The Americanization of Me

Age and ego conspire on an 86th birthday to see my life as a metaphor for America over the past century.

In 1921, “The Americanization of Edward Bok” appeared. Bok was, as I am, the child of immigrants who became, as I would, editor of a large magazine and took part, as I did, in public life. His book won a Pulitzer Prize and is still read, an artifact of those Horatio Alger days when a poor kid could pursue material success without introspection or doubt about its desirability above all else.

My experiences, much more modest, reflect how such immigrant striving was part of what Henry Luce called the American century of wealth and power, which devolved into moral and social complexity and, eventually, the divisions and doubts of this new one.

Back then, our parents escaped a nightmare, and we inherited a dream. Hungry ghetto kids before us showed the way. Herman Mankiewicz, who would later write "Citizen Kane," had sent a telegram to Ben Hecht from Hollywood: "Millions are to be grabbed out here, and the only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around."

And oh how they grabbed! Movies had started to talk soon after I did, and the children of immigrants gave them words. They showed us the way to earn a living with our brains, not with their backs as our parents did.

We all wanted to be writers. Between the 1920s Lost Generation and the Silent Generation of the 1950s, we were on the rim of the Melting Pot and, if we tried hard enough, could hoist ourselves over and splash around in the splendor.

Woody Allen mocked our ambition in “Zelig,” who wills himself into becoming like the people he sees in newsreels. In pseudo-documentary style, Irving Howe, a scholar of the immigrant experience, explains the fictional chameleon: “He wanted to assimilate like crazy.”

So did we all. High-school classmates Paddy Chayevsky, James Baldwin, Neil Simon, Bruce Jay Friedman and Richard Avedon went on to make art out of the world we inhabited and the shinier one we wanted to enter.

We fought in a war and barriers came down--ethnic, racial, gender--and some of us played a small part in that, never doubting that the world would keep getting better. My working life brought encounters with iconic figures--John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote--and their early deaths inevitably evoked sadness about how making good in America was infinitely more complicated than Edward Bok ever dreamed.

Now all that experience has to confront a national mood that has turned sour after a brief flicker of hope last year that is being overwhelmed by bitterness, cynicism about community and a distrust that is rampant.

If age teaches anything, it is that in time everything passes. If last year's hope has faded, this year's despair will, too. For better or worse, we never stop reinventing ourselves

As JFK said, "Life is unfair," but Americans are very good at making the most of it.

Bring out the cake and candles.

Cutting Up Huckabee, Left and Right

In the Washington Post today, the new Republican White Hope is being carved up like a Christmas turkey from both sides of the political spectrum.

"Is the thought of Mike Huckabee as president just vaguely scary?" Eugene Robinson asks. "Or have we learned enough about the man that we should be hair-on-fire alarmed at the prospect...that he could actually win?

"Huckabee," former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson notes, "is managing to compromise his most distinctive virtue at the very moment the attention of the public is focused on his candidacy. In politics, a candidate can bend over backward so far that his spine snaps."

Robinson's complaints are that the former preacher is "anti-reason" in denying evolution, a "country bumpkin" in his uninformed attacks on Romney's Mormon faith and "the last person in the country to learn that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iran ended its nuclear weapons program four years ago."

Gerson faults Huckabee for accepting the endorsement of "one of the most divisive figures in the most divisive debate in American politics," Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-immigration group, the Minuteman Project, who has called for Bush's impeachment over failure to enforce border security and proclaims, "I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that."

After being sliced from both directions, the Huckabee candidacy is left as a spineless carcass with no intellectual meat on its bones. Can somebody send the man a recipe for making turkey soup?

Party of Punishers

The Republicans talked a lot tonight about penalizing people--illegal immigrants, women and doctors who abort babies, gays in the military, Islamic extremists--anybody who makes them feel unsafe or uncomfortable or challenges their vision of a homogenous, God-fearing, heavily armed America.

Mitt Romney wouldn't say no to waterboarding but said yes to Guantanamo. Only John McCain and Mike Huckabee on the death penalty made passing references to human decency in any form, although Huckabee was ready to put Hillary Clinton on the first rocket to Mars.

There was no discussion of health insurance, education, the environment or any other issues that involve American society caring for the young, the weak and the helpless. The main Republican concern for members of future generations was about preserving them in utero and avoiding government spending that would create debt for them as taxpayers.

The '08 battle lines between the parties have been drawn. Republicans will play on voters' fears as opposed to their hopes, on shutting out Others rather than caring for them. Judging from tonight's performance, they have the right candidates to push their agenda.

The Wages of Sincerity

Those who worry about the flood of illegal immigrants, the Lou Dobbs legion, can take comfort in the story of Pedro Zapeta. U. S. Customs is on the job.

Zapeta came here from Guatemala, worked as a dishwasher for 11 years and lived frugally to make enough money to buy land in his mountain village and build a home for his mother and sisters. He was not educated enough to send money home or put it into a bank.

He saved $59,000 in cash, stuffed it into a duffel bag and went to the Ft. Lauderdale terminal for a flight home. When Customs officials asked how much money he had, Zapeta showed them the duffel bag. They seized it.

That was two years ago. Ever since, his volunteer lawyers have been trying to prove he was not a drug courier by providing pay stubs for his $5.50 an hour job. Customs officials had turned him over to the I.N.S., which initiated proceedings to deport the man who had been trying to leave the country.

When the story went public, well-wishers donated $10,000 to Zapeta’s cause, but the I.R.S. stepped in to claim taxes on all of his money.

His attorneys say federal prosecutors offered a deal: Zapeta could take $10,000 of the original cash, and $9,000 in donations as long as he didn't talk publicly and left the country immediately. He said no.

This week, a judge signed an order allowing him to work legally in the U. S. temporarily until his tax problems are sorted out. Would Lou Dobbs call that amnesty?

Hillary-Barack Face to Face

After Obama’s decision to curtail his role in the endless pseudo-debate schedule, how can the Democratic front runners give voters what they really need to decide who is best suited to clean up the Bush mess and lead the country forward?

Despite what polls show now, the choice between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will be close and crucial, and the two of them have an opportunity to get beyond canned campaigning and set an example to offset the politics of personal destruction that decided the last two presidential elections.

They would be serving their country, their party and, ultimately, their own interests by using a fraction of the millions they have amassed to buy TV time for a real debate of their differences--no moderators, videos or other gimmicks--about the war in Iraq, health care, immigration policy and the tension between homeland security and individual rights, among other subjects.

Conventional wisdom might argue against Clinton’s doing it because she is ahead in the polls, but conventional wisdom has never encompassed a Presidential contest between a woman and a man of color.

Clinton and Obama are members of the same party who have more in common than the manufactured sound bites and campaign gotchas indicate, and they may very well end up on a ticket together.

Why not provide an example of grownup politics for a country exhausted by the idiocy of show-business campaigning? Why not show what politics can be rather than what it has become? Why not give their supporters--and all voters--a sample of the kind of change they want?

They don’t have to be Lincoln and Douglas but, amid all the
madness to come in the next fifteen months, Clinton and Obama could show us some sanity that would eventually serve them and all Americans well. At the very least, it would provide a contrast to the Republican mud fight that is sure to come.

Thompson's Reagan Act: Timing is Off

If Fred Thompson’s slow-motion entrance onto the ’08 scene was meant to create suspense and/or keep him out of the political crossfire, it isn’t working out too well.

The suspense is long gone, and the anticipation is beginning to look like impatience as negative stories about his past, his changing staff, his lagging fund-raising and his wife’s undue influence just keeping coming.

Whether spontaneous or spurred by rival candidates, reports about Thompson’s lobbying career are beginning to chip away at the actor-Senator’s down-home can-do resume.

After the revelation that he worked briefly for a pro-abortion group comes the story now of his hefty earnings and campaign contributions from two corporations for pushing what turned out to be a taxpayer-financed $1.7 billion “hole in the ground” for a proposed nuclear breeder reactor in Tennessee.

The Presidential image is being tarnished by what looks like greedy opportunism.

While Giuliani and Romney keep dueling over who can save us from terrorists and illegal immigrants, the competence issue is beginning to bypass Thompson and, when he finally steps out to do his Reagan impersonation, it may be too little and too late.

The McCain Mutiny

With mass departures today from his campaign staff, it may be time to write John McCain’s political obituary. The captain of the Straight Talk Express deserves to go out on his shield like the honorable warrior he has always been.

In an eerie parallel to Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny,” the Senator from Arizona morphed from a lifelong by-the-book career serviceman to the unhinged Capt. Queeg of the popular 1950’s novel, play and movie.

In the anger over his support for an insane war, it would be an injustice if McCain’s service to his country were swept out with the Iraq wreckage. Unlike Bush, Cheney and, yes, Bill Clinton, he served and suffered through Vietnam, another unjust war not of his making.

Born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, an Admiral, was stationed, John Sidney McCain III went to Annapolis, was wounded in Vietnam, and captured and tortured during his five and a half years as a prisoner, most of it in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

As a Senator, he has advocated gun control, campaign finance reform and a humane approach to immigration legislation.

McCain might have been a quirky President, but unlike Bush, an honorable one if he hadn’t been derailed by the Rove smear machine in 2000 and his own mistakes for 2008.

But the Republican field of candidates he leaves behind provides the best possible contrast to his integrity.

Ave et vale, Senator.

Lindsey Graham Soldiers On

One thing about the senior Senator from South Carolina: He’s tenacious. As the prospective running mate of John McCain, he is resolutely optimistic about two apparently lost causes--his Arizona colleague’s candidacy and the war in Iraq.

But here is Graham, back from another trip to Baghdad with McCain and, as other fearful Republican Senators break ranks, practically breaking into song: “The military part of the surge is working beyond my expectations. We literally have the enemy on the run.”

On this trip, McCain and Graham bypassed the chance to go shopping in Baghdad again, but they did have lunch in Ramadi and attend an Independence Day ceremony at which 161 U.S. troops became naturalized citizens. McCain made a speech, and Graham led the new citizens in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

"Morale was very high," Graham said. "It was something to see."

Back home, his support of the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill has infuriated some constituents as well as Rush Limbaugh who has dubbed him Senator "Grahamnesty," which could lead to a challenge in next year’s Republican primary.

If McCain should turn into Rocky Balboa and win, that would be academic. If not, Graham won’t go down. Ever since he rode Bill Clinton’s impeachment to national recognition as a member of the House Judiciary Committee to replace Strom Thurmond in the Senate in 2000, he has always managed to survive.

The Price of Law and Order

It was never just about abortion. The struggle for America’s soul goes deeper, as the Supreme Court and Congress have been showing us this week.

It was never as simple as faith vs. reason. Rational people can recognize a Higher Power, the religious can respect science and logic.

What it has been about is the conflict between our hopes and fears, between the risks of freedom and the comfort of control, between our needs to feel decent and to feel safe.

Before the trauma of 9/11, the tension between those impulses could be kept in balance. Without that, the vicious idiocy of Bush’s Neo-Cons would never had free rein. For a time, the frustrations of Vietnam allowed Nixon’s paranoia and secrecy to subvert basic American values, but it never came to this.

This is an Executive Branch that makes Nixon look like a paragon of openness and respect for the law.

This is a Congress without the will and guts to stop a war started out of fear and stupidity and too craven to resist the hysteria over immigration and navigate through competing passions and interests toward a responsible compromise.

This is a High Court retreating from messy freedoms such as individual privacy, racial equality, protections from predatory business practices and the right to express unpopular opinions.

A living symbol of all this is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has emerged, at least for now, as the deciding voter in our losing 5-4 struggle to balance freedom and responsibility.

The duty of judges, he once told an audience, is to "impose order on a disordered reality." But at what price?

By January 2009 we may, to our sorrow, have found the answer to that.

McCain: Dead Man Walking

The party’s penchant for capital punishment of any candidate guilty of right-wing heresy has put John McCain on Republican Death Row, short of cash for appeals and dropping in the polls like the victim of a hangman’s noose.

McCain’s candor about campaign reform, global warming and immigration seem to have sealed his fate with the GOP faithful, who not only continue to flirt with Giuliani but are sniffing the after-shave appeal of Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.

What amounts to McCain’s political obituary is in the Washington Post today under the byline of Bush’s former speech writer, Michael Gerson, who credits him with
“a kind of nobility that seems unique in the current presidential race.”

And, Gerson might have added, unseen in American politics since his former bosses stole the White House in 2000.

Immigrants

This week, while politicians argue over amnesty and border fences, an immigrant couple in Chicago is providing a reminder of why America used to be called the Land of Opportunity.

A divorce court judge ordered Michael and Maya Polsky, who came here from the Soviet Union in 1976 with $500, to share equally their family assets of $350 million. In those three decades the Polskys, in addition to paying taxes on their accumulating fortune, had donated $7 million to the University of Chicago to start a school for entrepreneurs.

That sounds like a contribution to American society that social conservatives might applaud, despite the fact that the Polskys are offending their family values with a divorce.

In 1989, my wife, who is a divorce lawyer and mediator, and I wrote a book titled, “Getting Your Share,” for wives who were being declared equal partners by new divorce laws but were not being treated that way by courts.

Mrs. Polsky, who was a full-time homemaker during her marriage, is setting some kind of record as an exception to that rule.

Meanwhile Mr. Polsky, who made his mark with power companies and now deals in alternative energy, will be appealing the decision to avoid seeing half his fortune Gone with the Wind.