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Barack Obama Gave a Speech on Television.
I had tears in my eyes. I was sad for what we have surely lost – an intelligent, verbal president who speaks of values. When the former president mentioned Michelle Obama and their daughters, I felt empty, as if thinking of good neighbors who have moved away. He delivered a civics lesson at the University of Illinois, urging young people to vote -- clearly political but so rational and timely that it rose above partisanship, to become a warning: Where have we gone? What have we done to ourselves? He cited the white-power people who stomped in psychic jackboots through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, in plain daylight, not even bothering with hoods. He evoked the man who is still president as of this writing, who claimed there were good people on both sides. Barack Obama asked, plaintively: “How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?” My wife said that should be a bumper sticker. A president who can write and read and speak his native language. Imagine. On Friday in Illinois, he was at his best in the national and global bear pit -- Laurence Olivier performing Shakespeare’s speech for Mark Antony in “Julius Caesar:” “So are they all, all honorable men.” The previous president spoke against stereotyping people, saying he knew plenty of whites who care about blacks being treated unfairly, saying he knew plenty of black people who care deeply about rural whites. Then he added: “I know there are evangelicals who are deeply committed to doing something about climate change. I’ve seen them do the work. I know there are conservatives who think there’s nothing compassionate about separating immigrant children from their mothers. I know there are Republicans who believe government should only perform a few minimal functions but that one of those functions should be making sure nearly 3,000 Americans don’t die in a hurricane and its aftermath.” Like Shakespeare, he was making a bigger point: there is a malaise loose in the land. At one point he said Donald Trump is “a symptom” and not “the cause.” In other words, Trump is an illness that has been coming on for years. I nodded grimly, in my den, thinking of the McConnells and Ryans, who have sat by maliciously, allowing a Shakespearean character, the worst of the buffoons, the worst of the tyrants, to tear things apart. Was I imagining, the other day, that these politicians were squirming in their seats in the cathedral, along with their fidgety wives, listening to the orations for John McCain, wondering if anybody would ever confuse them with patriots? On Friday, Barack Obama gave notice to the young people of many shades and facial characteristics in his audience: you are the largest population bulge in this country, but in 2016, only one in five of you voted. “One in five,” the playwright emoted, enunciating his own words. “Not two in five or three. One in five. Is it any wonder this Congress doesn’t reflect your values and your priorities? Are you surprised by that? This whole project of self-government only works if everybody’s doing their part.” The television showed the college students nodding, or averting their eyes. Will they remember this warning at mid-term elections in early November? So many distractions these days. So easy to get lost, twiddling thumbs in the social media. Shakespeare was borrowing stories from earlier centuries but Barack Obama has been active in public life. On Friday he returned to the stage to deliver artful words, dramatically delivered, surely from the heart. How many reminders, how many chances, do we get? *** The transcript of Barack Obama’s speech (really worth reading): https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/7/17832024/obama-speech-trump-illinois-transcript Anthony Scaramucci went to the same school as my kids. He was known for his doting family, a block or two from the Main Street School. They made sure he was well-fed and well-dressed and prepared for the day in class. Their love and attention gave him a disciplined start that led him to a great education and business success. I don’t know when the Scaramuccis and Defeos came to the United States, and from what part of Italy. Not important. But I do know the prejudice and social barriers that Italians faced – pretty much the same faced by people from Ireland. (I can say that; along with my beloved American passport, I carry an Irish passport, courtesy of my maternal grandmother.) I have run into Scaramucci a time or two since he made a success of himself – well-spoken, polite, adult. I cannot process that with the profane, preening Trumpite I saw in his raucous 10-day cup of coffee in the White House. Maybe I am hallucinating, but something in Anthony Scaramucci’s upbringing just may have clicked in over the weekend, when he strongly criticized the current policy of President Trump to separate Latino children from the adults who have run into migration laws. Yes, yes, I know, the main issue began as stopping illegal migration, a valid goal, but now the world has seen and heard children, ripped from their protectors, crying in cages. And the world has seen the President of the United States as a movie villain, straight out of James Bond. I watched Trump on Monday, cruelly maintaining that this hurts him as much as it hurts those illegal kids, and I thought to myself, "This guy is enjoying himself immensely." (Somebody I know thinks it is Trump's obsession to destroy anything connected to Barack Obama.) "It's an atrocious policy," Scaramucci told Alisyn Camerota on CNN. "It's inhumane. It's offensive to the average American." Apparently still lusting to get back into the White House, Scaramucci blamed Trump “advisors” for steering him wrong about putting crying children into makeshift holding facilities. Was Scaramucci being political, trying to give Trump an out by blaming those silly little advisors to whom he listens so regularly? Or was he feeling some twinge of vestigial compassion, so out of fashion in this regime, when scoundrels like Jeff Sessions and Sarah Huckabee Sanders quote the Bible to justify separating adults and children? "The immediate, remedial need is to change this right now," Scaramucci said. People on Twitter and elsewhere have savaged Scaramucci for getting into this dialogue. Others have praised him. I cannot read into his heart. I don’t know how often he gets back to Port Washington, where a lot of his family still lives. (See Laura Vecsey’s chat with Anthony’s mother and uncle in our town.) I bet Scaramucci gets back often enough to see the number of Central American people who work and pray and socialize and play – and send their children to the wonderful public schools, the same way Scaramucci’s family did with him. Three of my grand-children have been going to the local high school in recent years. I see some of their classmates – kids with jobs in their mid teens, excellent use of English, some of them heading for college, just like previous waves of newcomers. Only Anthony Scaramucci knows why he chose to urge the president to change the “policy.” (As did all five living First Ladies.) I hope he might see it as living up to the way he was raised, by his family and by the community. -------------------------------------------------- Want to cite the Prophet Isaiah and others about this hostage-taking by Trump? Here is a message from the Rev. Dr. Susan Henry-Crowe, general secretary of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church: https://www.umcjustice.org/news-and-stories/a-shocking-violation-of-the-spirit-of-the-gospel-697 ------------------------------------------------------------ Ever since that White House Correspondents dinner Saturday night, I have not trusted my negative reactions.
I wanted to make sure I did not have a male-double-standard reaction to a female comedian who talked dirty about the disturbed man in the White House. She, after all, did not say anything that my wife and I have not shouted at the tube in the last two years. But there is a huge difference between insults hurled in a darkened tv den….or incessant breaking-news yammering on cable news….or kvetching on my own little therapy web site…or even actual news reported by my friend Michael S. Schmidt and other stars at the New York Times and Washington Post….and a raunchy televised monologue in a huge room filled with DC types. So despite judgments by my wife….and Masha Gessen in The New Yorker….that the speech was righteous and prophetic, I am reminded why the Times, my former employer, does not participate in the annual dinner. The Times also does not let its staff vote for awards – sports, entertainment, anything – because, as I understand it, the Times’ job is to report news rather than make news with a quirky vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame or something else trivial. The Times has been way ahead of the curve on ducking the dinner, which may have been a grand old Washington custom when (male) swamp-dwellers smoked cigars and chuckled at musty jokes about Franklin Pierce’s golf game, or whatever. I know scholarships and awards are involved, but the dinner (without the pulchritude of the Oscar show) was mean. Then again, I didn’t think Steven Colbert’s 2006 riff on President George W. Bush was funny. (I don’t think Colbert is funny, or Bill Maher, and I thought Louis C.K. was rancid when I caught him on tv once or twice. I love Letterman and Chris Rock and Wanda Sykes and Tina Fey but there are too many comedians. I know this sounds stuffy.) The point is, there is a disturbed man in the White House, courtesy of angry people with racial bias and rich guys and evangelicals and frauds like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. This is serious business. Hiring a comedian for shock value does not help. You should hear the stuff my wife and I shout at Sarah Huckabee Sanders in our den, as she pours self-righteous contempt on journalism, and facts, and reality. She was sent by the chicken-heart President to take the insults Saturday, and she reacted with stoic dignity, for once. If you ask me, we need to listen to dead-serious people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, neither of whom has ever been described as a comedian. The country needs Robert Mueller to do his job, and federal prosecutors, and lawyers, and journalists, and refreshing younger candidates, and journalists. The dinner needs to evolve if not expire. No more comedians. No more yuks. This is serious business. The correspondents should say: We are better than that.
Financial Wiz.
Great White Hope of Middle America. Muscles. Character. Paul Ryan came into our lives as the new wave. He knew how to make money for rich people, which as you know is good for all the rest of us. Then he would go off to the gym to work out. When he wasn’t lifting weights, Ryan did a little fund-raising through his Prosperity Action group, whose biggest contributors were – why, look here – Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who are connected with the now-notorious Cambridge Analytica group. (Perhaps you have heard of it.) When he is not spending quality time with his family next year, Ryan could still be handling political money – unless the Mercers are suddenly getting out of the politics game. Either way, Ryan will slink out of daily view as a poseur who could never, ever, stand up to the disturbed man in the White House or the White Citizens Council standing mutely behind Mitch McConnell. Ryan's announcement Wednesday makes at least 43 House Republicans who don’t want to face the voters in November – they’re not that stupid -- and senators who range from mossbunkers like Orrin Hatch, the senator from Big Pharma, to pretenders like Bob Corker, to flashes like Jeff Flake, who sometimes almost sounded like he had a clue. You know how this began, don’t you? It began with Donald Trump (we in New York knew all about that guy) who made up stuff about Barack Obama, playing into the schemes of a patriot like McConnell who announced – announced – that his main job was to undermine the new president. It was about race, kids. McConnell and John Boehner couldn’t stand the idea of a black man who was smarter and more graceful than they were. It’s been a project ever since – 1861 types, trying to get back to the good old days. Paul Ryan was a good front, like a male model who wears a suit well. But his suit was made of tissue paper and it fell apart in the hard rain falling on us now. The tax cuts? The tariffs? The federal budget keeps going up and Paul Ryan is getting out of town. On the same day that Paul Ryan announced he won't run again, the New York Times ran a great piece by Eduardo Porter on the front page of the Business section about a modest steel company that cannot compete with the killer tariffs that the disturbed man willed into being. Jobs, jobs, jobs. (And meantime, we have a disturbed man about to deal with Syria, while pursued by the law for his real “career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks,” as the Times editorial so accurately put it. The one thing to be said about Paul Ryan: he likes his image of a family man, a church-goer. That would account for the occasional flicker of shame on his aging face, the look that says, I could have been better than this. Instead, Paul Ryan, new-age Republican, just quits.
The Passover/Easter weekend ended well, or at least entertainingly. I enjoyed the latest version of “Jesus Christ, Superstar,” live on NBC, even with all the commercials. The music took me back nearly five decades and the production was modern and energetic, with great, careful harmonies from the large cast – performing on the move in an armory in Brooklyn. John Legend played the title role, transported at the end into the heavens, or at least the rafters, and to my relief he emerged in one piece for the curtain call. To my hearing in the year 2018, this version emphasized the doubts of Judas Priest – or maybe I was sensitized by Jon Meacham’s thoughtful take on Easter in Sunday’s NYT Book Review. Mainly, this version of “Superstar” was entertainment – and I was entertained. Legend was, in a way, out-rocked by Brandon Victor Dixon (best known for his friendly little salutation to Vice President Pence after a performance of “Hamilton.”) Bouncing his way cynically and energetically through the melee of Jerusalem, Dixon owned the stage. Sara Bareilles as Mary Magdalene? Let me just say that I am a few decades past it for pop music (most of it sounds like calisthenics)-- but that strong, lush voice and gorgeous Levantine nose on Sara Bareilles? Where has she been all my life? Then there was the mincing presence of Alice Cooper, performing the song he was born to sing -- that Vegas-English-music-hall mixture, “King Herod’s Song.” He said he was channeling Elvis; I thought of the late, great Tiny Tim on speed. (I read in the Times that Alice Cooper got religion when he sobered up. So we had a born-againer playing a mad king. That’s show biz.) The performance came after news that, on Easter morning, the great white hope of the Evangelicals could not even fake “the spirit of Holy Week,” as Laura Ingraham said in perhaps her final days as a creature of the cable. (It has come to my attention that Ingraham and Ann Coulter are actually two different people. How long has this been going on?) Last week Ingraham trashed one of the young people who survived automatic weapon fire in Florida and then, watching her sponsors vanish, she cited religious impulses to take it all back, sort of.) From his tropical Berchtesgarten, Trump tweeted out that he was going to enact new horrible penalties on Mexico and Mexicans. When questioned outside the church, Trump brayed affirmations of his intent on a weekend when Jews and Christians were honoring survival, celebrating outsiders, the others, in our world. The Four Questions had been asked at Seders, the extra place set for Elijah; the agony of the “carpenter king” noted in sacred and profane ways in church and on the stage of the armory in Brooklyn. And at my wife’s lovely Easter dinner, somebody at the table recalled a recent holiday when most stores were closed -- but a Latino bodega in our town was selling coffee and pasteles and more. The outsiders are now part of us. God bless them. And the President wants to expel them. That bad actor is still performing a role for which he never rehearsed -- not channeling Elvis or Alice Cooper but something more camp, and at the same time more vile, more ominous. * * * (A friend sent this in the Jesuit magazine, America:) https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2018/04/02/why-jesus-christ-superstar-was-live-tv-its-best (In case you missed Alice Cooper: )  The General gets it I was going to write about a heinous new development in baseball -- but other events intruded. As the Mueller investigation demands records from the Trump business, and the porno queen heads to court, the President shows signs of unraveling. In his pull-the-wings-off-flies mode, Trump had his garden-gnome Attorney General dismiss an FBI official just before his pension was official. On Friday evening, the retired general Barry McCaffrey issued a statement that Trump is a “serious threat to US national security.” Gen. McCaffrey fought in Vietnam, whatever we think of that war; Trump had spurious bone spurs. McCaffrey was later the so-called drug czar for the federal government, which is how I came to value his knowledge. So instead of writing about baseball, I am placing this note atop my recent posting because the ongoing comments are fascinating – from the Panglossian to the dystopian. I think it is important and life-affirming to be able to spot danger. Gen. McCaffrey has it. The majority members of Congress seem to have lost that ability. Meanwhile, Trump’s Russian pals keep pummeling the soft midsection of the U.S. while the President tweets and fires people long-distance, the coward.  These mugs don't get it (This was my previous posting; comments ongoing.)
I haven’t posted anything in 12 days. Been busy. One thing after another. On Wednesday I stayed with the Mets-Yankees exhibition from Florida, even when people I never heard of were hitting home runs off people who won’t be around on opening day. But it was baseball, and really, in ugly times like this, isn't that what matters? Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling were going on delightful tangents after Darling said Kevin Mitchell had just emailed him. Kevin Mitchell – the guy the front office blamed for leading poor Doc Gooden and poor Daryl Strawberry astray? That guy. Terrible trade, Hernandez said. Ron and Keith meandered into tales of a nasty fight in Pittsburgh, started by my friend Bill Robinson, the first-base coach. The broadcasters recalled how Mitchell was destroying some Pirate, and both teams had to stop their usual jostling and flailing to save a life. The good old days. I loved the filibustering about 1986. The best impression I took from the three hours was the sight of Juan Lagares playing the sun, the wind and the ball with knowledge, grace, speed and touch. “That’s a real center fielder!” I blurted. Curt Flood. Paul Blair. Andruw Jones. Dare I say it, Willie Mays? Baseball. I was happy. * * * I need to write something but I keep getting distracted. I turn on the tube and think I see a traffic cam of an addled old man trying to cross Queens Boulevard -- the 300-foot-wideBoulevard of Death -- in my home borough of Queens. Is he carrying a baby as he lurches across 10 lanes of danger? The wind picks up. His comb-over flies up. Wait, that’s not any addled old man from Queens. What’s he carrying? It’s not a baby. He’s got the whole world in his hands. I watch with morbid fascination as he lumbers into danger. * * * I need to write something but I keep getting distracted. We’ve had two March snowstorms in a week. On Wednesday we lost power for five hours but my wife made instant coffee via the gas stove, and put together a nice supper, and we listened to the news on a battery-operated radio and then we found Victoria de los Angeles and “Songs Of the Auvergne," one of the most beautiful recordings we know. The juice went on in time for us to catch up with latest news about the porno queen and the Leader of the Free World. Gee, we didn’t have scandals like this with George W. Bush or Barack Obama. I watched for hours. * * * I need to write something but I keep reading instead. My old Hofstra friend, basketball star Ted Jackson, recommended I read “Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America,” by Patrick Phillips about rape charges and lynching and the forced exodus of blacks from Forsyth County, Ga., in 1912. As it happens, I have relatives, including some of color, who live just south of that county, now re-integrated in the northward sprawl of Atlanta. The denizens of that county in 1912 sound like the great grand-parents of the “very fine people” who flocked to Charlottesville last summer. It never goes away, does it? * * * I need to write something but I keep following the news. At the White House press briefing Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders spat out, with her usual contempt, the little nugget that the President had won a very, very big arbitration hearing involving the porno queen and $130,000 the President's lawyer shelled out from the goodness of his heart. Oops, the jackals of the press did not know about that. Thanks to Sanders, now they do. I got the feeling Sanders might be leaving on the midnight train for Arkansas. I envision Sanders trying to hail a ride on Pennsylvania Ave. but a stylish woman with a teen-age boy in tow beats her to the cab. That woman is leaving on the midnight plane for Slovenia. * * * I need to write something, but stuff keeps happening.  Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee back in the day Alas, Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will not be able to attend the State of the Union speech Tuesday evening because she has a speaking engagement at the Roger Williams University School of Law in Rhode Island. (Williams is one of the great early Americans, remembered for “advocating separation of church and state in Colonial America. His views on religious freedom and tolerance, coupled with his disapproval of the practice of confiscating land from Native Americans, earned him the wrath of his church and banishment from the colony,” according to one history site. Make of this what you will.) The justice, age 84, has given clear recent signals that she intends to remain on the highest court for the foreseeable future. https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/01/27/us/politics/ap-us-justice-ginsburg-staying-put.html Good move, Madam Justice. I can’t speak for her – nobody should dare – but speaking strictly for myself, I don’t want to observe that generally affirmative evening soiled this this time around. For the inauguration a year ago, some of us in the family went to an Afghan restaurant on Long Island on the theory that the event would not be on the tube, and we were right. Aushak all around, for starters. As for the State of the Union speech and the bustle surrounding it, I’m going to listen to Terrance McKnight on WQXR-FM instead. Much healthier. (I ducked out on the Grammies after 10 minutes Sunday night; guys in fatigues and boots? Where were Stevie Wonder and Dolly Parton? What ever happened to songs?) Of course, I could be missing a one-time-only event Tuesday night. A year ago, I predicted 18 months from inauguration for this guy; it is still a possibility, given the collusion and money-laundering and racial slurs and general debauchery and ignorance emitting from the White House. But I’ll read about the event in the Times the next morning. What is the over/under (gambling term) for how many times he says “no collusion, no collusion?” Or waves his stubby fingers and says, “Truthfully….” I always enjoy the State of the Union because, even with the loyal opposition sitting on its hands for much of the speech, there is a sense of vestigial dignity to the evening. Plus, I love the way some public officials hang over the railing to shake hands, get an autograph, or offer sage if truncated advice. I always love to spot my fellow Jamaica High School grad (a few decades younger than my crowd), Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, engaging President Obama or President George W. Bush from her adopted state of Texas. I just discovered that Rep. Lee and her companions are known as “aisle hogs” because they line up hours and hours before the big event, to get up close with the President. The latest information is that Rep. Lee is undecided about attending Tuesday night. Old habits die hard. I’m guessing she will be there, perhaps to eyeball this office-temp president. Take a good look. Next year we might have President Pence – I know, I know -- not that he would want to get too close to a female legislator. Anyway, I’ll be listening to classical music Tuesday evening. I think Roger Williams would approve.  “Talk! Or we’ll make you watch the State of the Union.” David Sipress, The New Yorker, Jan. 29, 2018  Dr. Eric R. Kandel and Charlie Rose, Brain Series (photo, not video) One of the best things on television in the past decade was The Brain Series by Charlie Rose. The body of work exists – on line, easily accessible, and etched in the memories of viewers like my wife, who listened and learned. The leader of the discussions was Dr. Eric R. Kandel of Columbia University, whose knowledge and manner commanded the screen. The other guests were also brilliant, and Rose raised his game considerably, moving things along and actually listening to the experts. Now we are left with the image of a powerful man parading around his apartment in an open bathrobe, terrorizing young female colleagues. How do we process this? The series remains. I suspect the science and the humanity will remain pertinent, at least until future discoveries add to the knowledge. Can people live with a focused Charlie Rose moderating a landmark series? Can people live with their vinyl and CDs and downloads of James Levine conducting opera? Everybody has to live with their memories. I won’t miss Matt Lauer because I never, ever, watch morning TV. I don’t know how to gauge the widely variant charges or suspicions about John Hockenberry and Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz (and Charlie Rose), all of whom have interviewed me respectfully, let me hustle my books. What was it like for the capable women in those studios who made a visit so successful? Harvey Weinstein is easy. He is a monster who produced some great movies but he is a monster just for what he did to that beautiful and spirited and talented Annabella Sciorra, whom I have loved since she sang in "Mister Wonderful." (Go ahead, look at the video, watch her ex eat his heart out.) I want to be on the Weinstein jury. That’s all I’m saying. Then there is Garrison Keillor. There were years when we built our Saturday afternoons and evenings around his radio show – times when my wife and I sat in a parking lot outside a restaurant until he finished his weekly visit to Lake Wobegon (the one about a man driving his young family back to Minnesota for the holidays, the one about the pioneer who dies in the badlands, never getting to see the Pacific.) Keillor never presented himself as anything more than flawed. (His radio alter ego was reminded of this by his own mother, who couldn’t remember his name.) He added his human complexities to his voice, his words, his image. Now he is accused of – he says – sliding his hand into the back of an open blouse. A mistake, he says, which happened while consoling a woman. Keillor says he is not a tactile person, and I believe it. In past decades, I interviewed him maybe half a dozen times on the phone but never quite got to have a conversation even at rehearsals at Town Hall in New York. He nodded in recognition -- and kept moving. A shy guy. Who knows about him? Keillor played himself in a movie about his last radio show, art predicting life. The Robert Altman movie, “A Prairie Home Companion,” has an amazing cast, not the least of whom is Virginia Madsen as a redhead in a white raincoat who, he realizes, just may be an angel of death, with her eye on him. (She died in a car wreck while laughing at his radio joke, she tells him, as he edges away.) The movie (Altman’s last) is classic Altman, in that you have to listen to overlapping conversations – a stretch for younger audiences. One of the subplots involves Meryl Streep as a country singer on the show, who was once Keillor’s girlfriend, and every so often she reminds him of exactly that. He knows she is in pain that he caused. The ringleader figure in the movie is a creep, but a talented, sensitive, guilty creep. How human, art imitating life. Now the question is, what do we do with the education, the art, the culture, from people (men, in this context) who seem to be varying scales of creep? We have a major creep running for the Senate in Alabama. We have a serial creep as President. We have creeps of all major parties. Meantime, I can watch Keillor in that movie over and over again. Some day when I grow up and develop a brain, I plan to watch the Brain Series, but for the moment we are left with the major creep in the bathrobe who caused such pain.  Streep and Keillor in the movie, "A Prairie Home Companion"  Iron Eyes Cody, 1971. This is how I feel, (Note: This piece was filed Friday morning, just before John McCain announced he could not support this vicious bill. I have had great respect for McCain since I met him years ago. His action Friday may have doomed the legislation -- for now -- but these people keep coming back for their money.)
Lately, I’ve been seeing the image of the Native American with one tear rolling down his cheek. It was a highly popular commercial, for the ecology, from Earth Day, 1971. The man had paddled down a pristine river and sighted a modern Apocalypse of debris. That’s how I feel these days. It’s not just the natural disasters pounding Texas and Florida and the Caribbean and Mexico, places we know and love. It’s deeper. It’s the vision into the heart of darkness. I have dealt with the election of a cruel, ignorant and disturbed human being, believing he will be out within 18 months. He’s a symptom of something worse. The teardrop in my mind comes when I see stone-hearted members of Congress preparing to vote to take away health care from millions of people who need it the most -- fellow Americans, whatever that means anymore. I see politicians – and by that I mean Republicans – lobbying for votes, to stiff the poor and the sick. They are doing it for their donors, the Koch Brothers and villains like them, who want tax breaks, and do not care how they come, even at the penalty of taking away surgery from the ill and shelter for the aged. These donors would, essentially, kill for money, and so would their lackeys in Congress. Lindsey Graham. For a while, I thought he was showing touches of humanity but now he is front and center for the White Citizens Council, some of them doctors, for goodness’ sakes, who shuffle wordlessly behind Head Kleagle McConnell. They want money so they can keep going. Jimmy Kimmel is wise to this Cassidy guy. I hope Kimmel's rants do some good. Until McCain made his statement Friday, I could not count on three Republicans in the Senate to vote for the poor. Plus, I can think of a Democrat or two who would shaft people in their own states, for money. They do not want to care for their fellow humans. And they have the backing of some large and oily religious lobbies. I can remember when Americans told each other we were the good guys who helped win two World Wars. If you overlooked the Civil War, the war that has never ended, it was a workable image. This current collective meanness has been coming on for a while. It began when the McConnell-Boehner-Ryan coalition sabotaged Barack Obama for the crime of Presiding While Black. It’s about race, a lot of it. I’ve gotten pretty tough in my old age. I ascribe to the Iris Dement song, “No Time to Cry,” about how her father died and she had to keep going. But now I'm walking and I'm talking, Doing what I'm supposed to do. Working overtime to make sure I don't come unglued. I guess I'm older now and I've got no time to cry. Then I remember the Native American, so proud, so stoic, seeing what others are doing to his world. One tear. (Footnote: the man in the commercial, who went by the name of Iron Eyes Cody, was actually of Sicilian ancestry, Espera Oscar de Corti, and grew up in rural Louisiana. He portrayed Native Americans in movies, and married one in real life. He looked the part well enough that I remember his tear, 46 years later.)  (This piece was written 12 hours before John McCain cast a deciding vote in defeating the bill that would have taken health care from over 20 million people. I have read Paul Krugman's perceptive column in the NYT, also written earlier Thursday, long before McCain's vote, depicting the senator's erratic stances.
It's tricky to write about a moving story. On Thursday, Laura Vecsey wrote a glimpse of the Scaramucci family from our town. Later, Anthony became Trump's Trump via his vile rant to the New Yorker. It's a moving spectacle. I think I know where this is all going -- sooner rather than later, one can only hope. GV.) * * * This is not the role anybody wanted for John McCain – appearing in public with a red raw line above his eye, from the recent incursion toward his brain. I have been writing for over six months that I fully expected Sen. McCain to be a pivotal figure in the inevitable dumpsterization of Donald Trump. I spent a few hours with Sen. McCain in his office for a column during an Olympic hearing in 1999, seeing the cranky side and the generous side. Sen. McCain remains enigmatic – coming back from an awful diagnosis to cast a vote on health care, temporarily siding with the president who once declared him not a hero, and also supporting the amoral Mitch McConnell, to prolong this foolishness. But then John McCain did what I have expected of him on his good-John-McCain days: he plainly called the Republican health-care “plan” meaningless, empty. Now he has viscerally reacted to the pathetic tweeter of the White House by criticizing the call to bar transgender people from the military. This pilot served, was tortured. He knows how things actually work in the service, as opposed to the poseur from military school. The same goes for Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who lost parts of her legs while serving as a pilot in Iraq. I saw her on TV the other night, talking about the foolish gesture toward transgender military people. She was, as always, so smart, so dignified. So presidential. John McCain did not get to be president. His best moment during the campaign was to take the microphone back from the bigot in red who labelled Barack Obama “an A-rab.” It was hard, recently, to watch John McCain stumble while asking questions in a Senate hearing. Now we know what is happening. But I am counting on him to exercise the just part of him. His pals in the mute White Citizens Council posse that materializes behind McConnell cannot pretend things are just fine, when John McCain is reacting viscerally to the disorder. Unlike Trump, Sen. McCain felt no need to pander to the religious right on the transgender issue. I originally thought it would take 18 rational months to rid the country of the buffoon, but now I think it could happen by Labor Day. This can’t go on. John McCain can help by calling out a disturbed man. He flew many missions, but when he and Lindsay Graham pay that visit to the White House one of these months, it will be John McCain’s greatest mission.  Both? At Once? I counted on them. Just the thought of them got me through a horrible winter.
Every fan knows what I am saying: the unique place of baseball -- seasonally correct, holding promise of a new spring. My team happens to be the Mets, already sinking toward the lower depths, but fans of other teams will recognize the angst: for this I dreamed all winter? I see Curtis Granderson floundering and I see Asdrubal Cabrera falling apart – two of my favorite players, with intelligence and humor and a fine body of work, who were so fine last season. This is hard to watch. I am allowed to root. One of the liberations of retirement is shucking professional neutrality. I obsessed about the Mets’ pitching staff, all those talented kids, and I saw the Mets beating out the under-achieving Nationals. I needed the Mets to thrive, particularly since that sickening night in November when a candidate we New Yorkers knew as a damaged charlatan was elected, ick, but I cannot say it. I tried to get through the winter with partisan television news -- squirmed through rude interruptions of guests, daydreamed through 20-minute rambles with two minutes of content, rolled my eyes at the harmless repetitions of the word “lies,” as if they did any good. Everybody reacts differently. People I know are developing a cursing syndrome when McConnell and Ryan ooze into view. Tim Egan called Ryan an "Irish undertaker." I think he meant unctuous. With my Irish passport, I laughed out loud. Felt good. For 30 seconds. I tried behavior modification. I cannot listen to my large collection of rock and folk and country and jazz on my iPod. No mood for The Band or Stevie Wonder or Iris Dement or The Dead. Songs of lost love and rolling down the highway don’t do it right now. In mid-winter I listened to chamber music and waited for DeGrom and Céspedes and Familia, when his mini-suspension was over. Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun. Here comes the sun. It’s all right. But now we are a month and a half into this season, and the Mets look done. This is not their year. I know, I know, this is not the loyalty of a true fan, but I covered a zillion games of baseball and I can tell a team that has too many flaws. What’s up with the Alleged Dark Knight? In the same way that I assess my broken ball team, I assess my homeland. I thought the damaged goods would be returned to sender, like some bad Amazon purchase, within 18 months, and it could happen sooner. But the Democrats look like an expansion team – too old, too callow, no core. I scan the prospects among the majority party for enlightened, idealistic action: I see stirrings of conscience in Graham and Collins. I really like John McCain from having interviewed him once; if you spot him approaching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with a couple of cohorts, let me know. I watched Ben Sasse – a fresh face, a note of hope, like Michael Conforto of the Mets -- during the hearings the other day and thought, this guy could actually have intelligence and courage. But I’ve been wrong before. I thought my ball team would give me spring-to-autumn diversion. Now I peek at them, through spread fingers, like a child, for an inning here or an inning there. (I'm even happy for Yankee fans. First time in my life.) It’s mid-May and I have lost hope for my team.  Bernie Sanders visits West Virginia, where he won Democratic primary The other night, the conscientious Chris Hayes did a documentary from West Virginia, with the impassioned Sen. Bernie Sanders. I couldn’t watch. The state already voted for the poseur, Donald Trump, last November by roughly 68 to 26 per cent over Hillary Clinton. It’s all so familiar. Living in Kentucky, I covered Appalachia for the Times from 1970 through 1972 and remained in close touch for many years afterward. I saw bodies fished out of Buffalo Creek after an earthen coal dam gave way. I saw the crusading Doc Rasmussen going to hearings with an autopsy slide demonstrating Black Lung. I covered a few coal-mine disasters and the Harlan strike of 1974, so grippingly captured by Barbara Kopple. So long ago. So courant. The only thing that has changed is that we know more. Technology has gotten better – and worse. Coal companies can push more detritus downhill into the streams and gardens of their own people and scientists can measure the damage to air and water and lungs more carefully. When I covered West Virginia, Rep. Ken Hechler was the Bernie of his day, speaking out against corruption and pollution. (Hechler passed recently at 102.) A miner named Arnold Ray Miller tromped around to speak against corruption in his union – and was elected president in 1972. There was often hope of change, of throwing out the rascals and the big-city corporations, but decades have gone by, and good people still want to work, and young people have no hope and are resorting to killer opioids pushed on them by the same kind of doctors who said coal dust was good for the common cold. Every reliable study says there is no future, no justification, for digging and burning coal, yet frauds like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Big Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who calls himself a Democrat, bow down to their masters from Big Coal. It is pathetic. The decency and the religion and the patriotism of people from West-by-God-Virginia make them susceptible to all kinds of drugs – crooked politicians, phony prophets of economic success. Hillary Clinton, in her own artless way, told people that coal mines would be shut down. So they voted against her. Of course, Sanders had won the Democratic primary in West Virginia, proving that people of that state are terribly bifurcated, at their own expense. One of the first things Trump did to Appalachia was to remove barriers to dumping waste into the valleys where people live. And Big Joe shook Trump’s hand after his first speech to Congress. My wife and daughter Laura (who used to cover rascals in Pennsylvania) told me the MSNBC program was terrific. Now it seems people in McDowell County are speaking up for health care and even Big Joe Manchin is getting the message that you can sell out your own state just so long. God bless Bernie Sanders and Chris Hayes and West Virginia, but I just couldn’t watch.  Democrat Big Joe Manchin and his New Best Friend. Same old stuff. (start at 3:30 for deep expression of concern over diet) I did not watch the spectacle on Thursday because it makes me uncomfortable to see somebody behave like that in public. It’s a behavioral problem the Trump family really should have dealt with when young Donald was acting out while at the Kew-Forest School and was exiled to military school. Now it might be too late. But not too late for Republicans to open their eyes and realize what they have wrought. Two months ago I wrote that I was putting my hopes on Sen. John McCain to mobilize his colleagues, as the patriotic act of a military hero. The other day, the great Tim Weiner put his hopes on Sen. McCain as well as James Comey, the head of the F.B.I. Comey. The name is familiar. I also gave Trump 18 months in office before he got bored, or was forced out. The way it looks now, he will lose the Republicans in Congress, one by one. One can only imagine what the rational ones are saying in the corridors right now. Eventually, even moral ciphers like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan will catch up. Then there's this: last weekend on the resurgent Saturday Night Live, Michael Che alluded to Trump’s junk-food jones: “I’m starting to feel bad for Donald Trump . . . I hope he quits. Donald, is this really how you want to spend the last two years of your life?” I did catch a few clips from Trump’s performance on Thursday. The man looks terrible – new lines on his face, new jowls, new twitches. He seemed to be sucking wind between his one-liners. Dude, when you see McCain and Graham and a few others at the door for a little chat, they will be doing you a yooge favor.  (I can write this, since I carry an Irish passport, courtesy of my grandmother, along with my beloved American passport) Stephen K. Bannon runs our country, pushing the buttons of the distracted oaf who is technically the president. Trump shows what is under his personal rock when he refers to Jon Stewart as “Jonathan Leibowitz” (the comedian’s original name) after a TV gig. Guess Trump forgets he was passing as Swedish as long as he could, neglecting his family origins as Drumpf. Behind him is Bannon, pulling the strings, telling him how to keep Muslims out of the country. I looked it up. http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Bannon Bannon means “white” or “fair” – in the complexion sense, you may be sure. As an Irish passport holder, I can say, some of Trump’s closest advisors are named Flynn and Kelly and Bannon. It was not that long ago that “real” Americans considered people from Ireland the unwashed, the others, the threat. The Flynns and Kellys and Bannons were not considered good enough to haul trash or dig graves for “real” Americans, who had, of course, killed and dislodged as many original Americans as they could. There is reasonable debate about how many Irish ever encountered signs that said NINA -- No Irish Need Apply. Butongoing research proves it was there, in some windows, some newspapers, many hearts. The Irish persevered, and a descendent of Fitzgeralds and Kennedys became president. Now another president talks about a “ban” of Muslims, a registry of Muslims. He backtracks, but we know. In a dangerous world, the U.S. was already vetting people from dicey parts of the world. But with his tiny attention span, the new president tries to stop legal residents of the U.S. from coming home. Doctors. Scholars. Husbands. Wives. He is unashamed. He knows no history. Knows only fragments of things that flutter in front of his eyes. Knows only what Bannon tells him. It’s easy to spot the sneer on Bannon’s face. We want this guy advising our shallow president?  From a great article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/01/the-teen-who-exposed-a-professor-s-myth.html  (I can write this, since I carry an Irish passport, courtesy of my grandmother, along with my beloved American passport) Stephen K. Bannon runs our country, pushing the buttons of the distracted oaf who is technically the president. Trump shows what is under his personal rock when he refers to Jon Stewart as “Jonathan Leibowitz” (the comedian’s original name) after a TV gig. Guess Trump forgets he was passing as Swedish as long as he could, neglecting his family origins as Drumpf. Behind him is Bannon, pulling the strings, telling him how to keep Muslims out of the country. I looked it up. http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Bannon Bannon means “white” or “fair” – in the complexion sense, you may be sure. As an Irish passport holder, I can say, some of Trump’s closest advisors are named Flynn and Kelly and Bannon. It was not that long ago that “real” Americans considered people from Ireland the unwashed, the others, the threat. The Flynns and Kellys and Bannons were not considered good enough to haul trash or dig graves for “real” Americans, who had, of course, killed and dislodged as many original Americans as they could. There is reasonable debate about how many Irish ever encountered signs that said NINA -- No Irish Need Apply. But ongoing research proves it was there, in some windows, some newspapers, many hearts. The Irish persevered, and a descendent of Fitzgeralds and Kennedys became president. Now another president talks about a “ban” of Muslims, a registry of Muslims. He backtracks, but we know. In a dangerous world, the U.S. was already vetting people from dicey parts of the world. But with his tiny attention span, the new president tries to stop legal residents of the U.S. from coming home. Doctors. Scholars. Husbands. Wives. He is unashamed. He knows no history. Knows only fragments of things that flutter in front of his eyes. Knows only what Bannon tells him. It’s easy to spot the sneer on Bannon’s face. We want this guy advising our shallow president?  http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/01/the-teen-who-exposed-a-professor-s-myth.html  Voting Monitors Celebrate Productive Harvest (Photo: Diane Tuman) As rain began to fall Friday in DC, we went out to lunch on Long Island -- a modest Afghan restaurant, on the theory that the place would not exactly be humming with inauguration buffs. We had appetizers laced with yogurt and garlic, curry, rice, salad and nice crisp bread – the kind of cuisine new people bring to this country. Across from us, three young women in head scarves were talking excitedly, giggling occasionally. They seemed much like our own grand-daughter, sitting across from us in the booth – bright, hopeful, their lives ahead of them. America. Somebody in our family had turned down the chance to watch the Inauguration from a privileged site -- couldn’t pretend to be enthusiastic. However, on Saturday we did have loved ones in Washington and New York, mingling with the hundreds of thousands. From afar, it looked like good fun. No fire hoses, no dogs, not yet. The new President, who makes up everything, later said the press invented the figures for the two events. Yet I kept getting photos on my iPhone. Guess those multitudes were photo-shopped – with banners appropriate to this day. My email included a blessing from the Rev. Dr. Susan Henry-Crowe, the General Secretary of the United Methodist Church, for the departing President and his family, and the incoming President and his family. Her blessing included: “For the good of the earth and all of creation, which God has given us, and for the wisdom and will to conserve it, let us pray to the Lord. Lord, have mercy.” Another email was from an old friend, Roy Lloyd, one of the thoughtful religion commentators on WINS 1010 AM in New York. Roy described the pink caps worn by many marchers, adding: “The participants demonstrated something said by Helen Keller: ‘One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.’” Speaking of prayers: On the same gorgeous Saturday back home, I went for a fast walk on the high-school track, listening to the Grateful Dead on my headset. As I circled the soft red track, I blurted out the punch line in “Touch of Grey.” “We will get by” – emphasis on the “will.” In repetition, it becomes a prayer, just like the haunting punch line in George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun” – “It’s all right.” After this epic day all over the world, we can repeat this mantra in days to come: It's all right. We will get by.   Photos by Diane Tuman  Inauguration 2009 I respect John Lewis for staying away. I respect the people – including some close to me – who are going to Washington on Saturday to protest. I’m hunkering. I can’t watch the transfer of responsibility, of power, from the President to a reality-show host. For all that, the dominant feeling I expect on Friday is relief. This essay is being written on the national holiday for Martin Luther King, who went to Memphis in 1968 to back up striking sanitation workers. It is written in honor of John Lewis, who went to Selma in 1965 to protest American segregation, and who, thank goodness, survived the beating and is still with us, calling the new President illegitimate. How many people have been holding our breath since the election of 2008 – hearing in our hearts the lyrics by Dion DiMucci: “Seems the good they die young.” Instead, came a more subtle version – what Justice Clarence Thomas might call “a high-tech lynching” -- conducted by Mitch McConnell, missing only the hood over his face, and Boehner and Cantor and Ryan, who could not coexist with a black President. They screwed up the country, leaving a Rube Goldberg health-care bill that could have been so much better, and stalling on infrastructure and education. High-tech resistance. For eight years, President Obama has conducted business with intelligence and dignity; he will walk away observing the rituals of democracy. The main thing is, he and Mrs. Obama will walk away. I look forward to their books; I look forward to very rare glimmers of their children, leading semi-normal lives. The country will now have to respond to the demonstrated rapacity of the new people. This new person has nominated people who cut deals with dicey nations to make money for themselves and shareholders, who demonstrate contempt for the majority as well as for government. The current polls suggest that many people who voted for the man are now having misgivings. Did you see Charles Blow’s list of polls showing the people’s dis-satisfaction with the transition? That’s right, the people out there who thought this guy was a fine religious gentleman and an American patriot and a savvy executive are now having misgivings. (Mike Pence, the token of the religious right, looks stricken -- the only man on his island.) John Lewis is staying away. As always, John Lewis is way ahead on moral stances. What plans do you have for Friday?  Inauguration, 1961: Robert Frost blinded by the glare.  A private investigator I know (perhaps connected to the MI6?) has found current Ladbrokes odds of 11-10 that the impending President will not last four years. Here’s the article: https://www.inverse.com/article/26292-donald-trump-impeachment-odds Perhaps this is mere wishful thinking from people with a few bob to wager. You could ask, what do the Brits know? They voted for Brexit, against their own self-interest. Still, maybe they are on to something. Are American voters figuring out what they have done? The most recent Quinnipiac poll shows abysmal ratings for any incoming President. Here in P.T. Barnum’s America, some voters who hallucinated a fine religious gentleman or a successful businessman are having misgivings. Here are the numbers: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/poll-trump-presidential-transition-approval-233412 I recently wrote that something would get the new guy within 18 months – his tiny attention span, blatant conflicts and legalities, or being 70 and overweight. (Have you seen the latest photos of that neck?) A sex tape would be fine, too. Right now, a lot of people are preparing to demonstrate and lobby. At the same time, a friend in the Bay Area says she’s been crying since the election. I know somebody who has come down with a cursing affliction. Myself, I am hunkering down with a hard-covered book and classical music. Our emotions seem as roiled in a different way as those of McConnell and Boehner and Cantor and Ryan were when an African-American was elected president. Everybody has their own private angst. One of my favorite readers said he would cover my bet about 18 months. Put up or shut up, he said. I don’t bet. But I do root against four years of this guy:  Looming President Mocking Reporter With a Condition.
When Melania Trump “borrowed” chunks of Michelle Obama’s words last summer, she was found out in the flick of an iPhone. She didn’t seem to know the difference. Public figures are often caught using stuff from other people. Remember Joe Biden "borrowing" some material back in law school? And Tony Blair apparently re-channeling stuff from the movie “The Queen,” about him and Queen Elizabeth? The Web makes that harder and harder. Now it turns out that Monica Crowley, a former Murdochite on-air personality, scheduled to explain the complexities of national security for the Trumpites -- has used as many as 50 segments for a book under her name. In this day and age, wouldn’t you think she would know caution, if not shame? I say this, because just about everything is out there on the Web, easily checked. Research no longer is limited to dusty books or files from the back corners of a library. I know this, because in preparation for a talk I was thumbing through the 522 pages of “Look Homeward, Angel,” by my favorite author, Thomas Wolfe. I wanted to refresh my impressions of a few sweet passages but after an hour of enjoyable searching, I came up empty. Go to the laptop, dude. ---I knew there was a passage about a scholarly nun, examining a book at the bedside of a sleeping girl in a boarding school. I typed in “nun” and “book” and “sleep.” Found it. Still sweet and respectful. ---I knew Wolfe’s father liked to tell about being a 13-year-old, sassing Confederate soldiers in his village near Gettysburg. The Web reminded me that this epic section had been exorcised by Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe’s renowned editor, only to be revived decades later in an expanded version called “O, Lost.” I’ve requested it from our wonderful town library. ---I knew Wolfe often wrote about the lavish meals his father craved in his wife’s parsimonious boarding house in Asheville, N.C. – loving references to butter slathered on fat lima beans. I typed in a few words. Bingo. One would think that somebody writing today – even a Foxite news person – would have a little fear about lifting bunches of stuff from other sources. But anything flies these days. Just ask Kellyanne Conway, designated explainer and lookalike of the aforementioned Monica Crowley. Conway. says stuff with a straight face. I certainly would not expect Trump to understand these subtleties. * * * Meantime, has anybody else noticed that Crowley and Conway appear to have been separated at birth? And the seething Gen. Mike Flynn, who used to spew patently untrue “Flynn Facts” to subordinates, resembles the paranoid Col. Bat Guano, who shoots his way into the office in “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” – now coming true, in a universe near you.
3-1? He’ll get bored.
I’m bored of him already – his infantile speech, his lack of curiosity, his practiced reality-show squint, imitating an adult with normal thinking patterns. Imagine how bored he will be, after people explain stuff to him. “Sir, this is the rule.” “Mr. President, yes, the Senate can actually do that.” “Yes, those lawyers do have a legal right to question you about your holdings.” This is a guy who stood in front of adoring multitudes out there and pounded one fist into his palm and said he’d like to punch somebody right in the face. Not that easy, in reality. In a brilliant column, David Brooks described the man’s statements as “usually just a symbolic assault in some dominance-submission male rivalry game.” How did he get this way? “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” – Philip Roth, “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I say it was some father issue. Or something at boarding school. This is a troubled human being. But a strange minority coalition saw the candidate in its own personal fun-house mirror and put its money and fears and superstitions and prejudices on this lumbering figure. Diamond Jim. Most likely, soon he will say, “Who needs this?” :Eighteen months,.I keep telling my friends The real question is, how does it end? It could be impeachment -- the old John McCain making one more mission for his country. But boredom, confinement, anxiety, fear, could lead to resignation: I’m outta here. Then there is the Big Mac Theory. 6-1? I’m not a betting man. Won’t even place a two-dollar bet in the pressbox at the Derby. Long story. But I’m curious about the odds of him lasting in office. Last November, I found some odds on-line from the British bookies (some people will bet on anything.) The odds were 3-1 or 6-1 that the new guy would not last four years. Might have been wishful thinking. However, my cursory glimpse at the current web discloses no new odds. Why is that? Better to wager on soccer – when will Chelsea lose? Important stuff like that. I’m in denial, or withdrawal. I can’t take cable news anymore. I put on the stereo and listen to the great Terrance McKnight on WQXR-FM. I’m reading Dickens’ “A Child’s History of England,” refreshing my views of Richard III and Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell. (Dickens called him “A most intolerable ruffian, a disgrace to human nature, and a blot of blood and grease upon the History of England") Fair and balanced. You’ve heard of “Waiting for Godot?” I’m waiting for Céspedes. Meantime, the best people I know are talking about not taking this foolishness lying down. My wife is reading the Times, learning stuff on the tube. Making a plan. Fight back. Right on. I read the great piece by Jelani Cobb in the current New Yorker: “The Return of Civil Disobedience.” I remember how good people forced Johnson to slink away from a run in 1968. Nixon finally got found out in 1974. 10-1 I give this guy eighteen months. Then we get a nice, normal guy like Pence. Oy.  He’s already been a hero three times, by my count.
*- When he refused to take a pass from Hanoi because his father was an admiral. *-When my wife sat next to one of John McCain’s buddies on a flight out east, and the man told her how they ferried supplies to post-war Vietnam. I met McCain years later and asked why he ran a pipeline to people who tortured him. Eloquent shrug, with those ruined arms, told me: it’s the right thing to do. *- When the lady in red started with the Trumpian b.s. about Barack Obama being a Muslim, and John McCain said, “No, ma’am,” and took away the mike. Now I’m asking John McCain to be a hero a fourth time. Sometime in late January, the new President is going to legally and officially and publically expose himself as maliciously unqualified. He cannot help himself. I’m counting on John McCain, the man who is not a hero to Donald Trump because he got captured, to mix his miserable SOB persona with his idealistic free-thinker persona (that he exercises way too rarely) and become the congressional leader of the what-were-we-thinking movement. The movement needs a leader, a role model. Republicans are contaminated from eight years of sabotaging a black President (oh and also the country.) The Democrats are a disaster after rigging the delegate count against Bernie Sanders. The country needs somebody in Congress to stand up at the first blunder and say, “Enough.” My candidate is the guy who impulsively snatched back the microphone from the bigot-lady. Haven’t seen him much in eight years. But I know he’s in there. Right now, that’s all I’ve got. (Thursday: I can put one foot after the other, partially because of thoughtful columns by Nicholas Kristof and Gail Collins, and also because of the poem from Altenir Silva, writer friend from Rio: “I want to dedicate this poem written by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (October 31, 1902 – August 17, 1987). Here in Brazil, we always read it, when we are looking for better days. Best – Altenir.”) What Now, José? By Carlos Drummond de Andrade The party’s over, the lights are off, the crowd’s gone, the night’s gone cold, what now, José? what now, you? You without a name, who mocks the others, you who write poetry who love, protest? what now, José? You have no wife, you have no speech you have no affection, you can’t drink, you can’t smoke, you can’t even spit, the night’s gone cold, the day didn’t come, the tram didn’t come, laughter didn’t come utopia didn’t come and everything ended and everything fled and everything rotted what now, José? What now, José? Your sweet words, your instance of fever, your feasting and fasting, your library, your gold mine, your glass suit, your incoherence, your hate – what now? Key in hand you want to open the door, but no door exists; you want to die in the sea, but the sea has dried; you want to go to Minas but Minas is no longer there. José, what now? If you screamed, if you moaned, if you played a Viennese waltz, if you slept, if you tired, if you died… But you don’t die, you’re stubborn, José! Alone in the dark like a wild animal, without tradition, without a naked wall to lean against, without a black horse that flees galloping, you march, José! José, where to? * * * (Wednesday: All right, Joey Nichols is elected. I have nothing coherent to say as of Wednesday but may bounce back soon. Meantime, all comments, suggestions, verbal hugs, second-guesses or flat-out told-you-sos are welcome in Comments. I'm turning on classical music. GV.) Monday: I have never watched any reality show, intentionally, but one time I accidentally clicked on somebody named Simon, who was cruelly dissecting a guest. “What a horrible person,” I thought, pushing the clicker. “Who would let him into their house?” Of course, I never watched Trump on his show because almost everybody in New York knew him as a dolt and a poseur, a punch line. He was Joey Nichols to our collective Alvy Singer. Say it together: “What an asshole.” We knew. Now it turns out that a significant chunk of the country does not know, cannot process information about Trump’s business dealings, is not offended by his ugly boasting about sexual misconduct. The country, founded by patriots and enlightened leaders, has been dumbed down by the reality-show persona. At the same time, people stopped reading newspapers. They cannot tell the difference between news-gatherers and the comedians on the tube. Grown people repeat stuff that has been proven false. Go into a school sometime and talk about issues on the front page (or web site) of the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian. Blank looks. Trump is putting journalists in pens and mocking them. As he rolled over the cardboard Maginot Line of Republican challengers, Trump unleashed a barrage of incomplete sentences, incomplete thoughts, utter untruths, in the sing-song voice of an undeveloped human being. In a sing-song voice. Trust me, I’m telling you, in a sing-song voice. I have developed earworm, the condition when some piece of music is repeated so often that it bores its way into the eardrum, and stays there, repeating itself. It keeps repeating itself, believe me, in a sing-song voice. Other people are reporting earworm from this endless election. In the last catatonic days, I have been flopping in front of the tube like a beached whale, hoping that Steve Kornacki and Joy Reid on MSNBC, or maybe John King on CNN, will point at the state that confirms it is almost over. I’ve heard this condition described as “a great national nightmare” or a “societal nervous breakdown.” On Sunday evening, I made a break for it. I went upstairs and put chamber music on the CD player and read a new book I discovered in the library: “The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation Through Its Portraits” by Simon Schama – great stuff about Winston Churchill and Henry VIII and John and Yoko and the artists who tried to represent them. For a few hours, the earworm went away.  Chapman and Miller: Taking Our Minds off the Freak Show It has taken nearly a month of mourning, but I am finally paying attention to baseball again. The World Series has gotten interesting, after five games. Anything can happen, just like in real life. Of course, my avid interest in the fifth game may have come from fear and withdrawal, because of the assorted ghouls floating in late October air -- fright masks of Donald Trump and Anthony Weiner, perfectly matched, like twin Rasputins, scoundrels that never go away. Seeing Weiner crawl out of the crypt (with help from the FBI) to invigorate his soul brother from the other party drove me to watch the fifth game Sunday night. Before the Series began, I wrote on another site that I had no dog in this fight, since the gallant Mets went down in the wild-card game. That still goes. (Hard to feel much sympathy for a franchise that traded Lou Brock or a franchise that traded Rocky Colavito. Then again, I root for a franchise that, gulp, traded Nolan Ryan.) It would be easy to rationalize being a National League fan and root for a team that has not won a World Series since 1908, but what’s another year or 20? I also root for the Rust Belt, for old river towns like Pittsburgh and Cincinnati -- and Cleveland would qualify for underdog status ahead of Chicago. But that’s not the point. Escapism is the point. Things I have noticed about this Series: Jason Kipnis of Cleveland personified the ambiguities of this Series after his three-run homer Saturday. He’s from a Chicago suburb, and would not exult on TV about what it would mean to win a World Series. He’s going home, either way, after the Series, and did not want to insult his home town. Nice guy. I love the antiquity of Wrigley Field (blessedly still named after the chewing-gum family that used to own the team, not cursed anew with some geeky corporate logo.) Wrigley is one of only four ball parks in which pitchers warm up in foul territory, bless its heart. The Cleveland bullpen was slow to clear out for Jason Heyward to chase a wind-blown popup in the first inning Sunday night. I flashed back to Pat Pieper, the public-address announcer for half a century, who worked on the field, behind home plate. And I noticed the low-slung brick wall behind home plate from when my Brooklyn Dodgers traveled to meet Bill (Swish) Nicholson back in the day. I love Wrigley the way I love Fenway Park – a reminder of the past. But that doesn’t mean I am rooting for the Cubs. Pardon my smirk, but I love the two recent Yankees dominating out of the bullpen – lefty Andrew Miller of the Indians and righty Aroldis Chapman of the Reds. This is the time of year for Mr. October (Reggie) and Mr. November (Derek.) Now these two ex-Bronxites will be rested for longish duty in the sixth game. The Yankees won’t know if they made good deals, unloading these relievers for young talent, for several years, so this Series must be a lot of fun for Yankee fans, what with A-Rod preening in the overcrowded Fox gallery. (How I miss the Mets’ broadcasters, known commodities, not overloading the listener with detail and gab.) Any World Series only gets really interesting when it goes to a sixth game, full of developed plot lines, when anything can happen from here on in. For somebody who has been taking a month off in sympathy for the injured Mets, these are fresh faces, fresh arms. Thanks to long-suffering Cleveland and long-suffering Chicago and the long slog of post-season baseball for prolonging the World Series, for giving another day or three of diversion from twin Halloween horrors.   "All pink and powdered up" Trump is out on his feet. He is bragging about his stamina, how he is making two-three-four appearances a day, but he looks punch drunk. Poor old feller hasn’t learned one of the great lessons of life – take a nap. Refresh your brain. Have an inner life. Whom are we going to believe, Trump or Yogi Berra? In one of his most famous Yogi-isms, Berra revealed the secret of life: “I usually take a two hour nap from one to four.” You do the math. Trump, 70, has been accusing Hillary Clinton, who turns 69 on Oct. 26, of lacking stamina. He mocked her for coming in off the road to recharge her batteries. Then, in their third debate last Wednesday, she looked like Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), showing up in a fresh three-piece suit for a late-night pool match with Fast Eddie (Paul Newman) in the movie “The Hustler.” Just one glimpse of his refreshed opponent un-nerves Fast Eddie: “You look beautiful, Fats, just like a baby, all pink and powdered up.” Same thing the other night. If this were boxing, the ref would have called the fight. Trump is the modern reincarnation of Joe Louis’s Bum of the Month, over and over again. Trump doesn’t even know when to shut up. He yapped about Clinton’s need to take a drug test. Then she showed up for the Al Smith Dinner, and let him have it: "Donald wanted me drug tested before last night’s debate. And look, I gotta tell you, I am so flattered that Donald thought I used some sort of performance enhancer. Now actually, I did: It’s called preparation." Trump cannot prepare. I realized this 30 years ago, from several sports interviews with him, that Trump cannot process information. He has a serious flaw somewhere. His wiring is screwed up. He has not even learned the benefit of a retreat into sleep. “Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.” Of course, MacBeth had problems. Even a 15-minute nap will suffice. I have seen teams use “blue rooms” for centering players' minds -- letting them prepare their image of themselves in the game to follow. There are all kinds of lists about great people who knew enough to shut down, to let the mind and soul refresh. Churchill. Leonardo da Vinci. Eleanor Roosevelt often took naps before making a speech. I bet Hillary Clinton knows that.
 Body Double or Cardboard Figure? While waiting for the grifter Donald Trump to be hooted off the campaign trail, I have ignored my own guilt, as a sports columnist, in his public survival.
In his home town, where he was known the best, he was always a joke, a poseur, a piker, a pisher, as we say in New York. And I contributed to this by using him as a punch line for something gaudy, something trivial, something absurd. Trump pops up in many columns I wrote over nearly three decades. Football: I first became aware of Trump in the mid-‘70’s when I met his brother, Freddy, who had gone to grade school with friends of mine. (The Trumps lived in a tony area half a mile from my busy street.) Freddy talked with great respect about his younger brother, the builder. I met Trump when he purchased the Generals, a football team in a startup league. He held press conferences in his glitzy hotels – free advertising – and signed expensive players like Doug Flutie, but with Trump’s apparently short attention span, details were always vague. Figure Skating: Through a mutual friend, I got invited to an exhibition in the Garden, where I met the very bright Ivana Trump. The Donald wore a camel’s hair coat, and always stayed on the periphery of social conversation. Baseball: When George Steinbrenner seemed to have burned out, or gotten himself suspended, I would suggest he sell the Yankees to Trump. I assumed Trump could afford it; now it appears he could not. Later I realized George was twice as smart and had more compassion and social conscience than Trump. Tennis: Trump had a box at Ashe Stadium, right above the media section. For yooge matches, he would materialize up front, leaning on the railing, like the captain of a ship, but I noticed that his head and eyes never moved. He didn’t watch the ball. I realized he was preening, advertising himself. Or possibly it was a cardboard cutout, one inch thick. Boxing: I am an abolitionist toward boxing. Let’s start with that. A boxer, Stephan Johnson, died after a fight in the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. A few days later, Trump took my call and I reported his tone as shaken, but his rationale for boxing was this: “'You have to understand that we do not sanction the fights. That is done by the New Jersey State Athletic Control Commission. All we are is the venue -- and fighting is popular. Every fight sells out. We have other things like gymnastics; they don't sell out. All I know is, boxing sells out.'' So there you have it. It was easy to feel he was a lightweight, who built gaudy buildings and postured. I was always making jokes about Trump trying to build Brasilia on the edge of Manhattan. Now he is the darling of many religious folk and flag-waving patriots. Rachel Maddow said after the debate the other night that most people would be nervous if somebody with Trump’s facial twitches sat down next to them on an airplane. What did we in New York do wrong in not taking him more seriously? Mea culpa. * * * Here are some old columns in which Trump is a convenient target. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/28/sports/sports-of-the-times-about-missing-donald.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/12/sports/sports-of-the-times-a-front-row-witness-to-death.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/1988/12/07/sports/sports-of-the-times-will-donald-now-become-a-big-wheel.html http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-build-a-better-ball-park-and-the-world.html http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/08/sports/sports-of-the-times-donald-does-right.html http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/30/sports/sports-of-the-times-george-howie-donald.html http://www.nytimes.com/1985/02/06/sports/sports-of-the-times-michaels-dances-around-it.html http://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/21/sports/sports-of-the-times-it-s-a-bum-rap.html http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-a-happening-no-matter-what.html http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/06/sports/sports-of-the-times-ted-turner-peacemaker.html http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/20/sports/sports-of-the-times-just-five-more-shopping-days-are-left.html http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/13/sports/sports-times-dancing-rafters-garden-for-knicks-night-remember.html |
