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.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
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.
Friday, November 21, 2008
November 22, 1963
I was in the fifth grade. We’d just had art class, and the kid sitting next to me must have eaten his crayons rather than drawn with them, because he vomited all over the floor.
We’d just gotten him squared away – the janitor had to come in and clean, and disinfect the area – with me still sitting right next to it – and we tried to get on with what was left of the afternoon.
It was somewhere around 2 o’clock – maybe even earlier -- when another knock came on the door … the same janitor … Pop Geary, we called him … probably to come back with Round 2 of disinfectant, since, truth be told, the area still smelled pretty bad.
Instead, he whispered something to Sister Waltrude, the fifth-grade nun at Sacred Heart School in Lynn. She let out a shriek, and came back into the classroom holding her head in her hands, with an awfully stricken look on her face.
My GOD, she cried (blasphemous, really, for a nun teaching fifth grade. The President has been shot in Dallas.
I was slow on the uptake. I thought she said “battle,” and asked the kid on the other side of me why a president fights in a battle and dies. He didn’t know. I don’t think he even heard the question. He was just stunned. We were all stunned.
In 1963, every class at Sacred Heart School was equipped with its own TV set … mostly so we could watch PBS broadcasts of Mme. Slack’s French lessons, or some other current events programming on Channel 2. All I remember about any of THAT is that the Channel 2 test pattern song was the Radezky March, by Johan Strauss (well, I didn’t know that at the TIME, but I heard it properly introduced much later and put it together).
Sister Waltrude immediately turned on the TV to Channel 5, which was the CBS affiliate at the time, so we could listen to Walter Cronkite broadcast.
News – even now – can be frustrating to follow, and we have 24/7 cable outlets that can give us instantaneous information from the far corners of the world. Things in 1963 weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated, and the news came at its own pace … and was reported that way as well.
I don’t remember the exact time Walter gave his now-legendary “from Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time … some 38 minutes ago.”
Now, I was 10 years old. I knew nothing of the geopolitical ramifications of the president’s assassination. I did not know, for example, of the fears that we’d be invaded by the evil Communists, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist sympathizer … it took me years to delve into it and read up on all the conspiracy theories. All I knew is that the president was dead. That was scary enough.
Boys don’t cry … although Lord knows I wanted to. And I didn’t even know why. I didn’t know JFK. I didn’t cry a year earlier when my grandmother died, so why should I want to cry NOW?
But girls cry … at least, that’s what kids my age were always told. Boys don’t … girls do. And they did. I went into the cloakroom to get my jacket (it was unseasonably warm that day in New England) and Jan Jenerlavitch was sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out.
I lived far enough from the school so that I had to take the bus home. That bus came from downtown Lynn, MA, and included Lynn Classical High school, Cobbet Junior High School, and St. Mary’s catholic high school students on it. These were all people older than me, and some of them scared the HELL out of me on most days. Not today. The bus was somber, and there were a LOT of people crying. Especially black high school kids.
Again, at age 10, I had only a dim, and very superficial, understanding of the civil rights movement. I knew what I saw on TV, and it made sense to me that all people should have access to the same things, regardless of color. In the mind of a 10-year-old, that makes perfect sense, and you wondered why anyone in the world would think differently. But apparently, people did.
Studying history does fill in the cracks. And since the assassination has haunted me for 45 years, just about everything I ever learned about the history in and around that era has been seen, though my eyes, in the context of JFK’s death. A couple of years later, when I began to understand the struggles in the south (and the north too; let’s be fair), I understood why these kids were crying. It may have come a little later in the game than people would have liked, but John F. Kennedy (and his brother) took a stand at the University of Alabama and other places. And, after all, it was only the previous August – just three months earlier – that Martin Luther King Jr. led the march on Washington.
The after-school hours were a blur. Naturally, the entire family (mother, father, my sister Jayne and I) sat and watched all evening and well into the night. I learned for the first time that JFK was one of nine children, that his brother Joe had been killed during World War II and that his sister Kathleen had died in a plane crash. I learned that his father couldn’t talk because he’d had a stroke; and even found out that his grandmother was still alive at the age of 98.
I knew there was a Ted Kennedy because his senatorial campaign was only a year earlier (that’s when his opponent, Ed McCormack, said “if your name was Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke). But I never knew there had been a Robert F. Kennedy, or that he was the attorney general.
I grew up in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, in an Irish Catholic parish, and couldn’t understand the significance of JFK being the nation’s first CATHOLIC president. I thought everybody was Catholic. It just never occurred to me that anyone would admit to being anything else, since the nuns always taught us that the Catholic Church was the one true church.
I know there was a real fear that this was some kind of a larger plot to take over the country, and I suppose that scared me a little. But mainly, I just sat, motionless, taking it all in. I watched the plane land in Washington, I saw Lyndon Johnson make his short speech on the tarmac, saw Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained dress, saw grown men crying (something I’d never seen before), and, well, it was all just too much to take.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept going over and over it. I had this image of JFK riding in that car, top down, looking like the world was his … and BANG! Dead. It didn’t help that our evening newspaper – the one I work for now – printed a special edition with a big, bold, oversized headline that simply said “Kennedy dead.” It didn’t just add to the drama; it added to the overall sense of fright, doom and grief that was just pervasive.
I suppose the next morning I was on sensory overload, because I don’t recall much about the morning broadcasts. I was still 10 years old, it was still Saturday, and that meant “go out and play.” So I’d imagine that’s what I did. I know that we played endless games of touch football in the next door neighbor’s yard (not because of the Kennedys, but because that’s just what we did), and perhaps spent a good deal of Saturday doing that.
All I know is that the next time I got in front of the TV; everybody was talking about Oswald, and the death of Officer J.D. Tippett, and was re-running footage of his arrest and booking the previous day.
I’m not sure when, exactly, this took place, but at some point, Kennedy’s body was taken from the White House to the U.S. Capitol so it could lie in state under the rotunda. That’s the first time I heard those muffled drums … boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom boom, tadadada, boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom-boo-boom.
I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I started marching around the den in cadence to the drums, and my mother just SNAPPED at me, “Stop that!”
Sunday proved to be almost equally as momentous as Friday was, because that’s the day this country – in its unfathomable grief and fear – witnessed a vigilante killing on national television. I mean, what was next??
Today, with all of the paranoia that comes with security, security and more security, Lee Harvey Oswald would have never seen the light of day … or the light of anything. The Dallas Police Station would have whisked him away under the cover of darkness, at an unannounced time. He’d have been held in some isolation unit somewhere out in the boondocks of El Paso, or someplace like that … far, far, FAR away from the madness in Dallas.
But not in 1963. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to parade Oswald in front of the TV cameras as they escorted him from the police station to the county jail. I guess they thought they had it covered. It was just a short walk, after all, from the station to the car that was to take him to the jail, but not short enough.
Out of the crowd came Jack Ruby with a snub-nosed revolver. He shot Oswald in the abdomen, and the most notorious murder suspect since John Wilkes Booth in 1865 met the same end as did Mr. Booth … shot dead in his tracks. Odd that these two assassinations were almost 100 years apart.
I wasn’t watching when all this happened. We were playing touch football in Bobby Kaminski’s back yard – blowing off the pent-up steam that all kids my age were probably blowing off. Mrs. Kaminski – Eleanor – opened up the back door and shouted, “they just shot Oswald!”
We all ran inside to watch, me wondering why everybody was so stunned.
“Well, he shot the president,” I kept saying. I COULDN’T understand why Jack Ruby was being led away, COULDN’T understand why everybody thought this was so horrible.
But Oswald SHOT THE PRESIDENT,” I’d say. “Isn’t he a hero?”
My father had to sit me down when I got home – still tremendously upset that Jack Ruby was being treated as a criminal for killing the man who killed the president – and explain due process, and the American judicial system to me. It was just one of many lessons, civics and otherwise, I learned that weekend.
From the moment JFK’s death was confirmed, rumors started circulating that Charles DeGaulle would fly over to attend the funeral. Big Deal, I thought. Who’s Charles DeGaulle?
Again, my fifth grade brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion that there was anyone in the world close to being as important as the president of the United States, or that Charles DeGaulle was one of the heroes of the French resistance in World War II … OR that he was extremely important, maybe even more so than JFK; OR that he was one of the most prickly men ALIVE.
It was a very big deal that Charles DeGaulle came to the U.S. to attend John F. Kennedy’s funeral. Earlier that year, JFK had gone to France – at a time when relations between the two men weren’t exactly tremendous – and Jackie Kennedy went with him. And she charmed the socks right OFF Mr. DeGaulle.
You see, to me, the world was the globe that sat in the corner of our living room. Spin it around, and point to a country, and say “here, this is France.” I had no concept of what that meant … that there were French people who swore by their country, and their leaders, the same way we did. It was all just one big ball with a bunch of colors on it. I knew about the evil Communists (who didn’t?) but that’s how the world was presented to me in 1963: The Russians … and us … and faceless people who occupied other lands, and who weren’t nearly as important as either us or the Soviets. Or the Cubans (I remembered just enough of the Cuban Missile Crisis to know who they were).
Sunday, November 24, was just a lot of day. Period. I don’t know if I, or anyone, really, had any energy or emotion left to endure the funeral Monday. But it was heart-wrenching … and this time not so much because of what it put the country through, but for what it put the Kennedy FAMILY through. The rider less horse … the incessant muffled drums … the dirges … and Jackie Kennedy, her two children, and Robert and Teddy.
I remember Cardinal Cushing, of Boston, a good friend of the family’s, delivering an impassioned sermon. I remember Jackie Kennedy lifting the flag off the coffin as it sat in the capitol rotunda, so she could kiss the casket. But most of all, I remember JFK junior saluting his father one last time. He was only three. In fact, his birthday was on the day of the funeral. Sure, the moment was choreographed somewhat. Jackie Kennedy heavily choreographed that entire funeral to mirror the great state funerals of Europe.
But staged or not, how could you not cry for this kid? Even at the age of 10, I knew that while the country would have other presidents, he’d never have his father back. I thought of what would ever happen if my father just up and died when I was 10. The thought chilled me. My dad only died last year, when I was 53, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him at some point and grieve for him. Imagine going through all of that when you’re three?
I think we were all relieved when taps were played at Arlington National Cemetery. Somehow, the bugler hitting a wrong note lent not only authenticity to the occasion, but –in a perverse way – a very fitting end to it. The entire four days had been a bad nightmare, and that just put the period on the end of the sentence.
Today, I’ve come full circle on whether there was a conspiracy. When I was in college, which was right around the time the Abraham Zapruder film was made public, I was convinced there was one. Life was just an endless series of grassy knolls, magic bullets, intricate plots … I read books upon books, all of them advocating for some mammoth plot, and just ate up all of it.
The Zapruder film itself was unsettling. I’d never known the extend of JFK’s head wounds and as time went on, completely shut that aspect of the assassination out of my head, preferring to contemplate the socio- and geo-political ramifications instead. By the time I got into college, it was 1971, and the entire decade of the sixties had passed. Malcolm X was killed. So was Martin Luther King. And Bobby Kennedy. The fissures caused by these cataclysmic social events, along with the Vietnam War, and the growing rift between young and old – the so-called “generation gap” -- all of that could be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
And it wasn’t just social and political either. You could make a very strong case that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr never would have made it out of England had the American psyche not been so damaged by JFK’s death. The Beatles came along in early 1964, and they were certainly a sweeping breath of fresh air, youthful exuberance, and optimism for a country that had just been overwrought with grief and gloom.
And since we all have the benefit of knowing what the Beatles brought forth, both musically and culturally, it could be further argued that JFK’s death opened the Pandora’s box for the rampant use of recreational drugs, as well as the deepening cynicism, that just about ensured the demise of what had once become such a promising, optimistic decade.
Through the 70s and 80s, I was all for ripping the masks off the FBI, CIA, the Warren Commission, and anyone who had been a party to pulling the wool over our eyes by claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Then, I saw JFK, the Oliver Stone movie … and I just thought it was the biggest crock of bull ever. I know … I know … it wasn’t supposed to be historical. But come on! This is a guy who saw a bogeyman jumping out of every corner. And it just made me think that fertile imaginations were at play here … and that maybe, after all, that was just a random act of violence by a social misfit who was tired of being marginalized for his Marxist sympathies.
Because when you come right down to it, history rarely turns on conspiracies. It turns on random events that RESULT in people banding together. The Boston Massacre wasn’t planned. But it was certainly a tipping point toward arousing anger among the Boston colonists … without which there would have been no American Revolution.
There’s also this: It’s been 45 years since JFK was shot. Most, if not all, of the principal players on that day has long since died. There is no reason anymore for anyone who may have been inclined to keep a secret or two regarding a conspiracy to do so. Yet nobody’s said a word. Maybe there aren’t any words to say.
I used to be a bonafide Kennedy-phile. Worshiped the ground they walked on. I knew everything about all of them … the family histories, the unspeakable tragedies, the words of wisdom … but that died when Willie Smith was accused of rape and it came out that Ted Kennedy had rousted his son and his nephew out of BED so they could all go drinking. I’m no prude, but dammit all if I’d ever want to go out and get drunk with my son. I don’t care how old he is. A kid should always be able to look up to his dad without reservations. I looked up to mine every day he was alive … and I still do. One of the enduring American tragedies, if you ask me, is that there are so many kids who either don’t have dads in their lives to whom they CAN look up; or that their dads consistently fall short. And while nobody’s perfect, I just don’t see how a father can be so sloppy and undisciplined that he needs to go out and get hammered with his son.
For the longest time, I even tried to wish away the most damaging aspects of Chappaquiddick in my mind. I tried to justify the whole thing, believing that Teddy was just too stressed, too overwrought, too burdened by tragedies and responsibility, to have a clear head about much of anything.
And while I’ll always have tremendous sympathy for what the family has gone through, it’s just as true that at some point, your pass expires. At some point, you have to take accountability for the mistakes you’ve made. And I just don’t believe that Teddy ever has … at least not with regards to Chappaquiddick. He never admitted what most of the world seems to accept as universal fact: that he was drunk, horny and too consumed with alcohol and hormones to pay attention to where he was going … and too much of a coward to stick around after the accident to make sure every effort was made to remove Mary Jo Kopechne from that car.
And there were just so many eyebrow-raising details. This is a man who, only five years earlier, had severely broken his back in a plane crash. He had to walk around with a back brace, the pain permanently etched on his face. Yet he can crawl out the window of a car submerged in a lagoon and swim to safety? He can swim across the channel that separates Martha’s Vineyard from Chappaquiddick Island?
To me, the Kennedy dream began its slow, painful demise with Bobby’s death. In many ways, I think he was Jack times 10. Maybe not in the beginning, but by the time he died. John Kennedy was a cold warrior when he took office in 1960. In fact, if you go back and study that campaign, JFK was even scarier than Richard Nixon.
But he grew in the short time he was in office … grew past the bellicosity that marked his formative years in politics. He died before he could ever complete this transformation, but Bobby took it and ran with it. I think that if Bobby had lived, he’d have been one of the best presidents this country ever had. He seemed to have the right amount of ruthlessness mixed with genuine compassion for the downtrodden that either things would have improved or he’d go down in flames trying to improve them.
Alas, none of this ever came to pass. Instead of the Kennedy family dynastic that Old Joe pined for so deeply, we got the Bush dynasty.
Today, 45 years later, JFK’s death haunts me more than any single historical event in my lifetime. You look at all the potential that he brought to the White House … and you look at all the wreckage from strewn throughout history.
And that’s when you see the things that are … and ask why.
We’d just gotten him squared away – the janitor had to come in and clean, and disinfect the area – with me still sitting right next to it – and we tried to get on with what was left of the afternoon.
It was somewhere around 2 o’clock – maybe even earlier -- when another knock came on the door … the same janitor … Pop Geary, we called him … probably to come back with Round 2 of disinfectant, since, truth be told, the area still smelled pretty bad.
Instead, he whispered something to Sister Waltrude, the fifth-grade nun at Sacred Heart School in Lynn. She let out a shriek, and came back into the classroom holding her head in her hands, with an awfully stricken look on her face.
My GOD, she cried (blasphemous, really, for a nun teaching fifth grade. The President has been shot in Dallas.
I was slow on the uptake. I thought she said “battle,” and asked the kid on the other side of me why a president fights in a battle and dies. He didn’t know. I don’t think he even heard the question. He was just stunned. We were all stunned.
In 1963, every class at Sacred Heart School was equipped with its own TV set … mostly so we could watch PBS broadcasts of Mme. Slack’s French lessons, or some other current events programming on Channel 2. All I remember about any of THAT is that the Channel 2 test pattern song was the Radezky March, by Johan Strauss (well, I didn’t know that at the TIME, but I heard it properly introduced much later and put it together).
Sister Waltrude immediately turned on the TV to Channel 5, which was the CBS affiliate at the time, so we could listen to Walter Cronkite broadcast.
News – even now – can be frustrating to follow, and we have 24/7 cable outlets that can give us instantaneous information from the far corners of the world. Things in 1963 weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated, and the news came at its own pace … and was reported that way as well.
I don’t remember the exact time Walter gave his now-legendary “from Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time … some 38 minutes ago.”
Now, I was 10 years old. I knew nothing of the geopolitical ramifications of the president’s assassination. I did not know, for example, of the fears that we’d be invaded by the evil Communists, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist sympathizer … it took me years to delve into it and read up on all the conspiracy theories. All I knew is that the president was dead. That was scary enough.
Boys don’t cry … although Lord knows I wanted to. And I didn’t even know why. I didn’t know JFK. I didn’t cry a year earlier when my grandmother died, so why should I want to cry NOW?
But girls cry … at least, that’s what kids my age were always told. Boys don’t … girls do. And they did. I went into the cloakroom to get my jacket (it was unseasonably warm that day in New England) and Jan Jenerlavitch was sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out.
I lived far enough from the school so that I had to take the bus home. That bus came from downtown Lynn, MA, and included Lynn Classical High school, Cobbet Junior High School, and St. Mary’s catholic high school students on it. These were all people older than me, and some of them scared the HELL out of me on most days. Not today. The bus was somber, and there were a LOT of people crying. Especially black high school kids.
Again, at age 10, I had only a dim, and very superficial, understanding of the civil rights movement. I knew what I saw on TV, and it made sense to me that all people should have access to the same things, regardless of color. In the mind of a 10-year-old, that makes perfect sense, and you wondered why anyone in the world would think differently. But apparently, people did.
Studying history does fill in the cracks. And since the assassination has haunted me for 45 years, just about everything I ever learned about the history in and around that era has been seen, though my eyes, in the context of JFK’s death. A couple of years later, when I began to understand the struggles in the south (and the north too; let’s be fair), I understood why these kids were crying. It may have come a little later in the game than people would have liked, but John F. Kennedy (and his brother) took a stand at the University of Alabama and other places. And, after all, it was only the previous August – just three months earlier – that Martin Luther King Jr. led the march on Washington.
The after-school hours were a blur. Naturally, the entire family (mother, father, my sister Jayne and I) sat and watched all evening and well into the night. I learned for the first time that JFK was one of nine children, that his brother Joe had been killed during World War II and that his sister Kathleen had died in a plane crash. I learned that his father couldn’t talk because he’d had a stroke; and even found out that his grandmother was still alive at the age of 98.
I knew there was a Ted Kennedy because his senatorial campaign was only a year earlier (that’s when his opponent, Ed McCormack, said “if your name was Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke). But I never knew there had been a Robert F. Kennedy, or that he was the attorney general.
I grew up in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, in an Irish Catholic parish, and couldn’t understand the significance of JFK being the nation’s first CATHOLIC president. I thought everybody was Catholic. It just never occurred to me that anyone would admit to being anything else, since the nuns always taught us that the Catholic Church was the one true church.
I know there was a real fear that this was some kind of a larger plot to take over the country, and I suppose that scared me a little. But mainly, I just sat, motionless, taking it all in. I watched the plane land in Washington, I saw Lyndon Johnson make his short speech on the tarmac, saw Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained dress, saw grown men crying (something I’d never seen before), and, well, it was all just too much to take.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept going over and over it. I had this image of JFK riding in that car, top down, looking like the world was his … and BANG! Dead. It didn’t help that our evening newspaper – the one I work for now – printed a special edition with a big, bold, oversized headline that simply said “Kennedy dead.” It didn’t just add to the drama; it added to the overall sense of fright, doom and grief that was just pervasive.
I suppose the next morning I was on sensory overload, because I don’t recall much about the morning broadcasts. I was still 10 years old, it was still Saturday, and that meant “go out and play.” So I’d imagine that’s what I did. I know that we played endless games of touch football in the next door neighbor’s yard (not because of the Kennedys, but because that’s just what we did), and perhaps spent a good deal of Saturday doing that.
All I know is that the next time I got in front of the TV; everybody was talking about Oswald, and the death of Officer J.D. Tippett, and was re-running footage of his arrest and booking the previous day.
I’m not sure when, exactly, this took place, but at some point, Kennedy’s body was taken from the White House to the U.S. Capitol so it could lie in state under the rotunda. That’s the first time I heard those muffled drums … boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom boom, tadadada, boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom-boo-boom.
I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I started marching around the den in cadence to the drums, and my mother just SNAPPED at me, “Stop that!”
Sunday proved to be almost equally as momentous as Friday was, because that’s the day this country – in its unfathomable grief and fear – witnessed a vigilante killing on national television. I mean, what was next??
Today, with all of the paranoia that comes with security, security and more security, Lee Harvey Oswald would have never seen the light of day … or the light of anything. The Dallas Police Station would have whisked him away under the cover of darkness, at an unannounced time. He’d have been held in some isolation unit somewhere out in the boondocks of El Paso, or someplace like that … far, far, FAR away from the madness in Dallas.
But not in 1963. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to parade Oswald in front of the TV cameras as they escorted him from the police station to the county jail. I guess they thought they had it covered. It was just a short walk, after all, from the station to the car that was to take him to the jail, but not short enough.
Out of the crowd came Jack Ruby with a snub-nosed revolver. He shot Oswald in the abdomen, and the most notorious murder suspect since John Wilkes Booth in 1865 met the same end as did Mr. Booth … shot dead in his tracks. Odd that these two assassinations were almost 100 years apart.
I wasn’t watching when all this happened. We were playing touch football in Bobby Kaminski’s back yard – blowing off the pent-up steam that all kids my age were probably blowing off. Mrs. Kaminski – Eleanor – opened up the back door and shouted, “they just shot Oswald!”
We all ran inside to watch, me wondering why everybody was so stunned.
“Well, he shot the president,” I kept saying. I COULDN’T understand why Jack Ruby was being led away, COULDN’T understand why everybody thought this was so horrible.
But Oswald SHOT THE PRESIDENT,” I’d say. “Isn’t he a hero?”
My father had to sit me down when I got home – still tremendously upset that Jack Ruby was being treated as a criminal for killing the man who killed the president – and explain due process, and the American judicial system to me. It was just one of many lessons, civics and otherwise, I learned that weekend.
From the moment JFK’s death was confirmed, rumors started circulating that Charles DeGaulle would fly over to attend the funeral. Big Deal, I thought. Who’s Charles DeGaulle?
Again, my fifth grade brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion that there was anyone in the world close to being as important as the president of the United States, or that Charles DeGaulle was one of the heroes of the French resistance in World War II … OR that he was extremely important, maybe even more so than JFK; OR that he was one of the most prickly men ALIVE.
It was a very big deal that Charles DeGaulle came to the U.S. to attend John F. Kennedy’s funeral. Earlier that year, JFK had gone to France – at a time when relations between the two men weren’t exactly tremendous – and Jackie Kennedy went with him. And she charmed the socks right OFF Mr. DeGaulle.
You see, to me, the world was the globe that sat in the corner of our living room. Spin it around, and point to a country, and say “here, this is France.” I had no concept of what that meant … that there were French people who swore by their country, and their leaders, the same way we did. It was all just one big ball with a bunch of colors on it. I knew about the evil Communists (who didn’t?) but that’s how the world was presented to me in 1963: The Russians … and us … and faceless people who occupied other lands, and who weren’t nearly as important as either us or the Soviets. Or the Cubans (I remembered just enough of the Cuban Missile Crisis to know who they were).
Sunday, November 24, was just a lot of day. Period. I don’t know if I, or anyone, really, had any energy or emotion left to endure the funeral Monday. But it was heart-wrenching … and this time not so much because of what it put the country through, but for what it put the Kennedy FAMILY through. The rider less horse … the incessant muffled drums … the dirges … and Jackie Kennedy, her two children, and Robert and Teddy.
I remember Cardinal Cushing, of Boston, a good friend of the family’s, delivering an impassioned sermon. I remember Jackie Kennedy lifting the flag off the coffin as it sat in the capitol rotunda, so she could kiss the casket. But most of all, I remember JFK junior saluting his father one last time. He was only three. In fact, his birthday was on the day of the funeral. Sure, the moment was choreographed somewhat. Jackie Kennedy heavily choreographed that entire funeral to mirror the great state funerals of Europe.
But staged or not, how could you not cry for this kid? Even at the age of 10, I knew that while the country would have other presidents, he’d never have his father back. I thought of what would ever happen if my father just up and died when I was 10. The thought chilled me. My dad only died last year, when I was 53, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him at some point and grieve for him. Imagine going through all of that when you’re three?
I think we were all relieved when taps were played at Arlington National Cemetery. Somehow, the bugler hitting a wrong note lent not only authenticity to the occasion, but –in a perverse way – a very fitting end to it. The entire four days had been a bad nightmare, and that just put the period on the end of the sentence.
Today, I’ve come full circle on whether there was a conspiracy. When I was in college, which was right around the time the Abraham Zapruder film was made public, I was convinced there was one. Life was just an endless series of grassy knolls, magic bullets, intricate plots … I read books upon books, all of them advocating for some mammoth plot, and just ate up all of it.
The Zapruder film itself was unsettling. I’d never known the extend of JFK’s head wounds and as time went on, completely shut that aspect of the assassination out of my head, preferring to contemplate the socio- and geo-political ramifications instead. By the time I got into college, it was 1971, and the entire decade of the sixties had passed. Malcolm X was killed. So was Martin Luther King. And Bobby Kennedy. The fissures caused by these cataclysmic social events, along with the Vietnam War, and the growing rift between young and old – the so-called “generation gap” -- all of that could be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
And it wasn’t just social and political either. You could make a very strong case that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr never would have made it out of England had the American psyche not been so damaged by JFK’s death. The Beatles came along in early 1964, and they were certainly a sweeping breath of fresh air, youthful exuberance, and optimism for a country that had just been overwrought with grief and gloom.
And since we all have the benefit of knowing what the Beatles brought forth, both musically and culturally, it could be further argued that JFK’s death opened the Pandora’s box for the rampant use of recreational drugs, as well as the deepening cynicism, that just about ensured the demise of what had once become such a promising, optimistic decade.
Through the 70s and 80s, I was all for ripping the masks off the FBI, CIA, the Warren Commission, and anyone who had been a party to pulling the wool over our eyes by claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Then, I saw JFK, the Oliver Stone movie … and I just thought it was the biggest crock of bull ever. I know … I know … it wasn’t supposed to be historical. But come on! This is a guy who saw a bogeyman jumping out of every corner. And it just made me think that fertile imaginations were at play here … and that maybe, after all, that was just a random act of violence by a social misfit who was tired of being marginalized for his Marxist sympathies.
Because when you come right down to it, history rarely turns on conspiracies. It turns on random events that RESULT in people banding together. The Boston Massacre wasn’t planned. But it was certainly a tipping point toward arousing anger among the Boston colonists … without which there would have been no American Revolution.
There’s also this: It’s been 45 years since JFK was shot. Most, if not all, of the principal players on that day has long since died. There is no reason anymore for anyone who may have been inclined to keep a secret or two regarding a conspiracy to do so. Yet nobody’s said a word. Maybe there aren’t any words to say.
I used to be a bonafide Kennedy-phile. Worshiped the ground they walked on. I knew everything about all of them … the family histories, the unspeakable tragedies, the words of wisdom … but that died when Willie Smith was accused of rape and it came out that Ted Kennedy had rousted his son and his nephew out of BED so they could all go drinking. I’m no prude, but dammit all if I’d ever want to go out and get drunk with my son. I don’t care how old he is. A kid should always be able to look up to his dad without reservations. I looked up to mine every day he was alive … and I still do. One of the enduring American tragedies, if you ask me, is that there are so many kids who either don’t have dads in their lives to whom they CAN look up; or that their dads consistently fall short. And while nobody’s perfect, I just don’t see how a father can be so sloppy and undisciplined that he needs to go out and get hammered with his son.
For the longest time, I even tried to wish away the most damaging aspects of Chappaquiddick in my mind. I tried to justify the whole thing, believing that Teddy was just too stressed, too overwrought, too burdened by tragedies and responsibility, to have a clear head about much of anything.
And while I’ll always have tremendous sympathy for what the family has gone through, it’s just as true that at some point, your pass expires. At some point, you have to take accountability for the mistakes you’ve made. And I just don’t believe that Teddy ever has … at least not with regards to Chappaquiddick. He never admitted what most of the world seems to accept as universal fact: that he was drunk, horny and too consumed with alcohol and hormones to pay attention to where he was going … and too much of a coward to stick around after the accident to make sure every effort was made to remove Mary Jo Kopechne from that car.
And there were just so many eyebrow-raising details. This is a man who, only five years earlier, had severely broken his back in a plane crash. He had to walk around with a back brace, the pain permanently etched on his face. Yet he can crawl out the window of a car submerged in a lagoon and swim to safety? He can swim across the channel that separates Martha’s Vineyard from Chappaquiddick Island?
To me, the Kennedy dream began its slow, painful demise with Bobby’s death. In many ways, I think he was Jack times 10. Maybe not in the beginning, but by the time he died. John Kennedy was a cold warrior when he took office in 1960. In fact, if you go back and study that campaign, JFK was even scarier than Richard Nixon.
But he grew in the short time he was in office … grew past the bellicosity that marked his formative years in politics. He died before he could ever complete this transformation, but Bobby took it and ran with it. I think that if Bobby had lived, he’d have been one of the best presidents this country ever had. He seemed to have the right amount of ruthlessness mixed with genuine compassion for the downtrodden that either things would have improved or he’d go down in flames trying to improve them.
Alas, none of this ever came to pass. Instead of the Kennedy family dynastic that Old Joe pined for so deeply, we got the Bush dynasty.
Today, 45 years later, JFK’s death haunts me more than any single historical event in my lifetime. You look at all the potential that he brought to the White House … and you look at all the wreckage from strewn throughout history.
And that’s when you see the things that are … and ask why.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
My case for Barack
Election day is a week from Tuesday and according to some polls released today (October 26) the race is tightening.
I suppose I should have expected it, but it has taken me somewhat by surprise. The Republicans -- or, should I say, the McCain campaign -- is out of ideas and has BEEN out of ideas since forever. While some of the minutae of the current GOP platform may vary slightly from what the current administration has offered us, what McCain and Co. are proposing is more of the same.
I find myself in kind of a strange position. Back in February, I -- an independent -- registered as a Republican on Super Tuesday for the specific purpose of voting against our former governor -- Mitt Romney.
This meant voting for McCain, even though I went into this campaign season liking Rudy Guiliani very much, partly because I love New York and love the way he helped clean it up; and partly because I thought he handled himself magnificently on Sept. 11, 2001. But I soured on him rather quickly once I started listening to him, and by February figured the best of a bad lot was McCain.
John S. McCain, I figured, was the one Republican I could stomach in the White House if my guy -- Obama -- couldn't survive the primaries. So, logic dictated I throw a little support his way just in case.
That was in February. Hillary took Massachusetts (which I figured would happen) and Romney won the GOP side. But that was bascially his last, and maybe even only, hurrah. He flamed out soon afterward, and by March McCain's nomination was a foregone conclusion ... pretty remarkable for someone who'd been so dismissively written off only six months earlier.
So there's my reasoning ... and I'm sad to admit it now. I have been proven wrong. McCain's election would not be in the best interests of the United States of America. His ideas are old, terribly shopwarn, and they're proven failures based on what has happened, both over the the last eight years and the last eight weeks. Worse, McCain seems to be the same type of angry reactionary who ruled the White House for the previous eight years ... shoot first, ask questions later. Though hee likes to say he's a maverick, McCain -- just by his termperment -- would have fit in very well with the angry reactionaries in the Bush administration.
Then, there's the matter of Sarah Palin, who -- I'm sure -- is a nice woman who could, someday, command quite a presence on the national stage. But not now. Not even close. And McCain took what is already a ridiculously politically expedient process and multiplied it Times Ten with this selection.
Not that Joe Biden is any prize. And unscripted Biden is a terrifying thing. As someone on Bill Maher's show said last Friday, "he's on the 10-yard line. All he needs to do from hereon out is show up." Instead, he plants this SEED in people about the bogeyman terrorists launching some kind of horrendous attack on the country to "test" Obama.
Of course, that's exactly what the bogeymen did with George W. Bush. And maybe Biden's biggest mistake here was to remind people what an abject failure Bush's response to the test was ... how he completely fouled things up beyond repair with his response. His type of hot-headed, incendiary response was exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted, and Bush was either too stupid or too stubborn (or both) to see it.
But at least Biden had something tangible -- both in terms of politics and experience -- to offer the Obama ticket. I'm still trying to figure out what it is Palin offered -- unless it's an infusion of youthful vigor to detract from the rapidly-aging McCain.
This is a roundabout way of talking about Barack, because right off the bat, Obama gets points for at least being sober and rational in judgment. His reasons behind selecting Biden were sound and mature. He understood the politics of Biden's campaign ... and he understood that good leadership involves surrounding yourself with people whose opinions and expertise you respect, even if you're not the best of friends.
On the other hand, McCain's apparent reasons for picking Palin -- she's a woman (and could sway disaffected Hillary voters), she's young ... and evangelical to boot -- seem a bit more reckless.
Let's examine the "experience" factor. Experience in presidential politics is overrated -- unless it's YOU who are running ... and YOU have the glittering resume. George H.W. Bush had a glowing resume, both in diplomatic, executive and intelligence circles. You name it, 41 did it. He was head of the CIA, head of the GOP National Committee (a position he held at the time of Watergate), a U.S. Representative ... and vice president. I'd imagine he knew where every lever of power was, and how to push it when he had to.
Yet, he was a one-term president who couldn't parlay a legitimate accomplishment (the 1990 Desert Storm war) into four more years. And why not? Because for all his experience, he couldn't control the lunatic fringe of his own party. He tried. He came into office -- despite the brutally dirty campaign against Michael Dukakis -- with a reputation of being a genial country club Republican. But it did seem that George I lacked the backbone to stand up to the nut jobs in his party ... and by trying (and failing) to accommodate them, he not only lost THEM, he lost the middle, too.
I have no love for Ronald Reagan, but one thing I'll give him: He kept those nut jobs at arm's length. And for all his bluster, he actually governed from the center a lot more than people think.
With few exceptions (Ed Meese, Casper Weinberger), he employed pragmatic people who understood that to actually get things DONE you had to throw a few bones to the opposing party. He lost it late in his second administration when the combination of being a lame duck and -- just a personal opinion -- the beginnings of the Alzeimers reduced his effectiveness. But for all I didn't like about him ideologically, he knew how to communicate with people AND understood how to work with people with whom he had political disagreements.
He also understood the prudence of cutting your losses. When those Marines were blown up in Beirut, he didn't allow the rest of them to stick around so they could get killed too. He got the hell OUT of there and didn't worry about this "saving face" nonsense that has us still in Iraq now.
I thought George H.W. would be something like that, and while he wasn't my guy, I wasn't depressed for a month when he got elected (partially because I wasn't all that fond of Michael Dukakis either). But H.W. couldn't take the heat when the nut jobs started in on him -- even with a 90 percent approval rating (after Desert Storm). He tried to win these people over, and on election day, they couldn't get to the polls fast enough to vote for H. Ross Perot. That's gratitude for you.
It's important to understandn this, because when it was George W's turn, he learned his lessons. There was no way he was going to get outflanked by the Republican right. So he invited them all to the table, where they controlled him instead of the other way around. I seriously doubt George W. Bush ever HAD a policy he could call his own. Anything he got, he got from the wignuts with whom he surrounded himself ... Henry Kissinger refugees like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who itched to be back in power after eight years of Bill Clinton.
These are the people to whom McCain -- the so-called "maverick" -- sold his soul to get the nomination.
But as I say, experience ONLY counts when it's YOUR GUY who has the experience. In 2000, George Bush's only real military experience was in finding ways to avoid showing up for his Army Reserve commitments. So you never heard the Republicans talk about it. In 2004, John Kerry -- recipient of multiple medals in Vietnam -- was reduced to defending himself against scurrilous charges that he'd fabricated his record.
But all of a sudden, in 2008, we have a genuine war hero on the ticket ... and all of a sudden the ONLY criteria for holding the Oval Office is ... you guessed it ... experience. I have a tremendous amount of respect for what McCain endured in Vietnam. I can't imagine how he got through it, and I'm sure that in many ways it hardened him. But at the same time, I know lots of Vietnam vets who came back from the war permanently scarred. Some of them have overcome those scars; others, sadly, did not ... and sunk into lives of drug addiction and mental illness, and, in a few cases, died tragically prematurely as a result.
I'm not suggesting John McCain is afflicted with either the diseases of addiction OR mental illness. But the pendulum does swing so wildly on these issues that the experiences of being a POW, or having been wounded in battle, make up no more than a portion of your overall resume. The Republicans proved this in 2004 when the voters rejected John Kerry. So it's disingenuous for them to use it now as a reason to vote FOR McCain.
The next item to examine is McCain's record as a U.S. Senator, which, on average, would appear to be ... well ... average. He's done some good things. But he's also managed to get his name associated with one of the bigger scandals in modern Senate history ... the Keating Five.
The Republicans love to run against big government. Bush campaigned in 2000 as being an outsider ... a stranger to the Beltway. McCain's been a U.S. Senator for more than 20 years. His name has appeared on one of the biggest scandals the senate has seen in that time ... the Keating Five.
While his record as a senator doesn't DISQUALIFY him from being president,it, in and of itself, doesn't uniquely QUALIFY him either. Like his military service, it's certainly a FACTOR in the overall judgment of him, but there's nothing there the jumps up and says "Damn, we HAVE to vote for this man."
Again, going back to George W. Bush ... he campaign on being anti-Washington ... NOT part of the Beltway crowd. Why? Because he argued -- and not incorrectly, either -- that to be a part of the solution, you cannot be a part of the problem.
If the legislature is bogged down in petty partisanship, then the only logical thing to do is get new people in there who aren't so married to the old ways of doing things that they've become obstructionist. Right?"
Shouldn't logic, then, dictate that the most qualified person to be president is the LEAST qualified in terms of legislative tenure? Wouldn't a person not so thoroughly entrenched in the legislative morass that has affected politics since the first Clinton administration be more prone to see things differently than one who's been part of the problem for over 20 years?
Obama has been a senator for only four years -- hardly enough time to be an entrenched member of the club. So in a curious way, his LACK of experience actually plays to his favor.
But there are other reasons to support him. Unlike Al Gore and Kerry before him, Obama has a pulse. He has passion. He has ideals. He has noble goals. And he's black.
Wait. Stop. You're reading this, and you're saying "Ahhhh, that's it. he's voting for Obama because he's black." And you're right. I am. But please, let me explain.
You can thank Robert Wohl for what's about to come next. Wohl has a couple of HBO specials called "Assume the Position," that are both hilarious and illuminating. In the second one, his opening bit talks about the presidents, and the total lack of diversity that runsn through all 43 of them. As he says, "for such a diverse country ... not a whole lot of it up there, is there?"
Yes, that's a funny observation ... but it's also a very sad reality. This country grew to be the giant it is on the backs of ethnic immigrants who came over here and did all the heavy lifting that made us kings of the Industrial Age. And they have been poorly represented in the White House. With the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower (German-American) and John F. Kennedy (Roman Catholic) the overwhelming preponderance of presidents have been White Anglo Saxon Protestants (including the current one).
Barack Obama represents the HOPE, at least, that the next president will have the ability -- and curiosity -- to see the whole picture from a different template. I'm confident, given Obama's basically sober, measured and moderate nature, that this is NOT a man who's going to give away the store, open up the borders and let ALL the illegals in carte blanche (even if his distant aunt lives here illegally), or strip off his mask someday and become the modern-day Karl Marx.
But I AM confident that Barack Obama will see situations differently, see them from a fresh set of eyes, and perhaps react accordingly. I hope he does. We need to at least CONSIDER the possibility of taking a different road to get where we want to go. The one we're on is leading nowhere.
I also think Barack Obama, as person who has spent considerable time overseas, and in lands not always friendly to the United States, will bring a sensitivity about our place in the modern world that this administration simply does not possess. And not only does the Bush administration not possess this sensitivity, it don't WANT to. The Bush people don't care.
In fact, one of the gripes I HAVE with George W. Bush is his complete LACK of sensitivity about how we're perceived abroad. He -- and his followers -- think this a non-issue. I beg to differ. Countries act, and react, toward us based on what they SEE, and PERCEIVE ... not by what we TELL them. And they SEE what we do from a much different perspective than we do, and that has as much to do with the propaganda OUR government disseminates as it does the usual mistrust that exists between the U.S. and its enemies.
There's no better example of how destructive that mistrust can be than the sight of airplanes loaded with innocent people careening into buildings loaded with MORE innocent people. It takes an awful lot of hatred and resentment to whip yourself into the type of frenzy that would allow you to even CONSIDER doing something like that ... let alone carry it out. You don't just wake up one morning and decide to kill 3,000 people who have done absolutely nothing to you. You have to be so blind with hatred and zealotry that you'll kill ANYBODY for the advancement of your cause.
I'll grant you some of that is because of the indocrination that the radical muslems who pulled this off received in their native countries. But the Bush administration never seemed interested in identifying the catalyst ... what set these people OFF? Simple chemistry. You can mix up a bunch of chemicals in a test tube, but ONE of them has to act as a catalyst for there to be a reaction.
What was the catalyst? And what did our insistance on starting a war in the middle of that cauldron do to the cauldron ... both in the short and long term?
I'm hoping Barack Obama will be more of a soothing, sobering element on the world stage than George W. Bush was ... and I'm afraid I see John McCain as being cut out of much the same cloth as the current president.
We have also had the bonus -- sad though it may have been -- of seeing how both men would react to a crisis. Witness McCain's reaction to the Wall Street meltdown vs. Obama's.
McCain tried to inject himself into the process and ended up being party to making the situation worse. Obama -- who had no power beyond his seat in the U.S. Senate (same as McCain) stepped back and let the people in charge do their jobs. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obama's position in the polls took a huge leap after that. People saw that Obama has a cool head while they saw McCain as a glowering, angry man willing to elbow his way into the spotlight, even if he doesn't belong there.
Obama also came up with one of the better lines when he said "people expect their presidents to be able to do more than one thing at a time." It wasn't as good as "I can see Russa from my house," perhaps, but good enough.
I don't think Obama is perfect. I don't see him as being "the messiah," and nothing aggravates me more than the GOP taunting that Obama's supporters are hero worshipping of that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes.
I admit the country is taking a big risk in turning to him ... but I think the same thing about McCain too ... except I think it's a bigger risk. He's come across as angry, bitter, and caustic on the stump this fall, and I think this country has been run from anger now for eight years ... and all you have to do is look around to see how corrosive that anger has become. I look forward to someone a bit more dispassionate and introspective ... and less ready to come out swinging without examing the situation first.
Some of the anti-Obama swill has been nothing more than coded racism -- especially the efforts to hang Rev. Jeremiah Wright around his neck. I certainly don't AGREE with the reverend, and it would probably be a cold day in hill for me to get up and say "God DAMN America" in front of a church full of people. But if I did, I'd be appalled if someone tried to indict every OTHER person in the church because of what I said. That's dangerously close to McCarthyism, only there's the extra-added tinge of racism in there because of the anger --unique, in many ways, to African-Americans -- that Wright was expressing.
Similarly, the whole ACORN nonsense is just that ... nonsense. This was just a case of the loser pulling out all the stops. McCain took out all the guns, and started firing into the crowd, hoping that one of the bullets hits a vein or an artery. Again, even if ACORN's methods completely lacked ethics, there's no evidence that Obama, or any of his staff, put ACORN up to commiting voter fraud. And I doubt there will eve BE proof. However, there IS the fear that this is a Rovian Republican attempt to lay the groundwork for enough challenges to REALLY gum up this election ... perhaps as payback for the Florida challenge of 2000.
I have my concerns about the issue of Bill Ayers, however. I don't think Obama's a terrorist, and I don't think he condones, or ever condoned, blowing up buildings as a way of airing political grievances.
But at the same time, either he should have known, or someone should have told him pretty damn quick, that Bill Ayers would be a good guy to steer clear of, especially if he had political aspirations down the line.
I can also certainly understand McCain's desire to hammer away at this, too. I'm sure his reasons are aren't merely political. I'd image they're bitterly personal -- and I have no problem with that. While Ayers was blowing up buildings, McCain was a guest at the Hanoi Hilton. And if I were him, it would gall me, too, that Ayers had anything at all to do --however minor -- with springboarding Obama's political career.
But honestly, similar to the Rev. Wright issue, this doesn't mean Obama is sympathetic to terrorists -- either domestic or foreign. You DO run across a lot of people over the course of a political career. You're often forced to rub elbows with some unsavory people (I'm sure McCain has too), and seeing as Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were blowing up buildings, perhaps he really DIDN'T grasp the full significance of what Ayers and his cohorts did in the 60s.
It's the same thing with the SDS. I know what the group DID ... but beyond the usual suspects, I couldn't name five other people associated with the group. So someone with an SDS past could come up to me and wine me and dine me, and get me to intercede on their behalf, and unless I have the presence of mind to vett them on the spot, I wouldn't know .
I'm comfortable that Bill Ayers, today, is nowhere near Obama's campaign. I am confident Barack Obama has more brains than that ... even if he might not have known the full extent of Ayer' radicalism back when he was looking for people to help him get his state senate campaign off the ground in Chicago.
McCain's run a weak campaign. It's been rightly ridiculed as ineffectual, especially when someone such as Sarah Palin can go into a militantly red area of the country and talk about being with "real Americans," as if the rest of us are impostors. In response to Obama's position on taxes, McCain could do no better than to concoct a senario unique to him ... meaning he constructed a hypothetical containing ONLY that which he desired to include. He called this hypothetical "Joe te Plumber," even though the person in question was neither a Joe nor a licensed plumber.
It's difficult to disprove hypotheticals because to do so you have to inject "facts" into the scenario that -- as they used to say on Perry Mason -- are not not in evidence.
This is eerily similar to Reagan's much-ballyhood "Welfare Queen" (whom he also pulled out of thin air).
These anecdotal figures are nothing but condescending and insulting, and the fact that McCain actually scored some points with this pathetic attempt at distortion says more about us, as an informed electorate, than it does about him.
Barack Obama brings a breath of fresh air to a political system that is growing so polluted that it's bordering on toxic. He brings intelligence into a White House that hasn't had any in the past eight years. And of the two candidates, let it also be known that while McCain talks a good game when it comes to old-fashioned American values, HE'S the one who left his wife for another woman while Obama's the one who -- as far as anyone knows -- has a solid, loving marriage.
I don't mean to sound as if that's the only criteria for being president, but since the Republicans would like you to think they've cornered the market on morality, we DO need to bring this up.
Please. Cast your vote for Barack Obama tomorrow and let's turn the page and move on from these last very ugly, divisive, eight years.
I suppose I should have expected it, but it has taken me somewhat by surprise. The Republicans -- or, should I say, the McCain campaign -- is out of ideas and has BEEN out of ideas since forever. While some of the minutae of the current GOP platform may vary slightly from what the current administration has offered us, what McCain and Co. are proposing is more of the same.
I find myself in kind of a strange position. Back in February, I -- an independent -- registered as a Republican on Super Tuesday for the specific purpose of voting against our former governor -- Mitt Romney.
This meant voting for McCain, even though I went into this campaign season liking Rudy Guiliani very much, partly because I love New York and love the way he helped clean it up; and partly because I thought he handled himself magnificently on Sept. 11, 2001. But I soured on him rather quickly once I started listening to him, and by February figured the best of a bad lot was McCain.
John S. McCain, I figured, was the one Republican I could stomach in the White House if my guy -- Obama -- couldn't survive the primaries. So, logic dictated I throw a little support his way just in case.
That was in February. Hillary took Massachusetts (which I figured would happen) and Romney won the GOP side. But that was bascially his last, and maybe even only, hurrah. He flamed out soon afterward, and by March McCain's nomination was a foregone conclusion ... pretty remarkable for someone who'd been so dismissively written off only six months earlier.
So there's my reasoning ... and I'm sad to admit it now. I have been proven wrong. McCain's election would not be in the best interests of the United States of America. His ideas are old, terribly shopwarn, and they're proven failures based on what has happened, both over the the last eight years and the last eight weeks. Worse, McCain seems to be the same type of angry reactionary who ruled the White House for the previous eight years ... shoot first, ask questions later. Though hee likes to say he's a maverick, McCain -- just by his termperment -- would have fit in very well with the angry reactionaries in the Bush administration.
Then, there's the matter of Sarah Palin, who -- I'm sure -- is a nice woman who could, someday, command quite a presence on the national stage. But not now. Not even close. And McCain took what is already a ridiculously politically expedient process and multiplied it Times Ten with this selection.
Not that Joe Biden is any prize. And unscripted Biden is a terrifying thing. As someone on Bill Maher's show said last Friday, "he's on the 10-yard line. All he needs to do from hereon out is show up." Instead, he plants this SEED in people about the bogeyman terrorists launching some kind of horrendous attack on the country to "test" Obama.
Of course, that's exactly what the bogeymen did with George W. Bush. And maybe Biden's biggest mistake here was to remind people what an abject failure Bush's response to the test was ... how he completely fouled things up beyond repair with his response. His type of hot-headed, incendiary response was exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted, and Bush was either too stupid or too stubborn (or both) to see it.
But at least Biden had something tangible -- both in terms of politics and experience -- to offer the Obama ticket. I'm still trying to figure out what it is Palin offered -- unless it's an infusion of youthful vigor to detract from the rapidly-aging McCain.
This is a roundabout way of talking about Barack, because right off the bat, Obama gets points for at least being sober and rational in judgment. His reasons behind selecting Biden were sound and mature. He understood the politics of Biden's campaign ... and he understood that good leadership involves surrounding yourself with people whose opinions and expertise you respect, even if you're not the best of friends.
On the other hand, McCain's apparent reasons for picking Palin -- she's a woman (and could sway disaffected Hillary voters), she's young ... and evangelical to boot -- seem a bit more reckless.
Let's examine the "experience" factor. Experience in presidential politics is overrated -- unless it's YOU who are running ... and YOU have the glittering resume. George H.W. Bush had a glowing resume, both in diplomatic, executive and intelligence circles. You name it, 41 did it. He was head of the CIA, head of the GOP National Committee (a position he held at the time of Watergate), a U.S. Representative ... and vice president. I'd imagine he knew where every lever of power was, and how to push it when he had to.
Yet, he was a one-term president who couldn't parlay a legitimate accomplishment (the 1990 Desert Storm war) into four more years. And why not? Because for all his experience, he couldn't control the lunatic fringe of his own party. He tried. He came into office -- despite the brutally dirty campaign against Michael Dukakis -- with a reputation of being a genial country club Republican. But it did seem that George I lacked the backbone to stand up to the nut jobs in his party ... and by trying (and failing) to accommodate them, he not only lost THEM, he lost the middle, too.
I have no love for Ronald Reagan, but one thing I'll give him: He kept those nut jobs at arm's length. And for all his bluster, he actually governed from the center a lot more than people think.
With few exceptions (Ed Meese, Casper Weinberger), he employed pragmatic people who understood that to actually get things DONE you had to throw a few bones to the opposing party. He lost it late in his second administration when the combination of being a lame duck and -- just a personal opinion -- the beginnings of the Alzeimers reduced his effectiveness. But for all I didn't like about him ideologically, he knew how to communicate with people AND understood how to work with people with whom he had political disagreements.
He also understood the prudence of cutting your losses. When those Marines were blown up in Beirut, he didn't allow the rest of them to stick around so they could get killed too. He got the hell OUT of there and didn't worry about this "saving face" nonsense that has us still in Iraq now.
I thought George H.W. would be something like that, and while he wasn't my guy, I wasn't depressed for a month when he got elected (partially because I wasn't all that fond of Michael Dukakis either). But H.W. couldn't take the heat when the nut jobs started in on him -- even with a 90 percent approval rating (after Desert Storm). He tried to win these people over, and on election day, they couldn't get to the polls fast enough to vote for H. Ross Perot. That's gratitude for you.
It's important to understandn this, because when it was George W's turn, he learned his lessons. There was no way he was going to get outflanked by the Republican right. So he invited them all to the table, where they controlled him instead of the other way around. I seriously doubt George W. Bush ever HAD a policy he could call his own. Anything he got, he got from the wignuts with whom he surrounded himself ... Henry Kissinger refugees like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who itched to be back in power after eight years of Bill Clinton.
These are the people to whom McCain -- the so-called "maverick" -- sold his soul to get the nomination.
But as I say, experience ONLY counts when it's YOUR GUY who has the experience. In 2000, George Bush's only real military experience was in finding ways to avoid showing up for his Army Reserve commitments. So you never heard the Republicans talk about it. In 2004, John Kerry -- recipient of multiple medals in Vietnam -- was reduced to defending himself against scurrilous charges that he'd fabricated his record.
But all of a sudden, in 2008, we have a genuine war hero on the ticket ... and all of a sudden the ONLY criteria for holding the Oval Office is ... you guessed it ... experience. I have a tremendous amount of respect for what McCain endured in Vietnam. I can't imagine how he got through it, and I'm sure that in many ways it hardened him. But at the same time, I know lots of Vietnam vets who came back from the war permanently scarred. Some of them have overcome those scars; others, sadly, did not ... and sunk into lives of drug addiction and mental illness, and, in a few cases, died tragically prematurely as a result.
I'm not suggesting John McCain is afflicted with either the diseases of addiction OR mental illness. But the pendulum does swing so wildly on these issues that the experiences of being a POW, or having been wounded in battle, make up no more than a portion of your overall resume. The Republicans proved this in 2004 when the voters rejected John Kerry. So it's disingenuous for them to use it now as a reason to vote FOR McCain.
The next item to examine is McCain's record as a U.S. Senator, which, on average, would appear to be ... well ... average. He's done some good things. But he's also managed to get his name associated with one of the bigger scandals in modern Senate history ... the Keating Five.
The Republicans love to run against big government. Bush campaigned in 2000 as being an outsider ... a stranger to the Beltway. McCain's been a U.S. Senator for more than 20 years. His name has appeared on one of the biggest scandals the senate has seen in that time ... the Keating Five.
While his record as a senator doesn't DISQUALIFY him from being president,it, in and of itself, doesn't uniquely QUALIFY him either. Like his military service, it's certainly a FACTOR in the overall judgment of him, but there's nothing there the jumps up and says "Damn, we HAVE to vote for this man."
Again, going back to George W. Bush ... he campaign on being anti-Washington ... NOT part of the Beltway crowd. Why? Because he argued -- and not incorrectly, either -- that to be a part of the solution, you cannot be a part of the problem.
If the legislature is bogged down in petty partisanship, then the only logical thing to do is get new people in there who aren't so married to the old ways of doing things that they've become obstructionist. Right?"
Shouldn't logic, then, dictate that the most qualified person to be president is the LEAST qualified in terms of legislative tenure? Wouldn't a person not so thoroughly entrenched in the legislative morass that has affected politics since the first Clinton administration be more prone to see things differently than one who's been part of the problem for over 20 years?
Obama has been a senator for only four years -- hardly enough time to be an entrenched member of the club. So in a curious way, his LACK of experience actually plays to his favor.
But there are other reasons to support him. Unlike Al Gore and Kerry before him, Obama has a pulse. He has passion. He has ideals. He has noble goals. And he's black.
Wait. Stop. You're reading this, and you're saying "Ahhhh, that's it. he's voting for Obama because he's black." And you're right. I am. But please, let me explain.
You can thank Robert Wohl for what's about to come next. Wohl has a couple of HBO specials called "Assume the Position," that are both hilarious and illuminating. In the second one, his opening bit talks about the presidents, and the total lack of diversity that runsn through all 43 of them. As he says, "for such a diverse country ... not a whole lot of it up there, is there?"
Yes, that's a funny observation ... but it's also a very sad reality. This country grew to be the giant it is on the backs of ethnic immigrants who came over here and did all the heavy lifting that made us kings of the Industrial Age. And they have been poorly represented in the White House. With the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower (German-American) and John F. Kennedy (Roman Catholic) the overwhelming preponderance of presidents have been White Anglo Saxon Protestants (including the current one).
Barack Obama represents the HOPE, at least, that the next president will have the ability -- and curiosity -- to see the whole picture from a different template. I'm confident, given Obama's basically sober, measured and moderate nature, that this is NOT a man who's going to give away the store, open up the borders and let ALL the illegals in carte blanche (even if his distant aunt lives here illegally), or strip off his mask someday and become the modern-day Karl Marx.
But I AM confident that Barack Obama will see situations differently, see them from a fresh set of eyes, and perhaps react accordingly. I hope he does. We need to at least CONSIDER the possibility of taking a different road to get where we want to go. The one we're on is leading nowhere.
I also think Barack Obama, as person who has spent considerable time overseas, and in lands not always friendly to the United States, will bring a sensitivity about our place in the modern world that this administration simply does not possess. And not only does the Bush administration not possess this sensitivity, it don't WANT to. The Bush people don't care.
In fact, one of the gripes I HAVE with George W. Bush is his complete LACK of sensitivity about how we're perceived abroad. He -- and his followers -- think this a non-issue. I beg to differ. Countries act, and react, toward us based on what they SEE, and PERCEIVE ... not by what we TELL them. And they SEE what we do from a much different perspective than we do, and that has as much to do with the propaganda OUR government disseminates as it does the usual mistrust that exists between the U.S. and its enemies.
There's no better example of how destructive that mistrust can be than the sight of airplanes loaded with innocent people careening into buildings loaded with MORE innocent people. It takes an awful lot of hatred and resentment to whip yourself into the type of frenzy that would allow you to even CONSIDER doing something like that ... let alone carry it out. You don't just wake up one morning and decide to kill 3,000 people who have done absolutely nothing to you. You have to be so blind with hatred and zealotry that you'll kill ANYBODY for the advancement of your cause.
I'll grant you some of that is because of the indocrination that the radical muslems who pulled this off received in their native countries. But the Bush administration never seemed interested in identifying the catalyst ... what set these people OFF? Simple chemistry. You can mix up a bunch of chemicals in a test tube, but ONE of them has to act as a catalyst for there to be a reaction.
What was the catalyst? And what did our insistance on starting a war in the middle of that cauldron do to the cauldron ... both in the short and long term?
I'm hoping Barack Obama will be more of a soothing, sobering element on the world stage than George W. Bush was ... and I'm afraid I see John McCain as being cut out of much the same cloth as the current president.
We have also had the bonus -- sad though it may have been -- of seeing how both men would react to a crisis. Witness McCain's reaction to the Wall Street meltdown vs. Obama's.
McCain tried to inject himself into the process and ended up being party to making the situation worse. Obama -- who had no power beyond his seat in the U.S. Senate (same as McCain) stepped back and let the people in charge do their jobs. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obama's position in the polls took a huge leap after that. People saw that Obama has a cool head while they saw McCain as a glowering, angry man willing to elbow his way into the spotlight, even if he doesn't belong there.
Obama also came up with one of the better lines when he said "people expect their presidents to be able to do more than one thing at a time." It wasn't as good as "I can see Russa from my house," perhaps, but good enough.
I don't think Obama is perfect. I don't see him as being "the messiah," and nothing aggravates me more than the GOP taunting that Obama's supporters are hero worshipping of that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes.
I admit the country is taking a big risk in turning to him ... but I think the same thing about McCain too ... except I think it's a bigger risk. He's come across as angry, bitter, and caustic on the stump this fall, and I think this country has been run from anger now for eight years ... and all you have to do is look around to see how corrosive that anger has become. I look forward to someone a bit more dispassionate and introspective ... and less ready to come out swinging without examing the situation first.
Some of the anti-Obama swill has been nothing more than coded racism -- especially the efforts to hang Rev. Jeremiah Wright around his neck. I certainly don't AGREE with the reverend, and it would probably be a cold day in hill for me to get up and say "God DAMN America" in front of a church full of people. But if I did, I'd be appalled if someone tried to indict every OTHER person in the church because of what I said. That's dangerously close to McCarthyism, only there's the extra-added tinge of racism in there because of the anger --unique, in many ways, to African-Americans -- that Wright was expressing.
Similarly, the whole ACORN nonsense is just that ... nonsense. This was just a case of the loser pulling out all the stops. McCain took out all the guns, and started firing into the crowd, hoping that one of the bullets hits a vein or an artery. Again, even if ACORN's methods completely lacked ethics, there's no evidence that Obama, or any of his staff, put ACORN up to commiting voter fraud. And I doubt there will eve BE proof. However, there IS the fear that this is a Rovian Republican attempt to lay the groundwork for enough challenges to REALLY gum up this election ... perhaps as payback for the Florida challenge of 2000.
I have my concerns about the issue of Bill Ayers, however. I don't think Obama's a terrorist, and I don't think he condones, or ever condoned, blowing up buildings as a way of airing political grievances.
But at the same time, either he should have known, or someone should have told him pretty damn quick, that Bill Ayers would be a good guy to steer clear of, especially if he had political aspirations down the line.
I can also certainly understand McCain's desire to hammer away at this, too. I'm sure his reasons are aren't merely political. I'd image they're bitterly personal -- and I have no problem with that. While Ayers was blowing up buildings, McCain was a guest at the Hanoi Hilton. And if I were him, it would gall me, too, that Ayers had anything at all to do --however minor -- with springboarding Obama's political career.
But honestly, similar to the Rev. Wright issue, this doesn't mean Obama is sympathetic to terrorists -- either domestic or foreign. You DO run across a lot of people over the course of a political career. You're often forced to rub elbows with some unsavory people (I'm sure McCain has too), and seeing as Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were blowing up buildings, perhaps he really DIDN'T grasp the full significance of what Ayers and his cohorts did in the 60s.
It's the same thing with the SDS. I know what the group DID ... but beyond the usual suspects, I couldn't name five other people associated with the group. So someone with an SDS past could come up to me and wine me and dine me, and get me to intercede on their behalf, and unless I have the presence of mind to vett them on the spot, I wouldn't know .
I'm comfortable that Bill Ayers, today, is nowhere near Obama's campaign. I am confident Barack Obama has more brains than that ... even if he might not have known the full extent of Ayer' radicalism back when he was looking for people to help him get his state senate campaign off the ground in Chicago.
McCain's run a weak campaign. It's been rightly ridiculed as ineffectual, especially when someone such as Sarah Palin can go into a militantly red area of the country and talk about being with "real Americans," as if the rest of us are impostors. In response to Obama's position on taxes, McCain could do no better than to concoct a senario unique to him ... meaning he constructed a hypothetical containing ONLY that which he desired to include. He called this hypothetical "Joe te Plumber," even though the person in question was neither a Joe nor a licensed plumber.
It's difficult to disprove hypotheticals because to do so you have to inject "facts" into the scenario that -- as they used to say on Perry Mason -- are not not in evidence.
This is eerily similar to Reagan's much-ballyhood "Welfare Queen" (whom he also pulled out of thin air).
These anecdotal figures are nothing but condescending and insulting, and the fact that McCain actually scored some points with this pathetic attempt at distortion says more about us, as an informed electorate, than it does about him.
Barack Obama brings a breath of fresh air to a political system that is growing so polluted that it's bordering on toxic. He brings intelligence into a White House that hasn't had any in the past eight years. And of the two candidates, let it also be known that while McCain talks a good game when it comes to old-fashioned American values, HE'S the one who left his wife for another woman while Obama's the one who -- as far as anyone knows -- has a solid, loving marriage.
I don't mean to sound as if that's the only criteria for being president, but since the Republicans would like you to think they've cornered the market on morality, we DO need to bring this up.
Please. Cast your vote for Barack Obama tomorrow and let's turn the page and move on from these last very ugly, divisive, eight years.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Music, Music, Music
Today, I was listening to "I'm No Angel" by Gregg Allman and immediately I thought of July 3, 1991, at the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Norton, MA. My friend Mike called and asked if I'd like to go see the Allman Brothers with him. Free tickets. How on earth could I refuse.
So, I passed up the annual fireworks display at Lynn Beach and went to see the Allmans with Mickey. I'd see the AB's before. They're one of my favorite groups. But there was something about July 4 and Americana and the Allman Brothers that just seemed too surreal. Here we were, in the middle of a sea of bikers (nothing like the Allmans to bring out the inner Hog in us all), with firecrackers and cherry bombs exploding all around us. Talk about the rockets' red glare!!
What a great show! They played for so long -- and jammed so freely -- that the went way past the curfew and never got around to playing "Ramblin' Man," (which was to be their ultimate encore). You'd think that would be disappointing, but it wasn't. The discerning Allman Brothers aficionado knows that while "Ramblin' Man" is certainly a great song (indeed, their signature tune), there are so many other great songs in their repertoire that you could listen to three hours worth of music (which we did, bascially) and always come away wanting more.
Anyway, I bring this all up because "I'm No Angel" was one of that concert's real highlights. The group just come out of a mid-set intermission with "In Memory of Elizabeth Reid," a very cool jazz-oriented instrumental piece (inspired by the fact that when the Allmans used to go drinking in a nearby cemetery, they always gathered at the headstone of one Elizabeth Reid), and it served as an introduction to a more mellow point in the show (they also did a wonderful acoustic version of "Midnight Rider" -- another Allman solo piece).
Not that the mellow portion was bad ... but if you went there to see kickass rock 'n' roll, this was probably your cue to go to the bathroom, or get up and get something to eat ... of fidget. Me? I loved it.
However, "I'm No Angel" was the first song they played after this mellow interlude, and it just jerked the audience back into the spirit of the evening. It's a great song anyway, all about a roughhouse biker-type ("come on, baby, let me show you my tattoos") who promises that despite his savage appearance and reputation, he'll treat the girl of his dreams gently ("I'll never lift a hand to hurt you and I'll always leave you glad."). It's full of vivid images.
And it rocks! Especially when you get into it. And besides, who among us hasn't wished, once in a while, to explore his dark side? Even the ever-romantic Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues wrote "The Other Side of Life," about the desire to explore his dark side.
That song kicked the concert into overdrive, and paved the way for a parade of sizzling classics, from "Jessica" to "Revival" to "Statesboro Blues" to a lengthy first encore of "Tied to the Whipping Post" that had to last 15 minutes, with not a second of it wasted.
I've seen the Allmans several times, yet this concert stood out as special (though it would have been more special had we not got caught in a massive traffic jam leaving the stadium; I think we finally got home on July 5!).
So listening to the song brought back memories ... not only of that concerts but of others as well. I cannot count the number of rock concerts I've seen. Some of them have been perfectly dreadful (there was the Bob Dylan show a few years ago that was so bad that all I could think of was that line from Positively 4th Street, "I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes; then you'd know what a drag it is to see you!"), and I remember seeing the Cars once and wishing someone would steal them and dismantle them in a chop shop (RIP, Ben Orr).
Then there was Duran Duran (don't ask how that came about). Horrible.
But the great ones more than make up for the lemons. If you can go through life with even a handful of experiences like that July 3 Allman Brothers show (which was one of the most perfectly laid out shows Ive ever seen; if I were a rock star, and were planning a show, I'd have done it the same way), you're doing OK.
I think the absolute best rock show I've ever seen, barring none, was the October 1973 Jethro Tull concert at the Boston Garden. Well, first of all, even if you didn't intend to get stoned going INTO the show, you were totally wrecked coming out. That's how much cannibus swirled around unfettered. I remember wondering how in the world any cop could let THAT go! Probably because it was a hopeless battle.
This was right after "Passion Play" came out, and Tull performed the entire album in the first set. I can remember not really liking the album all that much when I heard it the first time (It's still one of the least played CDs in my collection even today). "Thick as a Brick" was so good that "Passion Play" seemed like a poor facsimile. It was as if Ian Anderson said "I'm going to do 'Thick as a Brick' all over again, but call it something else."
Now, it always helps when you get a guy like Ian Anderson, who understands theater, and understands that just getting up there and playing isn't enough. Rock 'n' roll was never MERELY about the music ... and that's what people my parents' age never understood (and it's probably what people of my generation and culture fail to grasp about rap). Rock 'n' roll was about the attitude ... the excitement ... the rawness and edginess that all the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin fans from the 40s and 50s never quite got because they'd never experienced it (though I suspect that if you appreciated the sophisticated jazz and blues of the 1920s and 30s you might have had a better chance of getting it).
"Passion Play" came to life that night. It helped that Ian Anderson made it an audio-visual show, with animated beginning that featured the contorted ballerina that adorns the album's cover. it was bizarre ... actually disturbing. But it was effective. It left you with your mouth agape, and just when it climaxed (like any good sexual encounter), out burst Ian Anderson (he almost ejaculated onto the stage, if that's possible!) to perform the album. It was probably the only time I ever found that album enjoyable.
It didn't stop with "Passion Play" either. They went onto do a good chunk of "Thick as a Brick" and a lot of "Aqualung," including an immensely enjoyable (and out-and-out kickass) version of "Locomotive Breath."
Thing is, though, I'm more of a fan of Tull's quieter, chamber music-like material, and really have a problem with Anderson if he forgets about that stuff when he performs shows. Usually, he's good about including it (though not always; I've come away from several shows of his extremely disappointed about the material he's chosen to perform). On this night, he represented his softer side more than adequately.
There was the obligatory "Bouree," of course ... Anderson does Bach. But there was also "Sossity, You're a Woman," from "Benefit," and one that he put on "Living in the Past" called "Life's a Long Song," which is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. It still remains a Krause staple on the iPod today.
I was just 20 years old in 1973, and went to the Tull concert with Mickey as well (we both had dates; he had some girl, forget whom) and I had Donna "Boobs" Bertazzoni from Quincy, who went to school with me at Northeastern University. We were just friends (although I'd have perferred it to be more than that). She was actually dating a guy named Sterling W. Honeywell (imaging dating a guy named Sterling??). The "W" stood for William, and, much to his credit, he preferred to be called Bill. But I always referring to him as Sterling, much to Donna's irritation.
For some reason, unrequited love and music go hand-in-hand with me, and it has a lot to do with why I like the Moody Blues ... who own another chapter in my "favorite concert" book.
First, the history. My freshman year of college, I fell madly for this girl Melinda Marchi, a stunning Italian from Cromwell, Connecticut. She had long, straight, jet-black hair and similarly dark, Mediterranean features. We took economics together, and hit it off, and I thought I had a chance.
Boy, was I wrong. I found out, through talking to her, that she liked opera, so I went out and got two tickets to "Tosca" by Puccini (hey, I wasn't proud; I'd have done anything back in those days!!). I'd never heard of it, but she'd mentioned she wanted to see it. Except, apparently, not with me. Because when I summoned up enough nerve to ask her if she'd go with me, she said she had other plans ... I guess sorting her socks or something.
I was crushed. First, the tickets weren't CHEAP! And second, abject rejection, especially if you've invested that much time and energy into cultivating that type of a crush, is like free falling off the Empire State Building.
As it so happens, though, life went on. Later that day, I discovered that the Northeastern bookstore didn't have a piece of reading material on my political science syllibus, so I had to truck on up to the Harvard Coop to find it.
Now, I LOVE Harvard Square. Some people go to Disneyland for fun and excitement. I go to Harvard Square and look at the freaks. And there are plenty of them! Brattle Street, which, to me, is the capital of the Eastern Elitism that conservatives always love to hate, is like a freak Mecca. It always energizes me, too, to walk into the Coop, as I did recently, and see stacks of books staring at me villifying the latest conservative du jour. In 1972, it was Nixon. the last time I went, it was 56 different books basically saying that George W. Bush sucked.
I always feel home at Harvard (and by the way, just to clear something up, you cannot pahhk your cahhh at Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd because you cahhhn't DRIVE in Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd).
Even on that day, after having had my balls summarily chopped off by Melinda Marchi, I kind of felt a little rejuvenated (though not a lot) by getting off the subway at Harvard and drinking in the atmosphere.
I found the book at the Coop (short for cooperative) and stood in line for what had to be a good 20-25 minutes to pay for it. I noticed this exotic music playing from a really nice set of speakers that just seemed to surround the room. It sounded familar, but I couldn't place it. It was mournful yet uplifting at the same time. The music ended with an orchestral flourish, a poem, and a loud gong.
Remember, this was 1972. There were no CDs. Just long-playing albums and record players that went back and repeated the same records. And on this one, the needle arm reset itself to the beginning of the album and all of a sudden I'm hearing "Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues.
What I HAD been hearing, of course, was the conclusion to "Days of Future Passed." Now, having heard it a few hundred thousand times, I picked it up around the song "The Sunset" and rode it through to the end, including "Nights in White Satin," and "Late Lament."
I'd probably heard NIWS a few times in my life (though not many) and had never heard the album. Nor had I heard much of anything else by the Moodies (just the singles they made famous).
Well, I ran right out and bought the album, and it nursed me through my own blues over being rejected. And through the rest of that year, I resolved to educate myself about the Moody Blues. I snatched up every album I could find (by then, there were six of the original upon release).
By October of 1972, I was thorougly Moodied. My sister thought I was possessed. So did my friends. It was Moodies, Moodies, and more Moodies. So it happened that I stood in line outside the Boston Garden the day tickets went on sale for their 1972 show for three hours with a bunch hof buddies from school and scored some. They sold out in no time, as this when they were REALLY at their peak.
By October, I'd stopped obsessing over Melinda and had gone back to enjoying life. So my friends and I simply went to the Boston Garden to enjoy a good show.
The show was all right. What made the concert memorable were the three guys sitting in front of us who were dressed like characters from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Seriously. I just remember one guy was dressed in black, with this pointy hat, and half-moons drawn all over him. He had a long beard and he was tanked before he even got inside. He was Merlin the Magician, or so he said.
They were primed, obviously -- and, just as obviously, they thought "Are You Sitting Comfortably" was about THEM!!!
Now, THIS was funny. Demented and funny. The only thing I'll always regret about the experience was that I was with a bunch of guys, and not with a girl, because that's the type of thing -- that kind of ambiance -- that can REALLY serve as an ice breaker if you want to end up getting laid. I looked around at the five guys sitting with me and just sighed. AWFUL timing.
As I said, the show wasn't memorable for the music. In those days, the Moodies were not a good live band ... at least I didn't think so. Their music was very sophisticated, a lot like the type the Beatles produced toward the end of their careers. Great on vinyl; difficult to reproduce in all of its technical wizardry on stage. Not to mention that they were probably just as stoned playing it as we were watching it. I understand there were a lot of drugs flying around the Moodies' entourage in those days!
All of this made for very sloppy musicianship, which -- musical fuss budget that I am -- annoyed me. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest.
But the show in the audience more than made up for it. These three guys were great to watch. They were SOOOOOOOO stoned that they couldn't keep themselves sitting up. They flopped all over each other (they were probably gay!!) and just swooned in RAPTURE every time a new song began. The ironic part, though, is that by the time the Moodies finally got around to playing the end of "Threshhold of a Dream," which they almost ALWAYS did as a whole block toward the end of the show in those days, these three guys were catatonic from having smoked so much weed. They couldn't even enjoy it!
I have two more shows to discuss before calling it a day. The first was in February 1990 ... Paul McCartney at the Worcester Centrum. Macca went out plugging his tour as a journey through the past, and boy, was it ever. Beatles songs, Beatles songs and more Beatles songs, and some of them really raised that lump right to the base of your throat. The first of this absolute melange of Fab music was "Got To Get You Into My Life," which is my absolute most favorite song of theirs, and it just got better after that. Old stuff ("I Saw Her Standing There" and "Things We Said Today"), solo stuff ("Live and Let Die"), trippy stuff ("Fool on the Hill") and classic stuff ("Hey Jude," which audience participating at the end that almost made it seem like a religious experience).
You watched the show, and you were keenly aware that this was history unfolding before your eyes. A lot of those songs had never been performed in public before, and there was just such an outpouring of gratitude on the part of the fans that, after all these years, Paul McCartney toured and played them.
Finally, but certainly not least, there was the Brian Wilson show in 2005 in which he performed the entire "Smile" album. In a lot of ways, this was one of the most extraordinary shows I've ever seen. Wilson toured with an 18-piece band, and you got the idea that maybe he was able to perform his old Beach Boys songs in a manner in which he'd envisioned them when he wrote them. He turned "Help Me Rhonda" into a symphony, almost, and I remember thinking to myself, "is this cool, or what!
"Smile" is also an extraordinary piece of music. Had it been released in 1967, the way it was intended, no one would have understood it. At least "Sergeant Pepper" had elements of the ritualistic rock album (and even at that, Pepper stood out as singularly bizarre that year). This had none, really. It was a collection of little songs strung together in a way to tell a story (perhaps a drug-hazed story, but a story nonetheless). If it reminds me of anything at all, it reminds me of the second side of "Abbey Road", with unfinished bits of songs strung together to create a definite aural effect, if nothing else; the songs themselves weren't that cohesive on "Abbey Road" and aren't on "Smile").
What separates the two records, of course, is the placement of the songs. Where "Abbey Road" was divided by sides (the first side being a collection of normal songs while the second side kind of wanders off into the realm of the bizarre), "Smile" interspersed both freely. Hence, you get these moments of brilliance that just seem to crop up out of nowhere.
For example, from "Heros and Villains" to "Surf's Up" you get a collection of melodious songs that -- as I've said earlier -- aren't really complete; yet create, by their sequencing, a definite mood. But in the middle of it all, there's "Surf's Up," one of the most complicated, perplexing, wonderful, beautiful, confusing, exasperating, uplifting, almost ethereal, songs in the rock repertoire. It is said to be the song that caused all the friction in the Beach Boys (Mike Love didn't understand it and wanted nothing to do with singing it), and it led, not-too-indirectly, to all of Brian Wilson's subsequent mental health problems.
It's not as if I'd never heard it before. It came out on other albums, and though you never heard it much, even on FM radio, once in a while someone would play it late at night ... and you could almost see the marijuana smoke swirling around the room when you heard it.
But hearing it live, sung by Brian Wilson, with all that history ... that was almost too much to take. The audience grew quiet, almost reverential, as the song unfolded. There was literally no noise. I thought I might be in church.
Then (another relic from the past) the matches and lighters came out and there was a sea of flames as Wilson wrapped up the song. And when he finished, the ovation was deafening. And it lasted for a good five or six minutes ... people standing, screaming, some of them even crying. What a moment!
This was not the first stop on the tour. Yet, Brian Wilson sat there ... and I don't think he knew what to do. He's not the most stable person ANYWAY, and I think he just wished it would end so that he could just go back to playing music. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but he accepted it graciously as it waned, and went back to playing music!
The ovation was almost as long, and as long, when he finished "Good Vibrations," too.
But the bonus was after the intermission, he and his band came out and played some real old, vintage Beach Boys material, ending the night with "Surfin' USA" and "Fun, Fun, Fun," with everyone up and dancing in the aisles.
The concert was also noteworthy because it was in July of 2005 ... and Wilson played "Ol' St. Nick." THAT was funny!
So there you have it. Five classic concerts I'll never forget.
So, I passed up the annual fireworks display at Lynn Beach and went to see the Allmans with Mickey. I'd see the AB's before. They're one of my favorite groups. But there was something about July 4 and Americana and the Allman Brothers that just seemed too surreal. Here we were, in the middle of a sea of bikers (nothing like the Allmans to bring out the inner Hog in us all), with firecrackers and cherry bombs exploding all around us. Talk about the rockets' red glare!!
What a great show! They played for so long -- and jammed so freely -- that the went way past the curfew and never got around to playing "Ramblin' Man," (which was to be their ultimate encore). You'd think that would be disappointing, but it wasn't. The discerning Allman Brothers aficionado knows that while "Ramblin' Man" is certainly a great song (indeed, their signature tune), there are so many other great songs in their repertoire that you could listen to three hours worth of music (which we did, bascially) and always come away wanting more.
Anyway, I bring this all up because "I'm No Angel" was one of that concert's real highlights. The group just come out of a mid-set intermission with "In Memory of Elizabeth Reid," a very cool jazz-oriented instrumental piece (inspired by the fact that when the Allmans used to go drinking in a nearby cemetery, they always gathered at the headstone of one Elizabeth Reid), and it served as an introduction to a more mellow point in the show (they also did a wonderful acoustic version of "Midnight Rider" -- another Allman solo piece).
Not that the mellow portion was bad ... but if you went there to see kickass rock 'n' roll, this was probably your cue to go to the bathroom, or get up and get something to eat ... of fidget. Me? I loved it.
However, "I'm No Angel" was the first song they played after this mellow interlude, and it just jerked the audience back into the spirit of the evening. It's a great song anyway, all about a roughhouse biker-type ("come on, baby, let me show you my tattoos") who promises that despite his savage appearance and reputation, he'll treat the girl of his dreams gently ("I'll never lift a hand to hurt you and I'll always leave you glad."). It's full of vivid images.
And it rocks! Especially when you get into it. And besides, who among us hasn't wished, once in a while, to explore his dark side? Even the ever-romantic Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues wrote "The Other Side of Life," about the desire to explore his dark side.
That song kicked the concert into overdrive, and paved the way for a parade of sizzling classics, from "Jessica" to "Revival" to "Statesboro Blues" to a lengthy first encore of "Tied to the Whipping Post" that had to last 15 minutes, with not a second of it wasted.
I've seen the Allmans several times, yet this concert stood out as special (though it would have been more special had we not got caught in a massive traffic jam leaving the stadium; I think we finally got home on July 5!).
So listening to the song brought back memories ... not only of that concerts but of others as well. I cannot count the number of rock concerts I've seen. Some of them have been perfectly dreadful (there was the Bob Dylan show a few years ago that was so bad that all I could think of was that line from Positively 4th Street, "I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes; then you'd know what a drag it is to see you!"), and I remember seeing the Cars once and wishing someone would steal them and dismantle them in a chop shop (RIP, Ben Orr).
Then there was Duran Duran (don't ask how that came about). Horrible.
But the great ones more than make up for the lemons. If you can go through life with even a handful of experiences like that July 3 Allman Brothers show (which was one of the most perfectly laid out shows Ive ever seen; if I were a rock star, and were planning a show, I'd have done it the same way), you're doing OK.
I think the absolute best rock show I've ever seen, barring none, was the October 1973 Jethro Tull concert at the Boston Garden. Well, first of all, even if you didn't intend to get stoned going INTO the show, you were totally wrecked coming out. That's how much cannibus swirled around unfettered. I remember wondering how in the world any cop could let THAT go! Probably because it was a hopeless battle.
This was right after "Passion Play" came out, and Tull performed the entire album in the first set. I can remember not really liking the album all that much when I heard it the first time (It's still one of the least played CDs in my collection even today). "Thick as a Brick" was so good that "Passion Play" seemed like a poor facsimile. It was as if Ian Anderson said "I'm going to do 'Thick as a Brick' all over again, but call it something else."
Now, it always helps when you get a guy like Ian Anderson, who understands theater, and understands that just getting up there and playing isn't enough. Rock 'n' roll was never MERELY about the music ... and that's what people my parents' age never understood (and it's probably what people of my generation and culture fail to grasp about rap). Rock 'n' roll was about the attitude ... the excitement ... the rawness and edginess that all the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin fans from the 40s and 50s never quite got because they'd never experienced it (though I suspect that if you appreciated the sophisticated jazz and blues of the 1920s and 30s you might have had a better chance of getting it).
"Passion Play" came to life that night. It helped that Ian Anderson made it an audio-visual show, with animated beginning that featured the contorted ballerina that adorns the album's cover. it was bizarre ... actually disturbing. But it was effective. It left you with your mouth agape, and just when it climaxed (like any good sexual encounter), out burst Ian Anderson (he almost ejaculated onto the stage, if that's possible!) to perform the album. It was probably the only time I ever found that album enjoyable.
It didn't stop with "Passion Play" either. They went onto do a good chunk of "Thick as a Brick" and a lot of "Aqualung," including an immensely enjoyable (and out-and-out kickass) version of "Locomotive Breath."
Thing is, though, I'm more of a fan of Tull's quieter, chamber music-like material, and really have a problem with Anderson if he forgets about that stuff when he performs shows. Usually, he's good about including it (though not always; I've come away from several shows of his extremely disappointed about the material he's chosen to perform). On this night, he represented his softer side more than adequately.
There was the obligatory "Bouree," of course ... Anderson does Bach. But there was also "Sossity, You're a Woman," from "Benefit," and one that he put on "Living in the Past" called "Life's a Long Song," which is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. It still remains a Krause staple on the iPod today.
I was just 20 years old in 1973, and went to the Tull concert with Mickey as well (we both had dates; he had some girl, forget whom) and I had Donna "Boobs" Bertazzoni from Quincy, who went to school with me at Northeastern University. We were just friends (although I'd have perferred it to be more than that). She was actually dating a guy named Sterling W. Honeywell (imaging dating a guy named Sterling??). The "W" stood for William, and, much to his credit, he preferred to be called Bill. But I always referring to him as Sterling, much to Donna's irritation.
For some reason, unrequited love and music go hand-in-hand with me, and it has a lot to do with why I like the Moody Blues ... who own another chapter in my "favorite concert" book.
First, the history. My freshman year of college, I fell madly for this girl Melinda Marchi, a stunning Italian from Cromwell, Connecticut. She had long, straight, jet-black hair and similarly dark, Mediterranean features. We took economics together, and hit it off, and I thought I had a chance.
Boy, was I wrong. I found out, through talking to her, that she liked opera, so I went out and got two tickets to "Tosca" by Puccini (hey, I wasn't proud; I'd have done anything back in those days!!). I'd never heard of it, but she'd mentioned she wanted to see it. Except, apparently, not with me. Because when I summoned up enough nerve to ask her if she'd go with me, she said she had other plans ... I guess sorting her socks or something.
I was crushed. First, the tickets weren't CHEAP! And second, abject rejection, especially if you've invested that much time and energy into cultivating that type of a crush, is like free falling off the Empire State Building.
As it so happens, though, life went on. Later that day, I discovered that the Northeastern bookstore didn't have a piece of reading material on my political science syllibus, so I had to truck on up to the Harvard Coop to find it.
Now, I LOVE Harvard Square. Some people go to Disneyland for fun and excitement. I go to Harvard Square and look at the freaks. And there are plenty of them! Brattle Street, which, to me, is the capital of the Eastern Elitism that conservatives always love to hate, is like a freak Mecca. It always energizes me, too, to walk into the Coop, as I did recently, and see stacks of books staring at me villifying the latest conservative du jour. In 1972, it was Nixon. the last time I went, it was 56 different books basically saying that George W. Bush sucked.
I always feel home at Harvard (and by the way, just to clear something up, you cannot pahhk your cahhh at Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd because you cahhhn't DRIVE in Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd).
Even on that day, after having had my balls summarily chopped off by Melinda Marchi, I kind of felt a little rejuvenated (though not a lot) by getting off the subway at Harvard and drinking in the atmosphere.
I found the book at the Coop (short for cooperative) and stood in line for what had to be a good 20-25 minutes to pay for it. I noticed this exotic music playing from a really nice set of speakers that just seemed to surround the room. It sounded familar, but I couldn't place it. It was mournful yet uplifting at the same time. The music ended with an orchestral flourish, a poem, and a loud gong.
Remember, this was 1972. There were no CDs. Just long-playing albums and record players that went back and repeated the same records. And on this one, the needle arm reset itself to the beginning of the album and all of a sudden I'm hearing "Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues.
What I HAD been hearing, of course, was the conclusion to "Days of Future Passed." Now, having heard it a few hundred thousand times, I picked it up around the song "The Sunset" and rode it through to the end, including "Nights in White Satin," and "Late Lament."
I'd probably heard NIWS a few times in my life (though not many) and had never heard the album. Nor had I heard much of anything else by the Moodies (just the singles they made famous).
Well, I ran right out and bought the album, and it nursed me through my own blues over being rejected. And through the rest of that year, I resolved to educate myself about the Moody Blues. I snatched up every album I could find (by then, there were six of the original upon release).
By October of 1972, I was thorougly Moodied. My sister thought I was possessed. So did my friends. It was Moodies, Moodies, and more Moodies. So it happened that I stood in line outside the Boston Garden the day tickets went on sale for their 1972 show for three hours with a bunch hof buddies from school and scored some. They sold out in no time, as this when they were REALLY at their peak.
By October, I'd stopped obsessing over Melinda and had gone back to enjoying life. So my friends and I simply went to the Boston Garden to enjoy a good show.
The show was all right. What made the concert memorable were the three guys sitting in front of us who were dressed like characters from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Seriously. I just remember one guy was dressed in black, with this pointy hat, and half-moons drawn all over him. He had a long beard and he was tanked before he even got inside. He was Merlin the Magician, or so he said.
They were primed, obviously -- and, just as obviously, they thought "Are You Sitting Comfortably" was about THEM!!!
Now, THIS was funny. Demented and funny. The only thing I'll always regret about the experience was that I was with a bunch of guys, and not with a girl, because that's the type of thing -- that kind of ambiance -- that can REALLY serve as an ice breaker if you want to end up getting laid. I looked around at the five guys sitting with me and just sighed. AWFUL timing.
As I said, the show wasn't memorable for the music. In those days, the Moodies were not a good live band ... at least I didn't think so. Their music was very sophisticated, a lot like the type the Beatles produced toward the end of their careers. Great on vinyl; difficult to reproduce in all of its technical wizardry on stage. Not to mention that they were probably just as stoned playing it as we were watching it. I understand there were a lot of drugs flying around the Moodies' entourage in those days!
All of this made for very sloppy musicianship, which -- musical fuss budget that I am -- annoyed me. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest.
But the show in the audience more than made up for it. These three guys were great to watch. They were SOOOOOOOO stoned that they couldn't keep themselves sitting up. They flopped all over each other (they were probably gay!!) and just swooned in RAPTURE every time a new song began. The ironic part, though, is that by the time the Moodies finally got around to playing the end of "Threshhold of a Dream," which they almost ALWAYS did as a whole block toward the end of the show in those days, these three guys were catatonic from having smoked so much weed. They couldn't even enjoy it!
I have two more shows to discuss before calling it a day. The first was in February 1990 ... Paul McCartney at the Worcester Centrum. Macca went out plugging his tour as a journey through the past, and boy, was it ever. Beatles songs, Beatles songs and more Beatles songs, and some of them really raised that lump right to the base of your throat. The first of this absolute melange of Fab music was "Got To Get You Into My Life," which is my absolute most favorite song of theirs, and it just got better after that. Old stuff ("I Saw Her Standing There" and "Things We Said Today"), solo stuff ("Live and Let Die"), trippy stuff ("Fool on the Hill") and classic stuff ("Hey Jude," which audience participating at the end that almost made it seem like a religious experience).
You watched the show, and you were keenly aware that this was history unfolding before your eyes. A lot of those songs had never been performed in public before, and there was just such an outpouring of gratitude on the part of the fans that, after all these years, Paul McCartney toured and played them.
Finally, but certainly not least, there was the Brian Wilson show in 2005 in which he performed the entire "Smile" album. In a lot of ways, this was one of the most extraordinary shows I've ever seen. Wilson toured with an 18-piece band, and you got the idea that maybe he was able to perform his old Beach Boys songs in a manner in which he'd envisioned them when he wrote them. He turned "Help Me Rhonda" into a symphony, almost, and I remember thinking to myself, "is this cool, or what!
"Smile" is also an extraordinary piece of music. Had it been released in 1967, the way it was intended, no one would have understood it. At least "Sergeant Pepper" had elements of the ritualistic rock album (and even at that, Pepper stood out as singularly bizarre that year). This had none, really. It was a collection of little songs strung together in a way to tell a story (perhaps a drug-hazed story, but a story nonetheless). If it reminds me of anything at all, it reminds me of the second side of "Abbey Road", with unfinished bits of songs strung together to create a definite aural effect, if nothing else; the songs themselves weren't that cohesive on "Abbey Road" and aren't on "Smile").
What separates the two records, of course, is the placement of the songs. Where "Abbey Road" was divided by sides (the first side being a collection of normal songs while the second side kind of wanders off into the realm of the bizarre), "Smile" interspersed both freely. Hence, you get these moments of brilliance that just seem to crop up out of nowhere.
For example, from "Heros and Villains" to "Surf's Up" you get a collection of melodious songs that -- as I've said earlier -- aren't really complete; yet create, by their sequencing, a definite mood. But in the middle of it all, there's "Surf's Up," one of the most complicated, perplexing, wonderful, beautiful, confusing, exasperating, uplifting, almost ethereal, songs in the rock repertoire. It is said to be the song that caused all the friction in the Beach Boys (Mike Love didn't understand it and wanted nothing to do with singing it), and it led, not-too-indirectly, to all of Brian Wilson's subsequent mental health problems.
It's not as if I'd never heard it before. It came out on other albums, and though you never heard it much, even on FM radio, once in a while someone would play it late at night ... and you could almost see the marijuana smoke swirling around the room when you heard it.
But hearing it live, sung by Brian Wilson, with all that history ... that was almost too much to take. The audience grew quiet, almost reverential, as the song unfolded. There was literally no noise. I thought I might be in church.
Then (another relic from the past) the matches and lighters came out and there was a sea of flames as Wilson wrapped up the song. And when he finished, the ovation was deafening. And it lasted for a good five or six minutes ... people standing, screaming, some of them even crying. What a moment!
This was not the first stop on the tour. Yet, Brian Wilson sat there ... and I don't think he knew what to do. He's not the most stable person ANYWAY, and I think he just wished it would end so that he could just go back to playing music. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but he accepted it graciously as it waned, and went back to playing music!
The ovation was almost as long, and as long, when he finished "Good Vibrations," too.
But the bonus was after the intermission, he and his band came out and played some real old, vintage Beach Boys material, ending the night with "Surfin' USA" and "Fun, Fun, Fun," with everyone up and dancing in the aisles.
The concert was also noteworthy because it was in July of 2005 ... and Wilson played "Ol' St. Nick." THAT was funny!
So there you have it. Five classic concerts I'll never forget.
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