Sense and Sensibility

Wishing for the gift of conversation

2011-12-14T06:59:00.000-08:00

My friend wants to stop exchanging gifts.
It is too late this year, of course. By the time she proposes this moratorium, my meager package – a brown box stuffed with books, an ornament, misshapen Scottish shortbread – has already arrived at her door. I love to imagine her receiving the box, with its silly stickers and festive mailing label. I like the thought of her deliberately placing the wrapped gifts under her tree and waiting, as I know she will, until Christmas morning when she will unwrap them. I like to imagine her reaction – the sigh of recognition that comes when a friend has nourished the morsel of you that the two of you share.
But my friend frets over the time that I spend ferreting out this treasure and fusses, too, though she will not say it, over the money I spend. She cannot know the thrill it is for me to prepare my little package in New England and send it southward, knowing it will meet a receptive audience. She cannot know that she is robbing me of that silly pleasure. We have come to an age, she says, where we don’t need things to attest to our devotion, and maybe she is right.
All of this she tells me in a three-page letter that arrives a week before Christmas. The letter is on good, heavy paper and printed in a jolly red ink. The letter is newsy and discursive, toggling from the health scares of mutual friends, to the meagerness of our last shared salad, to a blunt criticism of a recently finished book that disappointed.
I read the letter at the end of the day, when I have purged my skin of the day’s pollutants and plunged into a pair of fleece sweatpants and flannel top. I am very still when I read the letter, and alone, the only sound the sibilant spray of the shower in which my son sings softly to himself. It is one of those letters that can make you feel that you have dined with a person, looked into their familiar gaze and traced the pattern of their drifting thoughts. With a letter, of course, you have a souvenir. You needn’t rely on memory alone.
A few days before my friend’s request, I sat across from a friend I hadn’t seen in two years in a coffee shop whose cheerful décor bled away as we spoke. His life has been hard and messy, and though there was nothing I could do to tidy the fraying of it, and though I brooded over it for days after, I felt strangely enriched. I realized how few genuinely attentive conversations I had had in the past year. I realized that it was not so much the talking I missed, as the listening.
The day after my friend left for home, I found myself ambling aimlessly in the local mall, needing nothing but looking for something. My gifts had been bought, wrapped and mailed. I had name tags filled out and receipts annotated, but still I dawdled, peering listlessly through the thick glass at the frantic shoppers, dodging parents clinging to the limbs of howling toddlers, picking up baubles and frippery and wondering what an overly disciplined shopper like me was doing in a mall four days before Christmas.
What I was looking for, of course, was a package that would give me the feeling I had when I left my friend at the coffee shop or when I sat transfixed by my friend’s letter. I was looking to purchase the experience of conversation, of the charged energy generated by two people following one another’s lovingly appreciated digressions. It’s impossible to buy that, of course, which hasn’t stopped us from trying.
The rampant debt with which so many of us are wrestling has been engendered in part by a gluttony for objects that substitute for the kind of experience I had with my friend. This year, as in many of the last, the most popular category of gifts was electronic gadgets, most of those relating to communication – Androids, Smart phones, tablets, net books. The irony is that all of these tools, meant to facilitate conversation, only obviate it. They make it easier for us to avoid one another.
I will miss the time I spent prowling about the bookstores and burning myself on oven racks – all part of the care I took to send my friend a gift I delighted myself in imagining that she would enjoy. But the gift of presence, the reward of intimate attention, is one that I long for most. All of the rest, I realize, was only a substitute for that.

Say it again, 'It's about power'

2011-05-20T09:50:00.001-07:00

In French, it's called the droit du seigneur.

The phrase was coined in the Middle Ages when French feudal lords reserved the right to have sex with the brides of their subjects on her wedding night.
What luck for the ladies. One day, you're a West African immigrant scouring the tubs of the rich and famous, and than, bam, you're "Maid in Manhattan." Except in this case, the Lord of the Manor is a fat, wrinkly old pervert charging out of the toilet in his altogether, looking about as much like Charles Boyer as Pepe LePew.
When Dominique Strauss-Kahn burst out of his bathroom this week and, according to court complaints, forced himself on a hotel maid, he was not just one more womanizing politician caught with his pants down. He was one more powerful man victimizing a domestic, one more influential force betting on the silence of an underling, one more feudal lord who figured the housekeeper was his for the having.
He was, in that respect, not that different from former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
After announcing that he and the mother of his four children had separated after 25 years of marriage, the Kindergarten Cop dropped the bombshell that he had fathered a child with a member of their household staff.
Conan let out his inner barbarian 10 years ago, and if he didn't exactly grab her by the hair, he doesn't appear to have romanced her with roses, either. Unless you are Jane Eyre, when the boss comes on to you, you are not in a position to object. This is a relationship of power. The Governator had it. His servant did not.
Word is that when Schwarzenegger told his wife, the arresting Maria Shriver, about the love child, she said "Hasta la vista," walking out where too many other women have stayed. When their marriage ended, the wonder was not that it had ended so soon, but that it had lasted so long. So kudos to Shriver for leaving with her self respect intact. The only thing we need less than a priapic politician is another doormat wife.
Like Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger had been dogged by rumors of adultery. In what now seems a foolish errand, reporters who covered Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign chased down rumors that he had groped and molested women throughout his movie career. Had they followed the Diaper Genie, we might have been spared the specter of the Last Action Hero running the most populous state of the union.
The French press has frequently chastised its cross-continental brethren as overly besotted with the extramarital affairs of politicians. For the French, it's money, not sex, that derails public figures. The French were blase about former president Francois Mitterand's extramarital pursuits, until Mitterand put the Other Woman on the public payroll. Liberation journalist Jean Quatremer wrote that he had incurred the wrath about DSK's notoriously predatory relationship with women. "The only real problem with Strauss-Kahn is his relationship to women," he wrote, after DSK's appointment to the International Monetary Fund in 2007. "Too forceful, he often borders on harassment. It's a flaw known about in the media, but nobody is talking about it openly."
It would be so puritanical.
Meanwhile, Wednesday, TMZ announced that it had photos of Schwarzenegger's 'love child,' as well as his mother, whom news organizations have identified as Mildred Patricia 'Patty' Baena, a $1,200 a week housekeeper who had worked for the family for 20 years.
Photos of the woman have got Americans scratching their heads. You're married to a stunner who could dice garlic with her cheekbones and you're hustling the hired help? Why would you?
Why would Thomas Jefferson chase Sally Hemmings? Why did Ethan Hawke marry his nanny when he had Uma Thurman to come home to? Why did Jude Law pursue his nanny when he was engaged to Sienna Miller? Bill Clinton put it best, "because I could."
It's about power. It's about access.
Wednesday, Shwarzenegger's 17-year-old son Patrick changed his Twitter account last name to "Shriver." Perhaps what it takes is having your children look at you with incredulity and revulsion that makes you realize that a woman is not a vial of hotel shampoo. She does not come with the room.

c. Republican-American, 2011

Hell hath no fury like Hell denied

2011-05-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

After Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces on May 1, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee had a message for his corpse: "Welcome to hell, bin Laden."
Huckabee is a fundamentalist Christian. He was the youngest president ever of the Arkansas Southern Baptist State Convention. So his views on Hell, as a place of eternal torment, with gnashing of teeth and the burning of unquenchable fire, fit well within his tradition, which stresses a literal interpretation of scripture.
Of course, as a fundamentalist, Huckabee would also have to believe that, as a Muslim, there was no way in Hell Osama was going anywhere but Hell [Dash] the repository for all who do not accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. Under this theology, Osama would have plenty of company, including Buddha, (eventually) the Dalai Lama and Gandhi.
And that's where fundamentalist preacher Rob Bell draws the line.
Bell, the leader of the Mars Hill Bible Church, which typically draws 8,000 to 11,000 parishioners every Sunday, dropped a bombshell into a religious community that believes in the inerrancy of scripture. In "Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived," he claims that the belief in hell as "conscious, eternal conflict," is a "misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus' message of love, peace, forgiveness and joy that our world desperately needs to hear."
And with those words, Bell ignited his own inferno in the evangelical community. Christian blogs were afire with criticism of Bell's assertion. Blogger Karen de Young spoke for many, writing: "We need the doctrine of eternal punishment. Time and time again in the New Testament we find that understanding divine justice is essential to our sanctification. Believing in God's judgment actually helps us look more like Jesus. In short, we need the doctrine of the wrath of God."
Bell, fundamentalists charge, has left the fold and become a Universalist, an assertion Bell denies.
"Love Wins" reads like a breezy, conversational sermon that focuses not on hell and damnation, but on an eternal life, which, Bell writes, "is less about a kind of time that starts when we die, and more about a quality and vitality of live lived now in connection to God."
That's a vision that sits well with many denominations, including Episcopalians and Catholics. "Our theology doesn't posit the devil-with-the-pitchfork mentality as much as it does a state of a loss of grace," said the Mark Suslenko of St. Anthony's in Prospect. "When it comes to our eternal life, being thrust into one element or another is not what God does. It's what we choose," he said.
But Hell offers an effective way to "control people through fear," said Peter S. Hawkins, professor of religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, which made it effective. Hawkins maintains that scriptural references to Hell are few. "It was not Jesus' method or message. This notion of an eternal punishment of torture is obscene to me."
But Hell has had a hold on the human psyche for centuries, if for symmetry alone. If the good guys get heaven, the bad guys must get its antithesis. The Christian tradition is rich with searing imagery of Hell's grisly appointments. It got help from artists and writers, particularly Dante, whose elaborate treatment of the Inferno would scare the evil out of anyone.
But over the years, writers and the general public has grown dubious of Hell as an exit ramp on the after-death highway. Only 59 percent of Americans believe in hell, compared with 74 percent who believe in heaven, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
"What is hell?" T.S. Eliot asked. "Hell is oneself." The more misanthropic Jean Paul Sartre had a different idea. "Hell is other people," he wrote.
For Yale's Hawkins, John Paul II's depiction of Hell, articulated in front of a general audience at the Vatican in 1999, is the keenest, and most sensitive he has heard. "Rather than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy," John Paul said. Hell, he added, is "a condition resulting from attitudes and actions which people adopt in this life."
But that view is at extreme variance, not just for fundamentalists, but for humans frustrated with the inaptness of justice as it is meted out here on earth. Kill the Cheshire killers or consign them to life in prison. Neither seems to compensate for the horror they wrought. Hell sates a lust for vengeance unquenched here on earth.
But does that mean that Hell is the fate of unbelievers, where they are, as Jonathan Edwards preached, to be suspended "over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire? Is it, as Edwards described, a place where God "exercise(s) no love and extends no mercy to any one object there, but pours out upon them horrors without mixture?"
In "Love Wins," Bell asks: Is that the all-merciful, all-compassionate Jesus who died to forgive our sins?
Bell's book may be a watershed for a religious community living too long under the spell of Hell. As he writes "There are individual hells, and communal, society wide hells, and Jesus teaches us to take both seriously."
Wherever Hell is [Dash] in the center of the earth, as Dante posited [Dash] or in the center of men's souls, one thing is certain: No mortal, and certainly no politician, can say for sure who has a first-class ticket. That's a decision that is, mercifully, left out of our hands.

ode to the typewriter

2011-04-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

As far as I have been able to sniff out, there are only two typewriters remaining in my newsroom. One is on the fritz and the other is next. I may be one of the few employees to despair over these unlamented mechanical corpses, if only because I still find them functional, and, of course, am a romantic for their staccato vibe. I am told there are more of these artifacts on the "third floor," an eerie, unused repository of pica rulers, compositors' tools, hot type, lead letter fittings and, quite possibly, Grace Poole. I'm really not keen on prowling through the third floor, not only because the place gives me the serious creeps, but because I'm convinced my search would be futile. The typewriter is dead. Or perhaps.... not yet. Like most obsolete objects, the typewriter has been seized from the cliff of extinction by a bunch of hipsters who think the retro machine is cool. The New York Times reported on a subculture of "type-ins," where typewriter devotees gather "in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas<$>, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest." One disciple of these "Unplug and reconnect" love-ins described the soirees as "a jam session for people who like typewriters." And who could not love a typewriter? I didn't, at least not at first, when I sat in front of a gun-metal Royal typewriter in the ninth grade, attending to Mrs. Henninger's thrumming ruler tapping out letters while she barked, "A,S,D, F, semi." I was not a very good typist, or a very fast one. The metal arms of my letters seemed drawn to one another, like a contortionist's limbs, and I spent most of my time wrenching the twisted arms from the guts of the typewriter, my fingertips caking with sooty ink and Mrs. Henninger casting her censorious glare my way. I knew, of course, that success in typing was critical to my career as a journalist and so labored maladroitly away at the task, haplessly painting my compositions with Wite-Out or [JUMP]slipping correction tape into the machine's sights. I made my first foray into journalism covering the high school girls' field hockey team, and my first belabored report was so caulked with correction fluid that my mother took one look at it, said, "Gimme that," and sat magnificently erect in front of the Smith Corona and began her magic. My mother was a talented woman. She could sing beautifully in front of thousands of people and she could cook up a swell cauldron of meatballs and stuffed shells in less time than it took most people to pour a bowl of cereal. In a pinch, she could take up a quick hem and knew how to scrub the burned gunk off the percolator to make it sparkle. But I don't think I ever admired my mother as much as when she sat down with my pathetic drivel on high school field hockey and turned it into a percussive symphony. Her back erect, her elbows at 90 degrees, a half a stick of Wrigley's Doublemint gum snapping in her teeth, my mother's fingers walloped those keys with a dexterity matched only by the aural majesty of the performance. The keys crackling, my mother's gum snapping, the bell ringing at the end of the margins, and my mother's meaty whack that sent the carriage back again [--] it was symphonic. With a rip, she tore the page out of the typewriter, handed it to me, and placed the typewriter cover back with a satisfying snap. I was dumbfounded. "Honey, when I was growing up, you knew how to type or you were dead," she said. "The girls who typed the most words per minute [--] no mistakes, you didn't get mistakes [--] got the best jobs." "How were you?" I asked, still stupefied. "Me?" my mother said, plucking the gum out of her mouth and stuffing it into a metallic wrapper. "I was the best." I would think of my mother in the lonely night hours in my college newsroom, a sinister-looking well of rows and rows of barely operational manual typewriters lorded over by an AP wire machine that pealed out news alerts with the trill of an ice cream truck. There was something delicious about all those typewriters waiting to be manhandled in a syncopated roar to produce something coherent and credible. Perhaps that is why I still seek out the lone operational typewriter to mash a few words together. I like the thwack of the inked metal on the fibrous paper, the imperfection of the letters, the forceful blurring of the ink, the physical joy of hearing a letter hit its object. My letters are still smeared with correction fluid and sullied by xxxxx's. But I think I'm getting faster. I think I'm catching up to my mother.

Internet TV may give options to cable-averse

2011-03-14T06:22:00.000-07:00

I finally ripped the cables out of my house.

They hung in menacing black tendrils all over my basement and I resented them from the minute we bought the house. The cords were a tantalizing reminder that, for a fee, I could bring cable programming into my house, a prospect I saw as tantamount to reversing the sewage lines.
I have resisted cable for 30 years, and clung to my pathetic rabbit ears through the disastrous conversion to digital TV. Digital TV turned my television screen into a patchwork of evaporating Chuck Close-like squares. While some channels [--] all of them in Spanish [--] now come in with a fidelity verging on the photo-realistic, most periodically dissolve like Scotty and Sulu dematerializing on the transporter.
Only about 11 percent of Americans cleave belligerently to their antennae, too cheap or uptight to spring for VH1. But there is a new temptation on the horizon, and it does not require cumbersome black cables slithering through your floorboards.
It's Internet TV, which may do to cable what cable did to broadcast, which was what broadcast did to movies, which was what movies did to vaudeville, and what pretty much everyone has done to newspapers. It will give them competition.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that CBS reached a multimillion dollar deal with video service Netflix to stream classic TV shows like "Cheers" from its library. The news came just days after Amazon.com offered its "Prime" customers movie and TV shows instantly available for viewing over the web.
In other words, never mind the cable and or that puny computer monitor, your entertainment console of the future will be the same one it has been for the last 70 years [--] the boob tube.
Increasingly, televisions are being manufactured to connect to the Internet, allowing viewers to stream video, as Republican-American reporter Sam Cooper reported last week. Twenty-one percent of all TVs shipped last year were Internet enabled, and most of them come with the ability to access a video streaming device, like Netflix or Amazon.com.
If you are tech-savvy, you can also access Internet TV through an electronic device like a game console or Blu-ray player. Through these portals of the imagination, you may access such riveting television as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter. Both Google and Apple are also elbowing their way into the game, in many cases partnering with television manufacturers that offer subscription services, many of which, like Hulu, will be free [--] at least initially. So Apple TV, for instance, has a decoder box. If you subscribe to the service, you can download the shows and are charged in the same way as if you had downloaded a song from iTunes. You can access Netlix videos for as little as $8 a month.
That's a lot less than the average $70 fee Comcast's cable customers paid monthly for video services last year.
"Something like this was bound to happen," Carolin Lin, professor of the Department of Communication Sciences at the University of Connecticut, told me. "If cable TV continues to exist, it will have to change the way it exists."
But don't toll any bells, for the cable TV industry is far from doomed. It has billions of dollars invested beneath the asphalt of this country and will not go gently into the wired night.
But Internet TV disarms cable in this respect: Cable companies have obdurately refused to sell their services a la carte. That means that if you're a prude like me and only want CNN and the BBC, you have to navigate through a swamp of drivel to satisfy your particular taste. Internet TV offers an alternative: a small fee for limited viewing [--] particularly attractive to those like me who lack the time, inclination or budget to access an all-you-watch orgy of rubbish.
The trade-off is the same cross we have borne with the Internet all along [--]when the world is at your fingertips, plenty of sludge gets under your fingernails. But at a moment when the colossus of cable TV is gorging on America's checkbook, we can't afford not to get our hands dirty.

What Makes Fred Phelps Christian?

2011-03-08T12:37:00.001-08:00

Last week, Paris prosecutors pressed charges against John Galliano after a video of the former Christian Dior designer spewing racial insults went viral.
"I love Hitler," Galliano told a woman at a Paris bar, "and people like you would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers, would be…gassed and… dead."
Dior swiftly fired its popular designer, Galliano went reliably into rehab and the French police went into overdrive, charging the devilish-looking dandy with making "public insults based on the origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity." Those convicted face up to six months in prison and $31,000 in fines.
Galliano’s implosion came just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that even vile, insensitive speech spewed at military funerals is protected under the First Amendment. The case involved members of the tiny but toxic Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for barking antigay epithets at family members gathered at funeral sites. Venom, no matter how repulsive or merciless, is protected under our First Amendment.
Conceding that the church’s picketing of military funerals fallen soldiers' funerals "is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, "as a nation we have chosen … to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate."
We will not, in other words, go the way of France and more Draconian countries, which squelch speech from the heinous to the hopeful, even speech as repulsive and cruel as "God hates fags, "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and "You're Going to Hell."
The Westboro Baptist Church has bleated such statements during families’ most sacred and vulnerable moments. This flock of profane parrots has got it into their bird brains that God is punishing the U.S. for its increasingly tolerant attitude toward gays. As its spokesman told The New York Times after the Supreme Court decision, "God is punishing this nation with a grievous, smiting blow, killing our children, sending them home dead, to help you connect the dots."
Connecting the dots is what Rep. Peter King (R-NY), insists he is trying to do with his investigation of the "self-radicalization going on within the Muslim community." King was responding to the discomfiting but undeniable fact that a bunch of homicidal fanatics have latched on to radical Islam and twisted it to support their embrace of slaughter.
The Westboro Baptist Church has not yet slaughtered anything but the souls of the grieving, but at some point, a decent Christian has got to ask: what serpent has slithered its way through scripture and surfaced as hatred?
For the first time this week, as a devout Christian, I began to get a sense of what it must be like for a devout Muslim to endure the transgressions of a fraction of its members. While most Christians easily dismiss Fred Phelps and his Westboro mob as a bunch of fringe lunatics, others consider these sanctimonious, scathing scolds as typical Christians.
The Westboro Baptist Church is not Baptist. It is not even Christian. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, has called the Westboro church "blasphemous" and "verbal terrorism." That is because the Phelps and their like wound Christianity at its heart. This religion, with its insistence on plumbing beneath divine law to the love and mercy that is its source, has no room for hate. None. In 1999, Southern Baptists denounced the idea that "God hates any person," as it condemned "all violent acts upon homosexuals."
Does this country need to muzzle the hate-spewing, merciless frauds? It must not. It cannot. But free speech works both ways. Since 2005, a loose gang of motorcycle riders called the Patriot Guard Riders has shielded grieving family members from protesters. They are not Christian crusaders. But they can be. And they should be.
If hate is not a Christian value, it will take Christians to ensure it does not become one.
Contact: Tosh[AT]Rep-am.com

Let's hope he only painted them

2011-03-07T06:54:00.001-08:00

Forget the glimpse of stocking, what really shocked Regency England in 1790 was teeth.
Lustrous, carnivorous and tantalizingly exposed between a pair of moist red lips, these particular teeth belonged to the actress Elizabeth Farren, whose portrait opens the Yale Center for British Art's luscious new exhibit, "Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance."
This is not the sexiest painting Lawrence (1769-1830) ever painted. There are plenty of contenders, including the hunky "John, Lord Mountstuart," just adjacent, who looks as if he has been poured into a pair of Spandex leggings and caressed by a salmon-lined cape. If Mountstuart exudes a moody bravura, balancing daringly on a cliff [--] as the cobalt sea churns beneath him [--] Farren is his coquettish match, embalmed in a fox-trimmed translucent white cloak, caught mid-step as she strides mischievously across a summer field. Showing even a hint of teeth in the 18th century was the province of the mad, the crass and the lustful [--] so Farren's flirty peak made her particularly inviting. Portraits like Farren's led the banker-poet Sam Rogers to quip that if he wanted his wife painted he would go to the capable Thomas Phillips, but "if I wanted my mistress painted I would go to Lawrence."
When Lawrence, the self-taught son of an innkeeper, burst onto the London scene at the end of the 18th century, these sorts of elegant but erotic stunners were what brought him immediate fame. By 20, he was painting Queen Charlotte with unusual candor. By 22, he was elected to the Royal Academy. By 23, he was appointed Painter-in-Ordinary to King George III. By his mid-40s, he was a baronet, roundly considered the heir apparent to the redoubtable Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Lawrence's brilliance stands in contrast to his mid-century branding as a "chocolate-box painter." His doughy, adorable children, all apple-cheeked and fleshy, romping with dogs, play-acting in the forest and lolling about in rich velvet suits, had enough sentimentality to choke a nursery school teacher. Though there is blame enough to go around for 19th-century British schmaltz, Thomas Lawrence could reasonably be charged with leading the charge of the lite brigade.
As the London Observer wrote, "Lawrence painted children the way Disney does deer."
So the curators of this splendid show [--] jointly organized with the National Portrait Gallery in London [--] are to be commended for hauling old Lawrence out of the candy box and out onto the walls again. This canny reassessment does not shy away from Lawrence's excesses, but it reminds viewers of the dash, dexterity and exciting innovations he brought to the canvas in the pre-Victorian era. He may not have had the expressive agency of J.M.W. Turner or the breathtaking atmospherics of John Constable, but Lawrence had something else: a boldness and candor brought to an age of tumult when society itself seemed on the brink of collapse.
We think today of regency England (roughly 1789 to Queen Victoria's ascension in 1837) as the time of Austen and Mozart and classical symmetry. But the fall of the Bastille in 1789, the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 and the onrush of Napoleon's armies had England and Europe terrified that their centuries-old system of power was on the verge of collapse.
Lawrence, a child prodigy who had been charging for his portraits since he was 11, strode into this turmoil with a poise and cockiness perfectly suited for an anxious age. His portraits don't just come alive, they invade your space. They dare you to meet them head on, with a cool, almost defiant confidence that is as unnerving as it is magnetic. His backgrounds are stormy, with deep and abrupt contrasts that lend his subjects an air of immediacy and potency.
Look at the arrogance of "Arthur Atherley," one of Lawrence's most celebrated portraits. The young man doffs his hat with his left hand while placing his right, gloved hand, defiantly on his right hip. He stares directly at the viewer with huge cobalt eyes, his cheeks flushed with red, his mouth truculent and cocky. This is a 20-year-old who seems to say, "You want a piece of me?" Lawrence paints him in his favorite colors [--] a rich crimson, deep blue and dazzling white.
The sense of the primal is repeatedly enhanced by Lawrence's affection for ruby, cobalt and white, often applied with thick daubs of paint that seem to have been hurled on the canvas. Few other painters outside of Sargent have used white with such audacity. It is on fetching display in "Catherine Rebecca Gray," a peculiar full-length portrait of a pale, elegant woman descending a marble staircase, a peacock preening behind her. Mirroring the bird's pose, she holds a pink rose between her finger and thumb, her sapphire eyes in blazing contrast to her diaphanous, alabaster frock.

This is a show-off picture, a bit like the kind the Dutch used to paint in the 16th century.
But a more virtuosic example of Lawrence's adroitness with white is in his portrait of Isabella Wolff. This sumptuous portrait of a woman, most likely his mistress, draws its composition from Michelangelo's image of "Night," at the Medici Chapel. In it, Wolff, her auburn tresses fitfully tucked into a gold silk cap, rests her elbow on a pillow, absorbed in the examination of an open book. The woman's alabaster skin, her long, strong neck, patrician nose and high, rosy cheekbones suggest access to the sitter's private thoughts.
That sort of unfettered access to female sensibilities, which Lawrence achieves with a flurry of flicks and daubs of paint, curator A. Cassandra Albinson argues, "suggest, through the visual language of paint, that [Lawrence] had unfettered access to his sitter and was working directly from the motif."
Women take on a sense of their own sexual agency in Lawrence's portraits, just as men take on their own political agency. Lawrence's penchant for investing his portraits with a sense of theatricality and energy, often purposely leaving backgrounds unfinished, create a flamboyant sense of potency that makes the sitters forceful enough to triumph over the fraught temper of the time.
With the defeat of Napoleon, Lawrence spent time in Europe, then in thrall to the radiant, highly finished paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Lawrence's dashing color contrasts, his sketchy, halting, epigrammatic brush strokes, and, above all, the psychic intensity with which he rendered his subjects, put off many of the stuffy Salon stalwarts but engaged romantics like Eugène Delacroix. While Lawrence, the French painter wrote in 1829, "could be blamed for sometimes pushing to the point of affectation the search for striking and unexpected contrasts he still captivates; his picture is a kind of diamond which glitters all alone where it is and obscures everything around it."
Lawrence was, by turns, a proto-Romantic and Victorian sentimentalist. He broke the boundary between sitter and viewer and created a new generation of women whose elegance was invigorated by their own sensuality. His portraits of swaggering Adonises (including the portly George Regent, who was anything but) generated just the sort of moxie and patriotism England likely needed with Napoleon breathing down its neck.
If he was a "chocolate box artist," says Lucy Peltz, curator of 18th-century portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, it was only because his works were so heartily embraced. "We lost the ability to love Lawrence because we became cynical and ironic and post-modern," she says. "If we are now beyond post-modernism, then the moment seems ripe to reappraise Lawrence and for people to fully experience his love of paint, surface, color, personality, and materiality."

Marraige Lite a perfect fit for the French

2011-02-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

In 1999, when France created a system of civil unions similar to those in several states here, it expected that this domestic-partnership law would be embraced by gays.
And it was. But not nearly as much as it has been welcomed by heterosexuals.
Within a year of the law's passage, more than 75 percent of civil unions were signed by straight couples. More than two civil unions now take place for every marriage in France, meaning that the overwhelming majority of these pact civil de solidarite (PACS) are between heterosexual couples.
A PACS gives legal rights to both partners and can be dissolved with only a registered letter. It is, in other words, "marriage lite."
"We are the generation of divorced parents, Maud Hugot, 32, told The New York Times. "The notion of eternal marriage has grown obsolete."
Maybe. Or maybe it's just too hard.
In 2006, the Census Bureau reported that married couples became a minority for the first time in the United States. More couples are living together than ever before. The number of babies born to unmarried mothers has risen eightfold from 50 years ago.
Last year, when the Pew Research Center and Time magazine asked Americans whether they thought marriage was obsolete, 40 percent said yes. That might strike some observers as peculiar, since more than 70 percent of Americans aged 25 to 44 have been married, and more than 80 percent are married by 40.
Historian Stephanie Coontz has written about the most significant shift in marriage in the last 3,000 years [Dash] the growth of the "companionate marriage," in which couples were not only expected to divide the labor and forge political alliances, but actually like one another. Coontz has argued that Americans "have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love…placing too many burdens on a fragile institution and making social life poorer in the process."
She notes the recent survey that found that the number of Americans totally dependent on a spouse for important conversations nearly doubled from 1985 to 2004, while the number of people who had really close friends shrank.
To cynics, it has become almost schmaltzy to call one's spouse one's "best friend," but new research in successful marriages has found support for the idea that an emotional and intellectual bond is critical in maintaining a happy marriage.
The so-called "Michelangelo Effect," coined by the late Caryl Rusbult, holds that the more one partner "sculpts" or affirms the other's ideal self, the better the relationship. "When our partners can chisel and polish us in a way that helps us to achieve our ideal self, that's a wonderful thing," Eli Finkel, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, told Science Daily.
Similarly, while boredom is one of the biggest threats to marriage, intellectual and emotional stimulation ----which researchers call "self-expansion" ---- helps marriages to flourish.
"If you're seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position," Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, told The New York Times. "And being able to help your partner's self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself."
It would be --- unless you were threatened by that self-expansion, often the culprit in domestic abuse.
The 80 percent of us who do get married do so in spite of nagging cynicism that everlasting love is impossible. It will be different for us, we assure ourselves, and maybe it will. But as much as marriage "sculpts" us, it also humbles us. In a happy marriage, we're willing to drop the very qualities that spoil the rest of our relationships ---- envy, hatred, bitterness and the resentment that comes from feeling unappreciated.
That all of those things are so difficult to drop ---- that we cling to them with a desperation bordering on the self-destructive ---- may explain why many of us are just not ready for marriage. But anybody --- even the French --- who believe that making marriage easier to dissolve will lessen the anguish when it vanishes cannot have really known love to begin with.
c. Republican-American

What a joy it wasn't- caprice and corruption in 18th century

2011-02-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

At the twilight of the 18th century, his hearing gone, his body partially paralyzed, his soul consumed with the fear of going blind, Francisco de Goya gave society a piece of his mind.
Anyone who had been paying attention could not have been shocked by the bitter, incriminating bite Goya took of the hand that fed him. The first court painter to faithfully depict the dissipated, fatuous members of Spain's royal family, Goya was known for his acid acuity. But in "Los Caprichos," his pitiless disgust of artifice took a hideous [--] and surprisingly misogynistic [--] turn.
"Los Caprichos" is one of the two lynchpins in "Caprice and Corruption: 18th Century Prints," now on view at Wesleyan University's Davison Art Center collection. The other is the reliably censorious William Hogarth, whose "Harlot's Progress" is on view in its entirety.
Goya was appointed royal painter in 1799, the same year Los Caprichos was printed. In many ways he is the heir to Hogarth [--] whose "modern moral subjects" spared no one. Goya, the more ingenious artist, was more ghoulish in his satire, but he was also more certain where much of the blame for the artifice, hypocrisy and moral corrosion lay [--] with women.
His women are fox-faced, cunning, sorceresses who beguile their way into marriage and eat the flesh of infants. Women ride naked on broomstick, twist thread from infant tissue and exchange the edible flesh of crying infants. Ostensibly, greed and moral depravity was Goya's subject, but his treatment of women [--] as mischievous crones or lusty gold-diggers, puts the blame, so to speak, on Mame.
In part, Goya's images of women stealing the teeth out of the mouths of hanged men or inviting monsters into the nursery were his way of attacking the superstition and ignorance that thwarted reason. But so hauntingly appalling are these women [--] whether as artful nymphs who "Say 'Yes' and Give their Hand to the First Comer" or fiendish hags feasting on the flesh of the next generation [--] that it's hard to see them as anything but deeply misogynistic. As Anna Szapiro writes of the series, "Women have been transformed to grotesque humanoid creatures, merciless witches and crones capable of exploiting even their most innocent victims: the vulnerable, impressionable youth."
"Los Caprichos" was hardly Goya's final indictment on a world that had let him down. He would end his days in 1828 in Bordeaux, embittered by the artifice, cruelty and oppression he had endured in Spain. His "black paintings" became his last word on mankind's corrosive tendency to devour its own. By the end of the 18th century, the world had let many Europeans down, particularly intellectuals like Goya, who had put his money on Enlightenment ideals only to see them cut down by the guillotine and crushed under the Napoleonic Empire. Prints, a medium of largely private enjoyment, were a method of indulging one's bitter disappointments and vulgar appetites. And there is plenty of vulgarity to go around in "Caprice & Corruption." Ministers stick religious idols down women's bodices; satyrs frolic behind buxom women in forests teeming with carnality; wives pat their husbands with one hand and embrace their lovers with another. It is these sorts of paeans to debauchery that helpfully remind us that the 20th century was not the first to discover sex. Carnality was so rife for so long that novels about strait-laced virgins, like Richardson's "Pamela," were shocking in their heroine's embrace of chastity.
Capriccio, literally "caprice," had been around since the time of Alessandro Magnasco (1667-1749), but in the 18th century, the genre took a more astringent tone. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, for instance, known for his exceptional architectural vedute<$>, reminded patrons that the glory that was Rome was not produced without an exceptional amount of gore.
His "Prisons," published in 1760, combine the monumentality of Roman architecture with the grisly torture that he imagined went on in the subterranean chambers that held prisoners. Haunting, evocative prints, like "The Man on the Rack," "Prisoners on a Projecting Platform" and "The Well" depict prisoners being rent limb-from-torso, tethered to phallic pillars with thick, menacing chains.
Piranesi's etchings are considered Romantic, but in the flickering, webbed shadows, he seems to presage Expressionism. The contrast between the monumental idealism of Rome, suggested by the breathtaking architecture, and the underside of empire, represented by the squalid prisons, would have had deep contemporary overtones in 18th-century Europe.
William Hogarth's brilliance was that he didn't need to go to Europe or even hearken to the past to create his "modern moral subjects." Right there in all-too-jolly old England were enough drunks, whores, rakes, fakes and exploiters to make all the points he wanted. His memorable tale of corruption, "The Harlot's Progress," (1732), depicts "Moll Hackabout" from her arrival in London as an innocent maid, to her position as kept woman, poverty, sentence in the work house, and miserable death <$>is dense with contemporary characters and allusions. Hogarth's satire knew no bounds; he attacked everyone from politicians to preachers, expectant mothers and cuckolded husbands. Among his most revealing and least-seen pieces is "Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism" (1762), in which a sputtering preacher (probably John Wesley), holds a devil in one hand and a witch in the other while lascivious ministers and bored congregants cavort below.
So unsparing is Hogarth in his condemnation of humanity, that even death offers no respite. In "The Reward of Cruelty" (1751), Hogarth depicts a corpse being dissected by leering scientists. The inscription below gives a fair idea of Hogarth's view of the victim. "Torn from the root that wicked tongue/which daily swore and curst!/Those eyeballs from their sockets wrung/ that glowed with shameful Lust!"
Phony marriages, prostitution, superstition and widespread corruption were all vestiges of an ignorant age thought to be remedied by the wonders of the Enlightenment. If "Caprice & Corruption" reminds us of anything it is the foolhardiness of that belief [--] a folly that burdens us still.
"Caprice and Corruption" was organized by Wesleyan University students in Art & Art History 360. It continues through March 3.

Montaigne's essays reveal exceptional personal truth

2011-02-21T09:50:00.001-08:00

In 1878, drained, exhausted and despondent, John Ruskin, the leading art critic of 19th -century Britain, collapsed from mental strain. The bleak, sooty, winter, gloomy and unrelenting, sucked away his hope, leaving him, he wrote, "cold and dead," feeling in a "perpetual fog and depression of my total me [--] body and soul [--] not in any great sadness, but in a mean, small, withered way."
For two months, the prolific critic was crippled by psychotic nightmares, convinced of his own futility, unable even to pick up a pen. When spring took hold, and his spirit revived, Ruskin returned to his diary and recounted the terror and despair that had stolen him from himself.
"Let me see that I don't thaw away into waste myself, now the Spring's come again for me, once more!" he wrote.
Ruskin's diary is one of a series on display in "The Diary: Three Centuries of Private Lives," at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City through May 22. It comes at a time of revived interest in diary and autobiography, driven in part by the surprise success of the 736-page "Autobiography of Mark Twain," and in part by the proliferation of blogs, now the venue of self-revelation used by more than 20 million Americans.
In its candor and urgency, Ruskin's revelations are refreshing---- but exceptional. When it comes to diaries of the famous, the most we can hope for, with apologies to Stephen Colbert, is a kind of "truthiness." Most autobiographers disguise, evade, embroider and conceal, so that you may read all about Edith Wharton's childhood in "A Backward Glance," but nothing about her affair with Morton Fullerton, so critical to the writing of her novels.
So, too, with Graham Greene or Lillian Hellman or W. Somerset Maugham, who all wrote memoirs but whose discretion makes them seem evasive. Maugham, for instance, never mentions his bisexuality in "The Summing Up," which is today virtually all we talk about when we talk about Maugham.
But sex isn't the only subject diarists and memoirists evade. Writing about the lapses of candor in autobiography in last month's Smithsonian magazine, Paul Theroux reminds readers that "the setting down of personal detail can be a devastating emotional experience." Theroux wrote parts of his own memoir about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul, "with tears streaming down my face."
"Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other," as Rebecca West once said. "But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves."
Into this absurd brew of self-congratulation and omission, then, the publication of "How to Live: or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer," is more than a refreshing balm. It reminds us of the seminal point in history when the idea of writing about oneself in an exploratory, examined way was revolutionary. As Sarah Bakewell writes, the idea of the personal essay "has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person."
Born at the onset of the Protestant Reformation, when wars of religion slaughtered hundreds in his native France, Michel de Montaigne, was, as Andrew Sullivan has written "the quintessential blogger."
Montaigne called this new format the "essay," from the French word "essayer," which means to try. Montaigne's effort, coming as it did in mid-life after the devastating loss of his best friend, his own near-death experience and the death of five of his six children, was as simple as it was poignant: "How to live."
These days the question beckons from every self-help section in every bookstore. But in Montaigne's day, the idea of the individual was new, a phenomenon of the Renaissance. It was in that Renaissance spirit that Montaigne took himself as his subject, quoting Pliny's advice, "Each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up." So, as Bakewell writes Montaigne "set himself up like a lab rat and stood over himself with notebook in hand. Each observed oddity made him rejoice."
"I am myself the matter of my book," wrote Montaigne, an assertion that his contemporaries must have found impudent.
Did that make his Essays truer--- than most autobiographies? No doubt. Compared to the bloviating blogosphere, Montaigne's essays are wondrously artless. Most of what he knows about himself is fluid, flawed and ridiculous. "It seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve," wrote Montaigne.
"Question everything," Montaigne instructs, and be aware of your own fallibility. "Read a lot, forget most of what you read and be slow-witted."
That might seem a little disingenuous for a man who spent the first five years of his life reading and speaking only Latin, and by age 35, had probably read everything available to read. But today, when belligerent conviction has replaced civil discourse and "truthiness" has supplanted candor, Montaigne reminds us of the elixir a little candor and healthy dose of modesty can be.

Commonplace book reveals more about what we think

2011-02-15T06:45:00.000-08:00

For some years now, I have kept a commonplace book.
A commonplace book, of the sort kept by Francis Bacon and John Milton; Thomas Hardy and Henry David Thoreau, is a sort of low-tech aggregator of striking passages, apercus or insights, kept for the purpose of referring to them again.
Scholars have dated the commonplace book in Europe to the early middle ages, though some trace the practice to ancient Greece. The books were certainly kept by boys during the Tudor Age in England as well as in colonial New England, when books were hard to come by and pupils dutifully copied verses or excerpts of prose that appealed to them.

I began my common book in high school when I had become fed up with my dreary journal-keeping and its humiliating revelations, hoping that there must be a way to chart my emotional progress in less incriminating fashion.
So I began by jotting down a phrase from a poem or line from a song (“Pippin,” I’m embarrassed to say, was a favorite) into a palm-sized, lined notebook. I was not as dutiful a recorder as I should have been and seemed only to have logged phrases or stanzas intended to bolster my feeble self-concept, pledge myself to some grand ambition, or arm myself with some wise-yet-pithy riposte. Oh, yes, and there were the usual overwrought oaths to eternal friendship, in my case intended for a former girlfriend I’ve scarcely seen in 25 years.

If ever I thought that switching from a journal to a commonplace book would immunize me from certain embarrassment in adulthood, I was wrong. One can be just as shamed by the meaningful passages of youth written by someone else as those written by oneself. What possessed me, for instance, to inscribe “Evita’s Lament” in these pages? Or the poetry of that well-known bard, Judy Garland? Or long, circuitous passages by Kahil Gibran, T.E. Lawrence, Maya Angelo or Richard (shoot me now) Bach.

And while I have nothing against Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows,” what on earth could a 17-year-old have intended, writing “I’ve discovered the real thing…and can only regret the wasted years that lie behind…, squandered in trivialities.”

Such regret, and not yet 20.

What’s stunning about these books is what changes in them and what remains the same, yet more nuanced. If all we had at the end of our lives was a collection of sayings that were important to us, what would a stranger be able to discern of us? I for instance, was struck by the prevalence of so many Biblical quotes, and quotes from Shakespeare in so many of my early volumes. In later commonplace books, those quotes have become more tailored to my emerging understanding of faith and literature.
So while in my early 20s, I might have copied Saint Ambrose’s instruction “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks,” which I probably cribbed off of some religious store greeting card, in my 40s, I was reproducing Saint Augustine’s “Doubt is but another element of faith,” and Flannery O’Connor’s astute remark, “I hope that to be of two minds about something is not to be neutral.”

Temperance seems to have replaced self-righteousness, which is either conceding to the indignities of age, or something close to spiritual growth. In high school, I wrote “To achieve all that is possible me must attempt the impossible; to be as much as we can be, we must dream of being more,” which seems to have been the motto of some ruthless go-getter I scarcely remember. Today, the mottos I crib are more like these from Epictetus: “The surest sign of the higher life is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil;” and “attach yourself to what is spiritually superior, regardless of what other people think or do.” And my favorite, from Hamlet to his mother: "Assume a virtue if you have it not!"
Is that progress or regression? I’m not sure. But a commonplace book has shown me, as it might you, that the trajectories of our lives are not as horizontal as we might imagine.

Sometimes they remind us os shards of ourselves best forgotten. Other times, they strike a central nerve. More often than not, they reveal some parenthetical enthusiasm that is closer to self-disclosure than we realized.

But mostly, I think, they reassure us that other souls have passed this way before, with their anxieties and their self-scolding, their epiphanies and their anguish. There is some comfort in aligning ourselves to the struggles of the human race that came before us and will, undoubtedly, outlive us.

Caregivers -- so critical, so kind -- until they're not

2011-02-14T07:13:00.001-08:00

Even now, he worries about her.
Even now, after she struck him and berated him for soiling his diaper. Even now, after she cursed him, mocked him and threatened to lash Robert Harkness, a 64-year-old quadriplegic, to his bed and leave him there. Even after she threatened him with his worst fear: Sending him back to the institution to which he was confined for 29 years. Even now Buddy Harkness thinks about his nurse of 14 years and he worries.
After all, she was like family.
On Jan. 7, the state sentenced Tammy M. Labrecque, a licensed practical nurse, to 15 months in jail after she was found guilty of cruelty to persons. Attorneys in the sordid case compared it to something out of "Misery" or "Dante's Inferno," and it was all that and so much more.
The eight years of abuse Harkness said he endured from Labrecque is a story of viciousness and vulnerability, of brutality and dread, of a man so desperate for his own freedom that he would endure a stream of ridicule and cruelty so relentless that it finally sapped his will to live. But it is also a story of one woman's inexorable and imperceptible slide into sadism and the horrors that ensue when someone that you love becomes someone that you hate.
"She went everywhere with our family," said James Beck, Harkness' conservator, fanning out a stack of photographs that depict Labrecque on vacation with the family in Florida, in Maine, along the Connecticut shoreline. Labrecque lopes her arms around Beck and his parents, and Buddy, her beloved charge. "I question myself and say, 'How did it go on right under our noses?'" says Beck. "We all had affection for her. I don't understand how the person that she cared for could be the object of her anger."
About 12 million Americans currently receive care from more than 33,000 home health care providers, a number that is expected to rise as home health care becomes a cost-containment vehicle for aging boomers. The overwhelming majority of these providers are devoted, benevolent, self-sacrificing caregivers.
Many become, as Labrecque did to Harkness, part of the family. But the relationship between patient and caregiver is deeply nuanced. It is complex, precarious and susceptible to abuse. "It's a highly stressful situation," says William Dombi, vice president for law at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. "Many of these [patients] are not even able to communicate to you what's working and not working. That's where you'll see some workers take it out on the patients and some take it out on themselves."
Among the elderly, loneliness itself can be a disease. A friend who works with the elderly recalls alerting a supervisor to the fact that a caregiver was not doing her client's laundry, housekeeping or chores. When the elderly client heard about the complaint, she was livid. The caregiver, after all, made her laugh.
"Maybe that's more important to them than the stupid laundry," Ellen Rothberg, president and CEO of VNA Health Care, told me. "It isn't simple. They'll say, 'I don't want to get the girl in trouble.' We have situations where [the client] is like 'Am I going to rat on them?' It's complicated. Elderly people don't want to rock the boat. They're worried about losing everything."
Born with cerebral palsy, Harkness lived at home until he was 17 and his mother became pregnant again. Adhering to the counsel of the time, Harkness' mother institutionalized him at the former New Britain Memorial Hospital. He remained there for the next 29 years, until his move to Waterbury 15 <$>years ago.
"She knew his greatest joy was getting out of the hospital after 29 years," Beck said. "She constantly played on that fear. 'Nobody else will put up with you. Nobody else will take care of you.'"
"I hate Tammy," Buddy Harkness told Peter Zaniewski, his other nurse.
It is not easy for Harkness to talk. But Zaniewski was not mistaken. Harkness said it over and over again in the 10 years Zaniewski was his nurse. "Why?" Zaniewski would ask. And Harkness would go silent, rendered mute, Beck believes, by the paralyzing terror that he would be re-institutionalized, shunted away from his modest condo with its Red Sox banners, lime-green cockatiel and tabby cat named Romeo.
"I didn't want to put words into his mouth," Zaniewski said.
Tammy Labecque has lost her house. She has lost her profession. She has lost her freedom.
Beck wonders now if all of it [--] the deaths of family members, a job that she seemed to find thankless, deteriorating health [--] became too much for her.
He tries to rationalize a depravity he cannot understand.
"I still pray for her," says Beck. "Buddy does, too."
Harkness, his eyes moist with tears, mutters, "I do."

Snow brings out the phoney machismo in us

2011-02-07T07:07:00.000-08:00

Igot the L.L. Bean spring catalog today.
Are they kidding? I'm beginning to believe spring is just a myth designed to pry us out of bed in the morning.
I want to send the catalog back to Maine. Forget the tankinis and capris. Send turtlenecks! Send corduroys! Send wool! But, for heaven's sake, don't send snow.
Snow is the four-letter word that has all of Connecticut in such a chipper mood these days. Nobody talks about anything else.
"How about those riots in Egypt," I say to a friend, normally au courant <$>on world news.
"Riots?" he says, mystified. "All I can think about is how to keep the snow from swallowing my head."
Yes, well that's all any of us can think about, really. It's the tiresome topic that nobody wants to indulge and everybody keeps talking about.
"Enough snow for ya?" people say in vain attempts at banter.
"Well, it is New England in January after all," the stoics remind.
Yes, well, thank you very much. I know it's January in New England, but I was really counting on that Global Warming thing, and, besides, it is only Connecticut, and not the Nunavut Territory, which is why I don't ride my musk ox to work or insulate my attic in seal blubber.
Instead, I have to walk my dog, who doesn't seem to know what to do, or where to go<$>. Of all the indignities I was prepared to take on as a dog owner, shoveling out an outdoor litter box for my mutt was not among them.
Adding insult to injury, the relentless barrage of snow has turned the television weatherman into the Oracle at Delphi, breathlessly bleating about double-digit snowfall totals as if they were rising stock prices.
"AMAZING TOTALS LEFT BEHIND," Storm Team 8's Meteorologist Gil Simmons enthused on the WTNH website. "NUMEROUS LIGHT SNOW EVENTS THROUGH 8-DAY FORECAST...12" totals in many places!"
It is this kind of ebullient reporting that makes you wonder if weathermen are a different species. Do these guys ever have to pick up a shovel?
Then, of course, there are their on-air colleagues, standing in the middle of a snowstorm telling us that it is snowing and offering pearls of wisdom like, "State police advise drivers to go slow and use caution."
These kinds of aperçus can make you wonder why you don't watch television more often.
Snow of this magnitude and relentlessness tends to make people assert a Yankee machismo that is about as obsolete as the cotton gin. "People don't know how to drive in this," they'll say, squaring their shoulders like Sherman tank commanders. "We are Yankees, after all."
We're talking about a society in which two-thirds of us drive around in armored buses equipped with cell phones, GPS systems, remote control starters and DVD players in the back seat. We've got about as much in common with our Puritan forebears as we do with Masai warriors. Those Yankees rototilled the forest with their teeth. We're buying our breakfasts at drive-through Dunkin' Donuts and having our groceries delivered by Peapod. The only Yankees left are the ones tossing balls around in the Bronx.
The next time someone tells me to buck up and assert my Yankee backbone, I'm going to tell them to go wash their bonnet in lye soap.
I suspect the reason we make such blustering assertions about our pedigree is to distance ourselves from the other people who make driving in the snow so hazardous. "There's always some nutcake," people will say, "tearing around like a maniac, making things miserable for everybody else."
All of this implies, of course, that they are not the problem. They know how to drive in the snow. It's the other people making a mess of things.
The truth is that the snow makes midgets of all of us and that our best defense may be to crawl under the covers, curl up with a few catalogs and dream of sandals, sunshine, and dream of spring.

Rebecca Salter stopping at the still point

2011-02-02T06:46:00.001-08:00

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;/
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,/
But neither arrest nor movement, And do not call it fixity"
[Dash] T.S. Eliot, Buirnt Norton

Rebecca Salter secures the still point.
She lays it on the canvas, or fits it into woven Japanese paper, and there it looks ancient and modern, embryonic and complete, frenetic and tranquil [Dash] and like nothing at all.
When we talk about the "presence of absence," we might be talking about British artist Rebecca Salter.
Salter, now having her first museum retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art, has been described as a "minimalist," which might be a better term than the one she prefers, which is "abstract artist." But it is the tension between those two poles [Dash] minimalism and abstraction [Dash] that give Salter's work its energy, its haunting, suggestive sense and its palpable friction. Salter's works may be the most vacant, and yet saturated the gallery has showcased in a long time.
Born in England in 1955, Salter won a scholarship to the Kyoto City University of the Arts in 1977, where she hoped to develop her skills as a ceramicist. She stayed in Japan for six years, imbibing its art, architecture and language, but finding that her artistic reach exceeded ceramic's technical grasp, she abandoned the medium in favor of drawings and woodblock prints using Japanese papers.
Some of those works are on display here, magnificent, deeply textured and largely monochromatic works that play with the idea of porous and defined spaces. Angles like that of a door frame cut into feathered gray swaths of light, which resolve into wide black horizontal frames. Two or three long, narrow black bands interrupt the landscape, ominous as obelisks on a field of wheat.
It's not surprising that Salter should call these works on Japanese paper "spaces and places." They look, more than anything, like the interior of a Japanese home divided by thin, pellucid screens. Like the screens, they control rather than divide. Their mottled, fringed, deeply worked surfaces combine to make the work look older, the print equivalent of distressed leather.
Salter says the aged look of her largely untitled works on paper are her own attempt to incarnate the Japanese concept of wabi, or the aesthetics of simplicity, modesty of the well-worn, well-loved object." In large works like "Untitled RR31," mixed media on linen, Saltzer creates a work that looks, in its muted, vaporous state, like the passage of time itself [Dash] color dematerializing in a gray miasma of nostalgia and anticipation.
Salter has been lionized as an artist who creates "voids," artistic black holes into which infinitude of energy has been dumped. She has said that although she is not troubled by the designation of her paintings as "empty," it's a description with which she disagrees.
"I like to think that my empty spaces are in fact animated with energy [Dash] barely perceptible but there all the same," she said once. "I often say that I paint in whispers. A lot of work now asks the viewer to experience it. I ask the viewer to reflect [Dash] a very different activity."
These muted, subtle works, are reflective and the more time one spends with them, the deeper the reward. What looks like a wash of Mark Rothko-like gray turns out to be alive with vibrant, but tiny, gestural glyphs. "If anything," writes Achim Borchardt-Hume in the exhibit catalog, "the surfaces of Salter's paintings act as visual metaphors for the balance between knowing and not knowing, between what can be controlled and what cannot."
In 1985, Salter returned to England and was drawn, not surprisingly, to the Lake District. Her works had always played with the idea of impermanence and subtlety and the void as being rich in potentiality.
In the Lake District, where it rains almost daily, the erratic weather lends itself to such notions and here, Salter's work took a different turn.
She began to draw in the soggy, erratic weather, the subject that seemed the most obvious: the weather itself. Salter's notebooks from those exploits [Dash] pages of scurrying, fleeting, fusing ink [Dash] may be her most revealing. When she returned from her plein air sketching, Salter began to make drawings, which she cut up and reorganized and then mounted on a backing sheet. "In the end I started to paint emotion and try to pick up on the speed of the weather." With those images in mind, she says, she began to reassemble her cut up squares, always working to retain the energy of the line, so that all the lines are interrupted constantly, like the weather itself.
The resulting works, like "Untitled D58," are marvelously musical and completely coherent works on paper that lurch, arch reach and coil in elegant but spare whooshes of lines. The process allowed Salter to plunge into the Japanese embrace of chance and control [Dash] a balancing act that she articulates with gymnastic delicacy.
She has described her work as being "involved with the attempt to capture stillness in movement, a stillness with potential, not a passive quiet."It is the kind of quiet Victor Hugo was likely thinking of when he said, "One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do."
In 2003, Salter's work took a dramatic turn, when she spent three months at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany. Although Salter had intended to use that time to riff off of Albers' infatuation with the square [Dash] which would have been entirely in keeping with the direction of her work [Dash] she found herself bewitched by the tranquil, wooded grounds and her works took on an electrifying new energy.
Her "Bethany Squares" are arguably more suggestive of landscape than any of her other work. Her surfaces are worked up, worked over and then scratched away to reveal woven screens of irregular lines, some of them skewered by slender, arthritic branch-like forms, others blending into opaque, wing-like silhouettes.
Unsurprisingly, for an artist who began as a ceramicist, all of Salter's work have a textural quality, but all, too, have a sense of reverence to them, a gentle insistence to contemplation, where what is on the canvas intends to mirror that tranquility within.
"I think that I really discovered, what I knew all along, was that I'm really about drawing," Salter said. "I think painting is the wrong word….In Japanese, draw and paint is the same word, which probably has its origins in the word to 'scratch.' Painting comes out of calligraphy because they both use the brush. It's in the language because it comes from writing. That's what I think I do. I draw pictures."
A companion exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, "Rebecca Salter and Japan," will take Salter's work as a starting point for exploring the complex relationship between Japanese and Western practice. Two of Salter's key works are displayed with 15 paintings, drawings, and ceramics by Japanese and American artists drawn from the Art Gallery's holdings and private collections.
"into the light of things": Rebecca Salter, Works 1981-2010 continues at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, through May 1. for information, visit yale.edu/ycba or call (203) 432-2800.

Saints continue to hold sway in Catholic spirituality

2011-01-31T11:45:00.001-08:00

The throngs of mourners calling "Santo subito," or "Sainthood now" at John Paul's funeral in 2005, may soon get their wish.
In January, John Paul II moved one step closer to sainthood. Pope Benedict XVI said he would beatify his predecessor on May 1 in a ceremony in St. Peter's Square in Rome. Beatification is the last major step before possible sainthood.
The announcement came after Benedict confirmed John Paul II's first miracle [Dash] curing a French nun of Parkinson's disease in 2005. Officially, only one more confirmed miracle stands between John Paul II and canonization.
Although Rome is already bracing for an onslaught of 2 to 3 million onlookers expected at the event, many wonder what impact, if any, the canonization will have on American Catholics, many of whom were born after church reforms that tried to tone down the cult of the saints.
"For many, it won't make a perceivable difference at all," said Andrew Walsh, Associate Director of the Leonard Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, Hartford. "For others, it will be a validation of the things he is thought to stand for."
For most, those qualities would include John Paul II's staunch stand against Communism, his rapprochement with Jews and Muslims, his forgiveness of the Turkish gunman who shot him in 1981 and his poignant suffering in the face of worsening Parkinson's disease. John Paul II was the first pope to visit a mosque and a synagogue. In 2000, he asked pardon for the church's sins against Jews, women, heretics and minorities.
For others, it may bring up painful reminders of the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, which may assert the church hierarchy systematically covered up. One international group, We Are Church, has already spoken up, saying that John Paul's "penchant for spiritual authoritarianism" contributed to "the greatest tragedy of his tenure as pope: the sexual abuse of thousands of children globally."
Just last month, the Associated Press reported that a 1997 letter from the Vatican cautioned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police. The letter, the AP reported, "documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits."
Nancy Dallavalle, Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University, said ongoing disclosures like this call for restraint.
"It's clear that this is still an unfinished story in the church and John Paul either knew about or presided over widespread sexual abuse," she said. "John Paul II was a complex figure, powerfully able to convey his own spiritual conviction in a way that admirably touched hearts, but also one who presided over some very tawdry episodes, in particular the world-wide cover-up of a regular pattern of sexual abuse of minors by both priests and bishops." While agreeing that John Paul merits beatification, she said, "On the sainthood question ...the Vatican should show some restraint."
Others, like Brandon Nappi, of Holy Family Retreat Center, agreed, noting John Paul II's frequent praise of the late Legionaries of Christ founder Rev. Marcial Maciel, who was banned from active ministry by Pope Benedict in 2006 after testimony from more than 20 men that he molested them when they were teens. Last year, two Mexican men who say they are Maciel's sons, alleged that Maciel sexually abused them when they were young. Nappi said John Paul II's "failure to adequately address the sexual abuse and impropriety of Fr. Maciel" should give the Vatican pause. "I suspect that much of 2011 will be spent on discerning the pope's role in elevating Fr. Maciel without further investigating the countless allegations against him," Nappi said. "For six years, John Paul II praised Fr. Maciel even after a canonical case was filed. He along with many Catholics in the United States ...dismissed the allegations. This is very troubling."
Beyond the inevitable controversy regarding John Paul's reactions to the sexual abuse crisis is the question of how Catholics understand sainthood and whether the centuries-old veneration of the saints has changed since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Veneration of the saints continues to thrive in the southern Hemisphere, particularly in Africa, said Teresa Berger, professor of liturgical studies, at Yale Divinity School. "In Africa and parts of Latin America, the veneration of the saints is a really basic Catholic practice of piety and sometimes more basic than going to Mass on Sunday," she said. "There's a wonderful sense of being part of a very large communion of saints. For different concerns, you have different people."
But not all Catholics may be well versed in the cult of sainthood. That's where owners of Catholic bookshops and gifts often provide direction.
"A lot of people who come in here are hurting," said Michael D'Angelo, owner of Maryheart in Meriden, which sells Catholic gift items. "They have many, many problems. We have a book here with certain saints and what they pertain to. So if people have someone in the family who has cancer, we have St. Peregrine for that."
"On a daily basis I have somebody coming in saying is there a saint who can help me with this?'" said Kathy Conroy-Cass of St. Anthony's Book and Gift in Seymour. "People are always turning to them. The common saints [Dash] like St. Jude for impossible causes [Dash] people come in for. If I didn't see the intervention of saints, I would never do this, but I see it on a daily basis."
Catholic immigrants brought the cult of the saints with them, but not all ethnic groups had the same robust degree of veneration for the saints. By the mid-20th century some church leaders began to see veneration of particular saints as excessive, said Trinity's Walsh. "The religious reforms of the mid-20th century discouraged some aspects of popular devotional Catholicism in an effort to put Christ back into the center of worship."
"Where [the veneration of the saints] went wrong was when we looked upon the saints as, 'Well, God won't listen to us but the saints will,'" said the Rev. Thomas Reese, of Georgetown University. "This was problematic when God was presented as this tough, mean judge who was going to crack you over the head and send you to hell. Then it was looking to the saints as people who got God to cool off and be nice."
That's a simplistic understanding of a complex spiritual devotion, said Berger, of Yale Divinity School. "Catholics have this wonderful cloud of witnesses that respond to very detailed and complex and messy lives," she said. "Here we have lives of faith that have been lived convincingly and well," she said. "There is this sense of the possibility of the faithful who have gone before us interceding for us. So you kind of have friends in powerful places."

Elaine Cerullo, owner of St. Michael's Gift Shop in Waterbury, says she appreciates that those who are not Catholic might not understand the cult of the saints. "A lot people out of the faith don't understand this veneration," said Cerullo, whose has been in business 10 years A lot of times people will say to me 'Elaine, will you pray for my mother; she's got cancer.' I say, 'Sure.' If somebody as simple as me can pray for somebody, why not somebody that's so close to Christ?"
Saints have existed since early Christianity when particularly devout followers [Dash] initially martyrs [Dash] were swiftly acclaimed as saint. This included most of the early saints who died under Roman persecution. Beginning in 1200 the process of canonization became more rigorous.
"Sainthood doesn't mean a person's perfect," said Walsh. "It means that they exemplify one or more aspects of the faith. It doesn't mean you're a nice guy. It means that you have influenced others, that you are dedicated in a higher than usual way to the faith."
Over the centuries, certain saints became associated with particular human concerns and developed particular followings. Although younger Catholics may not be as steeped in the cult of the saints as their grandparents, Walsh said, most Catholics understand that the saints' stories "illustrate important virtues" and serve as role models in a life of faith.
"One of the important reasons for the saints is to show people that it is possible to achieve holiness," he said. Reese, of Georgetown, agreed. "As long as the saints point us toward Jesus and point us toward God, it's good," he said. "And they're good stories. We learn about our religion from stories. And the stories of the saints are good ways to learn what it is to be a Christian."
"They are, in a certain sense, spiritual heroes," said Dennis Kolinski, SJC, teacher Holy Apostles College in Cromwell. "They're somebody to emulate. It makes things very concrete."
Ironically, Pope John Paul II accelerated the process of canonization, naming more saints than all his predecessors combined. He beatified more than 1,300 people and canonized nearly 500. But John Paul II will need at least another verified miracle to become canonized [Dash] a process that could take years.
"He was a powerful, charismatic, authentic personality," said Nappi. "People loved him and even if you disagreed with him, you respected his genuine conviction and affability....He was a real person who understood their struggles. That he lived through Nazi persecution, was an actor, poet, and athlete made him somehow real to so many people. I have a hunch that the most influential popes in the near future will have to seem like "real people.' Whether or not this is an essential characteristic for the papacy is another question."
But Kolinski believes canonization will be forthcoming.
"After this beatification, I wouldn't suspect it would be long," said Kolinski, of Holy Apostles. "Essentially what they are going to be waiting for is a second miracle. It all depends on when God thinks that is appropriate. I think he's going to be a very powerful intercessor."

Lead me not into Tempation

2011-01-31T11:38:00.000-08:00

I am being led into temptation.
Stalked by the demon of materialism.
Ads are following me.
Specifically, shoe ads.
A comfortable, dowdy pair of Rockports tramps behind every website I visit. "C'mon," it seems to whisper. "You know you want me."
Well of course I do, but I was aiming for fiscal prudence.
That's becoming increasingly difficult as advertisers become more manipulative, consumers become more vulnerable and willpower is becoming as obsolete as typewriter ribbon.
The stalking shoes are a type of marketing called "retargeting," in which online retailers track what you perused online and then pester you with reminders to buy the very items you dismissed. Retailers like Zappos, B & H Photo and the Discovery Channel already use these kinds of ads, the New York Times reports. But with Google and Microsoft entering the field, retargeting has become more pervasive [--] and resisting temptation more challenging than ever.
Retargeting has becomes so invasive that the Federal Trade Commission is considering "Do Not Track" legislation that would allow Internet users the ability to control whether advertisers can track their online behavior and browsing history.

Nothing quite helps in the resistance of temptation like legislative prohibition.

In "We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess," Daniel Akst argues that contemporary society has lost its self-control. The obesity epidemic, the financial crisis, addiction to everything from sex to shopping to the Internet, and a savings rate that, until the financial implosion, was in the negative digits have collaborated to making willpower one of the qualities most envied and least employed.
"A lot of the behavior we call addiction is really a love of pleasure that carries the force of habit," he writes. Reframing our personality failures as "addiction," he argues, absolves us from blame.
We lost self-restraint, he asserts, when the fundamental pillars of society that checked our impulses [--] community, hierarchy, church, family [--] began to crumble.

In their place, as author Barbara Ehrenreich has powerfully argued, is the proliferation of the you-deserve-it Gospel preached by celebrities like Oprah, which insists that acquisition is not only what we need to sooth our perturbed spirits, but what we deserve<$>.
Throw into this toxic stew increasingly sophisticated marketing techniques like shadow ads and you've got a brew from which self-control evaporates completely.
"There is research that shows people still have the same self-control as in decades past, but we are bombarded more and more with temptation," Kathleen Vohs, a professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management told The New York Times. "Our psychological system is not set up to deal with all the potential immediate gratification."
Odysseus famously had his sailors lash him to a mast to avoid the tantalizing sirens. Think what such inhibition might have done for Brett Favre or Tiger Woods. In principle, Odysseus' realization that he was vulnerable to temptation, is what underlines mechanisms like 401ks and Christmas Clubs --- put the money away before you see it.
This year, downsizing household debt is the top financial goal for consumers, according to a recent online survey from the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. It's a laudable goal in a country nearly undone by debt.
But it's going to take a lot of willpower to walk away from a tempting pair of shoes that keep winking at us with such devilish allure.

Book Reviews: GK Chesterton; Marilyn Monroe

2011-01-25T07:16:00.001-08:00

"Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton"
By Kevin Belmonte (Thomas Nelson, $16.99)
One of the misfortunes of fame is that it may not hit the target you intend. That is, the celebrated, like the notorious, tend to get remembered for one thing. So C.S. Lewis may be remembered for his "Narnia" books and not so much for the clarity [Dash] and prodigious writing [Dash] on Christian apologetics. So, too, it was for G.K. Chesterton, to whom Lewis was deeply indebted.
Remembered, if at all, for his Father Brown mysteries, G.K. Chesterton was one of the most powerful intellects of his time. For a time, The New York Times wrote, Chesterton "cast…his shadow on a considerable part of the world." He wrote prolifically on subjects from poetry, novels, literary criticism, biographies and apologetics. Like Graham Greene, he was a convert to Catholicism. His writings on Christianity are among the most thoughtful and lucid and his literary criticism of Dickens marked him as "the greatest of all Dickens critics," according to The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens.
In his "Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life and Impact of G.K. Chesteron," Kevin Belmonte does not try to give Chesterton the painstaiking examination John Richardson gave to Picasso or William Manchester to Churchill. Instead, he provides a useful, readable introduction to Chesterton that carries with it Chesterton's own sense of humility and humor.
It is a wonderful introduction to Chesterton, amply annotated with Chesterton insights and witticisms. The book's companion, "the Quotable Chesterton: The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton features more than 850 quotations with Chesterton opining on everything from Architecture, to Jesus, to John Bunyan. A personal favorite: "Christianity isn't a failure; it just hasn't been tried yet."
"MM Personal: From the Private Archives of Marilyn Monroe"
By Lois Banner (Abrams, $35)
It's easy to feel a little tawdry thrumming through Marilyn Monroe's check stubs and perfume receipts, but that's part of the guilty pleasure of "MM Personal: From the Private Archives of Marilyn Monroe. "
This gorgeously assembled book, which reproduces the ephemera from Monroe's private archive of letters and documents once believed lost, is a bit like the legend herself. The volume is gorgeous to look at and scandalously gratifying to comb through. But one can't help feeling invasive and prurient, scrutinizing such otherwise banal artifacts as Monroe's budget books.
Like Monroe, stunning but shattered in a thousand different ways, the portrait that emerges is the one with which we are all most familiar: a vulnerable, beauty, anxious, frightened and frantic for approval. Letters from friends, a recipe for bouillabaisse and a receipt from a maternity store (Monroe had three miscarriages) underscore the banality and bathos of Monroe's life.
Desperate to be taken seriously among the intellectual elite, Monroe's own efforts fall pathetically short. One of the most revealing items is a letter Monroe wrote to a friend at the New York Times. Her disjointed conjectures on Castro and democracy seem a cumbersome attempt toward and intellectual gravity that was more aspirational than genuine. Monroe's smarts, such as they were, were intangible and cinematic. The best place to view them on display is in her films. Watch her maintain the flaky indifference to Tom Ewell in "The Seven Year Itch" and then wonder if any other actress, save Judy Holiday, could have pulled it off half as well.
Perhaps some of the most poignant bits are the telegrams and legal documents sent by punctilious studio heads, determined to get Monroe to behave. Clearly, the woman was being pummeled from every angle.
Written by Lois Banner and photographed by Mark Anderson, "MM – Personal" is impossible to ignore and embarrassing to like so much.

A catastrophe waiting to happen

2011-01-25T07:13:00.000-08:00

He was “dark.” He was “creepy” and he wrote poems about “killing people” and “strap[ping] bombs to babies.”
And that made him somebody else’s problem.
Jared L. Lougtner, who allegedly opened fire on a group of strangers at a Tuscon, Ariz., Safeway, didn’t glow with a neon sign that said he was unraveling. He didn’t drag himself to steps of a treatment center, begging for help. He hadn’t, like Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, been involuntarily committed for mental health treatment.
He was just a little…sinister.
And how many more are out there like him?
In the wake of the Tuscon massacre that left six dead and 13 wounded, a majority of Americans polled placed “a great deal” of the blame on the failure of the mental health system to identify people who are a danger to the community. That 55 percent of Americans blame the system is almost as alarming as the fact that so many Americans believe that the hodgepodge of hope, Silly Putty and triage that passes for mental health treatment in this country is a “system.”
And even if it we had a mental health care system commensurate to the needs of the mentally ill in this country, it would require more conscientiousness than the ostriches in the Tuscon case evinced. How many people need to have the wits scared out of them by a stranger’s behavior before somebody intervenes?
Pima Community College – which will probably not be receiving a rash of admissions next fall – had been repeatedly warned of Loughner’s erratic behavior. Ben McGahee, who taught a math class at the school, complained several times to college administrators, The Washington Post reported. “They just said, 'Well, he hasn't taken any action to hurt anyone. He hasn't provoked anybody. He hasn't brought any weapons to class,’” the Post reported.
Another student in one of Loughner’s classes sent an email to a friend that read: “We have a mentally unstable person in the class who scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come to class with an automatic weapon.”
The dean of the school, Patricia Houston, notified campus police after Loughner began ranting about murder, sputtering, “Why we don't just strap bombs to babies,” USAToday reported.
Campus police documented six complaints about Loughner between February and September 2010, the Post reports. Three school administers met with the 22-year-old before suspending him for posting a YouTube video accusing the school of genocide. At that point, Jared Loughner was somebody else’s problem – yours and mine.
“This isn’t an isolated incident,” Daniel J. Ranieri, president of LaFrontera Center, told The New York Times. “There are lots of people who are operating on the fringes who I would describe as pretty combustible. And most of them aren’t known to the mental health system.”
Could someone have committed Jared Loughner? It isn’t easy, but it is possible. Under Arizona law, any of Loughner’s anxious classmates or teachers could have contacted local officials and asked that he be evaluated for mental illness and potentially committed for psychiatric treatment, the Washington Post reported. In Connecticut, anyone may begin the commitment process by filing an application with the probate court alleging someone has psychiatric disabilities and is a danger to himself or others. Two court-selected physicians are required to examine the person to be committed and a hearing is scheduled 10 days later.
Nobody in Arizona did that. Instead, the college put the onus on Loughner to get a mental health clearance that his “presence at the College does not present a danger to himself or others.”
And, this, of course, is one of the major problems of the mental health “system.” We have put the burden of treatment on the ill, the disturbed and the vulnerable who can often hardly be expected to get through the day, let alone remember their medication. Psychotic patients, explains Dr. Charles Atkins, Waterbury psychiatrist and author, often suffer from anosognosia, or the inability to recognize that something is wrong with them.
Nobody wants to go back to the “Snake Pit” days of forced incarceration of perfectly treatable patients. But in some ways, we’re already there. The Justice Department reports that 16 percent of inmates in state adult correctional facilities are mentally ill. And where do they go upon release?
Visit an emergency room in the middle of the night. Listen to the ramblings of the mentally unstable who have nowhere else to go. Ask yourself if pity is the only response, or if it is just one of a score of options that are better than passing the buck.

2011-01-25T07:11:00.000-08:00

A Connecticut television station recently reported that a 12-year-old boy brought a BB gun and slingshot into school to protect himself from bullies. The report came just ahead of a state conference on bullying that concluded that a quarter of Connecticut students had been victims of bullying.
This, in the minds of many, is cause for alarm. Bullying is the current cause célèbre in American schools, right behind our souring scores in science and mathematics. If you're a parent who wants the attentive ear of the school administration, whisper the word "bully" to the principal and watch the panic.
School administers have every right to be on high alert for bullying behavior. Victims are terrified, depressed, even suicidal. A young Irish immigrant girl, ceaselessly berated by merciless, prepubescent goons, killed herself in Massachusetts, evidently unable to endure the taunts. A gifted Rutgers University violist, whose roommate posted a salacious homosexual video of him on the Internet, plunged to his death from the George Washington Bridge. According to the National Crime Prevention Council, over 40 percent of all teenagers with Internet access have reported being bullied online. To many who have been the brunt of pranks and survived, such reactions may seem wildly out of proportion to the intimidation itself. But the pervasiveness, anonymity and range of the Internet amplify the assault, making it harder to deflect and almost impossible to ignore. Worse, the malice itself has become a poisonous game, in which the dosage is continually augmented to ensure the biggest yucks.
Bullies seek those great big belly laughs of hate. Where, one wonders, did these youngsters get the idea that ridiculing another human being was the comedic equivalent of a home run?
One answer may be found on some of the most popular programs on television today: "American Idol," "Dancing With The Stars," "America's Got Talent." How much of the entertainment generated by these programs derives from the actions of the talent, and how much by the snide, caustic, spiteful comments of the panel of judges? Anybody watch Ricky Gervais' snarky comments on The Golden Globes? If there is a line between sardonic and spiteful, Gervais seems blind to it. Rumor has it that Ellen DeGeneres left "American Idol" precisely [JUMP]because of its venomous atmosphere. Even one of the oldest programs "America's Funniest Videos" mines its comedy from the misfortunes of others. "Look at the guy slam right into the tree! Wow! Can we see it on slo-mo?
Recently, the Boston Globe reported sociologists have found a sizable decline in empathy.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research reported that college students now are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest drop coming in the last 10 years. Students today are generally less likely to describe themselves as "soft-hearted" or have "tender concerned feelings for others" and more likely to admit that "other people's misfortunes" usually don't bother them, the Globe reported.
That's pretty alarming, particularly given recent neurological studies that indicate that empathy is "hard-wired" into the brains of normal children.
It seems we are born empathetic, but that the quality erodes over time.
In the wake of the tragic shooting that killed six and left a dozen wounded in Tuscon, Ariz., pundits and presidents have been swearing oaths for a less vitriolic, more "civilized" public dialogue.
But as New York Times Columnist David Brooks points out, "Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary."
Civility, he asserts, is rooted in an acknowledgement of our own "failure, sin, weakness and ignorance."
Once we recognize our own shortcomings, the theory goes, we are more accommodating of those of others.
That is certainly one tired, Puritanical way to approach civility: We're all flawed; therefore none of us have any business being nasty to others.
Nevertheless, it is equally true that we are all born with an inherent tendency toward solicitude, kindness and empathy.
When society begins to applaud those qualities instead of rewarding their antithesis, we may draw nearer to the civil discourse which we insist we desperately need.

The Princess is dead, long live the bitch

2010-12-22T12:41:00.001-08:00

The princess is dead.
Long live the shrew.
The princess, the staple in Disney's oligarchy since Snow White bit the apple, is going the way of Bambi's mother [Dash] consumed, in this case, in an inferno of bitchery.
The Los Angeles Times reports that “Tangled,” the last in a confectionary binge of “princess movies” the company has produced, will be “the last fairy tale produced by Disney's animation group for the foreseeable future.”
The problem with princess movies is not just that tiaras went out with the Kennedy administration, or that the financial meltdown has put a real dent in the market for castles, the problem is that nobody believes in princess' anymore.
Yes, Virginia, there is no Cinderella. There's just a brat with a cell phone ready to lacerate you with a text message.
The Times reports that Disney has grown weary of producing films that appeal exclusively to little girls, particularly after its last foray, “The Princess and the Frog” drowned at the box office.
“Among girls, princesses and the romanticized ideal they represent – revolving around finding the man of your dreams – have a limited shelf life,” the paper reports. “With the advent of 'tween' TV, the tiara-wearing ideal of femininity has been supplanted by new adolescent role models such as the Disney Channel's Selena Gomez and Nickelodeon's Miranda Cosgrove.”
All of this might be a watershed moment for feminist, who never enjoyed being defined by the stud who fitted their glass slipper. But consider what's replaced it: pubescent strumpets who can't seem to take Lindsay Lohan as an object lesson. These trollops-in-training are not measured by the purity of their hearts but by the viciousness of their tweets.
“By the time they're 5 or 6, they're not interested in being princesses,” Dafna Lemish, of Southern Illinois University, told the newspaper. “They're interested in being hot, in being cool. Clearly, they see this is what society values.”
It is certainly what the media tells us society values. From vituperative “housewives” emotionally eviscerating one another before their Botox degrades, to teenagers ripping out their mother's hair extensions on TV, a virtuous princess hardly stands a chance.
Which poses an interesting question: Which version of femininity was healthier: the virginal princess dreaming of being rescued, or the venomous viragos, skewering their rivals with a pair of stilettos?
The problem for girls is the narrowing of options. Too many of their role models lunge to the extremes, such that even former “good girls” like Lohan and Miley Cyrus, seem to graduate to increasing stages of debauchery. A “nice girl” like Bristol Palin who found herself in a family way, tried to do the right thing by marrying the cad, ditching him and then taking seemed to take revenge in television's reputation-redeeming bump- and grind-a-thon “Dancing With the Stars.” When she said that winning would be like giving “a big middle finger to everyone who hates my mom and hates me,” the dungeon door shut mercifully on the mortifying fiasco that was her adolescence.
Oh where, to invoke Guinivere, are the simple joys of maidenhood.
It cannot be easy to be a young girl these days, eluding the bullies, inveigling the Queen Bees, deleting text messages that have made indelible marks on their psyches. The princess model, despite its deficiencies, offered hope for the diffident who opted-out of the emotional roller derby that girlhood could become. One did not have to be Daniel DaFoe's craven harlot “Moll Flanders.” One could opt for Samuel Richardson tiresome but incorruptible “Pamela.” The delicious myth of the princess story was that moral character would trump flash and virtue, as Richardson wrote, would be rewarded.
Although Disney has ditched the fairy tale as a profit-making vehicle, it has not lost its currency. It has simply been tramped up.When a nymphet like Gomez snags Boy Toy of the Moment Justin Bieber [Dash] recently named Twitter's “most influential celebrity” [Dash] it's still the princess story, it's just been slutted up with adolescent kitsch.
Some would say that' progress. For others, it's just Dopey.

Illness puts friendship in perspective

2010-12-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, a friend of mine contracted MRSA, the virulent infection resistant to antibiotics commonly used to treat such staph infections.
She was in isolation for a week, fed powerful antibiotics intravenously, as she endured grueling surgical draining procedures to repel the infection.
I had not heard from Maria for months. It was not unusual for her to travel abroad extensively, so when my many letters sat unanswered, I was not alarmed.
But when Maria finally called, at the onset of autumn, to tell me what she’d been through, I was startled and a little puzzled. Why had she not called to tell me her life was in danger? Had she let me know, I might have flown to St. Louis, sent packages, or, at the very least, phoned.
“My dear,” she said. “I was fighting for my life. Every atom of my being was positioned in that direction. I could not indulge any more than that.”
I thought of Maria’s silent isolation in late October, when I was rushed to the local hospital with excruciating abdominal pain and underwent emergency surgery. My intestines had suddenly and dangerously twisted as a result of a congenital abnormality and had to be surgically repaired.
In its swiftness and severity, my attack sharpened and leveled my priorities. My son needed to be cared for and certain people – my mother, my boss -- needed to be told. But beyond that, as I lay in a hospital bed, fingering the black button that pulsed pain-killing narcotics into my body, who else?
For a moment, I thought of Maria’s stoicism, her need to harness her emotional and physical resources into a laser-beam assault on the intruder coursing through her blood stream. It’s customary in this culture to consider that sort of jaw-clenching tenacity as a form of valor, the very laconic resolve that made this country great.
I don’t think Maria was aiming for that Gary Cooper-style of fortitude, but I certainly considered it. I wanted that same taciturn grit. No one should know. Perhaps I’d wait until I’d fully recovered, I thought, and send out a missive of post-holiday cheer, briefly mentioning this dramatic little interlude I’d survived. It would be peppered with wry anecdotes and witticisms and would assure my close friends that I might have been gutted like a fish but could still not master the Australian crawl.
But the truth was that I was vulnerable and I was scared. I needed my friends – not all of them, but the ones with whom I was most emotionally connected. The realization that I needed them, that I was not, despite my usual stoicism, made of iron, unsettled me.
All of my religious training had insisted on the spiritual merit of vulnerability. “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” said St. Paul. Paul longed for a “thorn in the flesh” to align himself with the suffering of Jesus. That, of course, what made him a saint and me a pathetic chump, suckling a morphine drip.
But then I thought of another dear friend, who called me to her side as she was dying. I thought of spooning mite-size pieces of strawberry into her dry, chapped lips. I thought of sitting beside her, reading, looking up to catch her eyes opening briefly, glancing at me, and smiling. Only after she had gone did I recognize that Judi had given me a gift that allowed me to comfort her, and that real friendship does not countenance pride of any sort – even the pride of stoicism.
I came to realize that what Saint Paul may have meant in his entreaty to weakness, is that vulnerability doesn’t just defuse pride, it opens up avenues to grace. When I did write my friends, and relate my episode, they responded as I imagined they would: writing, sending cards, phoning, and even, in one special case, coming over with a home-cooked meal and a bouquet of flowers.
The world can turn not only small, but furious and hostile to the unwell, and the smallest courtesy looms large. Beyond that, of course, I learned --- in a way harder than I wished --- that, with apologies to Saint Francis, sometimes we need to be consoled as well as console.
This time of year, we often hear that it is easier to give than receive. But there is a gift, too, in allowing oneself to be the object of empathy – even temporarily. One is then far better equipped for the inevitable chore of returning the favor.

2010-12-22T12:33:00.000-08:00

I never considered myself a tough customer, until I tried to buy a stick.
I wanted a stick shift – 5-speed, manual transmission – for my new car.
I quickly found I might as well have asked for a dishwasher on the dashboard.
Less than 8 percent of American drivers now drive a manual transmission, down from a whopping 35 percent in 1980, the year I learned to drive. Whatever gains in fuel economy the stick might have afforded – a measly 10 percent -- have been far offset by the ease of the no-hassle automatic transmission.
And as we know in this post-industrial economy, ease is one thing you can’t get enough of.
I came by my affection for the stick shift quite honestly. Although my uncle taught me to drive in his baby blue Dodge Dart automatic, the only car regularly available to me was my mother’s 1972 pea-green, manual- transmission Pinto. These were the same cars later implicated in several fatal gas tank explosions, which were very nearly as dangerous as driving with my mother on a picture-perfect day under normal conditions.
My mother was a dramatic and volatile driver and my brothers and I grew to understand her moods by the degree of theatricality in shifting from second to third.
A particularly livid mood was easily identified by my mother’s meaty thrust from third into fourth, typically followed by an audible grunt and a racing of the car’s engine.
Sometimes I think my mother particularly enjoyed letting the car race there, in the limbo between third and fourth gears, as she mentally assassinated whatever human or administrative irritant was riling her that day. It was as if, during those accelerating moments, she was assessing the choices available to her: an obscenity-laced, full-frontal invective on her lousy turn of fate, or the resigned Buddhist-like acceptance that all life began with suffering and that she still needed a quart of milk.
Perhaps because the car was such an extension of her operatic personality, she was loath to give it up. That and the fact that it was so rarely in the driveway gave me little chance to practice the safe driving techniques I had learned in my uncle’s Dodge Dart.
“Mom, couldn’t I just drive the car with you in the passenger seat to get a little practice?” I implored.
“Do I look like I have kind of patience?” she said, shifting acerbically into third, the diagonal of her meaty forearm reaching, pinky extended. (The “sarcasm shift.”)
“But if I don’t practice, I’ll never learn,” I persisted.
She nodded. “There’s a Catch-22 for you.”
Ultimately, the sheer doggedness of my entreaty, combined with the logistics of running a family, triumphed. My mother let me drive her to work – after a fashion. She drove herself to work and then handed me the keys. “Listen,” she said, downshifting solemnly into second, “There’s something you need to know.”
I drew nearer.
“When you come out of my office park to go home, there’s a traffic light in the middle of a hill – a big one,” she said. “Some people call it a mountain, but it’s really just a bigger-than-average hill.”
I began to sweat. I knew this would entail the delicate calibration of gas pedal and clutch – which I had yet to master – and on a hill (or possibly a mountain).
“OK, here’s what you do,” she said, stepping out of the car and handing me the keys. “The minute you see the hill, slam on the gas and drive like hell. If you’re lucky, you’ll make the light.”
“But---,” I said, the keys slipping through my sweating fingers.
“See you at 5,” she said, and sauntered away.
I sat in the bucket seat wondering at the odds. Was it actually possible to beat a light by slamming on the gas? Wasn’t it equally possible that you would reach the red light that much faster? As I roared the gas pedal and sputtered into first, I realized that my mother had dodged any manner of calamities in her life by essentially slamming on the gas and driving like hell.
Perhaps there was something to it.
But, I was my father’s anxious-ridden daughter and while I visualized achieving this maneuver I inched inexorably up a hill that was – no, they weren’t kidding it was a mountain – easily 6,000 or 7,000 feet above sea level. When the traffic light appeared, mockingly, in the distance, I did as my mother commanded and slammed on the accelerator, racing feverishly to the summit until, with the slam of fate, the light turned red.
I panicked. I perspired. I wondered why my mother had chucked the St. Christopher’s medal from the visor. I fingered nervously under the seat for a rosary. All I unearthed were a desiccated French fry and a bobby pin. I stared into the rear-view mirror at the placid, middle-aged driver behind me.
He looked like the understanding type.
When the light turned green, I ran the accelerator. I eased up lightly, too lightly, on the clutch. The car rolled indecisively back, as if it might rock forward at any moment. But the more I raced the accelerator, the more I picked up backward speed. The car rolled backward at alarming velocity. I was riveted to the man’s expression in my rear-view mirror. He went from complacency to a kind of wide-eyed curiosity, to red-faced anger to horn-hocking terror in about seven seconds. Just as his horn blared, my back bumper nuzzled into his front grill and the light turned yellow. And then, as if the man’s anger had some sort of catalytic impact, the Pinto shot forward like a pea out of a slingshot.
I lunged across the street as the bleating of the man’s car horn grew fainter and more pathetic as the gulf between us swelled.
Good God, I thought. What am I going to tell my mother? But, of course, I’d tell her what I always told her: the Truth. “Mom,” I’d say. “I did just what you said. Worked like a charm.”

Please visit www.traceyosh.com

2009-12-07T07:14:00.001-08:00

This blog has moved to my new site, www.traceyosh.com

2009-10-05T11:44:00.001-07:00

My new book, "Every Little Thing" is now available. You can easily order a copy by sending $19.87 to P.O. Box 644, Cheshire, CT 06410 .

Sure, the recession looks over to me

2009-10-02T12:29:00.001-07:00

The recession has ended.
Or maybe it is ending.
Or perhaps it’s just slowing.
But it’s definitely going away, probably sometime around conceivably, say, next quarter.
Every day, it seems, we hear news that the recession, which people took forever to admit was occurring, is ending. It ended before it even began.
Everybody wants the recession to end, which may be why the economists and the media have been shoving each other out of the way to be the first to proclaim “the end” of the worst recession since the 1930s.
And, since the media and the economics experts were so adept at predicting the recession, we know how omniscient they’ll be at pinpointing its demise.
In May, more than 90 percent of economists predicted the recession would end this year.
In August, Reuters reported, “The worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression will probably end in the third quarter.”
In September, the same news agency reported, The global recession is coming to an end faster than thought a few months ago and may already be over.” It was echoing remarks that month by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who said the recession is “very likely over.”
As Robert Doll, chief investment officer at BlackRock, told USA Today, “We are in a recovery, the recession does seem to be ending, and there's a ton of cash on the sidelines getting a zero percent return.”
And my favorite, the New York Times, proclaimed the recession “over” on xxxxxxx. But as recently as Sept. 29, the newspaper reported that the number of people looking for jobs now outnumber job openings by six to one, a record ratio. Unemployed Americans, the paper wrote, “now confront a job market that is bleaker than ever…and employment prospects are still getting worse.”
By last week, when unemployment lifted to 9.8 percent, even the most buoyant pundits had to rein in their enthusiasm. As Gary Thayer, macrostrategist at Wells Fargo Advisors, told USA Today, the unemployment report “shows expectations for recovery may have gotten a little ahead of the reality.”
Uh, yeah. A little.
I’ve never been much of an economics expert --- but the most refreshing upshot of this economy is I have a lot of company. The people we look to for advice were caught with their pants down and have been struggling with their knickers around their ankles ever since. There is no joy in Muddville over this. Whether we like it or not, we are kept afloat by a web of expertise spun by our best and our brightest. When it falls apart, as it has done so catastrophically, the vacuum it creates is formidable.
I keep hearing that this will be a “jobless recovery,” which sounds oxymoronic to me, a bit like water that isn’t wet. I am not sure how people recover without employment, unless we are ready to start a new colony of ascetics.
What I see is an economy that has slashed through hope such that hope itself seems like a childhood myth. I see men who had the world by the tail scrambling through the rubble of their lives, trying to assure their families that it will be all right. I see women who were able to stay at home with their children forced back into the workplace, initiated into the Hobson’s choice with which so many women wrestle. I see capable, intelligent, gifted workers trying to feel relieved with a new, banal jobs that saps their creativity and underestimates their value. Well, they say, at least I’ve got health insurance.
Researchers say that those who lose high-paying jobs can take as long as two decades to get their old salary back. A Columbia University researcher examined workers who lost their jobs in the 1980s and discovered that most had not returned to their old wage levels even 15 to 20 years later. Worse, those who go through a layoff are more likely to be laid off again.
Optimism is among the most endearing qualities of the American character. But I fear it was optimism that got us into this mess --- sure I can afford a $450,000 house on a $15,000 a year salary ---- and prudence that will lead us out. It’s helpful to remember that the Cardinal Virtues were not a 1950s doo-wop group, but the hinge on which all other virtues depend. Prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude – you have all their albums. Maybe it’s time for Americans to take out their old hi-fi’s and give them a spin again. They’re as old as Plato, but they hold up pretty well.

An Old Dog With Lessons Still to Teach

2009-06-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

For a long time, I had an old dog.
My old dog didn’t run any more. His leg buckled one day about 5 years ago, and he became lame. He had been fielding a tennis ball, among his favorite amusements, and he looked up at me in a mixture of fear and apology and I knew he would never run again.
We had it repaired – but it was never the same. He never did run again with that ferocious fluency he had as a young dog. The way his shoulders muscled forward and the lean sinews of his belly stretched elegantly over the grass. Oh, he was beautiful to watch.
But when his left leg went, his right swiftly followed, so that when I touched his hind quarters his bones felt like dozens of little stones zippered into a purse of fur.
When he looked up at me, after he tore his ligaments irreparably, I remembered the first time I took him to the forest to run and he frolicked so hard and wantonly that he didn’t notice the ravine until he was chest deep in it. He yelped, and I ran, finding him sitting plaintively in a pool of mud, his right front paw proffered up to me as if in supplication.
I scrambled down the embankment and held his paw in my hand, feeling his coarse, plump paw pads to assess the damage. He looked at me with his chocolate brown eyes as if inquiring how extensive was the damage. I rubbed his paw and nodded reassuringly. With that, he leapt up the embankment, clawing at the rooted clay and sprinting ahead to the copse, free and exultant.
Never before or since had a touch from me healed any living thing.
So when he became old and limped and panted and slept so much more than he fetched, I found new, less exhausting ways to love. That is what you do when your loved ones age. You don’t ask about hikes or tours or concerts or diversions more exhausting than comforting. You ratchet down. You soften. You nuzzle against their belly and scratch their ears. You see their snouts widen in what you think resembles a smile.
We all know how these stories end. We know it from the beginning. But we do it anyway.
When I got Sam from a shelter 14 years ago, my beloved father, now gone, said to me, “I want you to know that if you get a dog, you’re going to have a lot of dogs.” Sam was only a puppy but my father was trying to steel me, to protect me, inure me from inevitability. To love, he was trying to say, is to lose.
But in those days, Sam was so young and spry and invincible and abounding with curiosity and life. He could hear then, and every wail of a siren was followed by his yawning, plaintive howl, such that I could not think of a fire engine without instinctively waiting for his response.
So, too, with yogurt, which I probably shouldn’t have given Sam, but did. Not a lot‑ just the dregs of the plastic container my spoon could not reach. Sam would take it in his teeth to some dark lair, where he would prop the yogurt cup between his two paws and ravage the insides with his long, elastic tongue.
When he went deaf and could no longer react to words like “squirrel,” no rhythm was lost between us because by then we knew each other better than most living things could. He could no longer lunge upward to the bed and lay his wet, bearded chin on my chest. But he would sidle up to my legs and with a low, hesitant wag; offer an ear to nuzzle or a belly to rub.
Not long after we got him, I realized that Sam was a better Christian than I’d ever be. He was devoid of temper, or pride or envy. He forgave promptly and completely. His instinct was love. It was not something he had to work at.
Mostly, Sam taught me how to be old and that being old and brittle is not a cause for pity or regret, but an opportunity for solicitude and growing place for love.
What did he know about death, I wonder, that I have yet to grasp? He knew that at some point, it is time to accept with grace an inevitability that reaches us all.
I still listen for him, the tap of his claws on the wood floor, the painting of an old dog exhausted by the effort. I am hollow in the place he filled, longing for the lessons he still had to teach.

Not Another Politician With His Pants Down?

2009-06-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

We may be reaching the tipping point on infidelity.
The best part of last week’s blubbering apology by South Carolina – besides the rich vein of satire it offered late-night comedians ‑ was the absence of his wife at the press conference.
For once, in what has become a conga line of confessionals by wayward politicians, a beleaguered wife did not dutifully march to the public kneeler with her cheating spouse.
For enraged wives everywhere, nauseated by the public humiliation of compliant spouses standing by their men, it was a pyrrhic vindication. OK, the guy cheated with Eva Peron, but at least his wife didn’t stand by him as he belted “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”
At least she had a little dignity.
Since infidelity has become the most popular hobby of the political elite, it is no longer the shock of the revelation, but the drama of the confession that has audiences riveted. Did they cry? Did they whimper? Did they invoke scripture ‑‑ or Rudyard Kipling? What about the other woman? Was she a looker ‑ or a hooker? Or a man? What about the e-mails? Was it Charles and Camilla or Abelard and Heloise?
And what about the wife? Did she quiver with a Stepford Wife stare like Dina McGreevy or turn steely-eyed and brittle like Silda Wall Spitzer?
Outside of the hackneyed and elliptical apologies of the offenders, one of the great unifying themes of cheating politicians is the lumbering clumsiness of their romantic overtures. You get a transcript of some of these emails and cell phone conversations and you understand why Nora Roberts has sold 8 million books. Have none of these men seen “The English Patient?”
Nevertheless, as tedious as these hypocritical homilists have become, there are signs of a New Dawn. Not only did Mrs. Sanford absent herself from her husband’s public farce, but the Italians – the Italians, no less – are tiring of Silvio Berlusconi’s dalliances. What will they tire of next? Olive oil?
The Italians, like the French, are a good deal more indulgent than we in matters of indulgences of the flesh. As long as the trains run on time and the bread is fresh, what happens in Rome stays in Rome.
That, of course, was before Berlusconi began attending the birthday parties of baby sitters. After his wife – a luscious vixen who posed topless in that gem of the Italian cinema “The Magnificent Cuckold” – began chastising him in the Italian press as a chicken hawk, Italians began to take note. It was not just that he was gallivanting about with floozies young enough to be his granddaughters; he was actually plying them with money and jewels. Berlusconi fruitlessly denied this, helpfully telling the Wall Street Journal, I've never understood what would be the satisfaction if there isn't the pleasure of conquest."
That’s the kind of answer you want from a married man.
Perhaps it is not outrage but fatigue that has bled this story dry. When The New York Times reported that a former White House intern who had an affair with John F. Kennedy would publish a memoir of her experience, all I could do was suppress a sigh. Is it still news that any estrogen-bearing creature within 10 miles of Pennsylvania Avenue had sex with JFK? Wouldn’t it be more newsworthy if you had been a female member of the White House staff who didn’t sleep with him?
If these sagas about finger-wagging cads and sermonizing southerners teach us anything is that we’ve got the wrong bunch of people authorizing canards like the Defense of Marriage Act. When they only real turn of the screw to a political sex scandal is the spouse who didn’t show up, it’s time to move on to more pressing matters.

Dand and Sadie's marvelous adventure

2009-06-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

No, it's not your imagination.
That bicycle was hauling a dog. Sadie, a 3-year-old golden Labrador retriever, is enjoying the cozy accommodations while her owner, Dan McGrady, bikes 850-miles from Annapolis, Maryland to Portland, Maine.
The pair has been pedaling through Connecticut this week.
McCrady, a 61-year-old federal government retiree, is riding a recumbent bike, complete with a commodious trailer typically occupied by toddlers, from his home in Annapolis, to Portland to raise awareness for the East Coast Greenway Alliance, which links major cities between Maine and Florida, often using old rail or canal lines, like the linear path in Cheshire, where McCrady biked Wednesday. While the Greenway is a recreational boon for fitness buffs, McCrady's goal was not to be the poster boy for the Greenway Alliance.
Not at first, at least.
McCrady, who was an Information Technology specialist with the government, is simply a guy who likes to challenge himself. Since his retirement from federal service at 55, he has returned to college to get his bachelor's degree, run a marathon, obtained his pilot license and become a magician. And, oh, yes, he also took culinary classes at his local community college so he's chef to his wife of 33 years.
Biking from Maryland to Maine just seemed another challenge. And what better way to do it than with man's best friend?
"She learned how to get in the trailer instantly," says McCrady, a medium-built man with a short-cropped gray beard. "But it took her about a week to get used to riding in it."
Lest anyone imagine Sadie is just a trailer potato, McCrady notes that Sadie jogs alongside the bike for at least 10 miles of what is typically a 55-mile daily ride.
McCrady, who has biked a three-day, 200-mile ride with a friend every year for the last several, expects the entire bike trip will take 22 days, with two days off a week to rest. After all, he says, "I've never done anything like this before. The first time I got off the bike I slept for 22 hours."
Initially, McCrady figured his challenge would just be a bonding experience for him, his dog, and the bike. But he figured that it would cost more than $2,000 for accommodations alone. So he contacted the Greenway Alliance, and suggested his ride could help raise awareness of the East Coast Greenway. Only 20 percent of the Greenway is off-road; the Alliance would like to make it 100 percent.
The Alliance agreed and supplied post-card size informational cards, which McCrady hands out to interested observers, as well as flags and a shirt emblazoned with the Alliance's name. McCrady's recumbent bike which was donated by Sun and Solvit products donated the trailer.
McCrady travels with a computer and blogs about his experience daily at www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie. The ried als may be accessed through the Greenway Alliance, www.greenway.org . Both sites allows supporters to make donations to the Greenway Alliance. Since he began his ride on May 23, McCrady says he's raised nearly $4,000. He hopes to raise $10,000 for the organization when he finishes in Portland on June 13.
On Wednesday, McCrady stopped in to Cheshire Bike and Repair Shop to adjust his bike and true his wheels. Sadie ambled over to the sidewalk, where she slept, her chin resting on the cool cement. "The first week was awful," McCrady said of the ride. "It was hot; it was humid; there were hills. By day eight it was fun and it's still fun today."
While riding through a sketchy section of Brideport earlier this week, McCrady said he noticed a toothless, gesticulating man running toward him, shouting. "I seen you!" the man hollered. "I seen you." McCrady was alarmed but the man said, "I seen you on the 12 o'clock news." McCrady stopped, shook the man's hand and let him pet Sadie. As the man walked away, McCrady heard him mutter, "I done caught me a celebrity."
For more information, visit www.firstgiving.com/danandsadie.

Susan Boyle vanquished or not

2009-06-02T13:59:00.000-07:00

I wanted Susan Boyle to win.
I wanted Susan Boyle, the zaftig Scottish spinster with a penchant for Andrew Lloyd Weber to win Britain’s Got Talent.
Instead, she had a nervous collapse.
Boyle, the dowdy old maid whose frowzy looks and blistering alto bowled even the misanthropic Simon Cowell over, was hospitalized at the Priory, a mental-health clinic, after coming in second in the top-rated British TV show. She joins a list of celebrity alumni like Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, all of whom had a longer tenure with fame than has she.
Who couldn’t have imagined it would end up this way?
There were really only two ways for this story to end and we all knew it.
First, there was the romantic notion that I and millions of others harbored – that Susan Boyle, representative middle-age frump, would crawl up that stage in her mother-of-the-bride dress and low-heeled pumps and blow all those pneumatically enhanced airheads out of the park. Talent triumphs over Botox. Virtue vanquishes vacuity.
Or something like that.
But the reality was equally imaginable: 48-year-old maiden aunt with learning disabilities succumbs to the merciless machinations of fame.
Which story is better?
In Forbes, Quentin Letts blamed the prurient public, which feasted on her freakishness with an avidity that bordered on the predatory. “The guilty party is, surely, all of us--all the members of a society that fell on an un-photogenic virgin as though she were the last tribal bush woman in the Amazon,” he wrote.
For all its fairy tale potential, popular reaction to Susan Boyle reeked of our basest instincts. Would she have been nearly the success if not for the freak-show nature of her success? If she hadn’t been so maladroit, if her bio had not shriek with anachronisms (48-years old and never been kissed!), would we even know Great Britain had a counterpart to “American Idol?” More to the point, had she looked her idol, Elaine Page, (a name infrequently invoked in these circuses) would her story been nearly as interesting?
As the daughter of a large woman with a big voice, I have a soft spot for Susan Boyle. But, perhaps because I am the daughter of a woman with talent, I know what a double-edged sword such a gift can be.
The trouble with talent is that you have to do something with it. Not to seems the height of ingratitude. But fame is not only fickle, but Faustian, and more often than not, fatuous. The famous are not always the most talented, but the neediest, the least secure and the shallowest. Indeed, if you were anything but shallow, the price of fame would be crushing.
"Anybody asked to sing live without professional training will face immense pressures, and then follow that up with a barrage of public comments about her looks, talent and behavior from all over the world and it's incredibly intrusive," Chris Thompson, medical director of the 14 Priory hospital, told The Associated Press. "It is an ethical problem for producers.”
An ethical problem for producers? Can those two words be invoked with a straight face? The only thing producers of “Britain’s Got Talent” were vexed about was the lack of revenue Boyle’s 225 million YouTube web views were generating.
“Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive” lamented the New York Times, itself at pains to figure out how to make money on the web.
Meanwhile, the British public appear to be in active penance. “Never in our fast-changing history, until Susan Boyle, have we managed to quite so swiftly canonize and then pillory another human being, for our own titillation," wrote the London Observer.
I wanted Susan Boyle to win because I want to believe in fairy tales. I want to believe that a chubby church volunteer with a voice like a trumpet could sweep the world off its feet and remind it that looks don’t matter. I wanted her to win because I’m a romantic and a softie, and, like so many of us, root for the underdog.
But perhaps victory is not measured in YouTube votes or the approbation of the sneering Simon Cowell. Maybe it’s just going home to the place they know you best, snuggling up with your cat, turning on the telly and knowing you could knock the pants off them – if only the price weren’t so high.

The Grim Reality of the Irish Church

2009-05-27T12:45:00.001-07:00

I wanted to be furious at “Angels and Demons.”
I wanted to be angry because I was tired of the hoary anti-Catholic hokum that Dan Brown and Ron Howard keep spewing to captive audiences. I couldn’t understand why audiences would rather gobble up convoluted conspiracy theories than nibble on a few facts. It isn’t like the Roman Catholic Church was bereft of juicy indignities. (Renaissance Rome, anyone?)
But Brown’s incense-and-intrigue Gothicism was beginning to grate. First, because it inflamed what historian Arthur Schlesinger once called "the deepest bias in the history of the American people," anti-Catholicism; and second, because its slipshod approach to history is one too many Americans accept as Gospel.
I was actually finding myself in sympathy with the tetchy William Donahue of the Catholic League, who accused Ron Howard, director of “The DaVinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” of “smearing the Catholic Church with fabulously bogus tales."
And then the report came out.
The report is the “Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse,” a 2,600-page Gothic saga of depravity, dread and shame that rivals anything Brown could produce. It lays bare 60-years of appalling abuse by priests and nuns on tens of thousands of children placed in their care.
The report, nine years in the making, details a climate of terror “created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment,” rampant in institutions for the destitute and unwanted. These were the places you were sent if you were poor, or your parents were ill. These were places you to which you were dispatched if your mother committed adultery or beat you with a broom. These were the places you were sent to be helped.
These were the places that would erase your shame.
What happened in these foul institutions? According to the report:
Nuns stripped children naked and beat them with pokers. Children were punched, flogged and set upon by dogs, according to the report. They were routinely forced to perform oral sex. One of the more than 1,000 anonymous victims reported being “tied to a cross and raped whilst others masturbated at the side.” Girls were molested in confessionals – one, even on an altar.
The abuse, which the report characterized as “endemic,” occurred with the collusion of the Irish Department of Education, which the report authors’ condemned as “toothless.” One of the members of the report’s investigating committee resigned, accusing the education department of stonewalling.
The release of the report, which covers a period between the 1930s and the 1990s, was fiercely debated. The Christian Brothers, the largest provider of residential care for boys, filed a successful lawsuit to suppress the abusers’ names. We don’t know their names But they sound something like this: Monsters. Criminals. Rapists. Hypocrites.
I want to be angry at Dan Brown but his silly contrivances and pallid “illuminati” conspirators seem like cartoon characters compared to the clerics of Ireland. Apologists will haul out their calculators and tell you that the percentage of abusive priests isn’t any worse that garbage collectors, or paralegals or newspaper columnists.
But the people who should speak up loudest about this anathema are not the atheists or the Darwinists or the secular humanists. They are Catholics – specifically Irish-Catholics, like myself – who cannot help but be revolted, incensed and humiliated by priests, brothers and nuns who gutted the childhoods of Irish children and left them unable to tell whether these men and women of God were angels – or demons.

Farrah Fawcett death watch

2009-05-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

Last night, I got to see Farrah Fawcett dying.
It was a ghastly experience, but Fawcett seemed to believe it important that I and others watch it, and so we did. All 9 million of us. The unflinching documentary, filmed by Fawcett pal Alana Stewart, was the highest-rated show on television May 15 among viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 and 25 and 54, The New York Times reported. NBC was so tickled with the documentary's success that it is said to be considering another Fawcett special. It will have to move fast. Fawcett, diagnosed with anal cancer in 2006, is in her final hours.
If you have had cancer, or have watched someone you love endure the lethal, degrading, de-humanizing “treatment” we now prescribe for its patients, you are likely to have found Fawcett's story resoundingly familiar. Suffering, regardless of one's “support system” is a stark, isolating business. To have that mirrored by a familiar, iconic face has to be a chilling, but somehow consoling experience. To that end, Fawcett's candor can only be beneficial.
But what on earth motivates a 61-year-old woman to share her most intimate hideous moments with 9 million ogling strangers? Fawcett insists that hers was a humanitarian gesture, intended to open viewer's eyes to alternative treatments (which, in her case, failed) and to address issues of patient privacy [Dash] a segment I must have missed. But as Alessandra Stanley noted on the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, nowhere in the two-hour documentary are screening procedures or risk factors for anal cancer addressed.
For the record, The American Cancer Society estimates that 5,000 Americans were diagnosed with anal cancer last year and 680 of them died. If caught early, it has an 82 percent survival rate.
Risk factors for anal cancer include anal infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV). Some 85 percent of anal cancers are associated with persistent infection with the sexually transmitted virus. Other risk factors include being over 50, having many sexual partners, anal intercourse and smoking. Most victims are men, but after age 50, the cancer is slightly more common in women.
Among the unanswered questions that may have been helpful to her audience include how quickly Fawcett sought treatment for her symptoms and of what that treatment consisted. The touching, tender portrait of a woman dying [Dash] particularly a woman with whom we have the illusion of intimacy [Dash] is touching but ultimately prurient.
The one lethal blow Fawcett struck was to the parasitical paparazzi, who ghoulishly stalked her through cancer treatments. “I always thought that the National Enquirer was as invasive and malignant as cancer,” Fawcett says in a voice-over narration. “But now I realize that it just runs a close second. The main difference between them is that the tabloid will try to destroy your life with bold-faced lies in front of the whole world.”
So Fawcett snatched the cameras from their clutches and did them one better; she showed them the raw truth of cancer's pitiless ruin, insisting, at one point, that Stewart film her projectile vomiting.
Perhaps the real malignancy here is celebrity, whose poison is so venomous that its victims believe they are only worthwhile under a camera’s lens.
I don’t know what perverted version of altruism Fawcett thought she was practicing when she invited viewers into her private anguish. But I suspect O’Neill and Stewart are more to blame for compiling a documentary that focused more on the hellish ordeal of their loved one than on a missed opportunity to provide a valuable service to Americans. Perhaps by being so long the victims of the voyeuristic paparazzi themselves, they have been infected by its salacious perspective.

Wesleyan massacre and the nature of obsession

2009-05-11T09:19:00.000-07:00

Not long after my son began reading, I discovered a disturbing trend.
Once we got beyond "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and "The Grouchy Ladybug," the books available for girls and boys began to diverge. Girls got "Junie B. Jones," "The Pony Crazed Princess" and "Ruby the Red Fairy." Boys got, "Transformers," "X-Men," "The Hulk" and "Spiderman."
Girls, in other words, get cooperative problem solving. Boys get obliterative violence.
Granted, my son's yen for reading has been sated by ample doses of "Geronimo Stilton," and "The Magic Tree House," but it has been difficult to navigate the children's literature section without repelling a barrage of violence. Spiderman, Batman, Ironman, Wolverine, the Avengers. Wronged mutants in search of revenge.
It is, of course, worse on television, where nearly two out of three programs contain violence, so much of it laced with sex that it can be hard to tell the difference. When it comes to violence, you'll see more of it in children's programming (69 percent), reports the National Television Violence Study, than in other types of programming (57 percent). I had foolishly imagined literature to have a kind of "halo effect," much like that which we used to endow the computer. Silly me. Not only is children's literature more laced with illustrations than ever, it's also nearly as fixated on vengence at the rest of the entertainment media.
Page through any of these volumes and you get the same old canned narrative arc: Decent, good-hearted lad suffers horrific act of injustice and becomes moody, brooding, muscle-bound, misunderstood loner, transformed not by the whims of adolescence, but by some supernatural intervention that renders him omnipotent. Leave the fella alone and he's a mild-mannered nerd (aka Dr. Bruce Banner, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker). Rile him and he becomes a vengeance-seeking vicious monster, full of fury, might and righteous indignation.
Last week, police say 29-year old Steven Morgan donned a wig and walk into an off-campus bookstore in Middletown and blasted away Johanna Justin-Jinich, a 21-year old Wesleyan junior. News reports indicate that the victim and the accused had met two years earlier at New York University and that Justin-Jinich complained to the university about repeated phone calls and emails but declined to press charges. One source told the newspaper that Morgan and Justin-Jinich had been friendly and had gone out to eat together, but that when Justin-Jinich went away for a three-day weekend, Morgan began pelting her with e-mails, chastising her for not answering his calls. That's when Morgan's anti-Semitic tirades began. Within days, Morgan sent e-mails, criticizing Justin-Jinich's clothes as being too revealing, the newspaper reported.
Strange how repellant someone becomes when they are outside of one's reach.
I don't know what malignance worms its way through a guy's mind until he can think of nothing else but the object of his desire. But violent obsession, of the sort police allege Morgan engaged in, is a plague, and it is one that disproportionately affects women.
The Census Bureau reports that one out of every 12 women has been stalked at some point in her life. Four out of five of those victims are women, most of them are young and most of them know their stalker.
All murder is senseless, but when a bright, promising student with a love of Pablu Neruda and passion for women's health, is slaughtered on a brisk May day on a college campus, most of us scratch our heads. When the accused is once again described (this time, by his father, in The New York Times) as "a loner, quiet, and not having many friends," the story begins to feel so very familiar. All too, repugnantly familiar.
Strangers ponder the psychology of the alleged killer. Reporters alight on a vain quest to find the accused's emotional center. Parents are put under a microscope and lawyers scour police reports with incriminating steel wool. We look for reason for such a bizarre fixation, as though butchery could be explained through logic. If we put the pieces of this puzzle together, perhaps we can shield ourselves from a similar fate.
But we never look hard enough at how we raise boys into men.
We never look vigorously at how we wean boys on what theologian Walter Wink has called "the myth of redemptive violence."
How many men will blow away their ex-lovers, ex-wives before we begin teaching boys that getting dumped is not the same as castration? How many children will be massacred by ex-boyfriends and fathers, the collateral damage of men who cannot accept rejection, who cannot simply get dumped and move on?
When we deify mutant loners who settle scores with obliterating mayhem we suckle a new generation on this myth of redemptive violence. When little boys grow up believing that the pyrotechnics of vengeance are the sine qua non of manhood, we cannot be surprised when they annihilate the neighborhood.
Contact: Tosh[AT]rep-am.com.

Flannery O'Connor's Mortal Morally sense

2009-05-07T11:57:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1955, after the publication of her seminal collection of short stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O’Connor received a fan letter from a clerk working in a credit bureau in Atlanta. The clerk had taken issue with The New Yorker’s negative review of O’Connor’s book and asked O’Connor whether these stories were really "about God."
As insights go, this one was not especially keen. Since the publication of her novel, "Wise Blood," which O’Connor later described as "comic novel about a Christian malgré lui" the Georgia author had been labeled as a Catholic writer, writing with a confrontational brutality many readers found unendurable. Her misfits, murderers, perverts and pious Christians were forever pulverized under her castigating, and often self-righteous glare. Why was O’Connor so cruel to characters who so patently needed redemption? Couldn’t she, as her imperious mother pleaded with Robert Giroux, write about "nice people?"
What Hester identified was O’Connor’s scorching conviction that there really were not "nice" people, only the saved and the damned. O’Connor’s stories relentlessly flay conscience toward often-imperfect revelation. Weighty, weird, wondrous and cruelly ironic, O’Connor’s fiction may have been the last gasp of a literature that engaged with the supernatural world.
A new, workman-like biography of O’Connor, "Flannery: A Life," by Brad Gooch has been published and it is long overdue. What it reminds us of is not just the searing prose and daring parables of this Southern Catholic writer. It also reveals of the paucity of good literature that is fearless in its use of religious allegory.
The biggest rise in publishing in the past few years has been the increase in spiritual/religious books, although the line between spirituality and self-help tends to be too slender for my taste. O’Connor would have recoiled at any moniker other than "writer," but she wrote with a cudgel-like insistence on mortality and grace. If that meant that a simple doctor’s visit by a good Christian woman could result in that woman being set upon by a stranger, lunging at her throat and calling her an "old warthog from hell," so be it. As O’Connor said, "Grace changes us and change is painful."
O’Connor’s acid sense of humor, which often derived from clueless characters oblivious to the overwhelming promise made to them, leavened her stories with mirth that seemed a little naughty for a devout Catholic.
Although I first discovered O’Connor in a high school anthology, it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s, living alone in a rented room in the eastern part of this state, that I appreciated the emphatic ferocity of her faith. Violence might be the opposite of grave, but O’Connor was unafraid to use it as a vehicle. That marvelous line that the misfit utters after he has just murdered an imploring grandmother, "She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" [Dash] could pretty much suit all of us.
O’Connor, who didn’t own a television until a congregation of nuns gave her one in 1961 said she wrote these gothic stories to shock a morally blind world. As she said, "To the hard of hearing you shout and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."
Most of O’Connor’s stories were written in the 1950s, those halcyon days of peace and good manners to which many would have us return. It’s harrowing to conjecture what she would have made of the more apocalyptic drone of today’s violence[Dash] the Columbine shootings, the Virginia Tech slaughter, or the annihilative tendencies of ex-lovers to blow away those they professed to love.
In 1960, reading from one of her more popular speeches, she wrote, "We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions." As a writer, O’Connor was on a quest for the "redemptive act," the shattering act of horror that gives humanity "the chance to be restored." At the end of her life, she asked for prayers to send her "the kind of grace that deepens perception."
In 1964, O’Connor died of lupus, the disease that has claimed her father. She was 38. Her book, "Everything That Rises Must Converge," a line drawn from one of her heroes, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, was published posthumously. After her death, one of her fervent admirers, the Trappist Thomas Merton wrote "when I read Flannery O’Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles."
Though 21st century readers hardly lack for horror in literature, it is often gratuitous horror of the Brett Easton Ellis/A.M. Homes variety. O’Connor never apologized for her horror nor did she ladle it wantonly. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism," she said once. "When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."

Just Say No to Makeover, Susan Boyle

2009-04-27T12:46:00.001-07:00

Say it ain't so, Susan.
Susan Boyle, the Queen-size Scottish belter with frizzy hair and muskrat eyebrows, appears to be on her way to a makeover. The 47-year-old spinster, whose stunning rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" on "Britain's Got Talent," made her a YouTube sensation, has reportedly plunked down $57 for a permanent and an eye-brow waxing.
Next, she'll be fending off competing offers from NutriSystem and Jenny Craig.
Because that is the way it is with fame, which brooks no truck for the dowdy. In the immortal words of Jules Styne, "If a girl isn't pretty/like a Miss Atlantic City/she should dump the stage and try another route."
Not Susan Boyle, who is rumored to be negotiating a record contract after her debut on the gladiatorial "Gong Show." So incongruous was her commanding voice to her decidedly dowdy appearance, that sneering spectators turned into howling supporters faster than you could say "YouTube."
Within days, the Washington Post's Robin Ghivan, who has so little to do now that Hillary Clinton has burned all her V-necks, was insisting that "the ugly duckling" get a makeover.
"The tale of Susan Boyle will not be complete until the shy spinster blossoms," she wrote. "Those who have been entranced by her story so far should let Boyle's fairy godmother finish her work."
Ghivan's counsel may seem craven, but anybody who's seen Sarah Jessica Parker's high school yearbook knows whereof Ghivan speaks. It's why 55-year-old Oprah Winfrey looks better than 35-year-old Oprah. On the way up, we like our entertainers to be a little frumpy (think "Second Hand Rose" Barbra Streisand, circa 1963). But we'd like to think that all that fame and fortune actually does something for them, otherwise the whole vicarious thrill goes completely out the window.
What good is the house in Malibu if you can't have abs like Julianne Michaels?
Dr. Robert Canfield, Professor of Anthology at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, has published an academic essay about the Boyle phenomenon, "Susan Boyle And The Power Of The Moral Imagination." Canfield says Boyle personifies our own doubts about ourselves.
"We can see in her an objectification of what we fear about ourselves," he told one St. Louis reporter. "So when she comes forth with that voice, that music [Dash] as if we have discovered Judy Garland at the age of 47 [Dash] we are thrilled. She's going to make it, we think…. And we unconsciously invest ourselves in her achievement."
Boyle only feeds the fires of indignity when, in a question about the reaction to her success, she tells ABC's Diane Sawyer, "The ones who were mean to me are now nice to me."
Oh! We think. The jerks! Let's hear them croon "Melancholy Baby."
One of the most magnificent sopranos of the last century was Australia's Joan Sutherland, who was nobody's idea of a beauty, but who almost single-handedly revived the bel canto tradition in opera. Granted, she didn't have Boyle's hirsute charms, but she didn't need Botox either. Most of us, who don't look like Kristen Chenoweth, and couldn't come close to sounding like her, want to prove those nasty undermining creeps who don't see our true worth, wrong. We want to hit that high-C, feel that tape snap across our chest, remember to thank our mothers during the Oscar-acceptance speech.
And we want to look like Eva Mendes doing it.
It is sobering to think that some of the most exceptional voices of the last century [Dash] Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Mary Martin, Barbara Cook or even Streisand [Dash] might today be stifled because of their possessor's girdle size. Marni Nixon had a voice like an angel, but only a pleasant, ordinary face. So when it came to finding a Maria to swoon to "West Side Story's" Tony, producers turned to Natalie Wood and let Nixon play vocal Cyrano. So, too, with Deborah Kerr in "The King and I" and Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady" [Dash] all Marni Nixon, the ghost singer who had no chance of matching the loveliness of these beauties.
Today, we can enhance voices and surgically manipulate bodies, but to hear the untouched richness of an instrument like Boyle's voice is a rare and elegant pleasure. She will likely be slenderized, air-brushed, plucked and polished, but I prefer to think of her as she was [Dash] looking just like us [Dash] and sounding anything but.

Bees and the Uncertain Protection of Motherhood

2009-04-22T08:49:00.000-07:00

My son has developed an irrational fear of bees.
Hyacinth bloom along the foundation of the house, bringing with them the menacing buzz of insects, many of them bees and all of them, in my son’s overactive imagination, out to get him.
He will not go outside.
This is ridiculous, I tell him. “You are the last thing on a bee’s mind,” I tell him, but he reminds me that I have no access to the mind of a bee, nor any particular aptitude for deciphering it, and so we are back to the absurdity of unreasonable fear.
This anxiety is of long incubation. Last summer, during Vacation Bible School, my son was stung by a bee for the first time in his life. Evidently the event sufficiently traumatized him to develop into a full-fledged phobia and has not incidentally probably ruined my chances for Vacation Bible School this summer to boot.
Scientists say that bad memories are particularly more tenacious than good ones for evolutionary reasons; the adrenaline involved in frightening experiences appears to seals in emotionally charged memories. Dr. Larry Cahill, a professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California-Irvine, found that emotional arousal helps us remember threatening events and circumstances – like my son’s bee sting.
So, my mother was right; we do remember bad events better than good ones, largely because benign memories don’t pose a threat and are, from the evolutionary standpoint, worthless.
My son falsely believes that I can defend him from the bees, a degree of faith I hardly merit. But the problem is that all children believe their parents can shield them from peril, a delusion largely of our own making. “I’m here,” we whisper. “You’re safe.” In the stage adaptation of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” now playing at TheaterWorks Hartford, Didion wonders about the deception inherent in maternal reassurance. “’Did I lie to you?’” she asks her fatally ill daughter, Quintana. “Did I lie to you all my life? When I said, ‘You’re safe, I’m here,’ was that a lie or did you believe it? Is a lie only a story that the hearer disbelieves? Is that the only definition of a lie? Or did you believe it?”
When I was 25 and living outside Washington, D.C., I became chronically ill with mononucleosis. I had trouble breathing. I couldn’t move without pain. I dreamed in sweaty, tempestuous whorls of color. I was unable to work.
“You’ll be fine,” my mother told me initially, convinced it was merely a virus. “You’re as healthy as a horse.” After six months with no improvement, my mother phoned me and, receiving the same bleak report, broke down in tears. “I can’t do anything for you!” she wailed. “When you were young and you fell, I could stop the bleeding and hold you in my arms and make it better, but I can’t do that now.”
That was the moment when I discovered that my mother was powerless against caprice, a shattering epiphany that baptized me into adulthood. We had both lost – she her magical curative powers and I, my ability to believe in them.
When my son asks me to hold him as we pad through the garden, I feel empowered by the fervor of his trust, and complicit in this vital deception of childhood. Soon, sooner than I wish, I will no more be able to protect him from bees as I can from failed friendships, unrequited love or the indiscriminate ailments of mind and spirit. So much of tragedy is mercilessly bee-like, arbitrary and excruciating. The only way to steel oneself for it is by a little magical thinking, believing for a brief, evanescent while, that mommy can protect us from everything.

Our Landscape Heritage to the Rescue

2009-01-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Now is a good time for a pep talk.
Or perhaps a tonic for our national malaise, this disequilibrium that has afflicted us and turned the economy into our national invalid. Apprehension can turn to machismo and chagrin with the flick of a paint brush, which is only one of the lessons the Hudson River School of painting continues to impart. The re-hanging of 28 pieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art’s unparalleled collection comes at a propitious time – for the Wadsworth, the city of Hartford and the country as a whole. That’s because the Hudson River School is not only the first, but also the most emblematic of American art movements and when one is unsure where one is going, it helps to remember where one has been.
It also helps to reconnect with our own national morality tale, and the Hudson River School is surely that. It is the place where American self-mythologizing begins, the place where its tall tales are rooted and its aspirations incubate. Its parables continue to define and edify us, even as its principles teeter on the hyperbolic.
It was always – even at the beginning when Thomas Cole, an Englishman, turned the mirror on America and underscored its magnificence – a lie, its best features sexed up and its worst fudged. But Americans believed it, and that intractable conviction became integral to the country’s identity.
The Wadsworth is celebrating the return of its Hudson River School works from two years of being on tour – mostly in Europe where undertones of American rapacity continue to resonate and for many Wadsworth habitués, the homecoming is more than welcome. Like the story the Hudson River landscapes tell, the Wadsworth’s future has been subject to great reaches of pomposity and retrenchment – it has lost three directors, two expansion plans and nearly 100,000 visitors in the last 10 years. It will now neither move nor expand but simply renovate its warren-like galleries, looking into its holdings to flaunt what it has, a bit like Thomas Cole insisting that the wilderness was not savage and exploitable, but sublime and indispensable.
Cole is justifiably credited with beginning the Hudson River School, the impassioned landscape style that dominated American art from 1825 to 1870, but from the beginning it was fraught with apprehension. Cole had been raised amidst the "dark satanic mills" of Bolton, England, and his genius was to see in his adoptive land the unspoiled wilderness and purity of nature that Europe had so vigorously corrupted.
Cole never actually tramped through exotic wilderness. It is part of the poetry of his story that the sights he depicted – like the lush Kaaterskill Falls (1826) on display here -- were already being exploited for the emerging tourist class that chugged up the Hudson River Valley.
"Kaaterskill Falls" was the great tourist spot of the early 19th century. Cole puts the viewer inside the dank cave over which the Falls spill, but, by the time he painted it, a tourist stand, picnic area and concession stand rose above the meandering stream. Kitsch had invaded and with it the degradation Cole most feared. Cole’s decision to expunge them is at once artistic and political. "Kaaterskill Falls" is, like all Cole works, a celebration and a warning.
It’s this tension between Arcadia and arcade that unnerves Cole and gives rise to his greatest, if overwrought, "The Course of Empire," now at the New-York Historical Society. This is a rags-to-riches-to rags tale that hits a little close to home. The Wadsworth has graciously provided "Mount Etna from Taormina," (1843), dashed off the same year, as an antidote and it’s all here – Cole’s ruined civilization in the foreground, dwarfed by the puissance of Mount Etna smoldering ominously in the distance. All that’s left of the glory days are a few ruins – the Hartford Times building, Sage-Allen, G. Fox – and a meandering shepherd.
"What is potent is nature," explains Elizabeth Mankin Kornheiser, the Wadsworth’s Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. "This was his warning in ‘The Course of Empire.’ If we loose sight of God and his natural creation, that’s what we’re going to end up as. In many ways, he was right. A civilization engaged in excess and greed. Everything is too much. Too much military. Too much luxury. We have forgotten about God and nature and our planet."
Cole was giving Americans their first religious paintings. Europe could have its gaudy ecclesiastical excess, but America’s defining characteristic was land, a resource endangered as early as 1827, when Cole painted "View of the White Mountains," an image of a single, axe-wielding settler, sauntering down a hideous laceration of land in an otherwise glorious wilderness.
So abrupt and certain was the "consciousness of destruction, of quick and inevitable change, "as Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that "one is in some sort of hurry to admire" what remained of the solitary American landscape.
The tale the Atheneum tells in this tidy exhibit is a tight and instructive one. Cole had been discovered by John Trumbull, the great American history painter, whose hideous "Niagara Falls from an Upper Bank on the British Side" reminds viewers of the radical innovation Cole undertook. Trumbull may have been a ham-fisted landscape artist, but saw Cole’s talent and introduced the Englishman to Daniel Wadsworth, who, in turn, introduced the precocious Frederic Church to Cole. Church became Cole’s pupil, but the tone in which he painted was, in many ways, the antithesis of Cole’s custodial tenderness toward nature. Where Cole was tender, Church was tempestuous; where Cole was apprehensive, Church was boisterous. Cole wanted to remind viewers of the sacred trust they had to preserve; Church wanted to impress on them how much capital they had to spend.
It’s telling that when Kornhauser showed Church’s "Coast Scene, Mount Desert" (1863) to her Australian counterparts a few years ago, the Australians flinched. "Too Texan," they scoffed. In other words, too bombastic, jingoistic, boastful – too macho.
But that machismo, the bracing sea crashing against the jagged rocks, spewing whorls of sea foam into the air, is equally a part of American identity. So much so that Alfred Bierstadt was unable to contain his enthusiasm over the majestic Yosemite Valley and, in "In the Mountains" threw in the Alps for good measure.
But Bierstadt and Church add a new dimension to this celebratory self-satisfaction. Divine Providence, in the guise of a beatific and guiding light, infuses paintings like Church’s iconic "Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness in 1636 from Plymouth to Hartford" (1846). Here, Rev. Hooker and his party flee into the bosom of the Farmington River Valley like the Holy Family on the flight into Egypt. In Church’s fulsome narrative, not only to the trees have ears (and mouths and noses) but so do the rocks, roots and every other natural accessory in the family’s path.
So brazen and hysterical is Church in his xenophobia that his brilliance as a painter is often overlooked. His Mount Desert scene may have a dash too much testosterone, but the radical way in which Church composed it, thrusting the viewer bodily into the churn of sea spray id a dazzling display of bravura painting and innovative cropping that presages Degas.
All of this brio ended, of course, with the self-sabotage of the Civil War, which forever maimed the country’s ability to see itself as divinely blessed. What’s fascinating is how post-Civil War painters like John Frederic Kensett and Sanford Robinson Gifford sought to assuage American guilt with tight, tranquil images of natural idylls. This time, nature is not evidence of the country’s supremacy, but a balm for its tranquility. Church’s divine conceit has been replaced by a contemplative, vaguely melancholic rumination.
All of this – the stewardship of Cole, the swagger of Church, the introspection of Gifford and Kensett – is part of the yeasty American narrative, from which we draw inspiration -- and chagrin.

Truth or dare

2009-01-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

Who says truth is stranger than fiction? Fiction is so much juicier. Especially when it's cloaked in the mantle of truth.
The latest winner of the memoir-as-fabulist contest is Herman Rosenblat, who evidently deemed his Holocaust survival story insufficiently wrenching, so he sexed it up a bit. His "Angel at the Gate" memoir told the story of meeting his future wife, Roma Radzicki, on the opposite side of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration camp. Rosenblat, whose much-hyped book was pulled by the publisher, Berkley Books, this week, admitted he embellished the story.
It turns out the teenage Rosenblat did not stand at the fence while a young girl on the other side tossed him apples and bread, an anecdote that seemed far-fetched to experts on Nazi Germany from the start.
Even more fantastic was the story that the two war-torn lovers met in Coney Island 12 years later and were married. But the story was one Rosenblat kept spinning and all sorts of inveterate romantics, chief among them Oprah Winfrey, were hypnotized by it. Winfrey called the story "the single greatest love story" she had heard in her 22 years of television.
It was so much better than James Frey's twisted tales of drugs and redemption, an extravagant fib that made his "A Million Little Pieces" into an Oprah Book Club selection and then forced Oprah to confront the sheepish Frey into what is becoming an on-air penitential rite.
It might seem that surviving the Holocaust at all would make for gripping reading, which only begs the question: Why lie? Certainly with so many dunderheads claiming the Holocaust was a hoax, it hardly helps to have "Holocaust" and "fraud" clinched in the same sentence. Worse are the guileless believers, like fellow writer Laurie Friedman, whose children's book, "Angel Girl," was inspired by Rosenblat's fancy. Lerner Publishing Group pulled her books from the stacks this week and was offering refunds to the 2,000 or so readers who bought the book.
With the publishing industry laboring under layoffs, cut-backs and consolidations, it hardly needs another fabulist spinning straw into fool's gold. Already Misha Defonseca's "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years" has been exposed as a fake. Earlier last year, Margaret Seltzer's "Love and Consequences" a memoir of a white girl growing up in an African-American gang, turned out to be the fabrication of a white Valley girl who listened to way too much gangsta rap.
This is decidedly what Emily Dickinson intended when she advised "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."
The last year has been a robust one for slanted truth, and not just in publishing. One could argue that the entire financial crisis now visited upon us began with a lie [Dash] or at least a lot of collective fibbing. Nobody in the sub-prime mortgage industry collapse could have looked frankly at such an implausible matrix and pronounced it sound. Nobody who looked with any kind of scrutiny at the kind of statements Bernard Madoff was spewing out to investors would have found them judicious. But when you are making a good return while the rest of the suckers sweat it out, why be persnickety?
A confederacy of dunces, indeed.
Humans appear to have an innate capacity for deceit [Dash] whether giving or accepting it. George Orwell memorably called lying "indispensably necessary." Researchers say nearly 60 percent of us lie at least once in a 10-minute conversation and that most people lie at least once a day, often the white-lies we tell to protect feelings. "Our minds and bodies secrete deceit," David Livingstone Smith , author of "Why We Lie" has said.
"Although deception is common throughout nature, human beings have developed this capacity to an unprecedented degree," Smith writes. "Our ability to speak not only makes of virtuosos of mendacity, masters in the poker game of social life, but it also gives us the unique ability to lie to ourselves: we hide the truth from others by hiding it from ourselves."
Stanford University researchers have found that the brain can banish unwanted memories of the kind wrought by traumatic events. Whether it can replace the toxic memories with idyllic ones is less certain, but I've been to too many Irish wakes not to see how dreadful anecdotes burnish with time. We believe deceit because it is too rich to suspect. It is only when it all comes tumbling down that we admit to our own naiveté and strike out again for candor [Dash] until the next delectable ruse comes along.

E-mail and its discontents

2009-01-02T12:41:00.001-08:00

After a week's vacation, I returned to 510 emails, of which 26 were what might generously be termed "important."
That's about 4 percent of the total, which appears to be my average rate of e-mail utility.
Put another way, 96 percent of the e-mail I receive is sludge.
Trash, spam, junk, ephemera, obstructive nonesense.
The more I use e-mail, the less useful it has become and the more anxious I become when I am away from it. Email has become my most dysfunctional relationship. I give and give and attend and worry, and what do I get? Another come-on from Land’s End.
A rational person might wonder why I pursue my dead-end relationship, but my ambivalence is roundly shared and has a great deal to do with how the brain functions in an environment that taxes it more than ever.
One of the tics the brain has is its appetite for novelty. It’s novelty that keeps us buying laptops to replace our desktops; switching from console TVs for flat-screen ones; turning in our cell phone for a Blackberry and our flabby old spouses for new trim ones.
"We are easily distracted… because we vastly overvalue what happens to us right now compared with what comes in the future and because novelty is intrinsically rewarding," writes Christopher F. Chabris in The Wall Street Journal.
So a typical American worker might be hammering away on some project with industrious intensity before the thirst for newness overtakes him. He checks his email. He checks his blog. He checks his favorite Web site – or a few. RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits, has found that the average American worker checks 40 Web sites daily, checks e-mail 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times a day.
Naturally, these workers tell themselves they’re multitasking, but what they’re really doing is procrastinating. Multitasking, that buzzword of every overtaxed American, is a fraud. The brain doesn’t work that way.
What actually happens when the mind shifts from task to task is that we lose time, in part because it takes the brain time to rev up again. In "The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory," Torkel Klingberg explains how neurons accelerate when we concentrate and decelerate when we’re interrupted. And we’re interrupted a lot. A 2005 study found that most American workers are interrupted every 11 minutes or so – and it takes them 25 minutes to return to the task they first began.
One research firm reports that more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of these unnecessary interruptions.
It’s not always others who distract us. Frequently, we distract ourselves. When I am struggling with a problem, for instance, I find otherwise onerous tasks like rearranging my file drawers inexplicably alluring. Working from home presents panoply of distractions so vexatious that I’ve given up on it altogether and now work from the library.
The instruments that have insinuated themselves into our lives to increase productivity seem only to invite procrastination. More voice-mail to check, e-mail to answer, iPods to program. One of the biggest retail days of the year is now "Cyber Monday," the post-Thanksgiving workday when workers return to their cubicle, not to work, but to shop.
As psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell told The New York Times, multitasking "gives the illusion that we’re simultaneously tasking, but we’re really not…..You cannot divide your attention like that. It’s a big illusion."
A University of California at Irvine study found that people worked faster in conditions where they were interrupted but they produced less. So it’s not your imagination. You are working faster than ever. You’re just not getting anywhere.
The problem with the canard of multitasking is that it spills over into our personal relationships. The most valuable commodity today is singular focus. Today’s teens, researchers say, typically interface with more than four pieces of technology simultaneously – the MP3 player, the Internet, the cell phone, and, oh, yes, homework. If you believe that has no effect on their brains, you have not talked to a teen lately. They have become increasingly bird-like in their spasmodic text messaging and cell phone monitoring.
Adults, alas, are no better. When was the last time you had a conversation with a friend who wasn’t driving? Or surfing the net? Or deleting e-mails? "I can hear you click-clacking away," my friend Maria says in our phone conversation. "Oh, nothing," I say, cavalierly. "Just checking the wire."
Maria does not say it, but I hear it in her pregnant pause: What is more important, my dear? Indeed, that civilized silence reminds me, what is?

Telling the Truth but Slant

2008-12-30T15:04:00.000-08:00

Oh, who says truth is stranger than fiction?
Fiction is so much juicier. Especially when its cloaked in the mantle of truth.
The latest winner of the memoir-as-fabulist contest is Herman Rosenblat, who evidently deemed his Holocaust survival story insufficiently wrenching, so he sexed it up a bit. His "Angel at the Gate" memoir told the story of meeting his future wife, Roma Radzicki, on the opposite side of a barbed-wire fence at a Nazi concentration camp. Rosenblat, whose much-hyped book was pulled by the publisher, Berkley Books this week, admitted he embellished the story.
It turns out the teenage Rosenblat did not stand at the fence while a young girl on the other side tossed him apples and bread, an anecdote that seemed far-fetched to Nazi scholars from the start. Even more fantastic was the story that the two war-torn lovers met in Coney Island 12 years later and were married. But the story was one Rosenblat kept spinning and all sorts of inveterate romantics, chief among them Oprah Winfrey, were hypnotized by it. Winfrey called the story "the single greatest love story" she had heard in her 22 years of television.
It was so much better than James Frey's twisted tales of drugs and redemption, an extravagant fib that made his "A Million Little Pieces" into an Oprah Book Club selection and then forced Oprah to confront the sheepish Frey into what is becoming an on-air penitential rite
It might seem that surviving the Holocaust at all would make for gripping reading, which only begs the question: Why lie? Certainly with so many dunderheads claiming the Holocaust was a hoax, it hardly helps to have "Holocaust" and "fraud" clinched in the same sentence. Worse are the guileless believers, like fellow writer Laurie Friedman, whose children's book, "Angel Girl," was inspired by Rosenblat's fancy. Lerner Publishing Group pulled her books from the stacks this week and was offering refunds to the 2,000 or so readers who bought the book.
With the publishing industry laboring under layoffs, cut-backs and consolidations, it hardly needs another fabulist spinning straw into fool's gold. Already Misha Defonseca's "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years" has been exposed as a fake. Earlier last year, Margaret Seltzer's "Love and Consequences" a memoir of a white girl growing up in an African-American gang, turned out to be the fabrication of a white Valley girl who listened to way too much gangsta rap.
This is decidedly what Emily Dickinson intended when she advised "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."
The last year has been a robust one for slanted truth, and not just in publishing. One could argue that the entire financial crisis now visited upon us began with a lie [Dash] or at least a lot of collective fibbing. Nobody in the sub-prime mortgage industry collapse could have looked frankly at such an implausible matrix and pronounced it sound. Nobody who looked with any kind of scrutiny at the kind of statements Bernard Madoff was spewing out to investors would have found them judicious. But when you are making a good return while the rest of the suckers sweat it out, why be persnickety?
A confederacy of dunces, indeed.
Humans appear to have an innate capacity for deceit [Dash] whether giving or accepting it. George Orwell memorably called lying "indispensably necessary." Researchers say nearly 60 percent of us lie at least once in a 10-minute conversation and that most people lie at least once a day, often the white-lies we tell to protect feelings. "Our minds and bodies secrete deceit," David Livingstone Smith , author of "Why We Lie" has said.
"Although deception is common throughout nature, human beings have developed this capacity to an unprecedented degree," Smith writes. "Our ability to speak not only makes of virtuosos of mendacity, masters in the poker game of social life, but it also gives us the unique ability to lie to ourselves: we hide the truth from others by hiding it from ourselves."
Stanford University researchers have found that the brain can banish unwanted memories of the kind wrought by traumatic events. Whether it can replace the toxic memories with idyllic ones is less certain, but I've been to too many Irish wakes not to see how dreadful anecdotes burnish with time. We believe deceit because it is too rich to suspect. It is only when it all comes tumbling down that we admit to our own naiveté and strike out again for candor [Dash] until the next delectable ruse comes along.

Hello? Is Anybody There?

2008-12-30T09:10:00.001-08:00

On the second floor of the Doubletree Hotel, just off Route 128, I spy the cry for help.
Just outside Room 217, a flimsy paper towel on which the word "Help" is scrawled, lies on the emblem-checked carpet . "Phone broken," I read, on another towel, just adjacent. The door to Room 217 is ajar, propped open by a metal wheelchair. It is 8:30 a.m. and I am home for Christmas, staying in a hotel near my brother’s house. In an hour, I am to meet him for Mass. I am sweaty from a workout in the hotel gym and am startled by the quavering handwritten note.
"Excuse me," I say, peeking my head into a small salon, littered with Sunday circulars, coffee-cups and two half-eaten bananas. "Do you need help?"
"Oh, yes, yes," says an old woman, sitting on the sofa. The woman’s wizened, caramel face is framed with a tangled aurora of chalky gray hair. She is dressed in an outlandishly vibrant housecoat of purple, electric orange and blazing yellow. "My phone is broken," she says. "They’ve left me alone."
I enter uneasily, snaking my way through the carpet of newspapers and in-room dining menus, over to the phone, which, unsurprisingly, works fine.
"Seems fine," I say.
"Oh, but, but -" the woman says, raising her hand palm down, beckoning for me to sit. "Could you just stay awhile?"
The woman is breathing. She is moving. She seems healthy, but undone, frazzled, anxious. "Sure," I say, tip-toeing past the bleating television to a nearby armchair. "What is -" I stammer awkwardly. "What’s troubling you?"
"Oh," says the woman, lifting her eyebrows and throwing her head back. "Oh, I’m terribly lonely. Terribly, terribly."
And I sit there, stunned by her candor, flustered by her condition and suddenly implicated in her plight. For a broken phone, I could fetch the management. For a medical condition, I could call a doctor. But for the intractable, routine and, I thought blithely, benign diagnosis of loneliness, I am not sure I have a remedy - or at least one that does not involve me.
John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Chicago, estimates that roughly 60 millions Americans feel lonely to the point of unhappiness at any given moment. That’s 20 percent of us. Loneliness, it turns out, can be quantified, examined and even parsed epidemiologically. It has an effect on our immune function. "Social isolation has an impact on health comparable to the effect of high blood pressure, lack of exercise, obesity, or smoking," Cacioppo writes in "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection," released last fall.
Researchers have found that feeling lonely can actually have an impact on stress hormones and heart function. Depression, plus loneliness, can hasten death in the elderly. And most, or 77 percent, of those who are elderly and living alone, are, like my new friend, women.
"Could you come over here? Sit by me?" says the woman. I get up and move over to the couch, where she looks steadily at me and then says, "Do you mind if I stroke your arm?"
Here is the moment where I really begin to feel creepy. This is either an extremely peculiar assault or a very pathetic yearning for human connection. I recall a conversation with a friend who worked in a nursing home and who was asked once, and rather desperately, by a resident for a hug. My friend complied hastily and the resident confided that she hadn’t been hugged in 15 years. Within the hour, the resident died.
"What’s your name?" I ask the woman, as she runs her thumb gently over my forearm. "Julia," she says, and smiles. For the next 10 minutes, I ask Julia about her life, her late husband, her daughter, her home, her interests. What she liked most, she said, was going to school. She spent years auditing classes at Harvard Divinity School. She was, shatteringly, an awful lot like me. Which, of course, is why I stayed.
"Julia?" says a voice from the hall. A hotel staff member arrives, looks at me a tad indulgently, rolls her eyes and says, "She’s OK. You can go."
I rise to leave and Julia says, "Oh, but did you leave your phone number?"
I nod and the staff member ushers me out, whispering "Don’t worry. She won’t even remember."
Later, talking about the encounter with my mother, who works in an assisted living facility, I confess my ambivalence - my desire to stay grating against my selfish impulse to flee.
"I see it all the time," my mother says grimly. "Dementia. She’s got dementia. "
Maybe, I say, though the diagnosis strikes me as blithe. I remember a Duke University study published last year that found the number of people who admitted they had no one to with whom they could discuss important matters doubled to 25 percent. I thought about that as I checked out of the hotel that morning, slinking past Julia’s room and hearing her thin voice calling out from her open door "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?"

Children's movies but the sass in crass

2008-12-23T06:53:00.000-08:00

When my son turned 2, a generous relative gave him a copy of the movie, "Shrek."

"This is hysterical," said the chirpy relative. "You'll love it, too."

Well, I did. Sort of.

"Shrek," like its cousins "Dr. Dolittle," "Finding Nemo," and "Monsters, Inc." are marketed to kids, with the gentle suggestion that adults will enjoy them, too. And you will enjoy them, particularly if you loved "Blazing Saddles," "Porkys" and "Animal House."

Don't get me wrong. "Shrek" is a funny movie with a redemptive message about the power of love. But in its unapologetic vulgarity, it is emblematic of the crassness and incivility of children's movies that has gone virtually unnoticed by the country's self-appointed finger-waggers. While the religious right is busy fulminating about which Teletubby is the gay, and assailing PBS for including gay parents on one of its most popular children's programs, the real threat to children's sensibilities goes unchecked.

In 2005, Warner Brothers introduced a meaner, leaner Bugs Bunny, a raging rodent whose beloved buck teeth now look like two glinting bayonets. The retooling of the wry sophisticate into a rampaging warrior is part of an updated Looney Toons series called "Loonatics," set in the year 2772. Those affably daffy vaudevillians have gone the way of Lassie. No kid worth his weight in Game Boys is going to buy a Shakespeare-quoting bunny rabbit. That is, like, so yesterday.

"Sexual content seems to be of more concern than gratuitous violence," Marsha Williams, a vice president for research at Nickelodeon told The New York Times. But while parents debate which is worse violence or sex a more subtle, but arguably more pervasive, threat stalks the nation's youth. It's incivility.

Listen, for a moment, to the way characters talk to one another in top-grossing "family" films like "Shrek" and "Dr. Dolittle."

"Two words," the ogre Shrek says to his companion, the Donkey, "Shut. Up."

Two words that you would likely not want your child to use, and two words that have become all too commonplace in movies from "Toy Story," to "Shrek." It is not merely those two words, but a whole manner of speaking to one another that is less articulate, less civil and generally more coarse than the days of "Sleeping Beauty" or "Bambi."

"Excuse me," says Shrek, to a put-upon Princess Fiona, "I have to save my ass."

Funny. Funny to an adult who understands the double-entendre. But does a 5-year-old understand that? Should they? Ever since Bart Simpson made it OK and even hip to say "This sucks," absolutely everything sucks, from chicken nuggets to "Chicken Run." Mean people suck, says a popular bumper sticker. School sucks, says a popular Web site that sells term papers to desperate students.

Just as advertisements directed at children bank on a more adversarial relationship between parents and children, so, too, children's films today celebrate a sharp-edged antagonism between characters. Sarcasm is the lingua franca of children's movies today, sullying the dialogue and sending the not-too-subtle message that he who comes up with the most smart-ass remark wins the day.

And then there are the, ahem, poop jokes.

Scatalogical humor has become the mainstay of most children's movies, meaning that a parent is likely to endure more jokes about flatulence, to say nothing of flatulence itself, at home than any frazzled working mother has any right to endure.

"Man, you gotta warn somebody before you just crack one off like that," the Donkey says to Shrek, as he follows the ogre up a mountain. "My mouth was open and everything."

All right. It's funny. But what message does it send to children about humor? As Mark Schone lamented last year in The Boston Globe, "Now you can't watch a kids' flick without stepping in poop. Potty humor has become de rigueur for movies aimed at children."

Schone cites movies like "Dr. Dolittle," in which Eddie Murphy's character wrinkles his nose as he treats a rat for a gas attack. In the new "101 Dalmations," a puppy named Whizzer pees on a picture of Cruella De Ville.

All of this leads to a crasser, less civil environment in which what we say to one another is judged not by its courtesy but by its derisiveness. How we speak to one another is the foundation on which we build social behavior. When it is spoiled by nasty slurs and sharp-edged digs at people supposed to be our friends we have no one to blame but ourselves when our children haul off and crack us.

Mary Pope Osborne is up a tree

2008-12-19T06:52:00.000-08:00

Mary Pope Osborne lives in a tree house.

OK, not in a tree house, but with a tree house, a coiling cupola-type nest that sits atop her lakeside home in Goshen like the top of a wedding cake.
It is only fitting, of course, that a tree house crown Osborne's home. Tree houses have been magical for the 56-year-old writer. Since she began writing them in 1992, Osborne's "Magic Tree House" series for children have sold 35 million copies and have been translated into 25 languages. One night on a recent book tour, she spoke to 2,000 people, mostly children, and signed books for four hours.
For Osborne, a lanky, blue-eyed woman with a aureole of saffron curls, it has been a magical journey that has finally driven home all of the theoretical esoteria that had captivated and confounded her. This Army brat who had traveled, Herman Hesse-like, to the East, lived in a cave in Crete, endured a riot in Kabul, an earthquake in Afghanistan and blood poisoning in Nepal, finally discovered the Answer to her quest and it was this: the complicated is very simple. And the simple is very complicated.
It shouldn't have surprised this University of North Carolina drama major that "finding herself" was as near as the closest tree house. An avid student of the world's religions, as Osborne is, should have known that all of the answers to life's most pressing questions, which Osborne avidly sought, were closer to her heart than she imagined.
"All of the mythology, all of the religions, all of the different cultures and my own childhood have all come perfectly together in these little books," says Osborne. "It's almost like a calling. It's not what you chose. It chooses you."
Osborne crosses one matchstick-thin leg over the other. Her Goshen saltbox, which she shares with her husband, actor and playwright Will Osborne, is all blonde wood and high ceilings, its eggshell walls decorated with early 20th century French travel posters and animal illustrations. It is an ample, understated place, with a lacy, multi-tiered deck that leads out to the moss-and-rock strewn woods below.
Although she has written 80 books for children and young adults, it has been the Magic Tree House series about a time-traveling brother-and-sister team that has made all of this possible.
'My fans are 7 years old'
"The amazing thing to me is how I can write a story set in the time of 9th century Irish monastery and have a person who has been on earth only four years absorb all of that," says Osborne, with a guileless incredulity. "It's convinced me that children can absorb far more than we give them. I feel I am feeding off of a hunger that growing minds have for learning."
Published from Korea to France and Slovenia to Turkey, the Magic Tree House books star the patient, analytical Jack and his impulsive, intuitive sister Annie.
Together, of course, they make up Osborne, who is more cautious than brave, and more patient than impetuous. While walking through the woods in Frog Creek, Penn., Jack and Annie discover a tree house that has the magic power to transport them to other lands and time zones. All they have to do is point to a picture in a reference book and say, "I wish we could go there."
Giving them trees
For Osborne, born in Fort Sill, Okla., to an Army colonel and his Alabama-born wife, the books allow children to engage in the aimless wandering through the woods that was the meat of her own childhood, but is often off-limits to children today.

"Now so many children don't have the chance to go into the trees and build a fort and disappear for four or five hours," says Osborne. "This goes a little way toward substituting for that."
Throughout Osborne's childhood, her family moved to a series of Army bases around the southeastern U.S. She has acute memories of the afternoons she and her three siblings spent planning and constructing various forts and havens in the lush wooded areas surrounding their homes.
"I remember all our constructions and all of our plans," she said. "Now it just seems so precious and sublime compared to the limitations that are out there today. Our mothers weren't that afraid for us. The free rein our parents gave us tremendously fed my imagination and sense of adventure."
But when Osborne found herself in the settled and static community of Fayetteville, N.C., where she attended high school, she felt stranded and at a loss, wondering who she was and what she would do with her life. A chance encounter with a community theater convinced her that acting would sate her hunger for a new self. So she studied drama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Deeply involved in the counter-culture, determined to find herself and live an "alternate life," she took off for Europe and the near East, where she spent several months in Lebanon and Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, before leaving Nepal, emaciated and exhausted, afflicted with blood poisoning, no closer to her idyll than when she first started.
"I didn't want a conventional life," says Osborne. "So I struck out in this naïve way to find a life, a different life. In the end I came back sort of defeated."
Finding herself, on a roof
Settling in New York, where she worked as a bartender and waitress, she met her husband, Will, and lived in a tenement on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village [Dash] in near poverty, she says [Dash] for 17 years.
It was on a rooftop of that building that she began sketching out what would be her first young adult novel, "Run, Run as Fast as You Can." A friend of a friend brought the book to a publisher, and Osborne became, as she says, "published before I even knew I was a writer."
She had, finally, met her alternate self. "Ever since I was a child, the people I envied most were the people who loved what they did and made sacrifices for what they did," she said. "There was focus in that. Sacrifice was a piece of it and artistic accomplishment was a piece of it. And saying something no one else could say."
Osborne has published nearly 15 books before one of her publishers, Random House, asked her to come up with a children's book series. While walking through the woods near a cabin the Osbornes own in Pennsylvania, she spotted a tree house and thought, "That would be a good setting for a story." But it took her one year and "seven bad books" before she caught on to the vehicle of a library of books to take Jack and Annie through time. "It's very hard to make the complicated simple," she says. "The simplest ideas are the hardest to find."
No end in sight
Initially, she published four Magic Tree House books, thinking she would end the series as a quartet. She now is on Magic Tree House number 35 and shows no signs of stopping.
Jack and Annie have been to Ancient Japan and China, Ancient Rome, the Moon, the Ice Age and the age of the Vikings. "At some point I must have thought that by the 29th book, I would have run out of energy, enthusiasm and places to travel in the tree house, but surprisingly, none of those things has happened yet," she says.
The series has been a stunning success that had filled Osborne's mailbox with between 500 to 1,000 letters a month from fans, most of whom are under 10 years old. Most are animated, some are heartbreaking and many are funny. "Dear Mary Pope Osborne," one began, "I love your books. I'm 7 years old. I'm working on a novel myself. It's a little scary. It's called 'The Septic System'."
Osborne has resisted offers to turn the series into a television show, movie or video game. "I want to honor the integrity of the lessons taught within (The Magic Tree House), the joy of gathering knowledge and the maintenance of a state of wonder in life. The joy of being a responsible and caring person, which Jack and Annie try to be."
Four years ago, Osborne, who has no children, came through Goshen and spotted and fell in love with a home she bought the next day. She has the luxury of being enormously successful and almost totally anonymous.
"It's not like being a celebrity with all the paparazzi," she says. "My fans are 7 years old. A 7-year-old just wants to rejoice with you. They see you as a peer. It's just sublime. I can't describe my love for 7 year olds."

How Revolutionary is this road?

2008-12-18T11:13:00.001-08:00

When "Revolutionary Road" comes hurtling through the cinemaxes of suburbia this holiday season, will we recognize it?
Certainly, we should. The film version of Richard Yates’ cultic novel is a torrid indictment of suburbia - the place most of us now call home. But the highway between "Revolutionary Road" and "Desperate Housewives" is a meandering one, even if it does land us in the same cul-de-sac. The reaction to Sam Mendes’ long-awaited film version of the novel, some of which was filmed in Thomaston, may tell us more about our embrace of suburbia, even as we chortle over its discontents.
In 1961, when Richard Yates published "Revolutionary Road," fewer Americans lived in suburbs that lived in cities or the country. Even then, "suburban" was code for "banality," its prized picket fences, as much an ideal as a concession. Frank and April Wheeler, the protagonists of Yates’ novel, have not so much "settled down" as "settled for." They see themselves as superior bohemians, determined not to be crushed by the mediocrity that engulfs them. Suburbia, for them, is literally a purgatory, a short-term passage on their way to the Left Bank.
The novel opens with classic suburban compromise- rehearsal for a community theater production of "The Petrified Forest." The selection is tellingly absurd. The Laurel Players may not be the Actor’s Studio, but, gosh-darnit, they won’t sacrifice high culture simply because they’re in the sticks.
Or, as Frank muses, "Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated."
What Frank wants - and April believes he can achieve - is a Jean-Paul Satre-like life in France, arguing existentialism at Les Deux Magots, writing the Great American Novel in some rank atelier, smoking his fingers into nicotine-stained nubs. The trouble for Frank is that he is better at sneering than at creating. The truth is, Frank is hollow at his core. As James Wood suggests in The New Yorker Frank is both Emma and Charles Bovary, "both a rank escapist and a conservative pragmatist: he has arrogated to himself twin rights that out to be incompatible- to dream of escape (and have adulterous affairs, like Emma Bovary), while simultaneously dreaming of timid stability, like Charles Bovary."
Richard Yates was hardly the first to lacerate suburbia as a purgatory of soul-crushing uniformity. By the time "Revolutionary Road," was published, John Cheever had already made his name as the "Chekov of the suburbs" and Hollywood had already weighed in with movies like "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," (1956) and "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955). In the later, suburbia emasculates Jim Stark’s apron-wearing father, Frank, to his son’s disgust.
Jump forward to Tom Perotta’s novel, "Little Children." Here, stay-at-home Dad, Todd has become the pinup "Prom King," lusted after by suburban moms, who see his affectionate relationship with his son as a come-on. Suburbia is still the Middle Earth of unmet desire, but its malaise has less to do with class concessions as it does with the failure of the American dream. Far from being an escape from urban discontent, suburbia is rife with its own perversions. A pedophile returns to the neighborhood, sending neighbors - including Dads hooked on Internet porn - into an uproar.
"These suburban stories start where the American Dream is supposed to end," says Kathy Knapp, assistant professor in the English Department at UConn-Torrington. "The suburbs now face the problems that suburbanites left the cities to avoid - poverty, immigration, an aging population, a declining tax base."
The ennui that Frank and April Wheeler confront is one of class anxiety, the same paranoia that leads Cheever’s characters to cart around a copy of Thucidities. The ennui that faces Benjamin Hood, in Rick Moody’s "The Ice Storm" is less cultural than personal. He, like Janey Williams, with whom he has an affair, has no aspirations to bohemia. He just wants to beat his boss at golf and cuckold his best friend.
In 1974, a dissolute Yates, then embalming himself with booze and cigarettes, told an interviewer that he had wanted to detonate the 1950s American ideal. "Our best and bravest revolutionary spirit had come to something very much like a dead end," he said.
Increasingly, says Knapp, writers like Chang Rae-Lee and Richard Ford are making their peace with suburbia, recognizing that it is as conformist or as craven as the people who live in it. The scorn with which suburbia was once held has been replaced by an wary acceptance that the American Dream is never far away from our basest actions. If the suburban doll house is sterile and vacuous, it’s only because the people living in it are more vapid than they want to admit.

Suburban angst in 'Revolutionary Road' et al

2008-12-18T07:40:00.000-08:00

I'm a suburban gal. I was born in the suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs. I'm raising my son in the suburbs.

I like the suburbs because they're the perfect place for people who can't make up their mind. ---- Cities are great if you like fine restaurants, penetrating art exhibits and people who know the difference between the James brothers and the Farrelly Brothers. They'd be swell places to live if they weren't so crowded.

The country is great if you like serenity, isolation and the company of cud-chewing neighbors, but the opportunities for conversation are limited if you can't lay anything.

The suburbs are the perfect place for the chronically ambivalent.

Because of that, the suburbs have spawned their own sub-genre of fiction: the suburb as the dumping ground for middle class perversity. Nobody likes people who can't make up their mind, particularly authors, who typically live in cities and have become darn miserable about it. The suburbs have been the convenient whipping boy of the intelligentsia, who accuse the suburbs of being fatuous, sterile and stultifying. From Sinclair Lewis, to Richard Ford to John Cheever to Rick Moody, "suburban" has become synonymous with banal.

Filmmakers have followed suit, with films from "The Stepford Wives," to "Pleasantville," to "Revolutionary Road," to "American Beauty"and back to "The Stepford Wives" again.

So much fiction has depended on lifting the veneer of suburban perfection that it's surprising that any veneer is left at all. But a new study gives new ammunition to critics of suburbia: Not only are the suburbs sterile, misogynistic and pretentious, they're also bad for your health.

A report by the Rand Corp. finds that people who live in sprawling suburbs tend to have more health problems. The study, which analyzed data on more than 8,600 Americans in 38 metropolitan areas, found that rates of arthritis, asthma, headaches and other complaints increased with the degree of sprawl.

"An adult living somewhere like Atlanta, with its spread-out suburbs and car-heavy culture, will have a health profile that looks like that of someone who lives in Seattle [Dash] but who is four years older, " Reuters reports.

In other words, it's not just the key parties, or the female robots, or the rose-petaled fantasies of middle-aged men that makes living in the suburbs precarious, it's the sprawl.

Sprawl, in other words, can subtract four years from your life.

All of it sitting in traffic.

Well, who signed up for sprawl? I sure didn't. When I was a kid, suburbs had a small town center, a few local pizzarias and drug stores, and perhaps a corner penny candy store. Now, they're choked with Jiffy Lubes and Chuck E. Cheeses, KFCs and Taco Bells. All of that is supposed to make our taxes go down, except that taxes are increasing almost as fast and as high as our blood pressure.

Researchers in the October issue of Public Health speculate that the more suburbs turn into interlocking strip malls, the less people are apt to ride their bikes, walk to their neighbors or jog to the local package store.

If only we had sidewalks, the authors lament. Then we wouldn't be such overweight, overanxious, coughing, sputtering, aching exemplars of middle-class angst.

Tell that to Jack Lalane. The guy's been pumping iron since the Bronze Age. A dearth of Bally's didn't stop him.

On the other hand, have you ever actually tried to hop on your bike and pick up your prescription at the local pharmacy? I have and do and want to tell you that you need nerves of steel and full body armor to do it. The only thing worse than lack of sidewalks are sidewalks that abruptly end like unfinished sentences, leaving you in a pit of ragweed, smashed beer bottles and crud, wondering why you didn't just rent a Humvee and marveling at the irony of losing your life en route to filling a prescription.

The only more dangerous place to live than a suburb is a city, where the fear factor, lack of available grocery stores and poverty contribute to high levels of obesity and chronic diseases.

The cities, of course, are now equally defaced by Burger King, Gap, Staples and Toys 'R' Us, meaning that wherever you are life is dangerous, unhealthy and eerily, noxiously indistinguishable.

Green Acres is the place for me.

Calder's Jewelry at Metropolitan

2008-12-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

Nobody could be a wallflower in a piece of Alexander Calder jewelry.
It was a sure remedy for reticence. Wearing a piece of Calder turned one into a mobile, and often into something more martial and primal, a Masai goddess or Celtic chieftain.
Calder, who spent the bulk of his artistic life in Roxbury, was celebrated for breathing air into sculpture, with his mobiles and stabiles. But his contribution to jewelry has been overlooked and underappreciated. A new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hints at why that might be. Culling from the more than 1,000 unique pieces of brass, silver and gold ornaments, the Met has come up with a representative 90, the first time they have been exhibited exclusively.
That is more than enough to convince viewers of Calder's transgressive approach to fine art. These bent, twisted, coiled spirals of hammered metal say as much about the artist's fetishistic devotion to primitive art as they do about his own pilgrim spirit. Calder didn't simply want art to move; he wanted people to move with it.
These are sinuous designs that hypnotize you with their enormity and elasticity. They twist and pivot, suspend and support, curve and swerve. One, a brass wire necklace that cinches the shoulders, slithers cursively to the abdomen in a series of serpentine doodles, outlining its wearer in extravagant glyphs. A Calder necklace could caress the wearer in delicate cuirass, or more pointedly defend chastity, as "The Jealous Husband Necklace" does. Here, brass wire takes on the pliancy of an extremely limber snake, but at the shoulders, a couple of well-placed barbs ward off all suitors
Nearly all of these gorgeous pieces are brass or silver and all are bruised by Calder's hammer. The intentionality of the artist's hand was crucial to Calder, who resisted all attempts to mass market his jewelry. His grandson, Alexander S.C. Rower, makes the point that Calder used "honest industrial materials" like brass and steel wire. Only a few of the items are gold – including a stunning ring of a spiral curling into a double-helix Calder made as his wife's wedding band.
"The jewelry is an invitation to join him in a utopian view that he had in which you don't have to wear pearls and jewels," Rower said. "Why not wear brass and ceramic plates?"
Why not indeed? As his friend, the British surrealist Stanley William Hayter said, "In the early days in Paris, everybody was wearing Calder jewelry."
Most were made for friends; although it's clear Calder had a broader audience in mind. These works, particularly the gifts, are leavened with Calder's pun-heavy humor, soldered with his breathtaking manipulation of formal images. "Calder's jewelry may be seen as a sort of surrealistic strategy to entrap the wearer into participating in an art performance, even to become bewitched," Mark Rosenthal writes in the gorgeous catalog. "To wear the jewelry is to induce dreams and to become metamorphosed."
Calder's puckish sense of humor, vividly displayed here with his fish, pig, lizard and initialized brooches, can sometimes undercut the bravura nature of his art. Strangely, in these smaller, mesmerizing pieces, his broader ambition becomes more evident. Whether in mobiles, drawings or steel sculptures, Calder was blurring distinctions between high and low, primitive and precious, art and craft and even surrealism and modernism, whose concepts he deftly straddled.
To achieve that in the international art scene was but no means a cinch, but to do so in the realm of jewelry heightened the intimacy of his quest. This was a man who created jewelry out of scrap metal during the glittering jazz age and put it on heiresses and socialites. And they wore it – even if it hurt.
Peggy Guggenheim, in particular, was an admirer and a picture of her in her Calder earrings, which are on display nearby, demonstrates how overwhelming (and uncomfortable) the pieces could be. Guggenheim poises delicately, looking a bit like she is about to be impaled by their exuberance.
But Guggenheim loved the earrings, and boasted to her friends, that although they had brooches, bracelets and necklaces, only she had a Calder mobile hanging from her lobes (She also had a Calder headboard for her pied-à-terre in Venice.)
Calder began creating jewelry out of scrap parts as young as age 8, when he cobbled together some electric cables he found to make a ring for his sister's doll. He began creating jewelry in earnest beginning in 1928 and kept at it throughout his career. Jewelry seemed to give him the opportunity to explore the archetypal power of ancient symbols in a more tangible way.
After moving to Paris in 1926, Calder had clearly been influenced by the primitive art he saw at Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro (Today Le Musée de l'Homme. He was particularly captivated by late-Bronze Age Celtic ornamentation, which he mirthfully appropriated. His curlicues are ancient and familiar, and wearing them signified a bohemianism of the purest sort. Many of the hallmarks of Calder's jewelry show up today in tattoos. Indeed, so much of Calder's rustic Boho ethos has been gobbled up by mass-produced "individualism" that his jewelry looks less ornamental and more sculptural than ever. When a pierced nose and Birkenstocks will gain you access to the avant-garde, Calder's rusticity looks almost quaint.
It's a credit to Calder's singular vision that 60 years later, he's still able to tell us how to get real.
The exhibit continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., New York, through March 1, 2009. For more information, visit www.metmuseum.org or call (212)535-7710.

They're going in debt for college, but not for me

2008-12-03T10:53:00.001-08:00

Ever since my son was a tot, I have squirreled away as much as I could muster for his college education.
Education is a priority in our family, but every year that goes by, it becomes clearer that nothing I could ever amass will dent what it will cost to send him to college. Despite his precocity and desire, college may be out of the question for him - and for anybody else earning less than an auto executive’s salary.
The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reported this month that the rising cost of education has put it virtually out-of-reach for most Americans. By the time my son, 7, is college age, he may take his place among the first American generation to be less educated than its parents.
Indeed, that has already happened. We have fewer college-age kids enrolled in college than six other industrialized countries and even fewer American kids complete their degree. The kids in Japan, Ireland, Korea and France far outrank us in college completion rates. Why? Did you ever talk to an American high school graduate and compare it to the conversation you have with a European? It’s like the difference between the Algonquin Round Table canapés and burritos with Beavis and Butthead. (Indeed, a recent study of America’s most elite universities found that while all college students could identify B & B, only 40 percent could even put the U.S. Civil War in the right century.)
Today’s 25 to 34-year-olds are actually less educated than their Baby Boomer elders. Only 39 percent of adults 25-34 hold an associate’s degree or higher in the U.S. Compare that to Canada, where the figure is 55 percent or Korea, where the figure is 53 percent.
That’s because while median family income has risen 147 percent from 1982 to 2007 in the U.S., the cost of college tuition and fees has soared 439 percent. How can anyone possibly afford that? They can’t. Student borrowing has doubled in the last 10 years and the percent of a family’s income it eats up is bigger than ever. A private, four-year institution will devour 76 percent of the income of a median American family.
"The middle class has been financing [college education] through debt," Patrick M.Callahan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, told The New York Times. "The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever it takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt."
In Connecticut, for instance, we do a great job at preparing our kids for college - as long as they’re rich. This state has the ignoble distinction of having the widest achievement gaps between rich and poor than any other state in the country, reports the U.S. Department of Education. So we get an "A" for preparing kids for school and an "F" for making it affordable, which is a bit like teaching a kid to ride a bike, and then not giving him one to ride on.
This might be merely onerous if the whole value of a college degree hadn’t become so dubious. Sure, all kinds of reports will tell you how much difference a college degree makes in terms of how much salary its recipients command, but, again, talk to some of these students and their ignorance on basic matters staggers the imagination. One study reported that less than half of college seniors knew that Yorktown was the battle that ended the American Revolution or the reason NATO was formed (remember the old U.S.S.R.?)
Not long ago, a college professor friend of mine wrote me about trying to prepare his students for a mid-term exam, which would rely heavily on the readings he assigned. One student bristled. ""I've never really liked reading. I don't see the point in it," she told my friend, her instructor. She added that she didn’t think it was "fair" that, at the college level, I placed such an emphasis on reading."
Yes, the world is a cruel place.
Nobody who’s visited a college dorm lately can deny that the place has been spruced up. In my day, the places looked like Soviet-era gymnasiums. Now they look like Doubletree Suites. And the potentate presiding over these glittering dominions receive a king’s ransom. In November, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that presidents at 12 private university pulled down more than $1 million last year. The University of Connecticut's president, Philip E. Austin, received $412,this year - above the national average of $328,400 for public institutions.
So embarrassed were several college presidents over their income that they actually gave back some of their salaries after the report came out. Next, they’ll be driving around campus in Hybrids.
If this country believes, as Thomas Jefferson did, that education is the great equalizer, it needs to pull the plug on fripperies and sinecures and start doing a better job at teaching its kids. Because right now, it ain't worth it.

Connecticut's Michael Theise

2008-12-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

Don’t scratch..
It’s not tape. Sure, that mildly ribbed, manila-tinted rectangular sliver looks like masking tape --- particularly when it’s used to stick a $50 bill to a "Yield" sign.
But neither the Yield sign, nor, alas, the $50, are authentic. Then again, the arresting canvas of Michael Theise, authenticity is a matter of perspective.
Doubt, alarm, verisimilitude and a willing suspension of disbelief, are all at play in the strikingly realistic work of Wallingford painter Theise. The trompe l’oeil artist is a successor to 19th century American painters William Harnett and John Haberle, to both of whom Theise makes sly reference.
And like Harnett and Haberle, Theise works in the 19th century tradition of moral landscapes. These stunningly accurate depictions of dart boards, road signs, Monopoly boards and, most disturbingly, money, are morality lessons for a new generation. Not surprisingly, they drip with irony. Theise, 49, is nothing if not arch, and his searing indictment of a society built on a fraudulent value. For Theise, that is the spurious assertion of financial security.
What’s particularly painful to concede is ‘twas ever thus. The precision of Theise’s depiction of a New York Central Railroad stock certificate is only matched by its utter lack of worth today. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s New York Central was the – take your pick, Enron? Lehman Brothers? Merrill Lynch? --- of its day. In "Hidden Assets" Theise paints a railroad stock certificate underneath two pristine $50 bills and on top of a folded copy of The Wall Street Journal.
All of this was dear in its day, but that particular opiate has lost a fair amount of its delirium-inducing properties today. Money is not just, as Theise playfully asserts "the Route of All Evil," in his creepily accurate image of an "Interstate Route 666" sign, but is, like trompe l’oeil itself, a ruse.
Trompe l’oeil has always been the parvenu’s highway to prestige. The Ancient Romans used it to make their homes look like they stretched into infinity. Most contemporary trompe l’oeil artists, harkening back to those historic roots, paint old objects – playing cards, groaning sideboards, and old lamps – but Theise is adamantly contemporary. He jars with the bold graphics, signs and the iconography of the 21st century. Painting money is his ballywick, but it’s also a way of clueing the viewer in to his impressive talent. As the Milford native notes, everybody uses money, so if he trips, even the most dull-witted viewer will notice.
"It’s very challenging," says Theise of his proclivity to reproducing the dollars. "Either it’s right or it’s wrong. And everybody knows because every body handles it every day."
Theise was always one of those kids with an eerie facility for exactitude. At Paeir College of Art in Hamden, he figured he’d focus on illustration because that was where the money was. Theise specialized in drawing animals, and would frequently borrow animal skins – fox, gopher, whatever was available – from the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, the way other people might borrow books from a library. He became so meticulous in his animal renderings that the only way to reach the next level was to go out in the field and observe them, which, he thought, was a little preposterous.
So when his professor, Ken Davies, showed him trompe l’oeil for the first time, he nearly fell off the chair with excitement. Here was scrupulousness that put Theise's own efforts to shame. Although he has a full-time job, working as produce manager for Stop & Shop, he paints daily, a discipline he believes has made the difference in his arresting oils. "I have a real respect for the rules of trompe l’oeil," he says. "All the objects have to be flat. All the objects have to be still." No flies on rotting fruit for Theise. "That would take away from the illusion," he says, "because I would expect the fly to move."
And that, of course, would be cheating.
Theise’s work can be seen at Cooley Gallery in Old Lyme and at Vose Galleries of Boston.

So many pots to throw

2008-12-02T08:48:00.000-08:00

Somewhere, in Joy Brown’s snugly organic house high on a ridge in Kent, there is a cup. It is a small, earthenware object, no more than two inches high and not more than that in diameter, whose form, heft, discolorations and proportions lodge in the lush membrane between memory and sensation so integral in Brown’s art.
The cup is one of thousands that Brown made as an apprentice in a primitive village in Tamba, Japan in 1974. The cups were never fired. They were never used. But Brown, the daughter of American missionaries, threw cup after cup at the direction of her mentor, Toshio Ichino, every evening in a village that had created pottery for 13 generations. At the end of the evening, the cups were thrown into the same muck of clay from which they had come, and Brown did not consider the act wasteful, but enlightening. It wasn’t just an exhausting tutorial on the transience of life and effort. For Brown, it worked to dissolve the boundary between the cerebral and the sensual, between thought and creation.
"We threw those cups thousands and thousands of times," said Brown, 58. "You’re throwing it and trimming it and understanding the thickness of the clay, how the lip turns, the balance of the cup. And in the process, you’re thinking is dropping back and you’re being with the clay. It’s developing your intuitive connection to the clay. It’s not coming from a thinking place. It’s sheer process." Brown, a tall, hale-looking woman with handsome features and soft gray eyes, breathes deeply. "It makes you more whole in a way."
Joy Brown is no longer throwing pots into the abyss, but the equilibrium she developed from years of discipline in Japan reveals itself in the serene, self-composed sculptures that have earned her praise over the last 22 years. She is among the state’s premier ceramic artists and the firing of her meticulously assembled wood-fired kiln has become something of a regional celebration, like the bonfire of some Yankee shaman.
Perhaps it is her talismanic figures, which bound and vault, soar and skip, consider and console. These wood-ash ceramic sculptures are ageless, sexless, neutral naifs, open mouthed and wide-eyed, neither Caucasian or Asian, young nor old. The guileless, earth-toned beings, squat, thick figures, all bald, with ample limbs and flat, square-ish feet, stare at the viewer with a mixture of wisdom and wonder. Their wide-eyed gazes manage to be both artless and incriminating. These are figures of disarming candor that insinuate themselves into the viewer's consciousness, like children looking for the truth.
"They’re kind of like how I’d like to be: Relaxed, alert, inquisitive."
All of that seems to aptly describe Brown, who grew up in Japan, and bounced back and forth between the countries as a twentysomething, trying to find her footing. Ultimately, she landed in Pine Plains, N.Y., where she studied with Paul Chaleff, and Wingdale N.Y., a craft village where she thought she’s satisfy her customer’s urge for shimmering trinkets by making shiny, glazed puts.
But none of it seemed to gel until she moved to Kent in 1984, building her house, then studio and kiln on this rustic knoll, where her enigmatic sculptures now greet visitors with an inquisitive conviviality. The sculptures are hand built from Georgia clay of a moist, ochre color, which Brown coils and presses into anatomical form. She strikes them with a light paddle, a little bigger than a ruler, to give them shape. Often, the creatures pull their knees together in a kind of tranquil alertness. These are figures in the art of active listening, a bit like the young apprentice Joy Brown, learning that discipline was the first step to creative awareness by making saki cups from which no one would ever drink.
"You’re pulling on your physical, your emotional, your mental capacities and talents to make these things," she says. "You’re not controlling the clay, you’re collaborating with it. It’s a relaxed awareness and you flow with the material. "
Joy Brown’s work can be seen at Bachelier Cardonsky Gallery, 10 Main St., Kent (www.bacheliercardonsky.com) or at www.artwithin.net.

Sins of the Father vested on their daughters

2008-11-25T14:50:00.000-08:00

Monika Hertwig was an 11-year-old fatherless girl growing up in post-war Germany when she and her mother had one of their frequent squabbles. In a fury, Hertwig’s mother, Ruth, turned and spat out, "You're a lot like your father and some day you're going to die like him."
The girl recoiled. She had been born a year after her father’s death and was told he had died in the war, like so many young Germans, a hero.
When the perplexed Monika asked her mother to explain the remark, Ruth replied, "Monika, they hanged him."
Hertwig’s father was the infamous Amon Goeth, an SS officer and the Commandant of the Plaszow labor camp, memorialized in "Schindler’s List" (played by Ralph Fiennes). How his barbarous legacy affected his daughter, and her courageous effort to meet the woman who knew his brutality most intimately is the subject of "Inheritance," Dec. 10 on PBS.
So much of what we know about the Holocaust has been conveyed by survivors and witnesses, and perhaps it has taken us 50 years to fully digest the breadth and vastness of its cruel efficiency. Understanding why it occurred, a dicier but ultimately more urgent quest, continues to perplex. Understanding the legacy of guilt children of Nazis carry with them can seem, even to Hertwig, indulgent to the point of coddling. "I never would have any pity with children of perpetrators," she says blankly. "Never."
After the war, Allied courts rejected the notion of collective German guilt, substituting the concept of personal guilt.
And yet, as Peter Schneider has written, collective guilt is inescapable. "Since genocide by the Germans was not the work of a scattered few, it touches the children of those who occupied the low rungs of the Nazi ladder or contributed to the atrocities by simply marching along," he wrote in 1987. "Theoretically, the children of war criminals had to decide between possibly equally strong emotions: attachment to their parents and repulsion for their crimes."
But that’s only in theory. While it’s true that some children of Nazis, like Niklas Frank, son of Hitler’s representative in Poland, Hans Frank, went on a public spree of exultation over his father’s execution, others remain tortured and shamed by their legacy.
It is one thing to ask how one turns a blind eye to the banality of evil, but it is quite another to ask, as "Inheritance" does, whether cruelty transmits through blood, and whether the sins of the father are, in this case, vested on the daughter.
This is a question that haunts Monika, and the film candidly captures her sullen, slouched body movements, the curtain of hair that shields her worn, leathery face. This is a woman who looks like she wants to disappear.
But she doesn’t. Moreover, she seems to walk straight into the vortex. In 2003, Hertwig wrote a letter to Helen Jonas, Goeth’s slave, asking to meet with her.
"I want to learn about my father, I want to learn about my family history. I want to learn about my mother and how my mother could have let this happen?"
"Inheritance is a documentary that sets several definitions - of victimhood, of courage, of guilt - on their heads. Director James Moll wisely embraces ambiguity in the film’s nuanced calibration between guilt, responsibility, the genesis of evil and the limits of compassion. Understandably, Jonas did not want to meet the daughter of the man who tortured her. Ultimately, she agreed because of her responsibility as a parent and grandparent, to visit the villa at the Plaszow camp.
Goeth was among the most sadistic Nazi SS officers, earning his position at the camp through his brutal "liquidation" of the Krakow ghetto ad his experience at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps in Eastern Poland.
From the time that she learned about her father’s butchery, Hertwig, now in her 60s, has struggled to learn more. There is no shortage of information about Amon Goeth. Survivors tell of him rounding up children and shooting them indiscriminately as they fled through the yard. Others tell of him setting dogs on Jewish prisoners, tearing them to pieces - deaths Jonas suggests she witnessed. "He was a monster," Jonas bleats tearfully to Hertwig. "He was a living monster. He enjoyed what he was doing." This is something Hertwig knows, but insists she needs to confront. "I believe everything," she says through tears. "But I can’t live with it."
Goeth was ultimately arrested in 1944 for black market corruption and was executed by the Poles. The execution by hanging took three tries and Hertwig has watched it. It is included in the film and perhaps the most startling effect it has is numbness.

There is anguish in this film and there is a paucity of clemency. Absolution seems indecent and even beside the point. What there is plenty of in "Inheritance" is courage --- even if it is 60 years too late.

The King of Cardboard

2008-11-20T14:17:00.000-08:00

Maybe they should have buried him in a box - cardboard, whose temper he knew so intimately.

Cardboard seemed to spool out of Copeland, warp, bow and twist in his hand, like clay or wire, pliant and supple and full of possibilities. People - not just the artists in New York or the gallery owners in Washington - asked him why he didn’t use wood. But wood was expensive and durable and Joseph Copeland was poor and fugitive, here beyond his time and gone too soon.
Joseph Copeland, 50, died Nov. 15 and nobody outside of his family and a few supporters knew he was a king. He was the King of Cardboard, a sovereign of refuse - the stray oatmeal container, the box of Arm & Hammer, the Maytag washer package, the matchbox-size pack of Junior Mints handed out at Halloween. These he collected, and painted, and glued, and twisted and coaxed until something impossible and inexplicable materialized: A Space Shuttle. An 18-wheeler. An M1 Adams Tank. Or the heavy-jawed tractor he had seen erase a house in his neighborhood like a dog devouring a rodent.
These were large-scale affairs of meticulous detail. The cranes lifted, the front-end loaders dug, and the back hoes operated through a series of precisely arranged parts made of strings, toothpicks, hypodermic plungers and lollipop sticks.
It might have been impressive, if it hadn’t been so improbable. Joseph Copeland was one of 10, born with a boot-shaped hole in his heart and a mind his family called "slow." Later, there would be kidney and diabetes problems, but that was later. In his youth, he was merely cherubic and uncanny. He was like a mockingbird, steeling spools of cardboard from his sister’s drawers, and cereal boxes from his mother’s cabinets. He would lay shoe boxes onto match boxes and fasten them with paper towel rolls and toothpicks and Popsicle sticks, lacquering them with Elmer’s Wood Glue, all the time never consulting a picture or a sketch or some facsimile other than his steel-jawed memory.
And all of this might have been just a unusual but peripheral hobby if a woman named Elanah Sherman hadn’t walked into the home Copeland was sharing with Patti Owen in the Brooklyn section of Waterbury in 1996. A disability-rights advocate worker in Waterbury to investigate Owen’s Medicaid problem, Sherman was struck by the accretion of cardboard and packaging materials in the home. "Would you like to meet my son?" Owen asked Sherman.
In the bedroom, arrayed on the bed were a convoy of large-scale, working replicas of building vehicles. Cranes Trucks. Front-End loaders. Secret panels that opened to reveal engines, levers and wheels. This, Sherman thought, is magnificent. Within a week, Sherman had called her friend, the art dealer Margaret Bodelle. When she saw his work, Bodell said, "I thought I was in the presence of a genius."
Within a year, Copeland had a one-man show in New York called "Earth Movers" He exhibited at the Very Special Arts Gallery in Washington, D.C., Real Art Ways in Hartford at Bradley Airport. He was featured in Sculpture magazine, which declaimed, "Copeland's ability to reproduce complicated equipment accurately in such an awkward medium borders on the miraculous."
But there were no miracles for Copeland. At 10, he fell in love, with a girl named Carol Nahlinger, whom he saw across the Bucks Hill Elementary School yard, and took his breath away. On a day that changed both of their lives, he walked up to her and said, "You’re an angel." For the rest of his life, until circumstance separated them, she was the only woman he ever loved.
In 1998, after more years apart than they liked to remember, he found Carol again and asked her to marry him. By then, he was sickly, and his diabetes and kidney disease degenerated over time. They never married because both of them were disabled and marriage would halve their disability benefits. But Carol said there was never a day that he did not tell her he loved her.
Yesterday, in an armchair at Kelley-Brennan Funeral Home in the city’s North End, Carol said, "I haven’t seen him since August," and plunged her aluminum cane onto the beige carpet and sobbed.
Last Saturday, Katro Storm, Bodell’s associate, drove his white 1997 Ford E150 cargo van to Abbott Terrace to ferry Copeland to a statewide forum on careers in the arts for people with disabilities. Storm approached the desk and said, "I’m here to pick up the famous artist Joseph Copeland." The staff gaped. The patients craned their neck. Joseph. Why, Joseph. You never told us you were an artist.
Copeland, weary and ailing, perked up. He refused a wheelchair. He walked to the van. He traveled to St. Joseph College, where the forum was held and where Copeland’s work was on display. There, among the people who knew him as King, around the work he forged out of improbability and dross, Joseph Copeland collapsed and later died.
His sister, Carol Rogers, is a religious woman who knows that all our days are numbered, but that Joseph’s were smaller yet. She remembers the world her brother created on the walls when they were children. A world called Richmond on a planet undiscovered. Each state in the world had a leader. Some were black. Some were white. Some were quick and some were slow. If there is a saving grace, she says, it is that Joseph died surrounded by those he loved, in that other world, the world he imagined, and in which he flourished, for just a little while, where cardboard, and Joseph, were king.

Living in a Duplex, With Mom

2008-11-18T08:16:00.001-08:00

My mother and brother just bought a house together.
This is a watershed moment. I spent many of my formative years trying to keep them from killing each other. The fact that they will now live under the same roof is a testament to the power of forbearance, filial devotion and economic desperation.
The fact is, they needed each other.
My brother had recently divorced and found his finances much diminished. My mother suffers from a generalized financial incontinence and a chronic aversion to stability. Change excites her. Living with her is like living in a vaudeville theater where the sets keep changing and you're never quite sure if the backdrop has shifted or if you're losing your mind. She is the kind of person who collects so many paint samples, she uses them as coasters.
So, when my brother started sniffing around for a new home and found he needed a little help, my mother found an excuse to help.
"I'm sick of this place," she said. "I've been here two years."
Ultimately, my brother and mother found a duplex outside of Boston that overlooks a public park. On a clear day, you can see Belmont.
For me, the purchase was convenient and consoling. I would no longer have to spend my visits home dashing about Route 128 from one house to another. My brother's presence in the house meant that my mother was less inclined to move. She was not shackled, alas, but at least she was moored.
Duplexes, in which one generation lived on one floor and another lived in the next, were a cozy and financially prudent living arrangement for generations of Americans at the beginning of the 20th century. According to the Census, they may become so again.
The 2000 Census reported that 4 million American households consisting of three or more generations lived together. Since 1990, the number of multigenerational families grew by approximately 60 percent.
The change is significant, but it's not seismic. Only 3.7 percent of American households are multigenerational, and the reasons families are linking back up have to do not only with money, but with the health of the older generation, and, in many cases, grandchildren whose parents are either absent or unable to care for them alone.
Cities like Waterbury, where I work; and Boston, in whose suburbs I was raised, were filled with duplexes and triple-deckers, which housed three generations, typically of immigrants. By 1920, Boston had 15,000 triple deckers. In Waterbury, 45 percent of foremen in the city's eight biggest factories lived in triple deckers in 1922. Even up to 1950, a third of the Brass City's population lived in three family units.
My son lives more than 1,000 miles away from one grandmother and 130 miles away from the other. The dynamic that exists between him and his grandmothers is more formal than the inter-generational mayhem that existed in the mid-19th century, when about 70 percent of grandparents lived with their adult children.
Grandparents, their queer maxims, funky-smelling furniture, pungent meals and obsolete appliances braided awkwardly but intimately with their young progeny. We saw them in their housecoats and their skiffs, their ill-fitting overalls and big blue curlers. They smelled not of perfume, but of meat, and lemon polish and age. They didn’t ask you what you did in school, because they knew. They kept your report cards in the credenza and your art projects on the ‘fridge. When you smart-mouthed them, they washed your mouth out with a large, bitter block of soap and made you scrub the floor. You watched them die, and when they died, you got their room.
The difference between my mother and brother’s house is a set of stairs. My son and nephew clomp up and down them, and charge in and out of big oak doors that thud when they hit the walls. "What is that?" says my mother, lying prostrate in bed at 8 a.m. "It sounds like the wrath of Thor."
But my mother gets out of bed, puts on her Lanz robe, plugs in the coffee maker and sticks two slabs of bread into the toaster. "Keegan!" she shouts up the steps. "Get down here and have your breakfast."
"I don’t wanna!" he bellows, and giggles uproariously with his cousin and the new puppy.
"Shut up and eat," says my mother, who scuffs into the bathroom to gargle.
And Keegan does, and he brings my son, and the puppy along. And the three of them sit around the table and stuff cinnamon toast into their mouths as my mother slathers Dove on her face and wonders what she’s doing up at this hour of the morning. And the two cousins sit and laugh and feed the crusts to the puppy, but they do not refuse Nana’s toast, because everyone knows Nana’s toast is better than anyone else’s.

Now it's our turn to step up

2008-11-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

I’m beginning to wonder if we have the mettle for this.
Austerity, to the American consumer can sound like a wallpaper pattern, something exotic and obscure, like chastity to a VH1 viewer.
Prudence has not exactly been this country’s financial beacon of late, and now that the economy is crumbling like Gorgonzola on bed of mesclun greens, we’re going to have to start acquainting ourselves with its sober charms.
Few societies have taken so avidly to profligacy as 21st century Americans. In the last 20 years, per capita consumption has grown 45 percent but our annual savings rate is in the negative digits. Alas, until the housing industry exploded like an overcooked gnocchi recently, nobody seemed to care. Indeed, so dependent has the economy become on consumer spending that when the country was struck by terrorists in 2001, the chief executive suggested our best response was to go out and spend.
Well, that is something we are very good at.
As Dr. Peter C. Whybrow writes, "Seduced by the enticements of a global market, the American consumer has in recent decades fallen victim to an orgy of self-indulgence," writes Dr. Peter C. Whybrown, author of "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough." Whybrow notes that while productivity per person hour in the U.S. is comparable to that of most European nations, its material consumption per person is greater by one third.
"America’s traditional immigrant values of resourcefulness, thrift, prudence and an abiding concern for family and community have been hijacked by a commercially driven, all-consuming self-interest," he writes.
For the past few years now, we have been worshipfully gobbling up all the adoring histrionics about the "greatest generation," never stopping to consider that we might be put to the test.
Daily, it seems, we wake up to triple-digit Wall Street losses. Companies that have been household names for decades are filing for bankruptcy or asking for bailouts. Brands that have been synonymous with urban chic – like Starbucks and Gap – are holding on to the increasingly dim hope that Americans will still want to spend $3 for a cup of coffee or $22 for a T-Shirt. The legion of advertisers who have scuttled the distinction between want and need must be in paroxysms of panic that Americans might adopt the wet blanket attitude of thrift.
This, of course, would be a seismic social change. This country throws out 68 pounds of clothing a year - that’s more than most others buy. Fifteen percent of the food we throw away has never been opened and is still within its expiration date. American women spend $7 billion annually on cosmetics -$1 billion more than it would cost to educate every child in the world. That $7 billion doesn’t count the 11.7 million cosmetic surgical and non-surgical procedures were performed in the United States in 2007 - a 446 percent increase in 10 years, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Surgery. The average American ate away from home an average of 4.2 meals per week in 2004.
For the still-frugal Americans who clip their own nails and dye their own hair, all of this prodigality has been difficult to endure. Not long ago, a woman called me, worried that her video-game-addicted grandchildren were oblivious to the reams of cash they were blithely tearing through. She had a terrific point. Arguably most prized consumer group are children ages four to 12, whose spending rose 400 percent between 1989 and 2002, when they spent $30 billion, reports economist Juliet B. Schor. We have suckled an entire generation on consumption, and now left them with the bill.
As a French friend of mine writes, "I think it’s difficult for a lot of people to function with less when they have known so much. Our corner of the world has been well spoiled and now we are taking away its big cookie."

So what to give up? The manicure? The car wash? The espresso? The hair color?

Or simply the notion that we are entitled to more than the world has ever known?

Things that make you a Scrooge

2008-11-11T12:26:00.000-08:00

This is why you don't do it. Or at least why you say you don't. The Zimbabwe government, led by tyrannical fruitcake Robert Mugabe managed to tear through $7.3 million donated by an international organization to fight killer diseases. The only disease Mugabe and his thugs appeared to vanquish was the virus of compassion, which is spread by equal parts pity and hope.

Practically nothing goes right in Zimbabwe, a country so corrupt that good government is measured by degrees of dissolution. Merciful souls who want to help that tortured country eradicate malaria, AIDS and tuberculosis pinched their pennies and sent Zimbabwe a hefty check intended to help its battered citizens live past the age of 45.

This is a country where nearly 25 percent of the population is infected with HIV/AIDS-- a disease that kills about 140,000 people annually. Most people there don't go to school past the age of 9 and don't make more than $200 a year.

It's the kind of place that should, and does, inspire compassion. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis and Malaria deposited $12.3 million in foreign currency into Zimbabwe's Reserve Bank, the New York Times reported. But some $7.3 million of that is missing, no doubt to the lavish cronyism that has rotted a country so liberally blessed with abundant natural resources. Under such circumstances, it is questionable whether the Global Fund will fund a $188 million grant intended to assist the devastated country. How broken is Zimbabwe? The country has an annual inflation rate of more than 230 million percent, according to the United Nations. One million children have lost one or both parents. This a country of 11 million people, 80 percent of whom are unemployed.

What happened to the $7.3 million is a mystery but the effects of its disappearance are not. This kind of theft inhibits well-intentioned people from helping where the need is greatest. For the stingy among us, it cements the reputation of African nations as being so lousy with corruption that they cannot even be graced by charity. At a time in which Americans are feeling economically pinched, those in other countries are dying. They are needier than ever, and the trust that is charity's linchpin is more exigent than ever.

What happened in Zimbabwe is the kind of malfeasance that leads Americans to utter nonsensical cliches like "Charity begins at home." It does not. Charity begins where it is needed most. Only xenophobia insists that mercy be directed exclusively to those who share our nationality. It is not just justice that is blind, but charity, which should be.

SEE The New York Times Editorial

Swearing and the FCC

2008-11-10T08:31:00.000-08:00

I swear.
More than I should and enough to be embarrassed about.
In a news room, cursing is like typing. Everybody hears it, but nobody's supposed to notice.
The “F” word, in particular, is frequently and theatrically invoked, and I am not immune to its versatility.
At home, I do not curse, except of course, on the occasion of electrocution or while talking to my mother.
The reasons I don't curse at home are manifold: My husband would discover what kind of a bawdy dame I really am; my son would start to sound like Anthony Soprano; and I would not like myself very much.
Cursing is, or should be, beneath me, and it is next on my list of vices to eradicate.
Of course, as there is honor among thieves, so there are distinctions among vices. While the “F-word” is, regrettably, a stalwart in my repertoire, I consider other expletives off-limits. These are chiefly anatomical vulgarities, which turn me prudish; and blasphemy, which turns me indignity. To me, obscenity is one thing; profanity is quite another. In my lexicon, Jesus Christ is a term of religious adoration, not the peevish reaction to a flat tire.
We all are offended by certain words and phrases, which is why we use them. They have impact. The U.S. Supreme Court is now trying to decide whether and how to punish stations that broadcast “fleeting expletives” on public airwaves. These are words familiar to any one who has ever watched a live music awards program. The words, which the Supreme Court are trying delicately to avoid are the “F-word” and the “S-word,” two expletives that seem to draw the most ire from television viewers.
The deliberation over dirty words stemmed from a new government policy that can punish television networks for a one-time, or “fleeting,” expletive, as opposed to a repeated use of profanities. The case came about after singer Cher quipped “[expletive] 'em” during a live awards program in 2002 and Nicole Ritchie whined about how difficult it was to get cow [expletive] out of a Prada purse? It's not so [expletive simple] in 2003.
It is useless to insist on polish from celebrities whose fame is so inventively wrested, like Ritchie, but Cher has been around long enough to know better. The Federal Communications Commission considers words that denote “sexual or excretory activities,” indecent. In 2006 Congress in 2006 raised the maximum indecency fine from $32,500 to $325,000.
Linguists tell apocryphal stories of historic figures and their liberal use of the vulgarism. My favorite is
Michelangelo, who is attributed with the quote, “You want what on the f---ing ceiling?” Every culture has an “F” or an “S” word, Australian linguist Ruth Wajnryb writes. Writers from Chaucer, to Shakespeare, to Rabelais and Lawrence (to say nothing of Philip Roth) have made liberal and inventive use of obscenities. But I confess to a growing weariness bordering on annoyance at writers like Junot Díaz, whose Pulitzer-prize winning “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” was so sullied by expletives that I found it unendurable. So, too, with Roddy Doyle the Booker-prize winning authors whose obscenity-laced prose vexes to the point of obliquity.
My problem with the Supreme Court's manifest intention to penalize broadcasters is that it does not go far enough. That may seem surprising, coming from a newspaper woman, particularly one who publicly admits to cussing, but newspapers are princes of restraint compared to broadcasters and the blogosphere.
I do not know when or how the use of the term “suck” dribbled onto television, but I find it vulgar.
How is it that one or two words gets the FCC up in arms, but broadcasters have been polluting the airwaves with gratuitous violence and glamorized lewdness for years? The average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV by age 18, according to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The American Academy of Pediatrics has found that “media violence can contribute to aggressive behavior, desensitization to violence, nightmares, and fear of being harmed” among children.
Meanwhile, in the period between 1998 and 2005, the number of sexual scenes on television nearly doubled, reports the Kaiser Family Foundation. And a recent Rand Corp study found that pregnancy rates are much higher among teens who watch a lot of TV with sexual dialogue and behavior than among those who have tamer viewing tastes.
Bad words? Yeah, ban them. Fine the broadcasters. But if the Supreme Court is looking to stop the “coarsening” of public behavior, as Justice Antonin Scalia said, it needs to look at the real, quantifiable damage done by too much sex and violence on TV.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

2008-11-10T08:29:00.000-08:00

In Blue Ash, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, police arrested an 89-year-old woman for football theft.

It appears that Edna Jester had been repeatedly irked by the kids next door heaving their football into her yard.

Well, you know how it is. The kids keep hurling the ball in your yard and, finally, you snap. That's enough of that, you say, and you confiscate the pigskin.
It's unclear whether the victims slunk into Edna's yard, recalcitrantly asking for their ball back. But if this neighbor dispute is like any other, they probably didn't. They called the cops. “Theft!”
If they throw the book at Edna, she may have just bought herself a $1,000 football.
Poor Robert Frost, who is only invoked today to assert that “good fences make good neighbors,” which he intended ironically and folks now take quite literally.
I knew a couple once who shared a driveway with their neighbor. So aggravated were they at having to shovel their side of the driveway before the other slug had even put on his mittens, that both refused to shovel, patch or sweep their driveway. In the winter, nobody went in; nobody went out. It was a Mexican standoff. Heaven knows who it helped.
I knew a neighbor who was so annoyed at what she took as the incursions of her neighbor on her property that she put up a stockade fence and hung voodoo-like dolls over the edges. My own next-door neighbor has recently thrust stakes along a Maginot property line he considers inviolate. My husband disagrees, but I figure if the guy wants two feet of scraggly hemlocks and limpid hostas, let him have at it. Less for me to mow.
Disputes between neighbors [Dash] over hanging tree limbs, stray soccer balls, errant trash barrels, barking dogs and unsightly debris [Dash] have got to be the bane of every small town mayor and police department. What can seem petty and frivolous to a law enforcement officer, can seem as critical to the adversaries as whether Iraq had WMDs or not.
[JUMP]So irksome have these absurdly mean disputes become that several communities, including New Haven, have set up community mediation groups to facilitate a little reason and forbearance into some pretty preposterous donnybrooks.
Charlie Pillsbury, of Community Mediation Inc., in New Haven, told me about one case where one neighbor was so aggravated by the bird feeder another had put on her property line that she began putting her cat food right under the feeder. Whether any nuthatches met a bitter end in the jaws of the local cat was unclear, but the real crime was the hellish animosity that developed between the neighbors.
“They tend to demonize each other,” Pillsbury said. “It goes beyond the conflict where suddenly they start thinking of their neighbor as a bad person.”
Or, as Jennifer Brown, of the Center on Dispute Resolution at Quinnipiac University School of Law, told me, “People start assuming the worst about the other person and they start assuming sinister motives to something that may have been, at worst, negligence.”
Some months ago, my family returned from summer vacation to be greeted by my neighbor, who complained that my dog had defecated in his yard. Just in case we missed the evidence, he provided a stake with a handwritten sign that read “Sam's poop.”
Well, my husband was infuriated. But having had several pairs of shoes gooped up by the stuff, I could understand my neighbor's frustration. I apologized, not just because I was wrong, but for the sake of neighborly amity. Alas, Pillsbury, whose group tries to resolve nearly 500 neighborly disputes annually, says most cases become so incendiary that people can no longer hear each other. “People don't listen,” he says. “It goes back to what your grandmother told you: 'God gave you two ears and only one mouth, so you can listen twice as much as you speak.'”
When it comes to property, I tend to take a long view. I figure we are only custodians of a slip of land, which never really belongs to us, but which we occupy and nurture. If we are callow and niggling about the space we occupy, how do we behave in the space we don't?
Too often, parties in neighborly disputes defend ugly behavior, declaiming, “It's the principle of the thing,” as if what they are bickering about is moral virtue, instead of dirt.
“A big part of their identity gets caught up in the dispute,” says Brown. “In a weird kind of way neighbor versus neighbor disputes are a kind of microcosm of what we see played out on a global scale between nations.”
Theologian Walter Wink has written that the real religion of the U.S. is not Christianity, but what he calls “the myth of redemptive violence.” Aggrieved parties are lionized not because they listen, appreciate and compromise, but because they brutalize those who offend them.
“Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong,” he has written.
For neighbors that means a whole economy based on our inability to talk to one another: Lawyers, judges, police officers, land surveyors, fence builders. They all feed the beast of our basest instincts. Maybe good fences do make good neighbors. Or maybe they just hide our deepest flaws.

The Not Quite American Stepfamily

2008-10-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

My brother told me about the death.
Sudden, though not entirely unexpected, he said. The obituary would be in the next day's Boston Globe. I could send a "personal greeting" on the newspaper's guest book. I could say I cared.
The man in question had been married to my step-sister for the last eight years. At least I think it was eight years, which is part of the problem. What I knew about John, or about his wife, my step-sister, was enough for shock but not enough for grief.
I knew, for instance, that there was a problem with alcohol. I knew that they were laboring under an onerous mortgage and the cost of raising four children [Dash] two from my step-sister's first marriage, which imploded years before. All the rest [Dash] the suspected recriminations of various family members, the rumors of drunk-driving arrests, even the depths of John's alcoholism [Dash]were a mystery. They were vague because I hadn't asked, I hadn't cared, I hadn't even considered. The truth was that although I had "known" my step-sister since she was a tow-headed 5-year-old riding in the back of her mother's cherry Dodge Dart, I didn't know her at all.
The U.S. Census reports that 17 percent, or 12.2 million children in the U.S., lived with a stepparent, step sibling and/or half sibling in 2004. Some one third of all children alive today are expected to become stepchildren before they reach the age of 18, according to the Center for Law and Social Policy. Some demographic experts believe that step families will be the most predominant family form in America by the year 2010.
But the etiquette that governs the behavior of these step-families, these half-families, these almost-but-not-quite-biological families, is, at best, vague. "What am I supposed to do with this woman?" a friend of mine asked, speaking of the second wife her late father had left. "Invite her to Christmas dinner? I don't even know her middle name."
I never lived with my step-siblings. My step-mother had three children when she married my father in the mid 1970's, and while we lived with my mother, we saw my father and step-siblings every weekend. It was a neat arrangement. There were three of us. There were three of them. It should have gone more smoothly than it did; we were of similar ages and demographic backgrounds. But while we did not live under the same roof as my father, we shared his blood and were deeply influenced by him. The differences of personality, coupled with the inherently strained marital situation meant that while we tolerated and often enjoyed their company, we were never intimates.
Strange, really. All those Christmases, all those baseball games, all those first communions and weddings and baptisms, and the only real bond we shared was my father, who toggled earnestly but imperfectly between father and step-father. If I learned anything by my father's determined effort to raise six children, only three of them his, I learned that it was possible to be too fair. A man of deep integrity like my father would never have believed that, but as a parent, I have found it to be true. Sometimes, somebody needs more.
It was perhaps this that kept me always at a distance from my step-sister, who just to add a little Freudian gut-twist, has the same name as I. Though there was more than enough opportunity, I never reached out to my step-sister, who clearly groped to form her own identity. I felt real pity, but, laboring under my own burdens, did little to inquire, let alone assist her.
And now her only recently ex- husband was dead. I had no idea what to do.
Since the death of my father in June of 2004, glue that held my step siblings and I together lost its adhesion.We scattered like spores from the same blossom. It wasn't that we didn't care. It was that we never developed the connection that moved beyond cordiality into affection, or even love. And yet, the news of her husband's death pained me.I had lived a life at least parallel to hers, enough to empathize, but not enough to pick up the phone, to send flowers, to extend a shoulder.
I sent a card, of course, because I am a card-sender and because my father would have wanted at least that. But part of my anguish is knowing that he would have wanted more, so much more, than I was ever able to give.
Contact: Tosh[AT]rep-am.com.

Wall Street Crisis or Moral Lapse?

2008-10-01T11:10:00.000-07:00

On the streets of Waterbury, Conn., today, outside Barista's coffee shop and down the street from Liberio's pizza, a man with pants hovering bellow his buttocks was talking about the Wall Street bailout package.
"No credit, no money, dude," the guy says to a couple of men poised to devour football-sized sandwiches. "No money from the banks, no work for you."
"Greedy bastards," one guy says and bits into his sandwich.
"We're all connected, man," the first fellow says.
A bit of street wisdom to underline the economic connectivity addressed in today's New York Times . But the idea of people being connected works better in Hollywood, where movies like "Magnolia" or "Crash." Sure we're connected, but when it comes to our pocketbooks, it's every man for himself.
Economists and politicians keep talking about how the current financial crisis is the final revelation en route to the Apocalypse, but to ordinary Americans, whom Washington likes to call "Main Street," the designation doesn't suit. For them, this is a moral values question. It's an us versus them question, and no matter how many times you tell Middle America that we're on the verge of a financial collapse, many Americans hardly break a sweat. Financial collapse is the a disfiguring disease that will happen to somebody else. It's not worth worrying about, and it's certainly not worth breaking into their wallets to fix.
Americans have a gut-level aversion of the kind Malcolm Gladwell writes in "Blink." "Bailout," is a sissy, quitter's word anyway, and when you add the prefix "Wall Street" it becomes an even more noxious suggestion, a gift horse to the polo set.
The only thing Americans loathe more than the rich are the intellectuals and this financial crisis is a perfect storm of their combined caterwauling.
The U.S. has had an anti-intellectual streak at least since the early 19th century and its visceral distrust of the elite is part of its national DNA. Of late, this disgust has ushered in reality TV, Broadway rehash, music remakes and several presidential candidates. Now that very same anti-intellectual/anti-elitist reflex is sinking the trial balloon sent up by Washington.
"It's like people live in a bubble," my hairdresser tells me. "they see their own little world, and it looks fine and so what do they care about a bunch of Westport stockbrokers? They don't understand that without those people, we don't get tips, contractors don't get work." My hairstylist flings her comb on the counter in disbelief.
At the gym, a woman who owns a frame shop tells me she thinks this whole "financial crisis" thing is a myth. Her husband is an electrical contractor, and he has more work than he can handle.
It is a canard or a crisis, a fiasco or a myth. Ultimately, it comes down to moral values.
United we stand -- or stood. But divided we fall.

What Newman Taught us about Marriage

2008-09-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

When Paul Newman died last week at 83, the image that passed through my head was an old-black-and-white still of Newman directing his wife Joanne Woodward in "Rachel Rachel."
In the image, Newman leans into his wife with palpable conviction, as if all Woodward needed to do was believe what her husband saw in her, and she could pull off the acting coup of which he knew she was capable.
"Rachel, Rachel," is a 1968 film, now considerably dated, about a repressed school teacher who discovers love late in life. It was the first time Newman directed his wife in a movie, a time in which good roles were drying up for Woodward, then a dowager at 38. Many things have changed in Hollywood since 1968 [Dash] among them the improbability of 38-year-old virgins [Dash] but the ephemeral shelf-life of actresses is not one of them. For Woodward to get back on the screen [Dash] a place she has not been seen with nearly the frequency as her husband [Dash] Newman had to wrest Hollywood from its ossified convictions.
Woodward went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for the film; she had won the Oscar her first time out as the multiple personality Eve in "The Three Faces of Eve." Another marvelous photo, of Newman and Woodward dancing at a post-Oscar party, clutching his wife's Oscar, underlines one of Newman's celebrated quips about his 50-year marriage (Newman's second; Woodward's first). The key to sustaining as long and fulfilling marriage as theirs, he once said, is balancing "correct amounts of lust and respect."
What we know about Newman and Woodward is that they stared in 10 movies together; raised three children together; were active in liberal politics together and stayed married to each other for 50 years.

At a time when marriages break up over bad cell phone service, that last fact is perhaps their most enduring legacy [Dash] that marriage can survive, even on the neurotic and narcissistic shoals of Hollywood, even in a town where pulchritude is the price of admission.
Newman once said of his wife Joanne that she was "one of the last of the great broads," and he meant it in that terrifically ribald, Ava Gardner sense of the word. When Playboy magazine asked him why he didn't take advantage of the women flinging themselves at him, Newman memorably quipped, "I have steak at home. Why go out for hamburger?"
Most of us dream of a marriage that lasts forever and ever, one whose tether will "fray but not break" as the poet Howard Nemerov wrote, or, if broken, is stronger in the broken places, to invoke Hemmingway. But nearly 43 percent of first marriages end in separation or divorce within 15 years. And even among the marriages that survive, one has to factor in a fair amount of inertia and capitulation. My own grandparents said the only reason they stayed with one another is that no one else would put up with them.
Yet, what most of us want is not just a marriage that endures, but thrives, excites and illuminates. Is it possible? A recent report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienes found that as people age, their brains respond less strongly to rewards. At 60, the brain just doesn't jump like it did when you opened Christmas presents at 6.
But, as with material rewards, so, too with marital ones?
The romantics among us, speaking as a card-carrying one, hope for a marriage fueled by unequivocal respect, enlivened by copious humor and tempered with boundless patience. As Woodward has said, "Sexiness wears thin after a while and beauty fades, but to be married to a man who makes you laugh every day, ah, now that's a real treat." Woodward and Newman were notorious for their differences [Dash] her love of ballet and his for race car driving [Dash] but what they shared was a vigorous intellectual curiosity and a commitment to causes outside of themselves. Both were dogged promoters of American playwrights [Dash] they met, after all on the stage of William Inge's "Picnic." Woodward may have single-handedly saved the Westport Country Playhouse from becoming a strip mall, and her husband's support for that cause was not incidental.
There was something ironic and fitting about Newman's death coming amidst the frantic bailout package being cobbled together in Washington. The genesis of the bailout was a combustible alloy of greed and magical thinking, two elements that had very little place in Newman's life or art. What Newman had [Dash] and he was one of the last public personalities to have it [Dash] was integrity, a quality almost as rare in Washington as it is in Burbank.
He'll be remembered, no doubt, for his iconic roles [Dash] the contrarian convict in "Cool Hand Luke," the unrepentant heel in "Hud," the conflicted husband in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," the dissipated lawyer in "The Verdict," and, best of all the wry, puckish thief in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." He'll be remembered for the $250 million donated to charities around the world through his food-line, Newman's Own. But for those of us who can easily forget the first rush of romance but never tire of a spouse's laugh, he offered a lens into the endless possibilities of marriage.
As a friend of Newman's wrote on hearing of his death: "No one in his audience was ever privy to the tenderness and pride Paul had for Joanne and her talent. Watching him on the set watching her, from his seat by the camera, was to see a man transformed: his brave face taken all unawares, his lips parted in amazement, his eyes brimming with tears that never fell. It was a brief window into a man in perpetual love."

Can't Help Lovin' Dat Mom of Mine

2008-09-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

My mother will be singing on Mother's Day. As she has sung on a thousand other Mother's Days. As she will probably do as long as there are Mother's Days, or mothers, or songs. For my mother has always been a singer and so I have grown up around songs.In my youth, I took this profession for granted. Some girls' mothers worked in bakeries and dressed in white aprons and brought them home brownies. Some girls' mothers worked in hospitals and dressed in white nylons and were useful when you fell out of trees. But my mother worked in nightclubs and dressed in black gowns with shiny rhinestones and brought back Dinah Shore and Sophie Tucker. It was not practical, but it was lyrical. And my mother has made no bones about which she considers preeminent."You have to follow your heart, pumpkin," she used to tell me, slapping on makeup as I set mesmerized on the the edge of the tub. "You can't ignore a talent; that'd be like spitting in God's face." My mother had her own theology, cobbled from the Catholicism of yer youth to the lyrics of Johnny Mercer to the pages of "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull." It was not the Nicene Creed, to be sure, but it was always engaging, if infrequently consistent. My mother is a sandwich of Auntie Mame, Bette Midler and Liza Minnelli,with a dash of Donna Reed. If one opened the closet of my mother's bedroom, one risked being beaned by a tambourine, a set of maracas and a feather boa. Well, my mother liked props. "Rhinestones and black, sweetie; they're a performer's bread and butter," she said. Together, we roamed the consignment shops of greater Boston, ransacking racks of clothes that smelled of moth balls and cigarettes, and, to me, looked like some one's old drapes. "But this would look faah-bulous on stage," my mother would say, a tad too loudly, attracting the attention of the rest of the patrons. Few people knew an actual cabaret singer and my mother was glad to be their first.That opportunity was not always greeted enthusiastically, "So," said a friend's father, after pronouncing a blessing on his meatloaf and folding his hands piously, "is your mother still singing in bars."I could only look quizzically in his direction and imagine what kind of lurid images he must have had of my mother, swilling whiskey in the saloons of Boston in some shimmering negligee like Marlene Dietrich. I could no more tell him that it was not quite like that as picture him singing "Fever" at his Monday prayer meeting. My neighbor's sneering only provided additional comic material for my mother, who spared no mercy in her good-natured indictment of suburban hypocrisy.My neighbors told their children not to care what other people thought about them. But together, they dressed in the same clothes, bought the same Impalas, ate the same crullers and not-so-furtively whispered about the goings-on of the louche family down the street.My mother dressed in a black sweat suit with fat white stars outlined in pink beads. "I got a lot of nerve going out like this she said, " gunning the Pinto meatily down the street.My mother combined maternity and entertainment in an alchemy of affection that embraced as it puzzled.When I was a girl, her voice would rise from the basement, where she vocalized while folding laundry, up through the heating vents into the oxygen of my girlhood, like heat, like air, like motherhood itself.In this ersatz intercom system, I would hear her ballads, the sound following me throughout the house like a shadow. "Fish gotta swim; birds gotta fly/ I gotta love one man 'til I die/can't help lovin dat man of mine," she would sing, as she folded underwear and matched socks and set the Maytag on spin.From this I learned that song could be everywhere, that a lullaby could be soft or gentle or breezy or bombastic. And every day, each moment, had its own lyric, its own heat.Of course, my mother short-changed us on certain things. I cannot cook, nor take up a hem, nor get that sharp crease in the arm of a shirt. I have no idea how long asparagus keeps or when the chicken is fully baked. But I have Gershwin and Mercer and Berlin, and thought I have been to operas, and concerts and symphonies and ballets,nothing to me is as mesmerizing as one singer and one piano. And if that singer is my mother, and the voice on the gust of air her own, then I am in love, with life, with music and with the voice that gave my life its lyric.
Published May 12, 1996

This Old Cracker can never get stale

2008-09-10T15:13:00.000-07:00

From January, 1997
In Casco Bay, Sunday nights are refreshingly predictable.
Most of the 365 brave souls who weather the winter in this intemperate cove of Maine have their dinners in the middle of the day and then, after a full and lazy afternoon, enjoy a late supper of salt fish and Crown Pilot crackers.
Or they did until last June.
Last June, Nabisco took the venerable Crown Pilot crackers.
Last June, Nabisco took the venerable Crown Pilot crackers off the shelves.Island Market on Chebeague was out of the them. So was Shaw's. And so was Paul's, one of those richly unglamorous places where you can order your groceries and have them arrive by boat in tidy little succulent packages. But no Crown Pilots came from Paul's after
Nabisco determined that the crackers, a New England favorite, were a "marginal" seller.
"Nothing like Oreos," said Donna Miller Damon, whose family roots in Casco Bay reach back to 1756. Indeed, Nabisco only sold Crown Pilots in three states: Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. There, the cracker was indispensable to the hardy souls who draw their sustenance from the ocean. Mainers use the Crown Pilot to thicken their chowder and have been doing so since the 19th century.
Next week, Nabisco will hold a press conference at the hub of Boston Harbor to determine the future of Crown Pilot crackers. If the Crown Pilot comes back to new England, it will be a victory for the tenacious Yankees who fought for the cracker. In Casco Bay, they've been waging a campaign to keep the Crown Pilot, and it has picked up enough steam to get the folks at Nabisco to reconsider.
"It's been amazing the stories people tell us about how to use the cracker," said Damon, who is organizing the campaign. "One man told me about how they used to fry clams and then fry the pilot crackers in the fat of the clam left in the pan," Damon said. "My son told me to try it with scallops and I tried soaking them in the friend scallop juice but it wasn't the same. Other people soak them in hot water and put sugar on them and eat them with milk as a dessert."
No, it's not biscotti, but Mainers have simple tastes.
I have simple tastes, too, and I can remember the admirably sturdy maroon box the Crown Pilots came in, the little gold crown over the "O" in the name, the enormous dish of chowder floating off in the background like a dream. Crown Pilots were what my mother used to give me when I was sick in bed with an upset tummy, which was often. Anything with taste made me sick. "Is that an herb in there," I'd say, suspiciously, eyeing the Lipton chicken noodle soup.
"It's just parsley; it won't kill you," my mother would say.
But as any picky eater knows, anything that's green and floats is toxic.
Oh, for the Crown Pilot cracker with its rectangular blandness. Like air with geometry. Yes, the Crown Pilot cracker, with its tiny, well-apportioned holes, the wonderfully flat flavor, the utterly prosaic, putty taste of it. The way it broke into your mouth and sent foggy plumes of dust into your every cavity. The way it meshed so perfectly with your saliva, becoming one gluey, cement-like mortar that stuck to the outline of your gums like caulk to a window. The Crown Pilot was the Jimmy Stewart of Crackers; tall and flat, but with a great poignancy to the word "dull."
Those of us who admired its textureless, tasteless character simply swoon at the sight of a Crown Pilot box. I see a box of Crown Pilots and I remember my baby blue, quilted satin robe with the embroidered bunnies on the lapel. I see my 13-inch Sears black and white TV and the e flicker of the mid-day movie, which was the best part about being sick, next to the Crown Pilots, which I consumed fervently all day.
Damon is well aware that there are other crackers out there. Just stop into a grocery store these days. You'd think they would give the cracker aisle its own Interstate. Crackers with cheese; crackers with lemon; flat bread crackers; crackers with low salt, low fat, low sodium...There is a veritable island of crackers to select from today, all of them offering a precious uniqueness. "Choices," my mother says, writing the word out on the paper table cloth of a restaurant with typical dramatic flourish. "That's what's destroying this country today. There are too many damned choices."
As for the new crackers, the islanders have already had their say. "All trendy," said one islander with a Yankee sneer. "here today," gone tomorrow."
Clearly there are other crackers that can thicken chowder. Oyster crackers, for example, are perfect once you get over the fact that they won't taste remotely like (ugh!) oysters. But Damon says that's not the issue.
"It's the oldest product Nabisco makes," she says. "It makes sense people are going to be connected to it. It's like apple pie. They equate it with memory."
It's a Proustian idea, perhaps, the way the bite of a cracker can send you reeling back to another time, an other place, a place sepia with distinction and belonging. But it is true, nonetheless, that the precious nature of a cracker, even a bland cracker, an absolutely ordinary cracker, plucked from the days when there were only three or four crackers to choose from, is grand in its own right. Perhaps it reminds people of their grandmothers, or their grandfathers or of Sunday nights were there was little to do but chew on raw fish and talk to family. Perhaps it reminds us that there was a time when there were few choices. And that given the choice, many of us would rather have that simple, but vanishing, option.
Published, January 29, 1997, Republican-American, Waterbury, CT

I Vole You So Much

2008-09-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

My mother was a chronic eavesdropper.
Whenever we went to restaurants, she listened in on the conversations of the couples nearby, and her conclusion was invariably the same. "They're not married. They're having an affair."
I used to dismiss her misanthropic ideas of marriage as the product of an overly dramatic imagination. But after a string of high-profile adultery cases, from John Edwards, to Kobe Bryant, Eliot Spitzer, Larry Craig, David Vitter, Kwame Kilpatrick and Bill Clinton, I'm beginning to think my mother was right.
So from now on, I'm going to adopt the French attitude toward politicians: As far as I'm concerned, they all cheat. Guilty, in other words, unless proven innocent.
About a quarter of men say they have cheated on their wives, a figure that must inflate with the degree of political prominence. Meanwhile, men like David Duchovny and Eric Benet get "treated" for "sex addiction."
Being a randy goat is now a pathology for which we should all feel pity.
All of that could make a girl feel strangely desirous of the prairie vole, the small animals common in the grasslands of North America.
Swedish researchers have identified a particular hormone responsible for monogamy in the fury creature. It seems that the hormone vasopressin is behind the monogamous impulse in voles. Researchers have found that human males with a genetic variation that reduced their amount of vasopressin scored significantly lower on a scale of partner bonding. These men were twice as likely to have had a marital crisis within the past year.
Naturally, you are not likely to find any vasopressin augmenters in your pharmacy. They'd be nosed out by Viagra.
If we really want a president who stays faithful to his paramour, we might try electing voles.
Or, we might try a variation of my mother's.

Elizabeth Edwards and my Guilty Pleasure

2008-08-18T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm ashamed of myself.
I plunked down $3.50 today to read People magazine's gush-all about how Elizabeth Edwards is "coping" with her smarmy husband's guilty plea in the case of the hound dog husband.
Why do I read this dross?
And yet, it's irresistible, like gawking at Annette Funnicello, shriveled up like an imploring munchkin on the cover of The Star. Staring into the schadenfreude of Elizabeth Edwards' public humiliation is a bit like replaying errors from The Little League World Series on ESPN: Shameful but riveting.
Could life get any worse for this woman? She lost a 16-year-old son in a car accident; is battling inoperable breast cancer; and gets cheated on by a silver-tongued fraud whose treacly apology would send anyone into a diabetic coma.
It seems bad enough to be married to a guy who a) weighs less than you and b) has better hair. But getting cheated on while you're retching your guts out from chemo is really low.
I thought I had reached my astonishment threshold when former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the Empire State's self-appointed Justice League of America, got caught with his pants down at The Emperor's Club. Prostitution may be the world's oldest profession, but it's second only to moralizing hypocrites.
The best part about Edwards' forced confession was his certitude that no one could be harder on him than he had been on himself.
Does this guy own a radio?
The second-best part of Edwards' confession was that he had only cheated while his wife was in remission. Evidently his marriage vows, too, were in remission. Edwards' televised admission, which is fast becoming the perp walk of public contrition, was Southern Gothic at its best. It had all the lurid buffoonery of a Flannery O'Connor novel. All that was missing was Edwards spluttering , "I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God's forgiveness."
In the belief that the fault lies not in the stars, but in our selves, I'm adopting a new creed: All politicians are guilty of adultery unless proven innocent. I think the French are right. Let's just presume all these guys have carnal appetites that surpass their moral sense. I'm so desperate for some integrity these days, that the best I can ask for from these rakes is discretion. Fidelity, apparently, is for the rest of us suckers.

St Paul Gets a Bad Rap

2008-08-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

When I told a friend that I had named my son after St. Paul, she had an arch reaction.
"Why would you name your son after that misogynist?" she said.
I was prepared for that. Whether invoking Paul's imprecation that "wives must be submissive to their husbands," (Ephesians 5: 22-23) or that Jews "killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets," (Thess 2: 15), Paul of Tarsus has been the fall guy for every iniquity from misogyny to anti-Semitism.
And yet this year, the 2,000th anniversary of his birth, the Vatican is celebrating "the year of St. Paul," by encouraging Catholics to re-examine Paul, the most influential shaper of Christianity outside of Jesus. How far this will go in reshaping the conventional wisdom about Paul will depend on how far the church is willing to go to bring new, more nuanced scholarship about this exhilarating [Dash] and exasperating [Dash] man into the pews.
From Andre Gide, to Thomas Jefferson, to George Bernard Shaw, the devout and the doubtful have taken aim at Paul, dismissing him as the wet blanket of the New Testament, a rigid, chauvinistic scold who took all the Good out of the Good News and replaced in with a dour, censorious bleakness. Jefferson called Paul the "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus." Nietzsche said that the evangelist had "a genius for hatred."
Paul, the first and most vigorous of theologians, has been the most maligned, misunderstood and misrepresented saint in Christian history. And yet I chose to name my son after him because I believe Paul best articulates the electrifying possibilities of humankind and the ecstatic contradictions that make it so difficult to achieve them. I love the very qualities that have vexed so many: Paul's volatility, his gusto, his self-lacerating disappointment in himself and his fiery invectives against those who he believes diminish Jesus' message. If Paul is vicious in his condemnation of the wicked, he can at least be credited for lumping himself in that group.
As historian Henry Bamford Parkes wrote, "Emotional and excitable, alternating between states of ecstasy and depression, utterly convinced of his guidance by the Spirit and given to boasting of his own achievements, utterly convinced of his guidance by the Spirit...Paul revealed his whole personality with an astonishing candor and sincerity. His letters were the earliest example of that full acceptance of naked humanity not as it ought to be, but as it was...."
Part of the problem for Paul is that his letters are a response to first-century crisis about which we know next to nothing. As Gary Wills writes in "What Paul Meant," "We hear his raised voice without knowing what the other side was shouting." The second problem, as Georgetown University Professor Anthony Tambasco told me, is that "some of the text that Paul gets blamed for, he probably didn't write."
Of the 13 letters attributed by Paul, only seven are now accepted as certainly his. Letters like those to Timothy and Titus, for instance, were clearly not written by Paul. They were written at a time when the church had become more systematized [Dash] and patriarchal. Hence: "Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man, she is to keep silent" (Timothy 2:11-13) was almost certainly not written by Paul.
"Paul had people who he called fellow apostles and they were women," said Tambasco, author of "In The Days of Paul."
The problem is while Paul writes memorably that "in Christ there is neither male nor female" (Galatians 3:28), he nevertheless believes, as Harold W. Attridge, Dean of Yale Divinity School, told me, "There's also the natural order of things that needs to be respected." And that was a first-century social order.
"There were some people in Paul's school and tradition who took that impulse in Paul rather strictly," Attridge said. "So the passage that talks about women not to take leadership roles or to teach in the church are probably not by Paul."
Paul's alleged anti-Semitism is a bit more subtle. As a bridge between Judaism and Christianity, Paul wrestles deeply with the necessity to keep all of Jewish ritual, including circumcision, or whether the risen Jesus is "the saving reality" and that the law, as Tambasco says "is God's second best gift." It's fine to keep it, Paul says, but don't impose it on non-Jews. Later Christians, of course, used this and other scriptural readings to bolster a raging anti-Semitism the vestiges of which are tenacious.
But the Paul I love best is the Paul who wrestles with his own failings and finds healing in God's grace. "I do not understand my own actions," he laments in Romans. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate....For I do not the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom: 7-15-16; 18-20). This is a man who admits he is clumsy at devotion "we do not know how to pray as we out, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words."
Is Paul harsh? Sure he is. But he is also gloriously poetic, recognizing that despite humanity's failings, it is trussed irrevocably to God.
"For I am convinced," he writes in Roman, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Contact: Tosh[AT]Rep-Am.com.

The Seven Deadlies

2008-08-11T11:58:00.001-07:00

In 2005, the British Broadcasting Company asked the British public to come up with a new list of Seven Deadly Sins.
It was a trick question. Just naming the Seven Deadly Sins – Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth, Anger, Envy and Greed – has become one of those Jeopardy questions won exclusively by classics majors. Sin in itself has become virtually quaint in Britain, where only 44 percent of the population believes in God, and only 9 percent attend church services a week.
But the great part about sin is that you don’t have to be a religious person to invoke the term. We all know ugly behavior when we see it. So when the BBC asked more than 1,000 Britons to come up with a new list of seven deadly sins, they fared pretty well.
Cruelty led the new list. It was followed in order by adultery, bigotry, dishonesty, hypocrisy, greed and selfishness.
You’ll notice that Greed is the only one of the original seven to make the new list. Nobody likes a greedy bugger, God or no God.
Coming up with a new list of Seven Deadly Sins sounds like a good late-night fodder for juiced-up theology students. After all, the old list, which has survived 1,400 years and has inspired several creepily captivating paintings, has always seemed to me to be a sin or two off. Anger, for instance, is foolish and exhausting, but sinful? So, too, with sloth, which while obnoxious and seedy, seems benign rather than venial? As my Jewish friend says, “So who does it hurt? “
That’s the big difference between the old list and the new list, which the Edinburgh Scotsman wrote, “capture(s) the essence of modern morality.” and the earlier list, which codified the most heinous sins in order to their affront to God. If you are a secular sloth, you are hurting no one but yourself. If you are a religious sloth, your indolence is offensive to the God who gave you life, and expects you to use it.
The newer list smacks of secular relativism, which is to say that this is a list of vices rather than sins. And it is not without an intrinsic morality. Cruelty is, indeed, a transgression of the highest order and its omission off of the original list (it seems a good substitute for Anger, for instance) is a puzzle.
But what’s interesting about the new list is that it is an inventory of behavior that bothers people, rather than behavior that bothers God. One would think they would be one in the same, God being a deity who is concerned about his creation. But clearly the petty indignities that we face daily in our interaction with others – the almost physical affront it is to be lied to, for instance – has reached a level of gravity that Gregory the Great, who gave us the final word on the Seven Deadlies, might not have been able to anticipate. What hurts modern, secular men and women is when other, modern, secular men and women let them down. Cruelty, of course can be emotional as well as physical – deliberate, as Blanch Dubois said. Adultery and dishonesty are synonymous. And hypocrisy is a finer form of mendacity. Lies, lies, and damned lies are far more hurtful than most of us can ever articulate. Indeed, for the Britons the BBC polled, they rise to the level of sin.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Seven Deadly Sins – the original ones – lately because I’ve decided to focus on them as part of my Lenten meditation. Lent, the period in the Christian Calendar from Ash Wednesday to Easter, is a period of self-denial and abnegation for many Christians and it is also a time of deep spiritual reflection. Focusing on each of the seven sins and trying to honestly to ascribe to what extent each is an obstacle for me, is the sort of excruciating spiritual exercise that Lent demands. (It can also make you feel wicked guilty, but I’m used to that).
We likely did not need Christianity to give us the seven deadly sins. Nearly all cultures have what might be called an “A” list of transgressions, but a codified list was not developed until the fourth century, by a Greek monk named Evagrius Ponticus (345-99), who came up with eight evil thoughts. Those were soon amended by another monk, John Cassian, who enumerated these faults in increasing order of severity: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (spiritual lethargy), vanity and pride. It took Gregory the Great (540-604), to come up with the final list: Lust, gluttony, avarice, sadness, anger, envy and pride. Sadness was changed to sloth in the 17th century. (Evidently it took the Industrial revolution to find idleness a divine affront.)
Last year, Oxford University Press came out with a wonderful series on the Seven Deadly sins, in which celebrated writers like Francine Prose and Wendy Wasserstein weigh in on each. Some of the volumes are tedious (surprisingly, Lust is the most so), some are illuminating (Phyllis Tickle tells us that greed was avarice not just for what exists but for “what does not yet exist”) and some, like Wasserstein’s “Sloth,” are sinfully funny.
But as Arthur Krystal wrote in Harpers, although “the concept of sin is not required to recognize contemptible and malignant behavior….without a firm conviction in the soul’s vertical passage, either up or down, sin is neutered, shorn of religious fear and loathing.”
Whether the old list still appeals to you, or the new list seems more germane, or you’ve developed your own list, it is striking how relevant these tired old sins can be. Lust (for a woman) nearly brought down our last president and sent Waterbury’s mayor to jail. Greed and pride toppled the state’s former governor. Envy has sent all of us into debt at one time or another and gluttony and sloth play a bigger part in our obesity epidemic than we would like to admit.
Ah, yes. The seven deadlies. They were a helluva group.

Have we come a long way, baby?

2008-08-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

From a lecture given at Naugatuck Valley Community College, Feb. 29, 2008

When people ask whether women have come a long way, it would be churlish to ignore the obvious. You bet we’ve come a long way. And we’ve got the bumps and bruises to show it. I think it’s important for us to remember, as we’re wringing our hands about what still needs to be done for women in this country, what it’s like to be a woman in other countries.
Women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. They can’t be seen without a male relative in many Muslim countries. In Africa, they are victims of female circumcision, perpetrated, one must remember, by female relatives. In Burma, I learned recently, if your husband beats rapes or otherwise violates you, you’re apt to jump into the river and drown yourself. Divorce is out of the question.
For most of the world, the view of women is still stuck in the fourth century, when St. Jerome, a 4th-century Latin father of the Christian church, said: "Woman is the gate of the devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent, in a word a perilous object."
Edna O’Brien, writing about women in Ireland, might have summed up the history of western womanhood when she wrote, "Ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women."
So, before we go pounding the podium about the lousy 74 cents we make to a man’s dollar, it’s probably wise to do a reality check. Consider yourself blessed to be born in this continent, in this country, at this moment of history.
I’d like to start by talking about another moment in history. In 1792, a woman called Mary Wollstonecraft published "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," interestingly, a companion to a similarly titled book about men she had published earlier. In it, Wollstonecraft argued that middle-class women were oppressed because of their deficient education. Women were educated, as it were, largely for a single goal: marriage. Consequently, their education tended to be a frilly affair that tended to cultivate a "weak elegance of mind, exquisite sensibility and sweet docility of manners supposed to be the sexual characteristic of the weaker vessel."
Wollstonecraft, in the revolutionary spirit of the day, insisted that women were basically being taught to be insipid flirts, as she says "only fit for a seraglio." What Wollstonecraft, (a bad personal model, alas) wanted was women of virtue and integrity, not frivolous empty-headed arm candy.
More than a hundred years later, another English woman, Virginia Woolf, famously wrote that women needed money and a room of their own to write fiction – and by extension to achieve anything in life. Woolf, too, derided the deficiencies of a middle-class woman’s education, and poignantly reminded us of "the accumulation of unrecorded life" from women whose minds and souls were not considered of value. Say what you will about the elitist message of Woolf’s famous address, but I think the most powerful social critique she makes is the recognition of what history has lost by stifling the voices of women believed too inconsequential to attend.

In 1870, an estimated one fifth of resident college and university students were women. By 1900 the proportion had increased to more than one third. Today, women outnumber men in colleges and universities. In 1890, women constituted about 5 percent of the total doctors in the United States. In 2005-06, women represented 50 percent of applicants to medical school. More women are going into medicine. More women are going into law. More women are going into engineering.
Mary Wollstonecraft would be proud.
When my grandmother was born, women couldn’t vote. Today 13 women serve in the U.S. Senate, while 61 women hold seats in the House of Representatives- that’s a record. Since the first woman was elected to the House of Representatives (in 1917, three years before women got the right to vote), 243 more women have served as U.S. Representatives or Senators. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California— is the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House.
Last year, U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson's became the first woman to lead the International Space Station. Today, of the 249 astronauts hired by NASA between 1978 and 2004, only 45 were women
In the year I was born, a bomb went off one Sunday in the halls of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four children. Two miles down the road, a 9 year old girl heard the blast at her own church. That girl grew up to become U.S. Secretary of State. I may not like everything she does and I may not agree with every statement she makes, but I thank God in heaven and the women who bled to make achievement possible, that that African-American woman is serving as one of the most powerful officials in this land. And when I see her standing beside the Saudi ambassador, all our political differences melt, and I raise my arm in a cheer and say, "You go, girl."
When I was nine and my parents divorced, my mother couldn’t get a credit card in her own name. She couldn’t get a car loan. We had to use my grandfather’s Sears credit card to buy clothes for school. Anybody here remember those days? Many retail stores would not issue independent credit cards to married women. Divorced or single women often found it difficult to obtain credit to purchase a house or a car.
Now, of course, everybody and their brother wants to give you credit, whether you’re a woman or a hedgehog.
Have we come a long way? You bet we have. But anybody who sits on their derriere and thinks we haven’t got a long way to go, hasn’t been paying attention. What’s standing in our way? Lots of things, including ourselves. Let me just focus on three of those things.
CHILD CARE
Ask a man what his number one concern is in deliberating over a new job and he'll tell you: Salary. "Show me the money."
Ask a woman, and what will she say? Flexibility. Most moms say they are willing to take a pay cut to spend more time with their children, according to a survey by Silver Stork Research. Child care is the top concern for working mothers.
You might ask yourself: Why doesn’t it factor in for men? Well, it does and I think one of the great benefits that the women’s movement has given men is that it allows men to be FATHERS. By insisting that their work be valued for equal measure as their husband’s, women have availed men of emotions many didn’t know they had. They have allowed men to feel. They have allowed men to love their children. And isn’t that an act of grace? Thank God for that collateral damage.
More and more, men, particularly in fields like medicine, are looking for flexibility in their work. Maybe if men get on board, corporations will actually do something about child care.
A while back, I was asked to report on how Welfare reform was working, five years after implementation. I spent time with mothers with toddlers crawling all over them, eager for employment but worried about leaving their children with strangers. Some of these women had been abused as girls. They know something about the kindness of strangers. When I got back to the office and told my editor about the difficulty these women face, he looked at me quizzically and said: Explain this to me: I go to Burger King and I see 'Help Wanted' signs. How is that possible?
Well, honey, you go into Burger King and tell them you want a job, and they will ask you if you can come in at 5 and leave at 9, and then return at 3 and stay until 7. Who’s going to take care of your kids then? It never ceases to astonish me how men think that infants evaporate after 6 weeks.
We whooped and hollered when the Family and Medical Leave Act was passed 15 years ago, but all it did was hold our jobs open. That's a start, but only a start. What good is 12 weeks with no income? As one mom said : "Twelve weeks is not nearly enough, but the time was unpaid and my job was not protected beyond the FMLA leave."
When Working Mother magazine asked 2,000 women how company policies might be changed to better support new moms, more than half the respondents suggested additional flexibility in schedules or work location (e.g., work from home). Although paid sabbaticals are highest on the wish lists of the panel, more than half of the moms (53%) reported that, if offered by their companies, they would be likely to participate in an intermittent leave program that would allow them to take on occasional paid assignments during an unpaid leave of absence.
Most moms know they need more time with their infants. Only \30 percent of women took 12 weeks off, but nearly the same number took more time. Good news: the majority of women in the survey (56%) received partial pay during maternity leave. But 23% got nothing. And you know who those women are. The women who can least afford it.But there’s always a fear out there. As one woman said, "I think any time you take a leave of absence from your job, there is a chance you will be overlooked for advancement or other challenges that may have come your way had you been working."
And I want to say this to the woman out there who don’t have children. We need your help. When I say ‘we’ I don’t mean women. I mean society. The child care debate has shamelessly been framed as a benefit debate exclusive to women. It’s not a difficult equation. When we nurture children, we have secure adults. When we make children feel secure, we have a secure society. When we recognize that child care is a societal responsibility, like paying your taxes so the needy can eat, we’ll have achieved something.
Try to see the larger picture. Don’t be too tough on other women. They have burdens you cannot know.
SECOND PROBLEM: Vanity
When Mary Wollstonecraft issued her decree 200 years ago, she was concerned that education was making women into vain dingbats. Education would turn them into women of virtue
Today, in this country, some 93 percent of American girls rate shopping as their favorite activity. Last year in this country, we spent a collective $282 billion on new clothes. We threw an average of 68 pounds of clothing and textiles out.The American advertising industry in this country spent more than $230 billion in 2001.
Americans spend $8 billion a year on cosmetics, which is $2 bilion more than the estimated annual total to provide basic education for everyone in the world.
More than 325,000 tummy tucks, breast augmentations and breast lifts were performed on women ages 20-39 in 2006. That's an increase of about 11 percent from 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
The breast and tummy procedures are most commonly requested by mothers after their last childbirth, plastic surgeons said. "This is a major extension of the rejection of the maternal body and (the) obsession with the adolescent, nubile body," said Rita Freedman, a clinical psychologist in Harrison, N.Y., who has written two books on body image. "Nature intended us to nurse our children for several years. And the nursing body is very different."
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, which surveys its 6,000 members annually, breast augmentation is by far the most popular procedure among all women -- 329,000 were performed in 2006.
About 11 million cosmetic procedures were performed last year , 7 percent more than in 2005 and 48 percent more than 2000.
What the heck are we doing to ourselves?
Is this necessary? Whose program are we buying into here? I don’t think its men’s. I think we have an unrealistic ideal of ourselves that is stoked and exploited by a media ravenous to tell you that you are fat, ugly, old and unemployable. Don’t buy it. Don’t buy somebody else’s definition of what you are, what you need to look like and for how long.
Don’t let anyone tell you you are too old, too fat, too wrinkled, too pale, too sensitive, too emotional, or, my favorite, too intimidating.
"We choose our destinies by our choice of gods," says Virgil.
What god are you praying to? What deity do you worship? Life would be a lot easier for us – men and women – if we cold make fundamental decisions about who we are. Without that fundamental conviction, we are prey to the closest Glamour cover, insisting, repeating, avowing that we Just Aren’t Good Enough. Yes, it’s hard to defend yourself against an advertising industry that spends $250 billion a year to tell you you are imperfect, inferior, "need work."
But that is the cross we bear. And only when we value our integrity over our vanity will we have any hope of triumph.
"The surest sign of the higher life," Epictetus reminds us, "is serenity. Moral progress results in freedom from inner turmoil."
VALUES
In my industry, like many industries, the boss is usually a man. My boss is a man. Every executive editor I’ve worked with has been a man. And part of me thinks that’s unjust and that one of the reasons newspapers are losing women at a faster rate than men is that the men who run the newspaper just don’t get it. They keep telling me people read the newspaper for information. I tell them, it depends on what your definition of information is. I believe that for women, information is emotional. I believe that newspapers and the men who run them, don’t value that, but that’s a story for another day.
Back to my boss, and all my bosses like him. They come in about 8:30, hang up their suit coats and spend the next 12 hours of the day deflecting one crisis to the next. Much of the day is spent with their heads in their hands, carping about the knuckleheads and nitwits who work for them. They go home about 8:30 or 9 at night and the next day, they start the whole thing all over again.
Now who wouldn’t want that?
I would suggest to you that one of the reasons we don’t see more women as CEOs or Senators or Masters of Industry is because they look at that lifestyle and they say: "What’ the point?"
Perhaps women haven’t achieved the heights of men, but perhaps we’re judging by the wrong barometer.
The great success in life is not to be elected president, or CEO, or dean or headmistress. The great success in life is knowing what success is. You make your own definition of success. Don’t chase what you already have. Don’t strive for what you presently enjoy. Don’t be like Colette, who at the end of her life said, "What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner." Better to be Tallulah Bank head. "The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner."
So choose your destiny. Chart your path. But make it your destiny. Your path. This is the real achievement of the women’s movement. The territory has been opened to us. But the path is ours to make. When you make that step, make it in harmony with your own self. But make it. Your destiny is the gift for coming such a long way, baby.

2008-07-21T10:27:00.000-07:00

Gawd, she's fat.

What a load.

She can hardly stand herself.

That's it. No more Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey for her. She's not going to eat for a week.

Look at that caboose.

She's not going to eat for a week.

Maybe more. She's such a tub of lard, she doesn't know how people stand her.

Really, she says, how do they?

Oh, c'mon, you're just trying to be nice.

Well, OK, maybe she's not as bad as that woman. Look at her . She looks like the back end of a garbage truck. Poor thing. Kill her if she starts to look like that.

Maybe more. She's such a tub of lard, she doesn't know how people stand her.
Really, she says, how do they?
Don't humor me.
Well, OK, maybe she's not as bad as that woman. Look at her . She looks like the back end of a garbage truck. Poor thing. Just kill me, she says, if I start to look like that.
And speaking of killing, she says, she'd like to kill that woman over by the Life Guard station. Look at that twig. Blonde, too. Figures. And tanned. Some people have all the luck. Wouldn't you just like to....
She's not that toned, though. All lanky and limp, like fettuccine . Not like that one. Gawd, could you die? Looks like somebody sculpted her with a chisel. Two kids! "It's not fair," she says. She says she's going to start walking around in a burlap bag.
She laughs. And you chuckle, too, a forced, revolted hiccup of irony. This is what you have done for 10 years, maybe 20. This is your friend with the body dysmorphia. That's a fancy name for self-hatred. Your friend is perky and petite and adorable with a waist you could wrap your hands around but these and other impassioned words of comfort bounce off her like teflon. You're not even sure if she hears you any more.
She just goes on mercilessly skewering her lovely physique with the devotion of a flaggelant, as if you are not wounded by her self-loathing, as if, in fact, you find it funny.
About three out of every four American women between the ages of 25 and 45 harbor unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Well, you say, with more than one-third of women obese, maybe this is a step in the right direction. But the same study found that 53 percent of dieting women who are already at a healthy weight are still trying to lose weight-- sometimes vomiting, popping laxatives, diuretics or diet pills.
Or sometimes just plying their pals with masochistic monologues about their hateful physiques.
Never mind that their beleaguered galpals may be hanging on to their own self-esteem by their eyelashes. Never mind that their own waist-to-hip ratio is not worth broadcasting. Never mind that these friends have exhausted their repetoire of esteem-bolstering endorsements. The self-denial and self-laceration continues.
At first I felt real pity for these waifs masquerading as sides of beef. I felt real perplexity and concern. On vacation on the Cote d'Azur with a woman who couldn't keep herself away from Swiss chocolate, I listened, wide eyed to her punishing scrutiny of her shapely physique. She spoke about her body with the repugnance of a monk forced into chastity. My reassurances about her beauty, her good fortune, her intellect and her graciousness dribbled into the sewers of Nice. She would eat carrots for the rest of her life, she assured me. She would eat them with a knife and fork, making it seem more of a meal.
When I think of the Cote D'Azur now, I remember the girl who never saw that she was the most beautiful thing there.
But, alas, there were so very, very many more. Girls. Women. Weighing themselves first thing in the morning and subjecting themselves -- a[Dash] and me, their most proximate confessor [Dash] to appallingly withering rebukes. Harboring a lethal attraction to mirrors and plate-glass windows, which offered the opportunity for vicious self-assessment. How they would run off their haunches, or donkey kick their way to tight tushes.
Oh, I felt sympathy for these miserable, pathetic wretches.
And then it. Just. Plain. Got. Old.
It was not funny any more. Or pitiable. Or remedial. Or unfortunate.
What it became was vanity. What it became was a big, bloated, lavish vanity that took over our friendship. And then it didn't matter if it was a disorder. Or a disease. Or the insidious society that corrupts women's opinions of themselves. What it became was boring.
Some day, maybe these women will be able to look back at pictures of themselves and see how fetching they were. Some day, maybe they'll regret all that self-excoriation.
I'm just not willing to wait that long.

Christie Brinkley's self-fulfilling prophesy

2008-07-08T09:14:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling strangely unthreatened by Christie Brinkley's divorce.
I should, of course, feel deeply vulnerable. After all, if a man can't stay faithful to a sylph with a body that won't quit, what chance have the rest of us hapless frumps got?
That's the question middle-weight, middle-aged middle America wants to know, watching the statuesque Brinkley, 54 and looking all of 30, saunter into court with that Pepsodent smile and Lily Pulitzer cardigan. Who would cheat on a woman like this? It's like cheating on Helen of Troy.
But the face that launched a thousand magazine covers was reduced to a mask of woe. The Uptown Girl was upended by a downtown tramp, another Long Island Lolita pushing prams at a Hamptons toy store and pocketing Brinkley's husband Peter Cook, with the change. But Cook's crime didn't stop at adultery. He went on to serial onanism, which he practiced "privately, secretly," in front of a Webcam.
Maybe there's a tawdrier story out there, but there are few that mix salaciousness and stupidity in such copious measures.
Unless, of course, you count the Alex Rodriguez divorce. The slugger's wife filed for divorce earlier this week, claiming "extramarital affairs and other marital misconduct," which the entire world seems to take as code for "sleeping with Madonna." Both Rodriguez and Madonna have denied an affair, which hasn't stopped People magazine from proclaiming the Madonna-Guy Ritchie relationship kaput. Us magazine reported that Cynthia Rodriguez's lawyer Earle Lilly said the reports of the Madonna dalliance were "the straw that broke the camel's back."
Lilly further reveals that Cynthia Rodriguez is a "Greek Orthodox lady" who "doesn't believe in divorce." This is the same pious innocent who refuted press reports of her husband's infidelity by coming to a Yankees game wearing a shirt with an anatomically impossible suggestion printed on the back. I'm all for wronged women, but anyone who marries Alex Rodriguez thinking he's Hugh Beaumont needs Dr.Phil on her speed dial.
Which brings us to Christie Brinkley, the four-times married supermodel who told a New York court that all she ever wanted was a "big, happy family." I don't doubt Brinkley's sincerity. But when your claim to fame is appearing on more than 500 magazine covers in your undies, you're going to have a hard time convincing people all you really want is a tuna casserole and pair of flannel pajamas.
Christie Brinkley, the only model to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated for three consecutive years, earned her mettle posing as a sex symbol. I'm sure she's a great gal, and reads Proust and Hugo in the original, but it's going to be awful tough for any guy worth his testosterone to look at her as anything but a woman whose exclusive purpose is his pleasure.
And that's the problem with being a sex symbol. Eventually, somebody is going to take you up on it.
Rita Hayworth, the 1940s femme fatale Life magazine dubbed the "Love Goddess," was married five times, all disastrously. Referring to her most famous temptress role, she said, "My problem is that every man I ever married went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me."
Trading in on your curves can do wonders for your bank account, but can be calamitous for your personal life. Christie Brinkley is really no different than Nicole Kidman, or Jennifer Aniston, or Elizabeth Hurley or any of the other sultry sirens who turned men's heads only to have their men's heads turn to another. Whatever these women's internal charms, it's tough for a guy to get that sultry image out of his head. He wants what was advertised [Dash] usually more. The very thing that turned his head to Brinkley is very likely what turned it to the teenage toy-store cashier.
It's too late for Brinkley, doomed to have her name forever sullied with the priapic Cook. But for girls who are itching for the laurel wreath of today's pop culture [Dash] the "hot" moniker [Dash] her tawdry tale is an object lesson. When the heat cools, your panting dog may be looking for another oven.

Are we tolerant or ignorant?

2008-06-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

About the same time a new survey revealed that Americans have a growing tolerance for other faiths, another British writer got into a kerfuffle over an ill-tempered remark about Muslims.
Booker Prize-winner Ian McEwan ripped into "Islamism" because of its intolerance of homosexuality and its limits on women's freedom. McEwan, author of "Atonement," was trying to defend his pal, the irascible Martin Amis, for saying that people who look like they might be Middle Eastern should be strip-searched and possibly deported. McEwan poured fuel on that fire, saying, "Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on [Dash] we know it well."

They sure do in Europe, whose natives are being driven buggy by an influx of Muslims, for whom they bear increasing disdain. It would be a miracle if Europeans believed all faiths [Dash] even Islam [Dash] offered equal opportunities for salvation, as 70 percent of Americans believe. Does that mean Europe is less religiously intolerant than we are? Or does it mean that what people say is religious intolerance is really cultural chauvinism? Is religion [Dash] to cite a frequent argument of my secular friends[Dash] a divisive force responsible for the slaughter of millions, or is it a convenient scapegoat for a centuries of bloodthirsty xenophobia?
This week's survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life revealed the U.S.A. as a surprisingly squishy and charitable place. Most Americans say your God is just as good as their God and your temple as good as their sanctuary. Lots of people uttered a big "hooray," over this, gladdened we had earned the hoary motto of our Great Seal, "Out of Many, One." But I suspect what looks like tolerance could mask a disquieting religious illiteracy and theological apathy.
For many of us, faith is a simple matter of being nice<$>. It's the Gospel of Oprah. You be nice to me; I'll be nice to you and we can retire to our decks and have nothing to do with one another. I figure Buddhists are nice people, because Tina Turner's a nice person and she lived through Ike. But do I know the five noble truths of Buddhism? Not a one. And I'd like to think Islam is a peaceful religion because a whole bunch of nice Muslims say it is, and shake their heads regretfully when nuts blow themselves and dozens of others up in Sadr City. But could I tell you the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni? Do I even know what divides them? No on both counts.
One of the more interesting highlights of the Pew study were the percentages of religious denominations who believed that "many religions can lead to eternal life." Only 57 percent of evangelical Christians agreed with the statement, but 79 percent of Catholics did. That's despite the fact that the Vatican has repeatedly asserted that Roman Catholicism is, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, "the one true Church of Christ." As recently as last year, the Vatican asserted that the Protestant and Orthodox faiths are "not proper churches," a statement that hardly bears the liberality American Catholics evince toward their religious brethren.
The problem Catholics have with doctrinaire positions like the Vatican's is that they're, well, not very nice<$>.
"Why can't we take Communion at your church?" my Protestant sister-in-law asks me. "Because," I say simply, "We don't believe it's the same thing." But my sister-in-law looks crushed, as if I'd denied her a brownie. I had failed on a measure of courtesy [Dash] whether that's theologically validor not seems not to matter.
And amiability is a key to social stability, even if the words "faith" and "civility" are not synonymous. But Americans can be magnanimous in matters about which they know little. And, as Stephen Prothero notes in "Religious Literacy" (Harper, 2007), Americans, regardless of denomination, know very little about religion. Gone are the days when Protestants and Catholics would lock horns over salvation by faith or good works. Today, most Americans cannot name a single title of the Gospel, the first book of the Bible or even half of the 10 Commandments.
I'd like to believe that the Pew survey represents progress in religious tolerance. But I think it represents progress in social<$> tolerance: Your crystal is as good as my rosary.
Maybe it is. It sure beats blowing each other up over who's wearing what veil in what public space. While I'm inclined to presume that faith of any stripe is inherently virtuous, I'd like to know more, if only to assure myself that I have made the right choice.

Who's the most religious of them all?

2008-06-30T10:53:00.001-07:00

Ah, New England, what a God-forsaken place.
Buried in the minutia of last-month's study from the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life was this tidbit: New England is the least religious place in the country. Only 30 percent of Connecticut residents attend church regularly, which is a relative flood of pews compared to our northerly neighbors, Vermont and New Hampshire, where only 23 percent of those surveyed say they attend weekly services.
But what are the ramifications of living in a relatively secular place? What does it mean in terms of social issues like crime, violence, poverty, teen pregnancy and the whole landfill of social ills that plague this country? Does being a religious state mean you're a safe, secure, sober-minded place to call home?
On the contrary.
If you compare the Pew survey results (http://pewforum.org/) with other social indicators, you find that the least religious place in the country is also among the safest and healthiest places to live [Dash] and has a higher tolerance for people who have different religious traditions. By contrast, the most religious places in the country are more violent, less tolerant and less healthy.
Crime, of course, is often said to be poverty-driven. But religion, one would hope, would put a break on those nefarious impulses. Religious traditions disagree on some thorny matters but all agree that murder is a no-no. So, too, with rape or robbery. Yet in the most religious sections of the country, these crimes are intractably high. Here, in this relatively secular and admittedly wealthier swath of the country, the murder rate is much lower.
The states with the highest murder rates, particularly those involving guns, are in the South, reports the Department of Justice. The highest murder rates in the country are found in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas[Dash] all states that rate high in religious attendance, where the majority say God is "very important" to them. Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Justice, "relatively low rates" of murder exist in New England.
And yet violent crime tends to be higher in regions where religion rates as very important [Dash] places like Texas, Mississippi and South Carolina.
The number one state in the nation for violent crime is South Carolina, where 54 percent of the population sees religion as very important and the same number say they attend weekly services. Florida boasts the second-highest rate of violent crime in the country and there, 57 percent say religion is "very important" in their life.
In Texas, 47 percent of those surveyed say they attend religious services once a week. In Mississippi it's 60 percent. Some 82 percent of Mississippians and 57 percent of Texans surveyed say religion is "very important" in their life, compared to 44 percent of those from Connecticut and Rhode Island.
A similar pattern exists when it comes to teenagers having children. In 2004, teenage birthrates were highest in Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Arkansas. The states with the lowest teenage birthrates were Connecticut, Maine, Vermont , Massachusetts and New Hampshire [Dash] the entire swath of New England, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
About six-in-10 Americans who attend religious services weekly say abortion should be illegal. But the highest rates of legal abortions took place in Florida and Texas in 2002, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two state with high rates of religious worship. (New York City, however, had the highest rate in the country.) The fewest abortions occurred in South Dakota (826), Idaho (829), and North Dakota.
On one crucial matter, however, religious attendance and social behavior actually align. And that's in the critical area of generosity. The most charitable states in the country are not the wealthy states in the Northeast, but the poor states in the South. The Catalogue for Philanthropy ranks Mississippi,Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama as the five most generous states in the country, as measured by charitable contributions [Dash] most of which go to churches in this country.
It's entirely possible, of course, that the high rates of crime in the South are perpetrated by venom-spewing atheists and heathens, but I don't think so. While the faithful among us would like to believe that religion tames our basest instincts, the truth is that all sorts of God-loving, church-going people commit heinous crimes. Maybe they're just hypocrites, or maybe they need a little more prayer than the rest of us.

Is the newspaper doomed

2008-06-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, my dental hygienist asked me what I did for a living. When I told her, she stared blankly, shrugged and said, "I don't read a newspaper."
It's not as if I had never heard that before. What was different was the indifference with which she said it. Plenty of people don't read the newspaper anymore - but they typically have the good sense to feel guilty about it. "I really should," they confess, as if newspaper reading was a bit like flossing.
No doubt business is better in the floss market than it is in newspapers, where the mood, to quote the executive editor of the New York Times, is "funereal." Last week, the Hartford Courant announced that it would eliminate nearly 60 positions, shrink its number of news pages and deep-six its Connecticut section. The news follow?ed similarly bleak disclosures from The Baltimore Sun, which is slashing 100 jobs; The Palm Beach Post, which is cutting 300 ; The Boston Herald, which will eliminate 130-160 jobs and the McClatchy Group, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, where 1,400 jobs will be eliminated.
The culprit? Advertising revenue, which the New York Times reports was down almost 8 percent last year, and is running nearly 12 percent below that this year. Add in the increased costs for newsprint, higher health insurance costs for employees, and increased competition from the Internet, and you've got what The New Yorker calls "a palpable sense of doom" in newsrooms.
Only 40 percent of Americans read a daily newspaper. That readership is largely male and typically older, despite the lame visual gymnastics newspapers have tried to make their product hip. Newspapers rebuff suggestions that they've "dumbed down," but anybody with a brain can tell you the newspaper you read today looks like a comic strip next to the one you read in 1974, when 77.6 percent of Americans read one.
But in 1974, there was no Internet, no Cable TV and no satellite radio. There was also a seriousness to news that is absent in today's entertainment-drenched culture, where serious network news anchors, like Katie Couric, launch YouTube pages to jack up their hip quotient. None of this vaudevillian stuff has helped -- and some of it may have hurt. In the last three years independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value, reports The New Yorker. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. From 1999 to 2004, newspaper circulation dropped by 1.3 million, says The Newspaper Association of America. This for a product that costs less than a candy bar.
All of that can make a news hound feel more than a little irrelevant. It can make the newsroom feel a little like Whoville, with reporters insisting "We're here! We're here." The risk of complaining about declining newspaper readership is two-fold. First, I'm preaching to the choir. Second, my lament could strike some as self-indulgent. I, of course, have a vested interested in the future of newspapers. My frustration is that too few Americans realize that they do, too.
Nobody goes into reporting for the money. Journalism school graduates are the lowest-paid college-educated people in the labor force. Their average starting salary is $26,000 annually, miles less than the $36,694 that a starting teacher in Connecticut makes. But like teachers, they are believers. They cleave to this hoary, highfalutin notion that informed citizens actually produce a better society.
I'm not sure where F & S Oil companies would not have done had they not had the local newspaper to inform them of their options. I don't know how many children in the Archdiocese of Boston might have been at risk for rape had The Boston Globe exposed the priestly pedophilia crisis in 2000. Or how wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Hospital would have fared had The Washington Post not exposed their mistreatment, a series that evoked a national outcry and produced reforms by federal officials.
When my hygienist told me that she didn't read newspapers, there was a part of me that wanted to say, "How dare you?" because behind the newspaper downturn is an overall dismissal of news that doesn't intimately concern her. As one 38-year-old told me, " I turn on CNN and make sure the world hasn't exploded. I turn on Scott Haney to make sure I can ride my bike. Other than that, I have no interest" In other words, "If it doesn't concern me, what do I care?"
With attitudes like that, newspaper survival is the least of our problems.