May 30, 2008--"Not the Scott We Knew"

Indeed, the Scott McClellan the Bush White House knew was the quintessential gofer.

Just like the gofer the Nixon White House thought they had in John Dean. But, as we know form the case of Dean, a spurned gofer can be a dangerous person. Especially if you are involved in various nefariousnesses.

When “sad” old Scott (how all the Bush apologists are now referring to him) two years ago resigned as Press Secretary, George Bush, standing by his side and tearing up, said that he looked forward 20 years hence to sitting on the porch with Scott, in rocking chairs at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reminiscing about the good-old-days of his administration.

Anyone who believed that the patrician Bush would even remember a long-ago servant much less hang out with him was delusional. I suspect that Scott, having quaffed of the Bush Kool-Aid, was the last to realize this.

But I also suspect that this deluded young man quickly came to learn the truth when during his two post-White House years nothing good or lucrative came his way. No jobs as “analyst” on Fox News (see how quickly they scooped up Karl Rove for big bucks), no big-time lobbying assignments, no corner-office corporate payoffs. I’ll bet that up-to-then-innocent Scott began to realize that his old Texas buddy wasn’t eager to pick up the phone on his behalf.

And then along came a publisher blandishing big bucks for a tell-all account about what really happened inside the Bush White House.

This is pretty much what the mainstream media are reporting about McClellan. Calling his motives into question. While the White House is in full talking-point defense. Not only calling this “sad,” but also saying in lock-step, using the exact same language, how they are “surprised” by what Scott wrote and how “this doesn’t sound like the Scott we knew.” (See linked NY Times article as an example of this kind of coverage.)

To someone who remembers Watergate, this sounds remarkably like how the Nixonites attempted to discredit John Dean—he was too low level an operative to know firsthand what he was claiming, that he was disgruntled by not being allowed a more role, that ultimately he was only trying to cover his own ass.

What got lost, at least for a whole then, and what is getting lost now as apologists and media flaks focus on motives and try to defend themselves from McClellan’s assertion that the media failed in its job to investigate what was really going on in the Bush White House as they lied their way to war, what was and is being overlooked is that, though yes Dean and McClellan were low-level flunkies, they got it right—they told the truth.

May 29, 2008--Mr. Spud

A couple of years back I was checking Forbes magazine’s list of American billionaires. Not just out of curiosity—though I admit I wanted to see if I had personally ever encountered any—but because I was trying to raise money for an education project with which I was involved and thought the people on the list might be willing to help fund it.

I had in fact met a few but not one J. R. Simplot, who was listed with a net worth of $3.6 billion. Though his name was familiar to me. I remembered that he was somehow involved with potatoes. That in the 1960s he had met McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and with a handshake made a deal to become the sole provider of potatoes for their signature French fries. The details escaped me until yesterday when the New York Times reported that Simplot had died at his home in Boise, Idaho (where else) at the age of 99. (Obituary linked below.)

But he wasn’t always in the potato business. In fact it took a while for him to indirectly find his way to them. Like quite a few great American entrepreneurs of his era, he began to amass his billions at a very early age. In his case at 14 after he decided to leave school and home because his father refused to allow him to attend a basketball game. Obviously, he was eager to set out on his own.

His mother staked him to $20 in gold coins and he moved into a dollar-a-night hotel, which also was the home for a number of local teachers. It was hard times and they were paid in interest-bearing scrip. Little Jack used his mother’s coins to buy some for 50 cents on the dollar which in turn he sold to a bank for 90 cents on the dollar. Then, with the profit, for a buck a head he bought a few hundred hogs and a rifle.

He clearly had a vision and a plan.

With the gun he shot wild horses, skinned them—saving their hides which he later sold for $2 each—cooked their meat on sagebrush fires, mixed this with potatoes, and fed the result to his hogs, which, after they fattened, he sold and made $7,000 in profit. A fortune at the time.

He set himself up as a potato farmer by parlaying this capital. He used it to buy some land, farm machinery, six horses, and a potato sorter. He had a partner but when they had a dispute they flipped a coin to settle who would become the sole owner. J.R. won and within a decade was the largest shipper of potatoes in the West. He owned 33 warehouses in Oregon and Idaho. During World War II, he supplied the army with most of their dehydrated potatoes.

From dehydrating he became interested in seeing if potatoes could be satisfactorily frozen. He was skeptical at first, saying that “Hell, you freeze spuds and they’ll go to mush.” But one of his researchers figured out how to do it and so when he approached Ray Kroc he had a good product to offer. The rest is history.

But J.R. was about more than potatoes. You don’t get to $3.6 billion on just spuds, even if you supply McDonald’s. He also was involved in fertilizer, oil, animal feed, beef cattle, and ski resorts in Chile and China!

And he had other interests. Changing with the times he invested $1.0 million in two engineers working in a Boise dentist’s basement and they came up with a new kind of computer memory chip, which eventually evolved into Micron Technology. J.R. Simplot, for that million, became their largest shareholder.

But like Warren Buffett he lived a relatively simple life—though he liked to hobnob in Sun Valley with the likes of W. Averell Harriman and Ernest Hemmingway—and until late in life drove himself around in a Lincoln Town Car (he owned a dealership) with the license plate Mr. Spud, often stopping at the local Macdonald’s for an Egg McMuffin. Of course with hash browns.

So don’t you just hope that somewhere some little kid has just left home to set out on his own and is doing fine living in a small hotel where he is hatching big ideas?

May 28, 2008--Sweet Cherries & Sauerkraut

Is there anything better than a handful of early-summer tree-ripened cherries or, a little later in the year, biting into a sweet peach dripping with juice picked in the orchard?

Well, if for decades you’ve been fortunate enough to drive upstate to Appleton, New York to visit Jim Bittner’s orchard to savor these treats first hand, you had better get an early start this year because as fast as he can he’s cutting down his fruit trees. So far 25 acres of sweet cheery and 20 acres of peach trees have been turned into firewood. Some of them were up to 30 years old. (See linked article from the NY Times.)

It’s not that he’s giving up, retiring, or selling out to developers. He plans to replace his trees with berry bushes for use in pies. It’s just that with the Immigration people cracking down on farm workers he can no longer depend on being able to hire enough to hand gather his fruit. So he’s feeling forced to turn to crops that can be harvested by machine.

Others, with the encouragement of sauerkraut producers are turning dairy farms into cabbage fields. It costs so much to automate the milking of cows (in many upstate places there aren’t enough workers to hand milk them), that planting cabbage will allow some farmers to remain viable. But many are resisting this transition to new kinds of cash crops as that will also cause an unacceptable transition in their traditional way of life.

None of this comes as news to farmers. Since the end of the Civil War there has been disruption and turmoil across the land among small farmers. The changes that were inevitable as the result of mechanization were accelerated during the widespread droughts of the 1930s, the over planting of certain crops that sapped the soil of its fertility, the Great Depression that was experienced most severely in rural America, and the beginning of federal farm subsidies that continue to this day and which favor corporate landholders.

These larger historical trends that have remade much of the life and culture of America, those macro forces and the newer ones that affect who is available to carry out farm work, they mean that before too long all of Jim Bittner’s fruit tree will be gone and it will be impossible to describe to our children and grandchildren what an incandescent joy it was to bite into a fresh peach and how wonderful to have its succulent juices run down from our mouths and onto our chins. Video games just don’t cut it in the same way on a hot summer’s day.

May 27, 2008--Have It Their Way

Almost overlooked while Americans struggled this weekend to pay for a fill-up and worried about whether their jobs would be outsourced was the plight of tomato pickers in Florida. Especially those working on Burger King farms.

The Coalition for Immokalee Workers that represents the pickers has for a year been trying to get Burger King, which was founded in Florida, to match wage increases already won from McDonalds and Taco Bell. The Florida Tomato Growers Exchange resisted and was even accused by the union of old-fashioned scare- and union-busting tactics—spying on individual workers and investigating organizations to which they belonged. As evidence that there has been progress in the tomato fields since the 1930s, they did not go so far as to hire scabs or Pinkerton Guards to defend the crops from sabotage or beat up on striking workers.

As a recent snowbird resident of south Florida, with an apartment not too far from the Immokalee tomato patch—in fact buying vine-ripened tomatoes every Saturday at the Delray Beach Farmers Market that came from those fields—in my own obliviousness I did not connect all the dots until I slowly began to learn what was behind the struggle in which these field hands were engaged.

Now I know a little better and understand some of what was at issue until the recent settlement. And to tell the truth, I’m not feeling all that good about the tomatoes I coveted and savored. Actually, they were wonderful but how they got from field to market to me is an upsetting story.

Burger King may be having some bottom-line difficulties with its Whoppers these days but they still have 11,300 outlets worldwide (nearly 7,000 are in the U.S.), employ 37,000, have annual sales that top $11.0 billion, and a net profit of $2.2 billion. But to accede to the demands of their tomato pickers, which all agree have not had a, to quote the New York Times, “substantial wage increase in decades,” considering what the settlement will cost them makes one wonder what is wrong with some segments of corporate America. (Article linked below.)

The workers were demanding a 1-cent increase in wages for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. Yes, 1-cent. This is what Burger King resisted for more than a year.

At the old wages, workers who live by the fields in “decrepit shacks and trailers” earned between $10,000 and $12,000 a year. And, the total cost to Burger King of the 1-cent-a-bucket settlement is, are you seated, about $300,000 per year.

May 26, 2008--Long Weekending

Enjoy the holiday.

See you Tuesday.

May 23, 2008--Let's Make A Deal

While John McCain and Barack Obama begin a long-distance debate about how best to deal with our “enemies,” whether or not we should talk with Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah or Syria or whoever is left in the Axis of Evil, all of this with the understanding that we have “a special relationship” with Israel and need to keep their defense and survival front and center, in the meantime, Israel appears to be talking with one of its own worst enemies, Syria. And according to the New York Times may be working out a deal. (Article linked below.)

Put aside for the moment the current political back-and-forth about what Nixon was up to when he had Henry Kissinger negotiate secretly in Paris with the North Vietnamese (and winning a Noble Prize in the process); or what Reagan was up to when he made nuclear disarmament deals with “The Evil Empire”; or again what Nixon was working out with Chairman Mao; and forget as well what George W. Bush managed to work out with two other Hitlers, Muammar al-Quaddifi and Kim Jong-il. And even forget John McCain’s own involvement in reestablishing normal diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam, a country in which he was held prisoner and tortured.

This we aren’t hearing about from McCain or his sycophant Joe Lieberman as they beat up on Obama about his eagerness to engage in discussions with Iran and others. I am sure that the still green Obama got tangled up in what he said at one of the early Democratic debates about his willingness to even meet with the “tyrant” Mahmoud Abadinejad during his first year in office—did he say that he would do so “without preconditions” or did he mean what he now calls “tough diplomacy”?

For the sake of discussion, no matter about any of this, though it will fester as yet another distraction while we struggle to have a real debate about the two candidates’ very different approaches to foreign policy. Both will be demonized and caricatured—McCain as wanting to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years, Obama for being naïve in his approach to Islamofascism.

But if we want a living case study of what might be gained by negotiating with one’s enemies there may not be a better current example that Israel’s talks with Syria.

If McCain feels that this kind of diplomacy only makes things more dangerous for Israel, he might want to take a look at why the Israelis are engaged in the process. It can only be because they think if they can work out some sort of accommodation with the Syrians (remember that Egypt used to be an archenemy?) they will become safer. By “negotiating away” the Golan Heights they might get Syria to agree not to allow Iran to use Syria as a base for its support of Israel’s even greater enemies—Hamas and Hezbollah.

And since deals have to be two-sided, what would Syria get from agreeing to a comprehensive peace treaty with Israel? According to reports, Syria obviously wants to reclaim the Golan Heights, which they lost to Israel in 1967, and have better relations with the United States because they too are worried about too much Iranian influence in the region. Specifically, in Syria where it is considerable and thus threatening to the current secular regime. Iran, as any sane analyst understands, has been the big winner in the United States’ war with Iraq, and one consequence of that is that they are spreading their reach over much of the Middle East.

This is far from a done deal, but among nations who invented and over the centuries perfected deal-making in souks and bazaars, it could easily happen.

So, what might an equivalent deal look like with Iran? It is obvious what we and Israel would want—abandonment of their nuclear weapons program and a concomitant reduction of threat against the Jewish state. The Iranians might, like Syria, want to be welcomed back into the “family of nations” so that they could solve some of their economic problems and thereby calm their restive, secular, Western-oriented citizens. (Some estimate this could represent up to 40 percent of Iranians.)

In Iran, as elsewhere in the Middle East, the desire to be respected is one potent aspect of their agenda. Many savvy historians, journalists, and observers contend that Iran’s desire to develop atomic weapons has less to do with attacking Israel than an expression of national pride. I do not want to test this hypothesis on the ground; but if even partially true is could be one more clue that a deal is possible. It seems to make more sense than bombing them back to the Tenth Century.

May 22, 2008--Snowbirding: Letter from Home (New Ending)

Forgive me, but there is more:

This is what I have been seeing with greater clarity during our first days back from Florida. All that aspiring and self-confident getting and posturing and preening and spending masking the simultaneous and complementary efforts of all the others who have gravitated here. What used to make our hearts beat faster when we were pursuing similar things. I’m now feeling like a spectator at someone else’s party. It’s an exciting party, but it also feels empty. And it makes me wonder what I had then been about. There were things that I could have rationalized to explain away my own relentless striving, if I had either the time or the inclination, though I suppose I did, but now I’ve been wondering about all that I let slip by.

A clue to this, to what I might have missed, came at breakfast the other morning when we were having coffee with Jonathan Miller, a friend from London who was in town to direct an opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to all the many other interest he pursues, he roams whatever city he might be in to take photos of abstract slices of otherwise overlooked and undistinguished buildings. He showed us one of his recent favorites. From right down the street. The huge Donna Karan billboard painted on the side of a building at the intersection of Broadway and Houston Street.

It was an image of the downtown skyscape over which was imposed her familiar DKNY logo. What made the photo special, Jonathan said, from his studies of neurobiology and the related psychology of perception, is that it is impossible to take in both images at the same time—you can see either the skyline or the DKNY. But not, in one glance, both.

As I peered at the picture on the screen of his digital camera, I tested his assertion. And yes, I could see just one image at a time. As he had said.

But still, in spite of this phenomenon clearly being beyond human resistance, I felt frustrated. Though having to acknowledge that it is biologically determined, I perversely pushed myself to overcome that imperative. So I might, uniquely, be able to see both images simultaneously. I even jokingly asked Jonathan that if I were schizophrenic might it be possible to see both, “You know, each personality would take in one image.”

To Jonathan this did not warrant even a snicker of response, and so he reached across the table to retrieve his camera. And at the same time, with a sneer, dismissed me as someone not worthy of any more of his attention.

Yet, as he pulled the camera from my hand and rose to leave, though I chose not to say anything further to him, I was certain that for a brief moment, I was in fact able to take in both images.

Perhaps it was my hyperactive imagination, perhaps a rebellious spirit that has never been comfortable accepting the impossible or the forbidden; but even now, a week later, I am convinced that I had seen at the same time both the Wall Street skyline and Donna Karan’s corporate logo.

Could there be any acceptable explanation for this? Whatever its source.

Only that, while snowbirding, after whatever I needed to do in the city to filter out the daily load of sensations—I suspect especially a literal narrowing of what I would allow to be taken in through my eyes and ears—down there along the ocean margins, I slowly reawakened those capacities so that I would not miss the smallest details--tracks in the sand the residue of the scuttling Sandpipers, the timed-to-the-minute morning and evening flight of the Pelicans, the smallest disturbance of the sea’s surface that revealed the hidden presence of bait fish and the inevitable feeding frenzies that foretold, the plaintive midnight wail from across the Intracoastal of freight trains pushing north, the swelling of the spring Hibiscus and the promise of the next day’s lurid blooms, being lulled toward an intoxicating afternoon nap by the slap of rain on the roof of the day room.

I have no other explanation.

As I wallowed in confusion, unable to make sense of what I was now feeling, my previous life, and what it all might portend, Rona reminded me that we were due downtown in an hour for a party announcing the engagement of Lori and Anthony. They had become very dear friends; and after years on their own, had met fallen in love, and had decided to take another chance at commitment. They were among my favorite people but still I struggled to rouse myself, even to celebrate with them, at a party where I would know virtually no one which would only darken my mood about what had become of my city.

Rona, though, said that we could not do this to them, we had to “make an appearance,” they were expecting us; and if I didn’t any longer care about any of that—the thought of which clearly annoyed and frustrated her (she was losing patience with my moping and deprecating New York) it would be “good” for me. I needed to get out and about. If I couldn’t even manage to do that in honor of our friends I should call the owner of our place in Florida to see if I could have it twelve months a year. (I noted that she didn’t say “we.”) I should stop all this feeling sorry for myself and become a full-time Florida resident. It would even have tax advantages, she added with a mocking tone, since she knew that would be an attractive idea to me as I sulked my way toward old age.

So I dragged myself to the shower, put on some clothing appropriate for the occasion (it had been so long since I had done that that I needed to leave unfastened the button on my trousers), and made my weary way down onto the teeming streets. Rona said let’s walk. Again, that it would be good for me. I was no longer getting any exercise since I had not found anything to replace our twice-a-day walks on the beach.

Well, Christian, I cannot begin to describe for you the bedlam into which we entered.

The sidewalks jammed with those scurrying from their offices; others like us weaving their way to bars and restaurants and loft parties in Soho and Tribeca; and the leftover day-trippers from New Jersey and Connecticut and Long island who had been stalking the city since afternoon and now as the sun was dropping raced to catch their commuter buses or retrieve their garaged SUVs.

Or the blare of traffic. An unrelenting rush of taxis and buses and screams of fire engines and ambulances, all in a cacophonous blend augmented by the basso continuo of the subway rumbling beneath Broadway. A riotous symphony of the city which at previous times I had experienced as exciting. As contributing to the electric meaning of life.

Now it was just noise. Penetrating, painful noise. And aimless bustle.

Fortunately, as I was about to submit to what would be enduring unhappiness and defeat and retreat back to the sanctuary of our apartment, we arrived at the site of the party—on Prince Street in glittering Soho, which was shrouded in an unexpected and welcome early evening hush. What until the 1970s had been factories and warehouses and machine shops were now boutiques for Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Calvin Klein. And above those mirrored shops, which when the area was rechristened Soho (derived geographically from being South of Houston Street) were illegal squatting places for visual artists and filmmakers were now priceless residential lofts for the lucky (who had bought early) and the super rich—it was well known that Rupert Murdock until recently had resided in a triplex loft just up Prince Street, a loft he sold two years ago to fashion mogul Elie Tahari for a reported $25 million. Another big city story of location, location, location.

The elevator crept and rattled up to the third floor and deposited us directly into one of these legendary living spaces. I reflexively began to estimate square footages and how much Lori and Anthony’s hosts would ask for it if they were to put it on the market. (Though I had been away from New York for just three-and-a-half months, and thus in spite of the other changes I have chronicled here, I still retained that real estate reflex which could calculate square footage with one hand tied proverbially behind my back while using only my peripheral vision.) I quickly deduced that it would add up to quite a nice seven-figure number even in this declining market.

But before I could refine my calculations, shape up in my mind the draft of what the listing would say (“4,000 sq. ft. artist’s loft in Soho’s gold coast. Magnificently renovated. Chef’s kitchen. Pictured in Architectural Digest [June 2003.] Floor-to-ceiling windows. Three bedrooms, two with workspace lofts. Marble solarium . . .”), before I could remember to adjust the armor of indifference and unhappiness I had been ostentatiously wearing since returning from Florida, Lori noticed us, spotted me about to fold back into my funk (Rona, obviously, had been slipping away to the phone this past week to confide in her), and with her most radiant of smiles pulled me back from the worst of my own self-indulgent pouts.

There was no resisting Lori, or for that matter her Anthony who also bounded in our direction. They radiated so much reciprocal happiness that I could not resist allowing them to fold me into their restorative arms, nor resist with them sharing a few tears. Theirs clearly from their new life; mine from realizing, in the flow of their emotion, that this too was New York. My New York.

There are no new beaches, no beginning of new friendships (please note Christian--as sweet and promising as they truly are) that can supplant this!

Sharing the aura of their joy, I realized that there needed to be no supplanting. There needed to be no either-or.

And thus I knew in that quick instant that I would be all right. That Rona and I would be all right. That like true snowbirds we would be migratory. Dividing our lives between wonderful roosts.

But enough of this. I must be making you weary as I rattle on. I know you are busy juggling so many things.

But please Christian, say hello to everyone at the Owl. To Tracie and Dave and Megan and Troy and Ken and Fatch and Jodi and Jen and Tom and Harvey and Joe and Charlotte and of course Jack. Tell them please how much I miss them and my Spinner Sharks and Wahoo salad and those lazy walks along the beach as the sun settles and the evening breeze begins to quicken. And add that I am fine. Let them know, please, that things are complicated but we’re now doing well.

And that we’ll see you in December. That’s a promise.

Steven

May 21, 2008--Rx: "Collateral Damage"

Not until late 2005, less than three years ago, did New York City’s public hospitals take aggressive action to reduce the number of dangerous bacterial infections caused by the failure of the hospitals themselves to maintain sterile conditions.

Since then, after taking routine action, preventable bloodstream infections such as those caused by bacteria that enter the body through heart catheters have been reduced by more than half, and pneumonia caused by microbes transported to the lungs via ventilators have plummeted by nearly 80 percent.

Before that time, infections of this kind were sloughed off by hospital administrators as something they charmingly dismissed as “collateral damage.” They claimed that they were using such “advanced lifesaving techniques” that this was expected and unpreventable. When employing such cutting-edge procedures, they said, inevitably there are downside risks.

But to even a layperson heart catheters and breathing tubes, though excellent treatments, do not by 2008 standards sound that experimental or exotic. And the fact that once the hospitals began to crack down on simple things such as requiring medical staff to wash their hands or wear latex gloves when treating hospitalized patients, that fact that this alone led to such dramatic reductions in infections and unnecessary deaths, makes one wonder what was really going on and what really happened to change the situation.

The latter is easy to explain—those who pay the bills, the federal government and private insurers began to refuse to reimburse for the care of patients with preventable infections. This did not mean that critically ill patients would be sent home—hospitals couldn’t legally get away with that—but rather that hospitals would have to eat the cost of that care. This for certain got their attention and caused them to get into the hand-washing business.

But there is also a darker side to the story that needs widespread attention if we want to ferret out other examples of, what else to call it, malpractice.

Perhaps the major reasons hospitals did not require staff to take standard precautions was because they made more money by not doing so.

According to the New York Times (article linked below) here’s how this worked:

Since few hospitals these days fill all their beds, if they can keep admitted patients longer, and insurers will cover the costs, they will run at higher in-bed capacity and thus net more income. So the (literally) dirty little secret was that it was not in the hospitals’ best financial interest to maintain a sterile environment—if after heart surgery a patient developed a virulent bacterial infection that required a few more days in the hospital—assuming they didn’t die first—what’s the problem? Patients most times survived and the medical center pocketed a few thousand extra dollars.

Win-win, no? Not exactly. And hopefully at least this often deadly scam is being exposed and perhaps will end.

May 20, 2008--Snowbirding: Letter From Home (Concluded)

This is what I have been seeing with greater clarity during our first days back from Florida. All that aspiring and self-confident getting and posturing and spending masking the simultaneous and complementary efforts of all the others who have gravitated here. What used to make our hearts beat faster when we were pursuing similar things. I’m now feeling like a spectator at someone else’s party. It’s an exciting party, to be sure, but it also feels a little empty. And it makes me wonder what I had then been about. There were things that I could have rationalized to explain away my own relentless striving, if I had either the time or the inclination, though I suppose I did, but now I’ve been wondering about all that I let slip by.

A clue to this, to what I might have missed, came at breakfast the other morning when we were having coffee with Jonathan Miller, a friend from London who was in town to direct an opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to all the many other interest he pursues, he roams whatever city he might be in to take photos of abstract slices of otherwise overlooked and undistinguished buildings. He showed us one of his recent favorites. From right down the street. The huge Donna Karan billboard painted on the side of a building at the intersection of Broadway and Houston Street.

It was an image of the downtown skyscape over which was imposed her familiar DKNY logo. What made the photo special, Jonathan said, from his studies of neurobiology and the related psychology of perception, is that it is impossible to take in both images at the same time—you can see either the skyline or the DKNY. But not, in one glance, both.

As I peered at the picture on the screen of his digital camera, I tested his assertion. And yes, I could see just one image at a time. As he had said.

But still, in spite of this phenomenon clearly being beyond human resistance, I felt frustrated. Though having to acknowledge that it is biologically determined, I perversely pushed myself to overcome that imperative. So I might, uniquely, be able to see both images simultaneously. I even jokingly asked Jonathan that if I were schizophrenic might it be possible to see both, “You know, each personality would take in one image.”

To Jonathan this did not warrant even a snicker of response, and so he reached across the table to retrieve his camera. And at the same time, with a sneer, dismissed me as someone not worthy of any more of his attention.

Yet, as he pulled the camera from my hand and rose to leave, though I chose not to say anything further to him, I was certain that for a brief moment, I was in fact able to take in both images.

Perhaps it was my hyperactive imagination, perhaps a rebellious spirit that has never been comfortable accepting the impossible or the forbidden; but even now, a week later, I am convinced that I had see at the same time both the Wall Street skyline and Donna Karan’s corporate logo.

Could there be any acceptable explanation for this? Whatever its source.

Only that, while snowbirding, after whatever I needed to do in the city to filter out the daily load of sensations—I suspect especially a literal narrowing of what I would allow to be taken in through my eyes and ears—down there along the ocean margins, I slowly reawakened those capacities so that I would not miss the smallest details--tracks in the sand the residue of the scuttling Sandpipers, the timed-to-the-minute morning and evening migration of the Pelicans, the smallest disturbance of the sea’s surface that revealed the hidden presence of bait fish and the inevitable feeding frenzies that foretold, the plaintive midnight sound from across the Intracoastal of the freight trains pushing north, the swelling of the spring Hibiscus and the promise of the next day’s lurid blooms, being lulled toward an intoxicating afternoon nap by the slap of rain on the roof of the day room.

I have no other explanation.

But enough of this. I must be making you weary as I rattle on. I know you are busy juggling so many things.

But please Christian, say hello to everyone at the Owl. To Tracie and Dave and Megan and Troy and Ken and Fatch and Jodi and Jen and Tom and Harvey and Joe and Charlotte and of course Jack. Tell them please how much I miss them and my Spinner Sharks and Wahoo salad and those lazy walks along the beach as the sun settles and the evening breeze begins to quicken.

But we’ll see you again in December. That’s a promise.

Steven

May 19, 2008--Snowbirding: Letter from Home

May 19, 2008

Dear Christian:

The hardest part of returning to New York City after snowbirding is to figure out what to say to the regulars at Balthazar about what we’ve been up to for the past three-and-a-half months. Considering how we spent our days in Delray Beach, it’s hard to make ourselves sound cool.

It was difficult enough before heading south to describe what we were doing after we both left our jobs. New York University and the Ford Foundation defined us as retired, but since our egos didn’t allow us to be comfortable with that designation we struggled to find ways to say what we were up to. Taking a version of a sabbatical? Our university friends would understand that. Wandering? Some of our younger friends who had recently done some of their own--one hitchhiking from Argentina to Peru—smiled supportively at that. Taking time off to figure out what to do next? A therapist we know approved of that. Or what we finally settled on—Living in different way we finally called it. That yielded some blank and some envious stares.

But did any of what we have actually been doing for the past few months qualify for any of these explanations? Sabbaticaling in Florida? Wandering in Florida? Living in a different way in Florida?

From the looks on our Downtown friends’ faces, regardless of what we said about ourselves, in spite of what we claimed we were up to, if you spend winters in Florida, one their looks told us, you’re snowbirds. “But, but, but,” we stammered in response.

“And retired ones at that!” they threw in for emphasis.

But during the three weeks that Rona and I have been back in the City, we’ve been casting a cold, objective eye on New York—the sort of capacity one develops after having been away from familiar haunts for a month or more—and retired or not, sojourning or not, the Big Apple is not looking so good to me. At least not at the moment.

All the clichés are true. The city is full of strivers. Not just those of song—the one who try to make it here so they can make it anywhere. But also those who come in from the city’s outer boroughs—Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The hip magazines cover and pitch themselves to the young investment bankers, the media elites, hedge fund operators, trust-fund kids, and aspiring actors, writers, and artists. Those who are all in a fierce struggle of the fittest to see who can make partner before 35, get cast in a TV commercial, open a new impossible-to-get-into restaurant on the fringes of a gentrifying neighborhood, get mentioned on Page Six, buy a place in the Hamptons from last year’s bonus, or get invited to Anna Wintour’s party at the Mets’ Costume Institute.

These folks are swarming all over our downtown neighborhood. We see them in Balthazar in the morning, like us, sucking down $4.50 espressos and we will find them later slipping past the rope line at a Meatpacking District club if we somehow manage to stay up past 1:00 a.m. and decide we need to take a walk over to the Hudson to inhale something resembling sea air.

They are the ones haunting the hottest boutiques in NOLITA (formerly Little Italy) looking for just the right whatever; poring over the zines at Café Cubana to see how many people they know who made it into print and fretting, since they were at that party last Tuesday at the Waverly Inn or managed to score a table at the Spotted Pig, why they don’t find themselves pictured there; and later in the week we will notice them hustling a screen play over coffee at Gitane with the friend of a friend who’s in town executive producing a film out at the Steiner Studio.

But filtering through all this glittering, visible behind that scrim if you look carefully, are the people striving in other ways:

The Mexican here illegally clearing tables so his kids can get an education and he can each week send money home to his parents in Santa Clara; the Polish girl working behind a coffee shop counter in order to have the chance to improve her English, take a few course at Hunter College, and then marry the guy she’s been with and return to Warsaw with enough saved for a down payment on an apartment; the Haitian woman, a boat person, who filtered north from Florida and now works six-day-a-week 12-hour shifts at $8.00 an hour with Mrs. Green in our building who had a stroke last September and now needs constant assistance and total body care; the Italian-American girl from Staten Island who dropped out of community college and now schleps on the ferry every day at 5:30 in the morning to lower Manhattan to get to Goldman Sachs where she has her sights set on moving up from the data entry pool to become an administrative assistant where, who knows, she might meet a trader and wind up on another, preferred island—Long Island; and you would notice the 47 year-old single mother who lives in what she calls an “Archie Bunker” house in Flushing and who after driving her son back and forth to early morning swimming practice plops herself onto a Green Bus, gets dropped off in Midtown, and spends the rest of the long day working in the sportswear department at Bloomingdale’s.

This is what I have been seeing with greater clarity during our first days back from Florida. All that aspiring and self-confident getting and posturing and preening and spending masking the simultaneous and complementary efforts of all the others who have gravitated here. What used to make our hearts beat faster when we were pursuing similar things. I’m now feeling like a spectator at someone else’s party. It’s an exciting party, but it also feels empty. And it makes me wonder what I had then been about. There were things that I could have rationalized to explain away my own relentless striving, if I had either the time or the inclination, though I suppose I did, but now I’ve been wondering about all that I let slip by.

A clue to this, to what I might have missed, came at breakfast the other morning when we were having coffee with Jonathan Miller, a friend from London who was in town to direct an opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In addition to all the many other interest he pursues, he roams whatever city he might be in to take photos of abstract slices of otherwise overlooked and undistinguished buildings. He showed us one of his recent favorites. From right down the street. The huge Donna Karan billboard painted on the side of a building at the intersection of Broadway and Houston Street.

It was an image of the downtown skyscape over which was imposed her familiar DKNY logo. What made the photo special, Jonathan said, from his studies of neurobiology and the related psychology of perception, is that it is impossible to take in both images at the same time—you can see either the skyline or the DKNY. But not, in one glance, both.

As I peered at the picture on the screen of his digital camera, I tested his assertion. And yes, I could see just one image at a time. As he had said.

But still, in spite of this phenomenon clearly being beyond human resistance, I felt frustrated. Though having to acknowledge that it is biologically determined, I perversely pushed myself to overcome that imperative. So I might, uniquely, be able to see both images simultaneously. I even jokingly asked Jonathan that if I were schizophrenic might it be possible to see both, “You know, each personality would take in one image.”

To Jonathan this did not warrant even a snicker of response, and so he reached across the table to retrieve his camera. And at the same time, with a sneer, dismissed me as someone not worthy of any more of his attention.

Yet, as he pulled the camera from my hand and rose to leave, though I chose not to say anything further to him, I was certain that for a brief moment, I was in fact able to take in both images.

Perhaps it was my hyperactive imagination, perhaps a rebellious spirit that has never been comfortable accepting the impossible or the forbidden; but even now, a week later, I am convinced that I had seen at the same time both the Wall Street skyline and Donna Karan’s corporate logo.

Could there be any acceptable explanation for this? Whatever its source.

Only that, while snowbirding, after whatever I needed to do in the city to filter out the daily load of sensations—I suspect especially a literal narrowing of what I would allow to be taken in through my eyes and ears—down there along the ocean margins, I slowly reawakened those capacities so that I would not miss the smallest details--tracks in the sand the residue of the scuttling Sandpipers, the timed-to-the-minute morning and evening flight of the Pelicans, the smallest disturbance of the sea’s surface that revealed the hidden presence of bait fish and the inevitable feeding frenzies that foretold, the plaintive midnight wail from across the Intracoastal of freight trains pushing north, the swelling of the spring Hibiscus and the promise of the next day’s lurid blooms, being lulled toward an intoxicating afternoon nap by the slap of rain on the roof of the day room.

I have no other explanation.

As I wallowed in confusion, unable to make sense of what I was now feeling, my previous life, and what it all might portend, Rona reminded me that we were due downtown in an hour for a party announcing the engagement of Lori and Anthony. They had become very dear friends; and after years on their own, had met fallen in love, and had decided to take another chance at commitment. They were among my favorite people but still I struggled to rouse myself, even to celebrate with them, at a party where I would know virtually no one which would only darken my mood about what had become of my city.

Rona, though, said that we could not do this to them, we had to “make an appearance,” they were expecting us; and if I didn’t any longer care about any of that—the thought of which clearly annoyed and frustrated her (she was losing patience with my moping and deprecating New York) it would be “good” for me. I needed to get out and about. If I couldn’t even manage to do that in honor of our friends I should call the owner of our place in Florida to see if I could have it twelve months a year. (I noted that she didn’t say “we.”) I should stop all this feeling sorry for myself and become a full-time Florida resident. It would even have tax advantages, she added with a mocking tone, since she knew that would be an attractive idea to me as I sulked my way toward old age.

So I dragged myself to the shower, put on some clothing appropriate for the occasion (it had been so long since I had done that that I needed to leave unfastened the button on my trousers), and made my weary way down onto the teeming streets. Rona said let’s walk. Again, that it would be good for me. I was no longer getting any exercise since I had not found anything to replace our twice-a-day walks on the beach.

Well, Christian, I cannot begin to describe for you the bedlam into which we entered.

The sidewalks jammed with those scurrying from their offices; others like us weaving their way to bars and restaurants and loft parties in Soho and Tribeca; and the leftover day-trippers from New Jersey and Connecticut and Long island who had been stalking the city since afternoon and now as the sun was dropping raced to catch their commuter buses or retrieve their garaged SUVs.

Or the blare of traffic. An unrelenting rush of taxis and buses and screams of fire engines and ambulances, all in a cacophonous blend augmented by the basso continuo of the subway rumbling beneath Broadway. A riotous symphony of the city which at previous times I had experienced as exciting. As contributing to the electric meaning of life.

Now it was just noise. Penetrating, painful noise. And aimless bustle.

Fortunately, as I was about to submit to what would be enduring unhappiness and defeat and retreat back to the sanctuary of our apartment, we arrived at the site of the party—on Prince Street in glittering Soho, which was shrouded in an unexpected and welcome early evening hush. What until the 1970s had been factories and warehouses and machine shops were now boutiques for Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Calvin Klein. And above those mirrored shops, which when the area was rechristened Soho (derived geographically from being South of Houston Street) were illegal squatting places for visual artists and filmmakers were now priceless residential lofts for the lucky (who had bought early) and the super rich—it was well known that Rupert Murdock until recently had resided in a triplex loft just up Prince Street, a loft he sold two years ago to fashion mogul Elie Tahari for a reported $25 million. Another big city story of location, location, location.

The elevator crept and rattled up to the third floor and deposited us directly into one of these legendary living spaces. I reflexively began to estimate square footages and how much Lori and Anthony’s hosts would ask for it if they were to put it on the market. (Though I had been away from New York for just three-and-a-half months, and thus in spite of the other changes I have chronicled here, I still retained that real estate reflex which could calculate square footage with one hand tied proverbially behind my back while using only my peripheral vision.) I quickly deduced that it would add up to quite a nice seven-figure number even in this declining market.

But before I could refine my calculations, shape up in my mind the draft of what the listing would say (“4,000 sq. ft. artist’s loft in Soho’s gold coast. Magnificently renovated. Chef’s kitchen. Pictured in Architectural Digest [June 2003.] Floor-to-ceiling windows. Three bedrooms, two with workspace lofts. Marble solarium . . .”), before I could remember to adjust the armor of indifference and unhappiness I had been ostentatiously wearing since returning from Florida, Lori noticed us, spotted me about to fold back into my funk (Rona, obviously, had been slipping away to the phone this past week to confide in her), and with her most radiant of smiles pulled me back from the worst of my own self-indulgent pouts.

There was no resisting Lori, or for that matter her Anthony who also bounded in our direction. They radiated so much reciprocal happiness that I could not resist allowing them to fold me into their restorative arms, nor resist with them sharing a few tears. Theirs clearly from their new life; mine from realizing, in the flow of their emotion, that this too was New York. My New York.

There are no new beaches, no beginning of new friendships (please note Christian--as sweet and promising as they truly are) that can supplant this!

Sharing the aura of their joy, I realized that there needed to be no supplanting. There needed to be no either-or.

And thus I knew in that quick instant that I would be all right. That Rona and I would be all right. That like true snowbirds we would be migratory. Dividing our lives between wonderful roosts.

But enough of this. I must be making you weary as I rattle on. I know you are busy juggling so many things.

But please Christian, say hello to everyone at the Owl. To Tracie and Dave and Megan and Troy and Ken and Fatch and Jodi and Jen and Tom and Harvey and Joe and Charlotte and of course Jack. Tell them please how much I miss them and my Spinner Sharks and Wahoo salad and those lazy walks along the beach as the sun settles and the evening breeze begins to quicken. And add that I am fine. Let them know, please, that things are complicated but we’re now doing well.

And that we’ll see you in December. That’s a promise.

Steven

May 16, 2008--Conventional Wisdom

If we apply current conventional wisdom to the presidential campaign, it says:

• Since Barack Obama is having difficulty attracting white, working-class voters, he will not win swing states such as West Virginia, Ohio, and Missouri.

• Since older voters turn out in disproportionate numbers and Obama is having difficulty appealing to them, this imperils his chances of winning in Florida.

• The suburbs for years have been voting Republican and these votes more than offset Democrat’s inner-city advantages.

• African Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, whoever they may be, but do not come to the voting booth at the same rate as, say, Jewish voters.

• Though constituting just 1.4% of the population, Jews vote disproportionately for Democrats and because they are concentrated in certain key swing states they are a force to be reckoned with.

• Latino voters will not for vote for black candidates and vice versa.

• In spite of what they say to pollsters, even educated, middle-class whites in the privacy of the voting booth will not pull the lever for a minority candidate in the same percentages as they say when surveyed. There is a 5-10 percent “Wilder Effect.”

• Young people get excited about certain candidates during the primary season but when it is time to vote they stay home and thus can effectively be ignored.

• The South, which was once solidly Democratic, since Eisenhower days has become solidly Republican.

• Money means everything in politics and to raise the money needed to run an effective national campaign a candidate has to depend upon “bundlers” and other fat cats.

• During hard economic times voters can be distracted from a focus on the issues that in fact impact their daily lives by appealing to them with cultural wedge issues such as gay marriage, prayer in schools, and abortion.

• When people fear external threat they vote for Republicans since they see Democrats to be weak on defense.

Conventional wisdom of this kind, by definition, is conventional because it is based on the extrapolation of accrued past experience. Everything I’ve listed above is derived from the actual results and data from previous elections.

But it may be that little of this will apply this election cycle. That is obviously because the Democrats are about to nominate Barack Obama and much of what we have learned from the past and that we think will apply to the future—our political conventional wisdom--may not apply.

A few examples:

Yes, Obama will likely lose West Virginia in November, which Hillary Clinton is correct to point out for decades has been a bell-weather state for Democratic candidates. Cause and effect: if you lose West Virginia you will lose the election. History teaches us that.

But the same history tells us that Democrats will not be able to win any states in the New South. And that this will continue to be true in November. But, also contrary to conventional wisdom, isn’t it likely that in addition to 90% of African Americans voting for Obama that with a black candidate heading the ticket they will vote in record percentages and thereby perhaps turn South Carolina, Mississippi, and maybe Alabama and Georgia into blue states? In 2004 “only” about 60% of eligible black voters voted. Shouldn’t we expect this percentage to jump to at least 75-80% in the fall? If that were to happen, wouldn’t that mean at least the temporary end to the solid Republican South?

Yes, traditionally most suburbs have been trending in a Republican direction. In some key places this has offset Democratic advantages in big cities. But during this primary season Barack Obama has been doing better and better among white, educated middle-class and affluent suburbanites. If this carries into the fall, his doing well there could tip into his column swing states such as Missouri, Ohio, plus quite a few in the west.

And I suspect that even Republicans would concede that young voters will hang in with Obama and not only continue volunteer to work in support of his ground game but will actually vote. They cannot be ignored this time around. And may as a result keep a few traditional blue stats blue and perhaps even turn a couple of red states into blue ones.

We are also seeing that the old ways of raising money are changing. Building on Howard Dean’s on-line fundraising innovations, the Obama folks have turned this into a virtual campaign cash machine. The Internet makes special interest groups, corporations, and wealthy individuals less essential to him.

And ironically, just yesterday George Bush, while in Israel, gave Obama a perfect opportunity to contrast his and John McCain’s approaches to foreign policy when he compared Obama to pre-World War II appeasers of Hitler. Not only did this reveal how much McCain is like Bush (he jumped in to gleefully agree with his president) and underscores Obama’s contention that a McCain presidency would in effect represent a third Bush term, but it also instantly united feuding Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s immediate reaction was to call Bush’s speech an outrage to Obama and to all Democrats. They no longer are willing to be labeled, as the conventional wisdom suggests, as weak on defense. By acting so forcefully they signaled that they will not allow themselves to continue to be Swiftboated.

May 15, 2008--Mister Softee Goes To War

Almost as contentious as the battles that raged on the stoops of Brooklyn about which baseball team had the best center fielder--the Giants with the Say-Hey-Kid Willy Mays patrolling the vast expanse of the Polo Grounds; the Dodgers' Duke Snider who lofted many a mighty home run blast over the towering right field wall out onto Bedford Avenue where kids like me who couldn't afford a ticket fought with each other to collect the souvenir; or the Mick, Mickey Mantle who as a switch hitter swatted homers from both sides of Yankee Stadium's plate--almost as heated as these baseball battles were the arguments about who sold the best ice cream:

Was it Bungalow Bar whose trucks in the shape of a brown-roofed bungalow replete with faux chimney plied my East Flatbush neighborhood from April through October, offering for a nickel treats such as a chocolate-covered pistachio ice cream bar or vanilla ice cream sandwich which on a hot day had to be gobbled down before it melted and the ice cream ran down your arm or plopped onto the sidewalk; or its upscale rival, Good Humor, from which, for a dime, if you were fortunate enough to have one, you could purchase and then savor their incandescent and rarified toasted almond or chocolate éclair bars; or was it Mister Softee, which from its truck dispensed delectable soft ice cream, which for an extra five cents, could be dipped into a bath of hot chocolate which coated the ice cream and then hardened into Mister Softee's signature Brown Bonnet?nn

To give you a sense of the intensity of the ice ream rivalry, patrons of Good Humor, not content just to flash their affluence before we urchins who had to settle for the cheaper Bungalow Bars (which we contend to this day were quite superior), had a ditty that they sang as the Bungalow Bar truck crossed Church Avenue and made its slow way south to us on East 56th Street, a taunting song that mocked BB’s familiar jingle:

Bungalow Bar
Tastes like tar
Take a bite
And spit it far

No one ever claimed we were classy!

But because of our sheltered youth, we had no idea that lurking behind the veil of innocence through which at the time we saw most of reality, was a darker, Darwinian truth—Good Humor, Bungalow Bar, and Mister Softee were not just friendly rivals roaming the streets in kitschy trucks, but were often literally at each other’s throats as they fought, often violently, to protect their territories.

Today, one would expect that since Bungalow Bar no longer exists except in our rapidly blurring collective memory, and with Good Humor, though it still makes its ice cream bars, having mothballed its fleet of trucks back in 1977, and though Mister Softee still exists, because the competition thus has ended, there should no longer be any lingering territorial problems. But this is New York City, where everything is about real estate, and so think again.

Three vintage Good Humor trucks have been lovingly restored and now two are running routes in Manhattan and one can be found every day in suburban Mount Vernon, and thus it is not unexpected that these are once again contending with Mister Softee which is still thriving and can be found on many street corners all of the Big Apple.

One would think that with just two Good Humor vendors left in the city there would be room enough for all who wish to sell ice cream on the street to not get in each other’s way—it’s a big town. And that they would not, like some years ago when ice cream rivals went at each other with over-sized steel wrenches and one brawler wound up in jail for 10 years, that this sort of thing was a part of New York’s high-crime-rate past.

Well, though things between the remaining Mister Softee fleet and the two Good Humor trucks have not as yet come to blows, they are currently, as the weather warms and the schools move toward closing, flexing their muscles.

The New York Times reports that a battle is brewing up on the West Side. (Article linked below.)

One Jose Martinez, pushing around a spotless 1966 Ford Good Humor truck, has been setting himself up at the corner of 83rd and Columbus, right across from P.S. 9 and the Sarah Anderson School. Well and good—though most of the kids haven’t a clue about the history of ice cream on the streets of New York (how many know anything about any aspect of New York History)—but it seems that spot has been the turf for more than eight years for Ceasar Ruiz and his Mister Softee truck. So the struggle resumes. Peacefully thus far.

Mr. Ruiz claims that he is entitled to this spot because of his having staked it out for so long (there are no city licenses or ordinances that assign spots to ice cream trucks), and that the Good Humor man should find another location. Mr. Martinez responded, saying Ruiz “doesn’t own this spot,” and he’s just “trying to make a dollar.”

So where do we go from here? Mr. Ruiz says that he usually shows up each afternoon at 2:30, but because of the new competition he’ll set up earlier in the day. But who knows how Mr. Martinez will respond and where this will wind up. As a no-longer-innocent adult, I of course suspect the worst.

But in the meantime, I’m hoping that Bungalow Bar resurfaces since I really miss those pistachio pops. You see, I’m still a man of the people. But now they’d probable cost at least two bucks. About what a nickel used to be worth.

May 14, 2007--McCain's Apocalypse

Both presumptive nominees have their reverend problems.

Barack Obama’s has been on more prominent display. Perhaps it deserves to be. At least to this point. Reverend Wright was his pastor for 20 years and Obama should have known before a few months ago about the full scope of Wright’s views—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Especially the ugly, which, whatever one thinks about the total context of Wright’s ministry, were and are at the very least politically damaging. Perhaps very damaging as some of the exit polls from yesterday’s West Virginia primary suggest.

But on the same day that Clinton was trouncing Obama in Appalachia, John McCain’s reverend was finally back in the headlines. True, those headlines were, as in the case of the New York Times, buried deep in the papers, but there was the Rev. John Hagee back in the news. (See linked article.)

He, recall, is the Evangelical minister with a wide television following who was exposed after he indorsed McCain (with the Straight Talker by his side) as having called the Catholic religion “the great whore.”

Now among some Republicans (and a few Democrats) there is nothing wrong with prostitutes. Quite the contrary. But Hagee’s views of Catholicism have been well known among Catholics for many years; and for whatever good Hagee’s endorsement did for McCain among Fundamentalists, as he has been attempting to pander his way into their favor, it has caused him grief among Catholics who comprise a significant percentage of so-called Reagan Democrats, another constituency McCain needs to cozy up to if he is to have a chance to win in November.

Thus, McCain, who it is important to note actively sought and did not just receive Hagee’s support, got himself caught between an Evangelical rock and a Catholic hard place.

So it was good news for McCain, right, that Hagee yesterday apologized to Catholics for being misunderstood about what he said about their religion?

Not exactly since it will only be good for McCain if the media continue to pay attention to the phony as opposed to the real Hagee and continue to give McCain a free pass while parsing the last details of the struggle between Obama and Clinton. And only if the media, like McCain, “accept” Hagee’s apology at face value and move on—back to Obama’s Rev. Wright problem. Because the true Hagee view of Catholicism is buried deep in his eschatology—how he and his followers see the End Times: the Rapture, the Apocalypse, the Antichrist, the Millennium, the Last Judgment, and all those good other good things.

Because it is at that time, when the world comes to a final end, that those Catholics (and Jews) who haven’t seen the light and converted to Hagee’s form of Christianity, it is then that they will be viewed to be “whores,” and thus suffer the consequences—a holocaust like we’ve never seen before and eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

So, though Hagee is perversely theologically “correct” to say what he said yesterday (if I can elevate these kinds of crackpot and extra-biblical view to theology and correctness)—that Catholics are not whores. But if he were being fully open and honest about his beliefs he would have said that Catholics are not yet whores. But wait, he would have added, your time will come.

I wonder if John McCain is OK with this. Maybe now that Obama is wearing an American flag pin, when the two debate, George Stephanopoulos will have the time to put it to McCain. It will take some fancy dancing, as opposed to straight talk my friends, to explain that one. And maybe then the Rev. Wright will recede to the background where he belongs.

May 13, 2008--Hillary Last Night at 3:00 a.m.

Can’t sleep. Too many things on my mind. So much to think about. For one of the few times in my life, I’m confused.

Isn’t it ironic? I just noticed that it’s three in the morning. The time I said I’m best prepared for. Ha! To deal with whatever crises crop up in the world. A terrorist attack. Another hurricane. Something with Bill. Whatever. And I would be up to it. To all of those. But look what it’s come down to. I’m exhausted, not delusional as so many pundits are claiming—I know how to count—but I don’t know how to stop this. Or what to do. Everyone’s speculating. But I’m the one who has to figure it out. So what else is new?

If it weren’t for Chelsea I would know. Who was it that said—“End the madness”? But so many people throughout my life told me, even from when I was a child--especially then--that I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t do that. Is that what I want Chelsea to take away from this? That I couldn’t make this happen? What kind of a lesson, what kind of a model would that be?

Last night, she and I had a few drinks together. She is such a love. She told me how proud of me she was. How what I have achieved in my life inspired her. Continues to. It made me cry. Not the way they smirked about in New Hampshire. But really cry.

Chelsea took me in her arms, we had had a lot to drink!, and said to me that it’s OK mom, it’s time for you to take a step back. Not to give up but to recognize what all the numbers are saying. That I can’t win this. I mean the nomination. Things are now stacked against that. And she told me that’s it’s not my fault. I did everything I could. I worked my heart out. Like, she assured me, I always did.

Well, it was my fault. I didn’t say that to her of course, she was being so wonderful, but I know. I know. I may be exhausted and frustrated and traveling on fumes as some snark on TV said, but if there’s one thing even my enemies will say about me, I’m not stupid and if I wanted to I could make a list of the things I could have done differently.

First of all I could have voted against authorizing this fucking war. When people look back on this campaign that’s what they’ll point to as doing me in—even before it started. But I got tangled up in it like a lot of others. I’m still kicking myself for voting with Bush. Not because I saw things the wrong way—quite the opposite—I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. Minimally it was premature. Invading Iraq. But I had to show them that a woman could have balls. Could be commander in chief. I was running for president even back then, even for years before that, and wanted to show them. But look how my miscalculation screwed me. Some would say it was my ambition. That too.

And there are more things I could put on the list—no Plan B after not putting him away on Super Tuesday, not telling Bill to cool it in South Carolina (why did I continue to listen to him, to believe in him?), not keeping my people on a shorter leash, not keeping an eye on the money, not understanding the importance of the caucuses.

And not seeing sooner how good a candidate he would turn out to be. It may turn out to be that no matter what I did would not have made a difference.

That’s another irony—I, I made him stronger! If I had stayed on the high road and talked about just the issues, had ignored rather than attacked him—saying that all he is is a speechmaker . . . and worse—he’d be still stumbling around sounding like an empty suit and instead of him I’d be the one picking a running mate. So I have that on my plate too.

OK, so how to think about this? What should I do? The media clack are speculating about what I want—to be on the ticket, to bring him down so I can run again in four years (I’ll still be “young,” they say—they should only know), to become Senate Majority Leader (are you listening Harry Reid?), to run for governor, and who knows what else. I know the possibilities as well as they. Better.

Others say I should be thinking about history—how I want to be remembered if this turns out to be the high point. And what about the so-called Clinton Legacy? But whose legacy are they talking about? His? Mine? Ours? Though there’s a point there. Even Chelsea was talking with me about this the other night. Because maybe it involves her as well. She didn’t say anything about this. She doesn’t think in those terms. She leaves that to her father and me. She at the moment just wants to take care of me. To make sure I’m all right and come through this in one piece. She’s really worried about that.

And to tell the truth there are times when I too worry about this. I can’t believe what I said at the end of last week. It scared me that I said what I said. Yes, scared me. About his base. And about hard-working Americans and white people. They quoted me out of context. What else is new? Someone asked me about an Associated Press report and I was talking about it. But I did on my own add the bit about “hard-working.” And connected that to “white people.” That wasn’t in the AP story. I’m not that delusional! I did that.

Look, I know we made race an issue. Back in South Carolina. Both Bill and me. I can’t deny it. It’s on the record and whoever writes about this in the future will point that out and maybe say that’s why things turned out as they have. I don’t have to wait to read what they will write. I know what doing that did to the demographics. His and mine. That was calculated. And it was in the heat of battle. When who would come out on top was very much uncertain. Look, they were playing the gender card. No, I’m not saying that he was, but all the media people were. When looking at the exit polling numbers they were saying it was women who were my strongest supporters, who were keeping me in the race. So what were we to do? To ignore the fact that he was black? They weren’t ignoring the fact that I’m a woman. This is a bloody business. There’s not much pretty about it.

But last week was different. I can’t deny it--what I said just slipped out. I didn’t calculate or parse it or test it in focus groups. I said it after it was all over.

Yes, I’m still making a big thing about continuing, not giving up. No woman should. In spite of what she told me I think even Chelsea wants me to keep fighting. Though I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just projecting because I can’t stop.

Forget the Clinton Legacy. What about the Hillary Rodham Clinton Legacy? The other one is about him with me sittin’ there at his side nodding along like a bobble-head wife. The Little Lady Legacy, the Mrs. Clinton Legacy, the stay-at-home-baking-cookies Hillary. I’m sick of that one.

But I need to ask myself what have I really accomplished on my own, in my own name? That was the whole purpose of the experience argument. But that didn’t work either. Too many young people, including young woman, rejected that. But that was the deal I made years ago. A lot of women did. They didn’t understand, that previous generation. Maybe they don’t even care. To these young women it was just another kind of slam-bang, thank you ma’am. Where they did the slamming! Enough of that too.

I don’t know what this should compel me to do. Try to get on his ticket, for example. After all, there hasn’t ever been a female vice president. I don’t know. Maybe if I could get a good night’s sleep after West Virginia I’ll be able to think it through. That’s what Bill is telling me—to be a part of history. Not just a footnote. I know that works for him. But for me? I’m not so sure.

But there is one thing I do know for sure—I don’t want to be remembered as just the candidate of white women over 65 who never went to college. Nothing wrong with them. They need representation, they need a voice and I’m proud that they have selected me. And they have. If there’s a forgotten group in this county that hardly anyone pays attention to it’s these women. They don’t have any organizations or constituency groups or lobbyists working for them. So if they will be a part of my legacy I’m fine, very fine with that.

Then there’s also been another part of my constituency. And Bill’s too. I’ll give him that. A big part. They were with me until South Carolina. And then they gravitated, really rushed to him. I know that a big part of that was that many of them for the first time in their lives, for the first time in history saw the possibilities. The real as opposed to the token possibilities. I understand that. In fact, part of our calculation to talk about race, OK—to make it an issue, was from understanding that. That there was nothing we could do to continue to hold onto them. They were and would inevitably drift away to him. Look, many of my own supporters came to me for the same kind of reasons. So I really understood that.

But still, in spite of knowing about these kinds of powerful attractions, I can’t reconcile what I said last week.

In the time that remains I have to do something about what I said last week. Some significant repair work. Though it’s not my inclination I have to figure out why I let that slip out and what it says about me. About what I really believe and who I truly am. But there will be time for that later. And I won’t be doing that on Meet the Press!

What then should I do now? Have to do now? There’s not much time for that, but I have to do something to make amends, to bring about some kind of reconciliation. This is important. Very.

Things are going to get even more complicated after today’s vote in West Virginia. What happens if I get 65 percent of the vote? That’s a real possibility. My people and the media who love the horse race will be telling me to keep going. To do the impossible. To even take things to the floor of the convention in August. I could do that. Wait for the sky to fall. Who knows? Maybe there’s another Reverend Wright lurking. Or a bimbo. I know about that one!

So I don’t know. I need to try to do the right thing. Maybe not just for myself but . . .

If I could only get some sleep than maybe I’d be able to figure it out.

May 12, 2008--Losing One's Bearings

The opening salvos of the fall campaign for the presidency have just been fired. And I use this metaphor—salvos—intentionally because they are like how a naval battle begins—with shots across each enemy combatant’s bow.

John McCain, former naval officer, fired the first shot. With his political poodle by his side—that would be Joe Lieberman—he accused Barack Obama of being Hamas’ preferred candidate. He moderated himself though, since he and his wife are both claiming that theirs will be a civil campaign, by not saying that Barack Hussein Obama is that terrorist group’s presidential darling. He graciously left that to others.

Senator Obama was quick to respond with a broadside of his own—saying that the presumptive Republican nominee was “losing his bearings.” (See NY Times article linked below.)

Obama’s use of the term “losing his bearings” unleashed another firestorm. McCain and his camp retorted that Obama was raising the age issue. But McCain was quick to add that that sort of thing is admissible in a political campaign. In fact, so is the relationship between Obama and Reverend Wright. Thus we were off to the races.

Pundits at the news networks were having a wet dream. Not only did they still have Hillary to kick around; but now, even before the dust from last Tuesday‘s primaries could settle (they were making sure as best they could that it never would), they have McCain and Obama biting each other in the neck. And about such good stuff.

The focus of the McCain-Obama coverage was on the age implications of Obama’s comments. Was he so early on pointing out that McCain was losing it? They had almost nothing to say about their exchange about Hamas since both candidates in effect have virtually identical positions—we will not even talk with Hamas until and unless they stop calling for Israel’s annihilation. Not much ratings juice in that part of the story.

But, ironically, they didn’t even get the alleged age attack right. Obama didn’t say that McCain was losing his marbles. Which would have been an assertion that he was beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Losing one’s bearings could even be construed, archly, as a reference to McCain’s naval background since losing one’s bearings means getting lost, going off course, as in a ship tacking in the wrong direction. As indeed McCain had done.

But more heretically, what in fact is so wrong with Hamas having a preferred candidate? If it suggests and then it turns out that Obama is a wimp and would be easier for Hamas to bluff, scare, and defeat, that obviously would not be much of a good thing. But if Hamas means that if Obama were to be elected they could do business with him and thus find a way to make a deal acceptable to all parties, including Israel, that sounds to me like a potentially good outcome.

But I know . . .

May 9, 2008--End the Madness

Things are going from bad to worse.

Many thought that Hillary Clinton hit unredeemable rock bottom on Tuesday when she got trounced in North Carolina and barely squeaked out a victory in Indiana. Neither was supposed to happen. She appeared to have momentum or traction, take your media-hype pick of descriptors; and it was hinted that she’d win by double digits in Indiana and might even pull an upset in NC.

When that didn’t occur, Tim Russett and Time Magazine declared the contest over. All that remained was for Hillary to implement her exit strategy. Others in her camp were reported to be doing just that—negotiating for tell-all book deals while publishers would still return their phone calls.

Would she take the gracious high road and release her delegates to vote for Obama or subtly work to bring Obama down in the general election so that McCain would win and she could stage her ultimate comeback in four years? Or was she angling for the vice presidency? Perhaps what she was really seeking was some face-saving series of events—big wins in West Virginia and Kentucky and some fig leaf solution to the Michigan and Florida messes, a deal that would allow her to claim that she fought to have “every vote count, every voice heard.”

Then yesterday she revealed her real intentions when she had her Reverend Wright moment. But this time she was her own Reverend Wright.

Commenting about an Associate Press report that Barack Obama was still having trouble attracting working-class voters, rather than letting that speak for itself, considering that the contest for the nomination is essentially over, she couldn’t resist agreeing. But rather than doing so in an objectively neutral manner she went out of her way to underline the racial and not the class implications, insinuating—and there is no other way to put it—that working people, “hard-working white Americans” are not voting for Obama. That hard working white people, she said “white” twice in two sentences to be sure no one missed her point, not only form her base but will not vote for Obama.

Parsing this it is obvious that she was making a number of syllogistically related points—

• Barack Obama is just a black candidate since he cannot attract white votes;

• “Hard-working Americans” is code for “white Americans”;

• This means that Black Americans, Obama’s base, are not hard working.

It would be easy to say more, and bloggers and op-ed columnists and editorial writers are all over it, but since the nomination is all but decided, I prefer to think about how we might be able to move on.

Clearly no one as yet has gotten through to Hillary Clinton that it is mathematically inconceivable that she can win the nomination even if she secures the best deals possible in Florida and Michigan.

Some have suggested that Harold Ickes or Terry McAuliffe or Dianne Feinstein need to have a private talk with her about a dignified exit. I doubt if that will happen or work. At this point, after he failed to deliver North Carolina for her, no one thinks she would even listen to her husband. In fact, on Tuesday night he was given a jet of his own and sent back to Chappaqua. I suspect we have seen the last of him on the campaign trail.

So it’s up to Chelsea.

It could be that this dogged, never-say-die tenacity that has been so commented about is less about Hillary’s personal ambition than a gift-by-example to her daughter.

How, especially as a woman, when the odds in this gender-biased society are stacked against you, to be a true equal to men, you need to show at least equal grit and determination. “Unless we do so,” she may be saying, “we will never break through the ultimate glass ceiling.” Isn’t this unwillingness to compromise and concede at the core of so much of Clinton’s appeal to her voter base?

During this long campaign Hillary as mother has seen her daughter come into her own. At first, when the very-private Chelsea (as the press described her) materialized on the campaign trail she stood silently in the background, smiling, clapping, and nodding as she listened to her mother’s stump speech. A bit later she went off on her own, mainly to college campuses, and found her voice. In fact, this Wednesday morning in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, in the face of boos and calls from the crowd to “End the dynasty!” (see NY Times article linked below), a brave Chelsea introduced her understandably deflated mom.

Now then it is time for Chelsea to say to her mother—perhaps this Sunday on Mother’s Day—

I love you more than you can imagine. You not only nurtured me but also have inspired me by your example. I now fully see what is possible for me and others who face discrimination because of gender or race. I do not want the public’s final memory of you from this historic campaign to be that of a desperate person. A desperate woman who inadvertently, from exhaustion, says things that are untrue to your nature. I don’t want to see you caricatured. You have been too special to me and to the country.

If that doesn’t work, Chelsea can add, And remember mom, there’s always 2012!

May 8, 2008--Mud Season

I know that a lot of places which depend on tourism try to come up with schemes (I almost said scams) to attract visitors during their off seasons. You know, how to get folks to visit Aspen in June and spend $400 for a hotel room when there is no skiing and no celebrities around at whom to gawk. Or how to seduce tourists to the Miami Beach during August when it's 100 degrees out and the humidity is a dripping 100 percent.

But though I love to settle in in Vermont to escape from the city's summer heat and to take in leaf-changing season, and understand why for those who ski winters are the ideal time to visit, I say to Vermonters leave well enough alone and forget about trying to lure tourists up there between winter and spring when all the state's charming footpaths and unpaved roads turn into a sea of mud.

It is called Mud Season and no one will argue that it’s inappropriately named. And no one will suspect that its some perverse form of Camber of Commerce hype. It’s literally a sloppy messy but natural time. A time of regeneration and eternal hope. If from all that snow and all this slop such beauty each year will emerge, viewed in the right way—which admittedly is not easy to do while slipping and sliding when calf-deep in mud--It’s also the time that separates true Vermont natives from the rest of us Flatlanders.

Only those who families who go back at least four generations take this season in stride. In fact, if Vermont is wired deep in your DNA, you don’t even take notice of the swales of goo. You just pull up your socks and get on with it.

But some innkeepers, probably folks who have lived in Vermont for only 50 years or so don’t get it. Never will. But I understand, though they’re now living in about the best place on earth, still, like the rest of us, they have to pay their rising heating costs (even cords of firewood have gotten to be expensive) and in many places up there gas already costs more than $4.00 a gallon.

So maybe we should forgive them that they are trying to turn mud into a tourist attraction.

According to the New York Times (article linked below), at the Wildflower Inn in Lyndondale, your $300 per-person midweek package includes, on arrival, a “complimentary mudslide.” So be forewarned—dress accordingly. When you check in a slice of mud pie awaits and then they rush you off to the spa for, you guessed it, a mud wrap. For the outdoors type, they guide you to the nearby mud bogs where if you’re luck you may spot a moose. And when you get back to the inn, they promise to pile on extra soap. An amenity that always gets me back for a second visit. I personally like nothing better than being able to filch a few extra bars of those little hotel soaps.

Sounds good, no? Well, when last we checked, the Wildflower, in spite of its unique Mud Season deal, has had as yet no takers. So if you’re looking for something unique to do this weekend, give them a ring.

The weather forecast for Friday is perfect—heavy rain. It will be just what’s needed to melt the last of the snow and as a result the resulting mud should all that anyone could wish for.

May 7, 2008--It's Over

Let’s pause for a moment.

Yes, ultimately it’s all about the numbers. But though the media folks are poring over the details of the returns from last night in North Carolina and Indiana—what they call the “internals”—to see if Barack Obama managed to squeak out a victory when all the votes are tallied in Gary (he didn’t) or if he picked up enough delegates to get to within 100 of those needed to clinch the nomination (with a predicted rush of Super Delegates today he will), if we get too caught up in process issues (how much more did Hillary have to loan to her campaign, was it wise for her to spend so much in NC, did Obama finally put the Reverend Wright behind him) or how she did among 65+ year-old white women or how much Rush Limbaugh influenced the vote in Indiana; if we get lost in this stuff, as I did until 1:00 am this morning, we will miss what this is really ultimately about—not the numbers but that Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party nominee. And we will fail to sufficiently notice the historic fact that he narrowly defeated a woman and that he is black.

I’m getting on in years and never thought I’d see this day.

I’m old enough to remember that when my very smart and talented mother wanted to have a career beyond the home “all” that was available to her was elementary school teaching. Nothing wrong with becoming a teacher, but very little else presented itself so she had to do “women’s work.”

I’m old enough to remember seeing “colored” and “white” drinking fountains the first time I visited my Aunt Fay in Florida. I’m old enough to remember that when Jackie Robinson bought the nicest house in my modest Brooklyn neighborhood it only took the Jews and Italians who lived on his block a few months to so hound him and his new family that they had to move out in the middle of one night.

None of this was 100 years ago.

I’ve been supporting Barack Obama for more than a year and have here been very critical of the Clinton campaign. Especially it’s attempts to caricature and marginalize him. But her candidacy too has been remarkable. In any other election cycle she would have turned out to be the “inevitable” candidate she appeared to be just four months ago before Obama won the Iowa caucuses. I would have been sending her money and blogging away furiously about why we should vote for her. In my previous life, during the Clinton White House years I worked very closely with her on education-related issues. She is brilliant, up to speed, fun, and committed to progressive goals when it comes to really making sure that no child gets left behind. We didn’t see too much of this during the campaign, which is too bad. She was so eager to win the nomination that when things began to turn south for her that Hillary disappeared. She would have made a fine president and that too would have been historic.

Today we’ll hear a lot about what kind of deal Obama will have to strike for her to get out of the race before the next few primaries. In truth he doesn’t have to make a deal. He is the winner even if she prevails in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico. The favorite form of media speculation will be about whether he will or has to offer her the vice presidential nomination (I predict he doesn’t and won’t) or if he will promise to pay off her campaign debts (he will, including at least $5.0 million back to her and Bill) or if the price of her campaigning for him will require him to supply her and Bill Clinton with their own planes (he will). The usual post-primary stuff.

But again about history. Who would have thought . . . We may well be following our better angels. Wouldn’t that be something.

His nomination, though, is about much more than the obvious history it represents.

Back on January 18, 2007—sixteen months ago (which in politics is like 100 years), on the day after Obama announced he was forming a “presidential exploratory committee,” I posted the following blog which still seems relevant and suggests why this is not about history but about what might be his capacity to bring change to America and the world. Indulge me. Here’s an excerpt:

Is Barack Obama just another fantasy? Another intoxicant?

Maybe yes. Perhaps no. But he may, just may turn out to be the real-deal . . . and electable.

More than that, if he does turn out to fulfill his promise, he may be just what the U.S. and world so desperately right now need.

I know that his every utterance and every vote will be scrutinized, as they should be, and the pundits in the media and blogosphere will parse and analyze his every action to see if he is drifting left to appeal to the Democrat base who vote disproportionately in the primaries or is embracing the middle in the knowledge that to be elected he must appeal to the vast majority of voters who are more moderate. We will be speculating about what he thinks about not funding the troop escalation in Iraq and where he stands on immigration and abortion and gays and . . . you know the list.

And while I care about all of these issues and many more (education, health care, agricultural policy, trade, outsourcing), right now I care about other, very different kinds of things. First among them, our position in the world—how we are perceived by our former allies and those who wish us harm. It seems essential to figure out how to again connect ourselves to those with whom we share obvious common interests and how to talk to and, yes, make deals with others who are currently viewed to be our adversaries.

Who better to send out into the world on that latter mission of healing and reconciliation than someone like Barack Obama? And here I emphasize the someone-like part. He appears to be a living, breathing example of what America is supposed to be about, and when we calm down enough to stop beating on each other over all sorts of cultural wedge-issues perhaps we’ll stop to focus on what we are really about: diverse, polyglot, tolerant, smart, ambitious, practical, self-made, brash, not fully-formed, generous, and above all hopeful.

He is the literal face of that America, the America of this still-young century, and by the time he is 60 will even more so represent what we will inevitably become.

Of course these characteristics are also his political weakness—for those who fear the "other" or need to place blame on those who are different to explain and deny their own failures and frustrations, for them he too is the perfect face.

But the big question is who he really is. Is he as authentic as he appears? Or is he just another hollow political self-creation? Does he have the stamina, courage, and vision to be a fine, maybe even a great leader?

It’s good to have him in the race so early so he can be tested and we will have the time to find out.

May 6, 2008--Day Off

Back tomorrow.

May 5, 2008--A League of His Own

As a part-time resident of Mallorca, even as an inveterate baseball fan, it is impossible not to become interested in soccer. Or as they prefer to call it—fútbol.

They, with me trailing in the wake of their enthusiasm, are especially fervent every four years during World Cup. At those times passions truly flow. Players who have left their native countries to play in the Latin American, European, and Asian football leagues return home to join their national teams, and the competition between countries then takes on added political and cultural dimensions. Those who really know these things, me not included, not only root for their countries’ teams but also propound the superiority of their history, way of life, and national systems.

Metaphor takes over and asserts itself on the pitch as well as in the swirl of stories and rumors that surround each of the star players. It is an anthropologist’s and political scientist’s dream. If you want to understand postwar Germany, for example, all one needed to do was look carefully between the cultural lines during the 2006 World Cup which was hosted by the Germans. Not since Nazi days, it was observed, did Germans at home and abroad display so many flags. Though this nationalistic fervor alarmed some with long historical memories, to others this represented the new Germany which felt fully comfortable for the first times in decades overtly and unashamedly expressing national pride. No matter that they didn’t win the Cup. They were proud once again to be Germans.

Then there are the Brazilians. Win or lose, there are always the Brazilians. At first, totally uninitiated, I did not understand why knowledgeable fans said that because of the way the Brazilians play football is the beautiful game. To me all the teams’ styles looked alike. But then during one game in the 2006 Knockout Round, I understood as Ronaldo sambaed his way across the pitch to score Brazil’s first goal against the team from Ghana.

This aging star, who during earlier games was jeered for being overweight and out of shape, not only demonstrated that he still had it but also turned me into a believer and new-born enthusiast for the Brazilian way. That goal, his 15th in World Cup play, also broke the Cup’s all time record and etched his name indelibly in football history.

But now Ronaldo may be making another kind of history. Until recently, like all other world-class players, he had a healthy reputation as a ladies man. This is expected, even required of soccer stars. Almost as much as their World Cup records. In some cases more so. Ronaldo had both—equal success on the pitch and apparently in the bedroom. His girlfriends are legend and included two Playboy centerfolds who the press labeled “Ronaldinhas.”

Recently, front pages all over Brazil are ablaze with reports that Ronaldo, say it isn’t so, was recently questioned by police after he invited three cross-dressing male prostitutes to a hot-sheet, pay-by-the-hour motel.

He does not deny the essence of the story but claims that he tried to pay them and send them away after he learned that they were guys.

But things may be more complicated than that because if true, though nothing Ronaldo did is illegal in Brazil, his image will be forever tarnished in the macho world of fútbol. More so than Barry Bonds’ or Roger Clemens’ is in baseball lore.

According to the first prostitute, “Andreia Albertini,” who is actually a transvestite named André Albertino, once in the motel he suggested inviting two of his cross-dressing “colleagues” to the party. They arrived and some hours after that, according to Señior Albertino, Ronaldo paid them the equivalent of $600 for whatever it is that happened—for their services or, as has been suggested, to hush them up. Albertino, police say, may have asked for $30,000 for himself to keep him quiet. Whatever the details, it doesn’t look good for Ronaldo.

This is far from the first time a Brazilian fútbol star has found himself in sexual-identity trouble. According to the New York Times (article linked below), in São Paulo last year, the head of a well-known soccer team accused another team’s player of being gay. The player sued for slander but the judge who heard the case threw it out, saying that since fútbol is a “virile game,” and not for homosexuals, if he wanted to continue to be gay and play soccer, he should leave his team, which the judge assumed must be entirely straight, and start either a gay team or homosexual league of his own!

Footnote: A few years earlier a group of transvestites who lived in Ronaldo’s hometown, without any judge’s urging, did in fact establish a team of their own.