Dan Riley's Blog, page 26

The Hillary Clinton Doll

Have you heard about the new Hillary Clinton doll? You wind it up and she falls under investigation. 
My friends in the "I'm with Her" community are doing a bit of a touchdown dance over the FBI's recommendation that the Justice Department not bring criminal charges against our girl. And well they should...as should the entire country because such charges may very well have opened the White House door wide to Agent Orange, who would proceed to strip the last vestiges of pride and progress from any future Independence Day.

Still, I take a more sober view of this blessed event. I suspect this will not be the last investigation of Hillary Clinton in my lifetime. If she's elected president and has to work with a Republican Congress, I'd put the chances of it investigating her for currently unforeseen reasons at about 100%; if she's fortunate enough to have a Democratic Congress, the likelihood of there actually being such an investigation probably drops below 10%, but calls for an investigation from Republicans will still be 100%. Let's face it, at this point in her public life we pretty much expect Hillary to be investigated as we expected Gerry Ford to fall down stairs and George W. Bush to screw things up. Being under investigation is now part of her public identity, and there's little she can do about remaking her past.

Perhaps there are other voters who, like me, take a bit of perverse comfort in the serial investigations of Hillary Clinton. For instance, I actually prefer to fly on airlines after they've been involved in a crash on the belief that all those maintenance and flight crews are more focused after a disaster strikes close to home. Then once in a grocery store line with a Swanson's chicken pot pie I remembered that Swanson's had just been busted by the FDA for having unapproved levels of rat hairs and feces. So I left the line and went back to the freezer and swapped my Swanson's chicken pot pie for a Bird's Eye. But then when I got back in line, I realized that the wake of a contamination scandal was probably the best time to buy a brand. What other company would be more conscientious about rat hairs and feces than Swanson's? And then there was my friend who'd lost a lover to melanoma and took the next man in her life off to the doctor to have every mole, blemish, scar and discoloration on his body thoroughly examined for potential malignancy. Between the year-long FBI email investigation and the seven multi-million dollar Benghazi investigations, Hillary Clinton must be the most thoroughly examined figure in American public life. And if "carelessness" is all they can come up with that's much like my friend's doctor telling her that her new lover could probably do a better job of cleaning behind his ears. Yes, no criminality, like no melanoma, is a big deal. 

Yet Hillary should neither get carried away with the touchdown dance nor resign herself to being victim of the inevitable investigations that will confront her bright, if challenging, future. What she should do is heed the most basic of all life lessons: learn from your mistakes.  This simple lesson has been much on my mind these days as I'm creating a unit on it for Lorna's online learning offerings. Researching the subject, you realize that more successes are borne of errors rather than getting it right on the first try. Lincoln had to miss on numerous generals until he got it right with Grant. Edison made a fetish out of trial and error when he wasn't trying to save himself time by ripping off Tesla. Before Steve Jobs became the genius of the modern age, he was just a jerk who'd lost control of his own company. Bill Belichick, one of my major management heroes, put a few miserable seasons as coach of the Cleveland Browns on his resume and had at least one episode of extreme carelessness in the process of becoming the greatest football coach of all time. Real smart people build on their mistakes.  (Of course there are exceptions...usually it's the dangerously confident "smartest guy in the room"; mitigating against Hillary being able to learn from her mistakes is that her husband is the epitome of smartest guy in the room syndrome who never seems to learn from his mistakes.)

We recently watched The 33, the film about the 2010 Chilean mine disaster. The miners survived more than three months, thousands of feet underground waiting to be rescued. The failing rescue effort itself was almost abandoned 17 days into the ordeal, but revived when rescuers learned from a mistake they had made in their earlier efforts. They learned that they could not aim their drills directly at the target area, because the pressure of the rock would divert the drill away. So they had to aim the drill off target and allow the pressure of the rock to push the drill in the right direction. Such lessons abound in business, sports, science...writing. They're there in politics, too, but not in such abundance since politicians are less likely to acknowledge mistakes and build on them. The appearance of infallibility is the fatal flaw of most politicians (thank you, Machiavelli...).

The critical thing with mistakes is they're wasted opportunities if you don't learn from them. If the people around Hillary celebrate the FBI's clearance of criminality as a bullet dodged rather than ponder it as a lesson to be learned, they'll no doubt have to learn it again. And again. And again. It's not as if they...or more importantly she...will be able to do anything to avert the partisan witch hunt that's been barking at her heels most of her public life. However, she can do more to earn the benefit of the doubt from the public when the next round of inquisition comes her way and that will help her as President. 

She'll get a good opportunity to show she's learned the lesson of this latest ordeal in the coming weeks and months. It'll probably happen on a national debate stage when she's asked by a reporter how she explains her insistence throughout the email scandal that she never personally sent any classified material when the FBI report shows she did. She can save a lot of time and money testing focus groups and questioning advisors on what to say, and simply say, "I'm sorry. That was, as the FBI said, careless of me. I'd like to say it's the only careless thing I've ever done in my life but it's not. It is a grievous one, however, and I am taking every precaution that it never happens again. As part of my team I now have a full time advisor not only to advise me of technical issues with email and Internet use in general but with legal and ethical issues as well. Again, my apologies to the American people for my sloppiness in handling the email and in handling the questions about it. That's not a matter of hiring another staffer, that's a matter of me being more direct and transparent. You deserve better, and I can do better."

We do, and she can. 

The Great Relocation

It was just about exactly 40 years ago that I finally heeded the call to go west, young man (and before I get into the story...a word about Brexit...the financial chaos of the vote to leave the EU aside, there's this: no more will Brits be free to hit the open road and travel throughout Europe without passports and without the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. As with all walls, you're not only locking others out, you're locking yourself in.) Anyway,  Lorna and I packed little daughter Meagan into our Fiat (yes, my weakness for things Italian once even drove me to drive a Fiat), and we left our home on scenic Canaan Street Lake in New Hampshire for a most uncertain future in California...no jobs and but two contacts awaiting us. With Dylan’s New Morning playing on the cassette player, I broke into tears before we were even 5 minutes down the road from our first and still fondly remembered home. (I probably won’t cry as much listening to Dylan again until the day the poet dies.)
We spent our first night on the road in the tent we bought with Green Stamps at a campsite in the Catskills…yes, we were taking the scenic route. That night we endured the most ferocious thunderstorm of our lives…either we were so high in the sky or the storm was so low to the ground, but middle earth was rolling and roiling beneath our sleeping bags. I was getting up and daring the elements every 20 minutes to tip the water off our sagging tent so it didn’t collapse in on us. Maybe it was a message from God to turn back home to sweet New England and never venture forth again. If it was, we ignored it.
A night or two later we were camping in an odd spot of Kansas where one minute you were in Central Time zone and the next in Mountain Standard…and the whole damn time you were back in the 1920s because it was dry…Prohibition Era dry. Some men can’t camp out without building a fire; I can’t camp out without opening a bottle of wine…so another sleepless night. Had I been Dorothy, I think I would’ve stayed in Oz.

In Utah, Lorna and Meagan took their shoes off and waded into the Great Salt Lake. It was a bit surreal. I could easily imagine Jesus walking across it, and could almost understand how Mormons came to believe that they’d stumbled upon some place Biblical.
When we reached San Francisco, once and future friend Bruce MacLaren had kindly left us the keys to his place in his absence so we could give northern California a proper tryout as our final destination. But that first weekend was the Fourth of July, and that California sun we'd come looking for was not to be seen. Sensible New Englanders that we were, we had packed our parkas and donned our grim apparel to watch the parade. We decided then and there that we had not traveled 3,000 miles for the laying out of our winter clothes/And wishing we were gone....
And soon we were…driving down the spectacular California coast, which was all that fed our imaginings about the Golden State once we had outgrown the fantasy of Disneyland. We hit Ventura and once again pitched our tent…this time on a beautiful, white sandy beach. I do declare, we found some real comfort there. I truly could have lived on that beach indefinitely…even in a tent. But then one weekend the rangers came by and told us they were booked solid and we would have to vacate our site for at least a week.   
It seemed a good time to look up Lorna’s long lost Aunt Bev in Van Nuys. So we called her and soon enough we were squatting with her in the famous San Fernando Valley, home of San Fernando Red, The Real McCoys and hundreds of other characters and places we had learned so much about growing up in front of American TV. Everything our pre-trip research had revealed convinced us to avoid Los Angeles, which included the Valley. But within a week, though not exactly charmed by the place, we were definitely intrigued. The writer Jan Morris had just written an article for Rolling Stone describing San Francisco as a city that offers less than meets the eye and LA as a city that offers more than meets the eye. We had come with fresh eyes to be witnesses to the truth of that. Soon we found an apartment of our own, Lorna found a job in the heart of LA, and we enrolled Meagan in a local school.

As planned from the start, I was to spend my days launching the writing career I had failed to launch while teaching in New Hampshire….the lesson being: you come to New Hampshire with your writing career in hand--à la my hero Salinger--you don’t start your career there (Grace Metalious be damned). Every day I tried my hand at writing scripts for sitcoms and finding the all-important literary agent. I found one who asked me to get him some sample one-liners he could submit to Johnny Carson. I worked like a madman on them on two different and equally difficult typewriters. One was a classic black Royal from like the Gutenberg days that Lorna’s grandfather had willed us; the other was Lorna’s robin’s egg blue, toy-like Olivetti. They both had persistent jamming problems and of course required correcting strips for my innumerable rewrites and typos. None of that put me in much of a mind for writing comedy, and the situation wasn’t helped much by the Valley heat and claustrophobic conditions of our small apartment. The frustration grew so much that one day I threw the Olivetti through a wall. The jokes never did come, but Lorna being Lorna sacrificed one of her paychecks to buy me a new Corona Selectric…which would do until Steve Jobs came along to rescue me from typewriter hell.
Two of the sweeter memories from that first year of the great relocation…
One, by November I had gone stir crazy being alone in that apartment with just my imagination for days on end and decided to take my mitt and go out and find a softball game. The first place I went was the park across from the home of Meagan’s best schoolmate pal Michelle. I approached a group just warming up for a game and asked if I could play. They said yes. Turned out they played every Sunday, and Lorna and I joined them, and after every game we went to a favorite Mexican restaurant. Lifelong friendships were formed back then…that persist through Facebook to this day…with me and Lorna and the softball gang…with Meagan and Michelle…with Lorna and me and Michelle’s family…with the softball gang and Meagan…and later Gillian…with Meagan’s kids and Michelle’s kids.

The second sweet memory is that it was the high summer of Ronstadt and Eagles glory. You couldn’t go into a restaurant without hearing a cover band do Desperado. You couldn’t walk down a street without having a convertible drive by blasting Take It Easy. You couldn’t say goodbye at a party without someone reminding you that you can check out any time you want but you can never leave. For any who have disdain for that period of music and that particular sound--and I know you're out there--all I can say is, you had to be there. For me it will always be the soundtrack to the great relocation...a time when I was the new kid in town.  

Thanks to old friend Art Pease for vintage postcard of old home in Canaan, NH

The Vagina Dialogues

Coupla white chicks sittin’ around talkin’ 

Elizabeth Warren comes calling on Hillary Clinton at home, raising eyebrows and setting tongues a-wagging all over the punditsphere.
Hillary greets Liz in her morning coat made of 101 Dalmatian furs and offers her a Bloody Mary. Liz says, “I bloody well will,” as they both cackle on their way to the bar.
In the Clinton’s Louis XVI living room, Hillary pushes the emails scattered all over the couch to the lush lama carpet, and the two of them curl their legs under themselves girl style to face each other from opposite ends of the Democratic spectrum.
“Tell me, girl,” says Hillary, “What do you think of Maureen Dowd?”
“The Heather?” asks Liz.
Hill lets out another cackle, but louder this time. “That’s good. We call her Alex Forrest. Every time I hear she’s about to write another column about us I tell Bill, ‘Hide the bunnies.’”
“Did you see that nasty columnshe wrote about you and me?”
“Meow.”
“We should do something mean to her.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I know. You tell her you want her to run as your VP and invite her for a sleepover to discuss it. Tell her Bill will be here.”
“Oh, cruel kitty! But then what? Do I flip-flop in the morning?”
“No…no. I’ll hide in the bathroom and when she steps into the shower, you know…totally naked…I’ll climb up on the toilet and pour a bucket of pig’s blood all over her.”
“Oh, Lizzie, you're a mean old Mommy, but I like you. Where do we get the pig’s blood?”
“Trump! A twofer.”
“High five!”
“Okay, seriously, Hillary, why did you invite me here?”
“Well, of course, my back channels have been talking to your back channels, and so you know I’m kinda interested in you  being my Veep and I kinda know you’re interested…”
“I’m listening."
“And so, Elizabeth Ann Warren, will you be my running mate?"

"Hmm, can I be honest with you?"

"Ha! Can you not?"

"They say you won't be able to handle the comparison in the enthusiasm gap between my  crowds and yours."

"Jesus, as if I've never shared the spotlight with a rock star before. Two of them in fact. Don't sell me short, Liz."
“Oh, I don't, I just want to make sure I don't have to be self-conscious in front of 10,000 excitable fans."

"Be my guest...bask in it. As long as they vote."

"And you're sure you don’t need a Hispanic?”
“With Trump out there, not necessary.”
“And you don’t want a younger white male?”
“That will only raise more mommy issues with the Bernie bros.”
“And you don’t think having two older white women running together will be a problem?”
“I’ve already written off the Limbaugh/Fox News/NRA vote.”
“Okay then, I’m on board...but with one stipulation.”
“Your principles, right?”
“Remember that time you came to me and I convinced you that the bankruptcy bill was bad and then you became Senator from New York and voted for it?”
“How can I forget? I see that interview you gave calling me out on it in my sleep. I thought that would be the end of my candidacy right there.”
“To tell ya, since I got into electoral politics, I have more sympathy with where you were coming from…things don’t look as easy from the inside as they do from the outside. That being said, I have to be up front with you. If you were ever to send me out there like Colin Powell with a vial of snake-oil to sell to the American people, I won’t do it…and I’ll be loud and proud about it.” 
“That’s why I want you as my running mate, Liz. Bill and I have got all the money we could ever need, and when we win this election, I’ll have all the power I could ever want. What’s left is legacy, and mine will not be 'the era of big government is over.'”
“What will it be, Hillary?”
“You. Me. Half the cabinet will be female. Gender matters. Feminine values matter. After 250 years we’re going to finally put the stamp of womanhood on this country in a way Barack could not put the stamp of blackness on it. I’m so done cozying up to their power, fluffing up their egos, polishing their nobs. All of them...if you know who I mean. We’re putting compassion ahead of aggression, nurturing ahead of exploitation, principle ahead of expediency."
“You’re turning me on here, Hillary.”
“I’m serious, Liz. We’re doing it for all the women out there…even the young ones who hate me...who think that losing your virginity is just a sex act and don’t get yet that you really lose it when you laugh at a man’s joke that’s not funny, you tell a man he’s wonderful when he’s not, you agree with him when you don’t. The older cynical ones too, like our Heather, Maureen, hollowed out from the inside trying to write things her entire life to please her father, her older brother, her male bosses.”
“And don't forget the working middle class women and single mothers, Hillary.”  
“Absolutely…and you know who else? All the sisters who have struggled to hold onto their humanness while living these imposed public lives…Laura Bush and Pat Nixon having to paint on phony smiles and stand silently by while their men made messes of the country; Lady Bird and Barbara Bush and Rosalyn forced to bite their tongues election after election; Nancy and Michelle turned into hideous, unrecognizable she-monsters by their husbands’ political enemies; Mamie turned into a great man’s appendage; Jackie made a martyr’s ghost. Betty Ford consigned to dependency. And foremost my hero, Liz, sainted and abused Eleanor. I don’t know if you know this but I’ve conducted what I call vagina dialogues with her over the years. She tells me our time is now...that we can do this...that I can do it with someone as strong as I am by my side...and that someone is you.” 
“I’m with her! I mean you…When do we launch this thing?”
“I’m thinking Cincinnati, Ohio, June 27.”
“Right on.”

"Never a Democrat"

When we were kids my best pal John Douglas had a mad crush on Linda Allen* and the two of us spent much of the summer of that crush riding around town looking for her (in today’s hyperbolic state, it’d be called stalking, but as I say, we were kids…). As happens in the world of puppy love, John moved on. And Linda eventually would mate up and marry Ron Sabellico. Ronnie was the older brother of Vinnie Sabellico who I coached in our town’s playground baseball league. Vinnie was our pitcher and had about a 19.00 ERA, though if you were to ask him today I’d bet he’d say if he had better defense behind him his ERA would’ve been down around 10.00. Ronnie and I would play on a Babe Ruth team together that was almost as bad as my playground team, and our pitcher’s ERA wasn’t much better than Vinnie’s (that pitcher’s name was Walt Zywiak, and decades later I became connected with Walt’s daughter on Linkedin…as you’ll see, interconnectivity is not an incidental theme here).
In early adulthood Ron and Linda Sabellico becamse close friends with the Campbells, Bob and Roberta. As my high school mentor, Bob Campbell had been one of the most important people in my life. A few years ago Linda and I became Facebook friends, and it was from Ron through Linda that I learned of Bob Campbell’s passing.  I wrote a blog post about him. The post drew one comment. It was Mike Sabellico, the son of Ron and Linda. It read as follows:

Mike Sabellico October 7, 2012 at 9:24 AM I came to know Mr. Campbell through my father, Ron Sabellico. He taught me how to play chess and how to think and debate/argue from a critical thinking perspective [without] shouting (the Italian solution!). Thank you Dan for sharing such a great story about an exceptional teacher, friend, and person.

It turned out that Mike, like I, had migrated West from Enfield, Connecticut, and taken up residence in Carlsbad, California, the next town over from us. I then became Facebook friends with Mike and his wife Katie, and one Sunday morning while sitting all alone in a Round Table Pizza watching the Patriots play on the big screen I saw a Facebook post from Katie. The Sabellicos were 20 minutes away watching the same game in a bar chock full of mad relocated Patriots fans. I paid my tab and made a mad dash to join them during halftime.  It was then that I met their son, Kevin…grandson of Ron and Linda.
Kevin, a high school senior, appeared to be a pretty exceptional kid…politically and socially active as well as being a scholar…and of course a Patriots fan. As the football season rolled into the political season, I became more impressed with Kevin when I learned he was running to be a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this summer. I was even more impressed when I showed up at the caucus station to vote for him and found his parents, both Republicans, passing out flyers in support of their son. (Could I have been as supportive if one of my daughters had decided to become a Trump delegate? I can't even...)  Kevin won the vote that day and will indeed be in Philadelphia as one of the youngest Hillary delegates from the entire country.
We just attended a high school graduation party for Kevin and his twin brother Shawn. At the party Kevin told me that he had just received a letter thad written to himself as a class assignment when he was a freshman. The teacher who made the assignment held on to the letters and sent them to all her students upon their high school graduation. I asked Kevin what he had written to himself that he found most surprising. He replied, “I told myself never to become a Democrat.”
I love telling this story because it shows that when we have the means to keep track of people from our past we can see that small, personal journeys can be pretty damn interesting. I also love it because it shows that as a teacher Bob Campbell was pretty consistent in the core message he passed on to his students from generation to generation, which was, as Mike put it, "to think and debate/argue from a critical thinking perspective." The fact that I took that lesson and went on to follow one political party and Mike took it to follow another shows that Bob Campbell was all about fostering independent minds, not indoctrinating. And finally I love the story because through Kevin it shows how in four short years and at a very young age, a life can take a totally unpredictable, even unwanted, turn.
(R-L) Lorna and I with Hillary delegate
Kevin Sabellico (don't let the Bernie bros get you, bro)

* Yes, Kevin, once upon a time your grandmother had the boys chasing after her.

Life Imitates Art. Again!

Danny Downs in his greatest role as Mon. Serpent in the Long Beach Playhouse 
production of Spinelli, September 2000. 

From the New York Times

Oscar Pistorius Removes His Artificial Legs at Sentencing Hearing
LONDON — Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner, removed his artificial legs and shuffled his way to the front of a courtroom in South Africa on Wednesday, the third day of a hearing to determine his sentence for the 2013 murder of his girlfriend.
Trembling and tearful, he rested his right hand on a desk for support as his lawyers pleaded with a judge to sentence him to community service rather than prison.
Dressed in a T-shirt and athletic shorts, Mr. Pistorius, 29, was under five feet tall without the J-shaped carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that earned him the nickname the Blade Runner. It was an image far more humble than that of the world-class athlete who successfully challenged able-bodied athletes.
Mr. Pistorius’s defense lawyers had asked him to take off his prosthetic legs to highlight the sense of vulnerability they say he felt when, acting out of fear and confusion, he fatally shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, early on Feb. 14, 2013. But the tactic appeared to also be meant generate sympathy from the judge and a lighter sentence than the 15 years Mr. Pistorius faces for murder.

From Spinelli

TRACY

Thank you. Now I know this might be painful for you, Mr. Serpent, but before you leave the courtroom, I wonder if you might do me a favor and remove your prosthetic devices.

SERPENT

(anxiously looking down at his legs, then up at TRACY)

Remove them?

TRACY

Remove them and demonstrate for the Court how you normally get around.

(A gasp goes up in the courtroom

HEPBURN rises)

HEPBURN

Objection, Your Honor. Is this necessary?

TRACY

Your Honor, the witness has been accused of affecting a false appearance in order to deceive the Court. I think he owes the Court a look at the real him.

(JORDAN looks to HEPBURN for a stronger objection, but there's none)

JORDAN

Objection overruled. Remove your legs, Mr. Serpent.

(With great trepidation, SERPENT removes his prosthetics and places them on top of the witness stand)

TRACY

Now would you come down from the witness stand and show us how you travel about day to day, year to year, millennium to millennium.

(SERPENT lowers himself down on to the courtroom floor and with arms tucked in tight to his sides--slowly, fretfully begins to slither

 JORDAN rises to watch, and slowly others--CLERK, BAILIFF, members of the gallery--rise from their seats to watch

 All eyes are transfixed by SERPENT'S painful progress towards GOD

 When he's almost there, he works his way up on his knees, starts bobbing his head and projecting his tongue in GOD'S direction, and then...)

SERPENT

(screaming)

You did this! You did this to me!

Blackout 
End Act One

It's a Bug's Life...and Mine

I’ve been totally engaged with pests lately, and I don’t mean the Bernie or Bust ones you find online. It began with a gnat-like creature that suddenly appeared in our kitchen and entertainment room area a few weeks ago and turned eating and TV watching into a tropical jungle-like experience. They even drove us out of the house for the day…but don’t cry for us, Argentina…or Italy…or New England, or wherever our friends may be. We spent the day with my brother and his wife who treated us to fine wine and bug free food while we waited for the chemicals to do their dirty work back at the house. But then came the semi-regular rodent invasion. A few years ago I put in some of those electric devices that are supposed to repel the mice with sound waves. They’ve done such a great job that I have about a dozen un-sprung mouse traps in the upper large attic and the mice have moved down into the space between the first and second floors where I can neither install traps nor ultrasonic and simply have to wait until they birth their springtime babies and move out into the great outdoors and hopefully into the waiting mouths of the neighborhood gopher snakes.
A few days ago these pesky annoyances took an intolerable turn, however, when honeybees commandeered the deep end of my swimming pool. They found a crevice in the grout between the tiles and moved in…lock, stock, drones, queen and honeycomb. They had conducted a similar occupation two years ago in the spa, and I repeated the same (ahem) remedy this time by sealing the crevice with silicone. The next day, I found a swarm of them trying to dig their way back in…depending upon your degree of anthropomorphism, either to get back home or to rescue their comrades. The day after that, I found dozens of bee bodies floating dead in the pool and impressions of bee bodies embedded in the sealant, reminding me a bit too much of the human impressions created by the volcanic ash in Pompeii. Don’t think I wasn’t a little haunted by the results of my action…and because I spent a good deal of time in a seminary where we routinely pondered such matters of high moral consequence, I wondered how much of a difference there was between my entombing countless bees in the concrete of my pool and Donald Blankenship, whose greed and negligence was responsible for burying alive 29 miners in his Upper Branch Mine six years ago.
Such was the severity of my moral conflict that when I finally was able to resume the use of my pool, I couldn’t take my eyes off the bug pictured here, which was on its back, kicking its legs and fluttering its wings in a vain attempt to stop from drowning. I swam four laps by it until the old Catholic guilt rose up again inside me and I decided to save it. I had no idea what kind of bug it was. For all I knew it could be carrying the Zika virus, and I would be responsible for spreading the scourge through San Diego County. As I studied the bug’s struggle to get its breath back and clear its little lungs of chlorine and muriatic acid, I wondered what about it moved me to such a deed. It wasn’t just the shame over what I had done to the bees because surely if it had been a spider on its back gasping for life, it’s unlikely I would’ve noticed let alone acted. Could it have been its size or brilliant green color that inspired me? I don’t think so. I can imagine large, green bugs that I would’ve let drown without a second thought. Then when I looked at it lying on the concrete close enough to take pictures of it, I realized what it was…it looked almost human. As it had been in the water, it desperately kicked its legs and arms, as I imagine a human might do in a similar predicament.

This reopened a question I’ve asked in The Nob before: what is it that arouses our sympathies for some creatures and not others. As happened, this moral dilemma of mine was playing out just around the time we were experiencing a national outrage over the killing of Harambe, the gorilla, after a child had fallen into its keep at a zoo. Folks were in high dudgeon about the alleged negligence of the parents and about the allegedly trigger happy animal control agents who seemed to cavalierly eschew the use of tranquilizers in rescuing the child. Not to say that those aren’t juicy topics for Internet debate where emotions generally trump fact and reason, but they aren’t my topic. Mine is this: would the outrage have been the same if the kid had fallen into a viper's pit or crocodile's or a mongoose's? More over, would any of those creatures even have been given a name like Harambe was? And is the same dynamic in play here as when the crash of a passenger jet with 300 Americans onboard elicits more anguish from us than a crash of 300 foreigners?       
Is it simple human nature to have more sympathy with those we can identify with?  Easier to identify with a gorilla than a python? Easier to cry for dead Americans than dead Egyptians? If that is so, then we must admit that some lives matter more than others. And then we have to ask, does that matter? Does it matter that we value some lives more than others?
It seems to matter immensely. It matters when it comes to determining what lives we’re going to use our chemicals, our guns, and our indifference against. It matters when it comes to deciding which lives we’re going to save, improve, and protect. It’s not only a political dodge to claim that all lives matter, it’s an outright lie to say it. As a species, we prove it’s a lie in billions of decisions we make every day.  This week I decided that the life of an anonymous green bug was more important to me than the lives of untold honeybees. And I also decided to spend a good deal of time contemplating that because I could…and because I should.


Reborn and on the run...

Least Popular Boy and Girl

As a frame of reference, I was voted "Most Popular Boy" in my high school graduating class, so I know a thing or two about likeability. And for the record, I didn’t have to do much for this award-winning personality…just took a little of what mom gave me and a little of what dad gave me and put a smile on it all. That’s not to diminish the advantages of going through life likeable, though it might not be on a par with what these folks have going for them…Pretty girl, young man, old man Man with a gun Two people in love
The rules do not apply

Yet, with all my appreciation for personality I still have a soft spot for competence. I was also voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed,” which is a rare Richie Cunningham/Malcolm in the Middle combo plate of affability and ambition. I don’t let that go to my head though because I know there are other such double threats—like Ted Bundy and OJ Simpson…both full of warmth and charm as well as being highly competent at what they did, and yet…and yet…total psycho killers. 
To this day, I feel that the United States of America missed a golden opportunity when it ignored Michael Dukakis’s staid if not quite thunderous proclamation at the 1988 Democratic convention that "this election is not about ideology. It's about competence." Oh, ‘twere it ever so.
Of course, it’s not even about ideology any longer. Ever since the great Bush v. Gore “who would you rather have a beer with?” debate of 2000, it’s become more and more about who is more personable. In fact, one could make an argument that the more winning personality has won every US election since Carter v. Reagan. This sad development is another by-product of our culture’s conflation of celebrity with politics. Voters are increasingly drawn to candidates they would like to invite into their living rooms to hang with rather than candidates who could decorate the living room, fix a leak in the living room, or just plain and simply clean up the living room. Competency in any area seems to matter far less than just having someone around with the right vibe.
This is ahistorical since history argues for the primacy of competence over personality. The melancholy Abe Lincoln, Thomas Anal Edison, the macho Theodore Roosevelt, vainglorious General Patton, imperious Kate Hepburn, mercurial Steve Jobs…all rose above likability obstacles to carve out legendary success stories. Among those I personally admire most—Ted Williams, Bob Dylan, Bill Belichick—I really wouldn’t care to have a beer with any of them…or invite them to one of those fantasy dinner parties people are always planning for the famous. Warmth and charm were not factors that contributed in any way to their respective enormous achievements.
Which all brings us to the fact that the two major candidates for President in 2016 are largely seen as unlikeable. This threatens to become a major focus of attention at the exclusion of important issues, such as climate change, income inequality, immigration, war and peace. It’s already turned the election coverage into a conundrum for the media. How can it properly handicap the race when both candidates register historically high disapproval numbers--58% disapproval for Donald Trump, 54% disapproval for Hillary Clinton.
These are mass impressions of course…made on a mass level. Most everyone who has had the experience reports that one-on-one and in small gatherings Hillary is--in Barack Obama’s deathless phrase--“likeable enough," which is why she prefers to campaign in lunchrooms rather than football stadiums. And Bill Maher and Keith Olbermann, who openly loathe Trump, say that in person he has always been very friendly toward them.  Again high school--even fictional high school—provides a useful frame of reference. We know that Trump was actually the model for Biff Tannen, the bully in Back to the Future, and that Hillary has more than once been compared to the overachieving, but calculating Tracy Flick from the movie Election. It may be true that everything we ever need to know about American politics we can learn in high school. So Trump and Hillary’s destiny to meet in a national, multi-billion dollar face-off between the Least Popular Boy and Girl may have been set way back in their teenage years.
But if I may take a partisan moment here, I will predict that Hillary’s approval number will spike up about 12 points once she’s no longer portrayed as the Wicked Witch beating the noble St. Bernard with her flying broomstick. She should be due an approval rebate, as she has in the past when she’s not seen fighting for something but rather having achieved something. Pygmalion, Cinderella, Snow White, Liza Doolittle, Pretty Woman…no matter what the song says, Americans don’t much want to watch her work hard for her money…whoever she is. They prefer mythic females to emerge via magic power or manpower or a makeover (as I said, this time it's primal). And you can bet that if those Hillary approval numbers go up as I predict, much media time will be devoted to whether it was a new hairstyle or laugh that did it for her.
Regardless, where some men look at those sorry poll numbers and see lemons, I look at them and see lemonade. I believe that with mutual assured destruction on the likeability front, modern Americans will have an election where competence really does matter. It will be a milestone in our nation’s recent electoral history as voters will be forced to look beyond the pleasing (or unpleasing) smiles, the soothing (or un-soothing) words, and the confident (or conning) body language and choose a president based on the question of competence. That should favor Hillary and be just enough to save the nation.

Days of Bob 2016--Ladies Edition

Happy Birthday, Bob
(live concert photo of Dylan by Doug Fiske) 
Here we go again...it's time for our annual Days of Bob as we count down to the Wicked Messenger's birthday. This year it's a special "I'm with Her" Edition featuring cover versions of Dylan classics by the ladies. Because I know that in my Facebook group I have certain friends who don't care for female singers as much as they do female Presidential candidates (looking at you, Murray), we're going to ease into this with a real gender-bending version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" by Marianne Faithful..whose voice on this is all you need to know about the heavy toll of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll (anyone unfamiliar with what Marianne sounded like at the beginning of her career is invited to visit the Nobby Works for my "As Years Go By" post). In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that this tune is not a Bob original...it's from back in his early days when he was covering other peoples' works...which come to think about is how he's spending his later days as well. Nonetheless...as he says, Bob first heard this from Rick von Schmidt in the green pastures of Harvard University.
On Day 2 of our special "I’m with Her" edition of Days of Bob, we turn to She-Bob, Patti Smith, to rescue one of Dylan’s most self-mutilated gems, "Changing of the Guard." Dylan’s occasional lapse into sloppy enunciation robs his version of its full power. So here Patti Smith steps up to give it the articulation it deserves:They shaved her headShe was torn between Jupiter and ApolloA messenger arrived with a black nightingale
I seen her on the stairs and I couldn’t help but follow
Follow her down past the fountain where they lifted her veil
On Day 3 of Days of Bob (Ladies Only Edition), Adele takes a Bob song and totally makes it an Adele song.
For those old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club, Wednesday was the day that was “full of surprises.” So how appropriate in multiple ways that on this Wednesday--Day 4 in our Days of Bob--we not only feature a former Disney kid, but easily the most surprising entry in my Ladies Only covers of Dylan…Miley Cyrus. Before hearing her do this song, I didn’t even know she was a singer, and since hearing it I don’t care how outré she gets (currently appearing full frontally nude in V Magazine). With this rendition of “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” she’s earned a permanent warm spot in my heart.
Days of Bob...Day 5...and on this Throwback Thursday we throw it back to the Queen of Dylan Cover Girls, Joan Baez, to express a sentiment you don't run in to much on FacebookDrifting in and out of lifetimesUnmentionable by nameSearching for my double, looking forComplete evaporation to the core
Though I tried and failed at finding any door
I must have thought that there was nothing more
Absurd than that love is just a four-letter word
Yet another h/t to Murray Passarieu, who alerted me yesterday that the Bernstorm is headed my way (confirmed later in giddy neighborhood emails). As happens, this event coincides with HBO's broadcast of "All the Way," the story of Lyndon B. Johnson's efforts to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. I cut my political teeth on the Johnson Presidency. He was the first President I campaigned for and the first one I protested against. And when I went to vote my first year of eligibility, it was LBJ that drove me to walk into the polling booth with the names of 25 electors to write in to cast my vote for Gene McCarthy against Hubert Humphrey...resulting, alas, in the dark presidency of Richard Nixon (you're welcome, America). With time and maturity to assess LBJ out from under the shadow of Vietnam, I, like many others, have come to see him in a more charitable light. As the HBO film shows he made an enormous political sacrifice to pass the Civil Rights Bill...in retrospect I must say that no president in my lifetime gave up more for a principle than he did. And more relevant to this weekend's politics, Johnson, a man of immense pride and power, gave up the presidency...not a mere campaign, but the whole shebang...for the good of the country. Oh, to find a man of honor like that again...which reminds me. I've been a little unfair to Ol' Bernie during this "I'm with Her" edition of Days of Bob, and so I'd like to dedicate Day 6 to him. Take it away, Lucinda...
Days of Bob...Ladies Edition...Day 7. Though I owned the album it first appeared on, I hardly paid attention to this song's existence until Judy Collins came along, plucked it off and gave it her full "Send in the Clowns" treatment. On casual listening it really does sound like a Stephen Sondheim song, but then the lyrics rise up and you know it's pure Bob (still sometimes even I have to wonder how he does it):They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes,They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is.But I feel nothing for their game where beauty goes unrecognized,All I feel is heat and flame and all I see are dark eyes.
Days of Bob...Day 8, a Sunday. Let's all go to church. The Right Reverend Chrissie Hynde at the altar, reading from the Book of Bob, Planet Waves, Cut 6. Let us pray...

Days of Bob...Covering Bob Just Like a Woman for 9 Days...time for one more cup of coffee before we go, and who should know more about coffee than a Turk and about being a woman than Sertab Erener?

We were in Switzerland at the family farm of son-in-law to be Niels Froelicher. I was snapping pictures with every breath I took...the place defies you not to. Just mere days into the trip I had so many pictures, I dared not wait till I got home to start the monumental task of sorting through them all. So I took advantage of an ailing leg to lock myself in the farmhouse for a day and put together a slideshow to commemorate the trip to that point. But I needed some music...I can't do a slideshow without music (and I don't mean those forgettable instrumental ditties Apple provides). I knew I had loaded damn little music on my iPad, so the choices would be meager. But when I checked my library, it turned out I had the only song I needed...Natasha Bedingfield's rendition of Ring Them Bells. So today let them bells ring for Bob...

Auteurs

Here’s what happened…Photoshop Elements, one of my go-to pieces of software, started acting freaky on me so I decided it was probably time to upgrade. I did so, and when I tried to install the download, I learned that my Mac OS did not accommodate the new Elements. No real surprise there. When it comes to updating operating systems, I’m practically a Luddite. I live in fear of this suspicious tendency they have of making all your other software suddenly obsolete, so generally I wait until they’ve done all their testing and debugging from beta to zeta. Besides, I had heard enough bad reports about Mac’s Yosemite to steer clear of it. So I tried to get a refund from Adobe for the Photoshop Elements, and here’s an untapped issue for all those Presidential candidates out there: Why is it you can purchase new software with a simple click, but if you need to get an RMA to return it you have a good chance of getting stuck in an endless loop after providing the buy date, your credit card, the serial number…and the only way out of the loop is a 30-minute wait for an online “chat” operator because if you call on the phone you only get automated options that direct you back online for your RMA?!?
I gave up and decided to go to Apple and take a chance on Yosemite only to learn that it had been upgraded to El Capitan, so whatever benefit I may have gotten from letting others get burned by Yosemite for me was lost. I’d like to claim that I threw caution to the wind but at this point it really just blew there of its own accord…like a napkin at a seaside picnic. My expectations were fully met…software which had become like old, comfortable slippers was a stranger now unto me….strangest of all the new incarnation of my beloved iMovie. I’ve rhapsodized before how important iMovie is to me…how after a celebratory event or vacation I can lose myself for days on end working on a little film documenting the occasion. I can honestly say that working in iMovie is one of the pure joys of my life. But this upgraded version that came with El Capitan was like an alien invader…different face, unrecognizable features, terms and names that rang foreign to my ears. Damn you, millennials! I know you’re responsible for this!
Anyway, this is a long, melodramatic way of introducing the three videos below. I had to spend a few days familiarizing myself with the new iMovie. So rather than following a few ho-hum examples on You Tube, I decided to make a fun time for myself...and voilà! Herewith…
My Dinner with Andre as John Ford may have directed it:
It's a Wonderful Life as Hitchcock may have directed it:
Star Wars as Stanley Kubrick might have directed it:

Everyday People

  Man in yellow shirt
For my last birthday, Lorna took me to see the latest Coen brothers film Hail Caesar at one of those ultra fancy theaters where they provide wait service at your reclining chair and offer gourmet entrees on the menu and a wine list. There was one other couple in the theater…it was a midday matinee…and all four of us fell asleep at various points during the movie (maybe it was the wine). Anyway, that’s not the story. The story is that as Lorna left to hit the ladies’ room on the way out and I stepped into the glorious California sun, I was confronted by two cops…one male and one female. The female did the talking while they both held their hands on their holstered guns. “Excuse me, sir,” she said. “Could you give us your name.” I did without reservation and then stood there with a bemused smile on my face as she spoke into her radio. In less time than it would’ve taken for her to draw her gun and shoot me, she confirmed that I was not their man. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re looking for a man around here in a yellow shirt and had to check.” And then as they turned to leave me in the peace and splendor of my own yellow shirt, she added, “Thank you for smiling.”
Perhaps this was confirmation of the white privilege I hear so much about. And then again perhaps it was just another anecdotal incident from an individual life having no bearing on any large, complex social issue. But the writer in me couldn’t help but observe that the lady cop was genuinely pleased, rather relieved, that I had smiled through our encounter. I do not normally smile in my rare encounters with police. I have a game face that I’ve perfected for most unpleasant encounters which is neither submissive nor abusive—just business. I smiled on this occasion because I really found it rather comic…I mean it was my birthday and it was La Costa, which is practically the golf capital of America and the biggest crime is, like, being late for your tee time. Nonetheless I came away impressed with how much grief this cop must run into on a daily basis to make a point of thanking me for being pleasant.
It might’ve been a one-off incident if the next day a clerk at Bev Mo hadn’t asked me how I was, and when I answered, “Fine. How are you?” he replied, “I'm good. Thanks for asking. Funny, I ask people all day how they are and no one ever asks me how I am.” As nice a guy as I try to be, no one would ever describe me as being of sunny disposition, and I sure as hell am not one of those people that goes out into the world each day determined to spread happiness wherever I go. It’s just that I answer when someone asks me how I am (sometimes in more detail than they may want), and I always ask how they are in return…a common courtesy, I guess, which has become a common habit. But in less than 24 hours I had two anecdotal incidents in which I detected ordinary people expressing subtle yet real anxieties about their everyday lives, and I now wondered if there was indeed some larger, complex social issue in the works.
Then lo and behold, just last month the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling that decreed that employers cannot order employees to be happy. The ruling has more to do with union organizing since the NLRB concluded that mandating happiness would put an undue burden on union organizers whose very existence is pretty much predicated upon workers having things to complain about. They really can’t complain under a company policy forbidding negativity. It’s a nice juicy topic for another post…in fact in another venue I do address the paradox of companies that say they want to hear how their employees really feel, but do not want to hear anything that will depress morale (I’ll link upon publication).
Labor relations, however, are a bit off tangent from this post because my concern here is how everyday people become “those people”…beat cops…store clerks…men in yellow shirts...objects of suspicion and outright hostility  It’s about how we’re increasingly dividing ourselves into adversarial groups…never more so than in political season. As I mentioned in last week’s post, war and politics have a way of stripping away the veneer of civility, which is so important in preventing us from constantly tearing each other apart. For me personally, this political season has been a severe one in that regard. I find myself divided from a group I am generally allied with…progressive Democrats. People who were everyday friends and acquaintances are increasingly becoming “those people” to me…and I, alas, to them. And it’s not just me. There have been numerous online articles about the toll the Democratic primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders is taking on personal friendships. In one of the best, Michelle Goldberg writes about Angie Aker, a woman she interviewed on the subject:  

When I first spoke to Aker last week, she was unapologetic about alienating some of her friends with her ceaseless attacks on Clinton. “Relationships have cooled or fizzled because of my unwillingness to temper what I say about turning a blind eye to Hillary’s war hawkishness,” she said. On Tuesday night, I emailed her to see if she saw any prospect of interpersonal tensions easing as the primary winds down. “I’m not going to refuse to do business with Hillary supporters or start fights with them at our friends’ bridal showers, but neither will I ever forget that when they had a chance to vote for and support a truly progressive future for people worse off than them, they decided a neoliberal feminist-in-name-only getting her turn was more important,” she replied. “It will color the way I see them from here on out, as I’m sure the force with which I’ve spoken against their views will color how they see me.” With that last part, at least, Clinton supporters will surely agree.

Agree they do…in spades. I belong to an online Hillary group and not a day goes by when someone in it is not lamenting about the break-up of a long friendship…sometimes even an intimate one…because of this primary. The tale of woe is usually accompanied by an illustrative email or post from the offending party that really is…from a Clinton supporter’s point of view…quite offensive. Goldberg assures us in her article that this trail of heartbreaks is generally limited to the most hardcore political junkies who are more inclined to let their passions run wild in social media. Most ordinary Americans generally hate politics and want to have as little to do with it as possible, knowing in their heart of hearts that it harms relationships rather than helps them. 
However limited this political tribalism may be to online relationships, the sad truth is, politics aside, our culture as a whole seems to be getting increasingly harsh and unforgiving…at work, at school, at play, in our media and entertainment. A smile or common courtesy may be weak tea in turning that tide, and the banality of a pop song may not be the antidote, but as soon as we forget that we are indeed just everyday people, we become a truly lost people.
Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrongMy own beliefs are in my songThe butcher, the banker, the drummer and thenMakes no difference what group I'm inI am everyday people, yeah yeahThere is a blue one who can't accept the green oneFor living with a fat one trying to be a skinny oneAnd different strokes for different folksAnd so on and so on and scooby dooby dooOh sha sha we got to live togetherI am no better and neither are youWe are the same whatever we doYou love me you hate me you know me and thenYou can't figure out the bag I'm inI am everyday people, yeah yeahThere is a long hair that doesn't like the short hairFor bein' such a rich one that will not help the poor oneAnd different strokes for different folksAnd so on and so on and scooby dooby dooOh sha sha we got to live togetherThere is a yellow one that won't accept the black oneThat won't accept the red one that won't accept the white oneAnd different strokes for different folksAnd so on and so on and scooby dooby doo
I am everyday people

                                                                      --Sylvester Stewart