Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009
First, let me say that my feelings toward Sen. Edward M. Kennedy are ambivalent at best. It's tough to really describe. Out of one eye, I saw a deeply flawed man, a scion of privilege, a playboy, the very essence of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby when he said, "They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
He was describing Tom and Daisy Buchanan in the novel, but he could have easily been talking about the Kennedys, as that same carelessness, or recklessness, seemed to follow them around too. Ted Kennedy was very much a product of his family's seeming air of privilege and invincibility, and it should come as no shock that, as No. 9 out of nine, he inherited a lion's share of this view of life.
Hence, Ted Kennedy could get someone to take his Spanish exam for him at Harvard so he could remain eligible for football. And he could expect -- without really giving it a second thought -- that his aides and coat-holders could simply clean up the tremendous mess he left behind in the waters off Dike Bridge in July 1969.
Why not? It had always been this way. He got back into Harvard even after it was proven he'd cheated; it's tough to say how much of the Old Man's money came from ill-gotten gains, but it's fair to say it was a substantial amount; it's also fair to say the Old Man's money and influence helped get his brother elected president; and it's fair to say that with people of privilege, in general, the rules are always meant for other people to follow. They play by their own rules.
It didn't matter that mind-crippling tragedy seemed to belie that feeling of privilege and indestructibility that ran through the Kennedy family. All that money couldn't protect Joe Jr. from dying during World War II -- on a mission he undertook, in no small part, because he was jealous of his younger brother Jack's heroism during the PT-109 battle.
And it didn't seem to faze Ted Kennedy that his sister Kathleen took a huge risk flying on a private plane in the middle of a thunderstorm ... and paid for it with her life. Nor did Jack's assassination. Nor Bobby's. Not even the plane crash in 1964 that almost claim his life.
None of those events seemed to put much of a dent in No. 9 son's view, apparently, that no combination of human folly, arrogance and carelessness could do too manage damage to him. So when Ted Kennedy drove his car off the bridge that separated the main part of Chappaquiddick from the poison ivy-infested beach on the other side, he had every reason to expect that all of that influence ... money ... public cachet over the mind-crippling family tragedies, would somehow leave a very forgiving and sympathetic public feeling very sorry for him.
But it didn't quite work out that way. Instead of being the type of chapter in his life that he could close quickly, and from which he could move on, Chappaquiddick became the defining point in a life that may have reached dizzying heights in terms of legislative accomplishment and prestige, but never could reclaim what was lost in both 1963 and 1968 by assassins' bullets.
Of course, it wasn't supposed to be this way when the Kennedy dynasty was set in motion. I would imagine if Old Joe had revealed his wildest dreams, they would have involved a 24-year dynasty of Kennedys, beginning in 1960 with Jack, continuing through 1974 with Bobby, and ending in 1984 as Teddy closed out HIS second term.
Could that have ever happened? Doubtful. Americans got sick of the Clintons ... and the reason they got sick of the Clintons is because it had no stomach for a political dynasty that flipped back and forth between two families. That's one VERY big reason Barack Obama is your president today. Certainly not the ONLY reasons ... but a big one.
But the Kennedy brothers were well positioned to at least make a run at such a dynasty. But again, one wonders just how ambitious young Teddy was. Chances are, had he not had this tremendous legacy dumped on him with the responsibility to uphold, he'd have been content to serve his two or three terms in the Senate and then go off and count his money. I truly believe that's all he ever wanted out of life.
Fate, of course, had other plans. And I really think that what defined Ted Kennedy from the time Sirhan Sirhan killed his brother Robert until he met and married his second wife Vicki was that inner tug-of-war that went on between what truly made him happy and what he felt his obligations to his family were. Here was a man who grown up with an army of maids, nannies, family members, and coat holders to clean up his messes for him. He wasn't exactly a ne'er-do-well, as was George W. Bush (a man who I find has an awful lot in common with Ted Kennedy, especially in his younger days) until he straightened out, but he was certainly destined for a life of no heavy lifting. His brothers had blazed the trail, first Jack and then Bobby. They were the ones who kept the Old Man's political ambitions alive and fulfilled. All Teddy had to do was show up.
He showed up, of course. And even when he was greener than the lawn on a bright spring day, he had instincts. He knew enough not to get angry and self-righteous when opponent Eddie McCormack told him in a debate that his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1962 would be a joke had his name simply been Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy. Any outward show of anger of indignation would have reinforced the fact that McCormack was, of course, right. If ever a man ran on his name and not his resume, it was Edward M. Kennedy. He knew it. He was stunned, of course, that McCormack showed so little class as to point it out ... and was probably very tempted to point out, himself, that the name McCormack, in Massachusetts, in 1962, had just as much political cachet as the name Kennedy (Eddie's uncle John was, of course, the Speaker of the U.S. House).
But he didn't. He let it pass. And the good people of Massachusetts felt sorry enough for him that Teddy swamped Eddie McCormack in the primary and went on to win the seat he never relinquished as long as he was alive.
Teddy's early career in the Senate was a virtual blueprint on how to win friends and influence people. He did what his brother Jack never could do ... followed rules of protocol. He ingratiated himself into the Senate club in a way Jack never did.
He'd grown in stature so that by 1969, when the Democrats chose their leadership for the new term, Ted was named assistant majority whip.
There was already serious talk about Kennedy running for president in 1972, but even if he chose not to, he'd still only have been 40, so there was plenty of time. Besides, it wouldn't have been too smart to waste him unduly in '72, so it seemed more sensible to see him as a major force in 1976, when he'd be 44 ... a year older than Jack was when he was elected.
Chappaquiddick, of course, rendered all of that speculation moot. There was no way he could run in '72 ... a mere three years after the accident. And when Ed Muskie self destructed, George McGovern picked up the pieces ... and lost famously.
Four years later, still gunshy about putting himself through all that scrutiny, and besieged by other, more personal, issues (such as his son's cancer, his wife's increasingly obvious drinking problem, and his family's natural antipathy on the whole issue of running and making himself a target for a third crackpot assassin) he ceded to Jimmy Carter (though brother-in-law Sarget Shriver gave it a try).
This is where I believe Chappaquiddick might have changed the course of U.S. political life. Without it, there would have been no Jimmy Carter. And, perhaps, no Ronald Reagan. I have no idea what would have happened in a Ted Kennedy presidency, but I am saying that here are two major U.S. political figures -- who couldn't have been more opposite in their approach to government -- who may never have seen the light of day had Ted Kennedy not been politically vulnerable in 1976.
By extension, too, you could conclude that much of what happened beyond the 80s might have been altered too.
Then again ... there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Ted Kennedy could just have easily thrown his hands up and said, "I don't WANT to be president." It certainly does seem that way. He always seemed very ambivalent about the whole idea of it. Even when he chose to run, in 1980, he couldn't complete a simple sentence telling Roger Mudd why he wanted to run.
He obviously felt a family pull toward reclaiming the White House out of memory for his fallen brothers. But it didn't seem to be a joyful task. It seemed to be more a grim project than anything else. He didn't really appear to be truly free of those expectations, and that legacy, until he chose not to run in 1988. That somehow triggered this tremendous release in him, too, as that's when he began what could only be described as his second adolescence ... a sort of non-stop spring break that culminated in him being in Palm Beach the night his nephew, Willie Smith, allegedly committed rape (a charge of which he was acquitted).
That was the only time in his life when his public transgressions affected his job. Because of all he was going through with the trial, and the exposure of his own sophomoric behavior, he was a non-factor in the Clarance Thomas hearings. And he had to get up at Harvard and confess these transgressions publicly, and promise to sin no more.
From that point on, a new, more dedicated, and certainly more effective Ted Kennedy emerged. He met, and married, his current wife, and it seemed truly happy and content with what life had given him. At an age when most people seem eager to kick back and enjoy the fruits of their lives, Kennedy was in there fighting ... and winning.
Always gregarious, friendly and helpful man even at his worse, he turned bipartisanship on issues that affected people positively into an art form. Kennedy developed the reputation for being able to reach across the aisle to either get support for his bills, or broker support for Republican legislation that he believed in.
Even though he had the reputation as being the "liberal lion," he also understood that compromise, and negotiations were more important when it came to getting things done than ideology. He could still state his case with resounding forcefulness, but he could also close a deal too.
His biggest political challenge came in 1994 when Mitt Romney ran against him, and somehow managed to insinuate that the Kennedys weren't as altruistic when it came to public service as they'd like you to believe.
"Mr. Romney," Kennedy shot back, "the Kennedys have never been in public service to make money. We've paid too high a price."
Game, set and match.
I don't know how you rectify the two diverging elements of Ted Kennedy's life. He was a deeply flawed human being who still managed to become a de facto father to a horde of nieces and nephews, and, with few exceptions, shepherd them to adulthood and productivity. It took him forever to grow up, yet even as he behaved like a college freshman in a dorm for the first time ever, he spearheaded some of the most meaningful legislation in our nation's history.
He might be the last true liberal to come out of old Roosevelt way of doing things, yet in many ways he was much larger than that.
Most of all, for a man with such national stature, he understood the old Tip O'Neil line that all politics is local. Ask anyone who ever sought help from him. He delivered.
Warts and all, Ted Kennedy is the last of a dying breed. We'll never see his likes again, and that, in the end, is a tragedy in and of itself.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Harper's Island
Give me a good old fashioned whodunit and I'm a happy man. It doesn't have to be a good one either. Give me any whodunit and I'm there.
This would explain how easily I became hooked on "Harper's Island," the blatantly derivative whodunit it extravaganza that just concluded last Saturday on CBS.
I grew up watching Perry Mason, which, to me, is still the best whodunit TV series ever made. Yes, it's a lawyer show. But the whole premise was that the excruciatingly incompetent DA -- named Hamilton Berger (of all things!!) -- couldn't have won a case even if the defense didn't offer counsel. So you knew that whoever they arrested was NOT guilty. Which made Perry Mason a glorified whodunit.
But a good one nonetheless.
You want a good whodunit author? Agatha Christie springs to mind. Her murders were neat, sophisticated and unintrusive; and the killer was never a dead giveaway. Arthur Conan Doyle ... another one. First, there was Sherlock Holmes and Watson (who was played as a buffoon in the movies by Nigel Bruce, but wasn't anywhere NEAR as dumb in the books). The plots were intricate, and, like Christie, the killers were never obvious. I've see "Hound of the Baskervilles" about 600 times and there's still a point, every time I watch it, when I'm totally clueless as to the murderer, even though I KNOW who it is!
For my money, the single most artful, and most FUN whodunit ever was "Ten Little Indians," based on Agatha's "And Then There Were None." Imagine, 10 people on some little island, all of them bumped off one by one, until it's down to the final two characters (in this case, Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne). Each suspects the other, because neither -- as it turns out -- is the perp.
I won't be the spoiler just in case you never saw it, but the ending will give you a jolt or two. I'll also say that the book and the movie have different endings. Same perp, but different endings.
"Harper's Island" owes a lot to "Ten Little Indians." Where the 10 victims were invited to the island by "Mr. U.N. Owen," in the earlier work, About a thousand potential victims (or so it seemed sometimes) sailed off to Harper's Island -- which is just off the Puegot Sound in Washington, apparently -- for a destination wedding.
And that's the first real weakness in this miniseries. There are just too many damn people to keep track of and care about. Ten -- as in the number of Indians -- was a nice little number. In Harper's Island, there were people crawling out of every corner. And once the show got going, they started dropping off faster than you could either count or absorb.
This was necessary, I suppose, to plow the field so that the cast characters who really mattered got their famous final scenes. And once the incidentals were winnowed out, THAT's when the thing finally got me hooked.
Another problem with this show was the absolute overkill of horror/slasher movie cliches. There was the obligatory creepy kid (you know, the precocious little twerp who seems to know way more than she chooses to tell, and has this "Lizzie Borden" look about her that makes you think that SHE has somehow pulled off this trainwreck of a wedding).
It was her voice that intoned the creepy "one by one" that served as the signature line in the opening credits. Some of the killing was rather derivative of whodunits of yore.
And it was too freaking BLOODY, even for a 21st century murder mystery. Here, I have to say that you're either a good, pot-boiler murder mystery or you're a slasher film. But you can't be both. "Harper's Island" tried to be both. I call this the "kitchen sink" method of TV production. Just get EVERYTHING in there so that when it's all over, you can say you had it all covered. In this regard, "Harper's Island" was no different than "Forest Gump" and "Mr. Holland's Opus" -- only with a lot more blood than both.
But the biggest complaint I have is that unlike "Ten Little Indians" they took the absolute cheap and easy way out. At least in "Ten Little Indians" the murderer WAS part of the group that got invited to the island. In Harper's Island, the murderer (or one of them, anyway), pulled a Lazarus and rose from the dead.
A little backtracking here. Seven years prior to the time period of the show, some guy named John Wakefield terrorized the island with a serial killing spree. One of the victims' daughters, Abby Mills, is returning to the island for the first time since the killings to attend the destination wedding. Even before she gets there, she's haunted by the memory.
The reason she's going is that her best friend, Henry, is getting married to Trish, the daughter of a rich businessman. Henry coaxes Abby back to the island.
Henry and Trish make the perfect Yuppie couple. Good looking (almost TOO trendy looking, actually), they look to be custom made for each other (even if Trish's father doesn't like Henry).
Anyway, Abby's father is the sheriff of Harper's Island, and -- supposedly -- he shot and killed Wakefield and that ended the spree.
But as soon as the wedding party arrives on the island, the murders begin anew ... each one more grisly than the last. Trish's father's murder is particularly gruesome.
Week after week after week, we get it POUNDED into our heads that John Wakefield is about as dead as Jacob Marley was. And that would be dead ... as in doornail.
Soon enough (but not soon enough for me!) the incidental characters were killed off -- some spectacularly and some off camera -- so that we were down to manageable cast. There were, of course, Abby, Henry and Trish; Jimmy (Abby's former boyfriend); Madison (the creepy kid) and her mother Shea; Chloe and Cal (the hottie and her English lover), Sully and Danny (Henry's best buddies) and Sheriff Mills.
The first to go is the sheriff, and what do you suppose happens after that? We find out that Wakefield is ALIVE!!! No shit! After more than 10 weeks of wondering WHO THE HELL could do something like this and still look everyone in the eye, we find out ... NO ONE!
This did not make me happy. I figure if CBS is going to make me sit through 10 weeks of blood, guts, bad dialogue, and a plot that -- at least in the beginning -- crept along slower than rush hour traffic in Manhattan, there should be some spectacular payoff ... not ... the dead guy wasn't dead!
Boy, did that piss me off. So OK, I figured, he couldn't do this all by himself. He HAD to have help. That much was obvious. There were still three episodes to go, much to early for a denouement.
But here, this just started getting ridiculous. Just about everyone on the island ended up wielding shotguns trying to catch this guy, and NOBODY COULD HIT HIM. Unbelievable. You'd think SOMEONE could have filled him up with buckshot.
Second, and let's not be too snide about this, if we'd sent John Wakefield over to Afghanistan, he'd have single-handedly killed the Taliban and captured Osama bin Laden. I mean, this guy was the commando's commando. Where the island denizens couldn't have hit water if they'd fallen out of a boat, this guy committed all his murders with NO WASTED MOTION. He went around with this boarding knife, while all the islanders had shotguns. He stayed alive; they got killed.
This actually led ME on a hideously wrong course because I got the bad feeling that we were going to be Victoria Principaled (remember ... she wakes up in Dallas to find out that Bobby's death -- and the subsequent year's worth of episodes -- was just a bad dream?).
Chloe and Cal were next, and their scene had some BALLS (one of the few that did). One of the games the writers in this series played is that every time the islanders split off in their efforts to find Wakefield (or whichever of the victims he'd spirited off to the underground tunnels -- another cliche) they were paired off differently. This -- obviously -- was done to divert suspicion from any single member, and I can understand that. But it often took on the characteristics of a Keystone Kops movie. You couldn't tell the players without a scorecard.
Anyway, Chloe goes missing and Cal goes off with Henry and Abby to find her. THEY go off in another direction, leaving CAL to rescue Chloe and propose marriage (kind of an odd place to get into all of THAT).
They have just enough time for one little kiss when WHOOOOSH, along comes Wakefield. Now, Cal SEEMS to be a pretty normal guy. He's smart ... he's a doctor ... he's good LOOKING ... but damn, he's standing about 10 feet away from Wakefield with a loaded gun ... and MISSES. I mean .. Come ON!
Naturally, he runs out of ammunition and tries to butt-end Wakefield (he of the boarding knife longer than a porn star's pecker) with the rifle.
Forget it. Wakefield easily disarms him, throws the rifle into the water, and in no time rams the knife through Cal, killing him (and throwing HIM into the drink too).
What follows is EASILY the best scene in the entire 13 weeks. Chloe tells Wakefield that he'll never have her (I suppose, meaning that she won't give him the satisfaction of killing her), leans backwards and falls into the water blow ... right next to Cal.
Even more annoying than the in-again-out-again antics of the cast (you go with him ... I'll go with her ... you stay ... and the next time we do all this we'll reshuffle the deck and play MORE musical chairs ...) were the obligatory red herrings. Most of them concerned Jimmy, who'd had a tough time adjusting when Abby left the island following her mother's murder.
Throughout all of this, the absolute ROCK of the group was Henry, the groom-to-be. He just seemed to absorb what needed to be absorbed, and he emerged as the voice of reason when everyone else was in full panic. In short, a real mensch.
But ... but ...
Well, they finally catch Wakefield ... and have another GOLDEN opportunity to kill them and put themselves out of their misery. And they elect NOT to. Instead, they tie him up with belts (are these fucking people SERIOUS????) and throw him in jail.
Here, we learn that Wakefield is bitter because Abby's mother -- with whom he'd had an affair years earlier -- gave up their son for adoption ... and to him, that was as bad as throwing him away. So he came back to the island to kill everybody all over again out of some sense of vengeance. And not to give anything away too soon, but this whole story line is absolutely preposterous if you can do even simple math.
These stumblebums, none of whom should have ever attempted law enforcement had they gone on to live through this, manage to allow Wakefield to escape, and he kills Danny (who at least puts up a good fight) with a paper spike. Shea and Madison (manning the fort with Danny while the others are out hunting around for God knows what) escape, Trish and Henry go back to the hotel for a shower and some sex, and Abby and Jimmy are paired off doing something else.
Henry and Trish are spooning on their bed when they hear a sound. Henry heroically goes off to investigate and Wakefield bangs the door down and goes after Trish, who is decked out in the wedding gown she WOULD have worn had the marriage ever taken place.
Trish breaks a window and escapes ... running into the arms of Henry ... who informs here, at this precise moment, that HE is Wakefield's accomplice. She cries, calls him a bastard, and he stabs her to death. Just like that. The anticlimax to end ALL anticlimaxes. We still have FIVE PEOPLE (not including Trish and Abby) alive and we already know who the killers are.
I suppose in the minds of the writers, the rest of the show had to have some kind of a denouement where the whole things was explained. Bullshit on that. I wanted it to go down to the wire, and have the killer and the lone survivor go mano-a-mano ... a fight to the death. That sort of thing. Either that, or I wanted one of these people to FIGURE IT OUT without all of them getting killed. Whatever, I didn't want the fucking KILLER to tell me with SEVEN PEOPLE STILL ALIVE!
Sadly, Sully's the next to go. Sully started off being an obnoxious frat boy and ended up tragically heroic. Yet Henry gets him alone, unburdens himself with some of the creepier aspects of his sociopathology, and stabs his erstwhile best friend to death.
What an asshole!
I don't even have to tell you this, because I know you're not this dumb, but for the sake of being thorough, Henry is -- of course -- Wakefield's son. And he staged this whooolllllle thing just to get Abby on the island ... presumably so she could watch as he and "dad" picked everyone off "one by one."
Henry, however, has one more trick up his sleeve. He kills WAKEFIELD instead of Abby (he backshoots Jimmy and thinks he's killed him, but dammit all if Jimmy doesn't turn up ALIVE). Oh, and I forgot ... Creepy kid and her mother got off the island in a motorboat that they just happened to find (golly, gee, look at THAT!!) in a deserted boathouse. The boat is gassed up, the motor works ... voila. As the Church Lady might have said, "how conveeeeeeeeenient."
I think I'll stop here for a second and offer this observation: These freaking people were just too NEAT for a bunch of scared shitless spoiled rich kids forced to run for their lives for all this time. Not a hair out of place, clean clothes, no brown spots anywhere in telltale areas, no stubble on the guys ... nothing. But you know ... if you're going to die, at least leave a good looking body behind. Right?
OK. After Henry kills Wakefield (he "chooses" Abby over his long-lost dad ... the same guy he's done all this killing for), Abby (FINALLY!!!!!!!) puts two and two together and gets the right answer. Henry flips over over so violently she hits her head and passes out ... and wakes up in some strange house. And for a fleeting moment, I'm saying "Shit! Fuck! NO! Not a dream! Goddamnit. If this is a dream I'll be so PISSED I might break my brand new LCD 42-inch flatscreen!!)."
Thankfully, no. Not a dream. But just as bad. Henry, as it turns out, is a RAGING sociopath (he says he always had these FEELINGS, but reconnecting with his father the serial killer just, you know, made it all make sense) who staged this whole thing, and got everyone from his previous life as an adopted son, out of the way so he and Abby (his half-sister as it turns out) could live happily after after. He also stages a church fire and fixes it so everyone's presumed dead. So he's a sociopath ... but he's a THINKING MAN'S sociopath. Uh huh.
Well, OK. They're supposed to be the same age, so HTF can they be half-siblings??? Somehow, the writers didn't exactly think that one through, ya think?
Abby, not surprisingly, wants know part of this lunatic. She escapes (more people escape in this damn show) and runs into the barn next door, where Jimmy sits, bound and gagged. Henry and Abby go into this whole song and dance about Jimmy, and why is he still alive, and how come you didn't kill HIM, and yada yada yada. Then she goes to kiss Jimmy goodbye and slips him a piece of metal so he can pick the locks of his handcuffs, which are behind him.
Jimmy turns into a contortionist and a locksmith and frees himself (again, if this were a creative writing course, this writer would have FLUNKED due to the sheer implausibility of the crap he wrote). Henry goes down by the water and threatens Abby, but Jimmy manages to jump Henry and they both fall over the cliff. One thing leads to another, and Abby -- who had Wakefield within her sighs about six dozen times and couldn't pull the trigger -- runs the boarding knife through Henry and kills the pathetic sonofabitch.
And she and Jimmy leave the island in a coast guard boat ... presumably headed for a life filled with group therapy, alcohol and drug abuse, and cursed with NEVER BEING ABLE TO EVER HAVE A NORMAL RELATIONSHIP AGAIN.
Despite all these criticism (and there were certainly enough of them), I watched every show, hung on every word, and tried to see through all the red herrings and other idiotic crap and find my killer. I had a sneaking suspicion Wakefield was going to turn up alive, but I didn't want to believe it, so I kept telling myself that it wasn't going to happen. They weren't going to be this cheap. But they were.
I also disregarded totally any suspect who was painted negatively during the course of the show, because that's Cliche No. 1 in throwing off whodunit aficionados. The bad guys are NEVER the killers. Ever. So JD (Henry's brother) and Jimmy (who was kind of sleazy) never crossed my mind as suspects.
Henry makes the most sense in that he controlled the levers here. It would be way too far fetched to think that any of the friends were involved, because how would they get everyone in one place? But for all I didn't like about the show, it's a credit to the writers that they put so many plot twists and red herrings in there that it wasn't BLATANTLY obvious that Henry was behind it all.
But as I said right up top, even BAD whodunits can hook me GOOD. And this just proves it.
What am I going to do on Saturday nights now??
This would explain how easily I became hooked on "Harper's Island," the blatantly derivative whodunit it extravaganza that just concluded last Saturday on CBS.
I grew up watching Perry Mason, which, to me, is still the best whodunit TV series ever made. Yes, it's a lawyer show. But the whole premise was that the excruciatingly incompetent DA -- named Hamilton Berger (of all things!!) -- couldn't have won a case even if the defense didn't offer counsel. So you knew that whoever they arrested was NOT guilty. Which made Perry Mason a glorified whodunit.
But a good one nonetheless.
You want a good whodunit author? Agatha Christie springs to mind. Her murders were neat, sophisticated and unintrusive; and the killer was never a dead giveaway. Arthur Conan Doyle ... another one. First, there was Sherlock Holmes and Watson (who was played as a buffoon in the movies by Nigel Bruce, but wasn't anywhere NEAR as dumb in the books). The plots were intricate, and, like Christie, the killers were never obvious. I've see "Hound of the Baskervilles" about 600 times and there's still a point, every time I watch it, when I'm totally clueless as to the murderer, even though I KNOW who it is!
For my money, the single most artful, and most FUN whodunit ever was "Ten Little Indians," based on Agatha's "And Then There Were None." Imagine, 10 people on some little island, all of them bumped off one by one, until it's down to the final two characters (in this case, Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne). Each suspects the other, because neither -- as it turns out -- is the perp.
I won't be the spoiler just in case you never saw it, but the ending will give you a jolt or two. I'll also say that the book and the movie have different endings. Same perp, but different endings.
"Harper's Island" owes a lot to "Ten Little Indians." Where the 10 victims were invited to the island by "Mr. U.N. Owen," in the earlier work, About a thousand potential victims (or so it seemed sometimes) sailed off to Harper's Island -- which is just off the Puegot Sound in Washington, apparently -- for a destination wedding.
And that's the first real weakness in this miniseries. There are just too many damn people to keep track of and care about. Ten -- as in the number of Indians -- was a nice little number. In Harper's Island, there were people crawling out of every corner. And once the show got going, they started dropping off faster than you could either count or absorb.
This was necessary, I suppose, to plow the field so that the cast characters who really mattered got their famous final scenes. And once the incidentals were winnowed out, THAT's when the thing finally got me hooked.
Another problem with this show was the absolute overkill of horror/slasher movie cliches. There was the obligatory creepy kid (you know, the precocious little twerp who seems to know way more than she chooses to tell, and has this "Lizzie Borden" look about her that makes you think that SHE has somehow pulled off this trainwreck of a wedding).
It was her voice that intoned the creepy "one by one" that served as the signature line in the opening credits. Some of the killing was rather derivative of whodunits of yore.
And it was too freaking BLOODY, even for a 21st century murder mystery. Here, I have to say that you're either a good, pot-boiler murder mystery or you're a slasher film. But you can't be both. "Harper's Island" tried to be both. I call this the "kitchen sink" method of TV production. Just get EVERYTHING in there so that when it's all over, you can say you had it all covered. In this regard, "Harper's Island" was no different than "Forest Gump" and "Mr. Holland's Opus" -- only with a lot more blood than both.
But the biggest complaint I have is that unlike "Ten Little Indians" they took the absolute cheap and easy way out. At least in "Ten Little Indians" the murderer WAS part of the group that got invited to the island. In Harper's Island, the murderer (or one of them, anyway), pulled a Lazarus and rose from the dead.
A little backtracking here. Seven years prior to the time period of the show, some guy named John Wakefield terrorized the island with a serial killing spree. One of the victims' daughters, Abby Mills, is returning to the island for the first time since the killings to attend the destination wedding. Even before she gets there, she's haunted by the memory.
The reason she's going is that her best friend, Henry, is getting married to Trish, the daughter of a rich businessman. Henry coaxes Abby back to the island.
Henry and Trish make the perfect Yuppie couple. Good looking (almost TOO trendy looking, actually), they look to be custom made for each other (even if Trish's father doesn't like Henry).
Anyway, Abby's father is the sheriff of Harper's Island, and -- supposedly -- he shot and killed Wakefield and that ended the spree.
But as soon as the wedding party arrives on the island, the murders begin anew ... each one more grisly than the last. Trish's father's murder is particularly gruesome.
Week after week after week, we get it POUNDED into our heads that John Wakefield is about as dead as Jacob Marley was. And that would be dead ... as in doornail.
Soon enough (but not soon enough for me!) the incidental characters were killed off -- some spectacularly and some off camera -- so that we were down to manageable cast. There were, of course, Abby, Henry and Trish; Jimmy (Abby's former boyfriend); Madison (the creepy kid) and her mother Shea; Chloe and Cal (the hottie and her English lover), Sully and Danny (Henry's best buddies) and Sheriff Mills.
The first to go is the sheriff, and what do you suppose happens after that? We find out that Wakefield is ALIVE!!! No shit! After more than 10 weeks of wondering WHO THE HELL could do something like this and still look everyone in the eye, we find out ... NO ONE!
This did not make me happy. I figure if CBS is going to make me sit through 10 weeks of blood, guts, bad dialogue, and a plot that -- at least in the beginning -- crept along slower than rush hour traffic in Manhattan, there should be some spectacular payoff ... not ... the dead guy wasn't dead!
Boy, did that piss me off. So OK, I figured, he couldn't do this all by himself. He HAD to have help. That much was obvious. There were still three episodes to go, much to early for a denouement.
But here, this just started getting ridiculous. Just about everyone on the island ended up wielding shotguns trying to catch this guy, and NOBODY COULD HIT HIM. Unbelievable. You'd think SOMEONE could have filled him up with buckshot.
Second, and let's not be too snide about this, if we'd sent John Wakefield over to Afghanistan, he'd have single-handedly killed the Taliban and captured Osama bin Laden. I mean, this guy was the commando's commando. Where the island denizens couldn't have hit water if they'd fallen out of a boat, this guy committed all his murders with NO WASTED MOTION. He went around with this boarding knife, while all the islanders had shotguns. He stayed alive; they got killed.
This actually led ME on a hideously wrong course because I got the bad feeling that we were going to be Victoria Principaled (remember ... she wakes up in Dallas to find out that Bobby's death -- and the subsequent year's worth of episodes -- was just a bad dream?).
Chloe and Cal were next, and their scene had some BALLS (one of the few that did). One of the games the writers in this series played is that every time the islanders split off in their efforts to find Wakefield (or whichever of the victims he'd spirited off to the underground tunnels -- another cliche) they were paired off differently. This -- obviously -- was done to divert suspicion from any single member, and I can understand that. But it often took on the characteristics of a Keystone Kops movie. You couldn't tell the players without a scorecard.
Anyway, Chloe goes missing and Cal goes off with Henry and Abby to find her. THEY go off in another direction, leaving CAL to rescue Chloe and propose marriage (kind of an odd place to get into all of THAT).
They have just enough time for one little kiss when WHOOOOSH, along comes Wakefield. Now, Cal SEEMS to be a pretty normal guy. He's smart ... he's a doctor ... he's good LOOKING ... but damn, he's standing about 10 feet away from Wakefield with a loaded gun ... and MISSES. I mean .. Come ON!
Naturally, he runs out of ammunition and tries to butt-end Wakefield (he of the boarding knife longer than a porn star's pecker) with the rifle.
Forget it. Wakefield easily disarms him, throws the rifle into the water, and in no time rams the knife through Cal, killing him (and throwing HIM into the drink too).
What follows is EASILY the best scene in the entire 13 weeks. Chloe tells Wakefield that he'll never have her (I suppose, meaning that she won't give him the satisfaction of killing her), leans backwards and falls into the water blow ... right next to Cal.
Even more annoying than the in-again-out-again antics of the cast (you go with him ... I'll go with her ... you stay ... and the next time we do all this we'll reshuffle the deck and play MORE musical chairs ...) were the obligatory red herrings. Most of them concerned Jimmy, who'd had a tough time adjusting when Abby left the island following her mother's murder.
Throughout all of this, the absolute ROCK of the group was Henry, the groom-to-be. He just seemed to absorb what needed to be absorbed, and he emerged as the voice of reason when everyone else was in full panic. In short, a real mensch.
But ... but ...
Well, they finally catch Wakefield ... and have another GOLDEN opportunity to kill them and put themselves out of their misery. And they elect NOT to. Instead, they tie him up with belts (are these fucking people SERIOUS????) and throw him in jail.
Here, we learn that Wakefield is bitter because Abby's mother -- with whom he'd had an affair years earlier -- gave up their son for adoption ... and to him, that was as bad as throwing him away. So he came back to the island to kill everybody all over again out of some sense of vengeance. And not to give anything away too soon, but this whole story line is absolutely preposterous if you can do even simple math.
These stumblebums, none of whom should have ever attempted law enforcement had they gone on to live through this, manage to allow Wakefield to escape, and he kills Danny (who at least puts up a good fight) with a paper spike. Shea and Madison (manning the fort with Danny while the others are out hunting around for God knows what) escape, Trish and Henry go back to the hotel for a shower and some sex, and Abby and Jimmy are paired off doing something else.
Henry and Trish are spooning on their bed when they hear a sound. Henry heroically goes off to investigate and Wakefield bangs the door down and goes after Trish, who is decked out in the wedding gown she WOULD have worn had the marriage ever taken place.
Trish breaks a window and escapes ... running into the arms of Henry ... who informs here, at this precise moment, that HE is Wakefield's accomplice. She cries, calls him a bastard, and he stabs her to death. Just like that. The anticlimax to end ALL anticlimaxes. We still have FIVE PEOPLE (not including Trish and Abby) alive and we already know who the killers are.
I suppose in the minds of the writers, the rest of the show had to have some kind of a denouement where the whole things was explained. Bullshit on that. I wanted it to go down to the wire, and have the killer and the lone survivor go mano-a-mano ... a fight to the death. That sort of thing. Either that, or I wanted one of these people to FIGURE IT OUT without all of them getting killed. Whatever, I didn't want the fucking KILLER to tell me with SEVEN PEOPLE STILL ALIVE!
Sadly, Sully's the next to go. Sully started off being an obnoxious frat boy and ended up tragically heroic. Yet Henry gets him alone, unburdens himself with some of the creepier aspects of his sociopathology, and stabs his erstwhile best friend to death.
What an asshole!
I don't even have to tell you this, because I know you're not this dumb, but for the sake of being thorough, Henry is -- of course -- Wakefield's son. And he staged this whooolllllle thing just to get Abby on the island ... presumably so she could watch as he and "dad" picked everyone off "one by one."
Henry, however, has one more trick up his sleeve. He kills WAKEFIELD instead of Abby (he backshoots Jimmy and thinks he's killed him, but dammit all if Jimmy doesn't turn up ALIVE). Oh, and I forgot ... Creepy kid and her mother got off the island in a motorboat that they just happened to find (golly, gee, look at THAT!!) in a deserted boathouse. The boat is gassed up, the motor works ... voila. As the Church Lady might have said, "how conveeeeeeeeenient."
I think I'll stop here for a second and offer this observation: These freaking people were just too NEAT for a bunch of scared shitless spoiled rich kids forced to run for their lives for all this time. Not a hair out of place, clean clothes, no brown spots anywhere in telltale areas, no stubble on the guys ... nothing. But you know ... if you're going to die, at least leave a good looking body behind. Right?
OK. After Henry kills Wakefield (he "chooses" Abby over his long-lost dad ... the same guy he's done all this killing for), Abby (FINALLY!!!!!!!) puts two and two together and gets the right answer. Henry flips over over so violently she hits her head and passes out ... and wakes up in some strange house. And for a fleeting moment, I'm saying "Shit! Fuck! NO! Not a dream! Goddamnit. If this is a dream I'll be so PISSED I might break my brand new LCD 42-inch flatscreen!!)."
Thankfully, no. Not a dream. But just as bad. Henry, as it turns out, is a RAGING sociopath (he says he always had these FEELINGS, but reconnecting with his father the serial killer just, you know, made it all make sense) who staged this whole thing, and got everyone from his previous life as an adopted son, out of the way so he and Abby (his half-sister as it turns out) could live happily after after. He also stages a church fire and fixes it so everyone's presumed dead. So he's a sociopath ... but he's a THINKING MAN'S sociopath. Uh huh.
Well, OK. They're supposed to be the same age, so HTF can they be half-siblings??? Somehow, the writers didn't exactly think that one through, ya think?
Abby, not surprisingly, wants know part of this lunatic. She escapes (more people escape in this damn show) and runs into the barn next door, where Jimmy sits, bound and gagged. Henry and Abby go into this whole song and dance about Jimmy, and why is he still alive, and how come you didn't kill HIM, and yada yada yada. Then she goes to kiss Jimmy goodbye and slips him a piece of metal so he can pick the locks of his handcuffs, which are behind him.
Jimmy turns into a contortionist and a locksmith and frees himself (again, if this were a creative writing course, this writer would have FLUNKED due to the sheer implausibility of the crap he wrote). Henry goes down by the water and threatens Abby, but Jimmy manages to jump Henry and they both fall over the cliff. One thing leads to another, and Abby -- who had Wakefield within her sighs about six dozen times and couldn't pull the trigger -- runs the boarding knife through Henry and kills the pathetic sonofabitch.
And she and Jimmy leave the island in a coast guard boat ... presumably headed for a life filled with group therapy, alcohol and drug abuse, and cursed with NEVER BEING ABLE TO EVER HAVE A NORMAL RELATIONSHIP AGAIN.
Despite all these criticism (and there were certainly enough of them), I watched every show, hung on every word, and tried to see through all the red herrings and other idiotic crap and find my killer. I had a sneaking suspicion Wakefield was going to turn up alive, but I didn't want to believe it, so I kept telling myself that it wasn't going to happen. They weren't going to be this cheap. But they were.
I also disregarded totally any suspect who was painted negatively during the course of the show, because that's Cliche No. 1 in throwing off whodunit aficionados. The bad guys are NEVER the killers. Ever. So JD (Henry's brother) and Jimmy (who was kind of sleazy) never crossed my mind as suspects.
Henry makes the most sense in that he controlled the levers here. It would be way too far fetched to think that any of the friends were involved, because how would they get everyone in one place? But for all I didn't like about the show, it's a credit to the writers that they put so many plot twists and red herrings in there that it wasn't BLATANTLY obvious that Henry was behind it all.
But as I said right up top, even BAD whodunits can hook me GOOD. And this just proves it.
What am I going to do on Saturday nights now??
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Common sense about food
I’ve always believed that most of life’s truly important decisions come down to that unwritten rule that can best be called “common sense.” You won’t find it in any textbook. And a lot of the time, what you DO find in textbooks, or in journals, or on the internet, defies that unwritten rule that can best be called “common sense.”
For example, common sense should dictate that inhaling acrid smoke from cylinders of tobacco wrapped in paper has to be unhealthy, especially since if you sucked the same chemicals contained in cigarette smoke from the exhaust pipe of a car, you’d die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
So whether tobacco is carcinogenic or not, you’d have to think it’s unhealthy. But ask anyone addicted to tobacco and they’ll rationalize their way out of it with explanations that make about as much sense as pretzel logic. The fact that tobacco IS a proven carcinogen just reinforces the common sense aspect of refraining from it, but, for whatever reason, people still flock to it like a moth is drawn to a flame. “It relaxes me.” “It relieves stress.”
Yeah. And it KILLS you too. Don’t forget that. Not to mention that it might be the most addictive of all commonly-abused substances.
But as addictive as tobacco is, there’s on surefire way to keep yourself from getting hooked. Don’t start smoking. That way, you’ll never have to deal with the problem. Similarly, there’s one ironclad way to manage alcoholism. Stop drinking. Not easy, but if you make the decision to stop, you never have to drink another drop of alcohol. Look the other way when you pass a saloon or a liquor store. Politely decline wine-tasting parties. Go home and play solitaire when someone breaks out the suds if you can’t handle being around it.
The point is … you don’t have to indulge.
Food is something entirely different, and that’s one of the reasons you see so many people today fighting weight problems. You can’t stop eating. Even if you are prone to uncontrollable binges, or 24-hour grazing, or you’re so badly diabetic that even a piece of bread spikes your blood sugar off the board, your body has to absorb nutrients, and the easiest – and certainly the most aesthetically pleasing – way to do that is through food.
Let’s talk a little about food. Or, rather, let’s say something nice about it … because there’s a lot nice to be said about it.
Food is cultural. It is central to most celebrations, especially ethnic celebrations. If you go to “Italian Night” at your local parish, you’re going to have pasta. You won’t see Vitamin C tablets underneath all that tomato sauce.
Food is also sensual (which is different from sensuous, although it could be that, too). Its flavors and aromas are certainly conducive to creating a friendly – even romantic – atmosphere. Or, to put it another way, if you’re wooing someone, and have a romantic evening in mind, you wouldn’t invite the object of your affections over to for a Met-RX shake. But you might cook a romantic dinner for two, with a nice, fresh apple pie for dessert afterward.
All of this goes in the way of saying that food is necessary component of life. Not only is it life-sustaining in a strictly biological sense, but it’s life-sustaining in a very real, spiritual and metaphysical sense too.
But while food can be hypnotizing in its effect on people, there is that double-edged sword where it can so dangerous too. Some foods are best eaten sparingly … delicious though they may be. And some foods – especially the ones that aren’t as aesthetically pleasing or conducive to romance -- seem to be the ones that end up being most nutritious and most beneficial to healthy living.
That’s not true in every case, of course (though if you’re in a position where you have to be selective about what you eat for health reasons, it might seem that way). But mixed in with all the joys of eating are some very stark, very cold, and very unappealing facts.
And the most important fact is this: Foods loaded with empty calories are of no nutritional value at all. They may taste heavenly, but they add nothing to the mix except inches around the middle and throughout the hips and, finally, the ever-expanding arse.
This doesn’t mean you can’t eat them!! It simply means that a steady diet of them, over a decent amount of time, will be more destructive than healthy.
We will get into what the term “empty calories” means. But the objective here is to address weight loss through common sense. I say that because we do not need formulas to lose weight. We don’t need “Zone diets” or “Dr. Atkins” or “L.A. Weight Loss” or anything else. I might take a flyer on Weight Watchers because it strives to create balance in the diet … which is the most important aspect of healthy eating.
But even then, losing weight comes down to common sense. If you eat every meal like it’s your last, filling yourself to the brim with whatever it is you’re putting into your mouth, you’re not going to lose weight. If you don’t exercise – even a little – and continue to eat like there’s no tomorrow, it won’t matter what you’re eating. You won’t lose weight.
There is no magic wand. There is no pill … no formula … no “ironclad” method. There is only you, your common sense quotient, and that little voice inside of you that will tell you how much you WANT to lose weight.
Oh, everybody wants to lose weight. Everybody wants to be healthy. Just like everybody who’s ever played baseball, or football, WANTS to be in the Major Leagues or the NFL.
Everybody wants it … until they figure out what it costs, not so much in terms of money, but in terms of sacrifice and hard work. Losing weight is the same. You won’t achieve one goal you strive for if you don’t want to make concessions, make sacrifices, be accountable, and take ownership of your particular body situation.
Of the four things I just mentioned, accountability is, to me, the most important. You cannot skate through life without being accountable. We’re all accountable. If we veer from the program enough times, that scale’s going to go in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter why. You could have a million good reasons … a wedding, a funeral, a birthday party, a banquet, a family cookout, a dinner party, some sort of a stressful situation … all perfectly good, perfectly NORMAL, reasons to relax your disciplines and overeat.
The scale doesn’t know the difference. Your cardiovascular system doesn’t know the difference. And if you’re diabetic, your body’s ability to handle glucose normally doesn’t know the difference. The accountability comes with what the scales, or the blood readings, or the cholesterol screenings, show.
So, the first thing we need to learn is that losing weight is 100 percent dependent upon how much we want to lose weight. How willing are we to do whatever it takes, no matter how crazy, how uncomfortable, how socially constricting, and how miserable it makes us. If you want to compare yourself with anyone, go to the gym and watch an athlete work out, especially in the summer. While all their friends are at the beach, they’re lifting weights, or running the track … often all alone.
They didn’t get those sculpted bodies just by wishing. They got them by working. If you’re heavy, or unhealthy, you won’t change YOUR body just by wishing. Or bitching about how unfair life is. Of course it’s unfair. Big deal. It doesn’t change anything. The scale does not lie. The blood kit does not lie. If the news isn’t good, then the only person who can change that is YOU!
We are all born with our own genetic code. Some of us are lucky. Obesity might not run in our families. Diabetes may not be a hereditary issue either. We may escape without becoming arthritic (though chances are that won’t happen; all of us eventually fall victim to that in some way, shape or form).
But the rest of us have to face these issues in some variety, and if we do, we do. If we’re inclined to be overweight, and if our bodies are naturally pear-shaped, or even more rotund, the reality is that we may never have a beach body. Women are hamstrung by the fashion-model look (which, I swear, is obtained only through extreme anorexia or bulimia) but guys don’t have it much easier. The guy-ideal is some buffed up ego freak who has either gotten that way through 24/7 gym time or (and probably more accurately) through steroids and human growth hormones.
The rest of us should be so lucky. My advice to anyone who sees these images and gives up hope is, “don’t look.” And if you forget yourself and look, keep repeating after me, “that’s not reality … that’s not reality.”
Reality is we come in all shapes and sizes, and reality is that we won’t get anywhere on our road to being healthy and REASONABLY thin if we can’t accept who we are or what our bodies look like; and that, like them or not, our bodies are uniquely our own.
But acceptance and giving in aren’t anywhere near the same. We may accept bad bone structure, but that doesn’t mean we have to concede our health as a result. We may accept that we’re doomed to a life of fighting the good fight, but that doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the dark side.
Oh, we do need to surrender sometimes, but in a different way. We need to surrender the notion that we can control our physical idiosyncrasies, or that we can control certain aspects of our life. We need to get that idea completely of our heads. But before I start sounding like a friend of Bill W (not that it’s a BAD thing to sound that way), I should stress that what we can’t control, we can certainly MANAGE. And maybe that’s a better word for it. And that’s what I mean about taking ownership. It’s our body, warts and all. It’s up to us to love it and accept it as our own, warts and all.
And of course you don’t deface something you love. You do your best with what you have. If you’re anywhere past the age of 13 and female, you’ve probably experimented with makeup (I shouldn’t be sexist; maybe there are some guys who do this too). And if you’re any age, and any gender, chances are good that you try to find a hairstyle (well, those of us who still HAVE hair anyway) that fits our face and looks reasonably pleasant.
We need to see our bodies in the same way we see our faces and hair. At its most basic, it is what it is. But with a little makeup, a nice hairstyle, some coloring, and perhaps a decent wardrobe, it will look somewhat presentable to the world at large.
We should put the same care into the body from the neck down, too. It is what it is. But healthy living, a decent diet, some consistent exercise (though certainly not excessive by any stretch) could make all the difference in the world.
Consistent exercise is simply walking at a good clip for about 45 minutes to an hour a day. It is also important to incorporate about two or three days worth of strength training … not to look like Ahnuld in his prime, but because, in later years, it could go a long way toward warding off osteoporosis.
But again, common sense comes into play here. What does that mean? Does it mean going to the gym every day and getting a hernia lifting weights? Are you supposed to drop dead trying to power lift three times your weight?
Of course not. It could mean anything from doing a 15-minute routine with handweights three mornings a week while watching “Crossing Jordan” reruns all the way up to the aforementioned. Whatever works best for YOU … as long as it’s SOMETHING.
So it’s not necessary to set records when it comes to exercise. Just move! Eventually, when you get comfortable with it, and it doesn’t become such a chore, moving might be easier and you may want to move even MORE. But never to the point where you injure yourself or where it becomes counterproductive in any way.
I view eating in much the same way. It is an excellent idea – if you’re totally new at this – to see a nutritionist (not to mention a cardiologist if you’re just starting out on an exercise plan after not having done any stressful activity in years) for some basic education. But that’s really all you need. A healthy diet should consist of a core group of foods (and it cuts a pretty wide swarth, too) with enough variety to comprise about 80 percent of your diet.
Anyone who’s ever done this knows what they are without me having to go over them here, but let’s generalize: Lean protein, lots of complex carbohydrates (and let’s understand that means fruits and vegetables, NOT truckloads of spaghetti), fiber (cereals, broccoli, etc.) and SPARING amounts of starchy carbs. And if you have to eat them, avoid white flour and refined sugar – at least as part of this core food plan (I hesitate to call it a diet). They are the WORST. And if you’re a diabetic, they convert to glucose once they hit your system faster than GLUCOSE does!!
Naturally, there are limits. But rather than bog you down with measurements and formulas, let’s just say that if you can refrain from eating until you feel full, and you’re keeping to these core foods, and you’re exercising, you WILL lose weight.
Nobody says this is easy. It’s simple … but not easy. It’s not easy to tear yourself away form a nice meal before you start feeling full. Sometimes, it’s not easy even KNOWING how to gauge that. But it’s a trick we should all learn.
One way is to train ourselves to eat slowly (a big problem of MINE; I eat like there’s a hurricane approaching). Eating rapidly puts you in the “full” category before you even know you’re there. Eating slowly gives you a fighting chance to take stock in what you’re doing. Remember this: It takes 20 minutes for the brain to know the stomach is full.
Another way is to make eating your sole occupation for the duration of your meal. That means no eating while watching TV, no eating while you’re working, no eating while you’re reading (even the morning paper, alas). Just eat. It’s part of the retraining process.
Another way is to eat AT THE TABLE. Sit down and ENJOY YOUR MEAL AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE ENJOYED. Don’t shove eating in there with a thousand and one other activities.
Also, get RID of this notion that eating is only allowed three times a day with no snacks. That’s true if your meals are spaced within five-hour intervals.
Otherwise, you should incorporate healthy snacks into your meal plan because they curb the excessive hunger that can lead to an overeating binge.
We tend to eat the most when we’re ravenously hungry. So, not only should you not SKIP meals, you should perhaps HAVE that mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. Just know that when you do, this is when you have to have the discipline to limit it to something sickeningly healthy … like an orange, or maybe a small salad, or carrot sticks (you get the idea).
Finally, it’s not a bad thing to splurge every once in a while. This accounts for all the times that you go somewhere and find out there’s nothing healthy for you to eat. So what you do, instead of obsessing about it, is eat the best thing you can find AND DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP OVER IT.
It also accounts for those days when you’re just sick to death of the grind and the pressure of it all, and just HAVE to have that steak bomb, or the quarter pounder with fries. That’s OK. Eat up. Just know that these items are delicacies if you ever plan on taking off weight and keeping it off.
Most of all, try not to obsess. There are plenty of things about life to obsess about, but food shouldn’t be one of them. Remember, if we weren’t meant to enjoy the sensual side of life, we’d be chomping vitamins and eating leaves off trees like elephants and giraffes.
Since we’re not, then let’s celebrate the fact that we get to choose how we provide nutrients to ourselves … and let’s go about making GOOD choices.
More later.
For example, common sense should dictate that inhaling acrid smoke from cylinders of tobacco wrapped in paper has to be unhealthy, especially since if you sucked the same chemicals contained in cigarette smoke from the exhaust pipe of a car, you’d die from carbon monoxide poisoning.
So whether tobacco is carcinogenic or not, you’d have to think it’s unhealthy. But ask anyone addicted to tobacco and they’ll rationalize their way out of it with explanations that make about as much sense as pretzel logic. The fact that tobacco IS a proven carcinogen just reinforces the common sense aspect of refraining from it, but, for whatever reason, people still flock to it like a moth is drawn to a flame. “It relaxes me.” “It relieves stress.”
Yeah. And it KILLS you too. Don’t forget that. Not to mention that it might be the most addictive of all commonly-abused substances.
But as addictive as tobacco is, there’s on surefire way to keep yourself from getting hooked. Don’t start smoking. That way, you’ll never have to deal with the problem. Similarly, there’s one ironclad way to manage alcoholism. Stop drinking. Not easy, but if you make the decision to stop, you never have to drink another drop of alcohol. Look the other way when you pass a saloon or a liquor store. Politely decline wine-tasting parties. Go home and play solitaire when someone breaks out the suds if you can’t handle being around it.
The point is … you don’t have to indulge.
Food is something entirely different, and that’s one of the reasons you see so many people today fighting weight problems. You can’t stop eating. Even if you are prone to uncontrollable binges, or 24-hour grazing, or you’re so badly diabetic that even a piece of bread spikes your blood sugar off the board, your body has to absorb nutrients, and the easiest – and certainly the most aesthetically pleasing – way to do that is through food.
Let’s talk a little about food. Or, rather, let’s say something nice about it … because there’s a lot nice to be said about it.
Food is cultural. It is central to most celebrations, especially ethnic celebrations. If you go to “Italian Night” at your local parish, you’re going to have pasta. You won’t see Vitamin C tablets underneath all that tomato sauce.
Food is also sensual (which is different from sensuous, although it could be that, too). Its flavors and aromas are certainly conducive to creating a friendly – even romantic – atmosphere. Or, to put it another way, if you’re wooing someone, and have a romantic evening in mind, you wouldn’t invite the object of your affections over to for a Met-RX shake. But you might cook a romantic dinner for two, with a nice, fresh apple pie for dessert afterward.
All of this goes in the way of saying that food is necessary component of life. Not only is it life-sustaining in a strictly biological sense, but it’s life-sustaining in a very real, spiritual and metaphysical sense too.
But while food can be hypnotizing in its effect on people, there is that double-edged sword where it can so dangerous too. Some foods are best eaten sparingly … delicious though they may be. And some foods – especially the ones that aren’t as aesthetically pleasing or conducive to romance -- seem to be the ones that end up being most nutritious and most beneficial to healthy living.
That’s not true in every case, of course (though if you’re in a position where you have to be selective about what you eat for health reasons, it might seem that way). But mixed in with all the joys of eating are some very stark, very cold, and very unappealing facts.
And the most important fact is this: Foods loaded with empty calories are of no nutritional value at all. They may taste heavenly, but they add nothing to the mix except inches around the middle and throughout the hips and, finally, the ever-expanding arse.
This doesn’t mean you can’t eat them!! It simply means that a steady diet of them, over a decent amount of time, will be more destructive than healthy.
We will get into what the term “empty calories” means. But the objective here is to address weight loss through common sense. I say that because we do not need formulas to lose weight. We don’t need “Zone diets” or “Dr. Atkins” or “L.A. Weight Loss” or anything else. I might take a flyer on Weight Watchers because it strives to create balance in the diet … which is the most important aspect of healthy eating.
But even then, losing weight comes down to common sense. If you eat every meal like it’s your last, filling yourself to the brim with whatever it is you’re putting into your mouth, you’re not going to lose weight. If you don’t exercise – even a little – and continue to eat like there’s no tomorrow, it won’t matter what you’re eating. You won’t lose weight.
There is no magic wand. There is no pill … no formula … no “ironclad” method. There is only you, your common sense quotient, and that little voice inside of you that will tell you how much you WANT to lose weight.
Oh, everybody wants to lose weight. Everybody wants to be healthy. Just like everybody who’s ever played baseball, or football, WANTS to be in the Major Leagues or the NFL.
Everybody wants it … until they figure out what it costs, not so much in terms of money, but in terms of sacrifice and hard work. Losing weight is the same. You won’t achieve one goal you strive for if you don’t want to make concessions, make sacrifices, be accountable, and take ownership of your particular body situation.
Of the four things I just mentioned, accountability is, to me, the most important. You cannot skate through life without being accountable. We’re all accountable. If we veer from the program enough times, that scale’s going to go in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter why. You could have a million good reasons … a wedding, a funeral, a birthday party, a banquet, a family cookout, a dinner party, some sort of a stressful situation … all perfectly good, perfectly NORMAL, reasons to relax your disciplines and overeat.
The scale doesn’t know the difference. Your cardiovascular system doesn’t know the difference. And if you’re diabetic, your body’s ability to handle glucose normally doesn’t know the difference. The accountability comes with what the scales, or the blood readings, or the cholesterol screenings, show.
So, the first thing we need to learn is that losing weight is 100 percent dependent upon how much we want to lose weight. How willing are we to do whatever it takes, no matter how crazy, how uncomfortable, how socially constricting, and how miserable it makes us. If you want to compare yourself with anyone, go to the gym and watch an athlete work out, especially in the summer. While all their friends are at the beach, they’re lifting weights, or running the track … often all alone.
They didn’t get those sculpted bodies just by wishing. They got them by working. If you’re heavy, or unhealthy, you won’t change YOUR body just by wishing. Or bitching about how unfair life is. Of course it’s unfair. Big deal. It doesn’t change anything. The scale does not lie. The blood kit does not lie. If the news isn’t good, then the only person who can change that is YOU!
We are all born with our own genetic code. Some of us are lucky. Obesity might not run in our families. Diabetes may not be a hereditary issue either. We may escape without becoming arthritic (though chances are that won’t happen; all of us eventually fall victim to that in some way, shape or form).
But the rest of us have to face these issues in some variety, and if we do, we do. If we’re inclined to be overweight, and if our bodies are naturally pear-shaped, or even more rotund, the reality is that we may never have a beach body. Women are hamstrung by the fashion-model look (which, I swear, is obtained only through extreme anorexia or bulimia) but guys don’t have it much easier. The guy-ideal is some buffed up ego freak who has either gotten that way through 24/7 gym time or (and probably more accurately) through steroids and human growth hormones.
The rest of us should be so lucky. My advice to anyone who sees these images and gives up hope is, “don’t look.” And if you forget yourself and look, keep repeating after me, “that’s not reality … that’s not reality.”
Reality is we come in all shapes and sizes, and reality is that we won’t get anywhere on our road to being healthy and REASONABLY thin if we can’t accept who we are or what our bodies look like; and that, like them or not, our bodies are uniquely our own.
But acceptance and giving in aren’t anywhere near the same. We may accept bad bone structure, but that doesn’t mean we have to concede our health as a result. We may accept that we’re doomed to a life of fighting the good fight, but that doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the dark side.
Oh, we do need to surrender sometimes, but in a different way. We need to surrender the notion that we can control our physical idiosyncrasies, or that we can control certain aspects of our life. We need to get that idea completely of our heads. But before I start sounding like a friend of Bill W (not that it’s a BAD thing to sound that way), I should stress that what we can’t control, we can certainly MANAGE. And maybe that’s a better word for it. And that’s what I mean about taking ownership. It’s our body, warts and all. It’s up to us to love it and accept it as our own, warts and all.
And of course you don’t deface something you love. You do your best with what you have. If you’re anywhere past the age of 13 and female, you’ve probably experimented with makeup (I shouldn’t be sexist; maybe there are some guys who do this too). And if you’re any age, and any gender, chances are good that you try to find a hairstyle (well, those of us who still HAVE hair anyway) that fits our face and looks reasonably pleasant.
We need to see our bodies in the same way we see our faces and hair. At its most basic, it is what it is. But with a little makeup, a nice hairstyle, some coloring, and perhaps a decent wardrobe, it will look somewhat presentable to the world at large.
We should put the same care into the body from the neck down, too. It is what it is. But healthy living, a decent diet, some consistent exercise (though certainly not excessive by any stretch) could make all the difference in the world.
Consistent exercise is simply walking at a good clip for about 45 minutes to an hour a day. It is also important to incorporate about two or three days worth of strength training … not to look like Ahnuld in his prime, but because, in later years, it could go a long way toward warding off osteoporosis.
But again, common sense comes into play here. What does that mean? Does it mean going to the gym every day and getting a hernia lifting weights? Are you supposed to drop dead trying to power lift three times your weight?
Of course not. It could mean anything from doing a 15-minute routine with handweights three mornings a week while watching “Crossing Jordan” reruns all the way up to the aforementioned. Whatever works best for YOU … as long as it’s SOMETHING.
So it’s not necessary to set records when it comes to exercise. Just move! Eventually, when you get comfortable with it, and it doesn’t become such a chore, moving might be easier and you may want to move even MORE. But never to the point where you injure yourself or where it becomes counterproductive in any way.
I view eating in much the same way. It is an excellent idea – if you’re totally new at this – to see a nutritionist (not to mention a cardiologist if you’re just starting out on an exercise plan after not having done any stressful activity in years) for some basic education. But that’s really all you need. A healthy diet should consist of a core group of foods (and it cuts a pretty wide swarth, too) with enough variety to comprise about 80 percent of your diet.
Anyone who’s ever done this knows what they are without me having to go over them here, but let’s generalize: Lean protein, lots of complex carbohydrates (and let’s understand that means fruits and vegetables, NOT truckloads of spaghetti), fiber (cereals, broccoli, etc.) and SPARING amounts of starchy carbs. And if you have to eat them, avoid white flour and refined sugar – at least as part of this core food plan (I hesitate to call it a diet). They are the WORST. And if you’re a diabetic, they convert to glucose once they hit your system faster than GLUCOSE does!!
Naturally, there are limits. But rather than bog you down with measurements and formulas, let’s just say that if you can refrain from eating until you feel full, and you’re keeping to these core foods, and you’re exercising, you WILL lose weight.
Nobody says this is easy. It’s simple … but not easy. It’s not easy to tear yourself away form a nice meal before you start feeling full. Sometimes, it’s not easy even KNOWING how to gauge that. But it’s a trick we should all learn.
One way is to train ourselves to eat slowly (a big problem of MINE; I eat like there’s a hurricane approaching). Eating rapidly puts you in the “full” category before you even know you’re there. Eating slowly gives you a fighting chance to take stock in what you’re doing. Remember this: It takes 20 minutes for the brain to know the stomach is full.
Another way is to make eating your sole occupation for the duration of your meal. That means no eating while watching TV, no eating while you’re working, no eating while you’re reading (even the morning paper, alas). Just eat. It’s part of the retraining process.
Another way is to eat AT THE TABLE. Sit down and ENJOY YOUR MEAL AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE ENJOYED. Don’t shove eating in there with a thousand and one other activities.
Also, get RID of this notion that eating is only allowed three times a day with no snacks. That’s true if your meals are spaced within five-hour intervals.
Otherwise, you should incorporate healthy snacks into your meal plan because they curb the excessive hunger that can lead to an overeating binge.
We tend to eat the most when we’re ravenously hungry. So, not only should you not SKIP meals, you should perhaps HAVE that mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. Just know that when you do, this is when you have to have the discipline to limit it to something sickeningly healthy … like an orange, or maybe a small salad, or carrot sticks (you get the idea).
Finally, it’s not a bad thing to splurge every once in a while. This accounts for all the times that you go somewhere and find out there’s nothing healthy for you to eat. So what you do, instead of obsessing about it, is eat the best thing you can find AND DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP OVER IT.
It also accounts for those days when you’re just sick to death of the grind and the pressure of it all, and just HAVE to have that steak bomb, or the quarter pounder with fries. That’s OK. Eat up. Just know that these items are delicacies if you ever plan on taking off weight and keeping it off.
Most of all, try not to obsess. There are plenty of things about life to obsess about, but food shouldn’t be one of them. Remember, if we weren’t meant to enjoy the sensual side of life, we’d be chomping vitamins and eating leaves off trees like elephants and giraffes.
Since we’re not, then let’s celebrate the fact that we get to choose how we provide nutrients to ourselves … and let’s go about making GOOD choices.
More later.
Monday, May 11, 2009
In defense of newspapers
Thirty years ago last month, I began my association with what was then the Daily Evening Item. Now it's simply The Daily Item.
I bring this up not to seek accolades, but to comment that much has changed in our industry since that Tuesday morning in 1979 when I walked into the second-floor newsroom to begin what has been an enriching and rewarding career at the paper.
In 1979, newspapers still held the upper hand in the gathering and dissemination of information, although television was – and in some cases still is – an unwelcome intrusion into the world of serious journalism. Even then, print people despised the “mike jockeys” as “rip and readers” whose only attributes were their voices and their looks.
Today, of course, the print medium – judging from the depressing advertising and circulation figures we’re seeing daily – would appear to be pretty far down the list of preferred news sources. There was no internet in 1979, and therefore no explosion of free, easy, and often glaringly biased information tailored to fit the political slant of just about everyone who has an opinion.
We are what we’ve always been … a slow-moving industry (printing once a day in an age of lightning-fast dissemination of news tends to paint you with that brush) that, while flawed by natural human imperfections, still holds to a uniform set of standards and is still bound by a uniform set of laws. And while there are some serious and responsible blogs on the web, it’s also true that, for the most part, internet postings are impervious to the types of checks and balances that at least attempt to keep the print medium fair.
Newspapers aren’t dead, but their print editions are in trouble. It’s likely that if you added the number of editions sold and the number of hits papers get on their websites (and this is especially true for papers that update their sites frequently) one could conclude the industry is as healthy as it ever was.
But that doesn’t explain why papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe are reeling, and why other papers have shut down their print editions entirely. I will leave it to those with far more expertise in the business side than me to explain that!
We stand to lose something very valuable if newspapers are to fall victim to the Information Age. And I’m not talking about the eradication of democracy as we know it (I don’t like that argument very much, frankly).
Of course, it’s true that a good newspaper holds the powerful accountable (often to the chagrin of the powerful and their allies). But whatever flaws there may be in the internet’s ability to be restrained and responsible, holding the powerful accountable is well within its capabilities.
But newspapers have other purposes. Even with a laptop and wireless, eating breakfast with your computer can be cumbersome. Eating it with the paper spread out in front of you is saner, neater and far less expensive if you spill your cereal or get crumbs all over the place.
Joking aside, I got into this business, and gravitated toward newspapers, because I always saw them as communities unto themselves. They were one-stop shopping vehicles where you could find out what was going on in your communities, find out who died, who got arrested, which local teams won, what was playing at the local theaters, which store was selling hamburg at five percent off, and what was on TV tonight. At the same time, you could clip coupons, do the crossword, play bridge and even chess, do word puzzles, check box scores and standings.
And best of all, you could do all of the above in some degree of comfort and with absolutely no pressure to be technologically current.
I’m sure someone from every generation has said this, but it’s doubly true now: this is a terrifyingly fast, impersonal age. Advances in technology happen faster than most of us can fathom, and there’s more and more pressure to either keep up with them or fall hopelessly behind.
The pace may be slower with newspapers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even with things changing a mile a minute, it’s necessary sometimes to digest, and to process. It’s also necessary to preserve and remember.
Newspapers give you something you’ll never find on the internet: A daily snapshot of life. Years from now, you can go back to an edition from The Item, and get a pretty accurate picture of what life was like on that day. It would really, really be a shame to sacrifice that for the convenience of staring at life through a monitor.
I bring this up not to seek accolades, but to comment that much has changed in our industry since that Tuesday morning in 1979 when I walked into the second-floor newsroom to begin what has been an enriching and rewarding career at the paper.
In 1979, newspapers still held the upper hand in the gathering and dissemination of information, although television was – and in some cases still is – an unwelcome intrusion into the world of serious journalism. Even then, print people despised the “mike jockeys” as “rip and readers” whose only attributes were their voices and their looks.
Today, of course, the print medium – judging from the depressing advertising and circulation figures we’re seeing daily – would appear to be pretty far down the list of preferred news sources. There was no internet in 1979, and therefore no explosion of free, easy, and often glaringly biased information tailored to fit the political slant of just about everyone who has an opinion.
We are what we’ve always been … a slow-moving industry (printing once a day in an age of lightning-fast dissemination of news tends to paint you with that brush) that, while flawed by natural human imperfections, still holds to a uniform set of standards and is still bound by a uniform set of laws. And while there are some serious and responsible blogs on the web, it’s also true that, for the most part, internet postings are impervious to the types of checks and balances that at least attempt to keep the print medium fair.
Newspapers aren’t dead, but their print editions are in trouble. It’s likely that if you added the number of editions sold and the number of hits papers get on their websites (and this is especially true for papers that update their sites frequently) one could conclude the industry is as healthy as it ever was.
But that doesn’t explain why papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe are reeling, and why other papers have shut down their print editions entirely. I will leave it to those with far more expertise in the business side than me to explain that!
We stand to lose something very valuable if newspapers are to fall victim to the Information Age. And I’m not talking about the eradication of democracy as we know it (I don’t like that argument very much, frankly).
Of course, it’s true that a good newspaper holds the powerful accountable (often to the chagrin of the powerful and their allies). But whatever flaws there may be in the internet’s ability to be restrained and responsible, holding the powerful accountable is well within its capabilities.
But newspapers have other purposes. Even with a laptop and wireless, eating breakfast with your computer can be cumbersome. Eating it with the paper spread out in front of you is saner, neater and far less expensive if you spill your cereal or get crumbs all over the place.
Joking aside, I got into this business, and gravitated toward newspapers, because I always saw them as communities unto themselves. They were one-stop shopping vehicles where you could find out what was going on in your communities, find out who died, who got arrested, which local teams won, what was playing at the local theaters, which store was selling hamburg at five percent off, and what was on TV tonight. At the same time, you could clip coupons, do the crossword, play bridge and even chess, do word puzzles, check box scores and standings.
And best of all, you could do all of the above in some degree of comfort and with absolutely no pressure to be technologically current.
I’m sure someone from every generation has said this, but it’s doubly true now: this is a terrifyingly fast, impersonal age. Advances in technology happen faster than most of us can fathom, and there’s more and more pressure to either keep up with them or fall hopelessly behind.
The pace may be slower with newspapers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even with things changing a mile a minute, it’s necessary sometimes to digest, and to process. It’s also necessary to preserve and remember.
Newspapers give you something you’ll never find on the internet: A daily snapshot of life. Years from now, you can go back to an edition from The Item, and get a pretty accurate picture of what life was like on that day. It would really, really be a shame to sacrifice that for the convenience of staring at life through a monitor.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Reflections on Brother Linus, CFX, upon the dedication of the new athletic complex in his name at St. John's Preparatory School ... my alma mater.
Brother Linus was my religion teacher in my freshman year at St. John’s Prep … but to end the sentence there does monumental injustice to the man.
He was so much more.
He was, all at once, a coach, a teacher, a mentor, a guidance counselor, and, perhaps most of all, a shepherd … taking the often-frightened freshmen who swarmed into the school each September and guiding them through that transition into young adulthood.
Schools such as St. John’s Prep are not for everyone. Even if you do have an above-average intelligence quotient, a place like The Prep demands so much more in the way of academic accountability than simply the natural, sometimes effortless ability to absorb information.
In fact, if you’re academically gifted, and expect to coast through St. John’s Prep based solely on that good fortune, save your money. You’ll have missed the entire point of what makes The Prep special.
Every school of this type needs a Brother Linus … someone who is not afraid to remind a 14-year-old kid that he’s just entered the world of high expectations while, at the same time, making it clear that he has that young man’s back as he navigates the rough waters of adjustment.
In 1967, I was that 14-year-old kid, catapulted out of the cocoon of Sacred Heart School in Lynn and thrust into the social maelstrom of The Prep. I had no idea what to expect. I knew this wasn’t Lynn Classical. For one thing, the school resembled a small college campus (my grandmother could never get used to that; she’d always ask me “how’s college?” when she inquired about school). And, back in 1967, residents boarded there. But otherwise, it was all new … and terrifying.
It was major culture shock … not to mention culture clash. One of my classmates came from Aruba, and had never seen snow until the first time we got some that winter. And boy, did we get some … a sneak snowstorm in November that made a major mess out of the commute home. I can still remember sitting in a parking lot that was Route 128, until well past nightfall, in a car with four other classmates and one beleaguered mother whose turn it was – sadly, for her -- to carpool.
Welcome to the winter wonderland, Mike Maxey (the classmate) and Mary McGovern (the mom).
Maxey must have liked the snow, by the way. He lives in Quincy now.
My freshman class was divided into seven groups, ranging from Offical Class (O.C.) Zero (the exceptionally smart ones) to O.C. Six (do the math). The only thing all of us had in common that year was the religion teacher: Brother Linus. I’m sure that, since we were at a school staffed with Xaverian Brothers, this not due to a shortage of religion teachers; nor was it any accident.
As a freshman guidance counselor, Brother Linus was – for all intents and purposes – the official “shepherd” of the ninth grade, whether that was part of his job description or not. He was the best friend a young kid could have at The Prep. Between the clashes in background and the inevitably wide disparity in emotional maturity that comes with a diverse group of kids, The Prep could be an extremely difficult and lonely place if you found yourself on the low end of the food chain in one respect or another.
Brother Linus was always there to help you sort it out, even if he often did it with tough love. He wasn’t afraid to tell you if he thought your difficulties were of your own doing, but he could do it in a way that reinforced your confidence instead of destroying it. That is a special gift.
As a religion teacher, all I can say is that Brother Linus turned the Baltimore Catechism on its head daily, whether he was describing Moses and his refugees -- as they wandered through the desert -- as “a bunch of rag-tag Jews,” or calling all the women in the Old Testament “Jezebels.”
He also used religion class as a time to bond with his students – many of them budding athletes (The Prep being an athletic, as well as academic, Mecca) – in other ways.
His universal greeting to all was, “Hey, ace.” One of the first things he told us was that he was a close personal friend of Vince Lombardi, the late, great coach of the Green Bay Packers. His lectures were always peppered with “Vince-isms,” and he’d often begin a class by saying, “I was on the phone with Vince last night …”
This seemed like it could be true. He was the freshman football coach. And there may have been a time, albeit briefly, when, naïve as I was, I actually believed him.
He loved his football … and disdained basketball (which he derisively called “bouncy-bounce”). He’d have us in the aisles with his impressions of a basketball player, running around in his short-shorts, screaming, “owww … he touched me.”
He didn’t seem to have much use for tennis, either. Once, during a particularly uninspired freshman football practice, he gathered us all together and pointed to where the tennis courts were (you couldn’t see them from the field, so it was an approximation) and said, “if want to go over there and hit that little rubber ball back and forth across that net, be my guest.”
But if he was entertaining as a coach and a teacher, he was also tough. He ran hard and physical practices, both in football and hockey … and never let up (not even when the Red Sox were fighting to win the 1967 pennant and – much to his annoyance -- we’d all be on the lookout for game updates if they were being played in the afternoon).
He was one of the few teachers I had at The Prep who actually gave out a syllabus (he didn’t call it that; but that’s what it was). On it was the term “SQ,” which stood for “surprise quiz.”
The only surprise about these quizzes is that they were brutal.
Brother Linus also demanded that we maintain a thorough (and legible) notebook that chronicled all his bon mots (over which he pored – at the end of every quarter -- as if he were an auditor for the IRS).
This, of course, was part of the shepherding process. I came to The Prep grossly unprepared for young adulthood, of course, and my first encounter with the tough side of Brother Linus the Teacher came when I got that notebook back at the end of the first quarter … with just a string of question marks all in a neat, tidy row … and a great, big “F.” I got a 75 for that quarter, pulled down considerably because of the sloppy notebook.
He told me he was being “generous,” because it was the first quarter of my freshman year, but that he was also pretty steamed at my total lack of care and organization. My mother was mortified. How could such a good Catholic boy – “and an altar boy, no less -- do so horribly in religion?
This led to the discovery of Krause’s Law No. 1: Religion teachers are eternally vigilant when it comes to ferreting out students who would tend to blow their courses off as irrelevant in comparison to English, Algebra, History and/or just about anything else … and they mark accordingly. I learned, after that disaster, never again to slight the religion teacher at St. John’s Prep.
Brother Linus died, quite unexpectedly, in 1977 … six years after I left The Prep and only a decade after I had the privilege of being one of his students. I always thought of him as indestructible, much like Red Auerbach. And it was hard to fathom that he had died.
Thanks to teachers like Brother Linus (and Paul Smith, Tom Ford, Bob McKenna, John Westfield, and many others) I sailed through college. I developed decent and disciplined study habits thanks to the expectations placed on me by the Xaverian Brothers education model.
Above all, I always kept an organized, legible notebook for every course in my five years at Northeastern University. Thank you, Brother Linus.
Shortly after the new Brother Linus athletic complex was dedicated, I went up to The Prep on a whim and decided to give myself a private tour. I walked all around the complex (which is massive, and impressive, and has neither a basketball nor a tennis court on hits grounds!) and, well, the ghosts just spoke to me.
I was immediately transported back to 1967, on that very field, hitting a tackling sled, listening to his lectures about guts, determination and Vince Lombardi, and how much it killed me to face him, in late October of that year, and tell him that due to poor grades my parents told me I had to quit the freshman team.
As I walked around the campus on that beautiful April day, I made my way up to the cafeteria and saw a gaggle of 14-year-old freshmen emerge from the building and spill out onto the campus. Which one of them was me? Which one of them had been ejected from the cocoon of a protective Catholic elementary/middle school and thrust, totally unprepared, into the social maelstrom of The Prep?
And who, in 2009, is The Prep’s Brother Linus?
Whoever he is, may God bless him.
He was so much more.
He was, all at once, a coach, a teacher, a mentor, a guidance counselor, and, perhaps most of all, a shepherd … taking the often-frightened freshmen who swarmed into the school each September and guiding them through that transition into young adulthood.
Schools such as St. John’s Prep are not for everyone. Even if you do have an above-average intelligence quotient, a place like The Prep demands so much more in the way of academic accountability than simply the natural, sometimes effortless ability to absorb information.
In fact, if you’re academically gifted, and expect to coast through St. John’s Prep based solely on that good fortune, save your money. You’ll have missed the entire point of what makes The Prep special.
Every school of this type needs a Brother Linus … someone who is not afraid to remind a 14-year-old kid that he’s just entered the world of high expectations while, at the same time, making it clear that he has that young man’s back as he navigates the rough waters of adjustment.
In 1967, I was that 14-year-old kid, catapulted out of the cocoon of Sacred Heart School in Lynn and thrust into the social maelstrom of The Prep. I had no idea what to expect. I knew this wasn’t Lynn Classical. For one thing, the school resembled a small college campus (my grandmother could never get used to that; she’d always ask me “how’s college?” when she inquired about school). And, back in 1967, residents boarded there. But otherwise, it was all new … and terrifying.
It was major culture shock … not to mention culture clash. One of my classmates came from Aruba, and had never seen snow until the first time we got some that winter. And boy, did we get some … a sneak snowstorm in November that made a major mess out of the commute home. I can still remember sitting in a parking lot that was Route 128, until well past nightfall, in a car with four other classmates and one beleaguered mother whose turn it was – sadly, for her -- to carpool.
Welcome to the winter wonderland, Mike Maxey (the classmate) and Mary McGovern (the mom).
Maxey must have liked the snow, by the way. He lives in Quincy now.
My freshman class was divided into seven groups, ranging from Offical Class (O.C.) Zero (the exceptionally smart ones) to O.C. Six (do the math). The only thing all of us had in common that year was the religion teacher: Brother Linus. I’m sure that, since we were at a school staffed with Xaverian Brothers, this not due to a shortage of religion teachers; nor was it any accident.
As a freshman guidance counselor, Brother Linus was – for all intents and purposes – the official “shepherd” of the ninth grade, whether that was part of his job description or not. He was the best friend a young kid could have at The Prep. Between the clashes in background and the inevitably wide disparity in emotional maturity that comes with a diverse group of kids, The Prep could be an extremely difficult and lonely place if you found yourself on the low end of the food chain in one respect or another.
Brother Linus was always there to help you sort it out, even if he often did it with tough love. He wasn’t afraid to tell you if he thought your difficulties were of your own doing, but he could do it in a way that reinforced your confidence instead of destroying it. That is a special gift.
As a religion teacher, all I can say is that Brother Linus turned the Baltimore Catechism on its head daily, whether he was describing Moses and his refugees -- as they wandered through the desert -- as “a bunch of rag-tag Jews,” or calling all the women in the Old Testament “Jezebels.”
He also used religion class as a time to bond with his students – many of them budding athletes (The Prep being an athletic, as well as academic, Mecca) – in other ways.
His universal greeting to all was, “Hey, ace.” One of the first things he told us was that he was a close personal friend of Vince Lombardi, the late, great coach of the Green Bay Packers. His lectures were always peppered with “Vince-isms,” and he’d often begin a class by saying, “I was on the phone with Vince last night …”
This seemed like it could be true. He was the freshman football coach. And there may have been a time, albeit briefly, when, naïve as I was, I actually believed him.
He loved his football … and disdained basketball (which he derisively called “bouncy-bounce”). He’d have us in the aisles with his impressions of a basketball player, running around in his short-shorts, screaming, “owww … he touched me.”
He didn’t seem to have much use for tennis, either. Once, during a particularly uninspired freshman football practice, he gathered us all together and pointed to where the tennis courts were (you couldn’t see them from the field, so it was an approximation) and said, “if want to go over there and hit that little rubber ball back and forth across that net, be my guest.”
But if he was entertaining as a coach and a teacher, he was also tough. He ran hard and physical practices, both in football and hockey … and never let up (not even when the Red Sox were fighting to win the 1967 pennant and – much to his annoyance -- we’d all be on the lookout for game updates if they were being played in the afternoon).
He was one of the few teachers I had at The Prep who actually gave out a syllabus (he didn’t call it that; but that’s what it was). On it was the term “SQ,” which stood for “surprise quiz.”
The only surprise about these quizzes is that they were brutal.
Brother Linus also demanded that we maintain a thorough (and legible) notebook that chronicled all his bon mots (over which he pored – at the end of every quarter -- as if he were an auditor for the IRS).
This, of course, was part of the shepherding process. I came to The Prep grossly unprepared for young adulthood, of course, and my first encounter with the tough side of Brother Linus the Teacher came when I got that notebook back at the end of the first quarter … with just a string of question marks all in a neat, tidy row … and a great, big “F.” I got a 75 for that quarter, pulled down considerably because of the sloppy notebook.
He told me he was being “generous,” because it was the first quarter of my freshman year, but that he was also pretty steamed at my total lack of care and organization. My mother was mortified. How could such a good Catholic boy – “and an altar boy, no less -- do so horribly in religion?
This led to the discovery of Krause’s Law No. 1: Religion teachers are eternally vigilant when it comes to ferreting out students who would tend to blow their courses off as irrelevant in comparison to English, Algebra, History and/or just about anything else … and they mark accordingly. I learned, after that disaster, never again to slight the religion teacher at St. John’s Prep.
Brother Linus died, quite unexpectedly, in 1977 … six years after I left The Prep and only a decade after I had the privilege of being one of his students. I always thought of him as indestructible, much like Red Auerbach. And it was hard to fathom that he had died.
Thanks to teachers like Brother Linus (and Paul Smith, Tom Ford, Bob McKenna, John Westfield, and many others) I sailed through college. I developed decent and disciplined study habits thanks to the expectations placed on me by the Xaverian Brothers education model.
Above all, I always kept an organized, legible notebook for every course in my five years at Northeastern University. Thank you, Brother Linus.
Shortly after the new Brother Linus athletic complex was dedicated, I went up to The Prep on a whim and decided to give myself a private tour. I walked all around the complex (which is massive, and impressive, and has neither a basketball nor a tennis court on hits grounds!) and, well, the ghosts just spoke to me.
I was immediately transported back to 1967, on that very field, hitting a tackling sled, listening to his lectures about guts, determination and Vince Lombardi, and how much it killed me to face him, in late October of that year, and tell him that due to poor grades my parents told me I had to quit the freshman team.
As I walked around the campus on that beautiful April day, I made my way up to the cafeteria and saw a gaggle of 14-year-old freshmen emerge from the building and spill out onto the campus. Which one of them was me? Which one of them had been ejected from the cocoon of a protective Catholic elementary/middle school and thrust, totally unprepared, into the social maelstrom of The Prep?
And who, in 2009, is The Prep’s Brother Linus?
Whoever he is, may God bless him.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Farewell, George W. Bush
I did this eight years ago, when Clinton's term expired, and I'm going to attempt it again ... and TRY to be as fair as possible.
First, let's establish one thing: George W. Bush is probably a good guy deep down inside. He strikes me as such. I mean, if I sat next to him at a ballgame, and we struck up a conversation, I'd imagine we'd be able to talk, and laugh, and wax philosophical about our love of baseball and sports.
So I'll go into this thinking he's not the personification of evil. I'll reserve that judgment for some of the others who contributed toward making these last eight years a very dark period in American history. But I'll cut HIM some slack. He reminds me of nothing more than a regular guy who has difficulty hiding his frustration at times, and even more difficulty admitting he might have miscalculated and made some mistakes. Sort of like your average fear-crazed boss bucking for a good review at your expense. Nice enough people ... until cornered. Then, the claws come out, and the fangs bared.
I wasn't happy he got elected, even though I never liked Al Gore. I thought Gore was bad candidate, that he made a poor choice in running mates, and that his campaign, and the way he campaigned, was very uninspiring. On the other hand, Bush is like a lot of political candidates ... great on the stump, able to connect on a personal level, but with nothing tangible to back it up. If I didn't study issues, and really LISTEN to some of the things he said -- not to mention pay attention to the people with whom he surrounded himself -- I might have voted for him too. He was a much more amiable-looking person on the campaign trail, happier, looser, more relaxed, and I would imagine people with no other point of reference voted for him because of that.
I don't know if the election was stolen. It's quite possible that Florida was simply a giant clusterfuck that was nobody's fault, and that the process was irreparably muddled. I know that's the way you steal elections ... create enough doubt and uncertainty as to render the entire process irrelevant. But since the Democrats have done this too in the past too, my reaction to this is shame on THEM for not being prepared for such an eventuality. If they got caught looking -- to borrow a baseball term -- then too bad. It isn't as if it's the first time it ever happened.
But if I were the Republicans, I'd hesitate to be that brazen, on the assumption that the Democrats would have watchdogs on the payroll to ferret out such things. I'll bet the Republicans did!
At any rate, the entire process was a farce, it made the U.S. look bad, and whether it was legit or not, by January 20, 2001, we had a president and it was up to us to at least wish him well. To do anything else borders on unpatriotic, I think. The process played itself out under the system that was put in place to adjudicate it, and, flawed or perfect, it is what it is. If you don't like the process, by all means get it changed by the next election. But absent that, it was what it was.
He wasn't my guy, and I'll admit that once the process started, I hoped, against hope, that they'd find something down there to overturn the results and swing the election to Gore. His issues, and his way of thinking, were more in line with mine. But despite everything, I had this feeling of powerlessness. My president was George W. Bush, I'm an American citizen, and, like him or not, I certainly didn't want him to fail. But I didn't think it was a realistic expectation.
I got an uneasy feeling even before the inauguration ... well, even before the election. Dick Cheney was a Henry Kissinger disciple, and I'm of the opinion that Kissinger, as Machiavellian as they come, did more than any American diplomat of his era to put us in bad standing in the world.
Anyway, that was one of the big reasons I could never have voted for Bush. Another is that even though he seemed like a regular guy, I had no respect for his intelligence or his curiosity (sometimes, you don't even have to be that SMART ... but for God's sake have some innate curiosity about the world around you!).
I saw Bush then -- as I do now -- as a child of privilege who never extended his realm beyond his core world. And while you may counter that the Kennedys were also children of privilege, let's not forget that three of them fought in World War II, one of them was killed, and another wounded badly enough that he was physically incapacitated for the rest of his life. There WAS another side to them ... a side that George W. Bush, by his own doing, avoided seeing.
Simply put, George W. Bush was, to me, a frat boy whose life was bought and paid for by privilege. He might have been an amiable enough fellow, but didn't have a clue as to what the problems in this country were. He rode out every possible crisis the country faced, protected by money and privilege. About the only thing in which he truly succeeded was running the Texas Rangers, and he was so good at that he traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs!
So, my fear wasn't that George W. Bush, himself, would take the country down some lonely, badly-traveled roads; but that the people around him -- the ones who groomed him for this undertaking -- would steer him there, and that he'd lack the requisite intelligence and curiosity to know any better.
As dull, boring, and completely uninspiring as Al Gore was, I got the feeling that he'd at least be his own man. He could have been the most ordinary of ordinary presidents (and I have a feeling he would have been), but I doubt there would have been half the drama, and half the trauma, that we got out of Bush -- and that's even WITH the acknowledgement that 9/11 probably would have happened regardless of WHO was president.
More about 9/11 before we go on. Within months of Bill Clinton's inauguration, terrorists planted bombs beneath the World Trade Center. Within months of George W. Bush's inauguration, terrorists flew planes into the WTC and killed 3,000 people. If the Obama people don't see a trend here, then they're not paying attention and have NO business claiming they were taken by surprise if some radicals try something this year.
But, alas, 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and, rightly or wrongly, he gets the blame. Just as Obama will get the blame if some public mall, or sports venue, is blown to smithereens this year.
Pursuant to 9/11, let me say here that I doubt there was a right, or a wrong, initial response. We needed Bush to express justifiable outrage, and we needed him to pledge, firmly and without hesitation, that those responsible would be held accountable. It's what happened AFTER that, however, what we can debate.
While nobody's suggesting we should ever forget that day, Bush pretty much based his entire presidency on the event. Especially during his first term, when he needed the seed to sprout daily for political purposes, he managed to get Sept. 11 into the conversation every chance he got. It was as if he woke up in the morning, looked at himself in the mirror, and the first words out of his mouth were "9/11." People got irritated with Jimmy Carter during the 1980 campaign for wrapping the flag around himself, hiding in the Rose Garden, and using the Hostage Crisis to his advantage, but he had NOTHING on Bush. George W. had now written the textbook on how to exploit a national tragedy.
Or should I say Karl Rove has.
I think history will judge George W. Bush the same way it judged Warren G. Harding ... as a slow-witted man led astray by advisers with agendas that didn't exactly jibe with the national interest. In an era when the world was changing, and in an era when our enemies had discovered an effective -- deadly, even -- way to level the playing field, Bush's team tried, in vain, to turn the clock back to the 1950s ... the immediate post-WWII aftermath in which the American Way was seen as the World Way by the part of the planet not imprisoned by the so-called Iron Curtain.
Problem is, a lot of water had flown under the dam between 1945 and 2000. Where our reputation, coming out of World War II, was of benevolence and heroism, our armor had been pierced a few times. We overthrew regimes, regardless of their popularity, if it didn't serve our interest. We lost, and lost BADLY, in Vietnam, after all was said and done. Each time we tried to play traffic cop to snuff out some local dispute, we created enemies as a result. A rag-tag band of Iranians got the better of us, holding our diplomats hostage. Zealots snuck a truckload of bombs into a Beirut barracks, killing over 200 marines. We got caught with our pants down in the Iran-Contra scandal. We sent the marines into Granada, and launched a military assault on Panama. We sent troops to Saudi Arabia and drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We launched periodic bombing raids on Iraq.
This isn't to say that some of these actions were justifiable or strategically necessary. But we got a reputation for being heavy-handed in much the same manner Israel is perceived now.
The world may have been prepared to accept a sort of pax Americana in 1945, but it wasn't in 2000. And overtures by the neocons who took over the Bush White House had to appear, to the outside world, as if the U.S. was going to try to reassert its dominance at a time when many countries and cultures were fighting to assert their own way of life. And I think this really came back to haunt the U.S. when it looked for allies to fight in Iraq. Countries that were with us in the 1991 Gulf War, declined this time.
I have no problem with what happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban supported bin Laden, and in that situation, that's guilty enough for me. I just with that Bush had finished one job before going onto the completely unnecessary war in Iraq.
There's plenty of evidence that this was the game-plan from Day 1. Perhaps there were a few neocons who worked in H.W. Bush's regime who disagreed with Poppy when he refused to march onto Baghdad when he had the army and the tactical advantage to do so. But while Poppy may have been patrician and out of touch himself, he was not dumb. Poppy understood, obviously better than the neocon zealots who worked for him, that there was always a "now, what?" about conquering Baghdad.
And the “now, what” would have been the most difficult part of such a campaign. H.W. obviously didn’t want to deal with that, and, in retrospect, I’d say H.W. made the right choice. I’m also guessing that he followed the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the person of Colin Powell, who convinced him that owning Baghdad was more trouble than it was worth.
And Dubya made the wrong choice. Not only did he make the wrong choice, he lied and schemed to win support. I refuse to believe, for example, that Bush didn’t know the intelligence was cooked prior to the invasion. I know I’ve said that he was woefully lacking in curiosity, but you’d have to comatose not to be able to say to your intelligence community “look, SHOW me a weapon – any weapon – and we’ll talk. Until then, forget it.”
No. These people wanted to finish the job they felt Bush I vacated, and they talked his son into doing it. No other explanation fits. And there are all sorts of problems with this. First, all situations change with time … and 10 years is a lot of time. There were obviously other trouble spots, different enemies, different threats … and, well, Saddam Hussein was soooo 1990. He wasn’t bothering anyone outside his own borders. And to the people who try to justify our involvement with the canard that we were overthrowing a cruel dictator, my answer is that there were people over there shooting at US … and OUR citizens, and OUR military. With all due respect to the Iraqi people, we needed to solve THAT problem first. Try to stabilize the rest of the region – as best as you can – and THEN figure out how to deal with Saddam.
Instead, the Bush administration destabilized the region even more. Not only that, it invited radical fringe groups to sprout up all over the country and turn what should have been a relatively easy military exercise (based on the comparative strength of the armies) into a protracted struggle that lasted longer than our involvement in World War II. This was such a monumental failure in planning and execution that it staggers the mind.
This would have been inexcusable even if the circumstances that led to the war were legitimate. The fact that they weren’t makes such gross failure criminal.
The Iraq war tops the list of Bush administration catastrophes because it was conducted under false pretenses and bungled worse than a third-rate burglary. But there were others.
Hurricane Katrina was nobody’s fault, to be sure. And even if federal response was perfectly orchestrated, and even if Brownie HAD done a heck of a job, there would have been devastation in New Orleans of a similar scope to what eventually happened.
But there wasn’t. And while it’s certainly true that state and local authorities should also be held accountable for THEIR part in this massive show of incompetence, the fact remains that there was NO federal oversight until it was much too late.
Acknowledging the fact that natural disasters defy planning and order, the biggest beef I have with Bush over Katrina was his seeming lack of concern while it was happening. As with the days preceding 9/11, when the intelligence community was all over the possibility that something was afoot (they just didn’t know what), Bush remained in vacation mode while one of his country’s most vital cities was literally going under water.
Compare that response to that of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was in the U.S. meeting Ronald Reagan when a massive earthquake ravaged a part of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev hopped the next plane and went back to the USSR. He understood the urgency. Bush didn’t … and still doesn’t.
I was never a fan of Bush’s rhetoric. I cringed at “Axis of Evil,” and “Bring ‘em on.” I thought his ridiculous preening on May 1, 2003, and the whole “Mission Accomplished” fiasco was unconscionable, not only because he turned out to be so wrong, but because he did everything in his POWER to avoid putting the uniform on when it was his time to. It’s one thing to get out of serving in the military. Clinton did it too. But you didn’t see him running around in a fighter pilot’s uniform!
This brings us to the 2004 presidential campaign, when Bush and Rove et al were their most Machiavellian … managing to turn John Kerry’s war record against him, even though Kerry at least HAD one to distort. That took gall, and the only thing I can say about it is that these people were their most cynical when it came to the way they played politics. And we Americans are at our most unconscious when it comes to being able to see through blatant political distortion. Karl Rove understood that, and took advantage of it daily.
I’m sure John Kerry wasn’t the most highly decorated veteran ever to have served in Vietnam. But he went, when he could have easily done the George W. route and hid in the guards … and then not shown up half the time there.
Kerry, like Gore, did not run a good campaign. He didn’t hit back hard enough when Bush attacked his war record. No, it didn’t help him that he took such an active stance in the antiwar protest movement when he came back, or that he threw his medals over a fence, or that he had a different story for every move he made, depending on what day it was. Kerry did plenty to derail himself. And the Democrats were perhaps a little squeamish about the idea of a loose cannon like Howard Dean as their standard bearer too (hindsight being what it is, however, they should have stuck with him. Turns out crazy old Dean had a plan in 2004, and was probably just as responsible, as chairman of the DNC, as anybody else of helping Obama get elected last November).
But damn. Kerry was running against a guy who was in the middle of massively botching the war he’d PLEADED for. And the No. 1 weapon the Bush team used AGAINST him was – of all things – his war record. George Orwell must have smiled, wherever he was.
That, of course, and religious extremism. I think if there’s any one positive that came out of Bush’s presidency it is this: it forced people in this country to re-examine the role religion plays in their lives. Not everybody, of course, because while a lot of Americans woke up to the dangers of religious manipulation, others dove that much deeper into it. That was one of the other big stories of 2004 – the grip that the religious right had on parts of the country.
I should think that by now, all but the most zealously religious can understand WHY it’s dangerous to mix anything “faith-based” with government. All we need to do is see how badly religious extremism, not necessarily in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, has been an instrument of destruction.
Only the unsightly denouement of the Bush presidency in his second term loosened that grip.
Part of Bush’s stubborn streak is due to his religious fervor – his steadfast belief that he’s on the side of “good” as opposed to evil. He never stopped to see, or to even look for, the shades of gray. Because, as with most religions, there are no shades of gray. Only absolutes.
Even before Obama was elected, Bush had already basically abdicated. His standing within his own part had deteriorated to the point where the alleged allies he’d had over the course of his presidency turned on him and embarrassed him badly over the bailout. And although John McCain ran a campaign that was every bit as bad in 2008 as John Kerry’s was in 2004, the fact remains that the financial meltdown greased his skids as much as anything else did. Until the meltdown in October, this race was not only close, it looked as if McCain might even pull it out.
I don’t want to get into the subtle racism of the 2008 campaign, because, honestly, I don’t see where Bush contributed to it. Bush basically stayed out of it. He may have made some half-hearted endorsements of McCain, but he didn’t go out of his way to help the guy – which must really gnaw at McCain, since he all but sold his soul to the neocons in an effort to win.
No. I can blame a lot of things on Bush, but I don’t think you can lay the codified racism at his feet. Mainly because by the time October rolled around, I don’t think he even cared. He knew the end was in sight, and I think he had reached the point where it couldn’t end soon enough. I honestly don’t think it mattered to him who won as much as it mattered to him that he was OUTA HERE!
In fact, I’ll extrapolate a little here and suggest that what really vexed Bush about the meltdown is not that it happened, but that it couldn’t wait until he was out of office. It was like one, final kick in what was already a flaming-red ass.
Once Obama won, Bush all but abdicated. There was no final flurry of activity … no rush to do something monumental to cement his legacy … the way Clinton tried, hard, to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians (do we remember how the Republicans stood in his way so he couldn’t DO that??).
The day after he got elected, Obama said that the country had only one president, and that he was perfectly willing to wait until his time came. Problem was, Bush seemed to want to hand the job off NOW! It was one, final ignominious act in presidency full of them. In the last month, we’ve heard more from Obama on official national matters, particularly with regards to the economy, than we have Bush.
That is sad.
If I were to use a psychological term to describe the Bush presidency it would be “bi-polar.” It was filled with high risks, intertwined with whining and sniveling when hit with criticism. On one hand, he wanted to go boldly where no man had ever gone … but treated those who might not have been up for the trip with scorn and derision. He unfairly questioned people’s patriotism, worked toward defeating politicians who opposed him by hinting they were traitors, felt it necessary – and even allowable – to violate civil rights and engage in the type of torture indigenous to the very people we were fighting … and, in short, probably did more to tarnish this country’s stated standards than any president in my lifetime.
I am not sorry to see him go. My ONLY hope for Barack Obama is that he act in a more even-handed, less arrogant, and less ideologically CERTAIN, manner. I’ll deal with my disagreements with him so long as he refrains from the arrogant recklessness of his predecessor.
First, let's establish one thing: George W. Bush is probably a good guy deep down inside. He strikes me as such. I mean, if I sat next to him at a ballgame, and we struck up a conversation, I'd imagine we'd be able to talk, and laugh, and wax philosophical about our love of baseball and sports.
So I'll go into this thinking he's not the personification of evil. I'll reserve that judgment for some of the others who contributed toward making these last eight years a very dark period in American history. But I'll cut HIM some slack. He reminds me of nothing more than a regular guy who has difficulty hiding his frustration at times, and even more difficulty admitting he might have miscalculated and made some mistakes. Sort of like your average fear-crazed boss bucking for a good review at your expense. Nice enough people ... until cornered. Then, the claws come out, and the fangs bared.
I wasn't happy he got elected, even though I never liked Al Gore. I thought Gore was bad candidate, that he made a poor choice in running mates, and that his campaign, and the way he campaigned, was very uninspiring. On the other hand, Bush is like a lot of political candidates ... great on the stump, able to connect on a personal level, but with nothing tangible to back it up. If I didn't study issues, and really LISTEN to some of the things he said -- not to mention pay attention to the people with whom he surrounded himself -- I might have voted for him too. He was a much more amiable-looking person on the campaign trail, happier, looser, more relaxed, and I would imagine people with no other point of reference voted for him because of that.
I don't know if the election was stolen. It's quite possible that Florida was simply a giant clusterfuck that was nobody's fault, and that the process was irreparably muddled. I know that's the way you steal elections ... create enough doubt and uncertainty as to render the entire process irrelevant. But since the Democrats have done this too in the past too, my reaction to this is shame on THEM for not being prepared for such an eventuality. If they got caught looking -- to borrow a baseball term -- then too bad. It isn't as if it's the first time it ever happened.
But if I were the Republicans, I'd hesitate to be that brazen, on the assumption that the Democrats would have watchdogs on the payroll to ferret out such things. I'll bet the Republicans did!
At any rate, the entire process was a farce, it made the U.S. look bad, and whether it was legit or not, by January 20, 2001, we had a president and it was up to us to at least wish him well. To do anything else borders on unpatriotic, I think. The process played itself out under the system that was put in place to adjudicate it, and, flawed or perfect, it is what it is. If you don't like the process, by all means get it changed by the next election. But absent that, it was what it was.
He wasn't my guy, and I'll admit that once the process started, I hoped, against hope, that they'd find something down there to overturn the results and swing the election to Gore. His issues, and his way of thinking, were more in line with mine. But despite everything, I had this feeling of powerlessness. My president was George W. Bush, I'm an American citizen, and, like him or not, I certainly didn't want him to fail. But I didn't think it was a realistic expectation.
I got an uneasy feeling even before the inauguration ... well, even before the election. Dick Cheney was a Henry Kissinger disciple, and I'm of the opinion that Kissinger, as Machiavellian as they come, did more than any American diplomat of his era to put us in bad standing in the world.
Anyway, that was one of the big reasons I could never have voted for Bush. Another is that even though he seemed like a regular guy, I had no respect for his intelligence or his curiosity (sometimes, you don't even have to be that SMART ... but for God's sake have some innate curiosity about the world around you!).
I saw Bush then -- as I do now -- as a child of privilege who never extended his realm beyond his core world. And while you may counter that the Kennedys were also children of privilege, let's not forget that three of them fought in World War II, one of them was killed, and another wounded badly enough that he was physically incapacitated for the rest of his life. There WAS another side to them ... a side that George W. Bush, by his own doing, avoided seeing.
Simply put, George W. Bush was, to me, a frat boy whose life was bought and paid for by privilege. He might have been an amiable enough fellow, but didn't have a clue as to what the problems in this country were. He rode out every possible crisis the country faced, protected by money and privilege. About the only thing in which he truly succeeded was running the Texas Rangers, and he was so good at that he traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs!
So, my fear wasn't that George W. Bush, himself, would take the country down some lonely, badly-traveled roads; but that the people around him -- the ones who groomed him for this undertaking -- would steer him there, and that he'd lack the requisite intelligence and curiosity to know any better.
As dull, boring, and completely uninspiring as Al Gore was, I got the feeling that he'd at least be his own man. He could have been the most ordinary of ordinary presidents (and I have a feeling he would have been), but I doubt there would have been half the drama, and half the trauma, that we got out of Bush -- and that's even WITH the acknowledgement that 9/11 probably would have happened regardless of WHO was president.
More about 9/11 before we go on. Within months of Bill Clinton's inauguration, terrorists planted bombs beneath the World Trade Center. Within months of George W. Bush's inauguration, terrorists flew planes into the WTC and killed 3,000 people. If the Obama people don't see a trend here, then they're not paying attention and have NO business claiming they were taken by surprise if some radicals try something this year.
But, alas, 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and, rightly or wrongly, he gets the blame. Just as Obama will get the blame if some public mall, or sports venue, is blown to smithereens this year.
Pursuant to 9/11, let me say here that I doubt there was a right, or a wrong, initial response. We needed Bush to express justifiable outrage, and we needed him to pledge, firmly and without hesitation, that those responsible would be held accountable. It's what happened AFTER that, however, what we can debate.
While nobody's suggesting we should ever forget that day, Bush pretty much based his entire presidency on the event. Especially during his first term, when he needed the seed to sprout daily for political purposes, he managed to get Sept. 11 into the conversation every chance he got. It was as if he woke up in the morning, looked at himself in the mirror, and the first words out of his mouth were "9/11." People got irritated with Jimmy Carter during the 1980 campaign for wrapping the flag around himself, hiding in the Rose Garden, and using the Hostage Crisis to his advantage, but he had NOTHING on Bush. George W. had now written the textbook on how to exploit a national tragedy.
Or should I say Karl Rove has.
I think history will judge George W. Bush the same way it judged Warren G. Harding ... as a slow-witted man led astray by advisers with agendas that didn't exactly jibe with the national interest. In an era when the world was changing, and in an era when our enemies had discovered an effective -- deadly, even -- way to level the playing field, Bush's team tried, in vain, to turn the clock back to the 1950s ... the immediate post-WWII aftermath in which the American Way was seen as the World Way by the part of the planet not imprisoned by the so-called Iron Curtain.
Problem is, a lot of water had flown under the dam between 1945 and 2000. Where our reputation, coming out of World War II, was of benevolence and heroism, our armor had been pierced a few times. We overthrew regimes, regardless of their popularity, if it didn't serve our interest. We lost, and lost BADLY, in Vietnam, after all was said and done. Each time we tried to play traffic cop to snuff out some local dispute, we created enemies as a result. A rag-tag band of Iranians got the better of us, holding our diplomats hostage. Zealots snuck a truckload of bombs into a Beirut barracks, killing over 200 marines. We got caught with our pants down in the Iran-Contra scandal. We sent the marines into Granada, and launched a military assault on Panama. We sent troops to Saudi Arabia and drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We launched periodic bombing raids on Iraq.
This isn't to say that some of these actions were justifiable or strategically necessary. But we got a reputation for being heavy-handed in much the same manner Israel is perceived now.
The world may have been prepared to accept a sort of pax Americana in 1945, but it wasn't in 2000. And overtures by the neocons who took over the Bush White House had to appear, to the outside world, as if the U.S. was going to try to reassert its dominance at a time when many countries and cultures were fighting to assert their own way of life. And I think this really came back to haunt the U.S. when it looked for allies to fight in Iraq. Countries that were with us in the 1991 Gulf War, declined this time.
I have no problem with what happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban supported bin Laden, and in that situation, that's guilty enough for me. I just with that Bush had finished one job before going onto the completely unnecessary war in Iraq.
There's plenty of evidence that this was the game-plan from Day 1. Perhaps there were a few neocons who worked in H.W. Bush's regime who disagreed with Poppy when he refused to march onto Baghdad when he had the army and the tactical advantage to do so. But while Poppy may have been patrician and out of touch himself, he was not dumb. Poppy understood, obviously better than the neocon zealots who worked for him, that there was always a "now, what?" about conquering Baghdad.
And the “now, what” would have been the most difficult part of such a campaign. H.W. obviously didn’t want to deal with that, and, in retrospect, I’d say H.W. made the right choice. I’m also guessing that he followed the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the person of Colin Powell, who convinced him that owning Baghdad was more trouble than it was worth.
And Dubya made the wrong choice. Not only did he make the wrong choice, he lied and schemed to win support. I refuse to believe, for example, that Bush didn’t know the intelligence was cooked prior to the invasion. I know I’ve said that he was woefully lacking in curiosity, but you’d have to comatose not to be able to say to your intelligence community “look, SHOW me a weapon – any weapon – and we’ll talk. Until then, forget it.”
No. These people wanted to finish the job they felt Bush I vacated, and they talked his son into doing it. No other explanation fits. And there are all sorts of problems with this. First, all situations change with time … and 10 years is a lot of time. There were obviously other trouble spots, different enemies, different threats … and, well, Saddam Hussein was soooo 1990. He wasn’t bothering anyone outside his own borders. And to the people who try to justify our involvement with the canard that we were overthrowing a cruel dictator, my answer is that there were people over there shooting at US … and OUR citizens, and OUR military. With all due respect to the Iraqi people, we needed to solve THAT problem first. Try to stabilize the rest of the region – as best as you can – and THEN figure out how to deal with Saddam.
Instead, the Bush administration destabilized the region even more. Not only that, it invited radical fringe groups to sprout up all over the country and turn what should have been a relatively easy military exercise (based on the comparative strength of the armies) into a protracted struggle that lasted longer than our involvement in World War II. This was such a monumental failure in planning and execution that it staggers the mind.
This would have been inexcusable even if the circumstances that led to the war were legitimate. The fact that they weren’t makes such gross failure criminal.
The Iraq war tops the list of Bush administration catastrophes because it was conducted under false pretenses and bungled worse than a third-rate burglary. But there were others.
Hurricane Katrina was nobody’s fault, to be sure. And even if federal response was perfectly orchestrated, and even if Brownie HAD done a heck of a job, there would have been devastation in New Orleans of a similar scope to what eventually happened.
But there wasn’t. And while it’s certainly true that state and local authorities should also be held accountable for THEIR part in this massive show of incompetence, the fact remains that there was NO federal oversight until it was much too late.
Acknowledging the fact that natural disasters defy planning and order, the biggest beef I have with Bush over Katrina was his seeming lack of concern while it was happening. As with the days preceding 9/11, when the intelligence community was all over the possibility that something was afoot (they just didn’t know what), Bush remained in vacation mode while one of his country’s most vital cities was literally going under water.
Compare that response to that of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was in the U.S. meeting Ronald Reagan when a massive earthquake ravaged a part of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev hopped the next plane and went back to the USSR. He understood the urgency. Bush didn’t … and still doesn’t.
I was never a fan of Bush’s rhetoric. I cringed at “Axis of Evil,” and “Bring ‘em on.” I thought his ridiculous preening on May 1, 2003, and the whole “Mission Accomplished” fiasco was unconscionable, not only because he turned out to be so wrong, but because he did everything in his POWER to avoid putting the uniform on when it was his time to. It’s one thing to get out of serving in the military. Clinton did it too. But you didn’t see him running around in a fighter pilot’s uniform!
This brings us to the 2004 presidential campaign, when Bush and Rove et al were their most Machiavellian … managing to turn John Kerry’s war record against him, even though Kerry at least HAD one to distort. That took gall, and the only thing I can say about it is that these people were their most cynical when it came to the way they played politics. And we Americans are at our most unconscious when it comes to being able to see through blatant political distortion. Karl Rove understood that, and took advantage of it daily.
I’m sure John Kerry wasn’t the most highly decorated veteran ever to have served in Vietnam. But he went, when he could have easily done the George W. route and hid in the guards … and then not shown up half the time there.
Kerry, like Gore, did not run a good campaign. He didn’t hit back hard enough when Bush attacked his war record. No, it didn’t help him that he took such an active stance in the antiwar protest movement when he came back, or that he threw his medals over a fence, or that he had a different story for every move he made, depending on what day it was. Kerry did plenty to derail himself. And the Democrats were perhaps a little squeamish about the idea of a loose cannon like Howard Dean as their standard bearer too (hindsight being what it is, however, they should have stuck with him. Turns out crazy old Dean had a plan in 2004, and was probably just as responsible, as chairman of the DNC, as anybody else of helping Obama get elected last November).
But damn. Kerry was running against a guy who was in the middle of massively botching the war he’d PLEADED for. And the No. 1 weapon the Bush team used AGAINST him was – of all things – his war record. George Orwell must have smiled, wherever he was.
That, of course, and religious extremism. I think if there’s any one positive that came out of Bush’s presidency it is this: it forced people in this country to re-examine the role religion plays in their lives. Not everybody, of course, because while a lot of Americans woke up to the dangers of religious manipulation, others dove that much deeper into it. That was one of the other big stories of 2004 – the grip that the religious right had on parts of the country.
I should think that by now, all but the most zealously religious can understand WHY it’s dangerous to mix anything “faith-based” with government. All we need to do is see how badly religious extremism, not necessarily in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, has been an instrument of destruction.
Only the unsightly denouement of the Bush presidency in his second term loosened that grip.
Part of Bush’s stubborn streak is due to his religious fervor – his steadfast belief that he’s on the side of “good” as opposed to evil. He never stopped to see, or to even look for, the shades of gray. Because, as with most religions, there are no shades of gray. Only absolutes.
Even before Obama was elected, Bush had already basically abdicated. His standing within his own part had deteriorated to the point where the alleged allies he’d had over the course of his presidency turned on him and embarrassed him badly over the bailout. And although John McCain ran a campaign that was every bit as bad in 2008 as John Kerry’s was in 2004, the fact remains that the financial meltdown greased his skids as much as anything else did. Until the meltdown in October, this race was not only close, it looked as if McCain might even pull it out.
I don’t want to get into the subtle racism of the 2008 campaign, because, honestly, I don’t see where Bush contributed to it. Bush basically stayed out of it. He may have made some half-hearted endorsements of McCain, but he didn’t go out of his way to help the guy – which must really gnaw at McCain, since he all but sold his soul to the neocons in an effort to win.
No. I can blame a lot of things on Bush, but I don’t think you can lay the codified racism at his feet. Mainly because by the time October rolled around, I don’t think he even cared. He knew the end was in sight, and I think he had reached the point where it couldn’t end soon enough. I honestly don’t think it mattered to him who won as much as it mattered to him that he was OUTA HERE!
In fact, I’ll extrapolate a little here and suggest that what really vexed Bush about the meltdown is not that it happened, but that it couldn’t wait until he was out of office. It was like one, final kick in what was already a flaming-red ass.
Once Obama won, Bush all but abdicated. There was no final flurry of activity … no rush to do something monumental to cement his legacy … the way Clinton tried, hard, to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians (do we remember how the Republicans stood in his way so he couldn’t DO that??).
The day after he got elected, Obama said that the country had only one president, and that he was perfectly willing to wait until his time came. Problem was, Bush seemed to want to hand the job off NOW! It was one, final ignominious act in presidency full of them. In the last month, we’ve heard more from Obama on official national matters, particularly with regards to the economy, than we have Bush.
That is sad.
If I were to use a psychological term to describe the Bush presidency it would be “bi-polar.” It was filled with high risks, intertwined with whining and sniveling when hit with criticism. On one hand, he wanted to go boldly where no man had ever gone … but treated those who might not have been up for the trip with scorn and derision. He unfairly questioned people’s patriotism, worked toward defeating politicians who opposed him by hinting they were traitors, felt it necessary – and even allowable – to violate civil rights and engage in the type of torture indigenous to the very people we were fighting … and, in short, probably did more to tarnish this country’s stated standards than any president in my lifetime.
I am not sorry to see him go. My ONLY hope for Barack Obama is that he act in a more even-handed, less arrogant, and less ideologically CERTAIN, manner. I’ll deal with my disagreements with him so long as he refrains from the arrogant recklessness of his predecessor.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)