Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 990
October 4, 2015
I always give you my money: How many times will I buy the same Beatles records, over and over again?
The other day I threw out my first Beatles album — which is akin to throwing out one of the only photos of a dead relative, a perfectly good organic burrito or a $20 bill. Beatles albums have been discarded before, but mostly by crazies and Klansmen back in early March ’66, when dubiously contextualized quotes from John claimed that “Christianity will vanish and shrink…” and that “We’re (The Beatles) more popular than Jesus now.” That was 49 years ago, three years before I was born. On Friday, I turned 46. And instead of taking some kind of inventory (I'm saving that for 50), I began to think about my relationship with the Beatles, who were still together when I was born (take that, Y and Z Generations!). And my relationship to them, unlike that with just about everyone else in my life after nearly half a century (friends, family, women, pets, the government, R.E.M.) is more or less the same: pure love. I am the human equivalent of Ringo’s peace fingers, and have been since I first began playing with the LPs that my mother and father gave me to play with because I was an early-depressed child. Some of those wonderful objects had posters, and lyrics, and these four beautiful men with sparkling eyes on their covers. Others had dyed vinyl, red and blue. They were much better than TV. John Lennon was still alive. So was George. It was Camelot in suburbia, with perfect pop music coming out of faux wood-grain speakers and later, an 8-track player made of white plastic and shaped like a diver’s helmet. But that’s when things began to turn. I could no longer stay on the floor in the den with the turntable; I had to gather around the weird-ass 8 track. It’s like that scene in "2001" when the vegan apes live peacefully with the tapirs until the monolith appears and that one ape realizes he can use tools — cut to lots of dead tapirs. And war. I should say that throwing out, say, the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack might be one thing, but the LP that I binned was "Revolver." And I did it because it was the wrong "Revolver"! There is a "Revolver" that exists in my head — the mono "Revolver," the music that changed everything, even Don Draper. This wasn't it. I bought this version on eBay and soon realized it was mixed, or remixed, all wrong. George Harrison’s cough at the beginning of “Taxman,” and the background vocals chiding “Uh, uh, Mr. Wilson… Uh uh, Mr. Heath,” were buried in the mix. You can remix Lou Reed or Pavement all you want and I’m good, but the Beatles I am orthodox about. How did I end up with this screwy "Revolver," and could there be people who actually prefer it? Should I have found one of them? Placed it back on eBay and lied about its merits in my sales description? My need to always have every Beatles album from "Please Please Me" to "Let It Be" at my fingertips 24 hours a day no matter where I am superseded the horrible sight of that Klaus Voorman cover going into the trash with the chicken bones and the pizza boxes, but it had to happen, or I risked losing my tether to the first time I heard “For No One” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” To paraphrase Supertramp, which I like to do as much as possible, the question of what, exactly, is a perfect and complete personal Beatles collection runs too deep for such a simple mind. Since the start of their recording career, the LPs, and later the cassettes and other updated media, have been released by Parlophone in the U.K. and Capitol in America. Not that I realized this at 10 years old. I just bought what was on sale in hopes that I would one day have everything, and kept doing so almost reflexively as the U.K. versions became easier to acquire, which is basically akin to shoving a 10-bob note up your nose. "Beatles for Sale," for example, was called "Beatles ’65" in my collection and it had “She’s a Woman” on it (one of Paul’s grooviest early songs). There was an album called "Hey Jude," which was not the only way you could get "Hey Jude," not that I would know that before buying it. I thought it was a Beatles album I’d missed, but most of those songs were already on the blue album. Did Parlophone and Capitol count on people like me to be stupid, anxious, Pavlovian? I drew certain lines. I didn’t buy the interview albums, although I was tempted. There was an album called simply "Rock and Roll Music," which had songs from the White Album (aka "The Beatles"), but I bought it because I didn’t own a copy of “I’m Down,” and as with “She’s a Woman,” I needed it. There was an album called "Love Songs" with a shit-brown cover that was easy to dismiss, but I welcomed it into my collection and pretended it was a catch, even though it for some reason considered “She’s Leaving Home” a love song — seriously. When I got my first car, I made sure I had every Beatles album on cassette, because you can’t play “Magical Mystery Tour” on vinyl in an ’87 Toyota Tercel as you speed down Sunrise Highway. When I went off to college, CDs had just come out. The first CD I bought was “Diamond Life” by Sade, and the next dozen were Beatles albums. Soon my 8-tracks and cassettes and LPs went… wherever. I got into drugs (like the Beatles did, man!) and went a bit slack in keeping everything neat and organized (it was the ‘90s). I chopped out a lot of drugs off the jewel box of “Rubber Soul,” with that swirly lensed shot of the lads, but even as addicted as I was by the ‘90s, if you told me I had to choose between my scorched CD or, well, drugs, I would have chosen “Rubber Soul.” I even liked “Run for Your Life,” which John purportedly hated, even though he wrote the fucking thing (I suppose I’ve written things I’ve hated, too… ). But do enough hard drugs and cold turkey will get you on the run. You will end up selling a lot of shit so you can keep doing drugs — you don’t need to be Maxwell Edison to figure that one out. I moved to Hollywood after college to try to write movies as good as “Caveman” and “Give My Regards to Broad Street.” I did more drugs. I sold my car for $500 and had nowhere to play the cassettes I managed to keep track of (“Revovler!”). I sold my CDs and my CD player. And the reason I knew that I was truly lost was that for the first time in a quarter of a century, if I woke up in the middle of the night and needed, actually needed for my sanity and wellness, to hear “Flying” or “Wild Honey Pie,” or regular “Honey Pie,” I was shit out of luck. You couldn’t call up a radio station and request it like you could have in the ‘70s. You couldn’t ask your roommate to play it for you on his upright bass and sing it (in his Georgian accent). You went through withdrawal. One of the first things I did when I got clean was re-buy all the Beatles albums on vinyl… again. Every last one, from “Please Please Me” to “Let It Be” and back — British versions, not a mote of dust on them. And then they came out on iTunes. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the appeal for someone with this kind of relationship to their music of having every song at my fingertips on a machine that was, at the time, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. They got me, hooked me the way I was supposed to get hooked, the way they demonstrated someone like me actually getting fishhooked in some boardroom — just a stick figure with the word “Beatle fan” and an arrow pointing to my long hair. I sold the vinyl on Bleecker Street, bought an iPod, and one by one, loaded it with every Beatles album plus “Past Masters One” and “Two,” because say I fall in love with a German film star and she needs to hear “Sie Liebt Dich” while we are making strange love, or an Andrea Feldman-like mental case who only wants to do it to “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number”)? Steve Jobs not only fixed the world, he fixed my Beatles problem for good. For good! And I wasn’t even 40. I couldn’t even lose the Beatles if I wanted to. They lived in The Cloud, which was probably a lot like the Sea of Holes in “Yellow Submarine.” Even if I lost the iPod itself — and I did — the albums were still there. But what if I lost my Cloud password, and my computer crashed, and I got fired from my job as a reasonably well-paid rock writer? And I lost another iPod (a Nano this time, because I was trying to be fiscally wise) and another after that (left behind at a particularly depressing DJ gig)? What if I couldn’t wring them out of the Cloud at 4 a.m.? What then, John? Paul, George, Ringo? Brian Epstein? Some days ago, an announcement appeared on the official Beatles Twitter and elsewhere, promising a major development. I am no longer even close to being the optimist and the dreamer I was back on that brown shag carpet, but somewhere there was a damp flicker that wondered, “Hey, maybe they cut a deal with Spotify?” Free Beatles music forever, for the low, low price of giving Facebook all my personal info and things that I enjoy! (The fucking Beatles.) Of course, I’d have to upgrade to the premium service, because nobody is shuffling Beatles album fucking sequences on me. Nobody! Instead, as all fans now know, it was yet another version of their hit No. 1 album, this time with videos. And once again I find myself, as I did as a prepubescent, building a vinyl collection of Beatles albums. I don’t go out as much as I used to, I reason. It will be nice to hear them on Sunday mornings with coffee and the paper. No need to travel with them. This is it. And there’s eBay — I don’t even have to go to a record store, which is fortunate because there are no more fucking record stores (apologies to all still living record stores). The first one I bought? “Revolver.” The best one. The perfect one. The one that’s probably better than “Blonde on Blonde” and “Pet Sounds” and “What’s Going On.” The one that makes me happy like a drug, like sunshine, like really good soup. When it’s in, it hits you in the face with its greatness. That cough at the beginning of “Taxman.” So, the other day I threw away a Beatles album. I guess I could have given it to a neighbor or just left it on the stoop. Someone would have taken it, but I didn’t want to pass on my disease. I’m 46. If I live, say, another 40 years (that’s being incredibly optimistic — let’s say 25), how many more ways will arise to entice me to purchase the same music I’ve been buying over and over again for my entire life? Will I need to own a “With the Beatles” (not “Meet the Beatles,” mind you) hologram? Will I have to abide by George singing “Don’t Bother Me” in my bedroom? Will there be volunteer programs where the catalog is simply uploaded into your brain, and you will never lose it? You will literally meld organically, cybernetically, with the Beatles catalog? And if so, how much will it cost? Should I begin saving now? The Best Things In Life Are Free, But These Ain’t: A short list of complete Beatles audio for the obsessive fan to purchase over and over again in various different formats (Warning to Fab completists and correctors: It’s a “short” list. Please no “you forgot” comments. We didn’t forget. The Yesterday and Today’s 1966 “Butcher” album, for example, is not here, because a near-mint version probably costs the same as a used Lexus SUV at this point, and the Cirque Du Soleil album is not here because French clowns are a bummer.) LPs Please Please Me – UK — 1963 With The Beatles – UK – 1963 Meet the Beatles – US – 1964 The Beatles Second Album – US – 1964 A Hard Day’s Night – soundtrack – 1964 A Hard Day’s Night – LP – 1964 Something New – US – 1964 Beatles For Sale – UK – 1965 The Early Beatles – US – 1965 Beatles ’65 – US — 1965 Help! – ’65 – US – Soundtrack — 1965 Help! – ’65 – LP – 1965 Rubber Soul – US/UK – 1965 (first 8-Track Tape release) Revolver – US/UK – 1966 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – US/UK — 1967 Magical Mystery Tour – US/UK — 1967 The Beatles (White Album) – US/UK — 1968 Yellow Submarine – US/UK – 1968 Abbey Road – US/UK – 1969 First Beatles cassettes issued in US Hey Jude – US/UK – 1970 Let It Be – US/UK – 1970 1963 – 1966 US/UK (Red Album) – 1973 1967 -1970 US/UK (Blue Album) – 1973 Live At The Hollywood Bowl – 1977 (actually pretty great) Rock n’ Roll Music – 1976 Love Songs – 1977 Full Beatles UK discography – CD release – 1987/88 Past Masters Volume One – 1988 – Available on CD Past Masters Volume Two – 1988 – Available on CD Anthology 1 – Multi format – 1995 Anthology 2 – Multi format — 1996 Anthology 3 – Multi format – 1996 1 – US/UK – Multi Format – 2000 Let It Be… Naked – 2003 Beatles Stereo Box Set – 2009 The Beatles in Mono – 2009 2010 – The Beatles catalog comes to iTunesThe other day I threw out my first Beatles album — which is akin to throwing out one of the only photos of a dead relative, a perfectly good organic burrito or a $20 bill. Beatles albums have been discarded before, but mostly by crazies and Klansmen back in early March ’66, when dubiously contextualized quotes from John claimed that “Christianity will vanish and shrink…” and that “We’re (The Beatles) more popular than Jesus now.” That was 49 years ago, three years before I was born. On Friday, I turned 46. And instead of taking some kind of inventory (I'm saving that for 50), I began to think about my relationship with the Beatles, who were still together when I was born (take that, Y and Z Generations!). And my relationship to them, unlike that with just about everyone else in my life after nearly half a century (friends, family, women, pets, the government, R.E.M.) is more or less the same: pure love. I am the human equivalent of Ringo’s peace fingers, and have been since I first began playing with the LPs that my mother and father gave me to play with because I was an early-depressed child. Some of those wonderful objects had posters, and lyrics, and these four beautiful men with sparkling eyes on their covers. Others had dyed vinyl, red and blue. They were much better than TV. John Lennon was still alive. So was George. It was Camelot in suburbia, with perfect pop music coming out of faux wood-grain speakers and later, an 8-track player made of white plastic and shaped like a diver’s helmet. But that’s when things began to turn. I could no longer stay on the floor in the den with the turntable; I had to gather around the weird-ass 8 track. It’s like that scene in "2001" when the vegan apes live peacefully with the tapirs until the monolith appears and that one ape realizes he can use tools — cut to lots of dead tapirs. And war. I should say that throwing out, say, the "Yellow Submarine" soundtrack might be one thing, but the LP that I binned was "Revolver." And I did it because it was the wrong "Revolver"! There is a "Revolver" that exists in my head — the mono "Revolver," the music that changed everything, even Don Draper. This wasn't it. I bought this version on eBay and soon realized it was mixed, or remixed, all wrong. George Harrison’s cough at the beginning of “Taxman,” and the background vocals chiding “Uh, uh, Mr. Wilson… Uh uh, Mr. Heath,” were buried in the mix. You can remix Lou Reed or Pavement all you want and I’m good, but the Beatles I am orthodox about. How did I end up with this screwy "Revolver," and could there be people who actually prefer it? Should I have found one of them? Placed it back on eBay and lied about its merits in my sales description? My need to always have every Beatles album from "Please Please Me" to "Let It Be" at my fingertips 24 hours a day no matter where I am superseded the horrible sight of that Klaus Voorman cover going into the trash with the chicken bones and the pizza boxes, but it had to happen, or I risked losing my tether to the first time I heard “For No One” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” To paraphrase Supertramp, which I like to do as much as possible, the question of what, exactly, is a perfect and complete personal Beatles collection runs too deep for such a simple mind. Since the start of their recording career, the LPs, and later the cassettes and other updated media, have been released by Parlophone in the U.K. and Capitol in America. Not that I realized this at 10 years old. I just bought what was on sale in hopes that I would one day have everything, and kept doing so almost reflexively as the U.K. versions became easier to acquire, which is basically akin to shoving a 10-bob note up your nose. "Beatles for Sale," for example, was called "Beatles ’65" in my collection and it had “She’s a Woman” on it (one of Paul’s grooviest early songs). There was an album called "Hey Jude," which was not the only way you could get "Hey Jude," not that I would know that before buying it. I thought it was a Beatles album I’d missed, but most of those songs were already on the blue album. Did Parlophone and Capitol count on people like me to be stupid, anxious, Pavlovian? I drew certain lines. I didn’t buy the interview albums, although I was tempted. There was an album called simply "Rock and Roll Music," which had songs from the White Album (aka "The Beatles"), but I bought it because I didn’t own a copy of “I’m Down,” and as with “She’s a Woman,” I needed it. There was an album called "Love Songs" with a shit-brown cover that was easy to dismiss, but I welcomed it into my collection and pretended it was a catch, even though it for some reason considered “She’s Leaving Home” a love song — seriously. When I got my first car, I made sure I had every Beatles album on cassette, because you can’t play “Magical Mystery Tour” on vinyl in an ’87 Toyota Tercel as you speed down Sunrise Highway. When I went off to college, CDs had just come out. The first CD I bought was “Diamond Life” by Sade, and the next dozen were Beatles albums. Soon my 8-tracks and cassettes and LPs went… wherever. I got into drugs (like the Beatles did, man!) and went a bit slack in keeping everything neat and organized (it was the ‘90s). I chopped out a lot of drugs off the jewel box of “Rubber Soul,” with that swirly lensed shot of the lads, but even as addicted as I was by the ‘90s, if you told me I had to choose between my scorched CD or, well, drugs, I would have chosen “Rubber Soul.” I even liked “Run for Your Life,” which John purportedly hated, even though he wrote the fucking thing (I suppose I’ve written things I’ve hated, too… ). But do enough hard drugs and cold turkey will get you on the run. You will end up selling a lot of shit so you can keep doing drugs — you don’t need to be Maxwell Edison to figure that one out. I moved to Hollywood after college to try to write movies as good as “Caveman” and “Give My Regards to Broad Street.” I did more drugs. I sold my car for $500 and had nowhere to play the cassettes I managed to keep track of (“Revovler!”). I sold my CDs and my CD player. And the reason I knew that I was truly lost was that for the first time in a quarter of a century, if I woke up in the middle of the night and needed, actually needed for my sanity and wellness, to hear “Flying” or “Wild Honey Pie,” or regular “Honey Pie,” I was shit out of luck. You couldn’t call up a radio station and request it like you could have in the ‘70s. You couldn’t ask your roommate to play it for you on his upright bass and sing it (in his Georgian accent). You went through withdrawal. One of the first things I did when I got clean was re-buy all the Beatles albums on vinyl… again. Every last one, from “Please Please Me” to “Let It Be” and back — British versions, not a mote of dust on them. And then they came out on iTunes. I’m sure I don’t need to explain the appeal for someone with this kind of relationship to their music of having every song at my fingertips on a machine that was, at the time, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. They got me, hooked me the way I was supposed to get hooked, the way they demonstrated someone like me actually getting fishhooked in some boardroom — just a stick figure with the word “Beatle fan” and an arrow pointing to my long hair. I sold the vinyl on Bleecker Street, bought an iPod, and one by one, loaded it with every Beatles album plus “Past Masters One” and “Two,” because say I fall in love with a German film star and she needs to hear “Sie Liebt Dich” while we are making strange love, or an Andrea Feldman-like mental case who only wants to do it to “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number”)? Steve Jobs not only fixed the world, he fixed my Beatles problem for good. For good! And I wasn’t even 40. I couldn’t even lose the Beatles if I wanted to. They lived in The Cloud, which was probably a lot like the Sea of Holes in “Yellow Submarine.” Even if I lost the iPod itself — and I did — the albums were still there. But what if I lost my Cloud password, and my computer crashed, and I got fired from my job as a reasonably well-paid rock writer? And I lost another iPod (a Nano this time, because I was trying to be fiscally wise) and another after that (left behind at a particularly depressing DJ gig)? What if I couldn’t wring them out of the Cloud at 4 a.m.? What then, John? Paul, George, Ringo? Brian Epstein? Some days ago, an announcement appeared on the official Beatles Twitter and elsewhere, promising a major development. I am no longer even close to being the optimist and the dreamer I was back on that brown shag carpet, but somewhere there was a damp flicker that wondered, “Hey, maybe they cut a deal with Spotify?” Free Beatles music forever, for the low, low price of giving Facebook all my personal info and things that I enjoy! (The fucking Beatles.) Of course, I’d have to upgrade to the premium service, because nobody is shuffling Beatles album fucking sequences on me. Nobody! Instead, as all fans now know, it was yet another version of their hit No. 1 album, this time with videos. And once again I find myself, as I did as a prepubescent, building a vinyl collection of Beatles albums. I don’t go out as much as I used to, I reason. It will be nice to hear them on Sunday mornings with coffee and the paper. No need to travel with them. This is it. And there’s eBay — I don’t even have to go to a record store, which is fortunate because there are no more fucking record stores (apologies to all still living record stores). The first one I bought? “Revolver.” The best one. The perfect one. The one that’s probably better than “Blonde on Blonde” and “Pet Sounds” and “What’s Going On.” The one that makes me happy like a drug, like sunshine, like really good soup. When it’s in, it hits you in the face with its greatness. That cough at the beginning of “Taxman.” So, the other day I threw away a Beatles album. I guess I could have given it to a neighbor or just left it on the stoop. Someone would have taken it, but I didn’t want to pass on my disease. I’m 46. If I live, say, another 40 years (that’s being incredibly optimistic — let’s say 25), how many more ways will arise to entice me to purchase the same music I’ve been buying over and over again for my entire life? Will I need to own a “With the Beatles” (not “Meet the Beatles,” mind you) hologram? Will I have to abide by George singing “Don’t Bother Me” in my bedroom? Will there be volunteer programs where the catalog is simply uploaded into your brain, and you will never lose it? You will literally meld organically, cybernetically, with the Beatles catalog? And if so, how much will it cost? Should I begin saving now? The Best Things In Life Are Free, But These Ain’t: A short list of complete Beatles audio for the obsessive fan to purchase over and over again in various different formats (Warning to Fab completists and correctors: It’s a “short” list. Please no “you forgot” comments. We didn’t forget. The Yesterday and Today’s 1966 “Butcher” album, for example, is not here, because a near-mint version probably costs the same as a used Lexus SUV at this point, and the Cirque Du Soleil album is not here because French clowns are a bummer.) LPs Please Please Me – UK — 1963 With The Beatles – UK – 1963 Meet the Beatles – US – 1964 The Beatles Second Album – US – 1964 A Hard Day’s Night – soundtrack – 1964 A Hard Day’s Night – LP – 1964 Something New – US – 1964 Beatles For Sale – UK – 1965 The Early Beatles – US – 1965 Beatles ’65 – US — 1965 Help! – ’65 – US – Soundtrack — 1965 Help! – ’65 – LP – 1965 Rubber Soul – US/UK – 1965 (first 8-Track Tape release) Revolver – US/UK – 1966 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – US/UK — 1967 Magical Mystery Tour – US/UK — 1967 The Beatles (White Album) – US/UK — 1968 Yellow Submarine – US/UK – 1968 Abbey Road – US/UK – 1969 First Beatles cassettes issued in US Hey Jude – US/UK – 1970 Let It Be – US/UK – 1970 1963 – 1966 US/UK (Red Album) – 1973 1967 -1970 US/UK (Blue Album) – 1973 Live At The Hollywood Bowl – 1977 (actually pretty great) Rock n’ Roll Music – 1976 Love Songs – 1977 Full Beatles UK discography – CD release – 1987/88 Past Masters Volume One – 1988 – Available on CD Past Masters Volume Two – 1988 – Available on CD Anthology 1 – Multi format – 1995 Anthology 2 – Multi format — 1996 Anthology 3 – Multi format – 1996 1 – US/UK – Multi Format – 2000 Let It Be… Naked – 2003 Beatles Stereo Box Set – 2009 The Beatles in Mono – 2009 2010 – The Beatles catalog comes to iTunes
So wait, millennials aren’t the enemy? From “The Intern” to “Grandma,” the threat of looming intergenerational war has been greatly exaggerated
“Time passes. That’s for sure,” reads the pithy Eileen Myles epigram that launches "Grandma," Paul Weitz’s latest feature. Based on typical Hollywood fare, it could be hard to tell; unless one happens to be Meryl Streep or Richard Gere, life ends after 60, and if you happen to lack a Y chromosome it would seem to stop at least a decade earlier. But some of this might be changing. "Grandma," starring Lily Tomlin, 75, and Nancy Meyers' "The Intern," with Robert De Niro, 72, are making serious box office buck, drawing in audiences a third their age. Even odder is that neither film pivots around the trials of getting older or the fruits of late coupledom—rather, both focus on the relationships between those of a certain age and those considerably younger, part of a handful of recent movies eschewing traditional plots to tackle the tensions between traditionalists, baby boomers, Generations X, Y and Z. Why the shift? Perhaps the fact that now more than ever we are likely to have to deal with those much older and younger than ourselves. Partly due to rising longevity and falling retirement rates, in 2015, for the first time in history, all five generations could potentially share a workspace. For those of Generations X, Y and Z, delayed marriage and childbearing means that it’s not uncommon for a single 32-year-old to socialize with those five to 10 years older, to compete for internships with applicants fresh out of college. We are entering an age of the pan-generational mashup, and we need to learn how to listen. Widely lauded for cynical character-driven dramas ("The Squid and the Whale," "Greenberg"), Noah Baumbach released two films in 2015 that seem cheery by comparison, both inviting anyone under 50 to sort out what they have in common. In "While We’re Young," Gen Xers Josh and Cornelia—played by Ben Stiller, 49, and Naomi Watts, 47—befriend millennial hipster couple Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver, 31, and Amanda Seyfried, 29. All childless, the four bike across Brooklyn, frequent bougie artisanal restaurants and puke into shared ayahuasca buckets. This cozy cultural crochet joining X and Y eventually unravels—Jamie and Darby aren’t nearly as earnest or ebullient as they seemed, and Josh and Cornelia ultimately opt to become parents—but both couples plainly gain more than they lose in the process. "Mistress America," Baumbach’s late summer comedy, studies the bond between 30-year old Brooke, played by the unsinkable Greta Gerwig, and Tracy, her soon-to-be stepsister, a college first-year played by Lola Kirke. Brooke and Tracy go dancing, attend spinning class, visit bars that proffer complimentary hot dogs. The climax of the film follows a road trip from Manhattan to suburban Connecticut to beg Brooke’s married ex-fiancé (an amusing Michael Chernus) for a serious loan. In a hatchback packed with college kids and one feckless millennial, the transition from youthful insouciance to settled-down banality couldn’t be more explicit. Inevitably, Brooke and Lola “break up” as friends, and just as inevitably, they get back together, in the film’s final scene sharing Thanksgiving dinner in an East Village diner. Tracy boosts Brooke’s flagging confidence as a dreamer who hasn’t gotten her start yet, and Brooke grants self-conscious Tracy a sense of her own distinct appeal. As said in one of the film’s most memorable voice-overs, “Her beauty was that rare kind that made you want to look more like yourself and not like her." "Grandma" and "The Intern" feature an even broader age range—from 5 to 75—poking holes in presumptions of what it means to get old, feel young or (not so) simply grow up. In "Grandma," a kind of “every-wave” feminism unites Elle, an unorthodox matriarch played by Tomlin, her daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), and teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) when facing an unplanned pregnancy. As Ben, “senior intern” to CEO Jules, played by Anne Hathaway, De Niro becomes a grandfatherly confidant—to his boss, office colleagues and practically everyone else with whom he comes into contact. Though differing markedly in tone, style and budget, both films suggest that getting older can lead to a sense of fearlessness and resilience that the young are missing out on. Many have dubbed "Grandma" another “abortion film,” in the spirit of "Obvious Child," but the film’s real focus is on the clashes between the generations already born and blundering. “The gravity of the choice doesn’t elude us,” said Tomlin in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival—and in this film the gravity of the choice brings three generations of women together, quite literally, in a clinic waiting room. At the film’s start, Elle has just broken up with her much younger girlfriend Olivia (played by a very believable Judy Greer), and is soon after visited by her panicked granddaughter. The drama unfolds over the course of a single day, and throughout Tomlin wears her own clothing and drives her own 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer. It’s not surprising that Weitz wrote the role with only Tomlin in mind. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine "The Intern" with anyone but De Niro, who tempers predictable gentle paternalism with a progressive take on working moms and the glass ceiling in a way that seems surprisingly sincere. But it’s harder to take the cross-generational gusto seriously in a context of unlimited fiscal resources (or springy safety nets) for every character involved. Ben’s enviable Brookyn pad sports a kitchen island and walk-in closet. He’s interning not because he needs the money (it’s never even clarified that he’s paid at all) but because, as confessed in voice-over at the beginning of the film, “There’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it.” In ways, "The Intern" seems to suggest that the remedy to senior depression is simply to “put ‘em to work!” even if that work involves menial labor and instantaneous deference to employers decades younger than you. "Grandma" is less utopian about the state of the economy, as Elle’s financial hardships leave her with a ramshackle L.A. bungalow and little else to live on (a mobile of cut-up credit cards twirls above her patio). Reminiscent of the 40 percent of American baby boomers with nothing saved for retirement, Elle’s hard up for cash, and the ensuing hunt for $600 prompts many of the film’s funniest moments: haggling over the value of first-edition feminist tomes at a womyn’s coffee shop, stealing weed from Sage’s boyfriend only to offer it for a price to an old flame (a wizened Sam Elliott). But Weitz doesn’t shy from the real anguish experienced by a woman at 70. Elle mourns the loss of her life partner, Violet, who has died a year earlier; she rues the literary margins at which her poetry has been cast; she breaks down at the thought of losing Olivia, coldly dubbing her a “footnote” to her life before bawling in the shower alone. It is for this reason—Elle’s very raw and tangible pain—that her undaunted solitary sojourn away from the camera during the film’s final scene turns out so deeply moving. By contrast, loss occasions only levity in Meyers’ film—a funeral home becomes a spot for a quirky first date between Ben and the office masseuse (a sultry Renee Russo), its innocuous petal-pink walls matched by the petal-pink cheeks of the affluent dearly beloved. Ben’s daily pill regimen suggests that he may have health troubles, but the brief scene in which his blood pressure seems to rocket is played more for laughs than concern. But then again, it’s a Nancy Meyers film; while "Grandma" leaves behind the high of a hand-crafted cocktail (something strong, a little bitter, with a cherry at the bottom), "The Intern" bestows the lingering headache of too many cheap Cosmos (sips syncopated to a soaring string accompaniment). There are currently more than 100 million adults in the United States over the age of 50, and until this year, baby boomers outnumbered every other generation in the United States. Generation X, the “neglected middle child,” has been compared to a “low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths,” by Paul Taylor, author of "The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown." Millennials and Generation Z seize most current media attention, but often not in a good way, often derided for their detachment from organized religion, dependence on social media, or even inability to form enduring romantic bonds. Baumbach’s recent features engage these subtler gulfs in generational values—how, despite any shared zest for craft beer or Bikram yoga, smaller age differences can be a beast to breach in daily life; when we speak of intergenerational conflicts, we rarely discuss those between people who aren't so far apart in years that one could be the other’s parent or child. "The Intern" and "Grandma" take a more obvious route, pairing septuagenarians with those decades younger, but thankfully resist full-blown nostalgia for the good old days in which their heroes came of age. And for each of these cases, there is something to be said for a Hollywood film that shows that there is life after 40—and before 20, and even past 70!—that age may be a matter of fact, yet never the object of pity. 
“Time passes. That’s for sure,” reads the pithy Eileen Myles epigram that launches "Grandma," Paul Weitz’s latest feature. Based on typical Hollywood fare, it could be hard to tell; unless one happens to be Meryl Streep or Richard Gere, life ends after 60, and if you happen to lack a Y chromosome it would seem to stop at least a decade earlier. But some of this might be changing. "Grandma," starring Lily Tomlin, 75, and Nancy Meyers' "The Intern," with Robert De Niro, 72, are making serious box office buck, drawing in audiences a third their age. Even odder is that neither film pivots around the trials of getting older or the fruits of late coupledom—rather, both focus on the relationships between those of a certain age and those considerably younger, part of a handful of recent movies eschewing traditional plots to tackle the tensions between traditionalists, baby boomers, Generations X, Y and Z. Why the shift? Perhaps the fact that now more than ever we are likely to have to deal with those much older and younger than ourselves. Partly due to rising longevity and falling retirement rates, in 2015, for the first time in history, all five generations could potentially share a workspace. For those of Generations X, Y and Z, delayed marriage and childbearing means that it’s not uncommon for a single 32-year-old to socialize with those five to 10 years older, to compete for internships with applicants fresh out of college. We are entering an age of the pan-generational mashup, and we need to learn how to listen. Widely lauded for cynical character-driven dramas ("The Squid and the Whale," "Greenberg"), Noah Baumbach released two films in 2015 that seem cheery by comparison, both inviting anyone under 50 to sort out what they have in common. In "While We’re Young," Gen Xers Josh and Cornelia—played by Ben Stiller, 49, and Naomi Watts, 47—befriend millennial hipster couple Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver, 31, and Amanda Seyfried, 29. All childless, the four bike across Brooklyn, frequent bougie artisanal restaurants and puke into shared ayahuasca buckets. This cozy cultural crochet joining X and Y eventually unravels—Jamie and Darby aren’t nearly as earnest or ebullient as they seemed, and Josh and Cornelia ultimately opt to become parents—but both couples plainly gain more than they lose in the process. "Mistress America," Baumbach’s late summer comedy, studies the bond between 30-year old Brooke, played by the unsinkable Greta Gerwig, and Tracy, her soon-to-be stepsister, a college first-year played by Lola Kirke. Brooke and Tracy go dancing, attend spinning class, visit bars that proffer complimentary hot dogs. The climax of the film follows a road trip from Manhattan to suburban Connecticut to beg Brooke’s married ex-fiancé (an amusing Michael Chernus) for a serious loan. In a hatchback packed with college kids and one feckless millennial, the transition from youthful insouciance to settled-down banality couldn’t be more explicit. Inevitably, Brooke and Lola “break up” as friends, and just as inevitably, they get back together, in the film’s final scene sharing Thanksgiving dinner in an East Village diner. Tracy boosts Brooke’s flagging confidence as a dreamer who hasn’t gotten her start yet, and Brooke grants self-conscious Tracy a sense of her own distinct appeal. As said in one of the film’s most memorable voice-overs, “Her beauty was that rare kind that made you want to look more like yourself and not like her." "Grandma" and "The Intern" feature an even broader age range—from 5 to 75—poking holes in presumptions of what it means to get old, feel young or (not so) simply grow up. In "Grandma," a kind of “every-wave” feminism unites Elle, an unorthodox matriarch played by Tomlin, her daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), and teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) when facing an unplanned pregnancy. As Ben, “senior intern” to CEO Jules, played by Anne Hathaway, De Niro becomes a grandfatherly confidant—to his boss, office colleagues and practically everyone else with whom he comes into contact. Though differing markedly in tone, style and budget, both films suggest that getting older can lead to a sense of fearlessness and resilience that the young are missing out on. Many have dubbed "Grandma" another “abortion film,” in the spirit of "Obvious Child," but the film’s real focus is on the clashes between the generations already born and blundering. “The gravity of the choice doesn’t elude us,” said Tomlin in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival—and in this film the gravity of the choice brings three generations of women together, quite literally, in a clinic waiting room. At the film’s start, Elle has just broken up with her much younger girlfriend Olivia (played by a very believable Judy Greer), and is soon after visited by her panicked granddaughter. The drama unfolds over the course of a single day, and throughout Tomlin wears her own clothing and drives her own 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer. It’s not surprising that Weitz wrote the role with only Tomlin in mind. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine "The Intern" with anyone but De Niro, who tempers predictable gentle paternalism with a progressive take on working moms and the glass ceiling in a way that seems surprisingly sincere. But it’s harder to take the cross-generational gusto seriously in a context of unlimited fiscal resources (or springy safety nets) for every character involved. Ben’s enviable Brookyn pad sports a kitchen island and walk-in closet. He’s interning not because he needs the money (it’s never even clarified that he’s paid at all) but because, as confessed in voice-over at the beginning of the film, “There’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it.” In ways, "The Intern" seems to suggest that the remedy to senior depression is simply to “put ‘em to work!” even if that work involves menial labor and instantaneous deference to employers decades younger than you. "Grandma" is less utopian about the state of the economy, as Elle’s financial hardships leave her with a ramshackle L.A. bungalow and little else to live on (a mobile of cut-up credit cards twirls above her patio). Reminiscent of the 40 percent of American baby boomers with nothing saved for retirement, Elle’s hard up for cash, and the ensuing hunt for $600 prompts many of the film’s funniest moments: haggling over the value of first-edition feminist tomes at a womyn’s coffee shop, stealing weed from Sage’s boyfriend only to offer it for a price to an old flame (a wizened Sam Elliott). But Weitz doesn’t shy from the real anguish experienced by a woman at 70. Elle mourns the loss of her life partner, Violet, who has died a year earlier; she rues the literary margins at which her poetry has been cast; she breaks down at the thought of losing Olivia, coldly dubbing her a “footnote” to her life before bawling in the shower alone. It is for this reason—Elle’s very raw and tangible pain—that her undaunted solitary sojourn away from the camera during the film’s final scene turns out so deeply moving. By contrast, loss occasions only levity in Meyers’ film—a funeral home becomes a spot for a quirky first date between Ben and the office masseuse (a sultry Renee Russo), its innocuous petal-pink walls matched by the petal-pink cheeks of the affluent dearly beloved. Ben’s daily pill regimen suggests that he may have health troubles, but the brief scene in which his blood pressure seems to rocket is played more for laughs than concern. But then again, it’s a Nancy Meyers film; while "Grandma" leaves behind the high of a hand-crafted cocktail (something strong, a little bitter, with a cherry at the bottom), "The Intern" bestows the lingering headache of too many cheap Cosmos (sips syncopated to a soaring string accompaniment). There are currently more than 100 million adults in the United States over the age of 50, and until this year, baby boomers outnumbered every other generation in the United States. Generation X, the “neglected middle child,” has been compared to a “low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths,” by Paul Taylor, author of "The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown." Millennials and Generation Z seize most current media attention, but often not in a good way, often derided for their detachment from organized religion, dependence on social media, or even inability to form enduring romantic bonds. Baumbach’s recent features engage these subtler gulfs in generational values—how, despite any shared zest for craft beer or Bikram yoga, smaller age differences can be a beast to breach in daily life; when we speak of intergenerational conflicts, we rarely discuss those between people who aren't so far apart in years that one could be the other’s parent or child. "The Intern" and "Grandma" take a more obvious route, pairing septuagenarians with those decades younger, but thankfully resist full-blown nostalgia for the good old days in which their heroes came of age. And for each of these cases, there is something to be said for a Hollywood film that shows that there is life after 40—and before 20, and even past 70!—that age may be a matter of fact, yet never the object of pity.
“Time passes. That’s for sure,” reads the pithy Eileen Myles epigram that launches "Grandma," Paul Weitz’s latest feature. Based on typical Hollywood fare, it could be hard to tell; unless one happens to be Meryl Streep or Richard Gere, life ends after 60, and if you happen to lack a Y chromosome it would seem to stop at least a decade earlier. But some of this might be changing. "Grandma," starring Lily Tomlin, 75, and Nancy Meyers' "The Intern," with Robert De Niro, 72, are making serious box office buck, drawing in audiences a third their age. Even odder is that neither film pivots around the trials of getting older or the fruits of late coupledom—rather, both focus on the relationships between those of a certain age and those considerably younger, part of a handful of recent movies eschewing traditional plots to tackle the tensions between traditionalists, baby boomers, Generations X, Y and Z. Why the shift? Perhaps the fact that now more than ever we are likely to have to deal with those much older and younger than ourselves. Partly due to rising longevity and falling retirement rates, in 2015, for the first time in history, all five generations could potentially share a workspace. For those of Generations X, Y and Z, delayed marriage and childbearing means that it’s not uncommon for a single 32-year-old to socialize with those five to 10 years older, to compete for internships with applicants fresh out of college. We are entering an age of the pan-generational mashup, and we need to learn how to listen. Widely lauded for cynical character-driven dramas ("The Squid and the Whale," "Greenberg"), Noah Baumbach released two films in 2015 that seem cheery by comparison, both inviting anyone under 50 to sort out what they have in common. In "While We’re Young," Gen Xers Josh and Cornelia—played by Ben Stiller, 49, and Naomi Watts, 47—befriend millennial hipster couple Jamie and Darby, played by Adam Driver, 31, and Amanda Seyfried, 29. All childless, the four bike across Brooklyn, frequent bougie artisanal restaurants and puke into shared ayahuasca buckets. This cozy cultural crochet joining X and Y eventually unravels—Jamie and Darby aren’t nearly as earnest or ebullient as they seemed, and Josh and Cornelia ultimately opt to become parents—but both couples plainly gain more than they lose in the process. "Mistress America," Baumbach’s late summer comedy, studies the bond between 30-year old Brooke, played by the unsinkable Greta Gerwig, and Tracy, her soon-to-be stepsister, a college first-year played by Lola Kirke. Brooke and Tracy go dancing, attend spinning class, visit bars that proffer complimentary hot dogs. The climax of the film follows a road trip from Manhattan to suburban Connecticut to beg Brooke’s married ex-fiancé (an amusing Michael Chernus) for a serious loan. In a hatchback packed with college kids and one feckless millennial, the transition from youthful insouciance to settled-down banality couldn’t be more explicit. Inevitably, Brooke and Lola “break up” as friends, and just as inevitably, they get back together, in the film’s final scene sharing Thanksgiving dinner in an East Village diner. Tracy boosts Brooke’s flagging confidence as a dreamer who hasn’t gotten her start yet, and Brooke grants self-conscious Tracy a sense of her own distinct appeal. As said in one of the film’s most memorable voice-overs, “Her beauty was that rare kind that made you want to look more like yourself and not like her." "Grandma" and "The Intern" feature an even broader age range—from 5 to 75—poking holes in presumptions of what it means to get old, feel young or (not so) simply grow up. In "Grandma," a kind of “every-wave” feminism unites Elle, an unorthodox matriarch played by Tomlin, her daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden), and teenage granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) when facing an unplanned pregnancy. As Ben, “senior intern” to CEO Jules, played by Anne Hathaway, De Niro becomes a grandfatherly confidant—to his boss, office colleagues and practically everyone else with whom he comes into contact. Though differing markedly in tone, style and budget, both films suggest that getting older can lead to a sense of fearlessness and resilience that the young are missing out on. Many have dubbed "Grandma" another “abortion film,” in the spirit of "Obvious Child," but the film’s real focus is on the clashes between the generations already born and blundering. “The gravity of the choice doesn’t elude us,” said Tomlin in an interview at the Sundance Film Festival—and in this film the gravity of the choice brings three generations of women together, quite literally, in a clinic waiting room. At the film’s start, Elle has just broken up with her much younger girlfriend Olivia (played by a very believable Judy Greer), and is soon after visited by her panicked granddaughter. The drama unfolds over the course of a single day, and throughout Tomlin wears her own clothing and drives her own 1955 Dodge Royal Lancer. It’s not surprising that Weitz wrote the role with only Tomlin in mind. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine "The Intern" with anyone but De Niro, who tempers predictable gentle paternalism with a progressive take on working moms and the glass ceiling in a way that seems surprisingly sincere. But it’s harder to take the cross-generational gusto seriously in a context of unlimited fiscal resources (or springy safety nets) for every character involved. Ben’s enviable Brookyn pad sports a kitchen island and walk-in closet. He’s interning not because he needs the money (it’s never even clarified that he’s paid at all) but because, as confessed in voice-over at the beginning of the film, “There’s a hole in my life, and I need to fill it.” In ways, "The Intern" seems to suggest that the remedy to senior depression is simply to “put ‘em to work!” even if that work involves menial labor and instantaneous deference to employers decades younger than you. "Grandma" is less utopian about the state of the economy, as Elle’s financial hardships leave her with a ramshackle L.A. bungalow and little else to live on (a mobile of cut-up credit cards twirls above her patio). Reminiscent of the 40 percent of American baby boomers with nothing saved for retirement, Elle’s hard up for cash, and the ensuing hunt for $600 prompts many of the film’s funniest moments: haggling over the value of first-edition feminist tomes at a womyn’s coffee shop, stealing weed from Sage’s boyfriend only to offer it for a price to an old flame (a wizened Sam Elliott). But Weitz doesn’t shy from the real anguish experienced by a woman at 70. Elle mourns the loss of her life partner, Violet, who has died a year earlier; she rues the literary margins at which her poetry has been cast; she breaks down at the thought of losing Olivia, coldly dubbing her a “footnote” to her life before bawling in the shower alone. It is for this reason—Elle’s very raw and tangible pain—that her undaunted solitary sojourn away from the camera during the film’s final scene turns out so deeply moving. By contrast, loss occasions only levity in Meyers’ film—a funeral home becomes a spot for a quirky first date between Ben and the office masseuse (a sultry Renee Russo), its innocuous petal-pink walls matched by the petal-pink cheeks of the affluent dearly beloved. Ben’s daily pill regimen suggests that he may have health troubles, but the brief scene in which his blood pressure seems to rocket is played more for laughs than concern. But then again, it’s a Nancy Meyers film; while "Grandma" leaves behind the high of a hand-crafted cocktail (something strong, a little bitter, with a cherry at the bottom), "The Intern" bestows the lingering headache of too many cheap Cosmos (sips syncopated to a soaring string accompaniment). There are currently more than 100 million adults in the United States over the age of 50, and until this year, baby boomers outnumbered every other generation in the United States. Generation X, the “neglected middle child,” has been compared to a “low-slung, straight-line bridge between two noisy behemoths,” by Paul Taylor, author of "The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown." Millennials and Generation Z seize most current media attention, but often not in a good way, often derided for their detachment from organized religion, dependence on social media, or even inability to form enduring romantic bonds. Baumbach’s recent features engage these subtler gulfs in generational values—how, despite any shared zest for craft beer or Bikram yoga, smaller age differences can be a beast to breach in daily life; when we speak of intergenerational conflicts, we rarely discuss those between people who aren't so far apart in years that one could be the other’s parent or child. "The Intern" and "Grandma" take a more obvious route, pairing septuagenarians with those decades younger, but thankfully resist full-blown nostalgia for the good old days in which their heroes came of age. And for each of these cases, there is something to be said for a Hollywood film that shows that there is life after 40—and before 20, and even past 70!—that age may be a matter of fact, yet never the object of pity.
Big Coal’s disgusting cash grab: Miners are being victimized all over again
This story was co-published with The Daily Beast. There was plenty in the complex deal to benefit bankers, lawyers, executives and hedge fund managers. Patriot Coal Corp. was bankrupt, but its mines would be auctioned to pay off mounting debts while financial engineering would generate enough cash to cover the cost of the proceedings. When the plan was filed in U.S. bankruptcy court in Richmond last week, however, one group didn’t come out so well: 208 retired miners, wives and widows in southern Indiana who have no direct connection to Patriot Coal. Millions of dollars earmarked for their health care as they age would effectively be diverted instead to legal fees and other bills from the bankruptcy. As coal companies go bankrupt or shut down throughout Appalachia and parts of the Midwest, the immediate fallout includes lost jobs and devastated communities. But the Indiana case stands out as an example of how financial deals hatched far from coal country can also endanger the future safety net. At issue is health insurance promised to people who worked for the Squaw Creek Coal Company in Warrick County, Indiana, near Evansville, who, like other retired union miners, counted on coverage after they turned 55. “We were assured as miners we would have lifetime health-care benefits — no one ever envisioned that we would have to worry about these other things that were going on,” said Bil Musgrave, 59, one of the retired miners in Indiana. “A lot of them depend entirely on this.” Secure health insurance has been one casualty of the wave of bankruptcies. Companies in decline are seeking to offload those obligations onto taxpayers, putting more stress on an already-strained federal safety net. An effort is underway in Congress to protect at least some families facing a loss in benefits because of the industry’s turmoil, but its prospects are unclear. Squaw Creek, where Musgrave started working almost 40 years ago, opened as a joint venture between Alcoa, and Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company. The unionized surface mine in Warrick County, Indiana, near Evansville, powered Alcoa’s huge aluminum plant nearby. The venture mostly petered out by the late 1990s, though mining has since resumed in the same area, using non-union miners. Under their union contract, miners who worked at least 20 years at Squaw Creek were entitled to a pension and to health care coverage once they reached 55. For many of those who are still under 65, this coverage is what they rely on; for those who are on Medicare, it offers a supplement to cover the extensive health care costs many of them now face. Some suffer from black lung disease, while others, including Musgrave, have fought cancers they believe are linked to industrial waste dumps at Squaw Creek. The Squaw Creek miners thought little of it when, in 2007, Peabody passed what remained of its Alcoa venture — some environmental reclamation work at the mine — to an offshoot called Heritage Coal, a subsidiary of a new entity Peabody created called Patriot Coal. The health care obligation for the retirees was assumed by Alcoa, which paid Patriot to administer the benefits. The United Mine Workers of America estimates this has been costing Alcoa about $2 million per year to cover the 208 miners, wives and widows. But here’s where the financial engineering got complicated and ultimately threatened those benefits: Peabody also transferred to Patriot 13 percent of its coal reserves, and about 40 percent of its health care liabilities — the obligations for 8,400 former Peabody workers. A year later, Patriot was loaded up with even more costs when it acquired Magnum Coal, a subsidiary of the country’s second-largest mining company, Arch Coal. This left Patriot with responsibility for another 2,300 retirees, and, by 2012, total liabilities of $1.37 billion. It looked as if Patriot had been set up to fail, and in 2013 it in fact did, seeking Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Patriot emerged from bankruptcy later that year after getting an investment stake from a New York hedge fund called Knighthead Capital Management. Patriot also reached a deal with the mine workers union to have it take over responsibility for the health care of those nearly 11,000 retirees, with a promise of about $310 million from Patriot to help cover the cost. Still, the deal wasn’t enough to keep Patriot healthy. With the industry contracting even further amid competition from natural gas, tougher environmental regulations and declining coals reserves in Appalachia, Patriot filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yet again earlier this year. This time, its assets are being auctioned off. Back in Indiana, there was no reason for the retired Squaw Creek miners to think their benefits were at risk from the Patriot bankruptcy, since they were being paid by Alcoa, a thriving company with $24 billion in annual revenue. But last week, Patriot’s lawyers, from the firm Kirkland & Ellis, made two filings at the bankruptcy court in Richmond that caught the union and the retired miners by surprise. In the filings, the lawyers informed the court that Patriot (or technically, its subsidiary Heritage) had negotiated a $22 million payment from Alcoa to assume the outstanding health care obligations for the Squaw Creek workers. The deal offers savings to Alcoa, given that the actuarial cost of the benefits is $40 million. But here’s the catch: Patriot is not putting the $22 million toward the Squaw Creek health care benefits. According to the court filings, only $4 million will go toward that purpose — $1 million for the benefits of former salaried managers at the mine, and $3 million for the rank-and-file miners. The rest of the money from Alcoa — $18 million — is going to cover the costs of the bankruptcy. This includes the fees for Kirkland & Ellis, which has at least four attorneys from New York and Chicago on the case, and the Washington, D.C. restructuring advisory firm _Alvarez & Marsal. The agreement with Alcoa, one filing states, “allows the Debtors [that is, Patriot] to obtain cash in the amount of $22,000,000, which will be critical for funding the Debtors’ costs associated with emerging from chapter 11.” In other words, the cash for health care benefits guaranteed to miners who never worked for Patriot Coal — who live in a state far from Patriot’s base in West Virginia — is now being used to pay the bills of lawyers and other professionals overseeing the break-up of Patriot Coal. The Kirkland & Ellis lawyers on the case either did not return calls and e-mails or declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Patriot said the company “has no further comment” beyond the filings. An Alcoa spokeswoman said that company also had no comment. Knighthead, the hedge fund behind Patriot, did not return calls. Under Patriot’s agreement with Alcoa, the Squaw Creek workers will be added to the larger pool of retirees covered under the union’s 2013 agreement with Patriot. The people in that pool, who now number about 12,000, get health insurance from the union-supervised Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association. But Patriot’s $3 million contribution to the beneficiary fund will only cover about 18 months of benefits for the Squaw Creek miners — putting more stress on a fund that is already expected to run dry in a few years. The union is pushing legislation in Congress that would put the 12,000 Peabody/Patriot retirees into yet another fund that has since 1992 been covering union retirees from shuttered mines. That fund was for years fed by the interest from fees coal companies were paying to restore abandoned mines, but since 2006 it has been buttressed by $490 million per year in taxpayer money. The bill has 54 co-sponsors, but is still awaiting a hearing in the House. Meanwhile, Patriot’s deal with Alcoa, and its plan to put most of the money toward bankruptcy costs, goes before the bankruptcy court Monday in Richmond for approval. “What we’re seeing here is a very shady deal to deprive 200-plus elderly and working Americans of the benefits they’ve earned so that these lawyers can put money in their pockets,” said union spokesman Phil Smith.
Kershaw gets 300 strikeouts, 1st pitcher to do it since 2002
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers recorded his 300th strikeout of the season, becoming the first major league pitcher in 13 years to do so.
Kershaw had seven strikeouts in 3 2-3 innings Sunday against the San Diego Padres, leaving with a 2-0 lead. He reached the 300-mark with a swinging strikeout of Melvin Upton Jr. to end the third.
Kershaw concluded the regular season with 301 strikeouts, joining former Arizona teammates Randy Johnson (2000-02) and Curt Schilling (2002) as the only pitchers since 2000 to record 300.
He joined mentor Sandy Koufax as the only Dodgers to reach the mark. Koufax last did it in 1966.
Kershaw received a standing ovation from the crowd in his final tuneup before the Dodgers open the NL Division Series at home against the New York Mets on Friday.
The pope’s billionaire entourage: How the 1 percent embarrassed themselves before the pontiff
Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24. The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day. Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection. All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour. Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'” 
Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24. The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day. Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection. All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour. Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'” Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24. The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day. Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection. All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour. Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'”
“Oh, OK?” Oh, brother. Wonder how Pope Francis would have responded to that bit of priestly pragmatism? After all, Francis is the one who wrote, “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
But sure enough, there in the exclusive crowd at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue Thursday night, hanging out as the Vicar of Christ celebrated Vespers, was Kenneth Langone, soaking it all in. There, too, reportedly, were a couple of other crony capitalists and St. Patrick’s fundraisers – Frank Bisignano, president and CEO of First Data Corp., and Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America. Bisignano, known as “Wall Street’s Mr. Fix-It” used to work for Citigroup and for Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and reportedly received annual compensation at First Data to the tune of $9.3 million. Moynihan was paid $13 million for 2014, down from $14 million in 2013. Last year, Bank of America, the second largest in the country – but the most hated — made a record-breaking $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department to pay up for allegations of unloading toxic mortgage investments during the housing boom. Nice. But of all the fat cats suddenly in the thrall of the People’s Pope, one was the most impressive. Watching Francis on television Friday afternoon as he met with kids up in East Harlem at Our Lady Queen of Angels primary school, I noticed a well-dressed man hovering near the pontiff. A politician, a government or Vatican official, I wondered? Nope, it was none other than Stephen Schwarzman, head of the giant private equity firm Blackstone. He was paid a whopping $690 million last year and last week, he and his wife donated $40 million to pay for scholarships to New York City’s Catholic schools. A generous gift for sure, but as Bill Moyers and I wrote in 2012, this is the same Stephen Schwarzman “whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months — one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.” “To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’ Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Armory’s entrance [was] hung with banners painted to replicate Mr. Schwarzman’s sprawling Park Avenue apartment. A brass band and children clad in military uniforms ushered in guests… The menu included lobster, baked Alaska and a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne Montrachet, among other fine wines.” It must have seemed like Heaven to some. And what makes this billionaire’s proximity to the pope all the more surreal is that just the morning before, Francis had spoken to Congress in reverent tones of two outspoken, radical, New York Catholics; activist and organizer Dorothy Day – co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — and Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, each of whom embraced poverty, social justice and resistance. “We believe in an economy based on human needs rather than on the profit motive,” Day wrote, and Merton worried about “the versatile blandishments of money.” Day wished the church’s bounty to be spread among the needy and not spent on cathedrals and ephemera. And Merton wrote, “It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you, try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself.” Whether the irony struck Stephen Schwarzman is unknown. He himself was probably in too much of a hurry for contemplation. After East Harlem, he rushed off to the White House and that state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. His plus-one was Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who infamously told employees they should be like hyenas stalking wildebeest: “It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system… because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement).” There you have it. In the Bible – right before the camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Masters of the Universe like Dalio and Schwarzman prefer the Law of the Jungle, buying proximity to holiness and assuaging guilt with cash, all the while upholding savage nature red in tooth and claw. By the way, Schwarzman’s wife gave the White House dinner a pass. She had a better deal: an excellent, paid in advance seat at the pope’s mass in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24. The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day. Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection. All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour. Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'” “Oh, OK?” Oh, brother. Wonder how Pope Francis would have responded to that bit of priestly pragmatism? After all, Francis is the one who wrote, “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
But sure enough, there in the exclusive crowd at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue Thursday night, hanging out as the Vicar of Christ celebrated Vespers, was Kenneth Langone, soaking it all in. There, too, reportedly, were a couple of other crony capitalists and St. Patrick’s fundraisers – Frank Bisignano, president and CEO of First Data Corp., and Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America. Bisignano, known as “Wall Street’s Mr. Fix-It” used to work for Citigroup and for Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and reportedly received annual compensation at First Data to the tune of $9.3 million. Moynihan was paid $13 million for 2014, down from $14 million in 2013. Last year, Bank of America, the second largest in the country – but the most hated — made a record-breaking $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department to pay up for allegations of unloading toxic mortgage investments during the housing boom. Nice. But of all the fat cats suddenly in the thrall of the People’s Pope, one was the most impressive. Watching Francis on television Friday afternoon as he met with kids up in East Harlem at Our Lady Queen of Angels primary school, I noticed a well-dressed man hovering near the pontiff. A politician, a government or Vatican official, I wondered? Nope, it was none other than Stephen Schwarzman, head of the giant private equity firm Blackstone. He was paid a whopping $690 million last year and last week, he and his wife donated $40 million to pay for scholarships to New York City’s Catholic schools. A generous gift for sure, but as Bill Moyers and I wrote in 2012, this is the same Stephen Schwarzman “whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months — one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.” “To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’ Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Armory’s entrance [was] hung with banners painted to replicate Mr. Schwarzman’s sprawling Park Avenue apartment. A brass band and children clad in military uniforms ushered in guests… The menu included lobster, baked Alaska and a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne Montrachet, among other fine wines.” It must have seemed like Heaven to some. And what makes this billionaire’s proximity to the pope all the more surreal is that just the morning before, Francis had spoken to Congress in reverent tones of two outspoken, radical, New York Catholics; activist and organizer Dorothy Day – co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — and Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, each of whom embraced poverty, social justice and resistance. “We believe in an economy based on human needs rather than on the profit motive,” Day wrote, and Merton worried about “the versatile blandishments of money.” Day wished the church’s bounty to be spread among the needy and not spent on cathedrals and ephemera. And Merton wrote, “It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you, try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself.” Whether the irony struck Stephen Schwarzman is unknown. He himself was probably in too much of a hurry for contemplation. After East Harlem, he rushed off to the White House and that state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. His plus-one was Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who infamously told employees they should be like hyenas stalking wildebeest: “It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system… because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement).” There you have it. In the Bible – right before the camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Masters of the Universe like Dalio and Schwarzman prefer the Law of the Jungle, buying proximity to holiness and assuaging guilt with cash, all the while upholding savage nature red in tooth and claw. By the way, Schwarzman’s wife gave the White House dinner a pass. She had a better deal: an excellent, paid in advance seat at the pope’s mass in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.Many of you know the words: “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” So sayeth Jesus in the New Testament’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 19, Verse 24. The pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. But if you were taking a close look at and giving a careful listen to some of those surrounding Pope Francis during his visit here in New York last week, you could practically hear joints pop and muscles groan as the superwealthy contorted themselves to thread the needle and purchase their way into the pontiff’s good graces. Camels? These wealthy dromedaries gave a new meaning to Hump Day. Notwithstanding his encounter with notorious, Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, the pope’s visit to the United States last week was a success, with millions turning out to get even a glimpse of him. But some had much better views than others. In fact, since before the Reformation, when the Catholic Church sold indulgences – pre-paid, non-stop tickets to heaven for affluent sinners –there has not often been such a display of ecclesiastic, conspicuous consumption and genuflection. All of which, of course, is more than ironic when you think about the things Pope Francis has said and written about the rich and poor, some of which he expressed during last week’s papal tour. Back in November 2013, the pope wrote that, “While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few… A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” Ideas like that got Kenneth Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and major political bankroller of New Jersey’s Chris Christie, a little hot under the collar. You may remember that last year he created a stir when he told Politico that he hoped a rise in populist sentiment against the one percent was not working, “because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” A year before, in 2013, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan had enlisted the DIY plutocrat to help raise $175 million to restore the grand and elegant St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, but in an interview Langone gave to the money network CNBC, he said one of his high rolling potential donors was concerned that the pope was being overly critical of market economies as “exclusionary” and attacking a “culture of prosperity… incapable of feeling compassion for the poor.” So Langone complained to Cardinal Dolan, and this is how the cardinal says he replied: “‘Well, Ken, that would be a misunderstanding of the Holy Father’s message. The pope loves poor people. He also loves rich people…’ So I said, ‘Ken, thanks for bringing it to my attention. We’ve gotta correct to make sure this gentleman understands the Holy Father’s message properly.’ And then I think he’s gonna say, ‘Oh, OK. If that’s the case, count me in for St. Patrick’s Cathedral.'” “Oh, OK?” Oh, brother. Wonder how Pope Francis would have responded to that bit of priestly pragmatism? After all, Francis is the one who wrote, “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”
But sure enough, there in the exclusive crowd at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue Thursday night, hanging out as the Vicar of Christ celebrated Vespers, was Kenneth Langone, soaking it all in. There, too, reportedly, were a couple of other crony capitalists and St. Patrick’s fundraisers – Frank Bisignano, president and CEO of First Data Corp., and Brian Moynihan, chairman and CEO of Bank of America. Bisignano, known as “Wall Street’s Mr. Fix-It” used to work for Citigroup and for Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and reportedly received annual compensation at First Data to the tune of $9.3 million. Moynihan was paid $13 million for 2014, down from $14 million in 2013. Last year, Bank of America, the second largest in the country – but the most hated — made a record-breaking $16.65 billion settlement with the Justice Department to pay up for allegations of unloading toxic mortgage investments during the housing boom. Nice. But of all the fat cats suddenly in the thrall of the People’s Pope, one was the most impressive. Watching Francis on television Friday afternoon as he met with kids up in East Harlem at Our Lady Queen of Angels primary school, I noticed a well-dressed man hovering near the pontiff. A politician, a government or Vatican official, I wondered? Nope, it was none other than Stephen Schwarzman, head of the giant private equity firm Blackstone. He was paid a whopping $690 million last year and last week, he and his wife donated $40 million to pay for scholarships to New York City’s Catholic schools. A generous gift for sure, but as Bill Moyers and I wrote in 2012, this is the same Stephen Schwarzman “whose agents in 2006 launched a predatory raid on a travel company in Colorado. His fund bought it, laid off 841 employees, and recouped its entire investment in just seven months — one of the quickest returns on capital ever for such a deal.” “To celebrate his 60th birthday Mr. Schwarzman rented the Park Avenue Armory here in New York at a cost of $3 million, including a gospel choir led by Patti LaBelle that serenaded him with ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.’ Does he ever — his net worth is estimated at nearly $5 billion.” As The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Armory’s entrance [was] hung with banners painted to replicate Mr. Schwarzman’s sprawling Park Avenue apartment. A brass band and children clad in military uniforms ushered in guests… The menu included lobster, baked Alaska and a 2004 Louis Jadot Chassagne Montrachet, among other fine wines.” It must have seemed like Heaven to some. And what makes this billionaire’s proximity to the pope all the more surreal is that just the morning before, Francis had spoken to Congress in reverent tones of two outspoken, radical, New York Catholics; activist and organizer Dorothy Day – co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement — and Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton, each of whom embraced poverty, social justice and resistance. “We believe in an economy based on human needs rather than on the profit motive,” Day wrote, and Merton worried about “the versatile blandishments of money.” Day wished the church’s bounty to be spread among the needy and not spent on cathedrals and ephemera. And Merton wrote, “It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you, try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself.” Whether the irony struck Stephen Schwarzman is unknown. He himself was probably in too much of a hurry for contemplation. After East Harlem, he rushed off to the White House and that state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping. His plus-one was Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who infamously told employees they should be like hyenas stalking wildebeest: “It is good for both the hyenas who are operating in their self-interest and the interest of the greater system… because killing and eating the wildebeest fosters evolution (i.e., the natural process of improvement).” There you have it. In the Bible – right before the camel and the eye of a needle, Jesus says, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.” Masters of the Universe like Dalio and Schwarzman prefer the Law of the Jungle, buying proximity to holiness and assuaging guilt with cash, all the while upholding savage nature red in tooth and claw. By the way, Schwarzman’s wife gave the White House dinner a pass. She had a better deal: an excellent, paid in advance seat at the pope’s mass in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.
Ben Carson slanders Islam: Here’s exactly why his claims about Muslims are dead wrong
In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.” Sadly, just as racial segregationists long garnered votes by promoting fear of black Americans, religious segregationists such as Carson today garner votes by promoting fear of Muslim Americans. In fact, Carson’s anti-Muslim intolerance has advanced his polling numbers and dramatically increased his campaign fundraising. In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether. Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda. Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.” Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam. For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women: 
In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.” Sadly, just as racial segregationists long garnered votes by promoting fear of black Americans, religious segregationists such as Carson today garner votes by promoting fear of Muslim Americans. In fact, Carson’s anti-Muslim intolerance has advanced his polling numbers and dramatically increased his campaign fundraising. In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether. Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda. Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.” Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam. For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women: In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.” Sadly, just as racial segregationists long garnered votes by promoting fear of black Americans, religious segregationists such as Carson today garner votes by promoting fear of Muslim Americans. In fact, Carson’s anti-Muslim intolerance has advanced his polling numbers and dramatically increased his campaign fundraising. In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether. Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda. Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.” Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam. For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women:
“Surely, men who submit themselves to God and women who submit themselves to Him…God has prepared for all of them forgiveness and a great reward.”Carson’s parents divorced when he was 8—a right American women didn’t have until the 19th century. Meanwhile, Islam was the first religion to give women the right to choose to marry or to divorce, the right to own property, to become secular or religious scholars, the right to inherit, or to run a business—all in the 7th century. Ayesha, wife of Muhammad, is recognized as one of the foremost legal scholars in Islamic history. Meanwhile, American women finally earn legal recognition as lawyers in the late 1800s. While women of color in 2015 America continue to lag behind white women in terms of college graduation rates and access to financial resources, Fatimah al-Fihri, an African Muslim woman scholar, used her inheritance from her father to establish the world's first University, al-Qarawiyyin University in 859 C.E. Prophet Muhammad repeatedly declared, “It is incumbent upon every Muslim male and every Muslim female to attain education.” Dr. Carson’s second claim, that Shariah requires killing people of other faiths, is highly objectionable to both the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. In truth, the Qur’an only permits fighting in self-defense, or to protect “churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques” from attack. Prophet Muhammad issued numerous charters with Christians, Jews, and pagans to affirm his commitment to universal religious freedom and equal human rights for all people regardless of faith. Throughout history non-Muslim historians have praised Muhammad for his pluralism and tolerance. While extremists have no doubt attempted to malign true Islam, Dr. Carson should recognize that a president’s role is to build bridges of peace and understanding—not fear and intolerance. Just as the George Wallaces of Dr. Carson’s childhood are remembered with disdain for their racial segregationist views, Dr. Carson risks a future where our children remember him in disdain for his religious segregationist views. America was founded on the ideal of religious pluralism, not religious segregation. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to realize this fact. Actually, I take that back. Qasim Rashid, Esq. is the national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Prince al-Waleed bin Talal School of Islamic Studies. His forthcoming book Talk To Me is due out December 15. Follow him on Twitter @MuslimIQ.
In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.” Sadly, just as racial segregationists long garnered votes by promoting fear of black Americans, religious segregationists such as Carson today garner votes by promoting fear of Muslim Americans. In fact, Carson’s anti-Muslim intolerance has advanced his polling numbers and dramatically increased his campaign fundraising. In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether. Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda. Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.” Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam. For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women: “Surely, men who submit themselves to God and women who submit themselves to Him…God has prepared for all of them forgiveness and a great reward.”Carson’s parents divorced when he was 8—a right American women didn’t have until the 19th century. Meanwhile, Islam was the first religion to give women the right to choose to marry or to divorce, the right to own property, to become secular or religious scholars, the right to inherit, or to run a business—all in the 7th century. Ayesha, wife of Muhammad, is recognized as one of the foremost legal scholars in Islamic history. Meanwhile, American women finally earn legal recognition as lawyers in the late 1800s. While women of color in 2015 America continue to lag behind white women in terms of college graduation rates and access to financial resources, Fatimah al-Fihri, an African Muslim woman scholar, used her inheritance from her father to establish the world's first University, al-Qarawiyyin University in 859 C.E. Prophet Muhammad repeatedly declared, “It is incumbent upon every Muslim male and every Muslim female to attain education.” Dr. Carson’s second claim, that Shariah requires killing people of other faiths, is highly objectionable to both the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. In truth, the Qur’an only permits fighting in self-defense, or to protect “churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques” from attack. Prophet Muhammad issued numerous charters with Christians, Jews, and pagans to affirm his commitment to universal religious freedom and equal human rights for all people regardless of faith. Throughout history non-Muslim historians have praised Muhammad for his pluralism and tolerance. While extremists have no doubt attempted to malign true Islam, Dr. Carson should recognize that a president’s role is to build bridges of peace and understanding—not fear and intolerance. Just as the George Wallaces of Dr. Carson’s childhood are remembered with disdain for their racial segregationist views, Dr. Carson risks a future where our children remember him in disdain for his religious segregationist views. America was founded on the ideal of religious pluralism, not religious segregation. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to realize this fact. Actually, I take that back. Qasim Rashid, Esq. is the national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Prince al-Waleed bin Talal School of Islamic Studies. His forthcoming book Talk To Me is due out December 15. Follow him on Twitter @MuslimIQ.
In his recent anti-Muslim crusade, Ben Carson promoted a disturbing form of religious segregation, claiming that a Muslim should only be president if he or she “renounces the tenets of Islam.” Sadly, just as racial segregationists long garnered votes by promoting fear of black Americans, religious segregationists such as Carson today garner votes by promoting fear of Muslim Americans. In fact, Carson’s anti-Muslim intolerance has advanced his polling numbers and dramatically increased his campaign fundraising. In the process, Dr. Carson has helped promote and sustain frighteningly high levels of anti-Muslim sentiment. A recent PPP survey in North Carolina reported that 72 percent believe a Muslim should not be allowed to be president of the United States. Likewise, 40 percent seek to ban Islam altogether. Under Dr. Carson’s crusade of religious segregation, some Americans appear to have forgotten the First Amendment’s fundamental religious freedom guarantee, and likewise Article VI of the Constitution, which forbids religious tests for any government office. Like his racial segregationist predecessors, Dr. Carson demonstrates that the Constitution is suddenly meaningless when influential politicians use fear and hate to advance their agenda. Undeterred from his myopic comments on CNN and the resulting blowback last week, Carson advanced his religious segregationist views in a recent email to his constituents, claiming that “Under Shariah law, women must be subservient and people following other religions must be killed.” Dr. Carson defends these claims by arguing that he “hate[s] political correctness. It’s dangerous.” More dangerous, however, are his patently false claims about women in Islam, and Islam’s view of non-Muslims. If Dr. Carson is correct—and unfortunately his rising poll figures indicate that enough Americans believe he is correct—then America’s 3 million Muslims are obliged to make America’s 170 million women subservient and likewise kill the nation’s 330 million non-Muslims. Both concepts are beyond absurd and wholly unfounded in Islam. For example, far from Dr. Carson’s claim that in Islam women are subservient, Islam gave women equal rights in 610 that our own United States haven’t given even in 2015. To this day America has not passed the Equal Rights Amendment. Meanwhile the Quran 33:36 emphatically declares the equality of men and women: “Surely, men who submit themselves to God and women who submit themselves to Him…God has prepared for all of them forgiveness and a great reward.”Carson’s parents divorced when he was 8—a right American women didn’t have until the 19th century. Meanwhile, Islam was the first religion to give women the right to choose to marry or to divorce, the right to own property, to become secular or religious scholars, the right to inherit, or to run a business—all in the 7th century. Ayesha, wife of Muhammad, is recognized as one of the foremost legal scholars in Islamic history. Meanwhile, American women finally earn legal recognition as lawyers in the late 1800s. While women of color in 2015 America continue to lag behind white women in terms of college graduation rates and access to financial resources, Fatimah al-Fihri, an African Muslim woman scholar, used her inheritance from her father to establish the world's first University, al-Qarawiyyin University in 859 C.E. Prophet Muhammad repeatedly declared, “It is incumbent upon every Muslim male and every Muslim female to attain education.” Dr. Carson’s second claim, that Shariah requires killing people of other faiths, is highly objectionable to both the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. In truth, the Qur’an only permits fighting in self-defense, or to protect “churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques” from attack. Prophet Muhammad issued numerous charters with Christians, Jews, and pagans to affirm his commitment to universal religious freedom and equal human rights for all people regardless of faith. Throughout history non-Muslim historians have praised Muhammad for his pluralism and tolerance. While extremists have no doubt attempted to malign true Islam, Dr. Carson should recognize that a president’s role is to build bridges of peace and understanding—not fear and intolerance. Just as the George Wallaces of Dr. Carson’s childhood are remembered with disdain for their racial segregationist views, Dr. Carson risks a future where our children remember him in disdain for his religious segregationist views. America was founded on the ideal of religious pluralism, not religious segregation. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to realize this fact. Actually, I take that back. Qasim Rashid, Esq. is the national spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA and Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Prince al-Waleed bin Talal School of Islamic Studies. His forthcoming book Talk To Me is due out December 15. Follow him on Twitter @MuslimIQ.
Parental rights for rapists? You’d be surprised how cruel the law can be
In 2009, Jaime Melendez raped and impregnated a 14-year-old girl in Massachusetts. He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to lengthy probation, and was ordered to pay child support. Then he pulled a familiar, and perfectly legal, maneuver: He demanded visitation rights, and offered to drop his demand if he no longer had to pay child support. A few years earlier, a North Carolina woman became pregnant as the result of rape and placed the baby for adoption. To complete the process, she was required to get permission from the father – who was in jail awaiting trial for the rape. He told her he would agree to the adoption if she didn’t testify against him at the trial. “What do I do?” she later asked. “Protect society or protect the adoption?” The law provided no answer. For the one-third of rape victims who become pregnant and carry their pregnancies to term, the law can be cruel indeed. A father’s right to be an active parent is no less hard-wired into the law than that of a mother. Rape victims are often forced to consult with their assailants on matters such as schools, summer camps and religious practices, and also to share custody. In about 15 states, rape victims have no legal protection against decades of intimate ties with the men they least want to associate with. Other states provide only minimal remedies. A woman’s decision to keep the child can thus bring years of manipulation, harassment and intimidation, as well as interference with her efforts to recover from her rape. Women still have the right to terminate pregnancies that result from rape, but many victims’ religious, moral or other beliefs make that simply not an option. As expressed by attorney-advocate Shauna Prewitt about her pregnancy, “My body – a body which felt so dead after my rape – had not only created life, but was nurturing life, and I was amazed … I chose to raise my rape-conceived child.” It took years of court battles with Prewitt’s attacker before his parental rights were finally cut off. “I got lucky,” she wrote. About 35 states allow courts to terminate the parental rights of rapists, but most of them require that the men first be convicted. However, given that less than one-fifth of rapes are even reported, and only about 5 percent of those result in convictions, these laws might just as well not exist. About nine states don’t require rape convictions, including Wisconsin, which also allows the mother to seek the termination of the father’s parental rights without first notifying him. In May, after years of dithering, Congress passed the Rape Survivor Child Custody Act (RSCCA), which pledges money for states that pass laws denying parental rights to men if the mothers show (usually in family courts) that they have been raped. Notably, the victims need only prove that the rape occurred by “clear and convincing” evidence -- not the tougher “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal courts. So far so good: Yet another gaping hole in rape law is starting to close and victims can now look forward to the day when their decisions to keep their children do not bring the ongoing presence of the rapist himself. What can possibly be wrong with that? In fact, several things, each of which shows why rape remains such a confounding area of the law, and why even the most well-intentioned measures can cause more problems. In the first place, it’s ill-advised to conduct rape trials in the family courts, which are clogged to the rafters and not set up to handle such complex cases. True, family courts can cut off parental rights in contexts such as child abuse, but resolving the subtleties of rape claims without the “machinery or protections” of criminal courts is a formula for bad results. We are already seeing the chaos – and the lawsuits -- that result when universities try to adjudicate rape cases, particularly when the accused claims he didn’t get a fair trial. In July, in a closely watched case, a California court threw out a University of California San Diego hearing panel’s penalties against a male student for sexually assaulting a female classmate. The court found that the entire process was botched and unfair. No one is happy with the criminal courts in rape cases, but shifting such cases to less-equipped forums could compound the problem. Second, easy as it is to say that “rape is rape,” not all cases are the same. The predatory stranger, husband or acquaintance does not equate, for example, with a man who had consensual sex with a minor. Statutory rape cases come up all the time, particularly when the female is underage, the male a young adult, and the girl’s parents are hopping mad about the relationship. While the sex may technically be illegal, the accused man may still be ready and willing to fulfill his duties as a father. In these circumstance, it may well work an injustice – particularly to the child -- to bar the father from his child’s life, regardless of whether the mother (or, more likely, her parents) wishes he would just go away. Too often lost in the discussion about rape-conceived children are the voices of the children themselves. Who speaks for them when, as infants, their fates are being decided? Nowhere in the RSCCA is there a requirement that they be represented by independent counsel. And what if they later wish, despite everything, to have contact with their fathers? Assuming that a father is able to have, for example, supervised contact with the child, is it right for the mother to block the relationship? In these circumstances, the mother’s well-founded desire to avoid contact with the father may not coincide with the child’s best interests. Of course, abortion is not in the child’s best interests either, but as Prewitt points out in a brilliant law review article, the readiness of most pro-life advocates to embrace a “rape exception” implicitly expresses the view that a rape-conceived child is a “wicked product” of a crime and less deserving of life than other children. “After all,” Prewitt writes with a heavy dose of irony, “What raped woman would willingly choose to give birth to her ‘rapist’s child’? What raped woman would choose to continue the victimization of her rape?” I am staunchly pro-choice, but once one takes the pro-life position, there should be no room for a rape exception. The issue of rapists’ parental rights highlights a key, and uncomfortable, flaw in the mainstream pro-life argument. If life begins at conception, then the unborn child of a rapist must be valued equally with one conceived through consensual sex. And once the child is born, its interests may well diverge from the desires of the mother. Clearly, we need reliable mechanisms to prevent rapists from using their parental rights (and the paucity of court convictions) to continue their torment of their victims. In many circumstances, fathers should be barred from exercising parental rights for some period of time. But once rape victims choose not to terminate their pregnancies, then their own needs must be balanced against what is best, in the long term, for the children. In the end, the welfare of the child must prevail. Eric Berkowitz is a San Francisco-based human rights lawyer and the author, most recently, of "
October 3, 2015
Cow-milking lessons from mom: Life (and writing) skills from my mother
Anyone who writes a book called "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters" has to expect to be asked about her own mother, so let me get that conversation started here. In my novel "Once Upon a River," the protagonist Margo Crane’s mother was a runaway. My mother, Susanna, was the opposite—she stuck around home. When everybody was running around and running away in the 1960s and '70s, my mom had to be there to milk the cow twice a day. Susanna has lived a life full of challenges and personal trials, mostly brought on by her own strong and determined character. She raised a heap of kids by herself, her own kids and other people’s—the price she paid for always being there was that other people showed up for the free babysitting. Sometimes neighbors or cousins stayed the whole summer. Mom was a horsewoman, and she became a horse trader. She also became the one the local farmers all called to help to deliver their difficult calves. She also has drunk plenty and smoked like a chimney for decades. She loves to spend time listening to music and laughing and telling and hearing funny stories. She wants literature to entertain and relieve her from stress, to smooth life’s rough edges. This is why Susanna doesn’t love my writing. She’s very proud of me, but she wishes I’d write something funny, like slapstick or folkloric humor. Or she wishes I would write a series of murder mysteries in which a clever woman outwits criminals before the book’s end. Instead, I write about problems that have no solutions. My stories make a reader think more and worry more. Nonetheless, an awful lot of what I’ve learned about writing has come from her. The first thing I learned was to work hard. From the time I was 7 years old, my mom was a single parent struggling to feed at least five hungry kids at any given time. She had eight acres of land, a few outbuildings and a pasture where she’d kept a horse. Well, as soon as she got divorced, she figured out that she could get free runt piglets from the local pig farmers (the ones that wouldn’t survive). She bought a mean old milk cow named Red, a Hereford-Ayrshire mix, some cheap calves at auction to raise for meat, and some chickens for eggs. She also grew a hell of a garden and canned 200 quarts of tomatoes. I have seen this small woman lug 50-pound feed bags, 80-pound bales of hay, and when it was time to restring the pasture fence, she wrestled railroad ties for us to use as fence posts. I shouldn’t say this, but she may have stolen some of them from alongside the railroad tracks. Furthermore, once she saw how big and strong I was growing up to be, she put me to work. When I was 9, she taught me to milk the cow, and I often did the evening milk duty. We didn’t know any better than to just pour the milk through a coffee filter and drink it just like that. Now I think that the raw milk lifestyle we enjoyed is illegal in about 11 states. The winter I was 10, our barnyard pipes froze, so for months I carried dozens of five-gallon pails of water before and after school. We chopped wood to keep the fire going to keep the house warm. Some summers we brought in thousands of bales of hay. (I think that working kids the way we got worked might now be illegal in a few states, too.) Among the many realizations I’ve had in my writing life, most important was realizing that writing well was not a matter of being brilliant. Writing, it turns out, is just more hard work. I learned this when working on a story called “Sleeping Sickness,” which ended up in my first collection. It happens to be about a mother and daughter, and the mother’s manifestation of depression is that she sleeps for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch (this is not my mom). And I kept working on the story every day, going through it over and over again, week after week, and then month after month, and my attention to the story was making it better, not in any glorious rush, just bit by bit it was getting better. I sent it to a magazine called Kiosk, and the editor sent it back with some suggestions, so I worked every day for another couple of months. Once I made that discovery, that writing a story was something like digging a ditch or chopping wood or weeding a garden or milking a cow every day, then I knew I had a chance in this writing business. Brilliance, I can’t count on, but hard work, well, I can do that. I was raised up for that. Case in point: “Bringing Belle Home” is a story in my collection "American Salvage," and I worked on that story for 24 years before I got it right. But I did get it, finally. There’s another story in that book that I wrote in five months—that was the quickest I ever wrote a story. That was the title story, and I wrote it in a kind of panic. Funny, the same thing happened in writing the title story of "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters"; I decided on a title for the book, and then felt I needed a story with that same title. It took about five months for that story, too. Maybe some of you new writers out there think that writing a story is going to get easier and faster as your career progresses. If anything, now that I know what I’m doing, it takes more time and more agonizing for me to write a story. Same goes for novels. My first one was the quickest; because I didn’t know any better, I was able to write a first draft of "Q Road" in six weeks. Oh, as an aside, some writers are always saying how their characters take over the story and write the story themselves. Well, give me some of that! My characters are like the laziest of actors, lying around in their comfy lounge chairs waiting for me to tell them what to do. When I get up in the morning to write, which I do seven days a week, three hours a day if I can, the characters are all staring at me out of my computer screen, waiting for me to direct and finesse their actions, dialogue, moods and attitudes. They want me to do the hard work. The second thing I learned from my mom is that reading is really great. Recently I heard my mom tell my brother she wasn’t going to do something like haul wood anymore, because it was a man’s job. I nearly choked on my stalk of raw asparagus. Well, there’s got to be some advantage to getting older, and now she spends a lot of time reading. She reads about five books a week, more than anybody else I know. She read to us kids when we were little, and we had a lot of books in the house, including the Nancy Drew series and a lot of horse books like "Black Beauty" and such. We did not have a TV in the house for most of my growing up. We didn’t get one until my brother started dealing drugs and bought one himself. But it was locked in his room. For the record, my brother straightened up his act decades ago and is a productive member of society. OK, let me confess something. I am not a bookworm. I know this sounds sacrilegious coming from a writer, but reading has always been work for me. Satisfying work, wonderful, important, meaningful, but work nonetheless. When I listen to other people talking about reading, it sounds like it’s as easy as floating down a river; when I read, it’s like rowing upstream. (And if you’ve read my work, you know rowing is a kind of work I like.) So I did not go to bed with a flashlight so I could read under my covers. Usually I fell to bed exhausted from running around all day and hauling wood and hay bales. If I didn’t want to sleep, my inclination was not to read, but to sneak out my bedroom window and run out into the night and have adventures with my friends and especially with boys. You can ask my mother if this is true. I used to go out into the night and travel miles to hide in shrubbery and peek in the windows of the bedrooms of boys I liked. Reading is to me like exercising and it’s like writing and like eating healthy. I do all these things every day, religiously, and I love doing them, though maybe not at any given moment. I’m telling you this just because in our work of trying to create reasons to read, I think we sometimes assume that for everyone reading is really fun and easy, and I want to suggest it might not be. Nonetheless, even if it is not exactly fun, it is hugely rewarding. Even today, my reading style is to read about four pages, and then get up and move around and then sit back down and read again, a few more pages. Reading is always worthwhile. I know as a writer that if I want compelling language and stories to come out of me, I’ve got to put compelling language and stories into myself. It’s that simple. Still, I occasionally lose my willpower, and then you’ll find me sitting in front of the TV eating cupcakes. Or more likely eating cupcakes while staring at the inmates, most of them sex offenders, at the minimum security prison next door playing basketball. In case you’re wondering what minimum security means, it means they don’t lock the inmates in. Watching my mom has taught me to take an interest in the people around me and engage them in conversation willy-nilly. So I am reading every day, but what I love best is to talk to people. My mom is, and I am, too, the person who talks to everybody in line at the post office. I love to chat with the postal clerks and grocery story cashiers, and the librarians and the guys at the oil change shop—no matter if they tell me to stay in the car, I get out and watch what they’re doing. I love to hear people’s stories and to learn how they feel about life and its challenges. (And I have learned that if you show some interest, people will indeed share their stories with you.) Most of what I’ve learned in life beside what I’ve read, I have learned from talking to folks. I’m happy when I’m sitting at a table sharing stories, jokes and anecdotes with friends. I’m happy to meet someone new who has an experience I’ve never dreamed of, and it turns out most people do have such experiences. My mother’s mother, Betty, used to do the same thing, though she lived a life very different from my mom. Betty was a proud active lifelong member of the Chicago League of Women Voters and attended and took notes at the Metropolitan Sanitary District meetings for decades. Occasionally I get story ideas from the people I talk to, but more often what I’ve gotten are glimpses and insights into the human psyche and soul, and that is worth more than any story plot. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I think of all my writing as communication first and foremost. Men are great to have around, but they have their limitations and you might not want to depend upon them too much. We’ll just leave it at that and say Susanna taught me to be independent. And I’ll make the case that being capable and independent has helped me stay happily married for 28 years to the same dude, my darling Christopher. You might have noticed that fiction writers, novelists especially, are most often people who need to live calm, sensible lives. A novelist needs a life without drama in order that she can deliver all the drama to the page. She also taught me to keep an eye out for what’s most interesting around me, right in my own neighborhood. My mom could always find lots of interesting people in her own community. Though her parents had been city people, from the time Susanna was young, she hung out with the old farmers and talked to them about how to raise animals and garden and drive wells and build barns. If anyone is interested in saving a dwindling resource, it would be the knowledge of the old men and women from American farms. They know how to do everything, and they know how to do it cheaply. If my biggest revelation was about writing being hard work, then my second one was the realization that I should write about the Michigan people with whom I’m familiar. In other words, I should write about people from my own tribe, who have special knowledge and skills that I know about, such as how to scrap out metal for money and steal railroad ties and castrate pigs. These are poor and working-class people and some farmers, people who fix their own cars and work low-paying jobs that aren’t very satisfying, and maybe they drink too much, these people, and maybe they love uncarefully. So many people say “write about what you know,” that it’s tempting to discount it, but I came around to understand that old saw in my own way. I lived for years in Chicago and then in Boston and Milwaukee, and I used to try to write about generic people who didn’t live any particular place, or else I wanted to write about city people, because they seemed more exciting than my own people. But when I lived in Boston and I’d tell people about my mom gathering everybody up to go haul a dead frozen cow out of a neighbor’s pond where she’d fallen through the ice and drowned. The neighbor had said we could have the meat, so the whole family went to go retrieve this cow with a boat and a chainsaw. Well, I could tell by the looks on their sophisticated city mugs that this sort of activity was new and interesting to them. Turns out my knowledge and experience of life has given me some stories to tell. Keep things lively In the moral universe, where we live our real lives and eat breakfast and go to work, the worst crime is murder, or maybe torture-and-murder. But in the writing universe, the universe of stories, murder and torture and mayhem are just fine. In some genres, murder is required! The real unforgivable crime for all writers is the crime of being dull. When I’m revising, which is 95 percent of what I do, maybe 98 percent, I’m continually searching what I’ve written to eliminate places where the story is bogging down, where a character is feeling self-pity or being melodramatic. In the moral universe, we all feel self-pity and indulge in melodrama and whimpering and whining, but there’s no need for it in the pages of a story, when our reader can so easily put down the book and turn on the TV to a cop show and eat a cupcake. Every moment of a book has to be interesting. Don’t take myself too seriously If I could show you a couple of photos right now, I’d start with one of Mom and me butchering a rooster last year. This rooster started out as a nice enough Plymouth Rock fellow, big and strong with glossy black-and-white plumage, but then he started picking on the hens, causing the hens to peck on one another. Everybody was losing their feathers. Then he started attacking my great-nieces when they went in to collect eggs. For the next photo I would then show you a photo of three things on a blue-and-white plate: two testicles and a chicken heart. You would notice that each of the rooster’s balls are bigger than his heart. The job of a writer is twofold. One half of your job requires you to take yourself and your vision and ideas and sensibility very seriously, to have confidence that what you write matters. And it matters enough for you to neglect your family and friends, and especially your housework. As Jane Smiley told the New York Times, “mess reminds me that I can choose to write or I can choose to clean, and I have always chosen to write.” And the other half of your job as a writer is to be humble and open to constructive criticism that can make your work better. This might come from friends or editors. Or even from your mom. But mostly it has to come from your own critical self. You must be prepared to admit and acknowledge that you are just plain wrong at times, that your work is not good enough. Yet. And then you have to go back to having confidence again, because you have to believe you do have what it takes to be able to make the writing good enough. And sometimes, when it’s rough going with the story I’m working on, I need to remember that writing is just part of my life. There are other things, like family, friends and food. And wine. And my donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, who don’t give a fig about my success or failure. And there’s the joy of talking to the people in the line at the post office and in the line to where we’re all waiting to renew our driver’s licenses. Mom taught me that it’s OK to hide the really good chocolates away from your kids and your husband. Honestly, are they going to appreciate them the way you do? Always keep in mind how things affect those who are not doing as well as you are. Don’t be fooled by what seems respectable—keep in mind what helps people get by. The only time I saw my mom get politically active recently was when she found out that our little Michigan township was going to pass an ordinance that said that people could not work on their cars in their driveways. It seemed that some people who did not have to fix their own cars thought that fixing one’s own car in the driveway made street looks messy. Well, my mom gathered up everybody she could find to go to that meeting and remind the folks on the board (who did not fix their own cars) that this was a community in which poor people, many of whom didn’t have garages, were trying to survive and keep their cars running as best they could with few resources in order to go to their low-paying jobs. She reminded them that it’s an important skill in the community for kids to learn how to fix cars, and the driveway was where they learned it. And I have found much of my inspiration comes from understanding how poor people and the working poor make it work in America, where the cards and laws stack up against them. And I consider it an important part of my job to show readers a picture of those who are struggling near the economic bottom, even if they are a little less attractive than those at the top. Mom is still teaching me to live passionately and not play it too safe. While my mom is still usually the smartest woman in the room (have I mentioned she knows how to build a highway bridge as well as how to make great cabbage rolls), she is getting older, and she’s frail. She just had her shoulder replaced, and she’s had five other recent surgeries on her arteries and her back. I’d like her to slow down and take it easy, but she lets me know she doesn’t intend to. She still parties heartily—she has the same passion for partying as I have for writing. She has a good guy friend who’s about my age who often takes her out to rowdy events, and he pulled me aside recently and said, “You know, this could kill her. Somebody threw her in the swimming pool last week. If you don’t want me to take her out, I won’t.” And though I’d like to put her on a diet of healthful foods and moderation of all kinds, I say, “Take her where she wants to go, and make sure she has fun.” She has taught me to prevail! Without saying as much, she taught me to keep going, keep working at whatever it was I was trying to do, and to thus prove myself more powerful than the opposing forces. She has used this word "prevail" rebelliously, saying she would personally prevail when she got divorced, when somebody cheated her on a horse trade, or when some jealous wife put the kibosh on some of her fun, even when her own body threatened to fail. For me as a writer, though, my own self-doubt is often the toughest force opposing me. If the problem is that I’m feeling crappy about myself and my writing, then the solution is to write some more and keep writing, to write better, to write something else. The cow has to be milked, morning and night, and the story needs to be written, no matter how lousy you might feel. I took the long way to writing. Though writing was always my dream, I studied philosophy in college and then education, and then I went on to get my master’s degree in mathematics. I went on for many years afraid to commit to a life of writing, or afraid to commit to trying. I was afraid of failing in such a competitive field. And yet, I could not give up writing. And at age 35 (with the encouragement of my mathematics Ph.D. adviser), I took my first serious writing course. There I met the powerful force of nature that was soon-to-be National Book Award-winning Jaimy Gordon, who has been a whole other kind of mother to me. And ever since then, I’ve just had to keep on working hard, keep on keeping it lively, and employ all those other lessons I learned from Susanna. And from the other mothers I’ve picked up along the way.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of several books, including "Women and Other Animals," "Q Road" and "American Salvage." Her forthcoming collection of stories is "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters," to be published by W.W. Norton on Oct. 5. She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, and she teaches writing in the low residency program at Pacific University.
Anyone who writes a book called "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters" has to expect to be asked about her own mother, so let me get that conversation started here. In my novel "Once Upon a River," the protagonist Margo Crane’s mother was a runaway. My mother, Susanna, was the opposite—she stuck around home. When everybody was running around and running away in the 1960s and '70s, my mom had to be there to milk the cow twice a day. Susanna has lived a life full of challenges and personal trials, mostly brought on by her own strong and determined character. She raised a heap of kids by herself, her own kids and other people’s—the price she paid for always being there was that other people showed up for the free babysitting. Sometimes neighbors or cousins stayed the whole summer. Mom was a horsewoman, and she became a horse trader. She also became the one the local farmers all called to help to deliver their difficult calves. She also has drunk plenty and smoked like a chimney for decades. She loves to spend time listening to music and laughing and telling and hearing funny stories. She wants literature to entertain and relieve her from stress, to smooth life’s rough edges. This is why Susanna doesn’t love my writing. She’s very proud of me, but she wishes I’d write something funny, like slapstick or folkloric humor. Or she wishes I would write a series of murder mysteries in which a clever woman outwits criminals before the book’s end. Instead, I write about problems that have no solutions. My stories make a reader think more and worry more. Nonetheless, an awful lot of what I’ve learned about writing has come from her. The first thing I learned was to work hard. From the time I was 7 years old, my mom was a single parent struggling to feed at least five hungry kids at any given time. She had eight acres of land, a few outbuildings and a pasture where she’d kept a horse. Well, as soon as she got divorced, she figured out that she could get free runt piglets from the local pig farmers (the ones that wouldn’t survive). She bought a mean old milk cow named Red, a Hereford-Ayrshire mix, some cheap calves at auction to raise for meat, and some chickens for eggs. She also grew a hell of a garden and canned 200 quarts of tomatoes. I have seen this small woman lug 50-pound feed bags, 80-pound bales of hay, and when it was time to restring the pasture fence, she wrestled railroad ties for us to use as fence posts. I shouldn’t say this, but she may have stolen some of them from alongside the railroad tracks. Furthermore, once she saw how big and strong I was growing up to be, she put me to work. When I was 9, she taught me to milk the cow, and I often did the evening milk duty. We didn’t know any better than to just pour the milk through a coffee filter and drink it just like that. Now I think that the raw milk lifestyle we enjoyed is illegal in about 11 states. The winter I was 10, our barnyard pipes froze, so for months I carried dozens of five-gallon pails of water before and after school. We chopped wood to keep the fire going to keep the house warm. Some summers we brought in thousands of bales of hay. (I think that working kids the way we got worked might now be illegal in a few states, too.) Among the many realizations I’ve had in my writing life, most important was realizing that writing well was not a matter of being brilliant. Writing, it turns out, is just more hard work. I learned this when working on a story called “Sleeping Sickness,” which ended up in my first collection. It happens to be about a mother and daughter, and the mother’s manifestation of depression is that she sleeps for 12 or 14 hours at a stretch (this is not my mom). And I kept working on the story every day, going through it over and over again, week after week, and then month after month, and my attention to the story was making it better, not in any glorious rush, just bit by bit it was getting better. I sent it to a magazine called Kiosk, and the editor sent it back with some suggestions, so I worked every day for another couple of months. Once I made that discovery, that writing a story was something like digging a ditch or chopping wood or weeding a garden or milking a cow every day, then I knew I had a chance in this writing business. Brilliance, I can’t count on, but hard work, well, I can do that. I was raised up for that. Case in point: “Bringing Belle Home” is a story in my collection "American Salvage," and I worked on that story for 24 years before I got it right. But I did get it, finally. There’s another story in that book that I wrote in five months—that was the quickest I ever wrote a story. That was the title story, and I wrote it in a kind of panic. Funny, the same thing happened in writing the title story of "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters"; I decided on a title for the book, and then felt I needed a story with that same title. It took about five months for that story, too. Maybe some of you new writers out there think that writing a story is going to get easier and faster as your career progresses. If anything, now that I know what I’m doing, it takes more time and more agonizing for me to write a story. Same goes for novels. My first one was the quickest; because I didn’t know any better, I was able to write a first draft of "Q Road" in six weeks. Oh, as an aside, some writers are always saying how their characters take over the story and write the story themselves. Well, give me some of that! My characters are like the laziest of actors, lying around in their comfy lounge chairs waiting for me to tell them what to do. When I get up in the morning to write, which I do seven days a week, three hours a day if I can, the characters are all staring at me out of my computer screen, waiting for me to direct and finesse their actions, dialogue, moods and attitudes. They want me to do the hard work. The second thing I learned from my mom is that reading is really great. Recently I heard my mom tell my brother she wasn’t going to do something like haul wood anymore, because it was a man’s job. I nearly choked on my stalk of raw asparagus. Well, there’s got to be some advantage to getting older, and now she spends a lot of time reading. She reads about five books a week, more than anybody else I know. She read to us kids when we were little, and we had a lot of books in the house, including the Nancy Drew series and a lot of horse books like "Black Beauty" and such. We did not have a TV in the house for most of my growing up. We didn’t get one until my brother started dealing drugs and bought one himself. But it was locked in his room. For the record, my brother straightened up his act decades ago and is a productive member of society. OK, let me confess something. I am not a bookworm. I know this sounds sacrilegious coming from a writer, but reading has always been work for me. Satisfying work, wonderful, important, meaningful, but work nonetheless. When I listen to other people talking about reading, it sounds like it’s as easy as floating down a river; when I read, it’s like rowing upstream. (And if you’ve read my work, you know rowing is a kind of work I like.) So I did not go to bed with a flashlight so I could read under my covers. Usually I fell to bed exhausted from running around all day and hauling wood and hay bales. If I didn’t want to sleep, my inclination was not to read, but to sneak out my bedroom window and run out into the night and have adventures with my friends and especially with boys. You can ask my mother if this is true. I used to go out into the night and travel miles to hide in shrubbery and peek in the windows of the bedrooms of boys I liked. Reading is to me like exercising and it’s like writing and like eating healthy. I do all these things every day, religiously, and I love doing them, though maybe not at any given moment. I’m telling you this just because in our work of trying to create reasons to read, I think we sometimes assume that for everyone reading is really fun and easy, and I want to suggest it might not be. Nonetheless, even if it is not exactly fun, it is hugely rewarding. Even today, my reading style is to read about four pages, and then get up and move around and then sit back down and read again, a few more pages. Reading is always worthwhile. I know as a writer that if I want compelling language and stories to come out of me, I’ve got to put compelling language and stories into myself. It’s that simple. Still, I occasionally lose my willpower, and then you’ll find me sitting in front of the TV eating cupcakes. Or more likely eating cupcakes while staring at the inmates, most of them sex offenders, at the minimum security prison next door playing basketball. In case you’re wondering what minimum security means, it means they don’t lock the inmates in. Watching my mom has taught me to take an interest in the people around me and engage them in conversation willy-nilly. So I am reading every day, but what I love best is to talk to people. My mom is, and I am, too, the person who talks to everybody in line at the post office. I love to chat with the postal clerks and grocery story cashiers, and the librarians and the guys at the oil change shop—no matter if they tell me to stay in the car, I get out and watch what they’re doing. I love to hear people’s stories and to learn how they feel about life and its challenges. (And I have learned that if you show some interest, people will indeed share their stories with you.) Most of what I’ve learned in life beside what I’ve read, I have learned from talking to folks. I’m happy when I’m sitting at a table sharing stories, jokes and anecdotes with friends. I’m happy to meet someone new who has an experience I’ve never dreamed of, and it turns out most people do have such experiences. My mother’s mother, Betty, used to do the same thing, though she lived a life very different from my mom. Betty was a proud active lifelong member of the Chicago League of Women Voters and attended and took notes at the Metropolitan Sanitary District meetings for decades. Occasionally I get story ideas from the people I talk to, but more often what I’ve gotten are glimpses and insights into the human psyche and soul, and that is worth more than any story plot. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but I think of all my writing as communication first and foremost. Men are great to have around, but they have their limitations and you might not want to depend upon them too much. We’ll just leave it at that and say Susanna taught me to be independent. And I’ll make the case that being capable and independent has helped me stay happily married for 28 years to the same dude, my darling Christopher. You might have noticed that fiction writers, novelists especially, are most often people who need to live calm, sensible lives. A novelist needs a life without drama in order that she can deliver all the drama to the page. She also taught me to keep an eye out for what’s most interesting around me, right in my own neighborhood. My mom could always find lots of interesting people in her own community. Though her parents had been city people, from the time Susanna was young, she hung out with the old farmers and talked to them about how to raise animals and garden and drive wells and build barns. If anyone is interested in saving a dwindling resource, it would be the knowledge of the old men and women from American farms. They know how to do everything, and they know how to do it cheaply. If my biggest revelation was about writing being hard work, then my second one was the realization that I should write about the Michigan people with whom I’m familiar. In other words, I should write about people from my own tribe, who have special knowledge and skills that I know about, such as how to scrap out metal for money and steal railroad ties and castrate pigs. These are poor and working-class people and some farmers, people who fix their own cars and work low-paying jobs that aren’t very satisfying, and maybe they drink too much, these people, and maybe they love uncarefully. So many people say “write about what you know,” that it’s tempting to discount it, but I came around to understand that old saw in my own way. I lived for years in Chicago and then in Boston and Milwaukee, and I used to try to write about generic people who didn’t live any particular place, or else I wanted to write about city people, because they seemed more exciting than my own people. But when I lived in Boston and I’d tell people about my mom gathering everybody up to go haul a dead frozen cow out of a neighbor’s pond where she’d fallen through the ice and drowned. The neighbor had said we could have the meat, so the whole family went to go retrieve this cow with a boat and a chainsaw. Well, I could tell by the looks on their sophisticated city mugs that this sort of activity was new and interesting to them. Turns out my knowledge and experience of life has given me some stories to tell. Keep things lively In the moral universe, where we live our real lives and eat breakfast and go to work, the worst crime is murder, or maybe torture-and-murder. But in the writing universe, the universe of stories, murder and torture and mayhem are just fine. In some genres, murder is required! The real unforgivable crime for all writers is the crime of being dull. When I’m revising, which is 95 percent of what I do, maybe 98 percent, I’m continually searching what I’ve written to eliminate places where the story is bogging down, where a character is feeling self-pity or being melodramatic. In the moral universe, we all feel self-pity and indulge in melodrama and whimpering and whining, but there’s no need for it in the pages of a story, when our reader can so easily put down the book and turn on the TV to a cop show and eat a cupcake. Every moment of a book has to be interesting. Don’t take myself too seriously If I could show you a couple of photos right now, I’d start with one of Mom and me butchering a rooster last year. This rooster started out as a nice enough Plymouth Rock fellow, big and strong with glossy black-and-white plumage, but then he started picking on the hens, causing the hens to peck on one another. Everybody was losing their feathers. Then he started attacking my great-nieces when they went in to collect eggs. For the next photo I would then show you a photo of three things on a blue-and-white plate: two testicles and a chicken heart. You would notice that each of the rooster’s balls are bigger than his heart. The job of a writer is twofold. One half of your job requires you to take yourself and your vision and ideas and sensibility very seriously, to have confidence that what you write matters. And it matters enough for you to neglect your family and friends, and especially your housework. As Jane Smiley told the New York Times, “mess reminds me that I can choose to write or I can choose to clean, and I have always chosen to write.” And the other half of your job as a writer is to be humble and open to constructive criticism that can make your work better. This might come from friends or editors. Or even from your mom. But mostly it has to come from your own critical self. You must be prepared to admit and acknowledge that you are just plain wrong at times, that your work is not good enough. Yet. And then you have to go back to having confidence again, because you have to believe you do have what it takes to be able to make the writing good enough. And sometimes, when it’s rough going with the story I’m working on, I need to remember that writing is just part of my life. There are other things, like family, friends and food. And wine. And my donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, who don’t give a fig about my success or failure. And there’s the joy of talking to the people in the line at the post office and in the line to where we’re all waiting to renew our driver’s licenses. Mom taught me that it’s OK to hide the really good chocolates away from your kids and your husband. Honestly, are they going to appreciate them the way you do? Always keep in mind how things affect those who are not doing as well as you are. Don’t be fooled by what seems respectable—keep in mind what helps people get by. The only time I saw my mom get politically active recently was when she found out that our little Michigan township was going to pass an ordinance that said that people could not work on their cars in their driveways. It seemed that some people who did not have to fix their own cars thought that fixing one’s own car in the driveway made street looks messy. Well, my mom gathered up everybody she could find to go to that meeting and remind the folks on the board (who did not fix their own cars) that this was a community in which poor people, many of whom didn’t have garages, were trying to survive and keep their cars running as best they could with few resources in order to go to their low-paying jobs. She reminded them that it’s an important skill in the community for kids to learn how to fix cars, and the driveway was where they learned it. And I have found much of my inspiration comes from understanding how poor people and the working poor make it work in America, where the cards and laws stack up against them. And I consider it an important part of my job to show readers a picture of those who are struggling near the economic bottom, even if they are a little less attractive than those at the top. Mom is still teaching me to live passionately and not play it too safe. While my mom is still usually the smartest woman in the room (have I mentioned she knows how to build a highway bridge as well as how to make great cabbage rolls), she is getting older, and she’s frail. She just had her shoulder replaced, and she’s had five other recent surgeries on her arteries and her back. I’d like her to slow down and take it easy, but she lets me know she doesn’t intend to. She still parties heartily—she has the same passion for partying as I have for writing. She has a good guy friend who’s about my age who often takes her out to rowdy events, and he pulled me aside recently and said, “You know, this could kill her. Somebody threw her in the swimming pool last week. If you don’t want me to take her out, I won’t.” And though I’d like to put her on a diet of healthful foods and moderation of all kinds, I say, “Take her where she wants to go, and make sure she has fun.” She has taught me to prevail! Without saying as much, she taught me to keep going, keep working at whatever it was I was trying to do, and to thus prove myself more powerful than the opposing forces. She has used this word "prevail" rebelliously, saying she would personally prevail when she got divorced, when somebody cheated her on a horse trade, or when some jealous wife put the kibosh on some of her fun, even when her own body threatened to fail. For me as a writer, though, my own self-doubt is often the toughest force opposing me. If the problem is that I’m feeling crappy about myself and my writing, then the solution is to write some more and keep writing, to write better, to write something else. The cow has to be milked, morning and night, and the story needs to be written, no matter how lousy you might feel. I took the long way to writing. Though writing was always my dream, I studied philosophy in college and then education, and then I went on to get my master’s degree in mathematics. I went on for many years afraid to commit to a life of writing, or afraid to commit to trying. I was afraid of failing in such a competitive field. And yet, I could not give up writing. And at age 35 (with the encouragement of my mathematics Ph.D. adviser), I took my first serious writing course. There I met the powerful force of nature that was soon-to-be National Book Award-winning Jaimy Gordon, who has been a whole other kind of mother to me. And ever since then, I’ve just had to keep on working hard, keep on keeping it lively, and employ all those other lessons I learned from Susanna. And from the other mothers I’ve picked up along the way.Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of several books, including "Women and Other Animals," "Q Road" and "American Salvage." Her forthcoming collection of stories is "Mothers, Tell Your Daughters," to be published by W.W. Norton on Oct. 5. She now lives with her husband and other animals outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, and she teaches writing in the low residency program at Pacific University.
My neighbor from hell: But did sweet, ugly revenge go too far?
Last January I was at a party when my wife texted that our walls sounded like they were raining. She wasn’t on LSD. She was at home with our two children, and it was much too cold for rain. I asked her to feel the walls to see if they were wet. They weren’t. I told her I’d listen when I got home, then forgot all about it. Later, when I passed my neighbor’s door, I heard the rain and knocked. No answer. I looked outside for my neighbor’s car, but it was gone, so I did what seemed the neighborly thing and called the guy. When he didn’t pick up, I left a voicemail suggesting he check on the noise. My wife nodded, and I fell asleep.
Two or three hours later, I heard banging on the front door. My neighbor was angry. His entire apartment was flooded. Why didn’t I tell him? I pointed out this was exactly what I’d done. I should have done more, he told me. Everything was ruined! I apologized, but this only emboldened him. He got angrier and louder. Eventually, my wife told him he was going to wake our kids. She closed the door, but because she was half asleep, she closed it with me outside, so I stood eye to eye with my accuser. It occurred to me he might punch me in the face. Some people need an antagonist, and I was the person he’d sought. My neighbor was older but wiry. He ran regularly, though with a notable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. I wished him the best before anything more happened, returning to my dry apartment.
My wife and I had been living in this apartment on the Long Island edge of Queens for almost five years. There were things we liked, such as the public transportation and public schools and parks and trees and variety of food. We also liked that we were paying less for more space than we’d had during the preceding years in young, sexy Brooklyn. One of the things we didn’t like was our neighbor, who embodied a non-optional mandate toward friendliness. If you didn’t stop to chat about who was visiting whom, if you didn’t comment on the weather (really, the weather!), there was something off about you. Probably you thought you were better than everybody else, especially if you arrived with subtle signs of foreign invasion: different diction, a smile that didn’t last long enough, unfamiliarity with the things that matter.
He seemed not to like me right away, which was okay because I didn’t like him either. Specifically, I thought he was a fake, that his commitment to all matters local masked a judgmental streak that seemed the driving animus of his life. When you live above somebody for five years, you see things; more to the point, you hear things, and never have I heard a more aggrieved human being. Every evening he paced the shared hallway or porch, cataloging to his brother or ambiguous girlfriends/friends the people who had wronged him. I was hardly alone in earning his ire, which was comforting, except there’s nothing comforting about entering the orbit of a man who believes there’s a right way to act, knowing you don’t act that way. Worse, the neighborhood was with him. People congratulated us on acquiring such an enviable neighbor. He’d lived in the building more or less forever, so there was little hope of him leaving.
When I recounted the flood story to my friends, they eagerly took my side. It wasn’t my fault his pipes burst. What did he expect? This was the question I couldn’t leave alone. While I didn’t feel as though I’d done something wrong, I didn’t feel as though I’d done something right either. I mulled a more genuine apology or, better, offering to help in any way I could. In the end, I did neither. It would be uncomfortable. Plus, I was annoyed. I concluded I didn’t owe this man anything, just as he didn’t owe me anything in turn.
*
There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in the Bible. Here’s a line you know: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in children’s programming, as well. Won’t you be my neighbor? But I’m not a Christian anymore, and I’m not a kid. I’m an adult with neighbors who sometimes challenge me in ways I don’t feel like being challenged. Whereas I feel like I have to endure the challenges my closest family or friends present, I don’t feel the same way about my neighbors. I’m not even sure what "neighbors" means.
My grandfather, who implausibly supported a family of six by raising chickens and selling eggs, had to know his neighbors. They were his livelihood. But my day-to-day existence no longer relies on neighbors. My income comes from a university. My food comes from supermarkets. My interests come from all over the place. I can talk to my friends from home or school or wherever on any number of electronic devices. I can have a face-to-face conversation with my brother in Japan from my computer. The "Jetsons" future so many of us waited for so impatiently has arrived.
If I don’t need my neighbors, and they don’t need me, why should I place a premium on a relationship dictated by chance? The last time I did that I was getting a physical before school, and the other kid waiting for the doctor started talking to me, or I started talking to him—I don’t remember. It was 30 years ago. I stopped making friends that way when I turned 5.
I understand the need for decency. I understand being nice to my neighbors in the way I understand being nice to anyone I have a superficial relationship with, like the person buttering my bagel. But if the person who butters my bagel moves next door, should our relationship grow deeper?
This mindset, I recognize, separates me from others, potentially for the worse. Many people’s best friends are their neighbors. My parents were these people. Some of my happiest memories from childhood are of my parents drinking and laughing with the neighbors. We had family nearby, so it wasn’t out of desperation that my parents befriended the neighbors. My parents genuinely liked them, and the feeling was mutual. After many years away, my mother eventually moved back to the neighborhood; indeed, she moved in with the neighbors, who still treat me as part of their family, even though they have two children and six grandchildren who live closer than I do. This was the example I grew up with, a meaningful one I carried into adulthood when I formed my own family.
The first places I lived on my own--Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ann Arbor--all felt a long way from rural New England. Small towns with large state universities are famously good places to meet people who look and sound different from you, to nurture self-indulgence and self-righteousness, to try on and discard different personae. Upon arriving at college, I permanently ditched what remained of my Boston accent. (On the phone, my mother told me I sounded like a snob.) I also made some of my best and most enduring friends. They were my neighbors. My first-year roommate performed my wedding ceremony 11 years later. I loved the people I lived with as much as anyone I know loved the people he or she lived with at school. Eventually, I moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where like many parts of New York, it’s normal not to talk to the people around you. So I didn’t. I never felt like I was missing something.
*
After the pipes burst, my neighbor stopped trying to be nice. It was sort of a relief but mostly annoying and, for my wife, frightening. My teaching schedule allows me to be home most days, but the days I’m at work, I’m at work all day. She didn’t relish an angry man stomping around while she was alone with two children. And was he angry!
In fairness, living below a family with kids is a bad deal, particularly my kids, who learned to walk early and never stopped moving. Like many kids, they enjoy screaming, apropos of nothing. My neighbor’s schedule as a bartender in a city where bars close at 4 a.m. could not have been less complementary with our schedule. For a while, my son woke at 4:30 a.m. His graduation to 6:15 was viewed in our quarters as a major achievement, but that difference couldn’t have seemed like much of a gift to my childless neighbor. He’s one person, and we were two people and then three and then four. Plus, we would throw parties sometimes. We rarely invited him. We didn’t want him there.
Neighbors might turn out to be people you would voluntarily spend time with, but there’s no reason to expect this. The biggest thing my neighbor and I had in common is that we’re guys. We didn’t come from similar places, and we didn’t do similar things for work or pleasure. We didn’t read the same books, or listen to the same music, or drink the same beer, or follow the same teams. One might rightly protest that there’s value in spending time with someone unlike you, and I agree. But I don’t want to spend time with everyone: I want to spend time with people I like, whether that’s easily anticipated or a complete surprise. Never for a minute did I like my neighbor.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe the concept of liking someone or something has gone too far. I criticized my neighbor earlier, but I sit in quiet judgment of people who obsessively like photos and posts on Facebook. In my fiction writing workshop, I admiringly quote Nabokov, who warns against readers who have to like characters. The high school version of myself would recoil at the very word likeable; perhaps the current version of myself should too. Maybe my inability to befriend a neighbor I don’t like represents a personal failing, a narcissism that demands everyone I spend time with share my little corner of the world.
On our last day, my wife told our neighbor she wished it had gone better. He sort of grunted, unwilling to cede the high road he walked alone. He wasn’t surrendering the personal injustice he nurtured for anything she was offering. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.
*
In a parallel universe, I rub my eyes and say, Let’s get to work. I return to my apartment, but instead of going to bed, I grab a bucket and towels. I spend the night dealing with the pipes and dealing with my neighbor. Possibly, I call the landlord. Get over here, I say. We need your help. We’re all in this together. If my pipes ever burst, I know implicitly that help will arrive. Knee-deep in water, exhausted, I look at my neighbor, who is still internalizing all that’s been ruined. He can see from my look that I feel for him, and he’s grateful. Now he is the one who apologizes. He knows he came off hot earlier, and perhaps he hasn’t always been the easiest guy to live with, but he appreciates my being here.
In the universe I inhabit, I come home tired. I have my own apartment to worry about, my own family to take care of, my own problems to ignore. I don't want to spend my night dealing with another person’s flooded apartment, a person who doesn’t even like me. I might want to be the kind of person who does this, but I’m not. I want to go to bed, so I do.
Shortly before my wife and I moved out, we received an unmarked envelope. It contained a sarcastic note thanking us for being such good neighbors. One of us was called a peach. I showed it to my wife, and as I watched her reaction, I understood this was the breaking point. Perhaps our neighbor designed the anti-thank-you note this way.
*
My wife and I started looking at houses, something she’d long desired and something I viewed with ambivalence. Now we were in agreement: We couldn’t stay. We liked the first house we looked at, a small ranch. Nobody living upstairs, nobody living downstairs! We couldn’t exactly afford it, but we’d figure it out, and we did.
Even before buying the house, we began to meet the neighbors. We were, at this point, prepared to do whatever it took. We didn’t just smile and wave. We chatted. Eventually, we brought over our kids and asked questions and nodded. Between our making an offer and closing on the house, one neighbor erected a new fence.
The other day my wife and I were in a different neighbor’s house. This neighbor was showing us pictures of her children while our children ran around, nearly breaking everything. This neighbor seemed happy. I offered, preposterously, to help her move heavy things. A few days later, she came over with a magnet of the town’s recycling schedule. It doesn’t have to be hard.
We’ve lived here two months, closer to my office and far enough from our old neighbor that there’s a good chance we’ll never see him again, which feels strange because there were few days over the past five years that I was home without being aware that he was home too. Some rooms and times I could hear him better, but I always knew when he was there. When he left town, the space felt different, not just quieter but also more peaceful. I never saw the inside of his apartment beyond what I could view from the hall when his door was open. He never saw the inside of my apartment either, yet he was as much a part of my experience in that place as anyone outside of my wife and children.
Someone that ubiquitous, it seems clear, deserved better. Except when I try to imagine what I could have done differently, I have no idea. I wouldn’t have been happier sharing drinks with him on the porch. I tried: It was awkward. Nor do I think being more confrontational would have improved things. What would I have said? I want you to be more respectful of my efforts. He might have responded, quite reasonably, I want you to be more respectful of my ceiling.
Now I have a desk in my basement, where it’s theoretically quiet, except I can hear everything above me, the running and yelling and dropping and picking up and crying, crying, crying. I have high-powered headphones, into which I blast piano sonatas, and still I hear other people living their lives.
Last January I was at a party when my wife texted that our walls sounded like they were raining. She wasn’t on LSD. She was at home with our two children, and it was much too cold for rain. I asked her to feel the walls to see if they were wet. They weren’t. I told her I’d listen when I got home, then forgot all about it. Later, when I passed my neighbor’s door, I heard the rain and knocked. No answer. I looked outside for my neighbor’s car, but it was gone, so I did what seemed the neighborly thing and called the guy. When he didn’t pick up, I left a voicemail suggesting he check on the noise. My wife nodded, and I fell asleep.
Two or three hours later, I heard banging on the front door. My neighbor was angry. His entire apartment was flooded. Why didn’t I tell him? I pointed out this was exactly what I’d done. I should have done more, he told me. Everything was ruined! I apologized, but this only emboldened him. He got angrier and louder. Eventually, my wife told him he was going to wake our kids. She closed the door, but because she was half asleep, she closed it with me outside, so I stood eye to eye with my accuser. It occurred to me he might punch me in the face. Some people need an antagonist, and I was the person he’d sought. My neighbor was older but wiry. He ran regularly, though with a notable limp, as if one leg were shorter than the other. I wished him the best before anything more happened, returning to my dry apartment.
My wife and I had been living in this apartment on the Long Island edge of Queens for almost five years. There were things we liked, such as the public transportation and public schools and parks and trees and variety of food. We also liked that we were paying less for more space than we’d had during the preceding years in young, sexy Brooklyn. One of the things we didn’t like was our neighbor, who embodied a non-optional mandate toward friendliness. If you didn’t stop to chat about who was visiting whom, if you didn’t comment on the weather (really, the weather!), there was something off about you. Probably you thought you were better than everybody else, especially if you arrived with subtle signs of foreign invasion: different diction, a smile that didn’t last long enough, unfamiliarity with the things that matter.
He seemed not to like me right away, which was okay because I didn’t like him either. Specifically, I thought he was a fake, that his commitment to all matters local masked a judgmental streak that seemed the driving animus of his life. When you live above somebody for five years, you see things; more to the point, you hear things, and never have I heard a more aggrieved human being. Every evening he paced the shared hallway or porch, cataloging to his brother or ambiguous girlfriends/friends the people who had wronged him. I was hardly alone in earning his ire, which was comforting, except there’s nothing comforting about entering the orbit of a man who believes there’s a right way to act, knowing you don’t act that way. Worse, the neighborhood was with him. People congratulated us on acquiring such an enviable neighbor. He’d lived in the building more or less forever, so there was little hope of him leaving.
When I recounted the flood story to my friends, they eagerly took my side. It wasn’t my fault his pipes burst. What did he expect? This was the question I couldn’t leave alone. While I didn’t feel as though I’d done something wrong, I didn’t feel as though I’d done something right either. I mulled a more genuine apology or, better, offering to help in any way I could. In the end, I did neither. It would be uncomfortable. Plus, I was annoyed. I concluded I didn’t owe this man anything, just as he didn’t owe me anything in turn.
*
There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in the Bible. Here’s a line you know: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There’s a lot of talk about neighbors in children’s programming, as well. Won’t you be my neighbor? But I’m not a Christian anymore, and I’m not a kid. I’m an adult with neighbors who sometimes challenge me in ways I don’t feel like being challenged. Whereas I feel like I have to endure the challenges my closest family or friends present, I don’t feel the same way about my neighbors. I’m not even sure what "neighbors" means.
My grandfather, who implausibly supported a family of six by raising chickens and selling eggs, had to know his neighbors. They were his livelihood. But my day-to-day existence no longer relies on neighbors. My income comes from a university. My food comes from supermarkets. My interests come from all over the place. I can talk to my friends from home or school or wherever on any number of electronic devices. I can have a face-to-face conversation with my brother in Japan from my computer. The "Jetsons" future so many of us waited for so impatiently has arrived.
If I don’t need my neighbors, and they don’t need me, why should I place a premium on a relationship dictated by chance? The last time I did that I was getting a physical before school, and the other kid waiting for the doctor started talking to me, or I started talking to him—I don’t remember. It was 30 years ago. I stopped making friends that way when I turned 5.
I understand the need for decency. I understand being nice to my neighbors in the way I understand being nice to anyone I have a superficial relationship with, like the person buttering my bagel. But if the person who butters my bagel moves next door, should our relationship grow deeper?
This mindset, I recognize, separates me from others, potentially for the worse. Many people’s best friends are their neighbors. My parents were these people. Some of my happiest memories from childhood are of my parents drinking and laughing with the neighbors. We had family nearby, so it wasn’t out of desperation that my parents befriended the neighbors. My parents genuinely liked them, and the feeling was mutual. After many years away, my mother eventually moved back to the neighborhood; indeed, she moved in with the neighbors, who still treat me as part of their family, even though they have two children and six grandchildren who live closer than I do. This was the example I grew up with, a meaningful one I carried into adulthood when I formed my own family.
The first places I lived on my own--Charlottesville, Iowa City, Ann Arbor--all felt a long way from rural New England. Small towns with large state universities are famously good places to meet people who look and sound different from you, to nurture self-indulgence and self-righteousness, to try on and discard different personae. Upon arriving at college, I permanently ditched what remained of my Boston accent. (On the phone, my mother told me I sounded like a snob.) I also made some of my best and most enduring friends. They were my neighbors. My first-year roommate performed my wedding ceremony 11 years later. I loved the people I lived with as much as anyone I know loved the people he or she lived with at school. Eventually, I moved to a neighborhood in Brooklyn, where like many parts of New York, it’s normal not to talk to the people around you. So I didn’t. I never felt like I was missing something.
*
After the pipes burst, my neighbor stopped trying to be nice. It was sort of a relief but mostly annoying and, for my wife, frightening. My teaching schedule allows me to be home most days, but the days I’m at work, I’m at work all day. She didn’t relish an angry man stomping around while she was alone with two children. And was he angry!
In fairness, living below a family with kids is a bad deal, particularly my kids, who learned to walk early and never stopped moving. Like many kids, they enjoy screaming, apropos of nothing. My neighbor’s schedule as a bartender in a city where bars close at 4 a.m. could not have been less complementary with our schedule. For a while, my son woke at 4:30 a.m. His graduation to 6:15 was viewed in our quarters as a major achievement, but that difference couldn’t have seemed like much of a gift to my childless neighbor. He’s one person, and we were two people and then three and then four. Plus, we would throw parties sometimes. We rarely invited him. We didn’t want him there.
Neighbors might turn out to be people you would voluntarily spend time with, but there’s no reason to expect this. The biggest thing my neighbor and I had in common is that we’re guys. We didn’t come from similar places, and we didn’t do similar things for work or pleasure. We didn’t read the same books, or listen to the same music, or drink the same beer, or follow the same teams. One might rightly protest that there’s value in spending time with someone unlike you, and I agree. But I don’t want to spend time with everyone: I want to spend time with people I like, whether that’s easily anticipated or a complete surprise. Never for a minute did I like my neighbor.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. Maybe the concept of liking someone or something has gone too far. I criticized my neighbor earlier, but I sit in quiet judgment of people who obsessively like photos and posts on Facebook. In my fiction writing workshop, I admiringly quote Nabokov, who warns against readers who have to like characters. The high school version of myself would recoil at the very word likeable; perhaps the current version of myself should too. Maybe my inability to befriend a neighbor I don’t like represents a personal failing, a narcissism that demands everyone I spend time with share my little corner of the world.
On our last day, my wife told our neighbor she wished it had gone better. He sort of grunted, unwilling to cede the high road he walked alone. He wasn’t surrendering the personal injustice he nurtured for anything she was offering. I didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t say anything to me.
*
In a parallel universe, I rub my eyes and say, Let’s get to work. I return to my apartment, but instead of going to bed, I grab a bucket and towels. I spend the night dealing with the pipes and dealing with my neighbor. Possibly, I call the landlord. Get over here, I say. We need your help. We’re all in this together. If my pipes ever burst, I know implicitly that help will arrive. Knee-deep in water, exhausted, I look at my neighbor, who is still internalizing all that’s been ruined. He can see from my look that I feel for him, and he’s grateful. Now he is the one who apologizes. He knows he came off hot earlier, and perhaps he hasn’t always been the easiest guy to live with, but he appreciates my being here.
In the universe I inhabit, I come home tired. I have my own apartment to worry about, my own family to take care of, my own problems to ignore. I don't want to spend my night dealing with another person’s flooded apartment, a person who doesn’t even like me. I might want to be the kind of person who does this, but I’m not. I want to go to bed, so I do.
Shortly before my wife and I moved out, we received an unmarked envelope. It contained a sarcastic note thanking us for being such good neighbors. One of us was called a peach. I showed it to my wife, and as I watched her reaction, I understood this was the breaking point. Perhaps our neighbor designed the anti-thank-you note this way.
*
My wife and I started looking at houses, something she’d long desired and something I viewed with ambivalence. Now we were in agreement: We couldn’t stay. We liked the first house we looked at, a small ranch. Nobody living upstairs, nobody living downstairs! We couldn’t exactly afford it, but we’d figure it out, and we did.
Even before buying the house, we began to meet the neighbors. We were, at this point, prepared to do whatever it took. We didn’t just smile and wave. We chatted. Eventually, we brought over our kids and asked questions and nodded. Between our making an offer and closing on the house, one neighbor erected a new fence.
The other day my wife and I were in a different neighbor’s house. This neighbor was showing us pictures of her children while our children ran around, nearly breaking everything. This neighbor seemed happy. I offered, preposterously, to help her move heavy things. A few days later, she came over with a magnet of the town’s recycling schedule. It doesn’t have to be hard.
We’ve lived here two months, closer to my office and far enough from our old neighbor that there’s a good chance we’ll never see him again, which feels strange because there were few days over the past five years that I was home without being aware that he was home too. Some rooms and times I could hear him better, but I always knew when he was there. When he left town, the space felt different, not just quieter but also more peaceful. I never saw the inside of his apartment beyond what I could view from the hall when his door was open. He never saw the inside of my apartment either, yet he was as much a part of my experience in that place as anyone outside of my wife and children.
Someone that ubiquitous, it seems clear, deserved better. Except when I try to imagine what I could have done differently, I have no idea. I wouldn’t have been happier sharing drinks with him on the porch. I tried: It was awkward. Nor do I think being more confrontational would have improved things. What would I have said? I want you to be more respectful of my efforts. He might have responded, quite reasonably, I want you to be more respectful of my ceiling.
Now I have a desk in my basement, where it’s theoretically quiet, except I can hear everything above me, the running and yelling and dropping and picking up and crying, crying, crying. I have high-powered headphones, into which I blast piano sonatas, and still I hear other people living their lives.
Margaret Cho: No one is more sensitive about p.c. culture than white people
Over the years, comedian Margaret Cho has been called many things. Trailblazer. Fearless. Dangerously funny. But what she is can be summed up in one word: ajumma. Ajumma is a Korean word that defies translation, though it sometimes comes out as “auntie.” Politely, an ajumma is a middle-aged woman wearing white footie socks with cheap plastic sandals as she stands, hands on skinny Korean hips, shouting her displeasure at the world. But the word has also come to be associated with formidable female lung power, because the ajumma refuses to be quiet. She not only owns her bawdy sexuality but doesn’t care if it scares you, because she is not here to please men, look pretty, or be rescued. These are strengths rarely possessed by the delicate or girlish. Margaret Cho has been this kind of woman most of her life. Not only has she been outspoken about her own experiences with childhood sexual abuse and being raped during her teen years, she has recently — and dramatically — stepped forward in loud defense of Planned Parenthood. No celebrity has been as willing to take the heat that comes from being unambiguously aligned with the mission of the embattled women's health care provider. Margaret Cho now fills that void, sparring on Twitter with conservatives such as Adam Baldwin and Dana Loesch, and fending off veiled death threats from online trolls. To one detractor, she responded: “I feed, clothe, entertain homeless people on street corners #berobin. You take away low cost healthcare for women in need. Who's the Christian?” She is a complex creature. Raw and real, Margaret Cho sports dramatic ink in places that peek out from demure sleeves, appearing every bit the badass big sister to a whole new crop of female comedians. She’s been performing long enough to make her a bona fide comedic institution: the sitcom she starred in two decades ago, “All-American Girl,” is widely acknowledged as having paved the way for NBC’s hit “Fresh off the Boat.” After kicking off with a new special that just aired on Showtime, “PsyCHO” — the title of her new tour — is about to hit the road. As Cho puts it on her website, "This show is about insanity, and about the anger I feel about everything happening in the world right now, from police brutality to racism to the rising tide of violence against women. It makes me so crazy — hence the title: 'THE PSYCHO TOUR,' because there is no 'i' in team but there is 'CHO' in psycho." (This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.) Paula Young Lee: You’re pretty awesome. How do you feel about becoming, for lack of a better word, one of the elder stateswomen inside the field of comedy? Margaret Cho: I love it! I think it’s great. I have to say that ajumma status is so ... cool. You know what that is, right? PYL: Yep. We could have an entire conversation just about that, being an ajumma when you’re a teenager. MC: I’ve always been an ajumma, but when you get older, the culture we were brought up in works in our favor where aging is good, combatting the Hollywood idea that aging is bad. I’m very grateful for that. PYL: Do you feel it’s changing your comedy? For example, do you feel you have to be more mature? MC: I think you try to create work that is really brave and funny and exciting. You have to constantly recreate yourself in show business, which is a very fast thing, especially now with the tremendous speed of social media. There are so many personalities, so many different kinds of comedy that you can access, so it’s definitely important to stake your claim and say who you are. But that’s the nature of comedy. You always want to be improving and growing and changing with what’s happening in the world. That’s when comedy is most effective. PYL: There’s been a lot of conversation right now about PC culture and how it’s affecting comedy in particular. Do you feel that you consciously or unconsciously rewrite jokes to respond to that? MC: Well, everybody gets a voice, and you kind of wing it constantly, but the loudest voices complaining about PC culture, oddly, are from white people. White fragility! White people are so sensitive about race and racial conversations. I feel like I’m always walking on eggshells when I’m around white people. It used to be so much easier when we all we had to do was walk on their backs. [Eds. note: A reference to Ashiatsu, an ancient massage technique associated with Asian women walking barefoot on clients’ backs.] But calling it out and talking about it ... I think it’s great, because there are definitely racial problems in this country. Comedy is a way we can figure out how to solve it, and how to solve it without making people really angry. PYL: I agree completely — I think that comedy can be a great bridge builder between opposing factions. I was struck by a comment you made on Seth Myers’s show: “Whenever white and black people fight, Asians and Mexicans never know what to do.” I think a lot of Asian Americans feel as if we’re stuck in the middle as an all-purpose placeholder, so I was grateful to you for saying out loud, “Umm, are we white?” Did you get backlash to that comment? MC: Backlash? No! It was so incredibly true that nobody protested! There is this weird idea of — of where do we fit in that spectrum? Where do we actually have the ability to talk about race and be understood? Asian Americans and Latinos face that kind of thing. We have a similar racial history, we’re all from different countries and different backgrounds yet [have] similar migration patterns and ideas about where we fit in the racial conversation. PYL: You really talk quite frankly about race and sex without becoming racist and sexist with the jokes. Is this something that comes naturally to you, or is this something you consciously craft? Maybe a bit of both? MC: I don’t know, I think maybe it has to do with identity and the understanding that this is a woman of color talking about race. As a woman of color you have little more permission to go deeper and question things because your identity, in a way, is a shield. But if you come at it from a minority status, my person, who I am, softens the blow of whatever it is that I’m saying, because I am that. PYL: I love your impression of your mother. It really is spot on ... you manage to capture the essence of Korean mother-ness. I always wondered what your mother really thought about it in private. MC: She loves it! She’s the star. She’s so many different things, so talented, and yet because of her age and her identity she never gets celebrated. So this is an unusual case where I’m able to shine a spotlight on her and she just revels in the attention. She thinks it’s so fun. PYL: So you’re close to your mother? MC: Yes — to both my parents. They’re really incredible people. PYL: And they’re not upset you didn’t become a doctor? MC: Well, I think they are upset, but now they realize that actually, maybe, it’s better! PYL: You’re remarkably successful, so that makes you like Psy — your parents can only be a little bit angry at this point! I was going to ask you: Is there mudang in your family? [Eds. note: A mudang is a Korean shaman; the gift runs in families.] MC: Not in the immediate family, but there are definitely some distant mudang relatives, for sure! PYL: I was wondering about that because you do have a shamanistic function. I think this in general is true of all pop cultural icons — which you are — we just don’t call it that. The ability to channel and mediate is what the mudang does, and that role is traditionally ascribed to women. MC: Right. PYL: This is also the age, when you hit your forties, when the mudang powers come into play. The older woman is at the height of her powers, which is the opposite of what Western culture posits. MC: Yes. PYL: All these issues regarding sexuality, independence, communication, spirituality — all these things come into coalescence. I was wondering about this vis-à-vis your upcoming tour; from what I’ve read about it in press releases, “PsyCHO” is your way to confront the morass of American society and then channeling your anger. MC: "Psycho" in itself is a feminized way [of] talking about insanity or perceived insanity. It’s always like, “She’s a psycho bitch” or “psycho ex-girlfriend” or whatever. In the film Psycho, the Anthony Perkins character becomes his mother to be a killer. So it’s a bit of feminized hysteria, which I think is the same thing. The show is trying to harness that feeling: how do we make sense of everything that’s happening, whether it’s all of this violence against women we’re seeing, which is starting to become institutionalized, with ISIS using rape as a way to justify their own involvement or acting like it’s part of their religion? Or somebody like Bill Cosby, who did something that nobody would believe for so long because people couldn’t imagine that he [could do] this, even though all those women had the same story and the same things to say and they named him, yet nobody believed them. There are so many different instances — I get so frustrated about it. So I want to talk about how we can use our anger to heal. There are a lot of different aspects to the show. ... In my own life, there is [the loss of] Robin Williams and Joan Rivers and so I guess it’s also about the passage — about becoming a mentor after your own mentors die. You have to become that. So I think that’s what I’m trying to do. PYL: These past few days, you’re been sparring a lot due to your support of Planned Parenthood. MC: Yes. I stand with Planned Parenthood because it's the only healthcare alternative for many women. They do Pap smears, breast exams as well as provide pre- and post-natal care, not to mention birth control and STD testing — all vital to women's health. Abortion isn't federally funded, but all these other things are. When people disagree, they only attack me personally — they offer no cogent rebuttal. Merely Bible verses and death threats, which prove how wrong these people are. It's sad how ignorant and bigoted some people are. PYL: That goes back to my initial question about how you feel about becoming an elder in this community, and becoming an icon and being a person who has to lead the way for the younger generation. I don’t know if you’ve ever envisioned yourself as a role model but, whether you like it or not, you are one. MC: You have to be the unni. You have to be the elder. [Eds. note:The unni is the eldest of sisters; the noona is the eldest sister with younger brothers.] PYL: Are you the unni in your family? MC: Yes! Well, I’m the noona, because I have a brother. But I am the unni of my comedic generation. I was born in the '60s, so a little bit older than the others. PYL: I’m always struck by how vulnerable you appear onstage. That [quality] makes you very relatable, but it makes me wonder about the toll it must take on you psychically. MC: There’s vulnerability — so I have to make sure the audience is certain that I know what I’m doing. There’s vulnerability there because my heart is open, but at the same time I definitely have a lot of "weapons" at my disposal. I have all the language, I have all of the moment — I have all of that to spar with somebody, to take anything on. PYL: You have a lot of confidence. Are you a born performer, or did you have to learn that as a skill? MC: I think I had to learn it. But I started so young that it might have just been that I kind of had to grow up and make people understand that I was worth listening to, even though I was a child. PYL: You have to holler. MC: Yes, you have to have a very holler-y sensibility. So they know there’s something worth listening to.
