. Although I hate to sentimentalize, after looking at the current crop of TV shows and movies it’s hard not to look back with nostalgia upon character driven scripts with stories about real people and audiences who were more interested in the problems of the living rather than the innards of a corpse or the flames of an exploding car. From my perspective writers should be striking for more control over the content of their shows, as much as for future profits. No, there were never good old days for writers in television but these days it kind of looks that way between my sneezing and my coughing.

Why bad buildings happen to good cities

2007-10-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

Some grumblings on Trump Place, the Hearst Tower, and the new MOMA.

By way of full disclosure I must confess that I am a passionate lover of cities and of their great architecture, but with no formal architectural training to give academic weight to my opinions. I’m just a cranky, opinionated guy with a strong point of view. So read further at your own risk. I was born in New York City at the time when the Chrysler Building and the Empire State were just constructed. I have lived in a New York that had the celebrated skyline that we all recall from films and photos; buildings with setback terraces built of natural building materials, steel, limestone, and brick, with discreet windows and stone carved decorations around the canopied entrances and the art deco facades. These were and are amazing buildings, the product of art and commerce at its best. Sure there was plenty of substandard tenement housing that warehoused the poor, but the city felt organic, even the worst of the housing was of brick and mortar and brownstone, rundown perhaps, but never ostentatiously ugly. Where we lived might limit our present lives but it never defined our future. And this city sheltered us.

There was very little new building taking place during my childhood in the Depression so I came to view the city as immutable; that is, until my visit as a boy of six to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was there that I first came to see and love modern architecture. Some of that fair was built by Wallace Harrison, one of the great architects who helped design the masterpiece that is Rockefeller Center. That fair was Oz for city kids like me and I expected that New York would someday become an Emerald City of great new modern buildings, tall enough to strut their streamlined stuff but not so tall as to cast annoying dark shadows, with fountains and gardens and statues and benches to sit on so as to swap stories with friends or read away a summer’s day. These would be affordable buildings that would shelter people on a human scale in a humane fashion. Well, kids can dream, can’t they?

As an adult I have been lucky enough to live in pre-war buildings in some of the great cities like New York and London and work in such splendid cities as Budapest and Berlin. I know that I am jealously protective of the cities I love, and not always rational on the subject of the new buildings that sprout up within them, sometimes without warning. I was appalled by the skyscraping of the former East Berlin by uber-companies vying with one another to see who could erect the tallest glass-walled architectural monument to its glory. Yes, these are better than the dingy modern buildings built before the wall came down in Stalinist style, but no more human in their context. During the Communist years the old pre-war Adlon Hotel remained a reproach to the architectural junk that the commissars were tossing up. It seems to me that the great cities need all the protection they can get from contemporary architects, and more from those growth crazed city governments who see a new tax base where you and I see a new architectural monstrosity. Take for example Trump Place that eponymous project that was recently constructed on the west side of Manhattan near Lincoln Center. It may not be the worst of the large apartment developments but it is the latest and worth examining for what it says about city architecture today.

Plans for this Trump project were approved during the Giuliani administration in an effort to develop a part of the city that was lying fallow thanks to the New York Central railway yard that covered it. The lack of buildings on that spot was a welcome visual respite at the edge of the Hudson for a city that was so overcrowded. But where some of us see a wonderful open space that might become a park, a Donald Trump sees a wonderful opportunity for increasing his fortune. All very proper and legal. He obtained the land, filed his plans, and the project went forward. There are sixteen new residential towers on the former West Side rail yard, many of them with apartments that sell for millions, with a small percentage of these set aside for affordable housing whatever that means in today’s world. It seems to me no accident that this group of buildings was put into play during the Giuliani administration. It is a monument to that former Mayor’s autocratic sensibilities. I passed Trump Place recently while driving on the West Side Highway and I was struck by the great irony that this development represents. Trump has associated his name with all that is successful and elegant in this city but one passing look at Trump Place with its blocks of million dollar apartments lined up in a massive row and the first thought I had was that Lenin had been reborn as an architect and he is plying his trade with the Donald as his client. These were factories for the rich to live in.

It is remarkable how much the free market – left unchecked by government oversight and inattentive zoning commissions - can replicate the worst of totalitarian aesthetics giving us an architectural style that might be called Kontempory Kommisar. The good part for me is that I am not obliged to look at Trump Place very often but the same cannot be said for the great 57th Street where Carnegie Hall reigns, and new construction is happening all the time.

While riding west on the 57th Street cross-town bus last week my attention turned to what was once the endearingly stupid art deco Hearst Building, designed in the nineteen twenties by Joseph Urban, the brilliant set designer for William Randolph Hearst’s movies and the architect for the Ziegfeld Theatre. The Hearst is a building that always amused with its dated, exuberant architectural folly. It was a small office building whose grandiose base was created for a tower that never was erected. Urban was the designer of elaborate stage sets for the Ziegfeld Follies and for the extravagant silent films in which Marion Davies, chorus girl/ soubrette/ and good-natured Hearst mistress appeared. The building commissioned by Hearst has eight phallic columns which contains figures at their base representing the arts and sciences. It was a fitting place for a newspaper and magazine empire meant both to inform and titillate. I enjoyed it for what it was – an architectural misadventure but a very lovable one. Hearst never managed to build the tall tower to top the amusing columns so there was something of an empty shell about the place. Sir Norman Foster, the revered British architect just succeeded in filling that shell. It has received nearly universal praise for its unique design and its “green” energy saving details. You can go on the internet and get a podcast tour of the premises by no less than Tom Brokow who will proclaim its serious virtues.

Sir Norman, who has built a fine addition to the British Museum in London, and done exemplary work on the Reichstag in Berlin, can be an admirable architect. In the case of the Reichstag, that building with its evil history could use all the transparency in glass that it could get from Sir Norman whose addition was intelligent and resourceful. But he has gone so far off the mark in New York that one might hope that he can be kept out in the future as an undocumented alien and a menace to my city.

The tower addition to the Hearst building, for those who have missed seeing it, is a series of intersecting blue diamond shapes that unfold like a hand held accordion dropped on its side by a drunken street musician. The total effect of its exterior is so ugly that it is a stick in the eye to the grandeur of that remarkable street that includes Carnegie Hall, the Osborne Apartments, the Art Students League, the Park Vendome and a great many splendid old skyscraper offices and residential buildings. This new building is so disconnected from its base that it looks like it was landed atop the old Hearst building rather than built upon it. It ignores tradition and context as if they were dirty words, why it’s very lack of connection to its base and to its neighbors on the street is what the architectural wise-guys find so exciting. That disconnect with its neighbors can work well as in the Hancock Building in Boston whose modern glass exterior reflects the gorgeous 19th century Richardson church nearby, but more often it creates a visual hodge-podge as in the Hearst Tower. And so its admirers have announced that its greatest fault – its lack of context to its base - is its greatest virtue.

I do appreciate the idea of a completely green building which is exactly what this one claims to be. It brings out the sleeping Al Gore in me. Yes, I want to save the planet from global warming as much as anyone does who cares about life in the future. This new Hearst Tower might be perfectly okay in a suburban industrial park, a commendable effort at warding off those abominable green-house gases, but what does it profit you if you gain the whole world but lose 57th Street? Come on, fellas! What were you thinking? Now I haven’t been inside the building where I understand the lobby is so vast it echoes the set of the German expressionist film “Metropolis” – at least it looks that way from the photographs. Mine is strictly the outsider’s view. This is a building that is so damned virtuous but impossible to love; and it is just plain ugly – at least to any honest passerby. No, I’m wrong. Someone does love it. The New York Times, the newspaper of record that has a sad record of endorsing the worst in city architecture over the past decade in its architectural reviews and editorial pages. It must always be remembered that The Times has deep interests in city real estate, Times Square and all that good stuff, and it tends to treat the works of local developers very carefully. Yes, that newspaper adored it. And they were not alone in their praise. The venerable New Yorker Magazine had high praise for it, a sincere but misguided infatuation by an aging roué of a magazine for the new girl on the block who is something of an exhibitionist. You can bet that none of the critics who praised this building would live in such a structure, huddled as they are in their cozy Victorian brownstones in Greenwich Village or Brooklyn Heights.

Was it not enough for The Times to cheer on the Iraq war? That war, for all its ignominy will no doubt end someday but Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower will be with us for generations to come, which at my age is forever. And as the great P.G Woodhouse would say, “it’s a blot on the landscape.”

II

What we city folk have been obliged to live with in the way of new buildings is truly remarkable. I won’t mention – oh but yes I will - the new Museum of Modern Art. This has to be the worst building ever created in modern times to exhibit art – and that includes the notorious Huntington Hartford Museum on 59th Street. Although the revered circular Guggenheim was built on stodgy Fifth Avenue years ago by Frank Lloyd Wright, disconnected from the street it graces - it plays off the Central Park it faces and works as a remarkable art viewing experience. It was and is grand in spirit and design. MOMA was not a work of Sir Norman’s atelier but it is built in his spirit. It has Pritzger Prize written all over it, and with its distracting escalators laden with visitors, and acres of glass, one sees more of the crowd than the paintings and sculpture, something that does not distract in the old Metropolitan Museum for all its tourists. Yes, the old MOMA lacked storage space and you couldn’t view every painting in the collection, but it was elegant, human in scale, designed for viewing art, and not created as a revenue machine to bring in out-of-town tourist to its many gift shops, and expensive restaurants, or to advertise the talents of its notable architect.

And what are we to make of all those titanium Kleenex tissues that Frank Gehry has carelessly dropped all over the western world spreading his architectural virus willy-nilly? The first time round in Barcelona it was great fun, but now, after it has started to breed and send its progeny around the world it is a bit unsettling. I recently sat under Gehry’s titanium bandstand shell in Millennium Park in Chicago (a city that has so many great building one can only gape in awe and envy when you visit) and I couldn’t figure out what purpose that mammoth hankie fulfilled for listening to music or sheltering against the winds coming off Lake Michigan. I then determined that its real purpose was to announce to the world that the great Gehry was here, eager to make his mark in the city of Burnham, Sullivan, and Wright, the greats who built the architectural treasure that is Chicago and its environs. And what great city today can do without that trademark architectural parachute? Do I sound cranky? A grouchy old man? Okay, when it comes to art and architecture, I admit to it.

Architecture for me is the most important of the arts. It is the mother art. It shelters us, it gives us a refuge in our daily lives, it gives us our place to work and play, and we are obliged to view it, like it or not, as we move through our cities. When it is great, it renews and restores our spirits. When it is bad it dashes those spirits. Sir Norman’s work exemplifies the new architecture in my city. None of your restrained Lever House/ Bauhaus elegance for him or his brethren. He has a statement to make – and it is “Look at me!” The appalling glass tower that he proposes to place over the old Park Benet building on Madison Avenue has been postponed due to community and zoning objections, but nobody can stop Sir Norman for long. He will come back from his drawing board with something that slips by the zoning board. He is the future, like it or not.

The Bloomberg era in New York may someday be known as the time when New York was assaulted by a rash of Hedge-Fund architecture on its skyline, leaving a mess for the generations to come to clean up with a bulldozer. More important, it was also the time when the middle-class was driven from the city by a soaring real estate market, and the city lost its mix of workers, store keepers, sales people, teachers, and artists, as the city became a place for financiers, movie folk, and e-commerce speculators. I know there have always been such people in my city, but the richest among them often left behind great libraries, concert halls, and museums. I know that the intention of the new Hearst Tower was to bring modern building techniques and green principles to bear upon architecture and create a fine workplace but the end result – as viewed from the street - is an insult to the street it has been built on. Yes, there are other atrocities to be found there. The fine old buildings on Fifty Seventh between Fifth and Madison have been covered with billion dollar corporate graffiti thanks to a city that has done next to nothing to stop the desecrations. Yes, bad buildings happen to good cities for the same reason that bad wars happen: private greed and public indifference, and wrongheaded, arrogant experts praising what the rest of us see with open eyes as ugliness and a huge mistake.

2007-10-08T06:52:00.001-07:00

Beware! The GOP Space Aliens from Xandur have arrived

This past week felt like a bad sci-fi movie released by the moguls of Washington. Many of the Republican notables have finally broken out of their pods and emerged as full fledged space aliens with a mission from planet Xandur to destroy the constitution and bring terror down upon the land. And to think that some of us once mistook them for humans.

First, there was Clarence Thomas on Sixty Minutes last Sunday. His appearance in that fascinating interview was everything we might have expected but dreaded. When he at last agreed to break out of his pod for the interview we knew for a certainty that this emotional disaster has spent his life licking his wounds, picking his scabs, and denying the realities of his life and the world he lives in. He is our first Supreme who appears to hate the planet Earth and all its people. It was an amazing performance. Smiling, glowering, condemning, whining; a living insult and a threat to the well-being of all Americans, particularly African-Americans, an insult to the justice system that we will have to live with for years and years to come. One could only wish that he had followed through on his resolve to reject any advancement that might seem to derive from some racial quota. He claims to have buried his Yale degree in his basement for this reason, then why not follow through and resign from the court for the same reason? But consistency is not for the likes of Justice Thomas. Grievance is his meat and drink, but only his own grievances, not those of the people who come before his court. Once I thought he was planted in the court by George Herbert Walker Bush to weigh it down with staunch conservatives, but now it is clear that Thomas comes with a mission from Xandur - not to follow through on the advice of his beloved grandfather to be a proud and self-sufficient man - but to complete his mission to destroy our Justice system and then depart on his flying saucer to his true home on the planet Cry-Baby.

Speaking of babies, we have W - Bush the Baby Slayer. His chortling delight in promising to veto the program that would assure health care insurance for uncovered children was, even for Bush, a bit of overacting. It was silent-film stuff. All it needed to be complete was a screaming woman tied to a railroad track with an oncoming train bearing down upon her. The cheap, quickie sci-fi films that this White House has produced in the past seven years - filled with bloody war and flooded cities - has come to its climax in this veto - it simply cannot come from a human born of man and woman. He is clearly something the scientists on Xandur concocted in a laboratory and sent to earth to do their bidding.

And what of John Mc Cain? He has ripped off the mask of non-conformity to join the religious right in a new crusade against "them." Is that really our McCain or an interplanetary imposter? Look into those dead eyes and you will find the answer. As for Rudy, our newly gun toting, Judi kissing, fear mongering front runner - when is he going to take out his ray gun and vaporize Hillary? Once he has completed that mission from Xandur he is sure to turn the rest of the country to rubble and ashes. And do we really believe that conservative Larry Craig was signaling for sex under that bathroom partition? Not me. He was contacting an agent from Xandur for further instructions - for Xandur like Iran has no homosexuals. And who has ever seen any trace of humanity in the faces of the Blackwater mercenaries? Another set of pods sent down to destroy us.

And to think that the American press has devoted itself to the woes of Brittany Spears and the authenticity of Hillary Clinton's cackle in the past week. The question arises, can Hillary or Obama or Edwards withstand the attack of these giant tomatoes? Where is Captain Kirk or Buck Rodgers now that we really need them?

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Confession of A Sometimes Redemption Believer

2007-08-04T08:32:00.000-07:00

Yes, you too can be redeemed. That sounds as corny as a preacher at a tent revival meeting, right? Suppose so. But I do believe in redemption. Not some kind of change through religious conversion, but the kind where the bad can turn around and become the good by their own willpower, by their own inherent decency, where wasted lives can be fulfilled by making good choices, and selflessness can prevail over our natural cruelty and indifference. In my mind there’s hope for failed lives, failed cities, failed plays, and most of all, failed people. As awful as human beings have shown themselves to be during my lifetime which covers the Great Depression, WWII, Adolph Hitler, Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and George Bush, I cling to the notion that change is possible for everyone and nearly everything.

This week I go to Chicago where “Rex” an old failed musical I wrote many years ago about Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I – one of the last works of the great composer Richard Rodgers – will be performed twice at STAGES a Festival of New Musicals. This happened after my surviving collaborator, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and I had a go at making the changes we always wanted to make yet were unable to do at the time the show first happened. We began by reorganizing the book and restoring some wonderful songs that had been cut from the musical under the pressure of a huge showbiz behemoth, “the Broadway Musical” and removing the clutter of its overdressed production which left it floundering like a dying whale onstage. As a playwright this is my kind of personal redemption, hoping that a play can be redeemed. Hell, I so believe in the power of change, I think Lindsey Lohan can sober up and become another Duse or at least a Meryl Streep for her generation, that the other tabloid Draculettes who eat up all the newsprint and devour internet space and the minds of our children; Britney Spears and Paris Hilton can release themselves from their prison of narcissism and find a small way to do some good in a world desperate for acts of kindness and generosity.

But there are times when even this cockeyed optimist (thank you Oscar Hammerstein) questions the ability of people to rise above their own selfishness and greed. One such time was this week when listening to the congressional debate about providing health insurance for poor children. The words “the road to socialized medicine” spewed forth from Bush and Co. with such ignorance and cruelty the speakers seemed to reveal themselves as beyond redemption. That these Republicans, President, Senate and House members, basking in the security of their state sponsored health care could descend to such depths of selfishness, cruelty and greed (their allegiance once more belonging to the Health Insurance industry rather than the American people) seemed a new low – particularly for those who think little of spending billions upon billions on this ill fated war. I kept waiting for a “surge” of decency from these people, but none came. They simply lack the courage that it requires to be kind. There are times when even this believer in redemption has to admit that there are some who are just plain damned by their own greed and indifference to other people’s suffering, and the idea of redemption for them is a delusion.

Michael Chertoff shouts “Boo!”

2007-07-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

Every family used to have a zany Aunt Millie or an old Cousin Hetty who predicted a coming storm through a painful ache in her big toe. If it twitched with discomfort the rains were sure to come. It was the “rheumatiz” actin’ up, so she stated, a sure signal that we would get a downpour in July, her foot condition always preceding the rainfall. To everyone’s amazement sometimes it rained and everyone spoke admiringly of Millie’s talented toe. This was pre-television and it was a more innocent age. Through her rain predicting toe she got the attention that the lonely woman craved. When it didn’t rain few noticed or cared and Millie was given a free pass to predict again. Meteorology has advanced a bit since Aunt Millie’s toe, but fear mongering still has its Aunt Millies and Cousin Hettys. The current one is Uncle Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, and one of the authors of the Patriot Act – a former Giuliani associate and current Bush cohort who has just advised us that we are due for a terrorist attack this summer based on nothing but his hunch. He offers no evidence. Only that hunch of his which may be as reliable as the old woman’s toe. And so fear-mongering is this Administrations summer sport. They are so good at it that they should try to get it into the next Summer Olympics. We have a champion team in Bush, Cheney, Rove, and Chertoff – any one of them sure to bring home the gold.

There was a sweet innocence to Aunt Hetty’s rain predicting toe that is totally lacking in Uncle Michael’s warning. He may be basing his hunch on events in Great Britain, the attempted terrorist attacks that were thwarted in London and in Scotland, but it appears that he has no more information than you or I do about what is to happen here, or so he claims. So why speak of that hunch – instead, shut your mouth and get your hot hunch over to the FBI and the CIA and start working to see to it that such an attack is prevented. His hunch may only be that subterranean chatter on the internet that seems to hold a key to terrorist activity for some terror experts. Now I don’t know if the terrorists will strike America again this summer any more than Mr. Chertoff does, but I do know we must be prepared for such attacks, and that is always a problem under this administration which ignored the warnings prior to 9/11, so it now feels free to shout Boo! whenever their political fortunes are at a new low. Bin Laden still walks the earth and shouting “Boo!” at him has had little effect, so don’t waste a perfectly good “Boo!”- use it on the American people. Like Aunt Millie’s toe and the rainfall, the law of averages and the machinations of terrorists indicates that an attack will happen again. It may be a failed attack, a thwarted attack, or a devastating one, but it will happen again. Making announcements like Mr. Chertoff’s are clearly designed to terrify the population just as the public has grown weary and disenchanted with the Iraq war, and the administration’s handling of the so called war on terror. And it happens just as fewer people believe the Bush mantra that “fighting them there keeps us from fighting them here.” We are meant to be scared, “Be afraid…very afraid, we are told.” And let Cousin George and Uncle Mike keep watch for all of us. By escalating murderous criminal acts into a war on terror this administration has failed to see that crimes are solved by police actions not by inflated rhetoric and unilateral wars. It is hard not to believe that Bush & Co. would not welcome a new terrorist attack in the homeland (that awful word reminiscent of fatherland) as the one way to wrest power from a too cautious congress and a terrified people and seize all the reigns of government again. My paranoid fantasy? Maybe. But there is nothing in the history of this administration that contradicts such an idea. The seizure of power by any means remains their basic game plan. We have seen it in the Justice Department, in the Supreme Court, and in every decision of the Bush years. What we need from our leaders today (and here I speak to the Congress and our Presidential candidates) is a program for inoculating all of us against terror, a program that will place the value of our civil liberties and our traditional democracy against Uncle Mike’s “Boo!” And it is long past the time to start a program that emphasizes courage over fear in the event of a real attack. Interesting, but those of us who lived through 9/11 in New York City are less fearful of another attack than most in this country, although every day we live with its possibility and dread the harm that it might cause our families. Not many of us have bought into the Bush administration’s statements that they have protected us over the past five or six years, but that they can’t talk about it for national security reasons. Why is it that everything that comes from this administration has the ring of a con man’s claim, or the accuracy of Aunt Millie’s big toe?

Our Mr. Brooks: David vs. Al

2007-05-29T17:34:00.000-07:00

Remember Eve Arden in that old sit-com, "Our Miss Brooks?" She was a schoolmarm who went the way of all sit-coms before re-runs, into our collective memory. Well, she's gone but we still have our Mr. Brooks. And he tries to teach us how to think from his blackboard on The New York Times. Let me start with a confession. I have yet to read Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” but I did read David Brooks critique of the book in the New York Times with my Tuesday morning coffee. Having established my lack of qualifications for defending Al Gore against Mr. Brooks’s screed on Gore’s reasoning and writing style, I will nevertheless proceed to write about something I know little about, just as Mr. Brooks does in column after column.

In his current Times opinion piece, The Vulcan Utopia, the Times foremost apologist for complacency during the Bush years attacks Al Gore for writing such labored sentences as “The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be) but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way…” Yes. Yes. Yes. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. Not up there with E.B. White or Scott Fitzgerald and the great English prose stylists of the past, but it got Gore’s idea across to me. It is a call for discourse rather than ranting and for the free expression of ideas rather than their suppression when dealing with the problems we face as a nation. Because of Gore’s belief that sound bite television has lowered our political discourse, and that the internet may remedy that failure to inform the electorate, Brooks calls Gore a “radical technological determinist.” After attacking Gore for a lousy writing style, Brooks strings together those three snooze inducing words for his polemic against Gore’s book. So much for Brooks’s style. Now all of us – writers and speakers – make small and great boo-boos in communicating. But how many of us would use the ugly non-word “upscalization” in a sentence in The New York Times as Brooks did in a recent column, and get away with it? Spell-check suggests that I replace “upscalization” with “specialization” but spell-check like Brooks has a lot of ideas but no common sense. He does get away with this and an endless stream of intellectual and stylistic absurdities by defending everything from the surge in Iraq to the purge in the Justice Department (albeit a wobbly defense) because The New York Times wants its tame, button down water carrier for the GOP to have his say in the name of fairness. Someone from the other side, which we now know as the dark side, has to be there to balance Maureen Dowd, who represents the gaudy side or Frank Rich, the sane and articulate side.

It seems clear to me that Mr. Brooks has begun the conservative attack on Gore in the hope that it will keep the thin skinned Gore from entering the Presidential race and winning it. “See what you’re gonna get, Al, if you take the plunge? The waters cold and murky!” is the subtext here. “Right now we are gonna call you stuffy and confused. Later we’ll add fat and foolish.” He suggests that Gore is some kind of Vulcan utopian, in other words a man who puts technology ahead of human beings, Vulcan being the god of Fire who like Gore was nuts for technical progress. He completely misses the appeal of Al Gore today; it is not his confidence in the progress that will come from technology (old hat) but Gore’s fundamental humanity, his respect for the individual, his respect for human rights, civil rights, and the Constitution - and his lack of cant about this President. What we admire is Gore’s willingness to speak out and risk being called a sore winner. I will continue to read our Mr. Brooks and watch him on the PBS nightly news because he is what passes for a Republican moderate, a man who speaks in a calm voice to defend this rotting administration, an undertaker spraying perfume on the surge, and nodding his head sadly at the fate of Attorney General Gonzales. It should not surprise us that our Mr. Brooks was educated at the University of Chicago in the seventies, educated under the conservative philosophy of Leo Strauss and birthplace of the neo-con movement, or that his first job was at The conservative "Weekly Standard." There he received his Phd in complacency. The very education, and the human concerns that Al Gore espouses may ultimately save us from the likes of Mr. Brooks and his intellectual masters, those neo-cons, and those plain old cons, Cheney and Bush.

Choosing a date for the Democratic prom

2007-05-23T06:20:00.000-07:00

As a life long Democrat, both big and small d whose first vote was for Adlai Stevenson, I am having my troubles with the current crop of would-be candidates. I am finding it hard to pick any one of them to take as my date to the prom. I am not listing them in the order of preference but in the order of trouble they cause me.

Hillary Clinton. She's the woman I want to love...the girl I want to take...but somehow I don't love her and I don't want to spend the next four years attending to her. She's smart, she's well connected, pleasant looking, and obviously ambitious - she's mother's choice for the prom, the Republicans and Maureen Dowd love to dump on her (great reasons for loving her) and yet...and yet..I can't bring myself to ask her to the dance. Yes, I find her being ambitious a great quality, if ambition means being prepared, wanting power for the good of the many - all different from the Bush ambition which manages to be lazy, selfish and ruthless at the same time. But I cannot warm towards her. Maybe it's the harsh, unmodulated speaking voice, or maybe it's just prejudiced me. My wife might say that I have the old male propensity to distrust strong women. If that was so I would not love both my wife and my late mother both strong , wonderful women, or worshiped Eleanor Roosevelt. No, there is a dryness in the soul and a coldness in the heart that I see in Mrs. Clinton and I fear it. It is the dryness and the coldness that places expediency about principle, the very expediency that allowed her to vote for the war, and to hang tough by defending that egregious vote. Most of all, I fear that others, too many others will fear it and see it as well. After Bush the American public will be - and should be - taking a hard look at all the candidates, and I don't think Hillary will pass the test. Oh, she may get the nomination - money and power still talks and grabs - and if she does, I will vote for her. With all her cautions and equivocations I will support her against any of the reptilian Republican candidates, all of them damned by their lies, and their willingness to embrace a party that has brought America to near ruin, both morally and economically. But guys, gals, fellow Dems, we can do better, can't we?

Barak Obama. Our Prince Charming. What Hillary lacks in charisma he makes up for in buckets full of charm...forget buckets, truck loads full, railway cars full, tankers full. I like his jaunty JFK persona, the rhetoric, the little hesitations in the voice, the scrappy pretty wife, the kids, and the skin color, the whole appealing biography. Yes, his being black is very important to me. If he was white I wouldn't give him another look, he'd just be another smart young guy on the make with a good line of talk. But I have yet to hear anything of substance from him, anything that can turn around this country as it comes crashing down after the Bush fiasco. I will withhold judgment on him for awhile - and yes, I'd vote for him over any fear mongering Giuliani they can throw up as their candidate. But Barak, you gotta give more to get more. If you don't put out a little more you'll never get that date for the prom.

John Edwards. Screw the four hundred dollar haircuts. How the hell can this country obsess about that when we are trillions of dollars up to our eyeballs in Bush wasted war money? But it does matter in our world of scandals and sound-bites. I am besotted with the great Elizabeth and I tell myself if she can love him as she does, well so should I. I like most of what he stands for, his sense of decency regarding the poor, an unequivocal anti-war stance, and a willingness to put himself on the line. But there is something preening, the male peacock in all his plumage that is a little off putting, often I feel he is the lawyer making his case for the judge and jury rather than the man who speaks to me directly from his heart. Still, for now, he's the best of the upper-tier candidates, and he would get my vote above all of the above.

Bill Richardson. Don't know enough about him yet but what I know I like. He's got wit (and we sure do need someone who can crack wise rather than being a wise-ass like Bush.) He's Hispanic, a great virtue, it's time we opened the Presidential men's club to Hispanics, and he's immensely personable and has great public service credentials. My best wait-and- see Candidate. Can he rise from his spot in the dreaded polls? That may well be his test in the months ahead. Like him a lot.

Dennis whose last name I can't spell. Good man. No chance. Yes, looks do count in our Brangelina world. Sad, but Honest Abe couldn't have made it in our cable news world. Happy that he's there to keep the other candidates honest.

And of course the reluctant Al Gore. Probably my first choice. I too was once young, good looking and thin, and I have the pictures to prove it. Now I am old, overweight, and except for my wife, nobody's idea of a looker. So I see in Gore both the advantages of age - wisdom - and the disadvantages - the need for that extra slice of Key Lime pie. Gore, more than anyone else appeals to the cranky old man in me. He's everything I believe in. Going on after a huge defeat, even an illegal defeat, making an immense contribution to the discourse of our time - both on global warming and the nature of democracy. Sure he looks a little smug these days. Wouldn't you if you have pulled yourself up after that crappy 2000 election - an election stolen by the highest court in the land - and done the great work that Al Gore has done? He's the best we have out there, but he may not ultimately wish to run, a sad fact for the country. So I will be juggling with these names in the months to come. And go with any one of them to the prom rather than that terrifying group of lying, shape shifting Republican candidates - most of whom belong on a police lineup with our President and VP rather than on a ballot. Or at the prom.

Impeachment Now

2006-11-29T12:02:00.000-08:00

As soon as the election results came in, Nancy Pelosi assured the Republicans that there would be no Democratic effort to impeach the President, thereby removing the one weapon we have that might exercise some control over this runaway train of a President. This, together with warnings from Republicans, such as the excellent Chuck Hagel, seemed to put the matter to rest.

But without impeachment what can be done to restore this Republic, and keep it from further harm to itself and the world? Nobody believes that the Democrats will remove the funding of our soldiers, so what now does George Bush have to fear? As Commander-in-Chief he can continue to execute this war with criminal incompetence until so many soldiers have been killed that he has destroyed the backbone and morale of the army, and completed the task of destroying American credibility throughout the world. He will not be up for reelection, so there will be no political accountability. He remains the Commander-in-Chief, with as much power to do harm as he ever had, and perhaps less reason to exercise caution that before. His entire career has been about diversionary tactics, shape shifting, ambushing opponents with smears, and most important, the refusal to be held accountable for his acts. What better way to distract from the war he has lost in Iraq than by starting another in Iran? If you can't shrink a catastrophe, at
the very least you can expand it into a cataclysm.

What cannot be said enough is that so many ordinary Americans understood that the war in Iraq could only lead to disaster, why then did our Republican leaders fail to do so? Because they lacked the vision and the judgment and the honesty necessary for their office. You cannot impose Democracy on another people, particularly a people who have never in their history known a democratic government. The very idea of imposing Democracy is an oxymoron. And the minute you start imposing Democracy abroad you lose it at home.

What is the impeachable offense, other than lying to America and to the world about the WMD's? First and foremost, stupidity. There is a point in which bad judgment is a crime, or as the diplomat Count Metternich said of some 19th Century misadventure, it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake. As a result of George Bush and Dick Cheney's mistake, the republic is at risk. That is what impeachment is about - removing those whose disgraceful actions have put the country in danger. It is not a vindictive act, it is the most patriotic act, to be used sparingly, only when the country has no alterative. In the coming months there will surely be enough Bush & Company mistakes exposed, coupled with evidence of the most venal corruption, sufficient for ten impeachments. All we need is one. It must happen or there will be no accountability, and without accountability, no correction of the course. Are we to accept in our leaders something we would not accept in our own children - lies, excuses, and outrageous bad behavior? If ever impeachment was necessary, this is the time. It will not tear the country apart; it will help to heal it.

Clarence Thomas, O.J Simpson, Tribalism and Me

2006-11-29T11:56:00.000-08:00

About fifteen years ago I was visiting my sister in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where she was dying of leukemia. While waiting in that hospital, trying to keep my balance between false hope and real despair, I watched the Clarence Thomas hearings on television in the visitor's lounge. I was not alone.

A great many African American doctors, nurses and orderlies had assembled there to view the proceedings. As testimony by Thomas's former associate, Anita Hill exposed the Supreme Court nominee as a sexist, a hypocrite, and a liar, it seemed clear to me that he would be rejected by both the black and white public who watched the proceedings. How could anyone want to see this hack, this right-wing pompous creep with his pubic hair jokes succeed Thurgood Marshall, the great African-American jurist? It seemed impossible that the African-American community would get behind an enemy to their progress, and accept the slandering of Miss Hill as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." All I could see was the Republicans using a black man to advance their social agenda to peel away the New Deal. Surely a people who had suffered as much as African Americans had, could not support such a man? It wasn't the first time I was wrong.

When Doubtful Thomas was finally voted through the committee, a great cheer rocked that TV room. The amiable African-American nurses and orderlies who were attending my sister in her last days were caught up in a raucous victory celebration for Thomas. While I saw a ruthless opportunist, they saw another black man under attack by the white world, and seemed to endorse his self-serving claim that he was experiencing a judicial lynching. We all know the outcome. Thomas is our most radical Justice, and we are stuck for a lifetime with this immutable block of judicial ice totally lacking in compassion for the poor of any color, a steadfast ally of the most reactionary forces in this country. It wasn't the first time I was right.

I don't have to tell you about the outcome of the O.J. Simpson trial. Like most white Americans I was astonished by the joyful response of the black community to the not guilty verdict for this very guilty murderer, but then I hadn't really examined my own tribal connections, and, if I had, no doubt I would have better understood the cheers, even though I could not justify them.

I was a child living in America during the Holocaust and I can never forget the horror I felt when I first saw those newsreel photographs of the murdered Jewish bodies piled up in the camps. When the state of Israel was founded, my Jewish family saw Israel as the last chance for the world to right the monstrous historic wrongs against the Jewish people by providing them with a safe homeland. As a boy I cheered the beleaguered Israelis as they triumphed over their Arab adversaries in battle. Israel had proven that Jews knew how to fight, and better yet, they knew how to win. I took pride in what the Israeli's had made of their country, not just by creating a democracy; fractious and alive as any democracy should be, and despite its orthodox fundamentalists introducing modernity to the Middle East, modernity not just in architecture and in agriculture but in civil liberties, free elections, and women's rights. Slowly, over time, my cheering diminished.

During the last Israeli incursion into Lebanon, as the civilian casualties mounted, I felt a deep concern for the hapless Lebanese people caught in the crossfire of yet another senseless war, and for the endangered Israelis where every win was now another loss. Once the bloodshed began the cry of "He started it!" seemed a dumb, childish, playground excuse that solved nothing. What mattered was the suffering and the hellish punishment of innocent peoples by tanks, or suicide bombers. Although I worried about the Israelis, and I suppose I always will, I thought I had finally gotten beyond my own parochial passions, that I was able to give equal value to the humanity of all the combatants in the Middle East, including the Palestinians. And yet...and yet...during a trip to London, I came upon a peace rally in Trafalgar Square, where a huge crowd of protestors were demonstrating against the Iraq war. I felt solidarity with the protestors until I saw the many anti-Israeli signs decrying the "Zionist" murderers, with anti-Semitic slogans and cartoons worthy of Joseph Streicher's "Der Sturmer." One look and suddenly I was a Jew again, alone, cut off from those who allegedly espoused the same anti-war cause that I embraced. Life is tricky that way.

I have never before written about the Arab-Israeli conflict because I recognize the tribalism within me. Like those who cheered O.J. and Clarence Thomas, it is driven by the hurts of the past, and this will always be so until we recognize our common humanity and not just our tribal roots. In the seventies and eighties finding one's roots was the way to overcome the negative stereotypes that many minorities faced and often internalized. But in my mind finding one's roots was a beginning, and not an ending. I am not asking that we deny our ethnicity, our unique culture, or our history, but that we first accept our common humanity. Easy to say and hard to do. It sounds as banal as the lyrics of a sixties peace song, but what choice do we have?

If I could I would declare a ban on all pride: Black Pride, Jewish Pride, Irish Pride, Scots Pride, French Pride, Muslim Pride, Italian Pride, Indian Pride, Hispanic Pride, Greek Pride, and you can throw in Women's Pride, Million Man March Pride, Gay Pride and Flag Day for good measure. You name it, I am the anti-pride man. And while I'm at it, down with all parades, with the possible exception of the Thanksgiving Day Parade, where Snoopy and the other gas balloons are inflated once a year, unlike the political and tribal gasbags who are always with us in their inflated state. It's not just that parades halt all traffic and litter the city streets; it's that they stop all thinking and litter the human mind. Group identity sounds great, often it feels great because it helps to salve our existential loneliness, but in practice it does not serve our greater goal of a world at peace. Tribalism is far too dangerous when the drum-beat can quickly become the suicide bomber or the atomic blast. Tribalism, ethnic pride, is a fuse waiting for a match. George W. Bush has lit that match in Iraq and used American tribalism as a rallying cry for his war without end. Tribalism in the twenty first century is as pernicious as global warming, far more dangerous than bird flu, and it is time for both the finger pointing and the cheering to stop. And please, please, for starters, less pride and no more parades.

American Freak Shows: Cruise and McCain

2006-11-18T07:13:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid we still had side-show attractions at the circus. In those politically incorrect days one was taken to see all kinds of physically deformed people - known as freaks - as a source of amusement; people who were put on display to be laughed at, to shock, frighten, and to entertain us. My squeamish folks would rush my older sister and I past these unsettling sights and get us to the main tent to watch the trapeze artists, the pretty girls riding on elephants, and the fearless, barrel-chested lion tamers. But we sneaked curious glances at the freaks nevertheless, and in one case I cried until my parent's purchased a huge brass ring from the nine foot giant who sold them to patrons for a quarter. All this came to mind as the television news filled up with the Cruise-Holmes wedding in Italy.

Who am I to question true love, but in this case, the true love seems to be more about publicity than marriage. How we Americans love a freak show. Here is Cruise, America's wild eyed couch trampoline champion, "With Katie and me and baby makes three" taking us to his blue heaven in Italy. And we go along for the ride, so desperate are we for some diversion from the cycle of bad news in Iraq. In this case the real freaks seem to be the newscasters; the very folks who are about to give us O.J. Simpson's mutli-million dollar, consequence free, televised "If I did kill them though I didn't kill them I would have killed them this way" confession on Fox, the freak show network. These are the very news people, together with their more respectable brethren, CBS, NBC, and ABC who have not shown us the real carnage of our wounded and dead troops in Iraq, or the deaths of the Iraqi population. Instead they have so confused hard news with "Entertainment Tonight" that they have seriously degraded their franchise to inform the public. Funny what makes some folks squeamish?

Forgive my digression. I meant to write about John McCain, whose anointment as the Republican Presidential candidate and possible future President seems inevitable, unless he lists so far to the right in the primary that he sinks his own boat in the election. As a New Yorker who lived through the Rudy mayoralty, I don't see Rudy winning that prize. As "America's Mayor" after 9/11 Rudy was proclaimed an American hero because unlike Bush he didn't duck for cover, but anyone examining his past and the claims made for him will find that Rudy lives in a house of cards. He did little to nothing to protect the city from terrorism prior to 9/11, and failed to provide our police and firefighters with proper equipment, despite the fact that the World Trade Center had been attacked in the past. About his other claim to fame, as superhero crime-fighter, crime was going down in the city long before Rudy appeared to shout "Shazam!" to fight the evil-doers. Worst of all, despite his pro-gay, pro-choice rhetoric, he was ready to crush our civil liberties, railing against offensive art shows and immorality while carrying on extra-marital affairs of his own; and announcing his intention to divorce his wife on television before telling her personally. Now that leaves us with John McCain, a genuine American war hero, but not without a very vulnerable past, as questionable in its own way as Rudy's, and I dare say, a bit of a freak himself.

What many have forgotten in our rush to the next news cycle, and the next freak show, is John McCain's role as one of the Keating Five; a group of Senators (alas four of the five were Democrats) who attempted to pressure an investigator into easing off on the Lincoln S&L investigation. As beneficiaries of a collective $1.3 million dollars in campaign contributions from Charles Keating Jr. the banker under investigation who ran the savings and loan, they tried to help their benefactor out of a tight situation that would eventually lead to his imprisonment. It was as crooked as any back-room deal in American politics, and McCain, the only one still with us in the Senate, was harshly criticized at that time for questionable conduct by the ethics committe investigating the matter. It is true that the senators were following the alleged status quo of campaign funding practises, but it was a highly questionable judgment on McCain's part, and one that should disqualify him from higher office if viewed in context with his entire career. So much has been made of John Murtha's ethical lapses in the past it is remarkable that McCain's dubious acts seem to be innoculated from close inspection by the newsmakers. Like Rudy, McCain is viewed as a moderate, but both these alleged Republican moderates have a deep grained streak of cruelty. McCain demonstrated his when he appeared at a Republican fundraiser in 1998, where he told this Rush Limbaugh style joke: "Question: Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Answer: Because her father is Janet Reno!" How the assembled Republicans roared as he humiliated an innocent child, cast sexual aspersions on the Attorney General and probably Hillary, all in the name of good old family-values politics. Of course he apologized later. They always do after the damage is done. Now in my world anyone who insults an awkward child is a freak. The lack of judgment and civility shown by that joke alone should disqualify him from seeking higher office. Chelsea Clinton has grown into a lovely young woman, but John McCain remains a flawed figure who still brings his failed judgment to this country, evidenced by his call for more troops for Iraq - a judgment that shows him as a future danger should he become our next President. And I guess when the judgment is as deformed as the judgment he has shown in the past, he is part of the great American freak show.

Winning for Dummies

2006-11-12T14:40:00.000-08:00

It was inevitable. The think tanks are now advising us on Cspan and the other pundit pit stops that there is little that the victorious Democrats can do about the war in Iraq without throwing that country into further chaos; little that can be done about increasing the minimum wage without upsetting small business, little that can be done about the Arab-Israeli nightmare without upsetting Israel, no way we can talk to the nuclear madmen in Iran and Korea, and no way to institute economic fairness without upsetting big business, big oil, and the pharmaceutical companies. No way is their way. They are warning us that this was no Democratic victory but a Republican defeat, eager to take the air out of our electoral triumph. They are predicting failure before the new Congress is even in session, advising us that we are now mired in such a debt laden Bush created mess that there is no way out, so we must move cautiously, make incremental steps, forget about investigating the crimes of the past six years, silence our voices and hope for the best while expecting the worst. In other words, the only solution is to become the Republicans. We are now assured that even the firing of the wretched Rummy won’t do the trick. Again and again they post their “No Exit” signs. So like the characters in that Sartre play, we are stuck in our own private hell. Well, there is a way out. And we don’t have to look to the Washington punditry or a wall eyed, sneering, tobacco stained French intellectual like Sartre for the answer. We have our own beautiful Britney Spears to offer a solution, which I call “winning for dummies.”

Ms. Spears, “America’s Sweetheart” for our trashy 21st century (oh, how far we have descended from Mary Pickford to MTV) is by all accounts not the smartest young stunner to emerge from the pack, yet she showed us how to win when faced with what appeared to be an intractable problem. Not all of us can lose our extra weight and go on the David Letterman Show, as she did, but like Britney, we can opt for change by biting the bullet and making changes. She decided to rid herself of a mistake, her feckless, untalented, handsomely scruffy young husband, Kevin Federline, just as America decided to divest itself of its untalented, unscrupulous Republicans. And she did it on the very day that America filed for divorce. Yes, there will be those like Mr. Federline’s ex-girlfriend, the mother of his other children who claim, “He’s such a nice guy. He’s made some mistakes but everyone else doesn’t have the whole world pointing their finger at their mistakes.” You can imagine Laura Bush nodding in agreement. And Denny Hastert, offering a grunt that sounds a bit like an “Amen.” We change by changing, by making the bold moves that cannot undo the past, but can salvage the present for the rule of law and leave our children and grandchildren a future democracy. Yes, guys, we won. And caution is the only losing strategy for winners.

BUSH: The Lame Hawk

2006-11-08T05:33:00.000-08:00

Forget your lame duck President, Bush is our first lame hawk. He may have lost credibility and lost direction, as claimed by Congressman Murtha, but it would be foolish to see him after this election as powerless, chastized and tamed by the judgment of the American people. He will remain George Bush, making a false show of bipartisanship, if only to wait his moment to strike and make his kill.

A lame duck will hobble along for two years, quacking and quaking, but George Bush is an opportunistic predator, and like the American kestral, he feeds on mice and insects, keeps his talons sharp, and an eye out for the weakness of his timid prey. So unless the newly elected Dems wish to become the meal of this predator, they cannot hide their views in the name of collegiality, they cannot scamper away from the big issues; removing our troops from the Iraq war, repairing the environment, or scutter away insect like from the outrageous disparities in American economic life. Like a hawk, George Bush is a social predator, he will cling to his right wing views and conservative friends, pretend to be flying above the fray, and wait for an opening to swoop down and strike the timid Democratic prey. Never has it been more important for the Democrats to act in a fearless, forthright manner, or our lame hawk will swoop down once again and make a meal of them. He may have lost the public confidence but he has kept his talons. So this is no time to celebrate the defeat of the worst President in American history. As President he keeps some enormous power intact. It's time for the Dems to go to work, and the work of this government is a clean-up greater challenge than the Katrina mess. This business of saying that the Dems should not investigate the criminal war profiteering and corruption of the Republicans - and should not investigate the origins of this war because the American people want to move on - is so much sliced baloney. You can't move on until you clean up the ground. Americans have asked for a change, and the Democrats had better find the way to do it, without hoping that this President will see the error of his ways. This hawk of ours, George Bush, will not change, cannot change, so that must always be kept in mind as the Democrats attempt to repair the great damage he has inflicted on America and the world in the past six years.

Six Wild Turkeys

2006-10-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should call it my pilgrim experience. On weekdays I live in the city near the spot where that light plane crashed into the high rise apartment building, reminding me of my vulnerability and that of all New Yorkers, including my new grand-daughter who also lives near the scene of the accident. I had forgotten that light planes were still allowed to use the city’s airspace over the East River despite 9/11. It was yet another instance of the stunning failure of this government on the issue of national security. New York never seemed more crowded, vulnerable or confusing, and the street traffic was more than a nightmare. One couldn’t leave the apartment without facing my fellow city folks with their cell phones glued to their ears, smiling, scowling, and chattering away like so many maniacs, rushing to places they didn’t want to go to in order to support a life they didn’t much enjoy. The mayor had just made a statement of elitist stupidity about the right of private planes to fly over the East River, in spite of the potential for future tragedies. Once again we heard that useless argument about “more people are killed in auto accidents than in light planes” – the same argument that some have made for the high casualty numbers of our soldiers in Iraq. Knowing that New York’s billionaire Mayor is a frequent flyer on his own private plane, it reminded me once again of the difference between us poor mortals and our ruling elite. At the end of the day the “screw-you” factor was hidden under the discourse, and we heard that the privileges of the powerful must be protected against all common sense, even by a shrewd political moderate like Bloomberg. Later, the government would have second thoughts about light aircraft over the city, but on that day it seemed that nothing would be done.

So I retreated to the Litchfield Hills, where I sometimes go for the weekend, vowing to my wife that I would not look at the Sunday New York Times, my three hours of news reading which were guaranteed to ruin the best of Sundays by bringing the world and its woes into my home. No “Meet the Press” for me. I wanted to leave North Korea and our failed nuclear control policy behind me, put the contemptible Joe Lieberman and his Republican backed candidacy out of mind, forget about all those Congressmen who had put the con in conservative, let Bush speak to the nation in his fakest, most desperate western twang without my getting his verbal cactus in my ears, and just spend the weekend reading a history book or a biography that had nothing to do with contemporary life. Something about the lives of the Tudors would do.

This was the leaf peeping season when tourists drive up to see the changing color of the autumn leaves, about the best time in the year to be in rural Northwestern Connecticut. Our local small town library was having its annual book sale, a big event in my book hungry life and I felt lucky to be in this place at this time. It was so damned beautiful. There are times when it’s great to escape into a time warp and this was one of them.

Sunday morning my Abyssinian cat Byron was seated on a window ledge looking out at the lawn that fronted our house near the Litchfield Hills. He arched his long neck, his bat ears twitched, and I was sure that his territorial instincts were offended by the sight of some ferile intruder cat. I rose from my chair and looked out the window and saw what had seized Byron’s attention. Wow! There, crossing the lawn were six, count ‘em, six wild turkeys. In the many years I have lived in Connecticut I have never seen wild turkeys like this brood, a proud family out for a Sunday morning, a gaggle of beauty striding forth in all their pride and innocence, and just for that moment of their passing into view, the world was reborn. We are amazing creatures. How little it takes to remind us that this world can be a good and beautiful place. I savored the moment, and then, alas, the turkeys walked into the nearby woods out of sight, and a few minutes later I got in my ancient Volvo, drove down to the village drugstore and like the news addict I am, bought the Sunday paper.

GOP VAMPIRES AND REPEDOPHILES

2006-10-04T03:54:00.000-07:00

Henry Kissinger? Henry K? Were you surprised when Bob Woodward reported that our former Secretary of Mistake was now advising President Bush in secret on the Iraq war? No? Well, neither was I. I was prepared for the return of Henry K by the movies of my youth. As a Bela Lugosi fan - for those born too late he was the Dracula or all Draculas - I am reluctant to apply the honorable vampire appelation to Kissinger, but there is no doubt that like Dracula, Kissinger cannor die and lives on the blood of the healthy young. I had assumed that he had gone into that vampire rehab found in conservative think tanks and the Charlie Rose show, but if he had, he has had a predictable relapse. Having long ago used up his supply of fresh blood in Southeast Asia, he has turned his voracious appetite for the good red stuff to the Middle East. He now tells us that "the only exit strategy is victory." As ever, his notion of a victory defies all logic, accomplishes nothing but the prologation of tragic errors, and requires the deaths of thousands of our young.

Speaking of our young, and as the father of two sons, I feel qualified to do so, what are we to make of the Foley scandal? Plenty. The see-no-evil Repedophile party, led by that perpetually bewildered high school coach Denny Hastert, is trying to juggle this hot rock so it will not be too badly burned in the coming election. They are hoping that Foley's excuse that he is gay and was molested when young will help cool this down. It won't. Gay people no more molest children by being gay than straight people do by virtue of being straight. It is a separate pathology, unfortunately, one that is rarely cured by rehab, so toss in the alcohol and the twelve step program a la Mel Gibson for better cover. What is most striking about the Foley matter is his sponsorship of anti-pedophile legislation in the past. and his power as a Repedophile fundraiser. Many of the recipients of his largesse are tossing the hot money back, but the Repedophile National Committee will be keeping his booty for use in this election. As a former coach Hastert knows that winning is everything. And he is backed by his President who shares this ethos. It was Hastert who managed to declaw the Ethics Committe in Congress in an effort to save Tom DeLay, so this refusal to acknowledge the lurid emails of Foley can come as no surprise.

This Repedophile party is so busy protecting embryos from stem cell research, and women from abortions, that they have little time to protect those who have actually been born and live real lives. Their love of the young stops at the actual birth of the child, the cut-off point for concern. The connection between the exploitation of the young sexually by a Congressman, and the exploitation of the young in war is not so strained. Both are about the uses and abuses of power, and our Repedophiles have abused their power more than any other American group in living memory.

How America got Moused by the Right

2006-09-14T05:49:00.000-07:00

As I read the controversy about "The Path to 9/11," and the comments about ABC/Disney
advancing a right wing agenda, spinning an anti-Clinton take on that tragic event, I recalled a short time in the early nineteen seventies when I was employed by WED, the creative arm of Disney that was preparing The American Pavilion for Disney World in Florida. It was my first and last experience with Disney editing American history to favor their conservative point of view.

Having written the pilot and several episodes of the award winning PBS series, "The Adams Chronicles," a study of John Adams and his relation to the American Revolution, the Disney people called my agent and I was hired on to create material for those robotic figures who would represent important personages from our history in the American Pavilion. I took the job because it gave me access to a world I had loved as a child. No bigger M. Mouse or D. Duck fan existed than myself when young. I had laughed uproariously at Thumper, wept copiously for Bambi, and could name the seven dwarfs before I could count to seven. Moreover, this would give me enormous credit with my young son who would get a vip tour of the Disney Studios and Disneyland. So I packed up my family and we went west, me to work for the mouse, they to discover the wonders of Los Angeles.

I was treated with every courtesy, and introduced to some of the most remarkable artists and set designers, whose work was - as the kids say - awesome. I started to work on my assignment, which was to find the words for some outstanding Americans that could be spoken by those audio-animatronic figures. But when I proposed some words by Mark Twain or Eleanor Roosevelt, I was confronted by blank stares followed by great unease. Twain was okay in his folkloric witticisms, but not in his leftish humanitariansm, and anti-trust politics. Eleanor was still a suspect figure, despised by the right, a funny looking do-gooder who had no place in the hallowed halls of the new American Pavilion - which was to celebrate American history as Walt, a 19th century conservative, saw it. Besides she was a woman. And Minnie Mouse was always a minor player in the Disney cartoon world. The Disney Organization in those days was still a place where people asked themselves "What would Walt do if he was alive today?" And the answer was always steer to the right -the far right and head for the heartland.

After taking my boy Nick to Disneyland a few times it became clear to me that this wasn't just the best amusement park in America, filled with fun rides and fabricated jungle thrils, it was a profound political statement. Walt had recreated a white clapboard Victorian America which had never existed, a place without Blacks, Chinese, Jews, Italians, Irish Catholics, a white Protestant Republican America bordered by picket fences and charming gingerbread houses, all of which contained items to be bought. It was safe, sterile, exhaustingly charming. Moreover, it was a high church of the souvenier. This was an America cleansed of its rich ethnicity, one that celebrated wonders and inventions; a Thomas Edison, Henry Ford America - a remarkable inventive America, but one that was incomplete and tainted by small town bigotries. In Disneyland's view of America there were no slaves or indentured servants, only the big eared mice and the other patented characters there to pose with you for photographs -like the natives on a distant tropical isle.

I did have a famous (at least to my family) altercation in Disneyland. My six year old son Nick and I were stuck under a waterfall during a malfunctioning ride. An hour later when they got the ride going again and we departed from it soaked to our skins, I asked for my money back. The smiling Disney rep explained that it was not the policy of Disneyland to return money, but they would provide us with a script ticket for a replacement ride. I noted that neither my drenched boy or I were in a mood to take another ride. We just wanted to get our money back, get back to our car, and drive home. I was told that it was not possible for me to get cash back from Disneyland. That was not the policy of Disneyland. In my exasperation - I do get exasperated with systems that do not allow for special circumstances - I shouted out "Fuck Disneyland!" and suddenly found myself offered the money for the ride. I had just discovered the keys to the Magic Kingdom.

This may seem somewhat far afield from "The Path to 9/11" but I don't think so. Even under the new management of Disney the cry of "What would Walt do?" could be heard by me as they created this so called "docu-drama." Walt would have shaped history to favor his Republican cronies, and distorted, if he could not ignore, history that gave his side a black mark. Like it or not, Mickey, Walt, and ABC/Disney, 9/11 happened under George Bush's watch, and you can build all your white picket fences around that fact, but that ain't history- it's Disneyland.

Bush and Osama - the Terror Twins

2006-08-17T06:40:00.004-07:00

I took some time out this past month to enjoy the summer and my family, which now includes a fourteen month old grand-daughter, and wonder of wonders, the world managed to get on without my commenting on it. Not very well, indeed terribly, but it is still here as am I - hanging on by a thread of optimism. The fragile cease fire in Lebanon - much too late - but here at last - gives us some small hope for that embattled country and for Israel, but any optimism one might have had has been dampened by the knowledge that havoc - not peace - is the life blood of Bush and Osama - that wonderful team - one of whom gave us 9/11 - the other the Iraq war. How they need each other and how their policies thrive on chaos and bloodshed - other men's - never their own - is now as obvious as global warming. Every time Osama gives an interview, or plots an Al-Queda attack, Bush prospers in his effort to consolodate his power and destroy the civil liberties of this county by revving up his Rove/Cheney patented fear machine, designed to keep the Republicans in perpetual power and the Democrats on the defensive. Under Bush our autos continue to run on a finite supply of expensive gasoline, but our government runs on an inexhaustable supply of cheap terror. Every time Bush gives an interview, and hints at another war of "democracy" on the Arab world Osama prospers in his efforts to stir up the Jihadists and the insurgency. There can be no doubt that team Bush/Osama work hand in hand without ever communicating - both are theocrats - both are fanatics - both are men who do immeasurable evil in the name of God - needing each other more than they need their allies. With such enemies - who needs friends? Rhetoric can kill, and in the hands of these men, it often does. As we watch the police work in Great Britain, we realize that the way to stop terrorists is not by issuing gung-ho statements, but by careful police work in concert with the international community - something our President has been unable to accomplish.

As a sometimes resident of Connecticut I followed the Lamont/Lieberman race during my hiatus. I was not surprised by the resulting Lamont primary victory. All you had to do was drive through the state to see the great number of Lamont banners on lawns, and the scarcity of Lieberman supporters, but I was a bit surprised by the aftermath. Not by Lieberman picking up the mantra of Cheney that a victory for Lamont was a victory for the terrorists - Joe has shown that there is no blow too low - nothing he will not do to cling to power - the surprise was in the half-hearted endorsement of the Clintons for the democratic victor, Lamont. Bill Clinton may well be the most charming politician since Roscoe Conkling, that 19th century rogue, and Hillary the most dedicated, hard working Senator of any state, ever, but they have failed to grasp the enormity of the Iraq war and what it has done to this country - and this is flat-footed politics that will win her few supporters in her run for the White House and lose him many former admirers.

I recently visited with my nephew, John McNamara at Sloan Kettering. John was one of the firemen who worked for weeks at Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11. Later, he volunteered for the cleanup of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. This is a good man, a modest man, an open hearted, generous man, and a real hero. In his late thirties he had no reason to expect the multitude of health problems that beset him in the past year, and he is now under treatment for cancer. He has only lately become an activist for other 9/11 workers who have suffered terrible health problems in the years after the World Trade Center catastrophe. By dismissing the dangers to the police and firemen, both the federal government and the local government did a great disservice to these men and women. Perhaps they didn't know, but they pretended that they did know that there was no great health risk, and these men and women went untested for years following their work on the sites. John and his wife Jennifer are expecting their first child in November. I know that John will get through this ordeal with his grace and courage but it's time the government paid its debt to the people who made the real sacrifices in 9/11 and Katrina.

As we come upon the anniversary of 9/11, one can only wonder at where we might be today if the Supremes had not made the most wretched political decision of our history by giving the Presidency to George Bush - the man who not only ignored the warning signs of the terrorist attack but used that attack and the threat of others to undermine our democracy. It is a dark spot on the reputation of such so called moderates as Sandra Day O'Connor who used the court for partisan political purposes. Did those genuine political conservatives know that they were giving the Presidency to the most radical president in our history? Shame if they did, and shame if they didn't. But it is a shame that covers a lot of territory; the lapdog press and the silent Democractic opposition. With any luck, and a little hope, on this 5th anniversary of 9/11, "the times they are a changin."

It's a bird, it's a plane: it's Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift

2006-07-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

Just when it looked like this country had taken such a wrong right turn, and that we were moving ever closer to disaster - a new kind of Bush police state under cover of fighting terrorism - just when it appeared that we would never find a real hero among our compromised leaders - one comes along. No, I did not find him at the local cineplex this weekend where Superman arrived to save the world and Hollywood. This one is the real deal, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift (USN). Swift was the naval officer who had represented Hamdan, the Gitmo prisoner in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. The result of this case was that an arrogant, power seeking President was told by a newly awakened Supreme Cout to mind his constitutional manners and start shaping up. Whether Bush can ever do so is unlikely, and whether our flag waving Congress, eager to keep Old Glory fireproof while defiling what it has long stood for - whether that Congress can fashion new laws to protect the innocent and convict the guilty - that is equally unlikely. One only has to listen to and look upon the likes of a Senator John Warner with his seersucker face and gassy rhetoric to know how hard that task will be. But I don't want to get too far away from my hero and this country's best new advocate - Lt. Commander Swift

I watched Swift on CSpan on this Fourth of July weekend, speaking out for the democratic process, not as an abstract ideal, but as a practical way to win a war on terror by following the rule of law, and I felt a rush of pleasure akin to what I felt as a small boy when I first saluted the flag in school assembly in PS 26. This man was a true beacon of light in dark times. He spoke without anger and without partisanship in defense of our liberties. Swift will not be easily swift boated by the demagogic Bush-Cheney-Rove axis of defamation. Here was a genuine American hero, a naval officer with a chest full of ribbons, the twenty year veteran of military service, speaking out against the subversion of our American idea of justice. Swift articulated the need to stick to our democratic values, and not rewrite the rules of civilized legal proceedings; claiming that this and this alone would make us safer. He believed that adherance to a rule of law would ultimately win out against the threat of terror, stressing the need for this country to recover its reputation for decency and legality among other countries as a practical matter, asserting that the soundest way to fight terror was without bluster and threats and with world support. Simple truths, but rarely if ever articulated by our leaders. Swift introduced some historical precedent for this, going back to the early years of our country when we banded together with other countries to fight and destroy the Barbary pirates - those 18th century terrorists. He spoke of the loss of face and reputation we suffer whenever we depart from our humanitarian tradition and the rule of law, such as the internment camps of WWII where we warehoused our Japanese Americans, and other exercises in war time illegality when panic drove the government into actions that we now look back upon with shame.

At first I thought of the courage it must take for a career office to defend an accused al Qaeda underling - this particular one being bin Laden's hapless driver - a semi-literate man from Yemen who was desperate to make a living to support his large family. And then I understood that in the case of Swift it was not courage but innate decency that drove him - something that did not need to be debated by him or weighted as a career making or career breaking decision. He took the case, followed it through, went to Yemen to collect evidence in order to defend his Gitmo client, and then helped to bring his case to the high court. In this he was much like John Adams who defended a British soldier in court after the Boston Massacre, defending the rule of law. What Swift was ultimately defending was not that Yemeni driver - but American democracy. This had little to do with the guilt or innocence of the man, everything to do with the honor of this country. And by winning that case, by showing the world that ours is a country where the rule of law can prevail, he believes that there will be fewer converts to terrorism. In the hero game, Swift is mine. He has demonstrated a rare moral courage and professionalism. I know the right is going to accuse this decent man of being a secret agent of the ACLU. They want Superman to come and rescue us - not a navy lawyer. But be careful Superman, the right is going to abandon you just as soon as they discover that you are an undocumented alien from Krypton.

Threat to my marriage: Gay Unions? No way! George Bush? I'll say!

2006-06-21T11:24:00.000-07:00

In his latest misadventure in bigotry, George Bush is speaking out against gay marriage. I will not be the first to say that this is code-language, bigot-speak, adapted from the old anti-miscegenation 'them blacks are after our wimmen' notions - now transformed into "those gays are after our sons." As a man who has been married to the same marvelous woman for fifty three action filled, 3D adventurous years, I feel I am one of the most qualified men in America to offer an opinion on the real threats to marriage among my countrymen. And George Bush is a big part of that threat. Like his ally and spokeswoman for the lunatic right, bimbo-fascist Anne Coulter, George Bush likes to wrap his bigotry in a moral fundamentalism that defies all sense, and in Bush's case reflects the cruelty of a loutish mind and an impaired moral vision. He cannot be unaware that the very anti-gay marriage law (covered over as "defense of marriage") that he proposes to write into law is an invitation to gay bashing, and that he puts innocent men and women's lives at risk when he suggests such legistlation to the Congress, even though one and all recognize that he is simply playing to his base with other people's lives, something he tends to do with war and peace. There are times when I think our President regards all life as some kind of big flat screen videogame with no real consequences for those whom he can manipulate. Still, there are real threats to any marriage and I would like to list them in the following paragraphs.

Real threats to ponder. Money problems. A decent minimum wage might do more for defending marriage than any other government act right now. A secure, well paid job is no assurance of a lasting marriage, but it sure helps. Another threat: Children. Nothing can tear a marriage apart as the unhappiness of our children, their school problems, their work problems, their marriages and divorces, and their illnesses. Speaking of illness, there is little to match cancer for threatening a marriage with stress, pain, and medical bills. And MS and Parkinsons do a good job of separating the girls from the boys. Indeed, medical advancements in these areas that might have been made have been delayed if not stopped by Bush's forbidden stem cell research - cures and good health might save many a marriage. Let's face it, the greatest threat to a loving marriage is death, not gays.

Now to get personal. George Bush is personally threatening my long standing marriage as no one else could possibly do. Here's what happened. I am a self confessed political junkie. When Bush speaks to the nation, I listen. Unless..unless..my wife is nearby or in the room and tells me to "turn that monster off." Almost from the beginning, when Bush first appeared on the national scene, she had a visceral dislike for Georgie Porgie. She hated his fake macho swagger, she despised his phony Texas drawl, she loathed his unctuous piety, and simply would not sit still to watch him in repose speaking to the nation or in action figure mode strutting on battleships. Elections came and elections went, State of the Union messages were delivered, but she refused to be in the same room with our President via television. She appears to regard it as a moral weakness on my part that I sit there transfixed by his speeches, determined to hear the very worst in the way of governance that he can offer first hand.

Now I do not like to be criticized for my taste in TV viewing, and if that includes a masochistic pleasure in watching our President, so be it. Who is she to grab the remote control and demand a Bushless world? Everyone knows that the remote belongs to the man in the family, even under the most extreme, provocative situations such as an appearance by our President. Why must I sneak about secretly turning on the TV, keeping the volume low, my finger on the mute button ever at the ready, hoping that my wife will not appear to shoot down my moment with George Bush? He has turned me into a furtive, politically unfaithful spouse. These differences about Bush watching may be signs of a deeper incompatibility that might well threaten our fifty three year old marriage but so far we have faced this Bush crises and prevailed. Question? How did I manage to be married for fifty three years when I am at best only fifty-two. There must have been an intra-uterine ceremony. Still, it has been a great marriage - filled with much pleasure and some pain - the way all good marriages manage to be - enhanced by the raising of two great sons. So, except for the matter of Bush's TV appearances - we feel we are safe 'till death do us part. And regarding gays? Who in their right mind can be threatened by other people's love, be they straight or gay, when the real threat to love is a ruthless President's manipulation of hate? So Happy Anniversary my darling. You're right, as always, but please stay away from my remote. Sherman

Strange connections: An actress dies and soldiers are murdered.

2006-06-21T03:54:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I attended a memorial service for an actress I had known when she had appeared in one of my musicals, just as I became aware of those two missing soldiers in Iraq who were later found murdered. On the surface these events seem to have little in common, but they are both about unfulfilled lives.

Susan Browning, the actress, had been one of the fine young talents on Broadway in the late sixties, a Tony nominee for her performance as the stewardess in Sondheim's "Company;" the girl who sang "Barcelona" to the delight of all who heard her. By the time I had met her thirty years later at an audition for my musical, she had experienced a failed marriage,a bout of alcoholism, and an eating disorder. She had changed from the slender young beauty of "Company" into an immensely stout woman - only her large, expressive dark eyes connected this Susan to the beauty that she had been. Her audition was superb. She was every bit the feisty, self-absorbed, witty character that I had envisioned for the writer Gertrude Stein in my musical. We immediately cast her in this romp about American's in Paris in the late twenties, and she did not disappoint us. Her performance was exceptional - full of wit, sparkle, and a charming wickedness, with a bit of risk that all splendid actors demonstrate on stage.

I got to know Susan from this regional theatre experience and we discovered that we shared a birthday, February 25th, joking that we could now never forget to send each other a card on that date. After a year or two we forgot. Susan - who later appeared as one of the nuns in "Sister Act" worked less and less frequently and finally retreated into a self imposed exile in her own apartment, a recluse who would not collect her mail or answer the telephone. A sad and lonely life - relieved only by her practise of Buddhism, and by her kind neighbors who took an interest in her well being until the end, comforting her in hospital, and seeking out her family to whom she had been long estranged. Members of that family spoke lovingly of the early Susan at her memorial, but at the end, like Blanche in "Streetcar" Susan depended on the kindness of strangers. Her own agents had failed to attend the funeral, sending an actor to represent them.

I had expected the memorial to be crowded with friends and fellow actors given the many Broadway shows and films Susan had appeared in, but except for a handful of family, and those West Side neighbors, there were only a few actor friends in attendance - those who had appeared with her in "Big River" a musical version of Huck Finn, and had fond recollections of her as a fellow cast member. I am afraid that a Buddhist memorial held in a small Upper East Side Unitarian Church on a fiercely warm summer Sunday held few attractions for most of her former colleagues who had not seen her in years. Susan, believing in alternative medicine, had refused to take her thyroid medication, and that together with her obesity had led to her death. Her reclusiveness had not encouraged her family, her old friends and acquaintances to share her last years. One of her neighbors remarked to me about her book lined apartment and her great intelligence, but few could fathom the mystery of so much promise ending so sadly. I suppose there is no good answer for the question of how a woman of beauty, intelligence, and great talent, could end her life in such loneliness and isolation. Stuff happens. And despite all the twelve step programs and the touchy feely belief that everyone can be saved from themselves, some can't.

It may seem a strange leap from the death of a lonely Susan Browning to that of the young soldiers who were captured and murdered in Iraq this week - but it is a leap I ask you to take with me. Ultimately, we are all connected by our common humanity. We all die alone, although in different ways. They too died alone and suffering, but in this case, not with the disappointments of a long life, but as young men abandoned to their fates by a government who had asked more of them than that government had been willing to give in return. Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Oregon, and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, brutalized beyond recognition, could not be easily identified when found. These young men had not made bad choices that led to ruined lives, their only bad choice was trusting in their government with its Rumsfeld doctrine, believing that they would go into combat properly armed and supported, and be welcomed as liberators rather than shot at as occupiers. Sent into danger in a Humvee without the necessary force to back them up, and isolated from the other Humvees who had gone off to chase insurgents, they were ambushed and outnumbered. One of these soldier's fathers spoke of the betrayal he felt in having his son die in this ill concieved, ill managed war. Relatives described Private Mechaca as "very nervous. He had never smoked, and he had started smoking. He was waking up in the night, very disturbed. He couldn't sleep well. He was very nervous, very jittery." He had seen the army as road to advancement in life. And he believed in what he was doing. But his young life ended on a road in Iraq, ambushed, brutalized, and murdered by persons unknown.

We are told that the chain of command is looking into this incident. Appropriate noises will be made, and more promises that young soldiers will not be left abandoned to the mercy of insurgents in the future, promises that cannot, and will not be kept in the endless fog of this war by this administration. Some deaths cannot be prevented. When an aging actress isolates herself and that isolation leads to her death it is a sad and cautionary tale about aging, depression and human nature - and what we do to ourselves. But when young soldiers are ambushed and murdered, it is a sad and cautionary tale about what is done to us by a misguided and arrogant government. These young men deserved better; not just to be mourned and forgotten after an investigation into the incident. In this case, the incident is the war. And the war is the Bush Administration.

Grossed Out

2006-06-04T05:36:00.000-07:00

A curious change has occurred in the way we regard films, politics, and life itself. Figures, statistics, polls, box office results, have taken on a new significance in the press, and I suppose, in the minds of many in the American public. When I was growing up in the dark ages, or, as I prefer to think of that time, a golden age, there was a place for the box office earnings of a film - and it was on the business page. Today, The New York Times, runs the box office figures of the latest film in the Arts section. The Arts section? Do millions of Americans really hold their collective breath waiting to discover if "The DaVinci Code " has made it to top place in the box office, or if it has earned in its first week the millions necessary to justify its enormous cost? Do I care what the gross is? Do you care? I doubt it. I do care if it's a good film, that if I go to see it, it won't waste two precious hours of my life. Quality no longer seems the big issue in entertainment - financial success is the key. Sure, if films fail at the box office it is more difficult for the artists and businessmen involved to get the financing for other films - but success and failure are not to be measured by the standards of The Wall Street Journal. So, I am truly grossed out by all the talk of grosses.

Some of this I attribute to the winners and losers psychology that has overtaken this country. In these Bush years, the winners are the multi-millionaires whose numbers have increased exponentially, those who have bought and sold power,or real estate, and the losers are the middle class whose numbers are declining as outsourcing of good jobs and the "global economy" has taken away their livelihoods. Just as we are supposed to celebrate the box office grosses of the latest manufactured megahit, we are encouraged to enjoy the profits of a Wallmart or the cavorting of the Paris Hiltons, the Donald Trumps, and the other gross figures of excess. They are not disconnected. Popularity at any price is what they share. We will sell it cheaper - even if it hurts this society - we will profit from our proflicacy via a personal sex tape - or we will become a household name by domesticating the law of the jungle ("You're fired! And I'm admired") in a popular TV show.

Now, I like horse races. But only on the track. It may seem a harmless endeavor - this preoccupation with "what it made," or "what he/she made" or what he/she polled" but I think it harms people, it harms art, and it harms our political discourse. It coarsens the way we look at all aspects of life. It is a demonstration of the Oscar Wilde remark, "He knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." I would less than candid if I denied my pleasure in the low poll ratings of Bush and his administration, but I would be happier still if the public's attention was focused not on the polls but on the lies, the misdeeds, and the criminal acts that have been committed by this administration. It is not sufficient that there is a general discontent, a malaise about this President and his people, it is important that the nature of the misdeeds be understood so that we, as country, never make such catatrophic mistakes in judgment again.

On another subject, the new Unity Party has been making its rounds of the various talk shows, promising a coalition of concerned Republicans and Democrats who wish to enter the next election with candidates who can break the hold that bi-partinship bitterness has on the nation. My instincts shout "Ralph Nader" - the spoiler - for whom we can partially count the blessings of the Bush Presidency. Why does this Unity Party seem to me a desire to save the Republican party from a well deserved defeat - one which will lead to a true investigation into its misdeeds - as oppossed to a genuine grass roots movement to reform our politics. The fact is our politics can't be reformed unless the Democrats come to power again and restore the balance of government power. The Republicans will own the Supreme Court for the next forty years, and it is essential that the Congress become Democratic soon. I have few illusions about the Democrats, they are sure to screw up in their own blundering, compromising fashion, but it won't be the Republican fashion, with a war brought on by lies and greed, and an environment so compromised that the world of our grandchildren will still be suffering from the Bush Administration's misdeeds. Without a thorough investigation of where we went wrong as a nation, we cannot correct our course. This is no time to kiss and make up in some "Unity Party" - a utopian dream that can only help to perpetuate our particular Republican nightmare.

On Worshipping False Idols

2006-05-25T05:21:00.000-07:00

The other evening my wife and I were dinner guests at the home of friends. After dinner we were asked to join them in watching the grand finale of "American Idol "- a two hour affair in which more Americans allegedly voted for their favorite pop singer candidate than had ever voted in a national Presidential election. As I watched the show, I found myself trapped in the middle of a noisy electroinc jukebox filled with weeping and cheering entertainers. The finalists were an extremely pretty girl (my personal favorite) with a secure but ordinary pop voice, and a young Southerner who looked like one of the chunky Tarlton twins Scarlett married and lost early to the Civil War in "Gone With The Wind." He had a reasonably able voice and a lot of fancy moves but to paraphrase the late Senator Bentson, "I have seen Elvis, sir, and you are no Elvis."

I am intrigued by pop culture and I had previously made an effort to watch this phenom of a show but with no success. In the past I was turned off by the head honcho, a man named Simon, a professionally nasty Englishman who exhibited none of his countrymen's fabled wit, and whose prissy, self congratulating manner, full of sneers and raised eyebrows, took aim at the hapless non talents who were paraded before him as an opportunity to exhibit his fabled lack of charity and his feeble gift for insult. I rather liked Paula Abdul, a genuine performer who had been in the trenches herself, and she appeared to have a kind heart and a capacity for tearful good will. Of course I suspected that here we were witnessing the good cop bad cop scenario of my favorite police dramas. Of the others I have less recollection. I do recall the host, Ryan Seacrist, a feckless Ken doll, with a mouth full of fancy Hollywood dentistry and a Howdy Doody puppet charm. There was a heavy set African American panelist who seemed knowledgeable and forthright, but after my first effort to watch the show both me and my TV were turned off the Fox Network until that final show.

On the evening of the grand finale my wife and I left our friend's home early and returned to ours to watch our local PBS station which had a program devoted to the life of the great blues man Muddy Waters. Not a very nice man, Mr. Waters, but what a life - starting with his rural poverty - and focusing on his great artistry which was brought to the world not by television moguls, but by Alan Lomax of the Smithsonian and a small record company, Chess Records, providing an artist whose work has enriched all of us who love American music.

Now I will no doubt be accused of elitism for claiming that I prefer the blues of a sharecropper's son to the confections of a megahit TV show. This word elitist has been thrown about a lot lately and it has more than once landed on my doorstep. The first time I ever heard the word was as a kid listening to a comedy show, "Duffy's Tavern" whose jocular motto for the seedy saloon which served as the setting was "where the elite meet to eat." In today's America the real elite (those who are privilaged and not accountable for their actions) are usually the people like a Rush Limbaugh who throw the word elite around as if it was a synonym for bird flu. It has become the insult de jour of those who oppose a humane immigration policy, or who view the Dems as being out of step with the three G's of the Republican party, Guns, God, and Gotcha. The New York Times devotes its Sunday magazine section to dire warnings to the Dems that they will lose again if they listen to their party elite and wander too far from the dead middle in politics towards a lefty elitism. The trouble is nobody seems to know where the middle is these days, and one man's elitism is another man's humanity. It seems clear that Americans are looking for an old truth - starting with something as simple as "love they neighbor," not the old lies about trickle down economy which against all the laws of gravity keeps trickling ever upwards. Nor do they want to hear the new lies of being protected by our leaders - leaders who have demonstrated a greater capacity for sheltering their incomes than sheltering refugees from a storm, and whose talent for protecting the country is outmatched by their talent for protecting their mistakes from public view.

The New York Times continues to fascinate me in these troubled times. During the Clinton years the slightest ripple about Whitewater would land on the front page. But in today's Times an important story about Dick Cheney who may be called to testify under oath at the Libby trial is buried in the back of the paper. They also have a story about American Idol in the back pages. Both deserve to make it to the front page because both tell us truths about America today. Packaged entertainment like packaged food may not kill us, but it makes us fat and dull and lazy, it is a Roman circus which distracts us from the failings of the Emporer. When the Times protects its journalistic behind by placing important stories about the administration in the rear, that may be politic, but is not worthy of our paper of record. We will probably watch the story creep forward towards the front pages reluctantly as events unfold. But if you want some relief these days from the elitist lies of the right wing pundits or the elitist cowardice of our paper of record, play a Muddy Waters record - and see how pain and love can be turned into an art that speaks the truth about the human condition.

A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR SECURING OUR BORDERS

2006-05-16T05:35:00.000-07:00

We all recall fondly the Saturday Night Live sketch "The Coneheads." In that brilliant sketch, the conical headed extra-terestrials replied to any queries about their pointy heads by saying "We're French." That cover story allowed them to live among us earthlings with ease. Claiming Frenchiness covered all their peculiarities. As I listened to President Bush offer his program for dealing with the illegal aliens last night, I could not help but think of the coneheads again. What if all the aliens coming across our borders illegally spoke French instead of Spanish? Would they then constitute such a problem to American nativists? I think not. So the thing to do is to get all the Mexicans who wish to work and settle in this country to learn French as soon as possible, indeed, make it a requirement before allowing them to sneak into our country. Set up emergency Berlitz launguage centers at our borders and begin the drill at once, from abaisser (to bring down) to zizanie (stir up ill feeling). Since both French and Spanish are romance languages sharing a common origin, it might be easier than building high fences, arming borders with electronic devices, and deploying the overworked, overstretched, National Guard to our borders. Think of the happy consequences.

As French speaking aliens, they cannot help but bring with them a whole new set of attitudes. Gone will be the hard working Mexican work ethic that troubles so many here. The warm smile is to be replaced by the superior sneer. No longer will these aliens be willing to work for sub-standard wages under dreadful conditions. Now, as French speaking Latins, they will demand higher pay, much shorter working hours, a month off in August, benefits up the kazoo, and if denied all this, go on strike and shut down our agro-business. Not for them to accept short term labor - they will demand lifetime job security - or riots in the streets. They, the noveau Hispano-French, will only accept a guest worker program that treats them like real guests - four hundred thread bed sheets- a spa - and a Godiva chocolate on the pillow at night. Failing to recieve such hospitality, they will return to their homes in Mexico and never darken our borders again.

Alas, this is not likely to happen. But there is a much simpler and less costly solution than any proposed by the President. Raising the minimum wage. Odd, how native Americans will flock to jobs that allow them to support their children and live decent lives. And some of this can be accomplished by raising that miniminum wage which now keeps so many Americans at the poverty level. Since the minium wage can only attract the most desperate workers from south of our border, raising it might manage to fill those service and agricultural jobs with American citizens. And while we are at it, a conversation with President Fox of Mexico should include more than reassurances that we are not trying to militarize our common border. It should include, "Vincente, how about working towards getting a living wage for your own people so they don't have to break our laws and live as outlaws north of the border."

The one area that Bush failed to address that hovered over his speech last night was the benefits that illegal workers provide for the agro-magnates and the Wallmart billionaires. It is not enough for Bush to exempt them from inheritance taxes and diminish their income taxes but he must provide them with cheap labor. This is his real financial base, those who support his party with enormous donations. They need the cheap undocumented labor, so everything else that Bush proposes is window dressing. That gets us back to the French. They are experts at dressing windows. Bush's proposals won't work because he doesn't want them to work, he simply makes them to appease his conservative nativist base, and only a conehead would fail to understand that.

THOSE BLANKETY BANKS IN BUSHWORLD

2006-05-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

I don't have to tell anyone who has lived in New York City that it is a great place to spend a day or a life. As a boy growing up in this city in the forties and early fifties under the shadow of the elevated train on Third Avenue, I was fascinated by its diversity - not just the people - the mix of races and classes - but the old brownstone buildings, the shops; Rappaport's Toys, Greenburg's bakery, Madam Bonte's patisserie, the Hungarian hardware stores that sold the best paprika and porcelaine bread boxes, the Odyssey Bookstore, the shop on Lex that sold little painted lead Hessian soldiers, the German shops in Yorkville that sold marzipan delights at Christmas, and beyond that the O'Henry like millions - dare I use his famous description "Baghdad on the Hudson"? - when Baghdad meant Arabian Nights romance, not Bushworld misadventures. There was a rich mix of people, each with their own extraordinary tale to tell of immigration and integration, their struggle, their triumphs, and their failures. New York was a city of small villages, each with its discreet neighborhood and local vendors who knew most of their customers well. You were not alone in that city. Enough with the nostalgia.

Something has happened to my city lately that is changing all of that. And not for the good. Trust me this isn't Uncle Sherman's fuddy duddy talk. It's every New Yorker's reality. Banks - Saving Banks - Commercial Banks - Private Banks - are swallowing the city I love. There is hardly a block that has not one or two new banks on it, just open for business, promising us the best CD rate (*check the asterisk for the truth) and offering free coffee, magazines, and a gift umbrella when you open a checking account. Their blank, plate glass facades are a visual blight and a social disaster. Who can enjoy a stroll in one's neighborhood checking out CD rates? In the last years it was Starbucks that had sprung up mushroom like over the city. Before that it was the egregiously signed Duane Reade Drugstores. But the banks have been the worst offenders. Why has this invasion of finance taken place recently? It is, I suppose, because money matters more than ever in America.

In this Bush world, the merchant banker, the hedge-fund manager, and the mortgage peddler are king, and these banks are the temples in which we are all invited to worship. The banks speak to our current obsession with earning money by making nothing but money. It is the result of outsourcing, the decline of manufacture, and the loss of decent middle class wage earning jobs. And the banks by their willingness to pay exhorbitant rentals have driven out the toyshops, the newsstands, the small bookstores, the independent clothing stores, the antique shops, the artists and artisans, all of which give a city color, charm, variety, balance, and visual delight. I spoke with a banker recently, and he assured me that half of these banks will consolodate and some branches will close in a year or so - there is simply not enough money - even in New York City to support so much financial real estate. But in the meantime, they are troubling to both the visual senses and to our common sense. They don't offer me the security that my old classic Manufacturer's trust gave me. As a boy I went into that hushed greek temple and added a buck from my allowance into my passbook account until Christmas when I spent it all on gifts for my parents and my sister. The bankers knew me then and carefully stamped the new balance in my book. As a young adult I found that there was a connection between the bank tellers and the customers. That connection is long gone - except in the case of "preferred customers." I'm not asking for George Bailey to return from "It's A Wonderful Life" to some fantasy world of kindly village bankers. I just want to see fewer banks, and those I do see should have the courtesy to dress up like a proper bank in marble columns - not do their porno peep show down the avenue wearing nothing but plate glass that exposes their ugly innards. The ghost of Enron hovers over these banks - the sense that nothing of value is being sold to anybody - that there is a great trick behind it all that will soon be discovered. We will all soon learn that the Wizard in our Oz is the fake patent medicine salesman. The banks seem to have one positive social use, however. The glassed in ATM areas serve as shelters for the homeless. From tax shelters to homeless shelters in the course of a day. We have lived from George Bailey to George Bush - and the change has not been pretty.

When the late Jane Jacobs wrote her classic book to save the small buildings and human scale of the city from the mega-developers, it was not just about saving the old brownstones and other architectural treasures as buildings. She was not advocating a museum city for charming old edifices. It was about the people who lived in those buildings, the mix of humanity necessary to have a real city life.

So it is necessary to speak about the change in the people of my neighborhood. It was once (in the sixties and seventies) a place where schoolteachers, lawyers, shopkeepers, writers, artists, clerks, psychologists and city employees lived and raised their families. Now, the merchant bankers have bought the old apartments and brownstones, the soaring price of real estate has driven out the middle class, and only a few stubborn hangers on like me and my wife - unwilling to sell out for a profit and settle in a place where we have no roots - remain from that original mix of humanity. My own grown children can't afford to live in this city, and I know few young people who can - unless they pile in with roomates - using their apartments as crash pads as they make their way up the economic ladder. And what young couple, other than your hedge fund manager, can afford to raise a family in this city?

Much of this reflects upon George Bush's agenda. His America is a place where a growing economy means the rising profits and luxurious lifestyles of the very rich - and where mostly everyone else shares real fears about their ecomonic future. I suspect that what has happened to New York on a grand scale has happened all over America. We are now a nation of winners and losers, and most of us are losers by the standards of Bush & Co. America is now a vast gambling casino. Place your bet on the right school, the right job, the right life - and you win. A wrong toss of the dice and you lose. What few recognize is that Bush and Co. declared economic warfare on the middle class of America when they came to power. Their weapons were tax cuts for the rich, the erosion of the inheritance taxes, outsourcing manufacturing, all of which has placed a grievous burden on the middle class. Most of all they were able to play with the hopes of the middle class that they too could share in the great rewards that the super rich enjoyed - just by making the right moves. The appeal to greed is often a winner, and Bush has used it well. Bush's great success has been his revocation of the New Deal, his erosion of the social safety net, his breaking of the social contract between our government and its people, not only destroying the progress made under FDR but under Teddy Roosevelt - the trust buster. Bush's America is the mirror image of Soviet Communism, with its attempt to revoke the rights of the individual. Instead of giving all wealth to the state as in Communism, the transfer of wealth has gone to a few CEO's with their mega salaries, stock options, and luxury perks in this strange new capitalism that fails to reward hard work among the many and prefers to make its banks the symbol of the new America, an American that is a playground of the few.

So I find my walks down the Upper East Side of New York an unsettling reminder of what has happened to my city and to this country in the last five years. It will take a great deal of work to restore the balance in the economy in this country. It can be done. And it must be done. It's not just immoral. It's downright ugly. Just look at those blankety banks.

Odds and Ends - Some random thoughts

2006-05-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

1. Tim Russert needs all the help he can get these days. Little Russ looks like a Kennedy cousin; one of those jolly miscreants cleared of criminal charges through the intercession of powerful friends, a man who took a pledge to annoy the innocent and grovel before the guilty on "Meet the Press." He can grill a Nancy Pelosi as if she was Eva Braun, while pussy footing with some Republican blowhard Senator. Speaking of Ms. Pelosi - I'm sure she's a nice woman - she has to be because she is so ineffective - which is often the property of niceness. Someone should tell the Democrats that being politic is no longer good politics. Where did they ever learn that statesmanship is being bland and boring? We need more Churchill and less Church Lady these days. There must be a school for losers that Democrats attend where they learn to hone and polish their concession speeches. Passion is good politics.

2. What do we have to do to get Tom Cruise out of the news and the news back into the news? Is there no rich emerite willing to offer him safe refuge like Dubai was for Michael Jackson? I would gladly let them run our ports in exchange for getting him safely out of this country and his films out of the cineplex. The world is simply too serious for this kind of foolish, self indulgent circus master - another demented, hard smiling egomaniac with a Mission Impossible - appearing human.

3. And what shall we do about poor Laura Bush? Is there no organization for the protection of former librarians married to pathological liars? However did a good girl like Laura ever get mixed up with that rough Bush crowd? Was it all a musical like "Grease" or a melodrama like "Reefer Madness?" Or are we all decieved? Could she be the Lady Macbush behind this bloody throne? What is it about Texas that can create a Laura Bush (America's favorite white gloved gun-moll) and her polar opposite, a plain spoken, truth telling Ann Richards. Now there's a great lady who deserves everyone's good wishes these days.

4. What can we make of David Brooks, The New York Times house conservative? Like a house wine he is acceptably bland, moderately priced, and he doesn't spoil the meal but he hardly adds any zest to it. He now bemoans the mean spiritedness of the Democrats as their fortunes appear to rise. Where was his voice of moderation and reason when Limbaugh and Coulter (those daffy, darling, defamers) were throwing their poisend brickbats and mud-pies at the (dare I say it)Li-li-li-liberal Democrats?

5. And will somebody tell our Katie to do something about that multi-million dollar grin before reading the evening news on CBS? Practise your frown. Botox be damned. We don't need perky these days, we need Ed Murrow and all his furrows to get us through the next thousand days of Bush & Co. - tragic days for this country.

Bush and the grassy knoll

2006-05-03T04:59:00.000-07:00

I've never been a big fan of conspiracy theories. As a child I learned that there were few secrets that could be kept by friends or family; when given a choice between silence (particularly sworn silence) and loose talk - people will always choose the loose talk. It is the business of the world to know everyone else's business, and common knowledge is the enemy of conspiracy. How then could groups of adults get together to conspire to perform dark deeds and keep it secret? Sure, there were the classical examples; Brutus & Co. in their Ides of March stabbing spree on Julius Caesar for one, but that was Ancient Rome when everyone was made of white Carrara marble, wore laurel wreaths and spoke an oratorical Latin - a language made for secrets - at least it was for me when I struggled and failed to master it in the sixth grade.

Most alleged conspiracies like the Protocols of Zion prove to be ugly forgeries planted by professional haters, or, as in The DaVinici Code with its crazed Albino monk and sinister Opus Dei, fictions about the Catholic Church. Trust me, if Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby as alleged in that book, somebody would have told somebody and that somebody ad infinitum and it would have been on Page 6 in 2 AD. Brad and Angelina from the get go.

Having lived through Pearl Harbor, I heard all the stories about Roosevelt conspiring to bring us into the war by setting up our navy to be hit by a Japanese sneak attack in Hawaii. It seemed bunkum then, and bunkum now. Having lived through the Kennedy assassination and heard all the theories and speculations - the other shooter in the grassy knoll - the man with the umbrella who sprayed immobilizing darts into Kennedy's neck, the Mafia hit for the Kennedy investigations of organized crime, Castro striking back for the Bay of Pigs, I came to the firm conclusion (for which I have absolutely no evidence but my experience of life) that it was Oswald alone, crazy, embittered, failed Oswald, with a love for guns and a hatred for the President who assassinated John F. Kennedy. Some people are crazy, and they do evil crazy things by themselves all the time - unassisted by Mafia hit men or guys with dart spraying umbrellas. They don't need orders from others to act, their own deranged minds issue all the orders they need. As far as 9/11 goes, it was an act of Islamic fascists to wound America, but it was not so secret that the Bush administration was not warned - and as Ms. Rice testified - chose to ignore the warning. When Hillary Clinton spoke of a vast right wing conspiracy to bring down her husband's Presidency it seemed to me that a lot of like minded conservatives disliked Bill Clinton and didn't need to conspire together to ruin him - they simply acted together openly on their common dislike - and Clinton himself seemed a part of that conspiracy through his ruinous behavior

So, having said all that, why am I so willing to believe in a Bush conspiracy to destroy democracy in America? Many years ago the Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis warned us that when fascism came to America it would not arrive wearing a swaztika and marching a goose-step in jack boots. It would arrive looking like a good ole boy, speaking with a twang and smiling a friendly down home smile. He meant Huey Long. His warning could apply to George W. Bush. Such a man would stop at nothing to gain power, and having gained it, do everything to consolodate his power.

First, let me state that I now believe that there was a conspiracy to steal the election in 2000 and in 2004, and it was successfully carried out by Bush and Rove and Cheney and their Republican brethren. I believe that there was a conspiracy to keep Democratic and minority voters away from the polls, lose their names in voter registries, and in the last election, lose whole blocks of Democratic votes in Ohio and elsewhere. Some of these activities were felonies, and I suspect that if convicted these felons will be sent to a polictical rehab center like Rush Limbaugh with his drug rehab - in other words, getting away with it. And I believe that there was a conspiracy of silence on the part of the American press to let it go - to keep from seriously examining these elections and their results - a conspiracy based on the fear of seeming partisan, kooky, and buying into lefty conspiracy theories. Most of all the press wanted to believe that the election was fairly won, the alternative was too threatening and thus inconcievable, and they did not want to encourage more accusations of liberal bias. To accept the fact that the elections were rigged would mean that the election was stolen by ruthless men and women who were ready to destroy the American democratic experiement for their own purposes - profit and power - much too scary for most of the press and the public to acknowledge.

I believe that the Democrats will lose the next election in much the same way for much the same reason - now compounded by the proliferation of electronic voting machines and lack of a paper ballott and exit polls. Some of this belief I owe to the work of writer Mark Crispin Miller and his excellent recent book "Fooled Again." That book managed to overcome some of my congenital anti-conspiracy bias. And some of my new conspiracy acceptance was based on my observation that the American people are by nature moderate and not sympathetic to the right wing fanatics who now govern them, and that they did not vote them into power. While I am conspiracy hunting, let me add that I do believe that Dick Cheney conspired with big Oil in secret meeting to craft our energy policy to create huge profits for Mobile and Exxon. Doesn't take a genius to get that one. It's a no brainer. You can give me all the theories about demand for oil exceeding supply and China using so much of it, blah, blah blah, as a reason for the King Kong prices at the pumps - and I will still say Dick Cheney. God doesn't give you that evil smirk if he didn't plan to make a villain out of you. Having said all this - how did these conspirators get away with it? Easy. They do not regard themselves as conspirators. They are so imbedded in the culture of greed and power that they regard their conspiracies as good public policy, normal behavior, a fulfillment of the American way of life, the final full expression of free enterprise unleashed. The country club golf course is their grassy knoll, and they have used it as a place to take aim at our democracy.

Despite the pollster's claims that the Republicans are in deep trouble in the coming elections, they will win again if attention is not paid to the way they conduct their election business. It is business to them - power means profits - and profits buy more power. It will take an aroused and enlightened electorate to make certain that the past is not prelude to the future. As a recent convert to the notion of a conspiracy, I pass on this warning in my best conspiratorial manner. Watch out! And look under every rock. The bad guys are determined to win again, and they will if the people do not understand the danger our democracy faces from them. Psst! Trust me on this.

Julia and Hillary: Not ready for the big stage

2006-04-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Julia Roberts recently opened on Broadway to poor critical reviews in the New York newspapers. Now Julia Roberts is a great film star - we all know and love that marvellous incandescent smile and have enjoyed her glowing movie performances. Forgive the film flack praise - but how else can you describe her? On film she shines a megawat glow, on stage she proved to be a very dim lamp. This did not mean that Ms. Roberts was a bad actress, merely that she was a fish out of water (albiet a lovely fish) on Broadway, lacking the theatrical training and equipment to meet the demands of a serious stage play, but still a great film star. Her attempting the stage was an act of courage. She failed, but the consequences did not effect the larger world, only her pride and her ambitions. Now on to Hillary Clinton. Let's say it early and say it often. Hillary should not be the next Democratic candidate for President. Like Ms Roberts, she has many commendable qualities, and like Ms. Roberts she will go down in defeat when she attempts to extend her range beyond her present capabilities. But unlike Ms. Roberts, she will take us down with her, and after four years of the Bush disaster, this matters mightily. We cannot afford another four years of a Republican President. Think Mitt Romney. Think John McCain. Think - and shudder - Rudy Guiliani.

I admire Ms. Clinton. As one of her constituants in New York I believe she has done an excellent job representing my state in the Senate, and I mean to vote for her reelection. She is intelligent, resourceful, hard-working, compassionate - all qualities lacking in our current President. But like our current President her rise to power came from family connections and it is time to clear the field of all relatives, even talented ones. Hillary matched against a John McCain or the egrigious Rudy Guiliani is dead meat, and we do not need either of those men occupying the White House, alienating the rest of the world and packing the courts with right wing zealots simply because the Democrats offered a human female sacrifice in a self destructive ritual that was financed by some wealthy power brokers. Anytime you read in the conservative press that Ms. Clinton will be a tough candidate to beat, be scared, be very scared. They want her out there as their most tempting target. I fear that it is not the men of this country who will vote against her in huge numbers, but the women, that unspoken backlash to feminism among women that has found in Hillary its poster child. She is (gasp) ambitious, serious, and living with a famously unfaithful husband. It may be unjust to her to disqualify her for some of her better qualities - qualities we praise in men - but that's the world as it is, not as it should be. And that's the world we will face in the presidential campaign of '08. If being unfair to Hillary is being fair to the country by cleaning out the conservative majority, so be it. She is a risk we cannot take. I feel for her. She draws nasty house-flies like Dick Morris and other professional Clinton bashers - and she would be forced to keep swatting away at them, distracting the country from the big issues and the great problems that confront us.

Most of all, what disqualities Hillary from heading the ticket was her unapologetic vote for the Iraq war. Now I have no inside information, I'm just a plain reader of the newspapers, yet I knew from the start that the war was based upon a lie, as did so many others. It was an embarassingly transparent lie, told by our government, perpetuated by such newspapers as The New York Times, so eager were they to cozy up to power and march to the drumbeat, in this case the dumb-beat. Hillary voted for that war. If she believed in the government's lies about the WMD's she was too easily fooled to be our next President. If she did not believe those lies yet voted for the war it is far worse; it meant that she was too eager to show a martial spirit that would prop up her Presidential ambitions, and such expediency, at the expense of truth and the national welfare is not what we need after eight years of Bush-world lies. Either reason should disqualify her for the Presidency at this time. But there is an office I would like to see her inhabit, the right role for her to play - that of the Vice President. It would be for her what the movies are for Ms. Roberts - the proper place for her to shine. And what an antidote to Dick Cheney! Not a bad stick in the eye to those who have led this country to disaster for eight years. And since Al Gore has recovered his groove, and tells it as it is better than anyone else around, he should be the front runner at this time. In his recent speeches he has told the hard truths about the state of this world - truths about the state of our country, and truths about the dolorous state of the environment. I think a Gore/Clinton ticket might make a winning combo. Women would approve of her in a supporting role, and she would be a great backup to a President Gore - the man who was cheated of his Presidency by a partisan court. Clinton/Gore, no. Gore/Clinton, yes! Why not try it? It worked in the past, and has a winning sound to it.

Suddenly The Big Surprise: Growing Older In America

2006-04-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

When I submitted my first piece to the Huffington Post I was asked to provide a bio and a photo of myself to be used alongside my web-log. Faced by the request for that picture, I realized that I hadn’t taken a new photo in years. Truth is I had taken a few family snapshots – me looking down in delight at my nine month old grand-daughter - but I hadn’t taken” a good picture” in years. I opened a photo album and pulled out a picture I liked that was taken thirty five years ago. There I was with a full head of dark brown hair, straight white teeth, unwrinkled countenance, a “not bad for a writer” kind of picture which I had used in the programs of my plays. I submitted it to the Huffington Post and it has accompanied every blog I have posted these past months. I rationalized the deception. After all I had lived more than half of my life looking like the younger man in that photo, and less than a quarter of my life was lived as the weary older man I now confronted in the mirror. Nevertheless, I was challenged by conscience or was it truth in advertising (an oxymoron if ever there was one) but not enough for me to remove that picture and replace it with a contemporary photograph. Since I make no pretense about my age – I have recently arrived at seventy four - I know that it is a foolish bit of vanity but one that I am not yet ready to abandon.

I thought little more about my age until I was recently interviewed in Chicago by Time Out a popular entertainment guide about a new musical, “Josephine Tonight!” for which I had written the libretto and lyrics. I had learned the art of lyric writing in my late sixties – not so remarkable – it was the age of many of my friends who were learning new skills and experimenting in other art forms. The show was opening in Chicago in a few days and the publicist asked me to meet with the magazine’s reporter to help publicize the show. I agreed. After being introduced to the young interviewer, he announced that he had looked me up in Wickipedia and he was surprised by the fruits of his research. He wanted to know why I was writing new work at this time of my life. How could a man who had once collaborated with the great Richard Rodgers now write a new musical, with a new off Broadway show in New York and this other one in Chicago? It was as if I had trespassed into a world of creativity that exclusively belonged to the young. Worse yet, how could I, this older white man, write about a young black woman - the teen aged Josephine Baker of my musical? The first question was pure ageism. The second was pure horse-shit.

I tried to explain to Junior that a writer’s material does not belong to any race or any generation, that hard as it is to believe, all of us share a common humanity. Josephine Baker, a woman who had struggled for a lifetime to break down racial barriers would have celebrated a musical written about a spirited young black girl growing up in a Jim Crowe world, one who transcends the limitations of her life. From what I knew of her she would never worry that her life was being dramatized by a white man. I knew that I was in deep trouble with the cutting edge “Time Out.” And I was proven right when the reviews came out a week later. While the Chicago Sun Times had nothing but the highest praise for the work, finding it “hugely entertaining…hit written all over it”, and the Tribune found almost as much to commend in the work of its “redoubtable author;” and other critics thought it was in the tradition of the great American musicals, Time Out found it creaky, yes creaky, you know, the way old people and old floorboards creak? Okay, maybe he didn’t really like my show but I suspected that I was facing the last outpost of bigotry in America; the view that the older artist has nothing fresh to offer the world. Sure there are artists who transcend the negative view of age – the Picassos, the Matisses, and in my field, the Albees and the Sondhiems. But for most of us lesser mortals, the world views us through our numbers. I had written a lyric in the musical sung by an ageing theatre star who sings, “Suddenly, the big surprise. You look old in someone’s eyes.” And here I was, the creator of those words, experiencing that emotion as a result of that article.

It is no longer acceptable to be a casual racist, but bigotry against older people is non-racial, non denominational, and acceptable among otherwise progressive people in this society – such as the men and women who run our entertainment industry. Amos and Andy are gone forever, but foolish, befuddled, meddlesome old grandpa and grandma, prone to do and say silly, rude, and outrageous things are universally accepted on television, in films, in ads. Sadly, this attitude towards older people is a part of our national tragedy, for had “young” W heeded the wisdom of his own aged father, and not his hand picked Hallelujah chorus, we might not be stuck in a dreadful war today. One of the great discoveries of aging – other than finding that our learning and creativity doesn’t stop at any given age - is that it is easier to be bolder in calling the powerful to task. I’m proud to say that some of us older folks were among the first to recognize the arrival in America of the four horsemen of this apocalypse: Bush, Cheney, Rove and Rumsfeld.

My mother-in-law Henrietta Fuhr was a modest and moderate woman who rarely made a show of her political views but when she was dying at aged ninety-three she did not waste her last days with sentimental journeys into the past; she expressed her outrage at the Bush administration and the hope that people would soon awaken to its greed and dishonesty. This gentle, intelligent woman was thinking about the world that Bush was creating for her children and grandchildren. She was deeply troubled about the future of the country she loved and was about to leave behind. And so am I and many of my aging contemporaries, most of them deeply committed to a country that honors its best traditions. Like my mother-in-law I don’t wish to leave this world as one who kept a safe silence while the great decider destroys this democracy. We elders have lived through enough storms to know that Bush is our own Hurricane Katrina, bound to leave such material, environmental, and moral wreckage behind that it will take generations of wise old men and women working with the smart young ones to put this country right again. But there are limits to my septuagenarian courage. Yes, I can willingly take on the government and its leaders in a web-log, but what I still can’t bring myself to do is change that picture on The Huffington Post. Perhaps it’s because I still feel that I am that vigorous young man in the photograph. Delusional? Sure it is. Okay Junior, just humor the old guy

The Republicants

2006-04-03T14:28:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, the Republicans siezed the language of our politics and ran away with it. Overnight, the Democratic Party became the Democrat party in the mouths of Republican pols, as if the "ic" on the end gave the Democrats a moral advantage that had to be stolen from them after generations of accepted usage. After all, to be democratic meant that the party was inclusive, that it supported democracy, that it represented all the people, and that it spoke for the majority in its aims and through its candidates. Whoever thought up the trick of the disappearing ic, attempted to dissociate the party from the people it represented. With Democrat you end with rat - and subliminally, the ugly sound evokes a rodent and who wants to vote for one of those. Clever! One of the unsung Republican dirty tricks.

I think it is high time that we Democrats of the old Democratic Party persuasion respond in kind. I propose that the Republican Party be renamed in the coming elections by all Democratic candidates, in every public forum, and forever after be known as the Republicant Party. It takes less work than went into lopping off part of the Democratic Party nomenclature. All it requires is the addition of a single letter, a tiny little t to the end of their party name and it does the big job properly, and best of all, truthfully. First, we have the obvious meaning of the Republicants. It is clear that they can't do anything right. Let's examine what the Republicants can't do, and if you agree, let us adopt this as our response to Democrat in the months and years ahead.

1) For starters, the Republicants can't tell the truth. From Bush downwards, they have lied shamelessly and consistently about matters of war and peace. Start with the Iraq war and the WMDs. Having started this war with a bogus claim, they proved that they can't work with the international community, and worse, that they haven't a clue as to how to get us out of the mess they created. They can't win a war against a homegrown insurgency and they can't leave the country for a generation to come - or at least that is what Mr. Bush suggests - leaving the task of extricating us from his national calamity and ours to another President. Try as they will to evade responsibility we cannot let them get away with that awful expression "mistakes were made." They, the Republicants made those mistakes, and they can't hide behind fuzzy, evasive words to escape their actions and their reponsibility. They think they can, but they can't, not the Republicants.

2) It appears that the Republicants can't provide an economy that benefits anyone but the top 10 %percent of Americans. They don't have a clue as to how you deal with a global economy, and the outsourcing of good jobs in America, other than letting profits pile up for the few at the top at the expense of the many and replace decent salaried work with poorly paid service emplyment. They can't provide jobs that offer a living wage, and they can't tell us why they can't. They can provide constantly rising gasoline and heating oil prices to the big oil companies but they can't take the growing burden off the middle class. The Republicants would call this "class warfare" but like Iraq, they started the class war by bringing us to a society of winners and losers - with more losers every day.

3) The Republicants can't provide real protection from terrorists. Remember, 9/11 happened on their watch. They can't say that nobody knew, there were warnings, warnings they chose to ignore as witnessed by Ms. Rice's testimony before the Congress. And they can't play the terrorism card forever. People are realizing that the manipulation of fear, be it code red, orange, or yellow, or by Presidential rhetoric, is about as much about politics as it is about protection of the people. We all know that terrorism is a threat, but it must not be exaggerated so that every person with a Middle Eastern complexion is suspect, save a Saudi Prince of a Pakastani strongman. Was anything as shameful as the exploitation of 9/11 by the Republicant party, and the further exploitation of this administration to curb Civil Liberties and freedom of information?

4) They can't control pork barrel spending and destructive deficits. They have increased our deficit to a point where our children and grandchildren will be paying for their promiscuous errors for generations to come. The Republicants are the foxes who are garding our national chicken coop and they can't forever build their bridges to nowhere.

5) They can't understand science, but they can attempt to block scientific breakthroughs. That includes stem cell research and global warming. And failing to understand the problem, they can't do anything to provide government help to find cures for our killing diseases and to prevent the melting icebergs and the pollution of our air. W has never met a fossil fuel he didn't love.

6) They can't protect our citizens, particularly the least privilaged ones, when a natural disaster such as Katrina occurs. Why, because they don't care, and fortunately, they can't hide their lack of caring anymore. Appointing conservative African Americans such as Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, and Condaleeza Rice to be Secretary of State decieves noone within or outside of the black community as to where the heart of the Republicant party lies - in the old pre Civil Rights South which they courted and inherited when the Democrats supported Civil Rights legistlation.

7) Most of all, and worst of all, they can't appeal to the best instincts of the voters, so instead they choose to divide people with bogus issues such as gay marriage. As a man who has been married to my one and only amazing wife for fifty three years - I feel no threat to my life or my family from those who are gay and choose to marry. Given the sorry state of marriage and divorce in this country, we should celebrate anyone who wants to join their life to another to create a family unit and thereby gain the privilages as well as the problems of every marriage.

8) And they can't bamboozle seniors with a phony Medicare drug benefit which mainly benefits the pharmaceutical companies. Not to mention how they can't reform Social Security, since their notion of doing so is to present a gift to the brokerage houses and compromise the security of seniors.

Now, having said all that, and I realize it's a lot of can'ts for this can't do Republicant party, there is another meaning to the cant that applies to our Republicants, an equally relevant meaning.

According to the dictionary cant without the apostrophe is defined as monotonous talk filled with platitudes. Can anything better describe today's Republicants as they attempt to appeal to the voters by appealing to fear and bigotry, the worst instincts of those voters?

The second definition of cant is hypocritically pious language. Nuff said. The abuse of God's name by these Republicant's leads one to belive that they can't have a conscience. And when a John McCain wiggles his way towards courting the very religious right that defamed him and his family, we see that even the most promising of their leaders can't win the Republicant nomination without selling out his own past with plenty of cant. Hear the pious language of the Republicant senators as they refuse to investigate the crimes of their own party, claiming that the Jusice Department is there for that purpose. By refusing to clean their own house, the Republicants expose their hypocracy time and again.

The third definition is that of cant as a special vocabulary peculiar to members of an underworld group. Can anything better describe the vocabulary of Rumsfeld, Libby and Co where all is being done to spread democracy and the billions to Halliburton are merely the side benefit of all that freedom spreading? And what of Mr. DeLay and Abramoff? Kenny Boy Lay and W? As the indictments pile up we know that we are dealing with an underworld group within the Republicant Party, and the special language they speak is greed, profits, at any price, and lies and coverups that are in the words of John Dean, worse than Watergate.

And fourth, cant means whining, pleading speech, to speak tediously, sententiously, to moralize. What better describes our President when he graces the podium to address the press and the nation?

So REPUBLICANT it is for me, and it shall ever be, until some Republicant comes along who is capable of speaking truth plainly and representing the interests of the American people and I will gladly drop the telltale t. Until then, I'll stick with the Democratic Party. I'll even vote Democrat if I am obliged to, for someone who can put the ic back in the party.

ESPERANZA – THE UNDOCUMENTED

2006-03-30T13:53:00.000-08:00

When my wife and I had our second child, twenty years into our marriage and ten years after our first son was born, we were not in our “first youth” as the French say, and we were looking for a mother’s helper to assist us with the care of a demanding, colicky infant. Gloria, a Hispanic woman who worked as a housekeeper for a family in our apartment building, hearing of our need, told us that she had a “cousin” – Esperanza -- newly arrived from Bolivia – who needed work. And so we arranged to interview Esperanza. I call her that, although it is not her real name. I am not trying to hide her identify for any legal reason but to protect her privacy which she values.

A tiny young woman dressed in a rough woolen sweater of vivid Indian design, Esperanza came to the interview wearing a long shining black braid, luminous dark eyes, a short turned down nose; hers was the profile of a Mayan goddess found in a frieze in an ancient ruin. Her few words of English were fortified by a great smile, and her bright eyes trained themselves on the books in my library with what appeared to be a wonderful curiosity about a world larger than the one she had known. With the help of her cousin Gloria – who had a fine command of English – and my own wretched high school Spanish – Esperanza informed us that she knew a great deal about child care, loved children, and had infinite patience– and although she arrived with no references other than Gloria’s testimony, it was all proven to be true in the next five years that she lived with us. Later we would learn that in the culture of Hispanic household workers “cousin” was a description of friendship and common geographical origin, and had little to do with actual blood kinship. Slowly over time, as Esperanza mastered English, and she came to trust us, we learned how this young woman had come into the country.

Esperanza, at eighteen, had been hired in her native Bolivia to act as the nursemaid and housekeeper for one of the Bolivian diplomats working at the UN. Eager to escape the relentless poverty of her life at home, and determined to help her impoverished family with her wages, she readily agreed to accompany the diplomat and his family from Bolivia to New York. After months of working for the diplomat, cleaning his house and caring for his small children, with no wages paid, she was advised that none would be paid. She was told that she was lucky to live in a clean room and eat three meals a day, and to stop bothering the diplomat and his wife about a salary. Didn’t she know that there were thousands of young girls like her back home who were eager to work under these conditions? Her job turned out to be a twelve hour seven day a week employment. She soon understood that she was being held in virtual slavery by the diplomat and his capricious, demanding wife, and that there was no one to turn to for help but the network of fellow countrymen whom she met on a grocery shopping expedition. She longed to escape from her unpaid bondage, but Esperanza was without a visa, a passport, or a green card, the diplomat had held on to her visa to keep her from escaping: she was as “undocumented” as a human being could be, and she knew she risked deportation if discovered. Her options were few. She could not return to her impoverished family in Bolivia, indeed, the diplomat might have made it difficult for her if she had, since he was a man who might seek to punish a girl who had fled his home.

In the course of a few years, while she was living with us and caring for our young son, Esperanza attended English classes at night, mastered the language both as a speaker and a writer, obtained her GED High School degree, cut her hair, learned to dress in a fashionable style, fell in love, and upon discovering that she was pregnant, married her lover. The marriage failed. The machismo of the husband was offended by his wife’s desire to improve her education, and she grew tired of his abuse and unfaithfulness. He moved on, leaving Esperanza alone and pregnant again. The right to life people found her on the way to a clinic, and convinced her to have her second child. They provided her with a crib, but nothing else in the way of support over the years. Alone, she continued to work to support her children, finding employment as an aide in a nursing home where she cared for the elderly, emptying bedpans and often lifting the aged into and out of wheelchairs, injuring her back, but continuing to work. During this time, she advanced her education with college courses and found work in an inner city nursery school as a teacher. By the time her son was in High School she had been voted Mother of the Year in her city. Her son went on to become a schoolteacher/coach, her beautiful daughter the editor of a Spanish language fashion magazine, and Esperanza herself found work as a liaison between the Hispanic community and the local school boards. She was never far from the poverty level, but she had raised two splendid children, and entered middle age a woman of accomplishment with loving friends and family. And she had made an important contribution to the Hispanic community in her city, and one to my children, my life and my wife’s.

This story might have had a very different ending if not for the intervention of some caring people. Tired of living in the half world of the undocumented, Esperanza tried to legalize her status and she applied for a green card at an immigration office. She naively reported herself believing that this would help to resolve her status. This only led to an order of deportation. She called my wife and told her what had occurred, fearful that her son and daughter, who had been born in America, and raised as Americans, were going to be forced to return to a Bolivia that they did not know, one in which they could not prosper. My wife, determined to prevent this, contacted the Governor of the nearby state where Esperanza lived, told him of this woman’s life and struggle, and he offered to help. Nevertheless, even with a Governor on her side, Esperanza had to make an appearance before an immigration Judge, and my wife and I were asked by the public defender to testify in her behalf. We swore to all that we knew that was good and true about her. But it was her six year old son, who arrived in court with a flute, and played it for the Judge, who clearly won the day for her. Music hath charms more powerful than friendly rhetoric. After much paper work by the lawyers, and months of delay, Esperanza’s status was legalized, and this country eventually obtained a remarkable citizen who added immeasurably to the good of our society.

I write this not because I want to glorify an exceptional woman who would much prefer that nothing was said about her, although she deserves whatever glory she has earned, but because I am confident that there are thousands of Esperanzas in our country, men and women struggling to make a good life for themselves and their children, fearful of deportation because they are “undocumented,” and swept into the generalizations about illegal aliens who break our laws, drain our resources and offer nothing back to our country but cheap labor.

There is an element of nativist racism in the argument against a more open and humane immigration policy. If the eleven million undocumented aliens were not brown, but fair haired Canadians from North of the border, would there be such an outcry? The problem of the undocumented is deeper than people being smuggled across the border into our country to pick strawberries and work our restaurant kitchens. If they willingly take low paying jobs that Americans refuse to take, is it the nature of the job, or the low minimum wage that is behind this refusal of our citizens to work at minimum wages? If the undocumented use our hospitals and schools, are they the problem for struggling hospitals and overcrowded schools, or is it the lack of universal health care in this country and the way funds for schools (derived from real estate taxes) are distributed? We can blame only so much on the undocumented before we are obliged to look at the documented failures of our own society and the Bush administration in the field of health care and education.

I know the downside of a guest worker program or one of amnesty; it appears that it is rewarding illegal behavior. Yes, true, but our society does that time and again. We reward a President who violates our constitution by refusing to censure him, we reward a Congress who squanders our treasure with pork barrel legislation designed by lobbyists; none of which is an argument for rewarding the undocumented, but it does help to put some perspective into this problem of what constitutes illegality. I herewith make a modest proposal. Why not return Texas and California to Mexico so that all the undocumented were citizens again? What would we lose? Some bad politics and some bad films? Best of all, gone from our republic would be the two states that gave us George Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger? And if we throw in Arizona, we might be spared the Presidency of a John McCain, wildly careening ever rightward towards the Republican nomination. Best of all, the undocumented would find themselves legal residents of a greater Mexico, and the problem would disappear overnight. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

WAR OF THE WORDS

2006-03-22T17:04:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy in the nineteen forties, my friends and I played a street game called “war,” while the real WWII was waged in faraway Europe by fathers and older brothers. In this game, a large chalk circle was drawn on the street, divided into as many segments as players, each segment marked with the name of a different country: Germany, France, England, Japan, China, Italy – the main players in the world’s war and ours. A “spaldeen” – a small hard pink rubber ball - was placed in the center of the circle. Each of the players put a foot on one of the countries, representing a piece of the known world. When the designated caller shouted “I declare war on France” the kid with his sneaker on France raced for the rubber ball as all other countries fled. As soon as France, grabbed that ball he shouted “freeze” stopping the other players in their tracks. I dimly recall that the next move was about throwing that ball at one of the frozen players, and if hit, someone would lose points or face or a turn. The arcane rules of the game elude me sixty five years later, but one thing remains perfectly clear. War was about countries – not concepts. Every child alive knew that. Countries at war could defeat other countries, draw up peace treaties, pay reparations, there were losers and winners, but no sane adult or wise child would believe that you could declare war on an idea or a social problem.

Who in that simpler time would possibly think of declaring war on crime? Or imagine the current and forever war on terrorism. Criminal acts by small groups were distinguished from martial ones by countries, the criminal to be pursued by law enforcement– for which we boys had the FBI, Captain America and Superman. The word “war” meant that one had to fight another country to safeguard one’s very own existence and the territorial integrity of one’s country. Anything else was labeled a crime to be pursued by intrepid crime fighters but without exaggerated rhetoric.

Many of the horrors of the twentieth century occurred when a criminal act was taken for an act of war. When an Austrian Archduke was murdered by a Serbian assassin in Sarajevo in 1914, the major European powers had a choice. They could treat this as the criminal act it was, exchange diplomatic protests and apologies, while pursuing those who might have collaborated with the assassin, or, as happened, they could unleash all the forces then in play; European xenophobia, competition for colonial territories, possession of the Balkan oil fields, and allow this to lead them into history’s bloodiest war; one that took more military and civilian lives than any conflict that preceded or followed it. Nothing was too vile for this war: poison gas, aerial bombing, machine-guns and grenades. Just as the murder of that hapless Archduke provided an excuse for WWI, the mass murder of 9/11/ allowed our sleeping leader to create a war instead of the police action that was clearly required. It cannot be repeated too often, 9/11 was an act of mass murder – but it was murder – requiring police action to find the surviving culprits and bring them to justice. It did not have to be treated as an act of war.

Some wars must be fought. WWII was unavoidable once the Axis powers began their genocidal march through Europe and Asia. As much as one might call it a war against fascism, it was, in fact, a war against distinct totalitarian powers, national entities: Germany, Italy, and Japan, nations that could be defeated in battle and brought back to a peaceful world. Even today, there are real wars waiting to be fought against real powers in the genocide in Africa. But Bush’s White House has never met a humanitarian reason it liked enough to act upon. Whatever one might think of Clinton’s compromised presidency, at the end of the day he helped put a stop to the genocide in Yugoslavia – fighting it as a police action in concert with other nations – not as a war. When Lincoln was assassinated we did not summon up a new Union Army to invade the South once again, we called it a crime and we pursued and punished the guilty. When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols the right wing zealots and discontents behind the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal building committed their heinous act, we sent in the FBI to find the conspirators, not an army of Commandos to fight all the white separatists and right wing nuts living in our hills. Until George Bush, we were very good at distinguishing between a crime and an act of war and excellent at protecting ourselves from foreign and domestic enemies.

` After all the warnings were received by the FBI and the State Department that terrorists were planning to fly airplanes into our tallest building, and these warnings were ignored by the Bush Administration - preoccupied as it was by cutting taxes for the very rich and the surgical removal of the New Deal – the administration went into its war mode, ignoring all other options. President Bush faced by the enormity of 9/11 and the need to do something, anything, after his inescapable negligence, his having fallen asleep on guard duty, sent our forces into Afghanistan. That action was designed to vanquish the Taliban and arrest or kill bin Laden and those responsible for the murder of three thousand innocents in the World Trade Center. It was more a police action than a war – supported by the rest of the democratic world, and for that reason, something of a success. This action seemed clear, necessary and somewhat effective. A wobbly new government was established, the Taliban retreated into their mountain strongholds chastened but undefeated, ancient statues were no longer defiled, the opium beds flourished once again, and bin Laden, protected as he was by our allies in Pakistan and his own Afghan friends crept out of sight only to reappear in those “Where’s Waldo?” commercials for al-Qaeda. But for Bush and company, failure to find bin Laden meant it was time for switch and bait. If the elusive Osama was too hard to locate, there was the very conspicuous figure of the evil Saddam in Iraq, quite gettable. In the White House there was the need to declare war on someone, somewhere, the sooner the better, and where better than a country like Iraq, ruled by that loathsome dictator.

If war was the answer to avenging 9/11 and protecting America, logic and justice would have led to our invasion of Saudi Arabia whose support of extremist religious sects spurred on the terrorists most of whom came from that kingdom. But the Saudis being our providers of oil were protected by their greasy shield of petroleum, and their long term amorous relations with the Bush family. Who can forget that hand holding of the President and the Saudi Prince as they tip toed through Texas? It was our Brokeback Mideast policy. And so this administration, fearing and failing to deal with the guilty Saudis, and feeling that it needed a war to assuage our national pride - a war to justify the deaths of those 9/11 innocents - gave us a war in Iraq to protect and control the price of oil of the Middle East, while claiming to bring democracy to that benighted country. In the words of that cynical 19th century diplomat, Prince Metternich, it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. And that mistake has led to thousands dead in Iraq, and an America that is fractured and disheartened.

Fighting a war, as opposed to pursuing criminals in a police action is more than a choice of words. War allows our government to suspend the very civil liberties that we are allegedly fighting to protect, it allows the administration to break the rules of a civil society, violate the Constitution, and in this case sets open-ended goals that cannot be reached – the elimination of terrorism - which can only prolong human suffering and the power of this President. Bush has given us a dreadful legacy – a permanent state of war, one with no end in sight, when a police action, vigorously pursued, could have devoted its resources to finding and bringing to justice those very men who had caused 9/11. One of the causes of this may be the President’s deaf ear to the nuances of language. A war and a police action may mean the same to him. We need to understand the meaning of words to speak truth. And worse for him, and for us, like a schoolyard cheat, Bush keeps moving the finish line and changing the rules of the game as he goes along.

We can no longer rationalize the behavior of our government and seek good reasons for bad decisions. We are governed by demagogic fear mongers and corrupt power brokers who call their most egregious failures successes, and trumpet their terror-mongering from Maine to the cornfields of Kansas, all this while Mr. Cheney’s Halliburton pockets millions from this war. Never in our history have such a pack of rascals and profiteers been abusing such power without the checks and balances in place to stop them. We have a President who still claims to believe that he has done the right thing invading Iraq, absent W.M.D and any true sign of a connection between Iraq and bin Laden. He can still turn to the American public and describe the dreadful consequences of the rising Civil War in Iraq as a challenge, but one we will overcome if we stay the course. That staying the course means the death of someone else’s son or daughter – deaths that appear to mean so little to this man. At last, the country seems to have caught on to his game. If one of the kids who played “war” in my street game had taken that “spaldeen” and hurled it at a passerby whose looks he didn’t much care for, instead of one of the “designated” player-countries, there would have been a general outcry of “Are you nuts, get out and go home!” Alas, we can’t shout “Are you nuts, get out, go home!” at Mr. Bush and hope for that to happen, but we can speak out clear and loud and focus our attention on his cohorts in Congress in the coming election. With the elections of ‘06 we can hope to restore the balance of power and through that the rule of law in this country, and if luck is with us, perhaps learn from the hard lessons of the last five years and the common wisdom of childhood. Tell the truth and play fair.

BUSH AS BAD THEATRE

2005-12-28T05:37:00.000-08:00

I doubt that there will ever be a great play called "The Tragedy of George Bush." As a playwright, I find a problem with Bush as a dramatic character in a serious drama. Although he is perfectly suited for satire, he is now caught up in a tragic national drama, the Iraq war, and it is as if Shakespeare's Bottom had stumbled into Hamlet by mistake and taken over the stage. Comedy is filled with amusing hypocrites, the snobs, fools, and pretenders who get their comeuppance before the curtain falls, men and women who cannot learn from experience, flat characters notable for their foolish single minded response to all circumstances. Bush is our own Tartuffe, Moliere's insufferable pseudo religious comedic character who uses his so called piety to gain power over the lives of others. Although Tartuffe takes place in seventeenth century France, it is Bush's voice we hear as Tartuffe pronounces, "How dare you even hinder or annoy when I've the means to ruin and destroy. You should have thought before my toes you trod. Attacking me, you set yourself 'gainst God." (Timothy Mooney adaptation).

Bush, alas, is not a knowing hypocrite like Tartuffe. Hypocrites are easy to expose while true believers like Bush stand fast as reality implodes around them. He appears to believe what he says even as he plays the leading role in our national drama. He would serve nicely as a foolish father in a sit-com, or a ridiculous boss in an office comedy, but he is the Commander-in-Chief who can and does send young men and women to their deaths. Sadly, he does not even have the true villain's consciousness of when he has done wrong. This is why aplogy and admission of error is so difficult for him. He believes in his God given rectitude in all situations.

The closest that true drama has ever come to a leader such as Bush is that of Shakespeare's Henry V, the wastrel inheritor of the English crown who puts aside his carousing, abandons his friend Falstaff, and take his nation into a war with France. But Henry's charcter is bouyed up by
his eloquence, ennobled by his courage and his love of England. Nobody can accuse George Bush of eloquence or locate his courage and love of country as he labors to strip it of its natural wonders, and sell his power to its worst exploiters. What he shares with Henry V is a ruthless ambition wed to a sense of royal entitlement. As Henry exploited his soldier's patriotism, Bush exploits his nation's fears. Our unwatched borers, unguarded ports, and unarmed Humvees tell their own story about this President as our protector.

Like most incurious people Bush starts with a belief and then searches desperately for the evidence to support it. This faith based approach to the world is one that most often has tragic consequences for others, rarely for the man himself, protected by his power and by the fear he has exploited in others. Bush is many things, but he is not insincere. It is delusional to believe that he does not believe what he says. In his heart of hearts he still believes that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to be found if only we had the right dogs to sniff them out.

No playwright's talents cound render a portrait of George Bush onstage that could command the attention of an audience for two hours. I doubt that Shakespeare himself could have done so. True drama requires a gravity on the part of its hero and in Bush we have a man who cannot understand and feel the emotional weight of any situtation, or recognize the consequences of his actions. If becomes clearer over time that he has never learned in the course of his misadventures, as he kept failing upwards toward the Presidency, the most essential lesson of life - the value of other people's lives. For this inherited characteristic we need only look at his mother, Lady Barbara, the woman who thought that the poor people caught in the catastrophe of Katrina should be comfortable living in unprotected squalor since they were accustomed to it in their daily lives. George proved to be her true son when as the Governor of Texas he viciously mocked the plea of death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman to be executed in Texas, with his "Please don't kill me" impersonation for Talk Magazine. This, from a man who claimed that he was born again through the grace of God's forgiveness and love.

Some subjects cannot be dramatized because of their gravity. The Holocaust is one of them. Slavery is another. The pull towards sentimentalizing, and thereby dinimishing the subject is so strong that our natural sympathies for the victims stand in the way of creating real people caught in horrible circumstances. True villainy is equally difficult to dramatize, but it has been done in such characters as Richard III, although it was easier in Shakespeare's day when Richard's hump could stand as a symbol for his twisted mind. Richard's consciousness of his own acts is part of his fascination. A character such as Bush who lacks such consciousness may preside over a country but he cannot command a stage. Bush's smirk is a poor stand in for Richard's hump. Shakespeare shows us the allure of evil as Richard courts the wife of the very man he has killed and wins her. True evil always fascinates. John Milton was obliged to give Satan all the good lines in "Paradise Lost" because evil - conscious evil - in a Macbeth or a Hedda Gabbler - intrigues us onstage while virtue - which we cherish in life - will soon bore us in theatre. But equally boring is self righteous, unexamined bad behaviour, the kind we see in Bush on a daily basis. Here is a President who grabs for more and more power with each new failure.

Our political history is filled with complex characters that provide the material for great drama. Lyndon Johnson - for all his buffonery - was a figure worthy of a great tragedy. He started with the noble goals of Civil Rights and a Great Society that would embrace all, and ended with a war that destroyed his presidency and cost thousands of young men their lives. Even Dick Nixon had his own malignant grandeur, a true fall from grace, or at least a fall from power through the very tickery that had brought him to power. It was no small achievement of his to reach out to China and to impliment much of Johnson's Great Society. But this kind of accomplishment under a flawed leader cannot happen under George Bush. As Gertrude Stein famously said of California, "there is no there there."

We have three more years of Bush as the main player in our national drama, three more years of platitudes, certainties, grinning, winking, cajoling, but never owning the consequences of his own actions. Since he cannot change his act, we will continue to get what we see - an empty man propped up with a foolish sense of his own worth, taking us from one new disaster to another - that is, unless the other players in our national drama, the stumbling Democrats and few surviving decent Republicans effectively oppose a leader who cannot lead. We don't need a hero for our national play, just some strong supporting actors with enough courage and sense to stand up against this comedian in our tragedy. More important is an enlightened electorate who must ultimately take center stage and restore the values upon which this country was founded.

BUSHED? Yes, but ---

2005-08-16T04:11:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, friends, but for me George Bush is above all our most exhausting President. That's why I haven't posted a blog in a few months. Worn out by what I see. Robotic in his governance, Bush cannot stop, he cannot change, he does not wear out, wear down, he keeps on going - our own demonic energizer bunny. Despite the loss in public confidence he pursues his old policies - never doubting - never re-evaluating - just marching along to his own drum beat, singing his upbeat war songs and his social security blues. He is that smiling, aggravating child - the one who won't listen, won't learn, and won't change - the child who knows that if he continues in his willful ways, you, the adult, will eventually be too tired to try to stop him. This man, who has never been accountable for his acts, depends not upon the wisdom of his acts but upon the weariness of his opponents to win the day.

Well, if that courageous mother of the soldier son who died in Iraq can keep her long, hot vigil outside of Crawford this summer - Crawford being the hell on earth that Bush has condemned himself to - his way to deny global warming - more than ever we are all obliged to catch our breath and keep going. Let's face it. It's not very complicated. This is a bad man who has led us into bad times, and it will take all our resolve to extricate ourselves and our country from its present sad state. Bush and his cronies would like us to believe that we are powerless to stand against him, and there appears to be some justification for his belief, because despite his lowest poll numbers he manages to push his legistlation through with the help of a weak opposition Democratic party.

Sadly, I watch my own Senators, Hilary Clinton and Charles Schumer cozy up to Bush's Supreme Court choice - John Roberts - another man who puts a happy face on repressive views. We are told there is nothing we can do to stop this nominee from reaching the court, so let's all be collegial and give a welcoming cheer for him. Well, there is plenty that we can do - the boring stuff of writing our representatives - joining others in a fight to keep the court free of ideologues who wish to turn this country back to a world without civil rights - one which only has privilages for those who can afford them. So let us all take a deep breath and keep going forward. We really have no choice, do we? There isn't time for weariness anymore, even for a young guy like me.

CAN A MAN BECOME PRESIDENT?

2005-05-06T04:28:00.000-07:00

As one looks toward the next Presidential election, assuming that our democracy can survive this presidency, the question we often hear is "Can a woman become President?" This reflects upon the interest in Hillary Clinton and her ability to be elected in a Presidential race. A more pertinent question may be "Can a man become President?" In asking this, one is obliged to define what one means by a man, something far different from the male who currently occupies our White House.

Let's consider the last election. The perception was the George Bush was the more manly candidate. He spoke with a western twang, walked with a swagger, appeared to be decisive, and clearly had no use for the effete Eastern liberals, intellectuals, and the sissy boys who waffled about at the UN. Despite the fact that the twang and the swagger were cultivated by this Eastern prep school boy with Yale and Harvard degrees, Bush was considered the more "authentic" candidate by a great many voters and pundits who found John Kerry "inauthentic" with his educated Bostonian ways, actual war heroism, and his inability to take a stand and stick with it right or wrong for life. As one who would not want to sit down and share a beer with George Bush, or go windsailing with John Kerry, I have my own definition of "man" and I would like to apply it to the qualifications for our next President.

A real man should be capable of flip flopping on any issue at any time. It is an essential element in thinking and living. There is no way to grow as a man without changing one's mind from time to time. The inability to change an opinion when life and events prove your original opinion or decision wrong, is not a manly quality. It is the quality of those who prefer to be deluded by life, rather than taught by it. The best thing that could be said of Kerry, who ran an overly cautious, defensive campaign that lacked the courage he showed in life, was that Kerry flip flopped on the issues. It meant that he was a man capable of growth. Thank God for flip floppers. History shows that Lincoln was a champion flip flopper, changing his views on slavery as he developed in his life, Teddy Roosevelt was a flip flopper, a hunter who protected the environment, an American aristocrat who sought to protect the worker from the very ruling class he was born into, and protect industry from the trusts. FDR's elitist views were tempered by the times he lived in. Harry S. Truman, a small town man with a limited background was capable of making great decisions, based upon his ability to learn on the job, starting the movement towards Civil Rights in the military. George Bush can never flip flop. He cannot change his mind, because it is a lazy mind, incapable of the activity required for flip flopping which can be a wrenching experience. Between the flip and the flop is a lot of mental and moral activity. He is far from stupid, but lacks that curiosity which allows for growth and change. By "sticking to his guns" he thinks he is acting as a man should act, standing by his principles, while in fact all he demonstrates is his inability to tolerate change and the weakness of those principles.

A real man does not always have to "feel your pain" but he must be capable of alleviating it. Real men are healers. They are not towel snapping bullies like our President whose target is the poor, those least able to defend themselves. For all his failing, Jimmy Carter was a real man. His was an unlucky Presidency, but it was one in which the poor and the envivornment were given a chance to survive. His actions for peace and for building decent lives for the poor, following his Presidency, reveal a man who is driven by true religious feelings, not one who uses his religion to beat down the poor because "the poor will always be with us."

A real man values human life so highly that he cannot help but oppose those who make war, destroy gun control laws, and cheapen life by allowing fellow Americans to suffer in life destroying poverty. A real man is not threatened by the way other people live, be they gay, straight, atheist, zen Buddhist - he is content to live and let live - and support laws that broaden human freedom, not limit it.

A real man does not claim to reform Social Security by destroying it. He does not claim to advance our freedoms by limiting them. A real man knows he does not hold a patent on the truth but works towards finding the truth by examining the world, not feeding on his own beliefs. That takes courage, the quality that a real man must have.

Most of all a real man can say "I was wrong" and mean it. He can take responsibility for his actions and know that responsibility isn't just admitting to error, but seeking ways to remedy that error. In this way George W. Bush is not a real man and never will be. He can drink his beer, talk his baseball stats, walk the walk on aircraft carriers, and nothing that he can do will make him a real man unless he can now become a born again humanist, not a very likely prospect.

The question I raise can only be answered by the American people when they reexamine the notion of what real man is in the next election. Perhaps a real woman can be a better real man than those who now swagger across the national stage, actors playing leaders, or perhaps she will assume the posture of the fake men who preceded her, and she too will be compromised by the need to appear tough and never flip flop and call intellectual weakness moral strength. Can a woman become President? Maybe, if she is a real woman.

New Friends, Old Friends,

2005-04-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago I worked on a musical comedy with a world famous composer. The result of our collaboration was not a success, but we had become friendly during the two years we put the show together, and after the ill fated show closed, the elderly, ailing composer and his elegant wife asked my wife and I to be their friends. There was something sweetly innocent about such a request, and I will admit, flattering, given the fact that he was a world renowned figure in the arts, and a bit of a curmudgeon, famous for his music but not his congeniality. We never expected this request. I had worked on shows long enough to know that the close family formed by a show's company usually falls apart when the show closes and people return to their old lives and new projects, but this couple did not want this to happen to us.

The composer's wife told us that so many of their old friends were ailing and dying, and that they needed to find new, younger friends to see them through the latter part of their lives which for all their fame and wealth had become an extremely lonely time. Althought they had children and grandchildren, they knew the special value of friendship. And so we became friends. Not the friendship one has with a contemporary, someone who shared schooldays and early hopes and a common frame of reference. But friendship none the less. I call it rainy day friends, the friends we need as we face grave illnesses and disappointments, the friends who help us through our losses. The composer and his wife are long gone, but now my wife and I find ourselves their age and facing the same losses, the ranks of friends and acquaintances are thinning, every month brings a phone call with news of some terrible malady afflicting people we care about.

If one is not religious one is unable to fall back upon some notion of a divine design in the lives of men and woman, it can be a bleak and lonely time. Children are caught up in their own lives and cannot be expected to provide the companionship that only friends can give. And so we, like the old composer and his wife, cherish our old friends and search for new friends to fill in the ranks. The rich and the powerful can always find company and amusement, but company is not friendship, and amusement is more often just distraction. Reading is a great ally against loneliness, forget newspapers with their scandals and rock stars - its books that we can turn to for company, little can beat an afternoon with Proust or Tolstoy or Agatha Christie - except for a friend. Quite simply, nothing can ever replace the company of a good friend. Friendship allows that open exchange of views, the telling of joys and troubles, the sharing of a common sense of life, its pains and its pleasures, and best of all, some reckless laughter - not the telling of jokes but the recounting of those absurd, common experiences we all have as we try to get through this life with some comfort and a little warmth.

Friendship can be dangerous at any time of life, friends abandon, friends betray, a friendship gone awry can open you up to a deepening sense of loss; worse still friends relocate, die and disappear from view. In the past two years I have lost two of the most amusing, engaging people I have ever known, the novelist Lois Gould, and my song writing partner, the arranger/composer Wally Harper. With their deaths a great hole opened up in my life, both were wry, outrageous, supremely funny, full of spectacular flaws, yet life enhancing people dedicated to their art and to the art of friendship. Trust me, friendship is an art form that requires some talent and training, and like everything in life, some do it better than others.

Getting older often means you return home from an afternoon at the movies and discover that nobody has left a message in your answering machine. It means that your e-mail has more spam than a GI's sandwich in WWII. It means that you must find within yourself something beyond yourself; new work and a fresh, passionate engagement with the world, easy to desire, not always easy to accomplish. If one allows age to become a spectator sport, one is lost to life, and to new people and new ideas. One needs the courage to pick up a telephone and initiate a call; friendship requires risk, at seventy you are a teenager again, facing rejection and hurt, but a good life requires risk, even if an old friendship ends in estrangement. Getting older means taking more chances - which is not to be confused with a trip to Las Vegas.

I have been especially blessed in life by knowing the affection of some terrific, caring people, delightful people with sharp minds and soft hearts. As long as one lives, the door can never be closed to new people, new ideas, and new experience. I suppose I thought of this today when news of an old friend's illness came to me. And I have been working on a memoir, "Spotless" which covers the first seven years of my life in a family that is no longer alive, and one I treasure more and more with time. There has been something exhilarating about trying to evoke their lives again, after so many years. One can get lost in the past, so I must remind myself from time to time to look ahead and phone a friend. Just like in childhood, we need our rainy day friends.

2005-03-25T14:50:00.000-08:00

The Emporer's Old Clothes

2005-03-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, the funniest story for me was of the Emporer who paraded naked through his kingdom, believing that he was wearing a beautiful invisible garment, having been sold by a trickster on the notion that his new invisible clothes were the grandest; that is, until a simple child cried out that the emporer was had no clothes on.

Lately, I have thought of that story in connection to the obsessive concentration of our society on fashion. The Academy Awards show was about women in extraordinary, elaborate gowns and guys in goofy tuxedos shilling for designers. That red carpet took gifted entertainers and turned them into mannequins, touting designer brands. "Who are you wearing?" was the idiot question of the night. A designated crone wearing a designer face lift and her shriekingly ignorant daughter commented on the gowns and the looks of the participants, with little curiosity about the roles these actors played and the training it took to create their characters on screen, let alone the artistic value of the work they had accomplished. Little if anything was said about the work of the actors parading before us in full sail. They were turned into commodities of the fashion world, diminished in stature, robbed of their true talents, dazzling with their "bling bling" jewels and backless gowns. Now, as a playwright, I have enormous respect for actors, too much respect to believe that anyone of talent should shill for fashion houses. Can you imagine a Bette Davis or a Joan Crawford being asked what they were wearing? The reply would have been a curt "What business is that of yours?" Or more likely, "Are you nuts?" But now the Oscars and the Grammys and the People's Choice Awards sell the idea that the gowns are the women, and the package is the talent.

Today, people are being packaged, and social programs are being packaged. It's the wrapping, not the content that seems to matter. Our President comes before us and tries to sell us a Social Security package based on privatization, a scam if there ever was one, a designer package meant to reward the brokerage houses for loyalty to the party, and further diminish the future security of the elderly. A war in Iraq has been packaged, calling it "Iraqi Freedom" - and we are to look at the package and forget the mounting number of the dead, our soldiers and the civilians caught in the crossfire of the war. And few are willing to say that our Emporer, the goernment is not wearing new clothes.

MOMA Mia - My modern where art thou?

2005-03-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

In the late nineteen forties when I was an art student at the High School of Music & Art, I bought a student membership to the Modern Museum and begain a love affair with that museum and its art that has lasted for most of my life. Not only was membership cheap, but the museum was just large enough to hold a fine collection of the major modern artists, yet small enough to feel like you were viewing their work inside a beguiling, curvacious modern home, one where you were especially invited to linger, have a cup of coffee, and look at the art treasures of the modern world. It was a place where I met my friends, took my dates to see classic silent films, ate inexpensive snacks in the member's cafeteria, sat in the garden and gazed at the big breasted bronze statues and Rodin's Bazac and felt like this marvellous museum belonged to me. It lifted my life as all great experiences with art can do. The museum was rarely crowded, and dedicated to art rather than commerce or mass tourism, the only concession to commerce was one small bookshop that sold art publications. It all felt organically connected to the humanism of the French modernist art that it predominately displayed.

I remember the big three; the agonized Guernica of Picasso, the huge Matisse painting, and most of all that primitive Rousseau of the sleeping Arab, highlights in what was a small but perfect collection of abstract and surrealist art. That feeling of personal affection for the museum continued for many years. Then with each expansion, something was gained in terms of new exhibition space for the growing collection, and something was lost in terms of the pleasure of looking at great art in a comfortable, human environment.

Last week my wife and I visited the new MOMA. Ours was only a two hour visit as we took in the new building, a splendid photography show, and a fine drawing exhibition, and then ran for our lives feeling oppressed by the building and the overabundance of art, and shops, and tourists. We never made it all the way up to the permanent painting collection, deciding to take in the rest on another day when the museum might be less crowded. I don't know how they accomplished it but they even managed to present the vast Manet Water Lilly painting as a huge rectangle of brackish water. I could not believe that this was the painting we all loved. When first approached it felt like airport art, the painting an intruder in the immaculate space. The much praised use of huge glass walls which allowed different floors and various exhibitions to flow into each other was an architectural triumph and a disaster in the presentation of art. One could take in other floors, look down at the garden, but for me, the visitor had a better view of other museum visitors than of the art. Why did nobody anticipate this as they studied the plans and renderings of the building?

The museum was now more than a repository for great art, it was a tourist attraction, something to write home about, but alas, not everything worth writing home about is worth loving. What was missing was a building that placed art in some human, proportionate context. The design was so clever, so accomplished, and yet so cold and unfriendly. Here we had the museum as a theme park, entertaining yet chilly, and ruthlessly informative, unwelcoming to anyone who had come to look at art, rather than tourists and escalators and shops. Unlike the Metropolitan Museum where if one is lost, one makes remarkable discoveries, finding pockets of painting and sculpture that one might not have been drawn to before, if lost in the new MOMA you kept looking for an exit. There seemed no way one could have a personal connection to a picture in that vast space, there were no delightful discoveries, only more "important" exhitibions. Most successful perhaps were the exhibitions of modern industrial design, the everyday products that were displayed in cases, and seemed at home in a glass warehouse, the objects reminders that people could actually used industrial design objects in their everyday lives.

We plan to visit MOMA again soon, hoping to amend or correct our first impression, but even if I grow to respect the building (one could never love it) there is no way that it can compare with that marvellous old building on 53rd Street that allowed a young man to have a first love affair with modern art. Yes, the world has changed, and one must accept that different times have different needs. But some things are constant. Human beings need human scale in 2005 as we did in 1950.

It is not the fault of scale alone. One can still visit the vast Metropolitan Museum and have an intimate experience with its pictures, deal with crowds of tourists, and yet focus on the art. The art is housed in well proportioned rooms, not interesting architectural spaces. Here at the new MOMA, the building swallows the art experience, its architecture which at first seems so seemingly light and elegant soon becomes an oppressive presence; a great transparent whale of a museum, a building to respect, perhaps, but never to love. Perhaps love is too hard to build into museums these days. It doesn't cost enough money. Sherman Yellen

Empathy, Democracy, and me

2005-03-07T04:49:00.000-08:00

Let others call themselves progressives, I am content to be called an old fashioned unreconstructed liberal. I was born the first year of FDR's presidency and have spent a lifetime watching liberals protect the citizens of this country on issues from Social Security to Civil Rights. Liberal was a proud name for a set of beliefs based on the idea of brotherhood and humanity, that is, until the word was redefined by a radical conservative minority who equated treason with civil rights, immorality with human rights, disloyalty with peaceful protest and a questioning of power.

When I was a boy I would hear the old guard Republicans excoriate FDR as "that man in the White House." He was considered a traitor to his class. I never thought I would be going down that same road, castigating the leader of my country now that I am in my early seventies, watching with alarm as our powerful leaders destroy the democracy I knew. Exaggerated? Possibly. But on balance it's better to be considered a crank than a coward. It's too hard to stand by and watch the erosion of a democracy that has taken two hundred years to develop, and not say a word or even two hundred more in its defense.

We now have a President who talks about exporting democracy to the world as if it was an American brand that will quickly bring joy, peace, and enlightenment to the downtrodden, rather than viewing democracy as an ideal that only grows into government when seeded in education, tolerance and a tradition of law. It strikes me as strange that the more democracy we try to export elsewhere, the less we seem to have at home. Are we now to believe that democracy is a finite resource? I am delighted that the Iraqis have had their first free election, but how much better if it had come from within, if it was their revolution, their resolve, their sacrifice and their glory, not a "democracy" imposed from without, with the extraordinary loss of civilian and military lives. How long will this nascent democracy last when we finally leave the scene? As an American I worry more about my own country's democracy than what happens abroad. Democracy, like charity, begins at home. When tyranny comes to a country it does not come wearing the uniform of another tyranny. Like democracy which must be fashioned out of native materials, tyranny comes in its own native guise. Back in the nineteen thirties Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel Prize winning author, observed that if fascism came to America it would not be wearing jackboots and marching in a goose-step, it would come looking and talking like a good 'ole boy, grinning and waving to the neighbors. He meant Huey Long, the Louisiana demogogue, but the analogy holds today.

Lies and evasions have become the coin of the realm in the hands of our national leaders. A clever, well spoken woman boldly lies to the congress and the congress votes to confirm her in office as Secretary of State. This will not be the first time in human history that political leaders lie and redefine patriotism to mean loyalty to a radical ideology and the suppression of information. We have a President reluctant to answer an intelligent opposition, salting the press with fawning, sometimes paid acolytes, just like some South American dictator, determined to answer to no one except his God, and fortunately for this president, he is convinced that God speaks through him. He will not let himself be accountable, will not admit to error, will not accept responsibility for errors made by others during his administration. Accountability is something that Mr. Bush has never recognized in his personal and profession life. Never has the bully pulpit of the Presidency been more accuratly named, serving a bully President.

Many say that we Democrats lost the election because we long ago lost the solid South. As soon as Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats pushed through Civil Rights legistlation that solid Democratic South cracked. The sainted Ronald Regan was eager to exploit this, but he had a sense of shame, a sense that is not shared by his Republican successors. Republicans, willing to pick up the broken pieces of Southern bigotry, reassembled them and founded a new radical conservatism on it. "Conservative" replaced segregationist or bigot as the term of choice. By finding sympathetic figures in minority groups, the new radical conservatives were able to deflect the charges of bigotry. Who needs Bull Connor with a fire hose and a bludgeon when you have Clarence Thomas ready to vote against every law that will lift up his own people? We can take heart when an old Southern segregationist like Senator Byrd speaks up for minority rights, speaks out against the duplicity that brought us to war, his is a rare voice of reason in the Senate.

All this has been done through the manipulation of fear and terror, following the tragedy of 9/11. Never have so few attempted to impose their radical views on so many, not since the Stalinists - those other true believers who serve as a role model for the right in its tactics and in its blind, intolerant certainties.

Sady, the liberals allowed themselves to be redefined as soft on terrorism and crime without putting up much of a fight. One could see it coming years ago when the very name Democratic Party was reduced to "Democrat" Party by its opponents, eager to detach the idea of democratic ideals from the adversary party, smirking as they coined the new truncated name for the opposition. Did we call them the Republic party in return? No, we left them with their "can" and their smirk intact. It sounds so childish, but by letting the radical right corrupt the language, and frame the debate, a great deal of democratic ground was lost without a battle.

The sad fact is we lberals let the playground bullies take over the playground, and now we have to face the results of our past timidity, as we find the economy broken by a spendthrift president, unchecked by formerly prudent members of government, or a Federal Reserve eager to cook the books for the President. We see America's thriving labor movement destroyed by economic policies which have shipped jobs overseas without building in protection for our own workers, and a pusilanimous press failing to stand up for the people's right to know. Our problem is not this new batch of Bush/McCarthyites - there are always tin horn tyrants ready to rise up and exploit ignorance and fear, it is the lack of Edward R. Murrows in our world -advocates for decent open government and democratic principles, men and women ready to probe deeply into injustice and engage the powerful in battle. The loss of press independence, with the consolodation of right wing power through conservative ownership of the media, is a part of our current American tragedy.

The President's plan to "save" Social Security by savaging it has met with tremendous resistance from the public. Despite the snake oil sales pitch, the White House finds it cannot con the people on this issue. For once, the use of fear by this administration has backfired. It results from the honest fear of the elderly and the middle class, fear of facing old age without a safety net of Social Secutiry which is creating the roadblock on this road to so called privatization which is really decapitation. Seniors, having witnessed prescription drug program become a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry, having seen a war declared to search for weapons of mass destruction turn up nothing but mass chaos, are now reluctant to see their Social Security safety net become a gift to the brokerage houses, and the security of old age damaged and destroyed for generations to come. Seniors are not opposed to this bill out of fear for themselves, contrary to what Bush claims they do understand that it may not affect while they are alive, but unlike Bush, they have empathy for the generations to come, the lives of their children and their children's children and want to see their economic futures protected.

Having said all that, unlike some liberals, I do not see President Bush as an evil man, determined to destroy democracy for sport and profit. He is no moustache twirling villain in our national melodrama, tying the heroine to the railroad tracks. He is more the CEO of a large corporation who feels it is his job to reward his stockholders, the people who put him in office, and screw the consumer if need be. I am sure George Bush loves his good wife and his two darling daughters, doesn't beat the dog or kick the cat, and believes deeply in God and country. It is not intelligence or good nature that this man lacks, it is empathy, the quality of moral imagination, the ability to understand the feelings and circumstances of those who are not ourselves, to project ourselves into the lives and problems of the less fortunate. It does not require the talents of a great writer to do so, nor the soul of a bleeding heart liberal, merely the imagination of a decent human being who recognizes that we do not live alone in this world. Through empathy a leader can understand those who were not well born, those not descended from well connected families and Presidential fathers. Empathy is quite simply the ability to imagine onself in another's worn sneakers. It is the quality that makes us both decent, charitable, humane, and civilized. Carried to extremes the lack of empathy can produce sociopaths and serial killers. In the case of George Bush it produces a frat house insensitivity to the feelings of anyone but his own privilaged group. Does he truly believe that it was through his own special skills and great wisdom that he gained his Yale admission, his ownership of a ball club, his Texas oil cronies, and his political leverage? He appears to have forgotten or never leared that there were always family and friends to see him through his early scrapes with life and the law.

Bush is a fortunate man in a world where most men are not. Most are born to struggle for a small measure of security in their lives. Instead of seeing his privalage as a gift,and an obligation, as FDR did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, and as some Rockefellers did, he regards his privilage as a condition he has earned, one to which he is truly entitled in the manner of ancient royalty. His tragedy is not that he does wrong, but that he believes that the wrong he does is right, simply because he does it. I am sure he means it when he says that he wants all workers to be part of the ownership society. But ask a worker in Wallmart why he is not in the "ownership society" that Bush proposes and they will laugh. All that most working Americans own is debt. True ownership requires discretionary funds, obtained through high salaried jobs or inheritance, not money used for daily survival. This is the President and the party that have refused to raise the minimum wage, a party that speaks a language of morality while practising policies of indifference that border on cruelty. Is it any wonder that Bush runs up a national debt unheard of in our history - when he was never obliged to scrape by with Daddy or Daddy's cronies to bail out his failues in the past. We have a president who had the brilliance to be born well. And the misfortune not to understand it.

That quality of empathy which is necessary in any truly religious person is totally lacking in the born again Bush. It is his tragedy as a man and ours as a country that unlike Clinton (who was laughed at for saying so) he doesn't feel the pain of others. Empathy is what made Lincoln great, what informed the life of such founding fathers as John Adams, Franklin, and Madison, and later, FDR. Without it a leader can only dictate, he cannot lead the people.

Without a couragous press to speak up and challenge the powerful our democracy is placed in greater jepordy than ever before. We sorely need a better class of journalists, a more vocal and strong willed Democratic opposition, men and women who are willing to risk the anger, the mockery, and the brickbats of the powerful when they are opposed. And an opposition party that knows how to oppose.

I have no special qualifications for making the above comments other than having lived awhile, read a little, and formed some opinions. I'm writing this blog because I have a desire to share my feelings and ideas with others, based on a life that has spanned seven decades. At other times I will talk about books, music, movies museums and theatre, subjects in which I have some knowledge, and cast an inquiring eye on anything I think worth writing about from Cristo's gates to the overdose of fashion consciousness in our society that corrupts and devalues people as it objectifies them. It gets lonely sitting here burdened with all these opinions so I will give them an airing on this blog from time to time. I welcome your comments. Sherman

A new beginning

2005-03-03T13:50:00.000-08:00

I have had the most wonderful day celebrating myself on my new webpage. I recommend it to anyone who needs a lift in this cold winter. I welcome all my friends, family, and curious strangers who might wish to see what today brings in the way of my snap judgments and words of wisdom.

Visit my new site at www.shermanyellen.com. Come soon, I get lonely.