Public Posturing, Authentic Lives

In 2008, Barack Obama told Tim Russert with a worried smile on “Meet the Press” that his wife and friends thought he was still there behind all the hype and on 60 Minutes admitted that the “attempt to airbrush your life...is exhausting.”

Five year later, we can still see an authentic person in the Oval Office, the man himself not buried in all the sludge that has been heaped on him by rabid opponents.

The contrast comes up with the undoing of Chris Christie in just a week, from plain-spoken populist to mean-spirited pol who plays dirty tricks on those who cross him and, when caught, throws his closest associate to the wolves to cover his tracks.

Say what they will about the President, even those who hate him can’t pair him with Christie as inauthentic. In defending the Jersey governor, Rush Limbaugh is reduced to daydreaming of better scandals.

“Why can’t we have Obama running around on Michelle or something?” asks El Rushbo. “Wouldn’t that be a much better scandal than Christie and bridge lane closures, for crying out loud?”

As the President wades into Year Six of his tenure with straightening out Obamacare and extending unemployment on his plate, no matter what valid criticisms may be aimed at him from Left or Right, no rational observer will pair him with the intellectual and moral pygmies like Christie, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and their ilk that the GOP is teeing up to replace him in the 2016 balloting.

When all their “airbrushing” is done, will Republicans have to fall back on someone like Jeb Bush, as they did last time with Romney, to create even the illusion of authenticity?

“You can beat somebody with nobody” is an old political axiom, which may lead to a 2016 retro match of former White House names.

Whatever. One thing is sure: Michelle and Barack Obama will be leaving the place hand in hand, Limbaugh’s fantasies not withstanding.  

The Moral Heart of "Downton Abbey"

In life, a minor character can assume a crucial role. For one who has experienced this phenomenon often, so too in popular art, as the housekeeper Mrs. Hughes, who has figured in all 34 episodes of “Downtown Abbey,” increasingly comes to the heart of conflicts that beset other characters.

That someone who has willingly suppressed her own passions in the service of others should be in this position is not an unexpected irony for those sensitive to the chasm between human beings who mindlessly eat the world for their own pleasure and those imbued by nature and/or experience to compassion and caring for others.

In the latest plot turn, Mrs. Hughes is again burdened by an impossible dilemma, her sole knowledge of the shocking assault on the housemaid Anna and what to do about it. Telling might punish the rapist but drive Anna’s husband to murder; concealing it forces her to share in the pain and guilt.

In life, as others keep pushing ahead mindlessly from day to day, the most responsible people are often put to such choices by their own natures, swallowing their own suffering in silence.

At every point, Mrs. Hughes takes the consequences of turning down her second chance to become a farmer’s wife in Season 1 and providing moral support and practical help to other Downton denizens at the price of her own emotional pain.


Even with her own strict moral code, she is compassionate over Bates’ physical handicap, the housemaid who is impregnated by a wounded soldier, the plight of Carson’s former vaudeville partner, Mrs. Patmore’s shifty suitor--anyone wounded by circumstances in an unfair world.

As viewers worry over the fates of all the other cast members, they may want to spare a good thought for the only one (beside her upstairs counterpart Matthew's mother) who keeps carrying the burden of being a feeling human being rather than a cardboard cutout. And for those she may resemble in real life.

Christie, Osama and Spite

Size matters, but so does moral essence. Snarling bridge traffic out of political pique may be petty compared to aiming airliners at tall buildings, but the dazzling human disproportion between ends and means, the reckless assault on innocent people and the subjugation of life to self-serving abstractions are inescapable, the mark of what Eisenhower’s favorite philosopher, Eric Hoffer, called “The True Believer.”

Hoffer’s prototype, in search of self-realization, used “a freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse,” to destroy perceived enemies by whatever means necessary to achieve his righteous ends.

Christie joins such company, not by his breadth of vision, but a pathetic failure to recognize the borders between populist posturing and making political power a literal bully pulpit. For months, observers have been parsing his performance but, in one swipe, he clarifies it with the kind of meanness that hasn’t been seen in politics since Nixon turned loose “the plumbers” to sabotage his perceived enemies with “dirty tricks.”

The New Jersey governor will continue to squirm out of as much responsibility as he can, but voters may have a harder time erasing the image of themselves being stuck in traffic jams at his whim than being killed by Osama in the Twin Towers.

Each question he dodges only raises more questions, and he is more than likely to end up in the ashbin of history without getting anywhere near the White House, as Nixon and Osama’s hijackers did.

How many of the GOP’s core will follow Christie’s low-rent True Believer  banner from now on?

Update: As if on cue, Karl Rove turns up to cheer Christie on. W’s “Turd Blossom,” who left the White House just before being nailed for firing Bush’s US Attorneys for not being political enough in prosecuting Democrats, thinks Christie has the “right qualities” for President.

He would.

GOP's New Grimm Tales

Just when Republicans were getting some traction with their “Chicken Little” yarn about Obamacare, the sky falls on them from different directions. Call such cautionaries from the new Brothers Grimm’ canon, “The Elephant and the Weasel,” as Chris Christie and Robert Gates personify why the pachyderm party just can’t seem to get a break in the realm of instructive narrative.

Christie is on an opinion-poll roll in Santa Claus disguise when he is outed as a vindictive bully over jamming bridge traffic to spite a political opponent while Gates’ tales out of White House school are getting the blowback they deserve from Obama’s people, albeit in a polite way

They point to a harrumph in his book: “I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, ‘For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran. Joe you be my witness.’ I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would ever write about such sensitive matters.” So many meetings, so much offensive levity.

GOP problems with children’s literature go all the way back to 9/11/2001 when George W. Bush’s was reading “My Pet Goat” to second-graders and froze over the attacks.

Parents, teachers and child-care experts have been arguing for two centuries over whether Grimms’ Fairy Tales are too bloody and traumatic for young children. But not to fear. In this age where politicians tell tall stories every day about the real world, nothing shocks any of us of any age any more.

Why Is Gates Opening Up Now?

The first question about the former Defense Secretary’s memoir is timing. For someone who prides himself on patriotism, why now?

In a flurry of leaks, advance excerpts and reviews, Robert Gates has put the President and his White House on the kind of political griddle he professes to abhor.

In his book, Gates says he “bristled at what's become of congressional hearings, where rude, insulting, belittling, bullying and all too often highly personal attacks on witnesses by members of Congress violated nearly every norm of civil behavior. Members postured and acted as judge, jury and executioner...in a permanent state of outrage or suffered from some sort of mental duress that warranted confinement or at least treatment for anger management.

“I continue to worry about the incessant scorched-earth battling between Congress and the president (which I saw under both Bush and Obama) but even more about the weakening of the moderate center in Congress.”

No one will argue with that, but in view of excerpts from Gates’ memoir, questions arise about his own anger management, not only over Congress but White House colleagues like Vice-President Joe Biden, “a man of integrity,” who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

Say what? Is this the same Biden who, as a Senator, appeared regularly on Sunday talk shows, to criticize and question the misbegotten war in Iraq that Gates was helping the Bush Administration to conduct?

The political flood of finger-pointing that he has unleashed will go on for a while but, in a back-handed way, Gates may have done a service for those who question the sanity of our continuing investment of so much blood and treasure in the Middle East by bringing the issue front and center.

The propriety of his doing it now is another issue entirely. For a man who entitles the book “Duty,” his timing raises questions that infuriated John F. Kennedy when he was in the White House.

In 1962 when former speech writer Emmet Hughes wrote a tell-all about his Eisenhower days, Kennedy was appalled. According to Ted Sorensen, Kennedy thought Hughes "had betrayed the trust of Republican officials by quoting their private conversations against them" and told his White House staff, "I hope no one around here is writing that kind of book."

No one did. Both Sorensen and Schlesinger wrote doorstop volumes about JFK’s White House tenure without a hint of gossip. Loyalty did not stop at his death.

We live in a different world now, but reading Gates’ unbuttoned book, it would be wise to remember that it is the work of a man who, although he says he “silently wept” at night for troops in Afghanistan, served all his “Duty” as a Washington spook, not in combat.

Whatever else he says about Obama’s White House, the people Gates is excoriating in his untimely memoir had actually been trying to stop their bleeding while he was still micro-managing it at the CIA and in the White House.

Downton Abbey Yard Sale

Phew! Avoiding spoilers for those who watch later, it’s hard to recover from last night’s Season 4 opener of everybody’s favorite gilded guilty pleasure without at least a warning about what mastermind Julian Fellowes is up to now.

Key cast members gone, the two-hour Downton premiere is stuffed with not only surviving lead actors but what looks like a lawn sale of forgotten characters from past years returning for whirlwind reprises. Without a scorecard, there are heirloom plates in the air everywhere.

Fellowes has too much aplomb to be overcome by jumping-the-shark anxiety, but some sense of hurry-up pervades the air in what is normally the most leisurely of atmospheres, with some moving moments and others more openly contrived.

As Downton moves through the 1920s with electrical gadgets invading the kitchen, there is an underlying sense that Fellowes is heading toward some kind of closure with his award-winning writing debut, Robert Altman’s 2001 “Gosford Park,” which turned him from actor to author, set in 1932 with a cast of decaying characters upstairs and down.

A disappointed aficionado can’t forgive Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown-Findlay for jumping ship last season to terminate Dan Crawley’s and Lady Sybil’s Downton lives. A spiteful check of their IMBD sites shows them both working in upcoming films, nothing major, and...yes, other TV series.

Downtown will no doubt sort out its transition problems, but a fan is reminded of a classic line in “All About Eve,” with the playwright yelling at the actress, “When will the piano realize it has not written the concerto?”

Meanwhile, Fellowes seems to be hard at work trying to sort out his keyboards for the future.

  

Is Blame Obama Game Ending?

For Republicans with brains, the handwriting is clear. Five years of bashing the President on everything have left the GOP in opinion poll hell, and their frontrunner for the White House in ’16 is Chris Christie, no Tea Party icon.

Little surprise, then, that the disloyal opposition is in rebranding mode: Paul Ryan makes a budget deal with Democrats and edges toward other accommodations while John Boehner shows up with a kind word for extending unemployment benefits.

Even the whooping over the Obamacare muddle is receding, leaving it to the diehards like Rand Paul to grumble about local sign-up difficulties.

While it’s much too early to certify a trend, opportunities for actual governing in Washington seem to be opening up.

The burden now will be on the President to seize the moment and take advantage of inching toward dialogue while the GOP sorts out its internal problems and tries to fashion a new face.

Next up: Immigration? Fiscal policy? Who knows?

Defining Snowden's Deviancy Down

"When someone reveals that government officials have routinely and deliberately broken the law,” says a New York Times editorial, recommending amnesty for Edward Snowden, “that person should not face life in prison at the hands of the same government.”

The Times’ Public Editor agrees, that Snowden “has done the United States, and in fact, the world, a great service.”

With all due respect, that plea comes tainted by the Newspaper of Record’s partnership with Snowden and his adviser, Glenn Greenwald, whose dedication to tearing down American government and media is legend.

What would the Senate’s last sociologist, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have made of all this?

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late New York legislator wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

He pointed out that, in 1929, the killing of seven gangsters in Chicago became the stuff of legend while half a century later “Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.”

By all means, let the Times advocate for Snowden, if it chooses, but before publishing that editorial, did anyone re-read former Rxecutive Editor Bill Keller’s exchange defending traditional journalism against Greenwald’s open desire to tear down American society with his agenda-driven attacks disguised as reporting? Do we need a Fox News of the left with even fewer scruples to balance Rupert Murdoch?

Snowden’s “patriotism” could have expressed itself in many ways open to whistle blowers, but he chose his outlaw status with Greenwald as business partner, mentor and legal advisor.

Whatever persuades the Times to plead his case, it concentrates on the harm to American society that NSA spying may have done but overlooks the collateral damage that its own partnership with Snowden and Greenwald may have done at the same time.

There is more than one way to define deviancy down in American society today, and the Times should reconsider its self-congratulation in pleading Snowden’s case for amnesty and encouraging those who consider endangering security heroism.

It is a step down from the newspaper that vetted and published the Pentagon Papers in the last century after carefully facing the legal and moral consequences of doing so.

In Benghazi, No Good Deed Unpunished

In the lethally labyrinthine politics of the Middle East, the murder of four Americans in Libya on September 11, 2012 continues to roil American opinion with partisan accusations of blame that resist the reality that Americans are simply beyond their depth in such ancient internecine murderous hatreds.

Now we have a new attempt to untangle the morass:

“Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

“A fuller accounting of the attacks suggests lessons for the United States that go well beyond Libya. It shows the risks of expecting American aid in a time of desperation to buy durable loyalty, and the difficulty of discerning friends from allies of convenience in a culture shaped by decades of anti-Western sentiment.”

Republicans who have made a crusade of blaming Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton for it all are quick to counterattack. Fox News dredges up a month-old interview with the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee to insist that the Benghazi attack was an "Al Qaeda-led event."

Anyone with the patience and strong stomach to read the full Times account can glimpse its complexity against the “fair and balanced” Fox rebuttal, with such fascinating figures as a 42-year-old “leader” who has spent most of his adult life in a Tripoli prison for Islamist extremism and now insists “God would have helped us. We know the United States was working with both sides” and considered “splitting up the country.”

When will we learn that in such situations no good deed goes unpunished, that ignorant hatreds will propel “leaders” who can gain power by railing against American intervention, no matter what we do or how we do it?

And when will Republicans at home stop trying to make political capital out of the blood and sacrifice of Americans we send to represent us in this moral swamp?

How many Benghazis will it take, in Syria and elsewhere, to find some balance between use of American power for good in the Middle East and being thanked for it with murder of our own people?

Spying, Suffering and Other Good Stuff

The year’s last TV Sunday morning is dominated by Snowden backlash and Obamacare bashing, of course, but tired ears yearn to hear about other issues from quirkier voices and get their wish on the “Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2013: The Best Posts of the Year, Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves.”

Reading them with fascination, I am reassured that diversity is not dead, and neither are human voices to offset the canned commentary from DC. As always, I am fascinated and grateful to be included, even though I accuse myself of chickening out by choosing my own post about NSA spying.

But others happily go further afield. Enjoy.

Happy Holiday Depression to You, Too

In the dying days of a hard year, those who are feeling low can take heart. Their reaction may be a sign of good mental health.

Anyone who isn’t depressed may just not understand what’s happening. The young may be excused for not knowing how much better American life has been and could be again. The despair of the old can be disregarded because they have so little time left to hope for real change, but what about everybody else?

In the wake of a holy day of hope and charitable feeling, made more poignant by close encounters with seldom-seen relatives, a long-standing suspicion returns that the world is divided into those who feel the pangs of reality and those who feast on life with little empathy for others.

If this sounds self-righteous or simple-mindedly leftish, it is more a characterological than political distinction. There is a difference between people who are satisfied simply to eat the world smugly and those whose empathy for others induces at least mild depression in a time when there is so little regard for so many who are in real pain.

Despite pharmaceutical TV commercials, depression doesn’t have to mean despair or helpless torpor. Turning inner rage outward to try to change the world can relieve the symptoms. (It’s worked for me over a long lifetime. Once I hired a President's daughter and put my magazine on the front pages and Evening News out of frustration with a clueless Board of Directors.)

For example, an angry response could be used to turn on a Congress that is about to kill unemployment benefits for a million Americans to score ideological points with the hopelessly selfish or to encourage serious discussion of a single-payer system for health care instead of continued point-scoring over the deficiencies of Obamacare while people go untreated by insurance-company greed.

At the very least, such efforts would help them feel alive rather than numbed by happy pills.

Two cheers for productive depression.

A Tale of Two Shoulders

During this season of aches and pains, the Obamacare battle resumes in full fury with little direct relevance to millions who are hurting and want relief.

Lost in the political clamor is any sense of how American health care really works in a cockpit of special interests and free-lance greed that permeates a “system” of patient choice but no protection.

As a metaphor and cautionary tale, I offer two ancient shoulders. My story may bore you but it has a point.

In excruciating pain a decade ago, I called several orthopedists recommended by my primary physician and was told I could have an introductory appointment in two or more weeks.

In desperation, I searched on my own and found “a physiatrist,” an orthopedic doctor who specializes in relief rather than surgery. He examined my shoulder and gave me a cortisone injection that stopped the pain.

After several years and injections, he recommended rotator cuff surgery. Reluctantly I agreed and went through a six-hour arthroscopic operation in which I could hear the surgeon and his associate debating their moves and the anesthetist stepping away to call his stock broker.

That night I had to go back to the emergency room for a morphine drip to finally stop the unbearable pain. A year later, after many Medicare dollars and even more of my own for physical therapy, my shoulder still hurt and I was not able to raise the arm above my head.

Flash forward a few more years. When my other shoulder acted up, I went to a new physiatrist who had helped me with back pain. She suggested acupuncture, which Medicare doesn’t cover, and I agreed. To this day, that shoulder has more motion and hurts much less than the other.

What does my story suggest? Not a condemnation of rotator cuff surgery but as my second physiatrist says, “To someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

There are 27,700 orthopedic surgeons in the US and 8,000 physiatrists. What are the chances of avoiding inadvisable surgery on the basis of this disproportion?

Beyond that, add all the other “specialists”—-podiatrists who clip toenails and bill for surgery, dermatologists who do more cosmetology than skin care, and so on down the line—-and national health care costs become clearer.

A Boomer generation reared to believe that every problem has a solution and a price is not going to change its attitudes late in life. Before them, people of mine did not expect so much, and those who survive still don’t.

"Take Heaven, Take Peace, Take Joy"

I can’t gift-wrap this, but it’s a Christmas treasure I have to share. Decades ago, I published it twice in different magazines.

Eric Sevareid was a talented writer who spent most of his life as a radio and TV journalist working with Edward R. Murrow during World War II as part of “a band of brothers” and later at CBS-TV in its glory days. He was a hero and a role model to me.

Herewith, excerpts from Sevareid’s essay:

"Christmas offers us peace in one hand but in the other it carries a sword. The peace it offers is the love we felt in childhood and may still feel again if we have lived our lives as we were instructed in our early days. The sword is our conscience, glittering as sharply as the icicles on the Christmas tree.

"Christmas is an anticipation for the children; it is memory for most adults. It fastens the grip of truth upon us and will not let us go. Implacably it demands of us that we regard our work and what we have made of our lives, our country and our world.

"By the glow of the soft lights, by the sound of child voices in song, piercing us with an almost unendurable purity, we are obliged to remember that our first and only commandment was to love, and we have not truly obeyed; that men were so commanded not to improve them, but to save them from themselves, and we have not truly understood.

"Of course, we say as the moment of truth approaches, 'Christmas is really for the children.' Suffer the little children to take this burden from us.

"Perhaps, were we to know the realities of our own deepest motivations, we would conclude that this is why we have made of the Christmas occasion an immensely complicated business. It is the sheer busyness of Christmas, not so much its commercialization, that has changed its forms and rituals. Perhaps we have lost not only the art of simplicity but the desire for it as well. But not, I think, in our deepest beings. And as long as we know in our hearts what Christmas ought to be, then Christmas is.

"The sophisticated may belittle the almost assembly-line transaction of the printed Christmas cards that swamp our parlors in piles and windows. It is impersonal, yes, as compared with the old-fashioned family trek down the street for greetings at the door. But each little square or rectangular printed card is a signal of human recognition, a reassurance that we live in part, at least, of their consciousness, however small a part, and so are not alone...

"We cannot live, in our families, in our nations or in the world, if we cannot open our hearts. I do not know how this compressed, elbowing and suspicious world is to go on in peace if this cannot be done. I see no ultimate security in any 'balance of power' or 'balance of terror' peace. We know instinctively that in the end only a peace through a balance of kindness will preserve us...

"There are a few words I read every time the Christmas season comes around...[perhaps] written by Fra Giovanni in the year 1513...which sometimes I think of as the most perfect passage in our language...

"'There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give you, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take peace. The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within reach, is joy. Take joy. And so, at this Christmastime, I greet you with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.'"

From Sevareid, long gone now, and me, wishes to all for a day of heaven, peace and joy.

The Least-Known Christmas Classic

Despite critics and commercials, movies are rarely art. Yet, one such undisputed work exists but is rarely seen in the season of Dickens and “Die Hard.”

It is “The Dead,” by John Huston, an acknowledged master of craft who directed Oscar-worthy entertainments from “The Maltese Falcon” to “Prizzi’s Honor” over almost 50 years. For what would be his last, he chose a short story by James Joyce about a Christmas dinner in turn-of-the-century Dublin, with a script by his son Tony and starring his daughter Angelica.

It is art, acknowledged as “perfect” by critics on every level, evoking deep feelings of longing and loss. For Huston, a man with a disorderly life who was portrayed as irascible by Clint Eastwood in a movie about the making of “The African Queen,” it was the summing up of a span that started with being the son of an actor and ended with this benediction of a movie about life, longing and loss made with his own children.

“The Dead” is available by streaming from Netflix. Those whose tastes run deeper than Dickens have it waiting to entrance them.

The Best American Business

With the economy struggling slowly upward, many families across the country are reminded these days of the most recession-proof business of all. After weeks of supplication, they are being told whether or not they will be permitted to pay as much as $200,000 or more (mostly in loans with interest over years to come) for a four-year product with no guarantees.

College admissions letters are bringing news of where beloved children will be going, leaving home to start their adult journey in life. (“Who,” I remember a middle-aged friend once asking, “was that 18-year-old kid to decide I was going to be a dentist all my life?”)

College education matters, perhaps even more so than ever in hard times. Yet, even with a slowdown in the rate of tuition increases, it is the largest blind item most Americans will ever buy and comes fraught with anxiety and uncertainty.

The President and his Secretary of Education are among those expressing doubts about the “prestige value” of a degree and urging a more realistic approach to higher education, instead of rewarding colleges for “gaming” the ratings and raising costs.

A laudable aim, but it can it be any more effective than Obamacare will be in containing hospital charges?

Paying for major surgery and college tuition costs are lofty and laudable aims but, somewhere between government intervention and free enterprise in which consumer choices are constricted and manipulated, there have to be ways to protect both the interest of individuals and the social benefits of higher education.

For those who will be outraged by any such suggestion, I can offer only anecdotal and biographical evidence. Were it not for tuition-free education at the City College of New York in the 1940s, I could not have dreamed of higher education.

Neither could have Dr. Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine, Colin Powell and dozens of Nobel winners as well as thousands of other scientists, physicians, teachers and others who spent their lives contributing to the general welfare.

Society may not afford to make such investments in its future today, but can it afford not to try and control some of the abuse and waste in the recession-proof college business we have now?  

Update: On the other hand, as some universities lower standards, there is faculty pushback against the creating “Walmarts of higher education—-convenient, cheap, and second-rate” by dropping crucial courses to improve graduation figures. In any event, it is long past time for serious national discussion about making colleges a source of serious learning again rather than a consumer product.