Claire Danes Drives Me Crazy

Reviewing movies for Esquire in the 1950s, Dwight MacDonald complained, “I can’t watch Audrey Hepburn, she makes me feel coarse.” I didn’t share that reaction at all, but watching Claire Danes now in “Homeland” recalls it.

Some actors, usually among the most gifted, bring out resentment in me, best explained as feeling invaded, manipulated by their intensity into responses inherently unearned by characters they are inhabiting. Dustin Hoffman is one (as he marvelously parodied himself in “Tootsie”). Meryl Streep is often another (check “The Iron Lady”).

Danes’ Carrie Mathison takes it all to a new level. Contrary to universal acclaim for her portrayal of a bipolar CIA agent, I find the performance disturbingly out of sync with the manipulative vehicle in which it takes place.

What we are talking about here is not over-acting but a mismatch of genres. As Hoffman’s Tootsie might put it, how juicily realistic can an actor playing a tomato in a commercial be?

In “Homeland,” veteran hams like Mandy Patinkin and F. Murray Abraham are doing their familiar schtick, while Danes is often acting in another universe. It’s easy to understand why viewers might be fascinated, but my ancient movie-loving mind is disoriented.   

“I think the more whole you are as a person—the more integrated—the deeper you can go into scary territory,” Danes tells John Lahr in the New Yorker. “It’s just amazing that we have a means of doing that safely. What better thing is there? It’s so cool to get that much more of an understanding of what it is to be a person.”

No doubt, but get Carrie back on her meds, please. And bring back Damien Lewis’ classically understated British embodiment of Brody soon to sooth our nerves.

The Shutdown's Stockholm Syndrome

In 1973, employees held hostage for six days in a Swedish bank vault refused police help and emerged to defend their captors. Such bonding between captives and their takers became known as the Stockholm Syndrome, and there as signs that Americans are succumbing to it now.

A new CNN poll shows 63 percent angry at Republicans for the government shutdown, but 57 percent are also angry with Democrats and 53 percent with President Obama as well.

Is insanity contagious or is there another explanation? In the 24/7 news cycle, a simple truth is not enough for the voracious media maw: The fact that Tea Party fanatics in the House, spurred on by Ted Cruz, are holding the nation hostage to their irrational rage is just not enough to feed the beast.

In a welter of truths, half-truths and lies being spread as the shutdown clock clicks on, all kinds of rationalizations take root about the motives of the captors and their cause. In this steamy atmosphere of tracking their tactics, the simple truth is easily lost.

It doesn’t help that the President has stepped back, allowing hoof-in-mouth HarryReid to do the talking. Railing at House conservatives as “anarchists” with a “Banana Republican mindset,” the Senate Majority Leader betrays his early days as a boxer not gifted at gab. Trotted out for TV cameras, he comes off less as a pitiful prisoner of the shutdown than someone you would cheerfully pay ransom to shut up.

When Barack Obama went to Oslo in 2009 to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, could he possibly have imagined that four years later his presidency would be defined by an irrational syndrome named for neighboring Stockholm?

If this doesn’t end soon, we’ll all be rattling our chains, ready for the loony bin.

Elections That Changed America

My granddaughter who turns 16 today has a high-school assignment: Was 1968 a critical election year that changed America? She will answer in her usually independent way but, as a delegate to that Democratic convention who was tear-gassed in Chicago, I can weigh in with an opinion.

In my lifetime, I would argue, there were three pivotal moments: FDR in 1932, Nixon that year and George W. Bush in 2000. The jury is still out on Obama in 2008.

Most elections reflect rather than divert social and political currents, but those few arguably made a difference in where the country was heading. One of the tests is what would have happened if the other guy won.

Without Roosevelt’s first victory and mandate for a New Deal, when and how would the Great Depression have ended and would social legislation that provided a safety net for the poor and old ever have been enacted?

If the 2000 vote had not been decided by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision on Florida, how would a President Gore have responded to or perhaps avoided 9/11 and the wars that followed? And how would he have dealt with impending economic collapse seven years later?

The case for 1968 is more complicated, as tantalizing as the outsized figure of LBJ, who started in the White House by waging a War on Poverty and passing a landmark Civil Rights law but ended by enmeshing the country in a Vietnam war nobody wanted.

Without Johnson’s downfall, the Richard Nixon who lost a gubernatorial race in 1962 after being beaten by JFK two years earlier would never been elected dogcatcher, let alone a President whose criminal behavior over Watergate led to resignation to avoid impeachment.

But the real changes in 1968 were more subtle. After a century of a Solid (segregated) South for Democrats, the Civil Rights Act brought George Wallace in as a third-party candidate to take those states away from Hubert Humphrey, cost him the election and start that section of the country on the path to being unalterably Republican.

The Democratic Party was fundamentally changed, too. The Northern liberal states went on to the fiasco of 1972, nominating George McGovern to be easily beaten by a not-yet-unmasked Nixon.

Neither major party has been the same since. As we face today’s horrors, what can we intuit about 2016? Can Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden on one side or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie on the other stop our downward slide into chaos?

Meanwhile, to my beloved granddaughter, happy birthday and make up your own mind about 1968. When your generation takes over, you will need to show better judgment than we ever did.

Doomsday Liar's Poker in DC

Maureen Dowd offers a Planet of the Apes scenario for 2084 America, while Gail Collins goes the other way in a Frankenstein revival with Ted Cruz as you-know-what.

All well and good for reason-strapped observers, but future and past parodies can’t match what the Shutdown is doing now. In South Dakota at Mt. Rushmore, those huge stone heads of Presidents past are averting their eyes as cones are placed on the highway below to keep tourists from stopping to ogle them. Only a Black Hills blizzard gets the National Park Service to take them down temporarily.

No news about the nearby historic saloon in Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickok was killed holding those famous aces and eights.

Back in Washington, nobody has a winning hand, but John Boehner refuses to fold, raising the ante with yet another threat of default if the President doesn’t throw in his cards.

Call it Doomsday Liar’s Poker, the ultimate version of insanity in Michael Lewis’ 1989 book portraying how greedy, reckless Wall Street morons were inflating the stock market and heading it toward ruin. Only this time the game is being played in Washington, and the stakes are the nation’s economy.

Even some of the players are the same. The New York Times describes how Tea Party plotters planned the current impasse with Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese III leading the way. Meese was a bad apple even back then, who resigned his post after involvement in the Wedtech scandal, a bid-rigging scheme was uncovered by an independent prosecutor. Now Meese is a “Conservative” icon.

The infamous Koch brothers are back too, with a group linked to them disbursing over $200 million dollars for the anti-Obamacare campaign.

Stakes are enormous now, but at bottom, it’s still the same old Liar’s Poker Game. Except that this time it will be American taxpayers paying the tab for generations to come.

A Medal for Michele Bachmann

Years ago, a drug-addicted employee used a passkey while I was away and stole stuff from my apartment, including a Purple Heart. That feeling of violation comes back as Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party comrades, after shutting down government, strike poses and remove barricades for veterans at Washington’s war memorials.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Boswell tells us that Samuel Johnson said about such hypocrites in the eighteenth century. Nothing has changed. GOP poseurs are willing to take food from the mouths of children of furloughed employees but won’t stand for obstruction in parks that celebrate sacrifice for the good of country.

I yield to no veteran on patriotism, but I insist that the park police do their duty, including a few whacks on the backsides of those barricade breakers.

Then they can go back to Capitol Hill and award themselves Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the line of duty. 

Why Did Miriam Carey Die?

A 34-year-old woman suffering from post-partum depression was killed in Washington this week, leaving behind a child, bottles of medication and a human mystery.

If I were still editing a magazine, I would have a reporter spend the next few weeks finding out all about Miriam Carey, what brought her to that televised car chase and what her life and death can tell us about mental health in America, hers and ours.

The resulting article might start with that riveting moment when police, guns drawn, surrounded her automobile. As it has occurred to me during hundreds of movies, I would want to know why officers of the law fired at her rather than just shoot out the tires and end the chase. What were they thinking?

From there, I would want to go back and read all about how Miriam Carey lived as dental hygienist in Stamford, Connecticut, got pregnant and had her baby, became increasing erratic at work, acquired a medicine cabinet full of antidepressant and anti-psychotic drugs and began a downward spiral that took her to her televised fate.

Her life and death surely hold clues about how little we really know about a mental-health industry that has been taken over by pharmaceutical companies with their cheery TV ads ending with small print about terrible side effects.

Her story should be told, not to indict the psychiatric profession but to dramatize what’s behind the easy generalizations of the TV talking heads that always follow such bizarre behavior. If those titled doctors have anything more prescriptive to offer than descriptive afterthoughts, it would be comforting to know it.

Meanwhile, we are all in a darkness about such matters. If Miriam Carey’s full story can shed even a little light, it should be told.


Update: Now Miriam Carey’s sister, a retired New York City police officer, emerges to question the police use of deadly force, saying there was "no need for a gun to be used." She is not alone in feeling that way.

Oxymoron? Wiser GOP Heads Arise

With Republicans and the nation still held hostage by a Tea Party brat pack, there is finally a stirring of sanity among party elders. Wiser heads are starting to push back about life beyond Boehner.

The New York Times reports a GOP Senate lunch erupting into a “lynch mob” against Ted Cruz, with John Cain/Lindsay Graham’s third amigo, Kelly Ayotte, angrily waving a printout from a Cruz-friendly group attacking 25 Republican senators for a procedural vote that it counted as support of Obamacare.

Republican governors are joining the chorus. “This is a huge distraction,” complains Tennessee’s Bill Haslam. “Instead of that being the conversation, we’re talking about the government shutdown, and the average citizen can’t help but say the Republican Congress isn’t helping.”

Another wise elder, former Mississippi governor and head of the National Committee Haley Barbour, adds: “The story people see now is President Obama sinking like a rock for months, and the only thing holding him up are the Republicans.”

Meanwhile, the President himself holds firm. “We don’t expect 100 percent. But...it is not acceptable for one faction of one party in one chamber to say, ‘Either we get what we want, or we’ll shut down the government.’ Or even worse: ‘We will not allow the U.S. Treasury to pay its bills and put the United States in default for the first time in history.’ So the message I have for the leaders is very simple. As soon as we get a clean piece of legislation, that reopens the government.”

He follows that with an even blunter speech: "Speaker John Boehner won't even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote, because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his party. That's all. That's what this whole thing is about."

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Republicans finally came to their senses and found the President too teed-off to settle with them?

Nah. 

Lawless in DC

This is as close as I come to live-blogging.

As a black car drives wildly through Washington during a crisis of lawlessness in Congress, all eyes turn from the Shutdown to what looks like a shootout in the Capital.

Switching cable channels, CNN seems chastened by Jon Stewart’s takedown during the last massacre and cautiously keeps referring to the driver as the “suspect,” but for at least an hour and a half MSNBC keeps running crawls about a “gunman,” “shooter” and “female gunman” with no evidence whatsoever that anyone other than law enforcement has been firing weapons.

Finally comes the fortuitous tape of the car chase (in Arabic, no less) with police aiming at the vehicle before it starts up again and speeds off. They are pointing guns at the driver, but when the car starts up again, not one has the presence of mind to shoot out the tires.

The babble will go on for hours, as Eric Cantor takes to the House floor to thank those forces of law and order that he and his cronies have been doing their best to defund.

With a little girl in the car and a woman driver, it’s all likely to turn out to be about mental distress, drugs or alcohol or all of the above. But the way things are in Washington now, the car chase is a brief respite from the main lawlessness there.

Stay tuned as the normal madness resumes.
 

Update: The driver turns out to be a dental hygienist who works in Connecticut prisons. In days to come, we will learn more about why Miriam Carey, unarmed, drove a Lexus so wildly through the streets of the nation’s capital and met her death there.

What was in her apparently disordered mind that led her to careen a car through the jumpy streets from the White House to Capitol Hill? In coming days, we will learn more about her inner life so that we can understand more about her than we do about the people who work there. Her small tragedy will be only a metaphor for the larger one being played out in Congress.

  

Women Having It All

At 50, a woman who is a college president, former powerhouse on Wall Street, wife and mother has written a new book, "Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection," to complain that members of her gender are “really shackled by expectations, rather than liberated.”

Duh. As an editor of women’s magazines during the 1960s who employed both Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan without always agreeing with them, I am taken aback by such ingratitude from a generation that benefited from those Feminist pioneers and now kvetches that their efforts did not free them from the human condition.

I have news for President Spar: Nobody has it all, women or men. There is a simple law of physics that applies: You can’t be in two places at once, in a boardroom and soccer game, making business decisions and dinner, nurturing profit margins and kids.

This year Barack Obama is awarding Gloria Steinem the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life “dedicated to advancing civil rights” for women. Civil rights offer the oppressed an equal chance at the pursuit of happiness, not a guarantee. President Obama himself can explain all about that.

Ironically, just before Debora Spar is interviewed about her book, the PBS NewsHour has a segment about how young girls in India are sold into virtual slavery by their impoverished families to older men who treat them like domestic animals.

No sentient human being who lived through the twentieth century would deny that most American women back then did not have full freedom to fulfill their potential. In some ways, some still don’t and Ms. Spar’s complaints will resonate with them.

"Women of my generation,” she writes, “got feminism wrong, seeing it as a route to personal perfection and a promise of all that we were now expected to be. Because we could do anything, we felt as if we had to do everything."

In an imperfect world, nobody reaches perfection and those who get close might want think twice before grousing about it.

Obamacare Blowback Begins

On its first day, millions of Americans flood web sites and phone lines to ask about health coverage the Tea Party has shut down the government to destroy.

Technical glitches aside, have Boehner’s bullies been hoisted by their own petard or, to be less Shakespearian, shot themselves in the foot?

The Affordable Care Act, with all its imperfections, looks less like tyranny to those millions than an opportunity to get health insurance for themselves and their families at reasonable rates. Messy as the process may be, they seem eager to embrace what the GOP radicals promise to oppose with their dying breaths.

As ugly as the shutdown is, it will be seen more as farce than tragedy if voters start enrolling in large numbers for Obamacare. Or is that what its Tea Party would-be destroyers have secretly been fearing all along?

As Ted Cruz apologizes to Filipino veterans for comparing the Act to the Bataan Death March in his pseudo-filibuster last week, negotiations go on for a face-saving exit from the Congressional impasse.

But Democrats may not be eager to cooperate as Sen. Dianne Feinstein sees her party gaining more leverage in the debt-limit fight as the  shutdown lengthens. Of the GOP buffoons, she observes, “They are effectively hurting themselves big time.”

Meanwhile, the surge of eager applicants for Cruz’s Death March goes on not only at the federal level but in states that have not hobbled the new law.

At the end of the day, the funeral is much more likely to be for the Tea Party than Obamacare.

World War II Vets Crash the Shutdown

One thing about the Greatest Generation: When we needed to overrun an enemy position, we seldom hesitated. Remnants of our troops did it again in Washington today, crashing barricades set up by the government shutdown and occupying the position.

The image tickles me. As all national parks remain closed by Tea Party insurgents in the House of Representatives, 91 octogenarians storm the World War II Memorial and take it.

True, guards stood aside while the vets, some in wheelchairs, crashed through, but the symbolism is inescapable: A generation that put its lives on the line when the country was under siege was not going to be deterred from a mission by today’s pissants on Capitol Hill.

While the old-timers did their stuff, the other bit of good news in DC was the delight of some government workers at being declared essential while the madness prevails. “Good for the resume,” says one.

And, as Walter Cronkite used to sign off the news, “That’s the way it is” in our world today.

Notes from a "Breaking Bad" Laggard

Thanks to one son and two grandsons, I was whizzing through seasons of “Breaking Bad” on Netflix as millions savored the finale last weekend and now carry on a philosophical debate over its power and meaning.

Partial ignorance may not be bliss, but still under the spell of multiple episodes, I venture to join the discussion.

Is Walter White more than a logical successor to Tony Soprano and Don Draper, anti-heroes who fascinated us with an unexpressed dark side of our own natures from a safe distance?  

Yes, maybe but, as White progresses from doomed good to demonic, our sympathies move with him by increments from compassion for his original plight to condoning behavior we deplore. His first intentional killing is justified by the victim having a concealed shard of plate with which to attack him, but from then on, we are off to the bloody races.

Just as White is freed from constraint by sure knowledge of his own mortality, viewers are liberated to make the journey with him while, for relief along the way, being invited to scoff at brilliantly satirical scenes of PTA meetings, baby showers and boring family dinners—-the dull flotsam and jetsam of dailyness that fills most lives.

At advanced age, I am fascinated by how new generations in real life are lulled into feeling immortal and acting with a selfishness that justifies cruelty while scoffing at empathy as sentimental weakness. Being in the know, like Walter White, trumps all other values.

The political world reminds us daily of that. How badly do we need the fantasy release from all of it of feeling all-powerful and enjoying evil while reassuring ourselves it’s only entertainment after all?

Even before cancer struck, Walter White was not going to live forever. Neither will the politicians in today’s headlines. Nor any of us.

“Breaking Bad” was great commercial art, larded with ads all the way, but as I continue to enjoy it without them on Netflix, part of me is saddened while fascinated.

But true fans need fear not. It may be gone but “Homeland” is back just in time to mesmerize us with more of the worst of humanity.

Will we ever see as well-done a series as either on the subject of “Breaking Good?”

The World Ends Tomorrow

Civilization as we know it has only 24 hours left. Those who doubt that can cling to a faint hope offered by Barack Obama’s favorite physician/writer.

During the health care debate in 2009, the President made his staff read a New Yorker article by Dr. Atul Gawande dramatizing the borderline thievery sanctioned by America’s fee-for-service system: about two communities in Texas, one with the second-highest per-capita Medicare costs in the country, twice those of a neighboring city with no discernible health benefits as a result of doctor-owned hospitals, surgery centers and diagnostic-test facilities.

Now Dr. Gawande reports that “as of October 1st, healthcare.gov is scheduled to open for business. A Web site where people who don’t have health coverage through an employer or the government can find a range of health plans available to them, it resembles nothing more sinister than an eBay for insurance. Because it’s a marketplace, prices keep falling lower than the Congressional Budget Office predicted, by more than sixteen per cent on average. Federal subsidies trim costs even further, and more people living near the poverty level will qualify for free Medicaid coverage.”

As the Tea Party fights to shut down the government over such infamy, whether or not the new law of the land will help the catastrophically sick and uninsured depends on where they live, with some states (California, New York, Minnesota, Maryland) complying and others (Indiana, Texas, Utah, South Carolina) doing everything they can to obstruct implementation.

Now the critical moment is at hand in a clash between John Boehner, who interned sweeping out his father’s saloon, and such as Dr. Gawande, a Harvard professor who directs the World Health Organization's effort to reduce surgical deaths.

As Republicans keep pointing out, it’s still a free country. Choose your own care giver and hope for the best.

Update: In one respect, GOP no-nothings have succeeded: Polls show most Americans know little about the Affordable Care Act, and much of that is wrong.

Less than half of the uninsured plan to get coverage through a state or federal exchange, a low number that may result from lack of knowledge about them, since 7 in 10 say they are “not too or not at all familiar” with these health insurance exchanges.

Those for whom Obamacare could mean life or death have been brought into suicidal confusion by vicious Tea Party lies.