"Pride of the Yankees"

They won’t be making any movies with that title about A-Rod. His tawdry downfall won’t ever be mentioned in the same breath as Lou Gehrig’s accomplishments or allowed to sully that heroic figure in the Stadium’s Monument Park.

“I’m fighting for my life,” Alex Rodriguez told reporters yesterday. “I have to defend myself. If I don’t defend myself, no one else will.”

Against what? Too facile to see him only as the archetype of a me-generation that overrides any team sense in sports or life, driven by a bottomless need for more adulation, more money, more women into pointlessly breaking all the rules in pursuit of some cosmic more to burnish his image for the ages.

Now, as all that blows away in self-made ashes, A-Rod’s total self-absorption morphs into a kind of moral stupidity unknown in previous times.

Contrast him with Gehrig in 1939, dying at age of 36, reducing a Yankee Stadium full of fans to tears, “I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement...

“When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know.”

The Gehrig who died with such grace left behind on the playing field a record of accomplishment that A-Rod never matched and now never will.

“It can all lead to a contract that surpasses the gross domestic products of some nations,” writes Doug Glanville, a former player turned columnist. “But as the drugs give your stats greater value, they take away everything else...Numbers mean nothing when you stop knowing what they are actually counting and why.”

David Brooks adds: “Locked in a cycle of insecurity and attempted self-validation, their talents are never enough, and they end up devouring what they have been given.”

As so many parse A-Rod’s prideful downfall, a healthy dose of Lou Gehrig’s grace and humility could help restore our sense of balance.  

The Existential Terrors of August

For someone with a grandchild due home from the Middle East next week, the State Department Alert about “potential for terrorist attacks” there this month is no abstraction.

“U.S. citizens should take every precaution to be aware of their surroundings and to adopt appropriate safety measures to protect themselves when traveling,” the government says. The safety measures are not specified.

As this warning chills millions of American hearts like mine, Edward Snowden is now free to roam the streets of Moscow, secure in the certainty he has struck a blow at government invasion of our privacy. One may be forgiven for not finding his criminal efforts on behalf of individual freedom vs. communal security heroic.

Once again we are in the grip of irrational fear bequeathed by bin Laden on 9/11 and a subsequent loss of social trust that has leaked into American life over those dozen years and poisoned our confidence that we can wake up every morning and, within existential limits, control our lives.

The news tells us that, beyond our daily existence, nothing is manageable in either the worlds of nature or man. Weather upheavals are matched by the political, and we are transfixed by freaks of nature like Ariel Castro, Anthony Weiner and their ilk.

In the past century, Americans may have been more naïve about the hidden motives of people as individuals or in political concert, but they shared a vision, however flawed, of their ability to fumble through to a better community.

Now, with 24/7 cable news and unlimited Internet gabble, we “know” so much more but have no context and no coherence for any of it.

As we spend this month under an official Travel Alert and no Congress in Washington to pretend that someone is running the country, what will shape our picture of the world is an existential anxiety that will fuel despair over what used to be called the Silly Season for news.

No one will be laughing.  

Surveillance, Security and Sanity

From his watery grave, Osama bin Laden is still punishing America. What he did on 9/11/01 still has us at one another’s throats over homeland security, arguing bitterly over tradeoffs between personal liberty and national safety.

 "All we have to do," he bragged back in 2004, "is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note."

In the atmosphere he created, we are tearing ourselves apart over how to be both safe and free.

Glenn Greenwald and his puppet Eric Snowden publish a secret 32-page summary of the N.S.A.'s XKeyscore program, which mines Internet browsing information the Agency is collecting at 150 network sites, and the government is forced to declassify the document.

To assuage fears over invasion of telephone privacy, the Agency also releases documents describing the collection of “telephone metadata.”

Two cheers for transparency as politicians deplore such invasions of privacy while the Administration fails to offer satisfying proof of their efficacy in preventing terrorist attacks.

Over all this, what Osama did on 9/11 still hovers to gaslight America into self-destruction, a term derived from a World War II movie describing intimidation and psychological abuse through false information that clouds the victims' perception.

As we commemorate our hard-won freedoms of the past century, with friends like Snowden and Greenwald to demagogue the issue, who needs enemies like bin Laden?


Update:  Snowden is sprung from the Moscow air terminal, at least for a while, as the White House fulminates. The ancient among us may wonder if the Russians will shelter him in the apartment that JFK-assassin-to-be Lee Harvey Oswald occupied there more than half a century ago.

Hillary and Bill, Huma and Anthony

Can the past help make sense of the Clintons and Weiners today?

Breaking up is hard to do, sang Neil Sadaka half a century ago, but go back further to Karl Marx, “History repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Or as Hillary and Bill try to distance themselves, the more apt Marx may be Groucho: “I don’t want to belong to any club that takes people like me as members.”

True, as Maureen Dowd chirps, Weiner is off the charts: “Aside from being a gift to clowns, hacks, punsters, rivals and the writers of ‘The Good Wife,’ Carlos Danger is also a gift to political-scandal survivors. His behavior is so outlandish and contemptible--the sort of thing that used to require a trench coat and park--that it allows Eliot Spitzer and Bill Clinton to act huffy.”

Yet, if a politician’s sex life should be judged on how it affects his performance in office, the former Comeback Kid and now most popular ex-president on the planet has more to answer for than any of his fallen comrades.

In 1992, Clinton, with Hillary standing by her man, went on 60 Minutes to weather the story of a 12-year-affair with Gennifer Flowers (who had tapes of them together) with a slippery near-confession, “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage.”

After winning the White House, he got himself impeached over Monica Lewinsky and her semen-stained dress, but forgotten now about that nasty episode is how it may have contributed to a failure to take out Osama bin Laden before 9/11.

Back then, the New York Times has noted that "during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled."

In 2007, Clinton reacted with fury to a TV mini-series portraying him as so distracted then that he failed to focus on the emerging threat of bin Laden. Yet, the program's advisor was 9/11 Commission Chairman Tom Kean, and there was evidence that Clinton might have done more about bin Laden if not for fear of public reaction that attacking him would be seen as a "wag the dog" diversion from impeachment.

In judging Weiner and lesser bozos of both parties, this kind of connection between public and private is as apt as seeing JFK’s sexual peccadillos as allowing J. Edgar Hoover to blackmail him and stay in office to hound Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

JFK and Bill Clinton are now rightly regarded as among the best of modern presidents, but their “private” sexual behavior was not the kind of joke that Weiner, Spitzer and their ilk are now.

Time to stop laughing and get back to serious issues.

Growing Cracks in Tea Party Cups

You can’t hold your breath and say no forever. As the President turns his back on Congressional tantrums, some sane Republicans are starting to gasp for breath.

The national political debate is slowly shifting from Tea Party vs. Obama to an internal GOP rift over avoiding defeat in 2014 and 2016.

Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn predicts that shutting down government to block funds for ObamaCare could destroy his party. “The strategy that has been laid out is a good way for Republicans to lose the House,” he says.

It’s “the dumbest idea I've ever heard,” adds North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr.

Meanwhile, the White House concentrates on taking its case to the country and avoiding another fiscal cliff on the debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew insists there will be no negotiations this fall to avoid a default such as those that led to a downgrade of the nation's credit rating in 2011:

"Congress is going to have to pass a debt limit that can reach bipartisan consensus in the Congress and that the president can sign into law."

The President himself tells New York Times interviewers he is concentrating on those “who are working really hard, are trying to figure out how they can send their kids to college, are trying to make sure that they can save for their retirement.”

If Congress is willing to work with him, he is ready but if the Republican response is “no on everything,” he won’t “sit around and twiddle my thumbs for the next 1,200 days.”

Meanwhile, Barack Obama is also looking beyond that time as he hosts Hillary Clinton at a White House lunch today. No doubt one of the subjects of their conversation will be what happens next if the GOP doesn’t get its act together on mending the growing cracks in its Tea Party cups.

Middle East Exhaustion: Tipping Point

If new bloodshed in Egypt is a wakeup call, could Syria be the last straw?

Cairo is aflame again, with scores of protesters killed, bloody fruit of an Arab Spring that keeps yielding more death than democracy. As tolls rise, it is past time to rethink the Bush-Cheney Neocon doctrine of a strong America bestowing freedom on benighted nations across the world.

Now the Joint Chiefs give Congress a report that overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in Syria would be “a vast undertaking, costing billions of dollars, and could backfire on the United States...Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

John McCain, of course, dislikes that assessment, but the reality of the past decade is expenditure of American blood and treasure in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan and elsewhere with, to put it charitably, mixed results at best.

No responsible critic would advocate, in the light of a nuclear Pakistan and wannabe Iran, complete withdrawal from the region, but isn’t it past time for a lighter footprint?

Even the President of the Arab American Institute concedes that “the region is on a path leading to self-destruction. What, if anything, can be done to reverse course?

“Syria is committing suicide--tearing itself asunder in a civil war that, with the support and prodding of outside forces, has increasingly become an exercise in sectarian blood-letting. American combat forces may have left Iraq, but the country has not found a way to make peace with itself. Daily terrorist bombings are killing scores of civilians, while a dysfunctional sectarian government appears to be focused more on prosecuting and persecuting its opponents than providing for the needs of its people...

”Lebanon, reeling from the pressure emanating from Syria next door, is once again teetering on the brink of civil conflict. Meanwhile, the conflicts raging around Jordan are having a destabilizing impact with that country receiving yet another massive influx of refugees.”

What the region needs now, the Arab spokesman asserts, is “a unified revolt against sectarian division and recognition of the futility of its self-destructive path.”

Before outsiders can truly help in that undertaking, the US is like a club-footed giant in the region, stumbling around with the best of intentions but more likely to bring damage than democracy with its blundering attempts to be helpful.

Haven’t we reached a tipping point?

Christie Challenges GOP Park-Your-Heart Politics

If nothing else, Chris Christie will be pumping blood into hardened Republican arteries between now and November 2016.

Naming Rand Paul among “any number of people” who project a “dangerous strain” of libertarianism on domestic surveillance, the Governor cites families in his state who lost loved ones on 9/11:

“These esoteric, intellectual debates--I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have...

“The next attack that comes, that kills thousands of Americans as a result, people are going to be looking back on the people having this intellectual debate and wondering whether they put...”

Christie cut himself off, but his comments at an Aspen Institute panel of GOP governors challenge his party’s herd mentality on Obama-bashing, bringing up George W. Bush.

The policy the current President is following, he told them, “hasn’t been different because they [sic] were right and because we haven’t had another one of those attacks that cost thousands and thousands of lives.”

As Republicans "nerve up" to shut down government over Obamacare and the debt ceiling, Christie offers a glimpse of an alternative to another 2016 kamikaze campaign for the White House.

How far he can go in primaries like those of the last presidential election where ideological purity reigned is open to question, but his bluntness is a promising sign.

Sidelining Schmucks

Ideological and ethnic opposites Anthony Weiner and Steve King are redefining shameless stupidity and uniting their own parties against them but, in our media-salivating world, getting more attention than comparatively sane office holders.

Republicans have already moved away from King by dissuading him from running for the Iowa Senate seat next year, but Weiner is still a candidate, even as a New York Times editorial advises him to “take his marital troubles and personal compulsions out of the public eye, away from cameras, off the Web and out of the race for mayor of New York City.”

While President Obama pledges “to use every minute of the 1,276 days remaining in my term to make this country work for working Americans again,” American government is gridlocked by Tea Party politicians as weirdly out of touch as Weiner and King but sounding rational only by totally ignoring reality.

“Congressional Republicans,” reports the Times, “are moving to gut many of President Obama’s top priorities with the sharpest spending cuts in a generation and a new push to hold government financing hostage unless the president’s signature health care law is stripped of money this fall.”

Weiner and King are on the fringes giving new meaning to the definition of “schmuck,” a Yiddishism for the male member as metaphor for stupid, foolish, or simply clueless, and now earn the highest rank in the lexicon of penile designations for unwise, total “putz.”

While Weiner is caught in post-disgrace sexual tweets and King opines that undocumented immigrants have “calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert,” they are only distracting voters from the stupidity of John Boehner’s troops, those lesser schmucks who have to be voted out of more years of disabling Congress next November.

In any language, they all have to be sidelined.

The Next Royal Baby

Now that Prince What’s-His-Name has made his fashionably late arrival and media royal womb watchers are all agog, it behooves a former member of the fraternity to offer the benefit of his experience to help them move on from their current trauma.

In the 1980s, as a woman's magazine editor duty-bound to run cover stories about the new baby’s super-celebrity grandmother, I published one showing her holding up Prince William, with a line reading "Princess Diana Faces the 'Terrible Twos' and Baby No. 2," based on nothing more than a suspicion that the royal timetable called for a backup prince sooner than later.

The day the issue came out, the Palace announced Diana’s second pregnancy, and I was besieged by phone calls from reporters about how we knew. To my shame I responded with exquisite bad taste, "Inside information."

Far-thinking royalty journalists should be marking their 2015 calendars since, even with the monarchy bench now three-deep, William and Kate are not likely to want to rear an only child.

Meanwhile, a retired member of the fraternity will be watching all the jubilation with pure pleasure at news that for a change doesn’t make him sick of the human race.

The Queen’s great grandson was only one of more than 300,000 babies born all over the world yesterday, but even just hours old, he is what used to be called a bundle of joy.

Update: The new prince is no longer nameless. He has three: George Alexander Louis, a long handle for such a short person but, as he grows, the media will find ways of shortening it. Prince Lou has a nice ring to it.

A Life in Black and White

Now that Barack Obama has turned personal about race and started a national debate, an older witness is impelled to step forward and testify.

Nearly 90 years ago, I was born to white shopkeepers in the black ghetto of Harlem, living in back of a small store, selling things to people even poorer than they were. Their customers were descended from African slaves, while they themselves had left behind a Europe where their kind would soon be killed by the millions.

We were all safe here from servitude and slaughter, but not fully American, free but far from equal.

When I was three and seriously ill, my parents gave up the store and moved away, but my father kept working in Harlem for the next forty years. When I was old enough, I would sometimes go with him on a Saturday for the fourteen hours he spent in a pawnshop there.

The patrons came parading through, most of them well-dressed, almost all black, carrying clothes, jewelry, musical instruments, cameras to offer as hostage for the few dollars they had to have for a few days or weeks.

Some seemed down and defeated, but many were jaunty, with the aliveness of people always dancing on the edge. Seeing me, they flashed white smiles from their dark faces, surprised and amused to find a kid among the forbidding figures guarding the pawnbroker’s cash box. I always smiled back, trying to drink in some of their joy.

Pawnbrokers made loans to the desperate, with higher interest than banks were allowed to charge. In earlier days, they were little more than fences, acquiring stolen goods cheap to resell. Now strict laws required them to be wary--but it was a sad business, bordering on usury, profiting from human misery. For my father, it was simply where he worked sixty hours a week to earn sixteen dollars.

Once he brought home an autograph, from Colonel Hubert Julian, an American pilot who single-handed had opposed Mussolini’s air force in Abyssinia to become known as Haile Selassie’s “Black Eagle.” What led him to a Harlem pawnshop I never learned, but for years I saved that scrap with the flamboyant signature of a genuine hero.

In the windows of Harlem shops, black-on-yellow placards showed the week’s offerings of local movie houses: Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen (huge letters) in “Gone With the Wind” with (much smaller) Clark Gable, or “The Big Broadcast of 1937” starring Rochester and (footnote size) Jack Benny. There was so little to nourish pride on those streets that when Joe Louis (called by newspapers, without irony, “a credit to his race”) knocked out Max Schmeling in their 1938 rematch for the heavyweight title, Harlem erupted in riotous joy.

From the Bronx, I commuted to City College, walking ten blocks to and from the subway station every day through a sea of dark faces without fear or harm.

After returning from World War II and being shot at by white people, I graduated and went to work at that Harlem campus, where I fell in love with a beautiful, brilliant young woman. But a decade before Barack Obama was born, we--certainly I--did not have the courage to marry and bring interracial children into a world so little changed from the time of my own childhood.

Soon afterward, I went to work as an editor in midtown Manhattan and was eventually hired by George H. W. Bush’s father-in-law as the first Jew among hundreds of employees. Needless to say, everyone there was white.

In 1955 at Redbook I assigned the first article in a national magazine on 26-year-old Martin Luther King during the Montgomery, Alabama bus strike. Ten years later when I was editor of McCall’s Dr. King wrote a memoir for me about leading young African-American gang members from Chicago on non-violent Freedom Marches in Mississippi where “they were to be attacked by tear gas. They were to protect women and children with no other weapons but their own bodies.”

When I became head of the American Society of Magazine Editors, I began an effort to recruit African-American college students as summer internes, but that program was watered down by fellow editors and subverted by a young black woman hired to recruit applicants who was found to be urging them not “to buy into the system.”

Martin Luther King was killed, and so was any white naivete about easily changing a culture so deeply ingrained in American life.

Looking back at that time and the years that followed brings a heavy sense of swimming against powerful tides that now seem even stronger than ever in the wake of an African-American president.

Yet there is hope in TV panels of black faces debating uncomfortable statistics on crime in their own communities and old white people trying to sort out what they can do for a better future.

Barack Obama has opened up biographical soul-searching. If it can slowly begin to change minds and hearts, the generations that follow us will be the better for it. 

Netflix Hijacks the Emmys

Talk about voter fraud, consider this: The brain-damaged “House of Cards” gets nine Emmy nominations this year while Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly flawed “Newsroom” is barely cited.

The hyped-up news is that “the online streaming network Netflix, best known until recently for rerunning other companies’ old shows and films, officially joined its cable and broadcast counterparts in the race for television’s most prestigious prizes, picking up more than a dozen nominations, including a best drama nod for its political thriller ‘House of Cards.’”

Turn the deck face up and you can see the truth. “Cards,” a bad re-do of a sly 1990 British series of the same name, is rated by Netflix viewers at two stars (“didn’t like”) while its predecessor gets three (“liked”).

If Netflix’s Emmy coup represents anything deeper than a change in content providers, it is the McDonaldization of TV drama, an instant delivery of 13 slabs of fatty spiced-up stuff for those who might mistake it for filet mignon.

Chalk it all up to Netflix’s wooing of Academy voters, along with their possible discomfort over the openly liberal political tone of “Newsroom.” Corporate show biz is still the scared-rabbit venue it was back in the Joe McCarthy days of blacklisting. So it’s safer to cite Jane Fonda and Jeff Daniels rather than the series itself.

“House of Cards” will win its share of Emmys but the public knows better.

Obama's Calm Coda to a Painful Week

“Trayvon Martin,” Barack Obama tells the nation, “could have been me 35 years ago.”

In an unannounced, unscripted White House press room appearance the President caps a week of heated national introspection with his usually calm demeanor yet the most personal public 20 minutes of his presidency.

Talking about “a history that doesn’t go away,” he says : “There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

“There are probably very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me--at least before I was a senator.

“There are very few African-Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off...

“For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”

In pointing out that “things are getting better,” Barack Obama nonetheless asks Americans not to get into a finger-pointing political debate but look into their own hearts, as he is doing, to find ways of doing better still.

He ends his appeal for racial conciliation by indirectly invoking Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.

“Am I judging people,” he asks Americans to ask themselves, “as much as I can based on not the color of their skin, but the content of their character? [Dr. King],” adding “Those of us in authority should be doing everything we can to encourage the better angels of our nature [Lincoln] as opposed to using these episodes to heighten divisions.”

No one, it would seem, could quarrel with that, but Fox News brings on Sean Hannity, George Zimmerman’s brother and others who do.

For many of us, however, it was a return of the Barack Obama we admired in 2008 and in whom we invested so much hope. We would like to see more of him in the next three years.

Update:  A New York Times editorial sums up the rational reaction:  “It is a great thing for this country to have a president who could do what Mr. Obama did on Friday.  It is sad that we still need him to do it.”