Volume 60

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2009

60. 10: THE ANGEL’S PROMISE, by Frederic Lenoir & Violette Cabesos (2006) BR 9.27.2009

                               

Not being an aficionado of mystery genre I nearly passed on this European best seller and its investment of nearly 500 pages. But it contained two of my enduring, if amateur, passions—archaeology and religion. I am a sucker for ancient crypts, sacred grottoes and sanctum sanctorums. Get me near a catacomb and I’ll dive into the musty recesses and loculi like a prairie dog at a convention of hawks.

There is enough violence in religion not to require a lot of extra mayhem, but a story centered on monasticism, with its monotonous Lauds, Matins, Vespers, Compline offices, can do with a little bloodletting to spice things up—think The Name of the Rose. Maybe that’s why one of my favorite “digs” is a place in Rome near the Foro Romano that is called The Mammartino. It is actually the earliest known prison in the city, and all that is left of it is a cell in which, legend has it, St. Peter was kept while awaiting his inverted crucifixion on the Vatican hill. Inside its low vaulted ceiling is a small altar with an inverted cross on it. The grimy cell also has a sewer cover that leads into the Cloaca Maxima. Reputedly, captured enemies like the Gaul, Vercingetorix, and Jugurtha, the Numidian king, were dispatched and dumped in the sewer. I can’t resist places like the Church of the Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the precinct of he Oracle at Delphi, he cemetery of Capuchins in Rome or the Catacombs at Denfert-Rouchereau in Paris.

Mont St. Michel, the splendid Benedictine Monastery just off the coast of France almost due west of Paris makes for a good setting for an archeological/murder mystery. Ancient, isolated by tides, buffeted by chilly winds, and murmuring with the incantations of centuries of dead monks who live lives that are almost a complete waste of time (my prejudice; they did copy some manuscripts rather nicely before xerography) while waiting for heavenly eternity. Monasticism was a loony bin of self-incarceration that magnified superstition, delusion, insanity and buggery by its compression and isolation.

The story’s protagonist is French archeologist, Johanna, who is having an affair with a married official of antiquities, but has had recurrent and scary dreams of a headless monk since she was a young girl on Mont St. Michel. Much of the story alternates between the present-day and events in the mount in the 11th Century when the Benedictines occupied the abbey and there remained some pagan Celt remnants on the mainland. The storey centers on restorations that were being directed by an architect monk named Roman. The work involves changes to an old chapel called Notre Dame sous-Terre, which we later learn sits above an even older pagan sanctuary. There is a lot about the architecture of the mount, probably more than necessary and difficult, without any schematics, to appreciate in what amounts to a multi-level structure built in different styles and periods.

Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Johanna is carrying one affair, has a narratively- superfluous trip to Italy with a girlfriend and is obsessed with finding out about the headless monk that haunts her. We learn that Roman is that monk and he was beheaded by a Benedictine competitor, Almodius, for the affections of Moira, a beautiful Celt girl who healed wounds he received when he was attacked by a brigand. Moira and Roman fall into a non-carnal love. He tries to convert her, but Almodius has her tried as a devil worshipper and she is subjected to a series of trial-tortures worthy of Dick Cheney, and she dies. Not long after he beheads Roman and throws his head into the pagan chapel, leaving him decapitated and roaming between heaven and earth and unable to be re-united with his Moira in Paradise.

I won’t go further with plot except to say that there are secret burials, several more murders, another affair for Johanna, a manuscript discovered at the abbey at Cluny, written by Roman. If the writing were not so good, you might suspect the hand of Dan Brown in all of this. The mystery does pull you along, but forces some slogging through material and scenes that are tedious. We are regularly reminded that the answers to Johanna’s haunting are subterranean. There is a recurrent Latin promise of the Angel Michael that she “must dig in the earth to reach heaven.”

Like most mysteries the denoument is a deconstruction. But for this reader it takes place far to frantically and with too much reliance upon characters being used to explain the plot they are participating in. The conclusion is a little bit too much Laura Croft, intellectual tomb raider.

The Angel’s Promise is, not in the same league as The Name of the Rose, perhaps because it has appeared in the wake of The Da Vinci Code, which, in some ways it seems to try to emulate with a labyrinth of plot that ties up breathlessly and neatly in the forty pages. All mysteries are solved for the reader. But it also fails for lapsing into an almost schmaltzy melodrama. Separated and unconsummated love across the ages between a monk and a beautiful Celtic healer-priestess (he literally loses his head over her) borrows too much from Heloise and Abelard. Lenoir is a religion scholar and Cabesos is a writer in case one gets to suspecting there might be some parallels “off stage.”

Crypts within crypts, within crypts, contain secrets wrapped in Latin phrased ambiguities. Present-day murders replay those of the Middle Ages, and every sign signifies. Perhaps to this reader’s disappointment (blame my non-theism) the narrative would have been more interesting had it been about belief and rather less that of belief. There was plenty of murder in the Middle Ages, and in and between religious communities, but, while some of it was over matters of faith, most of it was over very earthly stuff, like power, money, and sex, the same stuff that explains most of human mayhem these days. Religion, as in the cases of Jonestown and Waco, is its demented justification.

The reality of religion is not he existence of God, which cannot be proven or known, but the persistence of belief in a God. The Angel’s Promise has a wing in each side of this distinction.
______________________________________________________
©2009, James A. Clapp

60. 9:    NOSTALGIA PORN     9.17.2009

                          

Confession: I ask for the “senior discount” when I go to the movies. That way I don’t have to hand them the deed to my home. (Related confession: I sometimes slip in to see another movie at those multiplex theaters, without paying. Serves them right for not having double features like when I was growing up.)

That’s a good segue to my theme for the day. It is nice that we are having senior citizens who are living to ripe old ages, but I have some reservations about it—one of which is that some of them should not be allowed near computers and the Internet. Not all of them, but those who have what I would call arrogant nostalgica. This concerns me because, at least demographically, I am on the cusp of, if not already a member, of this generation. Otherwise, they are oooh, soooo not me.

They are the generation that somebody had the foolishness to call “The Greatest Generation,” but some of them are becoming the greatest pain in the ass.” Yes, some members of that generation that lived through the Great Depression and fought in WWII so we wouldn’t have to learn to speak German and Japanese did wonderful and often heroic things. They were my parents’ generation, and like my 92-year-old mom, many of them are still around. But I am speaking also of a cohort that was a few years later than them, those who were kids during the depression and the war, and were on the cusp of the social changes that occurred during the tumultuous period from 1955 to 1968. These are the ones who have been allowed to have computers and Internet access.

I also suspect that a good number of this generation is responsible for the likes of Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes. Why? Because they are suspiciously socially, if not politically, conservative and would easily fall for slogans like “Morning in America,” that offered them a return to those “good old days” of their “greatest” youth when the culture was not so complicated and polychromatic.

But maybe I’m pushing that a bit too far for my theme—that is, that too many of this generation, many of whom have lived more years in retirement that they spent in the work force, are becoming a nuisance in filling the Internet with nostalgia porn. They are trying to turn the country into a national front porch of a retirement home on which legions of codgers sit around on rockers in gated retirement communities and lament the passing of the days when “men were men (who only liked women), women were in the kitchen, kids played baseball rather than Grand Theft Auto 4, phones were rotary and Bakelite, Coke came in glass bottles, you could tune your own car, movies weren’t on long sex scene, cigarettes and hot dogs were not harmful . . . well I could go on, and on, or just direct you to some of the emails I receive from people (mostly guys) who, if they find the 21st Century so unacceptable, might have gone “gently into that good night” of Aqua Velva, hair pomade, and all cars were made in America.

But no, they would rather sit there, rocking on their prostates, on the front porch of gauzy, over-sentimentalized memory, cranking out on their lap-tops an endless stream of “remember whens,” Glen Miller 78s spinning out on “His Master’s Voice,” reminiscing about the days when we could tell our enemies by their uniforms, and our friends by the pallor of their complexions. So, here are some examples from stuff that has been seen to me.
From something called “Wisdom from Grandpa”:

Whether a man winds up with a nest egg, or a goose egg, depends a lot on the kind of chick he marries.
Trouble in marriage often starts when a man gets so busy earnin' his salt that he forgets his sugar.
Too many couples marry for better, or for worse, but not for good.

Just use the white bag if you feel your breakfast coming up.

This one is from a site called “Geezers”:

At sporting events, during the playing of the National Anthem, Old Geezers hold their caps over their hearts and sing without embarrassment. They know the words and believe in them. . . . It's the Old Geezers who know our great country is protected, not by politicians or police, but by the young men and women in the military serving their country. This country needs Old Geezers with their decent values. We need them now more than ever. Thank God for Old Geezers!

OK, I’ll get you another bag. You’re gonna love this next one, from something called “The Drug Problem in America”:

The other day, someone at a store in our town read that a methamphetamine lab had been found in an old farmhouse in the adjoining county and he asked me a rhetorical question, ''Why didn't we have a drug problem when you and I were growing up?'' I replied: "I had a drug problem when I was young":
I was drug to church on Sunday morning. I was drug to church for weddings and funerals.

I was drug to family reunions and community socials no matter the weather. I was drug by my ears when I was disrespectful to adults.
It goes on, but you get the idea. The guy who wrote this probably uses Flomax, Celebrex, Cialis, and Lipitor, washed down with Metamucil.

I like this next one because it employs the sort of logic you hear from protesters at health care town hall meetings. It’s called “We Survived”:
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

This, of course, is not being read by the dead mothers and children who might be alive if idiots like this guy were not influencing public policy. But this idiot has company—the guy who write something called “SCHOOL -- 1957 vs. 2007” Just two of his comparisons are enough:

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2007 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario: Pedro fails high school English.
1957 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college.
2007 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.

He left out the scenario where Jack brings his gun to school and blows away Pedro for being an undocumented worker.

There are many more sites and emails, but I will close with this one, because it begins a little defensively. It didn’t have a title, but used colored fonts for emphasis (some of us codgers are pretty clever), although the graphics were wretched. It goes:

Senior citizens are constantly being criticized for every conceivable deficiency of the modern world, real or imaginary. We know we take responsibility for all we have done and do not blame others.
HOWEVER, upon reflection, we would like to point out that it was NOT the senior citizens who took: The melody out of music, The pride out of appearance, The courtesy out of driving, The romance out of love, The commitment out of marriage, The responsibility out of parenthood, The togetherness out of the family, The learning out of education, The service out of patriotism, The Golden Rule from rulers, The nativity scene out of cities, The civility out of behavior, The refinement out of language, The dedication out of employment, The prudence out of spending, The ambition out of achievement, or, God out of government and school.

Hey, Jack, can I borrow your shotgun?

Memory can be very selective. Within the mnemonic orbit of he “Greatest Generation” is Jim Crow, “No Irish (Italians) Need Apply,” castrating Gays, and I could go on. But these people still believe in “Mourning in America” and they still vote, still show up at “town hall meetings,” still exert a strong influence on public policy. If they spend too much time dwelling on the past, uniformed about the present and not concerned enough about the world their grandchildren will inherit, their memories of the great days of their generation will help bring about the demise of America in which they share blame.

So let this "senior" offer a few un-gezzerly aphorisms of my own :

The present has plenty wrong with it, but its parent is the past.
Nostalgia can be wonderful, even when reminiscence doesn’t always tell the truth.

Memories are a nice place to visit; but if you live in the past, you are already dead—you just don’t know it.
___________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp
Note: I have saved the links for the sites I have quoted from (in the event you accidentally swallow some rat poison and need a quick regurgitive).
http://www.libertyhigh56.net/special pages/seniors/seniors.htm

60. 8: TEN JEWS; NINE ESCAPED, reviews of FORESKIN’S LAMENT, by Shalom Auslander (2007), and THE GREAT ESCAPE, by Kati Marton (2006) 9.11.2007

                             

I just happened to read these books in succession. I don’t review all the books I read, but I got to wondering if these two could be reviewed together. You might not agree after reading it, but I’m giving it a shot.

We all know the rule about it being acceptable within a racial or ethnic group to make fun or insult your own kind. African-Americans can use the “N” word with impunity (although I can’t imagine Jesse Jackson greeting Barack Obama with it). The Chinese can get upset if gweilos (what they call us—“white ghosts”) make jokes about “Chinese fire drills,” so upset they start running around in mass confusion and falling all over one another. I can make slurs about Italian-Americans, but you try it and I’ll have my MAFIA pals put the dismembered head of your favorite pet in your bed. Jews come in for plenty of anti-Semitism, but have a rich internal humorous self-deprecation (they sure can be finnier at it).

With all of this there is a slight problem—when you laugh along with another ethnic groups aren’t you to some degree laughing at them, too. When you are reading Foreskin’s Lament it is difficult to make this distinction at times. First, because Auslander is merciless and blasphemous. Second, because his courageous—how many of you have the guts to call your God a “prick”?—send up of Judaism is a model for all of us who are sick and tired of credulous cretins telling us what we should believe and what terrible things are going to happen to us if we do not believe.

“Write what you know” is the first rule of writing (after “find something to write on”) and Auslander, whose premise is that he is about to become the father of a son, and that usually means a little Jewish boy is going to lose his foreskin. The problem is that Auslander is losing is faith, which is what most of this book is about documenting.
Shalom Auslander, who has had articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, and who has been heard on NPR’s This American Life, believes in God. He says so straight up as late as page 307: “I believe in God. It’s been a real problem for me.” He seems to believe for the same reason that I do not—he needs somebody to blame and be pissed off at. I know that if I believed in God I would spend all my time being pissed off at Him (and I have better things to do with my time). The very religious people of all faiths, people like Auslander’s family, and people I call “theopathic,” are, I believe, obsessed with God and their faith. Auslander is trapped in such a family, even after he distances himself from it. Once you have been indoctrinated into a faith, you can never quite escape. I know that, too.

With some contrast, The Great Escape is about nine Hungarian Jews who grew up in Budapest in the early decades of the 20th Century. They did escape, from Hitler. But Judaism played little or no part in their lives, at least in a direct way. Author Kati Marton, also from a Hungarian Jewish family, writes that “Unlike the Jews of Russia and Romania, Budapest Jews were integrated into the city’s great academic and cultural—though not its political—institutions. Budapest, like New York, Paris, and Berlin, became a magnet for the brightest from all over the region.” These were men who were not from the shtetl, they were religiously non-observant, urban, modern and cosmopolitan. When they left, often reluctantly, the city they loved, some with only the “linguistically impenetrable” Hungarian language, they were “outsiders” not only to other countries, but to Jewish communities in them. But how much their secularism played in the success they achieved in Europe and America is difficult to extricate from their intellectual and personality endowments.

Four of them were physicists, names we can, or should be able to, recognize: Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, were instrumental in splitting atom and played major roles in the Manhattan Projects that created the atomic bombs that helped end WWII. Wigner was awarded a Noble Prize. Brilliant mathematician John von Neumann, who should have received one as well, developed game theory that influenced many fields, and is regarded as he father of the computer. They might have been captured by the Nazis, who they knew were intent on developing their own atomic weapon.

Four other Budapest Jews were literal luminaries. Andre Kertesz became perhaps the greatest photographer of urban life of the 20th Century after he escaped to Paris and later settled in New York City. He began in his native city but became one of the first to use the new lightweight Leica in 1928 to inspire the likes of Cartier-Bresson and other photographers who captured and were captured by the fascinations of modern urbanism. More famous, because of his boldness perhaps, was Robert Capa, the father of war photojournalism. Capa (nee Friedman in Budapest) is best known for one of his first photos, that of the Falling Soldier, a republican infantryman in the Spanish Civil War at the moment he is hit by a royalist bullet. He went on to establish Magnum and led a dashing and productive career until killed by a mine in Vietnam during the French-Indochina war. Hailing from the same streets was Michael Kaminer, who became Michael Kertesz, then Curtiz. (BTW, Actor Tony Curtis, born in Brooklyn of Hungarian Jewish parents named Schwartz—he was Bernie Schwartz, and name he disliked—chose his stage name as a form of the Magyar Kertesz.) Curtiz, who never learned English very well, immigrated to Hollywood and became best known as the director of the venerable film, Casablanca. Including his Hungarian works he directed over 170 films. Sandor Korda migrated from Budapest to Paris, Hollywood, then finally in England where he was best known as the movie producer-director Alexander Korda, who is responsible for the famous movie set in Vienna, The Third Man, among many other films of note.

The ninth Budapest Jew was the famed journalist-author and disaffected Communist (Darkness at Noon) Arthur Koestler. His famous anti-utopian novel “transcends border and ideologies” and in informed from his periods in the Berlin underground, three months in a Seville jail and is ideological breakdown in the midst of the Stalinist purge of 1936-1938.

What this reader particularly enjoyed of Marton’s treatment of her subjects was her attention to the urban environment that so influenced them—Budapest and its cafés. I remember my own cappuccino in the venerable New York café in Budapest, not long after it had been returned to that name (having been renamed the Hungaria during the commie years.) Budapest had hundreds of cafés by the turn of the century. They were places of convocation, conversation, newspaper reading, letter wand journal writing, debate, theatre and loitering. As Marton reports the famed French film Director Jean Renoir once noted, “The foundation of all great civilization is loitering.” She adds that “No city in Europe took loitering more seriously that Budapest. All of her nine “escapees” remained nostalgic for their Budapest café days wherever they were.

Maybe the root of Auslander’s problem was not just his life in an intense orthodox Jewish community, but that he had the misfortune to be born in an American suburb, and not near a café in Budapest.
___________________________________________________________
©2009, James A. Clapp

60. 7:    SEEMS HE CAN’T    9.5.2009

                           

                                                       © 2009, UrbisMedia

Dear President Obama:

“Yes we can!” was your political mantra of the campaign.

And we believed.

But, alas, more and more, it seems, you can’t.

We were already disappointed with George Bush when he was selected president. It only took you eight months to disappoint us. You might yet wake up and realize why we elected you; but I have not the audacity to hope.

I voted for a basketball player, but you are turning out to be another golfer. I should have known when I first saw you playing the Republican sport. Your were to be our champion, but not matter how many times you went to the opposition with your delusional desire for bipartisanship, no matter how many times they knocked you down like a Bozo punching bag, you kept coming back for more.

One would expect that a guy who played playground ball would know that when you lose respect, you lose. When the opposition senses that you put being loved above winning, they smell blood in the water. And smell blood they did, emboldened by your timidity, you equivocation, your temporizing, they struck with every audacious form of attack, stirring deep into that residue of racism and resentment, tapping into that fear that there might finally be a political leader with the balls to take us into a more enlightened 21st Century (they need not have worried, it seems), putting Hitler mustaches on the face of the President of the United States, calling you “Fascist,” “Communist,” even “racist.” And you took the “trash talk,” went to Martha’s Vineyard and played effing golf! Those of us who voted for you laughed derisively and despondently, when they called you a “liberal.” “Progressive” would be a real stretch, and “Center-Right” seems the best fit.

So, if that bunch of dorks you have as “advisors” can’t bring you around, I am going to let out my bitter disappointment (this is my audacity of hope). Believe this—I am not alone. Your approval numbers are declining faster than the gas gauge on a Hummer. Let me begin with a couple of wake-up calls.

Bi-Partisanism. If B-P was not always bullshit in America it certainly is now and, the sooner you crank that into your political reality the sooner you will have a chance to rescue your sinking administration. Forget about it; the other guys are playing you a cheap tin kazoo and you keep coming back for more. Get this: most Republicans hate your guts, and they want your administration to fail. That’s their prime job as they see it. Christ, just watch them on the news and talk shows. Wake up, dude, they would just a soon knife you in the back as shake your hand for a photo op. And part of this is because of . . .

Racism. It’s alive and virulent in the good ole US of A. So deal with it. You took Mr. Charlie’s White House and they don’t like it one bit. You are not the Great Black Hope to them, you are the “N” word that dare not speak its name (at least in public). That’s what Palin’s “not a real American” was code for, what the “Birther” thing is code for, what the rants over the Sotomajor nomination were about. Our racists are never going to like you, so forget about trying to gain favor with them. They are social scum and you neutralize them, not hug them. But also don’t do dumb crap like you did on the Professor Gates thing, saying you “don’t know the facts” and then bunching what you just said you didn’t know with remarks about the way police have been known to treat Blacks. Hell, Rodney King was smarter than you on that one. I almost put my head in my hands and wept. Talk about blowing it. I though you did a great job with your speech after that pompous ass Rev. Wright nearly scuttled your campaign, but you undid all of that in one thoughtless moment.

Given that, what have you accomplished?

It seems only the stem cells need rejoice—and they didn’t even vote!

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell?” Nothing, except lose the confidence of the gays.

DOMA? Nada except lose more gays.

Guantanamo? As glacial a pace as you could muster. But you kept secret renditions and nothing done about the Patriot Act. Bush lives!

Torture? Looks like the war criminals will walk. Afraid to offend the CIA, afraid to offend the military; they sense the weakness, too. Notice how Dick Cheney sneers at the new president, broadcasting that he can’t or won’t protect the American people. And Obama gives it credibility by not even defending himself. Cheney lives!

Katrina? On the anniversary you couldn’t even be bothered to do a George Bush flyover. Played golf.

Iraq? Still 130,000 troops there. Blackwater is back in there, getting their big bucks. Notice how the so-called “surge” is unrvelling? You need to read an article in the recent Mother Jones that lays out nicely how U.S. officers can give out no-bid contracts to Iraqi sheiks up to a half-mil each time for building projects at hugely inflated prices, a nice under the table way of bribing their allegiance away from Al Qaeda—but only if we keep paying! Like the good ole Bremer days when $8 billion in pallets of shrink-wrapped hundred just “disappeared” these payments are made directly in cash. Nice photo of you with the sheik, by the way, just like the one Bush took with him.

Afghanistan? This will be your Vietnam. Korrupt Kharzi is the Diem in this version. Now we learn that Wakenhut, the mercenaries hired for this place stages nude, drunken parties. It’s all over he media. That ought to help our international reputation. Maybe you should have a word with Mrs. Clinton since this State’s responsibilty. It is astonishing how easily you have bought into the sucker’s game in Afghanistan. No end in sight, but it will be around for the mid-term elections and probably 2012. Even the right wing is starting to go negative on it, positioning to make it your war. You will go down like your approval ratings, like a Stinger missile taking out a Russian helicopter gunship.

The recession? Wall street still rules, and right from inside your administration through Geithner and Summers. The Wall Street boys saw you coming and sold you the bridge down the street. If they are “too big to fail” then you are “too dumb to succeed.” Oh, the economy will come back, although a lot of little people you could have helped will have gotten screwed along the way. Real unemployment is in the teens. Instead, you have let the Wall Street boys back into their old game, and without any loss of their bonuses (despite the, ahem, your tough talk to them.)

And Health Care for all Americans? The issue that might bring us into the orbit of civilization. Many see this as your litmus, your real test. This was to be the centerpiece of your presidency, your legacy—and you are blowing it! Instead you make stupid comparisons of health care with the Post Office. Meanwhile your “bipartisan friends” knife you in the back—again—and the right wingnuts crank up the “death panels” and forced abortions while you outfiddle Nero

.
I voted for you because I believed that you meant to make system change; that’s the real change we were looking for—systemic change—not appointing the same guys that caused the problem to the same positions of power, not carrying forward the disastrous agenda of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Basically, you talk a good audacity; but you can’t, or won’t, walk it.

I like you, Mr. President. I still have a glimmer of hope and, I suppose I should not encourage more complacency from you by saying so, but I will never, ever, join the opposition or vote for them. But you are not the president I voted for. Not even close.

With all due respect,

DCJ

P.S. Hey, if we are ever on the same basketball court, choosing up sides for a little half-court three-on-three? Please don’t choose me to be on your team. I prefer teamates who play to win.

©2009, UrbisMedia

60. 6:    TED KENNEDY AND THE LAST HURRAH     [MR] 9.1.2009

                     
                         Mayor Skeffington’s (Spencer Tracy) Last Hurrah ©Columbia Pictures. Graphic
                                                ghostly amendments by UrbisMedia., 2009

Actuarially, Ted was on the young side, only seventy-seven when he died. But considering his brothers’ fates . . . . Given the eulogies and encomiums related to forty-seven years of service in the U.S. Senate there is much that can be accounted to his debt of atonement for that awful lapse of judgment at Chappaquiddick. It is that account—and the Kennedy mystique, of course—that explain the lying in state, the expansive news coverage, the sense of history, that surrounds his passing.

I do not mean to repeat all that, which is better said by others. But something did pop out of it, out of Ted Kennedy the consummate politician, the man who had many friends among the opposition, who influenced so much legislation and public policy. It was that Kennedy who made himself into the almost classic Boston-Irish politician, who consorted with political pals like Tip O’Neill and Pat Moniyhan, other members of the old breed of which he might well be the last. It comes out now, that this great silver lion of the Senate was the type of guy who would get a kid a baseball signed by the Red Sox, or ask parents of a soldier killed in Iraq if he could come to the funeral, who would take the time to get a phone call through to Nancy Reagan who was celebrating her birthday on a yacht at sea.

Each time I hear one of these anecdotes my mind would flash back to Spencer Tracy, and to a movie about the waning years of the old political machine. A central, if somewhat didactic, theme of the movie is built around a funeral. Kenndy’s career was in national, not local, politics, but he obviously saw the connections in bioth political and social terms

.
Urban politics has not been a very large genre in the movies. The subject of how cities are governed often requires some additional help from crime and corruption in order to hold the attention of movie audiences. So despite the fact that city politics pervades our lives in so many ways there are relatively few films that employ it as a central cinematic theme.*

One film that does, however, is The Last Hurrah (1958) featuring Spencer Tracy as Irish mayor Frank Skeffington. The mayor is loosely based on real mayor James Curley, in an unnamed New England city that very much resembles Boston. Skeffington is an old-style political boss running a campaign in the old style of “grassroots politics” on the eve of the emergence of television in politics. “Grassroots” is represented in this film in the close contact that the mayor has with his various constituencies. Skeffington holds “court” each day with his ward “heelers” before, like a seigneur in some medieval town, giving audience to a line of supplicants and petitioners outside his home, and visits funerals and other social functions.

Contemporary viewers might find The Last Hurrah a pastiche of stereotypes and political clichés. “Yes men” are overly solicitous, ethnic stereotypes cast in a bit too much relief, and class-distinctions seem a bit too distinct. But then, this is a film, based on Edwin O’Connor’s book of the same title, about what is now very much a bygone era.
Although reforms and declines in immigration had undone the underpinnings of political machines their vestiges remained in cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and a few others. In particular, that inductive style of politics referred to as “grassroots” politics remained appropriate to central cities with distinct ethnic districts and new immigrant populations. Skeffington’s unnamed city retains features of late 19th century social geography. His ward organizers are expected to bring him information about wards that are primarily Irish, Italian or Jewish, and importantly, to get out the vote for him at election time. These tactics are in some measure even more important that in the past, when politicians could rely upon patronage, backroom deals with city contractors, and if necessary, strongarm intimidation, to get their way.

Skeffington is given an easy charm in Tracey’s portrayal, but his roots are much in contrast to Kennedey’s. He has come up in the world from the scrappy Irish tenements, from which, we also learn, so has the Roman Catholic Cardinal and other leaders of the community. But he has been unable to achieve public office and retain it without making his share of enemies along the way. Principal among these are the old line Yankee WASPS who assemble in their private club and plot ways to overthrow the mayor. It is these enemies that provide the melodrama that drives what otherwise might be a soporific narrative. Skeffinton finds ways to frustrate the crusty vengeance of newspaper owner Amos Force (John Carradine), who years earlier abused a relative who was in service in his house for taking a piece of fruit. He outfoxes the leading banker who is holding up on bonds for a low-income housing project by enticing his dim-witted son to be fire chief, a post at which he is very likely to cause embarrassment. He attends funerals and other social events, using his charm and cleverness to endear himself to various constituencies. There is even a little lesson in the art of political compromise when, at a dinner with his nephew and his wife he explains how he managed to get a statue erected in the Italian ward where different groups there wanted to honor different Italian historical figures.

But all of this political acumen is doomed against the rising forces of the new politics. The jobs of policemen and firemen are still beholden to the mayor, there are still favors he can bestow and patronage jobs to distribute, but many of the ethnics have moved on into the middle class, suburbs now encircle the city, which increasingly is home to the poorer elements of society, and politics is being re-shaped by the medium of television. His political opponents nominate a dolt to run against him, seen almost exclusively in television and, in spite of obvious ineptness, he prevails over the old political warrior.

The undoing of the Skeffington machine is not the opposition of the old English-based elite of the city, rather the demographics of the new metropolitan area, and television. The emergence of the suburbs, in which issues were different, or competitive with those of the older parts of the city, placed limitations on the old, ethnicity-based grassroots politics. Residents of suburbia were often the children of the residents of the ethnic neighborhoods, but the ethnic mixture of the suburbs, based more upon concerns such as the quality of schools, home-ownership, and journey to work, was more diversified. Unlike the neighborhoods of the inner city, the suburbs were not predominately Irish, or Italian, or Polish, but as likely to be a mix of thee and other ethnic backgrounds.

Television became a means by which candidates could be presented more like products that personalities. They could be “packaged,” shown only in the best of “photo-op” circumstances, and engage in a non-interactive form of communication with their constituencies. While Sheffington was telegenic, he was at his best in small groups and on-on-one political relationships.

Kennedy’s last hurrah combined the old politics of the personal touch with mass communications. In the end, politics seems most successful if you can make the people believe in you by believing in them. And you demonstrate that by employing the personal touch.

The Last Hurrah is marred by an interminable death scene in which Skeffington’s heart has given out and his political deeds are re-hashed as if to determine the direction of his soul. But then, Skeffington had only a single, wastrel, of a son. His real family was his political cronies. Kennedy could not be more of a contrast; he had busloads of family. As to his great earthly sin, the public seems to have forgiven him. He already knows whether there is any forgiveness beyond that.

______________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp
*Although it does not deal with urban politics per se, a film that presents an interesting point of view on American politics in general is Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), which relates a tale with a strong message about the prospects for populist political movements being exploited by fascist interests. Capra, always interested in the “common man” in the American idiom seized upon a story about a young female newspaper reporter (Barbara Stanwyck) who writes column in which she concocts a fictitious author of a letter of protest against an unjust political and social system. The “John Doe of the letter, which reads:

Dear Miss Mitchell:

Four years ago, I was fired out of my job. Since then, I haven't been able to get another one. At first, I was sore at the state administration because it's on account of the slimy politics here. We have all this unemployment. But in looking around, it seems the whole world is goin' to pot. So in protest, I'm goin' to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof.

Signed, a disgusted American citizen,

John Doe

The ruse creates great interest and many men come forward to claim they are the author of the letter, allowing Mitchell to choose an ex-baseball player and homeless person, John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) to impersonate John Doe. Doe preaches charity, kindness, and a doctrine of brotherly-love, and instigates the formation of “John Doe Clubs” across the country. But this is all exposed and exploited by a fascist organization run by D.B. Norton (Edward Arnold) and the disgraced John Doe is thrown out by his disappointed admirers. In the end he decides that he will, in fact, carry out the threat of the John Doe letter and leap to his death from the roof of City Hall. Only common Americans, awakened from the false promises of fascism, can save him.

Meet John Doe seems like a very dated film when viewed today in the contemporary American context, but viewers might find more threads of commonality than they would expect with the circumstances of America in the 1930s and the worries about the fragile state of democracy.

60. 5:    CHRISTIANITY AND CAPITALISM: SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE    8.26.2009

                                            

Once, long ago, I considered going the way of St. Francis of Assisi or Ignatius Loyola, forsaking the trappings of a wealthy and privileged life (as if I really had one) and letting my hair (singular) grow long, giving away my Armani suits and Bruno Magli shoes to beggars, wearing sandals and itchy homespun sackcloth, living in huts and bathing annually. This is how legend tells us men and women used to find their faith. Some men even took to emasculating themselves in ways too gruesome and cringey to consider. I once witnessed at the shrine of Guadalupe in Mexico, a group of people making their way across the piazza in front of the church on bloody knees. I also read of some jerk who went all the way across Spain to the shrine of St. James, on his knees. Why didn’t he just wait for the next bus? Where did the notion, what I remember the nuns calling “mortification of the flesh,” emerge? Some people might think that St. Theresa, who reputedly made and wore her own crown of thorns so that she could feel the same pain as Jesus, attained some profound level of piety that comes only with such discomfort (or psychological derangement). Somehow we got the idea that a Sadhu holyman, naked and standing for hours on one leg, is more metaphysically informed than we are, and not just a guy who had all his accounts with Lehman Bros.

The association of impoverishment of material possessions and physical pleasure with godliness appears in most faiths and might owe to stories like that of Job, or parables like a camel passing through the eye of a needle, but I suspect there is a deeper, more insidious reason for the religious sentimentalization of deprivation—it justifies and deflects criticism of systems of religious-economic-political power that create and maintain poverty and destitution—across all faiths.

Today, there are very many people who do not have to make a conscious religious decision to live the poor ascetic way of life to hopefully to be closer to God—it is already decided for them, and along with it they will get to suffer like St. Theresa, be as materially deprived as a Sadhu, and likely get to see God earlier than those preaching to them. Curiously, these notions exist right along side the wealth, opulence and self-indulgence of people practicing the same religion, worshipping the same gods. Indeed, many of those of have arrogated great substance and privilege are of the religion’s hierarchy—cardinals, mullahs, yogis, pastors and rabbis—the “holier than thous” living “off the fat of the land” (and the backs of the poor) as it were. What accounts for this inconsistency?

In a broadcast from a megachurch somewhere in the American southwest I watch a slick-suited preacher with requisite pompadour hair enthralling his flock with a sermon on “Jesus the CEO.” He wants his believers to take on Jesus as the “Chief Executive Officer” of [their] lives.” Is there anyone among the thousands being fed the implications of this connection between a Christianity and American Capitalism that gets the perversion of Christ’s original message (or even Adam Smith’s original message)? But we are not unfamiliar with the perversions of American Christianity, where the New Testament is merely a grab bag for some spurious association of scripture with CEOs or some corrupted extrapolation from Christ’s life and death to a justification for any right-wing agenda from preemptive war to bailing out huge corporations. Yet, none of that audience would recognize that Christ was much more like provocateur documentarist Michael Moore trying to throw an arrogant CEO out of the “temple” of American enterprise, than he would ever be that CEO. Christ was the son of a carpenter (Joe the Carpenter, not the Father in Heaven), and probably un-unionized at that; Christ was opposed to the establishment—the Romans, the Sanhedrin, the money-lenders in the temple. He would puke at being called a CEO.

But there you have it, yet another conflation of the two religions of America—Christianity and Capitalism. They dance in a relationship of co-dependency, shoring each other up when needed to maintain the power of the DOW and the pulpit through the intercession of their acolytes in Washington.

Poverty suits the purposes of religions in manifold ways. Religion promotes the idea of giving up one’s “worldly goods” not to beggars (what’s the point in that; then the beggars have to give up the goods, like a game of hot potato?) No, silly, the idea is for those goods to end up in the coffers of the Church (or some Swiss bank account). Moreover, by equating poverty with piety Church gets a double-down from poverty. It ends up with a lot of donations and property, but it really doesn’t have to do much to assuage the problems of the poor (some charities and clinics, but the Mother Theresa’s dispense more prayer than penicillin, it’s cheaper) because there is always that idea lurking that if you start to get rich you might start doing some evil things.

Not that Church is against some people getting rich; quite the opposite, in fact. First, it is interested in the Church getting rich, but it also needs rich people to help it because the Church really doesn’t produce anything except the Holy Trinity of Credulity—Fear, Ignorance and Guilt. If it plays its cards effectively, the Church gets rich people to cough up money for to assuage their guilt.

Some Protestant denominations work this rich angle differently. Calvinists, for example, believe in predestination. If you are born rich, or achieve riches, God meant you to be rich; if you are poor, c’est la vie. Either way, you are part of God’s script, so there’s nothing wrong with it. This attitude fit nicely into the Reagan years in America, and Protestant churches flourished on the theme that God wants you to be rich (just drop a bit in the collection basket).

Poverty also often accompanies ignorance, so we have a lot of poor people without jobs, healthcare, and even a roof over their heads, but they are kept floating between religious resignation and false hopes and, counterintuitively, can often be recruited by the cynical elements of church and state to vote and protest against their own interests. Since they are believers they can be made to believe almost anything—WMD, Iraqis flew the 911 planes, that changes in healthcare policy will mandate euthanasia.

Capitalism took root in the rich compost of the Protestant Reformation. Its fundamental principal is the private ownership of capital, which has a right to profit as it sees fit. Jesus, the carpenter, would end up framing houses for a construction company that could lay him off at will. He could try cabinet-making, but IKEA would run him out of business. Capitalism has always exploited human nature, but it is now at the point where it is over-exploiting Nature nature. But the church is right there to justify it with some good ole “multiply and subdue the earth (with some credit default swaps). Next time the rats will go down with this ship.

But Americans have been so effectively sold on capitalism as an economic religion that large numbers of them don’t know it was saved by The New Deal and that Social Security and Medicare are “socialism.” And so, from the Vatican of American Capitalism, Wall Street (and just as corrupt and greedy as the other Vatican), comes the crusade to keep the worker in terror of losing his job (and of unionizing), and Washington in fear of losing its electoral financing and K Street bribes. And “bail-outs” are not corporate welfare when you are “too big to fail.” There is something drastically wrong with a system that fails because it screwed the people, but it gets the people to pay them again for screwing them. And there is something tragically wrong with a people who can’t see what’s happening to them because they are bent over.

So when their faith in God and Mammon take them to disastrous wars or economic calamity, the people go to church. There the well-dressed, well-fed, well-housed, priest or preacher awaits them with a scripture or a homily that is as insidious as the promises of the pharmaceutical ads that surround the evening news—God and Wall Street want you to “Ask your Broker”; if the news is bad, “Ask your Preacher.”
_______________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp

60. 4:   BALLISTIC MALE ENHANCEMENT     8.22.2009

Anybody with half a brain knows that the Second Amendment to the Constitution was meant for militias and not for dimwitted men who have a compelling need for what could be called “ballistic male enhancement.” Of late, as evidenced by the number of armed gunholes that have found presidential town hall meetings as desired venues to wield their 9mm weenies, the political power of the NRA is proving to be the salvation of the angry white male who cannot abide female liberation and their loss of gender entitlement to the employment market.

So, we now have in many states something called “open carry,” which means you can carry pretty much any loaded weapon out into places of such extreme danger as town hall meetings, malls, churches, just about anywhere where a granny with a lethal handbag loaded with her prescriptions, or a mom bearing down on you pushing a stroller with homicidal intent might be threatening your already compromised manhood. In a protest group outside Phoenix there were at least a dozen armed men, one with an AR 15 assault rifle (obviously in fear of being attacked by a battalion of Taliban). Local police said none of the armed men was arrested—obviously they were not referring to “arrested development.”

Anybody with two-thirds a brain can discern that all this justification for bearing arms for “personal protection” isn’t about lurking terrorists, or street thugs, but about a deeply sublimated personal cowardice. We love to hear the logic those stories about how, if all the students at Columbine or Virginia Tech had been armed the “perps” (a term they love to use, always it’s the other guy who is a perp) might have been dispatched before doing such harm (their hypotheses are always rendered as certainties). Great, so let’s increase the potential number of armed unstable people and maniacs and live in a society where everyone, and no one, is afraid to say “Sir, this is a line for ATM and you just stepped in front of me,” (answered with “Go ahead, make my day”).

The brutal fact of the matter is that people who reason this way are already whacky. The world they envision would make a Quentin Tarantino movie look like Sesame Street. This is the sort of reasoning that responds to any reasonable attempt to regulate firearms with the mindless mantra that “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Wow, let’s take a time out and consider that profundity for a moment. How about, OK, but people with guns find it a lot easier to kill people they want to kill than people who carry, well, let’s say, rubber duckies. Although a rubber duckie could be employed to choke someone to death, it doesn’t have the capability to spray ten rounds a second around a classroom or a McDonald’s. Attacking someone with a rubber duckie is non-lethal hand-to-hand combat. Picking people—or a president—off with a telescoped high-powered rifle from two hundred yards is an act of supreme cowardice. No one ever heard of a “drive-by choking.” If the Columbine killers ad gone into their classroom and challenged their classmates to a fist fight to the death they would probably have had heir asses handed to them. Splitting means and ends is a rhetorical trick only a dimwit that spends too much time a gun shows would buy. Guns do kill people, more efficiently, more remotely, with greater certainty and in greater numbers. That’s what they are made to do.

The problem is that your average gun-hole* accepts no reason to limit the type, availability and right to carry firearms. To them, as they circulate their militia newsletters and hole up in Montana, the world is a place where Al Qaeda, UN black helicopters, the IRS, illegal aliens, or Janet Reno are ever threatening to force their women to have abortions, make them pay taxes, or worst of all, take their guns away. Their cognitive state pendulums between paranoia and victimization. Mind you, these brave, camouflage-wearing, “rootin-tootin, six-shootin” cowboys are not quite ready to head over to Iraq or Afghanistan for some real danger. No way. Those “rag heads” over there don’t intimidate as easily as your average cable news reporter. They don’t spend all their time cleaning and fondling their weapons (insert masturbatory allusion here) but take them into places of real danger.

Much speculation circulated during the presidential campaign that an African-American president might not make it as far as mid-term elections before joining Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy. The list might be longer had the aim been better of those who fired guns with intent to kill at TR, FDR, Truman, Ford and Reagan. Amazingly, Mr. Obama, although too soft on gun control, gets no credit from the gunholes, who insist that he is bent on disarming them. Emboldened by Obama’s timidity** and the violent rhetoric and scarcely-disguised racism of the Palinistas and looney right wing media—and assisted by legislators who, with political guns to their heads have taken the Second Amendment to the ludicrous level of “open carry”—the gunnies have brought their swagger and intimidation to the town hall. Why, when confronted and asked, bring a lethal weapon to a political rally, they arrogantly answer, “because we can, and because it is legal.” Given that in may states it is relatively easy to obtain a permit to carry loaded concealed hand gun the amount of “legal” firepower that might be brought to a public event is inestimable.

No one knows how many concealed weapons are being brought to political rallies and town halls, but if reason does not return and weapons detectors and extended perimeters are not created and enforced we might have to start practicing saying “President Biden.” Amazingly, the triggering event (forgive the pun) is the debate over health care in America, the only (economically) developed country to shamefully leave a sixth of its people without any care at all and allow most of the rest to be subject to the greed of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Curiously, these armed intimidators circulate among protestors brandishing signs about mythical “death panels” in the health care proposals when that firearms account for nearly 54% of suicides! Who needs death panels?

The irony is that the gun-holes have become the great internal and ubiquitous threat to public safety that they putatively fear. What they seek is the equivalent of the tenuous wall of safety that exists in nuclear proliferation—Mutually Assured Destruction. We will become a society that lives in self-induced suspicion and fear of one another’s armament, open or concealed. Maybe the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. A restaurant filled with fully armed patrons is little different than fully nuclear nation states; it only takes one shot fired to detonate the MADness.

America has reached the nexus of social changes such as a demographic profile dominated by people of color and immigrants (including an African-American president), compressed and seething undercurrent of racism, and a growing un-regulated and disorganized “militia” of armed and angry white males seeking expression for their “diminished manhood.” Allowing gunholes to strut their inadequacies amidst paranoid protestors, a goading right-wing media, and a gun culture that callously fuels their fear of disarmament is a formula to produce a society at war with itself.
_____________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp
*I am not referring here to many responsible gun owners who are true hunters or target shooters or people who keep a firearm for home protection.
**He decided, presumably to allow greater firepower to someone bent on dispatching him, to let the assault weapons ban lapse.

60. 3:    ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953) a movie review, 8.17.2009

                                                                                                   © 1953, Paramount Pictures

Every so often, like phoning up and old friend, I have to put this movie in the DVD player (I wore out the VHS version). Like David Lean’s Summertime (Archives, No. 29. 4), it takes me back to a great city that is also a “character” that plays Cupid in an almost schmaltzy romantic sweet tragedy for my romantic soul. It was an apt title for a film that fit in with the semi-travelogue features being made in “the Eternal City” during the 1950s by Hollywood on the Tiber.

Roman Holiday, with due credit to Dalton Trumbo’s writing and William Wyler’s direction, has more to it than films like Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) that tried to capitalize in Roman Holiday’s success but were little more than travelogue. Ultimately, that success, it must be admitted owes mostly to an engaging old city and an enchanting young girl. It is, or rather became in no uncertain terms, Audrey Hepburn’s film. Established co-star Gregory Peck reputedly insisted after the first day of shooting, that the newly-introduced actress be given equal billing. She won the “Best Actress” Academy Award for her rookie performance as a princess from an un-named European country who is in Rome as part of a diplomatic tour and escapes her handlers for a few days wondrous romp as a uncommon commoner in the city.

Struggling reporter Peck discovers her snoozing on a bench beside on of the city’s magnificent fountains and, when he further discovers she is the errant princess, the game is afoot. Keeping the princess away from apprehension by her handlers while the reporter surreptitiously gets the story of his career and sidekick photographer Eddie Albert snaps candid shots of the beautiful ingénue all takes place before the Coliseum, the Spanish Steps, the artsy Via Margutta, and the 1950s clean streets of Rome. It is a contrast to a parallel and socially-contrasting story by Federico Fellini, La Strada, released a year later, in which a young girl is sold to a travelling entertainer.

The fresh and fetching beauty of Hepburn against the crumble of the ancient city is ideal for a plot of discovery. The princess is not only charming in her discovery of how the common people live, but also of her own existential dilemma—the prison of her royal duty. That is what I wanted to expose to my class of mostly female students in Hong Kong in 2000 when I screened Roman Holiday for them. Would the princess, who gets to wear beautiful gowns and has servants at her beck and call, forsake it all for her budding love for the handsome American news reporter? Or, would she return to the tiresome routine of her royal obligations?

I can tell you what I was rooting for. I was already in the skin of Gregory Peck and I really felt for him (and me) when that stunning beauty with a captivating innocence makes the hard decision to return to the palace. I have a lot of contempt for royalty in general, and I wanted Peck (me) and Hepburn to continue roaring around Rome’s streets on that Vespa, she clinging with those balletic arms to him (me), carefree in the Eternal City. That was my fantasy when I saw the film as a young man, when I screened it for my students, and it still was the other night when I was shoving popcorn in my gray-bearded face (which maybe somebody should throw a glass of cold water into). Maybe it was best that Peck was left longingly looking back into that palace where she gave her news conference in full princess regalia and demeanor. Maybe he would have aged faster than her and the thrill of the Vespa rides and the discovery of first love would have eventually, as it always must, worn off. The Eternal City can be unforgiving about the realities of life; it has seen enough of it for a hundred cities. By 1960, Fellini was exploring a more sordid and debauched Rome in La Dolce Vita, a title with plenty of irony.

I don’t remember much of what my students thought, but the girls, all Chinese, were blown away by Hepburn. “How beautiful she is!” they exclaimed. They wanted to be her, and who can blame them. I reported to them that, back in the 1950s, American girls rushed out to have their hair bobbed like Audrey did in the movie, to shape their eyebrows like her, even her clothes were mimed everywhere. She was still a sensation, forty-seven years later.*

But when I was once again wishing she would choose love over duty in Roman Holiday it came to me that Audrey Hepburn seemed to have a special charm for older men and I can’t have been the first to, belatedly, notice it. Peck is clearly many years older than Hepburn in her first screen romance. But watch a few more Audrey Hepburn movies and you get the idea that Hollywood saw her as the woman who could easily steal the hearts of older men. She has the same success with much older Gary Cooper (Love in the Afternoon, 1957), much older Cary Grant (Charade, 1963), much older Fred Astaire (Funny Face, 1957), much older Humphrey Bogart (Sabrina. 1954); and very much older Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady, 1964). She is also a "bride of Christ" really very much older, in The Nun's Story (1959). Her role opposite George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) seems the exception.

Perhaps this wonderful actress was (and remains) the older man's dream: beautiful, sophisticated and innocent. So what’s wrong with my still being boyishly in love with her? I have plenty of company.
________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp
*Audrey Hepburn has also become somewhat iconic in the Orient. Her beautiful long neck fits well with the almost fetishistic and erotic regard Asian men, particularly Japanese me, have for the female neck. See, e.g. Alan Brown, Audrey Hepburn’s Neck (1997), a novel of young men coming of age in Tokyo.

60. 2: The Red Line, a short story, by Sebastian Gerard

A NOTE TO THE READER: This short story is adapted from my book in progress, The River Dragon’s Daughters, a story based on female infanticide and the Three Gorges Dam ion the Yangtze River in China. The red line represents the height the water will rise behind the dam above the current river level, inundating many towns and villages and necessitating relocations of millions. It is based partly on two of my visits to Sichuan. (J. Clapp)

                                                                                              © Pauline Shu, 2001

Below the red line. Above the red line. The red line cleaved Sichuan’s fate. It’s like the dirt ring around a bathtub, Nick Hanna thought. They’ll fill the Sichuan tub up to the ring. It’ll be the world’s biggest bathtub, but the plug will never be pulled on this one. Maybe.

Right about now Hanna would like a nice bath, a couple of hours into trudging along the narrow path etched into the side of the gorge-steep slope that rises from the fast-flowing sepia river below. Tired and sweaty after making his way up the path that led from that little cove where he stopped to eat his lunch and cool his hot feet in the quiet shallows. Curious little green-brown striped eels, like the ones he’d seen squirming in tubs in the open markets, had slithered up to inspect his toes.

Close by the opposite bank a river cruiser took advantage of the faster current on that side of the river. All Yangtze river cruisers seemed to be painted in the color that Hanna came to call “jade foam green,” a pistachio-hue that was ubiquitous in China. It covered the sides of the Chinese cruise ship (streaked with ochre rust), the decks, the bulkheads, cabins, salons and companionways. On his one and only trip on a cruiser he remembered its hue was modified only by the varying thicknesses of the grimy layer of diesel grease that coated everything. The petroleum flavor was part of a fragrant stew of cigarette smoke, mildew, clogged toilets, galley odors, and a toxic smelling cleaning fluid that all but guaranteed the addition of the acrid smell of vomit.

Now, sitting at the cove, with only curious little eels for company, Hanna felt lonely again. He wondered if the river, which for so long had its way, might soon be brought to human control by the massive dam being completed miles down river. The Yangtze’s currents had shaped, determined, and even taken, the lives of so many for generations that receded into a misty unrecorded past. Soon it might be reduced, at least a great stretch of it, to an enormous deep, placid lake. And under it would repose hundreds of towns and villages, temples and tombs, and the very cove in which he was cooling his feet. The surface, on which oceangoing freighters would be sailing, and calling at new towns along its elevated banks, would be far above where he was sitting, well up the mountainside, up to the red line.

As he made his way up the path to a height nearly one-hundred meters above the cove Hanna figured that he was still below the red line. The farmers and villagers who lived in this area would have to be re-settled in one of the new towns that were being prepared for them. What it would be like for someone whose generations of ancestors farmed these slopes to be relocated to some sterile town and have to find a new livelihood.

That was the reason Hanna was here. Two years ago, back in San Diego, he heard David Chen, a civil engineer born in Chongqing, speak about the Yangtze dam project on the local public radio program, explaining how hundreds of towns, villages and historic sites, even large cities, would sink below the lake that would rise behind the world’s largest dam—the Three Gorges Dam. Since then Hanna had applied for and received a sabbatical and a research grant and the appropriate PRC bureaucrats had signed off so that his host institution would be Chongqing University.

In the four months since he had been in China Hanna hiked all over the red line in the territory between Chongqing and Yichang. The experience had somewhat scrambled his preconceptions and categories. He was a specialist in policies for deliberate, planned urban development, but he had become enchanted with the older, organic and unplanned Chinese towns that seemingly has “grown” and fitted themselves into the Sichuan landscape. Their predominantly wooden structures, the narrow, cobbled, streets of little shops below cramped flats, and the way the towns conformed themselves to, rather than altered, the topography, stood in stark contrast to the post-revolution urban monstrosities of ugly grey slabs rudely rammed into the landscape. It gave him pause when he thought what might be erected to “replace” the old towns and villages that would soon become a vast Chinese “Atlantis.” These old towns were dirty and beaten down, sometimes becoming firetraps or occasionally wiped away in floods, but they were also fascinating indigenous places. With their streets, squares, temples, and buildings reflecting the residue of generations of use, the urban quirks and idiosyncrasies that expressed the personalities of their residents in numberless diverse ways, they had traits that could never be anticipated, or replicated, if even imagined by urban planners. The new cities that would be built to house those from below the red line would never, not for centuries at least, if ever, approach the special urbanity of these doomed, indigenous, old towns.

                                                                                              © Pauline Shu, 2001

In the early morning the village was still damp and shrouded in mist. A hunched and gnarled old woman laboriously pushed a cart, and a man opening the shuttered entrance of his noodle shop, as the crudely rendered sign of a steaming bowl of noodles hinted, were the only people in sight. Hanna could have been in the China of a hundred years ago, perhaps a thousand years. The only clear sign of the present he could discern was the red line that ran across the buildings of one lateral street like the Hebrew houses in the Biblical story of the “Passover.” Except at the Passover the houses with blood on their doors indicated which first-born sons were to be saved; that would not be the case with these homes. The line rudely slashed across the lintels on the front of a small temple and its adjoining meeting house, like a slapped smear of lipstick on a woman’s face, Hanna thought. Then with the suddenness that the sharp demarcation these villages had with the countryside Hanna was on the path through the fields and orchards. Sometimes, where there were no buildings, the authorities would place a small billboard on the slope with a red line on it and the meters above the current river level. He could see one all the way across the river, a white square in the green hillside, but too far away to read.

Outside the village a slight bend in the path that paralleled the river a narrower path intersected from up the slope. Some small vegetable patches of tomatoes, long Chinese beans, and a striped melon or squash looked well tended. He could just see the eaves of a sloped slate roof up above. Wondering whether the structure might have a red line he pushed his weary legs up the path. As he approached the house that was another thirty meters or so up the slope he first heard women’s voices and then saw two figures seated on a cement platform that served as a porch. Hanna was more surprised than the women. They glanced up from their tasks, but didn’t seem at all startled or fearful at the unannounced arrival of a large Western man.

“Nihao,” Hanna called in as friendly a tone as he could muster. It came out as something of a croak; it was the first word he has spoken since early morning when he “nihao-ed” the old lady back in the village. She hadn’t returned his salutation, but this elderly lady did.

“Nihao,” she replied evenly, lifting her eyes to him only as she said it. Her hair, cut in that bowl-shaped Chinese coif called a wa wa tou that is usually seen on young girls, was evenly black and grey. She was squatted on a small, low stool, legs akimbo, washing red and green tomatoes in a wooden tub. As he took a few steps closer Hanna guessed that she was probably older than she looked, maybe into her eighties. He had that surge of inadequacy that had plagued him since he arrived: what does one say after “nihao” when that’s pretty much the extent of one’s vocabulary. Would she continue with a broadside of sentences in the local dialect? But she just went back to her tomatoes. He could have said, somewhat redundantly, “Ni chifanle ma?” “Have you eaten yet?” But in the circumstance it sounded to him like he was inviting himself to lunch.

The girl sat on a low rattan chair, behind and to the side of the old woman and could not have been a greater contrast. She was preparing those long Chinese string beans. But what struck Hanna was the grace with which she was doing it. She was wearing a flower print shift, pulled up just above her knees, which exposed thin limbs demurely crossed at the ankles. Her arms formed and ellipse such that her pose seemed almost balletic. She leaned forward, her back straight, her head slightly cocked. She seemed to take scant notice of the stranger.

Hanna very much wanted a picture of this little tableau. He extracted his digital camera from his backpack and lifted it, pointing to it with his other hand. Qing? But there was no way he’d get beyond “please,” so he just gestured and added, in English: “Please, would you mind if I took a photo of you both?” He said it slowly and with an exaggerated plaintive tone in his voice.

The old woman looked up impassively, and Hanna was preparing to be refused. But she nodded her head in the affirmative, and broke a slight smile.

“Xie, xie,” he said, quickly kneeling and setting the exposure. Neither of them ceased with what they were doing, but Hanna could see in the screen that the young girl almost imperceptibly straightened up and lifted her face slightly towards the camera.

Hanna rose, smiled and thanked them in Chinese again, bowing as he did. Then he started to move off in the uphill direction.

“Will that picture be on the cover of Time, or Newsweek?”

Hanna stopped in his tracks. The voice was almost without accent.

“What?” he said as he turned.

“You’ll need a model’s release if you plan to use that for commercial purposes.” It was the old woman speaking. He could scarcely believe his ears.

“You speak . . .”

“Yes, and a little Italian, as well.”

The girl said nothing, but she had a little smile on her face.

“What a pleasant surprise,” Hanna said. Then thinking that he might be giving insult to the Chinese language, added, “I mean I haven’t had much of a chance to speak English for some time. I’m trying to learn some Putonghua.”

“Of course,” the old woman interjected. “My granddaughter was about to boil some water for tea. Perhaps you will join us? You have learned to drink green tea, haven’t you, because I have no coffee I’m sorry to say. I would love an espresso macchiato.”

“It will be a pleasure.”

Inside Hanna scanned the modest room. There were the ubiquitous framed calligraphic Chinese characters on the walls, along with what appeared to be an intarsia view of the Three Gorges. On the wall opposite where he sat on a divan day bed Hanna could also make out that there were framed diplomas. He could not discern their origin, but he could determine that the lettering was in English, not Chinese.

Over tea Hanna answered questions about his research. There was no need for him to simplify his vocabulary. Afterward, the girl excused herself for an errand she had to run and left on a bicycle. Hanna then said he, too, had to be on is way, although he hated to leave.

“I will escort you part of the way,” the elderly woman said, “and show you the best path to take.

About a kilometer from her house the woman stopped. “See there, right where this little path turns to avoid that old (saying its name in Chinese) tree that has spent a long time getting its roots around that large rock, “ she said. She gestured to a modest-sized tree that to Hanna looked a bit like a gnarly old olive tree whose tree’s roots were partly exposed and wrapped in what could be a strangle or an embrace around a large chair-sized smooth shale grey rock. “My neighbor, Lao Ma, told wonderful stories of the that tree and that rock, about how at first they did not get along because when the tree was just a seedling the rock felt threatened by its close presence. The rock, he said, worried that the tree’s roots would dislodge him from place and he would be sent rolling helplessly down into the river below.”

Hanna’s mind played a video of the rock tumbling and flipping in the air for over a hundred meters and ending with a huge coffee-colored splash. But he could see that the roots had conformed themselves to the shape of the rock, twisting around its contours and then re-entering the hard packed soil. “That must have been some time ago, by the look of things now,” he said.

“Long ago. Old Ma said that the tree and the rock were like this when he was a boy, and that his father had told him the story. At first, as the tree grew, it tried to push the rock out of the way, his father told him. But then the tree saw that some other trees on its side of the path were leaning over to the down slope of the mountain, and some were eventually blown over by the wind. He noticed that the rock prevented him from leaning over, and actually supported him against the force of the wind. Very slowly the tree began to extend its roots around toward the front of the rock, not to push it away, but to get a better grip on it.”

Hanna wondered if this story, which was tending towards a parable, was going to end in another of those inevitable “the Chinese have a saying for such things” endings.

She continued. “The rock, being older, wiser and more indestructible, noticed the growing embrace of the roots, but made neither complaint nor compliment. The rock was old enough to know that the rains that took away a little of the soil each time they came would one day loosen his hold upon the earth and he would, like many other rocks like him, end up at the bottom of the river. He knew that the tree’s roots, extending deep into the earth, would hold him to it.”

“Ah, it’s sort of like the story of having a tiger by the tail,” Hanna said.

“Not really. The rock and the tree became more like friends who come to depend on each other. The tiger and the man remain adversaries.

“Yes, I understand what you mean. And the force pulling the rock and the tree together are in the opposite kind of relationship.” Hanna said.

“My granddaughter calls it symbiosis.” But maybe also it is a metaphor for the relationship between China and America, do you think?” She asked in a tone that indicated she had already given the question some attention.

“Let me guess: China is the rock. Do I have that right?”

“China is over five thousand years . . .”

“OK, and along comes this merely two hundred-year-old seedling that thinks Plymouth Rock is the only rock that really counts. Yes, I will admit that we have been a rather brash tree, but the rock of China has not been very steady in it own soil if I might risk offense by saying so.”

“Well put, professor. Perhaps that’s why it is a good idea for a relationship something like . . .” she gestured to the rock and the tree. We can hope. China is making more of America’s products, and that money is helping to improve China’s standard of living . . . for some at least. It’s a beginning.” She lifted her eyebrows in signal for some assent.

“And you, excuse me, I mean China, uses those monies to purchase some of the debt America is using in its ‘tiger by the tail’ relationships elsewhere in the world,”

“So the symbiotic relationship is already established, do you think so?

“As Rick said to Captain Renault: ‘I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.’”

“Rick?”

“Forgive me, please, I was making reference to a famous American movie, called Casablanca. Have you ever seen it?” The woman shook her head “no.” “It is set in Morocco during the Second World War. A great love story, but it also proves that friendships are often more complicated than love affairs. The rock will outlive the tree, but eventually the roots of trees will, as they must, break down the rock, sapping its minerals and . . .”

“Please lower your voice, Professor; I would not want the rock and the tree to hear such things, especially when they do not have much longer in the warm sunshine on the side of this mountain.”

“Sorry, sometimes it’s best to just let a metaphor be a metaphor, and not some death struggle between biology and geology.”

“We should continue walking now,” the woman said, “I will go with you as far as the house of Old Ma.”

“I would like to meet Mr. Lao. Can you introduce me,” Hanna said, not considering that the man might not speak English.

“That will not be possible, Professor. Lao Ma is dead. He died the day after they painted a red line on his house.
__________________________________________________________
The photographs in this story are from the work of my friend, architect Pauline Shu, who was a Fulbright Scholar in China in 2001 and whose work was exhibited as “Documenting the Dammed” in San Francisco at he San Francisco Main Library, November 6, 2004 to February 5, 2005.

60. 1:   Hey, Dude, Where’s the Hell is My Audacity?    8.7.2009

                                 

It happens to all people who get to the pinnacle of power—they lose perspective. The worry is that this might be what is happening to Barack Obama. Obama’s election to the presidency was truly momentous and very welcome, but it is not unremarkable in other respects. He followed perhaps the worst president in the nation’s history, a truly stupid and inept man who ignited preemptive wars, and brought the nation to near bankruptcy and carried almost the lowest possible approval ratings for the last years of his administration. Obama ran against a bumbling old man still pumping his “hero” status as a pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and who showed his “judgment” in selecting a ditzy right wing liar for a running mate.

With superior oratorical and organizational skills, superior intelligence, an engaging personality, and matinee idol good looks, he took the helm of a badly damaged nation. No small part of that success was that he promised to end the Bush wars, tear down his prisons for un-indicted “war prisoners,” rescind Bush’s tax favors for the rich ad powerful, reverse his stupid attitude about stem cell research, and delete “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military.

Obama’s popularity might be broad, but it is not universal. He is not proving to be excepted from the ugly residue of racism that remains in American society; indeed, his election has served to haul it out into the open. The presidential campaign brought forth the insinuations from the lipsticked yap of Sarah Palin that Obama was not a “real American” that loosened the bigotries of the Joe the Plumber, gunslinger, Christian-cretin dimwit set. Maybe all the cheers from the other side kept him from hearing the slurs and innuendos. But the political opposition heard it; it was all that was left of their base. So, when his “stimulus package” came up for Congressional approval the new prez brought in the Republicans in a spirit of collegiality and the quickly turned around to stick it to him.

Rather than taking the rebuff as a declaration of legislative war, our new champion continues to wish to be loved by all at the expense of the very promises and agenda that we elected him to pursue. Have the cheers and the media exposure blinded him the realities? To what he inherited?—a country that almost blindly went along with preemptive war, with torture, a president who all but ignored the plight of African-Americans in a hurricane-ravaged city, the huge shifting of national wealth to the rich and connected. Obama’s election didn’t change all that and, with disappointment, his eagerness to be loved and accepted by all has resulted in a distressing compromise of those promises.

Our present concern is that Mr. Obama is showing the very thing that will result in the failure of his administration—weakness, timidity, and appeasement. To the Republican sharks, and Fox, Limbaugh and rest of the right wing scum, weakness is like blood in the water. Obama will never, ever, win these people over, or the considerable number of racists and bigots that are becoming more vocal and obstreperous with every attempt of the president to play a fruitless and losing “bi-partisan” approach to approval of his policies.

Most recently, Mr. Obama incredibly took to chiding his fellow Democrats for criticizing oppositional “Blue Dog” Democrats with whom he is currying unlikely support. What does he have to give up of his agenda to pay for their support? Maybe it’s time for our new president to gird his loins and go to political war with the people who obviously see their relationship to him in bellicose terms. They have shown their hand; the “tea-baggers” tried to scuttle his economic policies, the racist innuendos flew from the mouths of right-wing media windbags to try to slur Judge Sotomajor, now gangs of idiots desperately in need of dental and mental care, are screaming down politicians talking about health care, even issuing death threats because, although man of them are using Medicare, they fear “socialized medicine.” Aren’t these federal offences?

Meanwhile, Obama pursues what he seems to regards as a “high road” of bi-partisan politics while his opponents and the racists who would treat him like Steppin’ Fetchit, litter that road with political IEDs. That he has had half a year now to figure it out, and hasn’t, is worrisome, and disappointing. He has been called a “socialist,” “communist,” and “fascist” (and that’s just what he has been called in public) by his opposition, and while he seems willing to accept it with his bright, perfect toothy smile, those of us who supported him are losing patience with the Mr. Nice Guy routine.

He has not extricated us from Iraq; he has dug us deeper into Afghanistan; he has done nothing about “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” in the military (Why not, he said he would. Why is he Chickening out?) He’s glacial on the Gitmo matter while the injustice goes on; he seems unwilling to do anything toward prosecuting the war crimes of the Bush administration; and just yesterday he told a reporter that he was holding off on removing the tax breaks for the rich because “we are in a recession”--as though the freakin’ rich are the ones being hurt by the recession! He is looking more like a Bush III, but ironically without the audacity that Bush at least knew how to exercise.

It was perhaps with more than comedic intent that Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show yesterday, referred to “the most interesting man in the world” as, not Barack Obama, but Bill Clinton, freshly returned from an audacious trip to North Korea to rescue two Asian-American reporters. Day by day, Barack Obama looks less and less interesting and more and more vulnerable and ineffectual. It already does not look good for a national health policy that won’t be a sop to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies that run American health policy for the sake of their greedy profits. If he loses this one, the opposition will be convinced that this emperor has no clothes. It is certainly not too late for Obama to wake up to political realities and put the gloves on and start kicking some ass; but it is also not too early for some of us who put much hope in the yet to be demonstrated audacity, to tell him that, in America, smiles and rhetoric, without being backed up by some balls, could be a one-way ticket to a one term presidency.
____________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp