Reel Life

Many of us are thinking about movies, now that the Oscar nominations are out. Personally, I don’t care about the nomination count, who or what was snubbed, not even what  racial or ethnic groups were slighted. I just like movies. But a couple of months ago, I read a blog by a very successful businessman who said one of the secrets of his success was not wasting time watching films.

We all know that movies represent an escape, but are they a waste of time? Some more than others, of course. At their best, though, they can teach in a way that other media can’t. History, for instance. The Roman Empire, British royalty through the centuries. The Civil War (and every other war we can think of). Presidential assassinations. The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, and lately, even Brexit. Yes, they distort and often play fast and loose with the facts, but even when they get things wrong, movies can still inspire us to do our own fact-checking on the subject involved.

Speaking of taking us places, that’s what foreign films do. I remember attending a film festival and seeing an entry from Burkina Faso. Where on Earth is that? I had to look it up – turns out it’s in Africa. It showed me through drama what it’s like to live there, and how the people think and communicate, in a special way that even traveling there might not reveal.

We all know that movies teach us fashion and lifestyle. The downside is that the perfect folks we see on screen often impose unrealistic expectations on us. So maybe the upside is, we take better care of ourselves. I remember that when I moved from the East Coast to Southern California, it seemed like everybody might have been a movie star.

In another sphere, movies can actually teach us how to feel. I have been convinced that most people are not born with empathy or compassion, and even if some of us were, we may not know how they work until we see them demonstrated in a movie. We learn about ourselves: what makes us laugh, or cry, or afraid.

On a public radio show I like, they have an occasional segment with a woman who says that movies are her church. I get that. I grew up in New York City and remember when movie theaters were like cathedrals, not like today’s megaplexes. The Loew’s theater on East 72^nd Street had a fancy baroque interior with pinpoint lights like stars on the ceiling, and what looked like actual clouds moving across the sky. Sometimes that was more entertaining than the movie.

By that successful businessman’s standards, I guess I must be a miserable failure, but if it’s because I spend too much time at the movies, I think I can live with it.

Security Risks

How many times has our President talked about creating jobs? But on his watch, some 800 thousand federal workers, at this writing, find themselves unable to do theirs, at least temporarily, due to the government shutdown. Of course, some have been required to work without pay. Essential workers, they’re called. Excuse me, but there’s another name for that job status. If I were forced to work for free indefinitely, what might my attitude be toward that  job, however essential it is? How secure might I feel about my life going forward?

The President would like us to think of him as a champion of security by holding out for his border wall. Yes, it would protect us from a few gang members, drug importers, and the odd terrorist or two, among thousands of Central American women and children seeking to get away from such people back home. But what about the bad guys who come here through legal ports of entry every day? Or those who were born here and live here already? Pardon me for engaging in what-about-ism, but…well?

For someone so concerned about security, the President, his associates, and even members of his family, seem much too cozy with powerful figures in Russia. What kinds of security risks are involved there, and how did we used to handle them? Just go back a few decades, when Red was not a good political color. Consider what happened to Americans who took too much of an interest in the USSR, went to the wrong meetings, or hung out with what were thought of as the wrong friends or colleagues? What happened to those Americans who were found to have acted as agents for Soviet Russia? It was a bit more than just a few years in prison. And there were no cable interviews or book deals at the end of that road.

I wish we would have been more focused in recent years on building a cyber wall rather than a steel or concrete one. These days we have to be careful not to get too belligerent with our adversaries. I worry that all they have to do is click once, and it’s lights out here.

As for walls, I heard one wag on a British radio talk show who said he favored a US border wall, but not one limited to the border with Mexico. Put it around the whole thing, he said, not to keep foreigners out, but to keep Americans in. Sounds like we have an image problem with some folks right now, ya think?

The President we put in office not only represents us, but, whether we like it or not, defines us too -- something to keep in mind as we pick the next one.

R.I.P. Brûlée

After some 18 years with him, we knew the time was getting close, and it finally arrived a few days before Christmas, when Brûlée the cat collapsed on the living room carpet and died a short time later.

The calculation of a cat’s age in human years varies, depending on the veterinarian. One we know (not Brûlée’s doc) said that for the first two years, the animal gets the equivalent of 25 human years, and it’s four human years per cat year after that, which would have made Brulee 90, though his actual vet felt it was closer to 100.

My wife and I got Brûlée from the animal shelter in July of 2001, when he was said to be about nine months old. We had an early indication of what we were getting into when, on the way home in the car, we heard a scratching sound in the cardboard carrier they gave us at the shelter. As we crossed the railroad tracks, a white head popped through a new hole in the side of the carrier. He was male, though we used the feminine form of the name Brûlée for him after “crème brûlée,” which we thought was closer to his coloring. He was mostly what they call flame-point Siamese, cream-colored with orange ears and a tail with orange bands on it, reflecting another breed involved in his ancestry.

Anyway, we soon found that our house had a new supervisor, and we had to resign ourselves to our new roles as staff. Brûlée was not shy about making his demands known. Not shy about anything, really. When somebody rang at the front door, he answered it.

In his prime, Brûlée’s prodigious acrobatic talents entertained guests. Through the use of cat toys, we could get him to leap several feet into the air, even do 360-degree spins. This all happened well before social media and smartphone cameras. What we called “Cirque de Brûlée” would certainly have gone viral.

Now that he is gone, we are keenly aware of daily things we don’t have to do anymore, but still at least start to do out of long habit. Having a cat, as many of you know, can be like having a perpetual human toddler. Sometimes you have to close doors to keep the animal from harm or from causing trouble. Turning on hall lights at night so as not to trip over him in the dark, or step on his tail, was important. And then there was filling and cleaning litter boxes, more of which were needed around the house to accommodate an aging cat. I still can’t bring myself, at this writing, to throw out the last remaining box on the back porch. Finally, there are the daily rituals that have suddenly ended, like my lap time with him as I drank my morning coffee, turning up the heat in the house on cold days so he could sit next to his favorite furnace vent, or having him join us for dinner.

Though we have no children, a relative who’d had them tried to make us feel better by comparing the impact of Brûlée’s departure to an 18-year-old child’s heading off to college. No, not quite the same. Still, we take comfort in reporting to you that Brûlée remained Brûlée right up to the end, which I hope others can say about us when it’s our turn to go.

Baby, It's Cold Everywhere

It’s hard to think of a Christmas season song actually offending anyone, but “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has managed to do it. The classic holiday tune is heard by some as sanctioning date rape. At first, I was in the “Oh, come on now” crowd, but I guess I can see their point. That said, this doesn’t seem like the best battle to pick.

But it IS a good excuse for me to offer you a little Christmas allegory about the types of men women encounter. It goes like this: It’s holiday shopping season, and a locked car is parked on a city street with a brightly decorated package clearly visible in the back seat. We don’t know what’s in the package, but the wrapping is impressive and attracts attention. Four different men walk by.

The first is doing a business deal on his phone. He sees the package, says, “That’s nice,” but keeps walking and returns to his phone  He’s busy. The second guy, sees the package, says, “That’s nice. I want that, but it's not mine and hasn’t been offered to me, and I’m really not a candidate for it.” He walks on. The third sees the package, stops, says “That’s nice. I want that. Maybe if I hang around nearby for a while, the owner will show up and I can persuade her to share it with me.” Finally, the fourth man appears, stops, says “That’s nice. I want that. And because I want it, I’m entitled to it!” He smashes the car window to steal it.

OK, so we all know that the last guy is a bad penny, but what about the other three? We could give the first man credit for resisting temptation, but he simply had other priorities. The second guy may be the mensch of the group. He is tempted by what he sees but but resists on principle. The third guy hopes to get what he wants by following what he perceives to be the rules. Maybe he’s a nice, normal, charming individual -- or maybe he’s just a manipulator.

So what’s the point here? It’s that to face the modern world as realists, women must prepare themselves ahead of time for how they are going to respond to any of the kinds of men crossing their path, and there are certainly more than these four. There are good ones out there. Men, for their part, can ask themselves what a real man might appreciates in a real woman. And adults in general must make it a priority to teach children what successful relationships are and what their role in them will be as they grow up. It’s way more than about fixing song lyrics.

Naming, Blaming, and Fading

You have no doubt heard by now of the drive to remove the Zuckerberg name from the San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. The new building was made possible in part by the $75 million contribution from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife. But lately Mr. Zuckerberg’s name is MUD. Or at least he’s picked up some on the soles of his shoes, largely because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the seemingly cavalier way in which Facebook handled users’ information.

It’s hard these days to get a name to stick on things. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the home of the Giants ballpark has had three names since it was built: Pac Bell Park, SBC Park, and now AT&T Park. For a while, the late legendary Candlestick Park was Monster Park, after a prominent manufacturer of electronic cables.

Events change names, too. I spent some time in Palm Springs, in  an area that is the site of  many. The now-well-known Palm Springs International Film Festival, for a number of years, was known as the Nortel Networks Palm Springs International Film Festival, and an annual film achievement award was even named after the sponsor company’s CEO. Nortel went bankrupt a while back. The women’s golf tournament once known as the Colgate Dinah Shore is now called the ANA Inspiration. The Bob Hope Desert Classic became the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic, and then his name fell off.

It’s one thing when names just fade into history, and another when history turns on them. The famed Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University almost lost its name when it was determined that President Wilson was something of a racist. These days, many iconic figures of the past have been found to have had unacceptable flaws or were simply on the wrong side of history. Maybe the safe thing to do is not to name anything after anyone. Or, paint the names on with watercolors, so they can be easily washed off.

I have had only one thing named after me – a sandwich in a local restaurant that has long since closed. I didn’t care what they actually put in it, as long as they held the mayo.

Mea Culpa

"I’m sorry if my remarks offended anyone, that was not my intention.” How many times have we heard that in recent days? The bigger question is, when you hear that, do you buy it?

Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, just elected in Mississippi, took a lot of heat for saying that if a political supporter invited her to a public hanging, she would be in the front row. It was intended as a compliment or a thank-you for that individual, but as has been pointed out, public hanging has a special meaning in her state, because of the lynching of black people following Reconstruction after the Civil War, So, was she ignorant or was she dog-whistling? A joke? Racial overtones aside, it seemed to me like an odd and unpleasant thing to say. But it didn’t bother most of the voters in Mississippi, it appears. And she did apologize.

That said, it’s truly fascinating to hear or read some of the stuff that comes out of people’s mouths or what they write. They can apologize for offense, but the question remains, what were they thinking? Public radio host Harry Shearer  has a segment on his show called Apologies of the Week, devoted to outrageous comments for which the speakers or authors have apologized. There was one example of a Thanksgiving print ad for a Colorado pizza parlor in which a Pilgrim says to a Native American, “Sorry about all the smallpox, how about a slice of pepperoni?” The parlor owner apologized, saying he was trying to be “edgy,” and offered to pull the publication.

Look, we all have said offensive things occasionally and have had to apologize. We were drunk, angry, or perhaps something just seemed funny at the time, and we misread the audience. I bet most of us have had racist, sexual, or just plain outrageous thoughts, but most of the time, they don’t make it to our mouths or our keyboards. We can apologize for what got through the gate, but that’s just the first step. Our concern must be the pain we have caused, not the damage we have done to our nice-guy or gal image of ourselves, and if necessary, we have to follow it up with appropriate action to demonstrate our concern.

I disagree a little with Jesus here. We don’t have to feel bad about every sinful thought that occurs to us. But we should when they turn in to actual sins against others in the form of words or deeds. When it comes to speech, we may be legally free to say or write whatever comes in to our heads, but as I always say, we are never free from the consequences of that speech, and we would do well to consider them carefully before opening our traps, especially in this world of PC. Sometimes, it’s actually refreshing when people keep their authenticity to themselves.

Accidents of Birth

For most Americans, it’s been a given that if you were born here, you’re a citizen, no questions asked, end of story. The President has floated the idea that he can put an end to that by executive order, even though legal scholars say it’s in the Constitution and he can’t do it that way.

Birthright citizenship is a fairly widely accepted concept in the world. In our case, If you’re born here, you don’t have to wait in line, take history tests, or learn English, you’re American. In most cases, our ancestors had to do the heavy lifting, making the trip here voluntarily, or in many cases, involuntarily. For those born here to decide to put a hurdle in front of future babies who enter the world on our soil  just isn’t quite fair, is it? And wouldn’t it be the worst paperwork nightmare ever? I see no justification for those of us who only had to be born here to act superior. We had no control over it, and can’t take credit for it. We were just lucky, and our first response, one would think, would be gratitude.

I do have a problem, though,  with one legal provision: that you have to be born here to be President. It’s a romantic idea. But why should someone foreign-born, who has taken the trouble to become a citizen, who loves this country and considers it home, follows the principles we espouse, and is deemed to have the necessary qualifications, be automatically excluded from the Presidency, just because of an accident of birth?

Let’s stop this “anchor baby” talk. Heck, we might even take it as a compliment that foreigners, including many who are talented and have contributions to make,  want to live here. At the rate things are going, that might not always be the case.

Hanging Five

It wasn’t exactly the Blue Wave that Democrats were hoping for in the midterms, but it was a lot better than nothing. While ground was lost in the Senate, there was enough of a surplus of Democratic victories on the House side to achieve way more than a slim majority. And with the chair positions on key committees switching to blue, the rubber is off the stamp for President Trump. Let’s not forget the almost 100 women among the winners.

A couple of other things to note: While voters couldn’t seem to resist electing Republicans in a few marquis races, the red paint was often a lot lighter on down-ballot choices for state legislature and on measures. Florida voters, for instance, elected a Republican governor but approved Amendment 4, which will allow felons to vote if they have served their time. And in several states, voters favored the expansion of Medicaid, another decidedly Democratic victory.

One of the TV pundits said something I really liked, which many of us may take for granted. This country has a tradition you don’t find in many others: the gracious private congratulation from the loser to the winner, and the often eloquent concession speech, which not only symbolizes the continuity of our system, but often gives the loser a bit of a star turn, as was the case with Beto O’Rourke, who clearly has a bright future ahead of him.

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The next two years aren’t going to be pretty. There’s a fair amount of blah-blah about this being an opportunity for deals to be made between Republicans and Democrats, but I have serious doubts. There are no signs of anyone coming to Jesus anytime soon.

 I’m just wondering if it isn’t time for a new political party now. We haven’t always had the same two major parties, and the names changed fairly often. We even had Whigs for a while. Is the Republican brand fatally damaged? I don’t know what we would call a new party full of honest, authentic, and reasonable people. Might it be Sanity, or is that too obvious? Gee, who’d want to vote against THAT?

 But hey, surfers, if you’re waiting for the really big waves, you better pick another day to go to the beach. Have faith, though, they are still coming.

Peanuts and Crackerjack

INSFB is an acronym in my written posts that stands for “I’m Not a Sports Fan, But…” I have a few relatives and friends who are glued to the TV for every contest that involves a ball or a puck, horses or wheels. Not me, I don’t care. But then, there is baseball. This doesn’t mean I watch regular-season games or go to the ball park without being invited. But the World Series always pulls me in somehow.

First of all, I grew up mostly in New York and was a child back when the city had three Major League teams. I went to all-boys schools, and when the fall rolled around, I simply did not have any friends unless I could talk baseball for at least five minutes at a time. So I started listening on the radio and occasionally watching TV. What was not to like? There was Mel Allen doing play-by-play, and there was Red Barber, too. I went to a game in Yankee Stadium when Mickey Mantle was in the Yankee lineup, with the untranslatable Casey Stengel managing. My brothers collected baseball cards that came with the bubblegum, and so did I. If I still owned those cards, I could buy and sell many of you reading this right now.

What is different about baseball? First, it’s the most American of our sports, and it seems the majority of us have a passing acquaintance with the rules of the game. Baseball metaphors pervade everything, even sex. And it’s one of  the few sports that have no time limit, as we discovered with this season’s World Series Game Three.

I like to watch it on TV because of the closeups on the players’ faces .There is no better definition of the word “focus” than what is on the pitcher’s face before the ball is thrown. The batter’s face isn’t far behind in that department.  And with 90-to-100-mile-per-hour pitches and the ease with which fielders make double-plays, it’s a wonder that anyone gets on base at all. The team managers have it down to a science about which pitcher to put in to face which opposing batter. It all seems to be under strict control. But the level of uncertainty injects just the right note of drama. The pitcher may throw a string of perfect innings, and then the circumstances arise where the next ball arrives at the bat just right, and it all changes instantly.

We’ve heard repeatedly that the upcoming election is a battle for the soul of America. I’m grateful that baseball, a significant part of that soul, is not involved. It will be there whichever party wins. And the way life is now, we will always need distractions like this iconic game.

Anger Management

This past week I heard and watched several radio and TV programs devoted to women’s rage – not only what they were angry about, but whether they were allowed to be angry at all, as women have traditionally been raised to be nice and to keep the boat afloat instead of rocking it. Those days are clearly over.

I’m angry too, maybe for slightly different reasons. The way I look at it, the whole Brett Kavanaugh drama was unnecessary. I’m angry at whoever it was that leaked Christine Blasey Ford’s confidential information about sexual assault, virtually forcing her to testify. I’m angry that President Trump didn’t pull the Kavanaugh nomination early on, or that Kavanaugh himself didn’t withdraw, which he could have done without having to admit to any wrongdoing and save us all this grief . I’m angry that President Obama wasn’t afforded the opportunity to have his own Supreme Court nominee considered a year and a half ago, and wonder whether some of the arcane rules of the Senate and perhaps the House that permit such manipulations are constitutional.

But I’m willing to accept that maybe all this WAS necessary. We seem to be going through a period of what 19^th century religious leader Mary Baker Eddy called a “moral chemicalization,” when the tolerance for wrongs protected by practice or tradition runs out. It happened with taxation without representation, with slavery, with women being denied the vote and gays being denied marriage, with bullying, and now with sexual violence. Like the guy in the movie, women are saying, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Upheavals happen in nature all the time. Take earthquakes, hurricanes, even forest fires. They are not about God taking out His or Her anger out on us sinful humans here below (sorry for the gender binarization). They’re about relieving stress and restoring balance. It is never a comfortable process, and isn’t supposed to be. The explosion or eruption seems sudden, but the tensions leading up to it have been building for a long time. Like a pain that suddenly appears in our body, it says, “Pay attention to me!”

This is where we have a choice. We can stew in our anger, or we can fix what’s broken, channeling the anger into doing the repair work. Our founding fathers (yeah, the ones who made it into the history books were male), left us the tools to do it, and the next opportunity comes in November. But elections are not just about beating the other guys and racing to the opposite extreme. We have to think of them as a way to restore balance. After all, If we rock the boat too hard, we all drown.

Permanent Record

Those of us of a certain age will remember the times in our youth when our parents warned us, “Don’t do anything bad at school. You don’t want it to be on your permanent record!” What was this exactly? In those days, perhaps, we thought of it as a paper document which followed us forever, transported by some unknown handler to the next school or even workplace in a Manila envelope. It could never be altered in any way, so any dings acquired in our life’s journey would be there forever, along with the good stuff.

When we prepared a resume, or if we were really fancy, a CV (I always wanted one of those!), we naturally tried to shine the best light on ourselves. We left out the missteps, hoping the employer wouldn’t find us out. Depending on the position we were seeking, the resume might be accepted at face value, and if we performed well in the interview, and the references we supplied said that we walked on water, we got the job. For some positions, though, the background checks were more serious. I am reminded of the female radio talk show host, who received a marriage proposal from a successful businessman she’d been seeing. She would not say yes until he showed her his tax returns for the previous three years.

Of course, it is much harder now to skate by, as there really IS a permanent record for young people, thanks to social media. But in the darker ages, fact-finding was more difficult. A consistent theme in a novel I finished a few years ago was: “You really don’t know people.” The late writer Anais Nin used to say that if a hundred people who knew her were to write biographies of her, there would be a hundred different versions of her life, depending on what each writer saw.

Sometimes, the last snapshot someone took of us might be an ugly one. The other 99 people might think we are a paragon of rectitude – but there’s that one, or more than one, we offended, disrespected, or even injured. Have we apologized, even if we don’t remember what happened, or do we continue to feed the good-guy or girl myth, even believing it ourselves? We may or may not be suitable candidates for the United States Supreme Court, or President, or Pope, and maybe we just have to admit that and move on. We have a much better shot at forgiveness, though, if we just own up to our checkered past and accept being human.

Quick March

The sorry Kabuki-esque nature of this week’s Supreme Court confirmation process has generated plenty of heat but relatively little light. We have seen this movie before, and once should have been enough. Does it have to happen again when the next Supreme Court vacancy occurs? The process has to be standardized, by legislation or some other means. Clearly, we can’t completely remove partisan politics from what goes on, but there are ways to make it fair, or at least fair-er. So I’m going to try an idea.

To start with, there should be a series of deadlines, with the clock starting as soon as there is a vacancy on the Court -- a deadline for the President to make a nomination – with one or two backups in case the first choice falls out. All three would be subject to background checks by the FBI. There is another deadline for the Senate Judiciary Committee to open hearings for the nominee. As part of that, there is a deadline for receiving information about the nominee from other sources to be turned over to the FBI – this, to discourage last-minute bomb-throwing – a “speak now or forever hold your peace” provision for this process. All government records relating to the nominee would have to be made available to the committee in a timely manner. The ommittee would only question the nominee during the hearings. Others with information would face questioning by the FBI.

The committee would have its own deadline for taking a vote, and the full Senate would have a deadline for yea-ing or naying the nominee. If it’s nay, the Judiciary Committee moves on to the second choice, and if necessary, the third.

Under this timeline, there would be no more Merrick Garland situations. The Judiciary Committee, even if the majority were from an opposing party to the President, could not hold things over until a new President took office.

I’m sure you can see the flaws in this. Suppose a vacancy occurs in an outgoing President’s last days before a new President is inaugurated? I know that’s a problem. But it would be more the timing governing the process and less the party politics. It’s certainly not a perfect scheme – but then, how’s the current one working for us?

To Tell the Truth

When I first heard about the attempted rape allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, it was eye-roll time for me. “Oh, God, not another one of those things!” and more than a little skepticism followed when I heard it was about drunken behavior at a high school party three decades ago where the participants were minors. I attended upscale, all-male institutions myself right through college, and the concept of a privileged young man feeling entitled to take advantage of a young woman after the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol was not exactly new. This case is NOT Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill 2.0. Nevertheless, out came the historic video clips, and we cable news junkies had to live through that all over again.

Did what happened to Christine Blasey Ford qualify as a #metoo? In those cases, the downfall of highly placed men has come after the establishment of a pattern of bad behavior. In this particular case, there is no such pattern, at least not yet. But Dr. Ford has a point.  We need an investigation to get to the truth, or very close to it,  before she testifies to the Senate committee. She says he did it; Judge Kavanaugh says he didn’t. Both can’t be right. I am not trying to minimize the damage done to Dr. Ford as a teen and what she is going through now. It’s awful. But the simple question remains: Did he do it?

 As for disturbing patterns, though, there already appears to be one in Kavanaugh’s case -- questions about his relationship with the truth, which have come up during his confirmation hearing. We all may have different evaluations of the behavioral excesses of a drunken teenage boy, but veracity certainly does have a bearing on whether this man is qualified for the Supreme Court.

It’s the timing that stinks more than anything here. The Republicans wouldn’t even consider President Obama’s pick of Merrick Garland to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, choosing instead to wait till after a new President took office. There should be a similar delay now until a new Congress is seated. This is a fairness no-brainer.

A Bloodless Coup

Are they heroes or cowards? That’s the question being asked about the writer of the anonymous New York Times op-ed piece and those in the Trump administration who make up what is called in the piece the “Resistance.” These are the self-styled “adults in the room” who believe they’re holding things together in the White House in the face of the President’s ever-loosening grasp on reality.

Personally, I’m way past trying to judge the writer or the writer’s like-minded colleagues. The ship is taking on water and these folks are throwing things over the side to keep it from sinking. They’re doing it largely because those whose job it is to do it won’t. As for the New York Times, I’m confident the paper would not have allowed the publication of an anonymous op-ed unless it came from someone high up. At the time I am writing this, we don’t know who it is.

You’d have to be living in a cave not to notice the confluence of events in recent days. The funeral of John McCain was a deep expression of yearning, within government and without, for a restoration of balance and a recovery of the loss of national pride. Then there is the Bob Woodward book, revealing the chaos in the White House, and, as if to confirm it, the Times op-ed piece.

The revelations we’re being presented with are not surprises. It’s all been going on for many months, like the earthquakes warning us that the volcano is about to erupt. Some are trying to put a lid on the crater. But now, the hot lava is starting to flow, and those in the way of the stream will be compelled to figure out their next steps. And forgive me for the metaphor mixes here.

I don’t believe President Trump would resign voluntarily. The one absolute power it seems that nobody around him can thwart is the pardon. Whether he could pardon himself is a question, but he may need it for others, possibly even members of his own family. He has warned that if he is ousted, the stock market will crash and there will be violence in the streets. I believe the exact opposite is true. The Dow will soar like a rocket, and there will be parties in the streets, as stability returns.

So then, the Resistance: heroes or cowards? I don’t know, but somehow, for the moment at least, I’m sorta glad they are there.

Saint John the Divine

As tributes continue to flow for the late Sen. John McCain, the praise may seem a little excessive to some. But there’s a simple reason for it. He was an old-school Republican who very easily could have been President, in a time when candidates for that office were actually Presidential.

McCain, as we all know, would have been the first to tell us that while he would have made a good President, he wasn’t sainthood material. He made more than one serious mistake in judgment, including going along with those who gave him bad political advice. As one who thought of myself as a Republican, I had to draw the line in 2008, when Sarah Palin was on the ticket with him. I likely would have voted for him, were it not for the prospect that if something happened to him while in office, she would become President. In my view, we dodged a bullet then, but in 2016, a similar bullet found us.

What do we admire about McCain? We know about his heroism as a prisoner of war in in Vietnam, his fight for campaign-finance and immigration reform, and most recently his vote against the repeal of Obamacare, much to the chagrin of the President and most other Republican legislators. We also know about those mistakes, that he had the honesty and authenticity to admit he had made.

He was clearly flawed and didn’t always live up to his own values. But the difference between McCain and what we have now, is that he HAD values and set goals that were beyond what were expedient for him. And he appreciated the critical value of relationships in accomplishing what he thought, and what quite a number of his colleagues in both parties agreed, was best for the country.

The elevation of John McCain seems over the top right now because it’s not just about him. It’s a rebuke to our current President and to his supporters in Congress. Being Republican used to stand for something besides just being in power. I first was a little sad that McCain didn’t stay alive long enough to witness the coming downfall of the current occupant of the White House. That would have been nice karma. But Sen. McCain’s death is the 2-by-4 hitting the Republican Party over the head with the message: Wake up, and clean up your act, or be added, to borrow a phrase from one of the senator’s speeches,  to the ash heap of history.

Getting Used to It

Right-wing talk show host Laura Ingraham raised more than a few eyebrows with her recent comments on immigration – both illegal and legal – that has foisted “massive demographic changes” on this country, so that in some areas at least, “the America we know and love doesn’t seem to exist anymore.” Is she right? As Bill Maher pointed out on his show last week, Fareed Zakaria – certainly no right-wing ideologue – seems to agree in one sense.

“The scale and speed of immigration over the past few decades represent a real issue,” Zakaria has written. “Since 1990, the share of foreign-born people in America has gone from 9 to 15 percent. Most of the new immigrants come from cultures tha are distant and different, and societies can only take so much change in a generation.”

Is this racism? It’s actually about something much deeper: evolution, a process we get more familiar with the longer we live on this planet. It seems folks either resist it or accept it. But as with most life issues, there is a spectrum here. At one end of the scale are those who fight change tooth and nail, and at the other end, those who embrace it with enthusiasm. In the middle, though, there are those who are still on the fence. I submit that it’s OK, even natural, to be a little conflicted about it.

I have noticed a few subtle things. I live in a techie area these days, and in certain movie theaters, among the condiments offered to put on popcorn is curry, reflecting the taste of many of the East Indian tech folks in my area. Curry on popcorn? Another one: I turned on the TV to get updates on an impending disaster in a town where I once lived in the South. Almost all of the people being interviewed there did not have Southern accents. They had moved there from someplace else. For a second, I was a little sad about that. I missed how the locals talked when I lived there.

But clocks do not run backwards. Things will never be the same again, but they aren’t supposed to be. And evolution includes competition. I don’t think it has to be a negative. I like to think that when cultures, religions, even political views are allowed to rub up against each other, the way they do in this country, there is always friction, but  the best ideas seem to survive as the harmful ones fall away. It just takes time.

Those of us who say we embrace change would do well not to look too far down our noses at those who resist it. They may seem to be motivated by hate, but it’s really fear. There are people whose minds will never be changed. But there are many more in the who are unsettled and just not sure. They are the ones who need to be cut some slack and given a little  time to process it all.

Choice and Compromise

Am I pro-life or pro-choice? Can I be both?

It’s a little tougher than walking and chewing gum at the same time. First, I recognize that I shouldn’t be discussing this at all for two big reasons: I am not a woman, and I have no children. But to be brutally honest, I have a hard time shaking some internal conviction that life begins at conception. Another human will potentially be joining us on Earth.

I say this because one of the justifications for abortion is that fetuses don’t quite count until they reach a certain stage, what is called viability. That’s a comforting construction. It relieves us of the thought that abortion might actually involve killing something.

OK, at this point, I can hear the blood in some of you boiling at me. But let me finish. Roe v. Wade is less about defining life than it is about allowing a woman a choice, up to a point in the fetus’s development. I support that choice.

Laws have always been about compromise, about threading needles, turning lofty principles into  workable rules for living down here on this planet. We permit the taking of life under certain circumstances, such as self-defense. And physician-assisted suicide is increasingly allowed. We are starting to accept the notion of choice at the end of life as well as at the beginning.

The determination of the beginning of life is by no means a settled issue in the law. Someone who kills a pregnant woman can be charged with two crimes in many states. And in a few, pregnant women who drink or take drugs are committing child abuse or neglect. Frequently, these are low-income women who have difficulty accessing legal abortion and/or giving up a bad habit.

We make moral compromises all the time. Before we bite into the hamburger, do we think about the fellow being it came from? We didn’t have to look the cow in the eye before it was slaughtered. We comfort ourselves with the thought that the animal was bred for this fate or that protein is good for us. I have not stopped eating meat, though, and probably won’t, as long as it’s legal.

As for the courts, they will always be raising or lowering bars. Since this country’s founding, Supreme Court decisions have sometimes been shockingly unfair, on either side of many issues. What were those justices thinking? we ask. But it seems that even jurists gradually learn to adjust their decisions to accommodate clear moral shifts, or at least to admit reality. That said, I don’t see a nice clean ending to the debate over abortion anytime soon. But I’m not a big fan of euphemisms, either.

When Bleep Happens

I can’t use the word I want, as this will likely be on the radio.

Anyway, when bleep does happen, the first thing we do is search for the reason, and then the blame game starts. How did Trump happen? It was the Russians. No, it was the media giving him too much free publicity. No, it was Hillary, who couldn’t connect with her “deplorables.” Or, how about the Democratic leadership, trying to tube Bernie? As for me, I blame the Electoral College. It was all of those things, maybe more.

Systemic failures usually have many causes – big things and little things that somehow sync up and expose a flaw that wasn’t thought of. With all the backup systems built into nuclear power plants, there are still Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, and Fukushimas. The levee system designed to protect New Orleans failed in Katrina. The same media that saved our bacon in Watergate couldn’t keep us from getting into a questionable war in Iraq. The system of government our Founding Fathers created, with all its checks and balances, didn’t protect the country from Andrew Jackson, Warren G. Harding, or Donald J. Trump.

No system designed by humans is foolproof. There will always be something that gets by or around it. In some cases, there will be warnings, sometimes loud ones, that go unheeded. But in a way, we can be grateful for failures, because they expose the flaws in the equipment or institutions we depend on. We can address these flaws and build better defenses. The President’s shameful news conference performance in Helsinki hopefully will serve to wake up those of us who have been asleep, in time for November.

We have learned that we do in fact need a wall -- not the kind Mr. Trump talks about, but a cyber-wall to protect us from Russian and possibly other future intruders. Suppose the money budgeted for the next umpteen-zillion-dollar bomber were spent instead on hardening technology?

The ship of state may have a massive hole in it right now, and it has to limp into port for repairs. But I am optimistic that the ship will not sink. Our free press is far from perfect, but this time around, the much-maligned mainstream media have protected us from real catastrophe. Robert Mueller and his team, along with the intelligence community, are telling us exactly what’s been going on, and at least some justice will be done. This particular national nightmare will eventually be over.

Summertime for Hitler?

 I have no children, but like many others, I was moved by the pictures, and especially the sounds, of kids separated from their parents as part of the current administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration. We often miss the impact of these stories until we are hit over the head with dramatic 2-by-4s. Remember the little Syrian boy with the red shirt found dead on a Turkish beach after he fled his country?

The comparisons to Nazi Germany have been made: children separated from parents; detention facilities in scattered and usually undisclosed locations; controlled tours of facilities designed to show that things weren’t so bad, and the head of state using the word “infest” to characterize the influx of immigrants. Of course, there is no real comparison to the Holocaust, just echoes, though rather loud ones.

All that said, I’m also interested in getting beyond emotions and symbols to find out what happens now. The President has rescinded the separation policy, and a federal judge has ordered that families be swiftly reunited. But how much has this ill-thought-out program cost so far, and what will it cost in the future? The question of damages and/or reparations will likely come up. Will we taxpayers have to pay that bill?

Then, will the current Congress, or the new one, finally get down to crafting a comprehensive, workable immigration law that imposes reasonable controls on who gets into our country, but is flexible enough to accommodate legitimate asylum-seekers, the Dreamers, needed seasonal workers, and the professionals we seek to fill shortages in certain sectors?

We did relatively little over the years as we watched Syria devolve, but that was an ocean away. Now we have our own little ISIS-type enclave, or violent groups of them, in Central America to deal with, motivated not by twisted religion but by power, greed, and more than a little misogyny, which women and their children understandably want to escape from. What are we, and other countries in our hemisphere, going to do about this? Can’t we see beyond putting up walls?

Too many questions and not enough answers. But I think we have to remember that most of us, as descendants of immigrants, were born here by sheer luck. We didn’t have to lift a finger to be American. If less-fortunate people born in other places want to come here, and we deem them worthy of staying here, we have to help them become the Americans we want them to be, and to make sure we have a government worthy of not only their respect, but our own.

It's Your Life, Anyway

That’s a play on the title of one of my favorite movies, 1981’s “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” in which Richard Dreyfuss plays a successful sculptor who is left paralyzed from the neck down following a traffic accident and goes to court seeking permission to die.

I am not opposed to assisted suicide, which has now gained a level of acceptance. We allow abortions, so why shouldn’t similar allowances be made on the other end of life? And typically, it is done with friends and family made aware. But the suicide of those who can easily do it themselves is another thing, as in the recent cases of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, and prior to them, Robin Williams and some others. Folks even get a little angry, as in, “They had everything: money, fame, lovers, and maybe even a sense of accomplishment, so what was their problem?” When it’s a celebrity, especially a beloved one, part of the sadness and anger is related to the fact that their gift-giving has ended. We won’t get anything more from them.

The basic fact is, we don’t really know people. We believe that great artists are telling us everything about themselves through their art – but we’re often wrong. We buy into the mask they present to us, which in some cases only adds to the pressure they are under to keep wearing it. And we get upset when it’s torn off.

The problem with suicide is that the perpetrator thinks that he or she is doing it in isolation. Often, the opposite is true. They have, in that moment, forgotten the positive impact they have had on the lives of others…and what awful impact killing themselves will have on those receive the news after they’re gone. There are people in my life I thought disliked me, whom I have resumed contact with on social media in recent years, Now, they’re telling me how great I was earlier on and even how much they learned from me. I sure didn’t get that impression at the time they were learning it.

I bet almost all of us have toyed with the idea of offing ourselves at fleeting moments. One of the hard parts is finding a painless and un-messy way. But there is one overarching reason that I would probably never do it. None of us knows what’s on the “other side.”  I was raised Catholic and was taught that suicide is a mortal sin. And you know where they say mortal sinners go after death. Suppose the Catholics are right? If what they say is true, whatever your situation is here on Earth, if you kill yourself, you will be in a lot deeper doo-doo than you are right now, and it will last forever. It’s not a chance I want to take.