Eric Off the Cuff

What Remains after 9/11

2008-10-26T18:22:00.002-04:00

When I was growing up, if something bad happened to me at a particular place, I did my best to avoid it. Gradually, I let myself approach the bad scene, but still could not bring myself to look at it directly.

Shortly after 9/11, whenever I went downtown I averted my eyes as I approached Ground Zero. It was something awful that had happened to me, and it hurt to come close to it, to acknowledge what I lost. I took furtive glances as I walked down Broadway, at the blackened shell, twisted beams, mountains of debris, cranes, land-movers, and barriers, and a dense penumbra of dust and smoke.

Looking at the disaster up close was troubling, but it was worse to stare at the site from a distance, or from another direction. Looking southward from the Avenue of the Americas, I tried to replace through force of memory the landmark that always indicated south, but there was nothing there, not merely dilapidated but dead and gone. If I pretended that I had not seen New York for thirty years, or that I just arrived, an empty southern vista would be normal. The World Trade towers would be like other New York landmarks that disappeared. But I could not pretend.

That was why I passed the site time and again on my lunch break. I needed to look at the demolition site, because ruins were something; they accounted for what disappeared. Although the towers were never my favorite buildings and I had visited them only a handful of times, I tried to fill in the space they once occupied, with how I remembered them best. I recalled the sensation of walking the curves of Maiden Lane, and suddenly from two blocks away, confronting a bluish glass structure, like a vertical whale, and wondering what it was, to be told that it was the south tower. And I thought, “So that’s where it is.”

During these elegiac visits downtown, I walked back up Broadway and noticed the sign “The Woolworth Building” chiseled over the doors of the skyscraper. I crossed Broadway to admire the tallest building of a hundred years ago, its arches and filigree. I entered a new phase of mourning. My World Trade Center was taken from me, so I consoled myself by taking stock of other landmarks that sustained my New York identity. When I saw the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building through an office window, I stared at them to absorb and savor them. As powerfully built as they were, they might be as vulnerable and transient as I was, so I must preserve them in detailed memories.

It might seem absurd that a person links his identity to buildings. I don’t live or work in any of these places, and did not design them; yet they contribute significant motivation for living here, and they are a source of pride. One of my first defining moments in New York came a few weeks after I arrived. I had just painted my 3-room east village railroad flat when friends invited me for drinks at a midtown bar. After happy hour was over and we’d gorged ourselves on free hors d’oeuvres, my friends led me to the median strip on Park Avenue in the 50s and told me to look up.

In the twilight, colossal Bauhaus skyscrapers, glass and steel, inspiring, terrifying, and clarifying, surrounded and covered me in their shadows. They imposed on me a new perspective of myself in in a world that was alien to my expectations, impervious to my schemes and deaf to my desires. My new self-image was neither grandiose nor romantic--I was reduced to scale. Staring up at those buildings that did not scrape the sky so much as impale it, I could not avoid an emotional response, a sense of where I was, and what my relationship would be to New York. It was an initiation. When confronting structures of such immense scale, you either decided to exist in the midst of the power that built and maintained them, deal with it, perhaps benefit from it, or flee.

I chose to live in New York, to feed off of its size and power. Others no doubt have been repulsed by it. Over the years, I also learned where the small buildings were, the quirky neighborhoods, hidden concrete glades with fountains or waterfalls around the corner from bustling thoroughfares, quiet enclaves in bedlam. I cannot separate myself from New York’s buildings. I wish they had not destroyed the old Penn Station. Whenever I drive down 7^th Avenue and 33^rd Street I mourn a beautiful landmark of which I was deprived and which will never be again. And I am grateful that Grand Central Station still stands.

Now I take stock of what remains. I gaze at the golden roof of the New York Insurance building, and admire that big white cake at 40 W. 23^rd Street, and risk a voyeur’s disgrace by peering at the dark brick façade of the Hotel Chelsea. I stare at buildings whose names do not appear in tour books, because they capture my eye and imagination. If all men are mortal and Socrates was mortal, then the World Trade Center was mortal, and so are all things that humans build. We must do what we can to rebuilt them—in their empty lots and hearts.

TIME VS. TIMEPIECES

2008-09-24T11:59:00.011-04:00

I was changing after a recent swim when another man dressing a few lockers down on the same bench observed that I was switching watches. "So you have two watches, one for swimming and another for dress," he noted with ironic amazement.

I was embarrassed to admit that I own more than two watches. I own a dozen, nine of which are functional at any moment, and only five of which I wear on a regular basis.

Then for some reason, pride in timepiece?, I provided him with the extraneous information that my dress watch is also a scuba watch, water tight up to 100 meters, but I am reluctant to wear it while I am swimming laps for fear of scratching it against the bottom of the shallow end. My comrade in exercise smiled ruefully and recounted that he once swam while wearing his prized Rolex and cracked the crystal against the watchband of another swimmer. The Rolex, which had sentimental as well as monetary value, was ruined by the chlorine.

"You must have been heart-broken," I commiserated.

"Actually, it was liberating. We shouldn't be attached to possessions, right?" he asked. "If it were one of the instruments I use in my job, I would be concerned. But a watch is not a necessity."

"In principle I agree with you," I replied. "But I love my watches. Even the ones I never wear. They're talismen. They not only tell time but remind me of times."

He nodded more in sympathy for my mental defect than solidarity with my position.

"I replaced my Rolex with this thirty dollar watch," he said. "It's great. It keeps perfect time, has run on the same battery for eight years, and has other functions, too."

Being a watch-junkie, I was getting excited hearing about this exciting, versatile timepiece and asked him for the brand. Then we discussed the recent vicissitudes of the wrist-watch, how it had once been a token of milestone events--graduation, retirement, etc.--and not everyone had one. But now it was a common and cheap accessory to be purchased anywhere.

"And it's funny that watch lovers like a heavy watch even though it's clunky and gets in the way."

"They'd carry a sundial on their wrists," he said. "The odd thing is that the Swiss wind up and automatic watches don't even keep perfect time and they always need to be serviced. People are stupid."

It's a harmless obsession, I said. And we left it at that.

But like every other conversatio I have had with an intelligent stranger this did not leave me just like that. It shone a thin but penetrating light on some of my least observed values. Why, I asked myself, was I so compulsive about my watches, changing them, and carrying more than one? Did I really need one in a swimming pool? What did it say about me?

My obsession with watches began weeks after the birth of my daughter, when I was smitten by an illustration of a Swiss Army watch in a newspaper ad. The colorful bezel--a metallic lifesaver--and the round, childlike numbers of the dial charmed me even in black and white newsprint. For weeks I struggled with this unforeseen and irrational attraction. I was at the beginning of fatherhood, with a vulnerable baby and wife depending on me, yet I was like a six year old fantasizing about a watch. I did not immediately purchase the Swiss Army watch since I was suspicious and disdainful of my reasons for wanting it. Was I reverting to a childhood lust for toys that coincided with the birth of my child, or acting out my anxiety over the passage of time?

I resisted the whim. I already had a watch. It was the only one I owned in my adult life—an elegant, versatile Seiko my wife gave me unexpectedly one day when I came home from work. She had spent a large fraction of her salary on this gift, and haggled desperately with the store owner to be able to afford it, so it assumed an O Henry Gift of the Magi mystique. It was a versatile timepiece, with a splendid array of functions that I have never seen in any other watch: analog and digital, it told regular and military time, provided the day and date, and had alarm clock and stopwatch functions, too. Everything about it from its wafer thin case to the intricate links of its band was sleek and silver, and it had such catlike reflexes that when it fell off a surface or slipped from my wrist, it always nimbly landed face up. Yet, because this wunderkind of watches had no numbers, and proved too elegant and sophisticated for my mood, and I took it for granted.

For a month, I suppressed my desire for a new watch with numbers by taking long drives. Then circumstances intervened. My wife’s versatile gift watch steamed under the crystal while I was playing basketball. Its hands, if not time, stood still.

The jeweler said that a new gasket would take months to order and insert. I was warned that wearing it everyday might jeopardize its long-term function. Now that necessity justified my craving for a new wristwatch, it flared uncontrollably, so my wife, infant, and I went to a mall where I would find the “number” watch I lusted for.

My wife supported my desire for a new sports watch, but her view was that if I was going to be frivolous, I should be practical. She reasoned that I needed a watch that would be supremely resistant to water. She convinced me to forego the more expensive and, to her mind, juvenile number watch and purchase instead a diver’s watch with bright green circles in place of numbers. She persuaded me that this was what I had wanted all along, although I had never seen it before. I soaked in her excitement by osmosis and enjoyed the diving watch but could never shake the feeling that it was a compromise.

My yearning for a watch with numbers went into temporary remission, but four years later, I found one on sale for $20. It came in a green, fake alligator case that snapped closed. I bought it on the spot. For the first month I had it, I took off my numbered watch at night, buckled it in a circle, and replaced it in its box so that each morning I could relive the thrill of wearing it for the first time. Gradually the fake alligator strap was bitten at the notch where I fastened it and I stopped the ritual of newness. Now, five years later, my numbered watch sits in its box, an unworn relic of a childish fetish.

Since then I have bought five more watches. Now I have more timepieces than days of the week, at least one to match any color and style of clothing. I try to be fair to all of my watches, and give each of them a turn on my wrist. Sometimes, I change watches when I come home so I can give each one a chance.

My only excuse for this conspicuous consumption is that others are apparently as addicted to watches as I am, if the floor space in department stores and catalog pages devoted to watches are any indication. Since, timepiece technology is commonplace and most watches durable and reliable, people must buy watches for other reasons than telling better time. Watches are more about fashion than function. They are accessories that give glitter to the drab conformity of our dress, and say something about the taste, economic status, and aspirations of the people who wear them.

My craving for new watches merits no distinction from other shopping addictions. However, I cling to the redemptive idea that a watch does not measure time so much as console for time lost. When I am stuck in line or waiting for my number to be called, I anxiously consult my watch to confirm my distress. There, with static grace, a beautifully designed face stares back at me with elegant hands and splendid colors. At that moment, the theft of my time and the truth about how little I have are forgotten and I am rewarded by the model of efficiency and art adorning my wrist.

Election Vs Selection

2008-09-14T14:45:00.003-04:00

Every two years or so I am seduced like most Americans into the believing that my most important choice in life is the one I make in a voting booth. I am pulled into the clamor of the political spectacle like a lonely, wide-eyed innocent to a summer carnival. I listen to loud pundits, who like barkers, call out the exceptional value of their opinions. I watch commercials with amusement, and listen to thunderous oratory. Despite the boisterous and burlesque tone of election campaigns, I am admonished time and again to take the process seriously and to be informed. Presented with various candidates, I am warned that my choice will have lasting consequences in my life and the lives of hundreds of millions of others. The process ends when I enter a booth behind a plastic drape, pull switches, yank a lever—elect!

The hype about elections is the biggest scandal in American life. The notion that my choice of pre-selected politician will define or change my life is as preposterous as the assertion that which TV show I watch will have lasting impact on my health.

At best, the election is a surrogate for all the smaller decisions in my life that are vitally important and more difficult to make—my selections.

As we muddle along we tell ourselves that our electoral decisions are meaningful and that we would be wise to prepare ourselves to make the right choice. We fantasize that our elected officials from president to surrogate judge will save us. By electing the right politician we will be made whole again, our problems will be solved, our bad luck reversed, our choices—those that were good but soured and the ones bad from the start—will be rectified and redeemed. Elections by this measure become a secular rite of ablution and healing.

Only afterward, when we see that whomever we elected did not appreciably change anything, and that they either blundered or were besmirched by scandal, do we see the error of our false hopes. And of course, we react with one more dose of the same purgative—we vote the rascal out.

Elections are a symbolic quick fix to distract us from real choices that are more personal and private—and more urgent—the choices that really matter and that truly affect the course of our lives—let’s call them “selections.” Elections are the periodic consolation prize for the choices that would matter most if we could make them—the selections we don’t have an opportunity to make, or those we make poorly. These are selections like what job we ultimately get, who our bosses really are, and what our colleagues are like.

The election process is a generalized and symbolic representation of the selection process. In the former, we are given more information than we can possibly use and much of it is worthless. In the latter, we are always given less information than we need. Selection is a far more critical to our individual happiness than an election, and far too complex and specific to discuss with others. Elections can agitate you, become a part of your life and burrow inside your psyche, but their impact dissipates like an alcoholic beverage. Selection penetrates you to your very depth and its impact never leaves you. Each selection you make enters your personal history, become a feature of your psychic topography, a tattoo no laser can remove. You wear it behind your eyes and in the bend of your smile.

Indeed, selections are so personal and indelible that nobody except maybe your mother and car salesman would offer to help you make one or even discuss it. When you try to talk about your quandary in making an important and difficult selection, those whose opinions you solicit will tell you they cannot help you—selection is an act you must perform on your own. This same hands-off dread of guilt for squandering or destroying someone else’s life by tampering with their choices does not apply to elections—the surest proof of how unimportant elections truly are. Loud people carrying signs shout at you as you approach the polling place about the candidates they want you to vote for right until you open the door of the polling place and walk in. the moment that you enter the official polling place.

The torture of selection was never more vividly and humorously depicted than in the game show Let’s Make a Deal. We felt little rubber hammers of pain on our hearts as we watched endless mini-tragedies that poor selection could bring. As avaricious contestants squandered money in hand for a donkey behind door number two, we cringed because we knew we could do the same. Selection is just too hard.

If selection were not so hard, we wouldn’t care so much about elections. They are public rituals that permit us to release personal steam from the selections that we make with imperfect knowledge and are stuck with. They give us the chance to talk openly about choices that have little personal consequence while we deal privately with those that bend our twist our lives. Since elections really don’t change our lives so much and selections do, perhaps we should think less about being an informed electorate and more about being wise selectors.

Of course, corporations and wealthy private contributors would have little interest in influencing or helping us with making wise selections. A fortune can be made exploiting public policy, but no money to be made in promoting personal happiness

The Cicada: Is Democracy Better Than Monarchy or What Kind of Choice Is This Anyway?

2008-08-27T13:43:00.004-04:00

I am like a political cicada. My interest in all things electoral emerges periodically, then abruptly disappears. For awhile I am passionate about my views; I make predictions, learn all I can about the candidates and the issues, until I realize that political events supercede my control, while outcomes confound my understanding and frustrate my will. My interest, which arose out of some unconscious need, recedes.

This cycle of interest arousal and loss is partly biological. At times, I awake from social hibernation, I look around me with blinking eyes, am disquieted by what I sense, and feel an urgent necessity to take interest in the world; I suspect that some of this interest is manufactured out of temporary boredom with my own life and preoccupations.

However, the more immersed I become in the political spectacle, the more tedious, repetitive, and inaccessible the action and verbiage become. By comparison, my own life seems more interesting. At least it is unambiguous and I have some control over it. Of course, interest in politics might be more abiding if my presidential preferences were occasionally reflected by electoral outcomes. This never happens.

In all the elections I have seen, my favorite candidate has never even made it to nominee. It is an ignominious record of selection futility. And of course, I believe that the best candidate has never even run for president. So when elections come, I am always in the booth between the levers of two evils, agonizing which is the lesser.

This kind of participation grows tiresome . It is like trying to support one of two teams in the Super Bowl when you are indifferent to both. Fortunately, I have liked more football teams that made it to the Super Bowl, more teams that won the World Series, even more hockey teams that won the Stanley Cup (and I rarely follow hockey) than I have presidential candidates who made it to the general election. Otherwise I would have neither sports nor politics to comfort me.

Some would say my election ennui would metabolize to excitement if I became more involved. But I think this would only make it worse. It is emotional quicksand--something makes you sick, so you do more of it? This is tantamount to advising someone who likes their wine too much to switch to hard liquor--so their inebriation will be more efficient. My problem is both chronic and acute. It drives me beyond cynicism, beyond iconoclasm, all the way to apostasy. I actually begin to contemplate whether the democratic presidential election as a leadership-delivery system is so great a political improvement over monarchy.

I wonder if the primitive African tribes that made their chieftain candidates run a brutal gauntlet were not more prescient than primitive. (If the candidate survived, he won!) Will mankind in 3000 look back and determine that democracy was not all that? That is no political improvement overall, but just the desperate flailing response to a few bad monarchs? When taking all the authoritarian and democratic leaders into account, will elections prove a better modality for selecting leaders than the divine right of kings or the mandate of heaven? I can't presume to know.

What I do know is that a least with monarchy, you don't go through the motions of believing you have a real choice, that is someone you really like or trust or believe in, or that you are deciding between two disparate individuals. The king or queen are who they are--they are rich, they are pampered, they are lucky--and you accept them or ignore them. Whereas, in our system, you're always stuck with two strangers with two different faces that you have choose between, like two different faces, but always on the same coin.

This charade of choosing a president in our system is exemplified by the risible uproar over Senator McCain's senior moment about how many houses he owns. Chances are he has never even lived in all his homes. Like the rich man in Satyricon who cannot be bothered to look at financial records that are six months old, McCain has more important matters on his mind than his precise wealth. And so, for that matter, should the Democratic leaders, who are also far wealthier than the electorate. Senator Obama is a multimillionaire, who resides in a multi-million dollar home and vacationed in The Bahamas and Hawaii in the past five months. Do the Democrats expect us to vote for their candidate because he is rich, but not as rich as his opponent, and thus more sensitive to the problems of the poor and middle class in coping with the present economic conditions?

The same presumptuousness infects the Democratic Party as a whole Democrats tout themselves as being better equipped to fix the economy. But with the exception of The New Deal and the Great Society, when have the Democrats or their government model created jobs? And even when the jobs were created, were they jobs that most Americans would want, or were they the kinds of jobs that are government-made and disappear as soon as budget cuts are required?

My sense of our two-party system is that the Republicans believe in a system that works for very few people. But at least they are honest about it. The Democrats, meanwhile, pretend that they want to help and can help the many people for whom the system rarely if ever works. And then, of course, even when they are elected, they fail to redeem their promises...always blaming someone else for their failure. (We didn't get affordable federally subsidized health care in the 1990s and we haven't gotten out of Iraq since the Dems took over Congress in 2007). At least with the Republicans, you know as a voter what you are getting and where you stand. The Democrats are like smooth-talking insurance salesmen who sell you a phony policy. Or like the fraternity brother who is supposed to catch your stiff body when you fall backwards in a game of trust and then lets you fall down a flight of stairs.

Memory Sustains Life

2008-08-16T21:12:00.004-04:00

I have always had a good memory. Except for students in school, memory is a faculty in general disrepute. It is far better to be spontaneous, instinctive, and bold. Memory is deemed most useful to those who are aged and past prime--and who ironically may lack it. Memory must be promoted before it becomes obsolete.

People are obsessed with knowing what is happening right now and in trying to predict what will happen in the next moment.

We are "dated" when we reference the past. Worse, we are identified as living in the past, which is deemed pathological and pathetic. Looking forward is heroic and brave...looking backwards is a good way to get whiplash.

History was once promoted as a prescription for improvement. Many of us believed that by knowing the past we could avoid repeating it. This wisdom has been trumped by the theory of eternal repetition. We know that we must repeat the past in variation because beneath our sophistication, we are animals that must repeat ourselves in order to live--and die.

Meanwhile, we move toward the future, not walking briskly, or steadily, or in a straight line. Rather we dance in great circles, spinning in a direction not always apparent, beguiled by the music in our minds.

Luckily, there are many good things to remember...college is one.

It may not reflect any other experience we ever have, but this is not a bad thing. If each of us can experience an exception to the realities of living, then why would we ever deprive ourselves of this for several years on the cusp of turning adult?

I recently showed my wife and teenage daughter the campus of my alma mater on our way home from a vacation. It was my first time back since I graduated more than thirty years ago. I could not believe how many new buildings there were and how new the older buildings appeared. I always remembered my dorms as having dark facades, but they looked scrubbed and new.

We drove around the campus, on the sidewalks as well as the campus maintenance roads--they looked alike. We must have been the only ones on the premises on the second day in August. It had rained profusely in the area that afternoon. Steam lifted from the pavements and the grass and drifted among the trees. The light was neutral, pure, and honest, and the colors expressed themselves in depth.

It is a small place but the long absence increased the distance. There were many new buildings, and I struggled to remember what many of the old ones were for. The building where I had received my mail had become a library. So much for memory!

But the power of memory is borne out by the fact that I am writing an essay about this obscure homecoming. Essay writing is one experience I remember most about my liberal arts education. I wrote many essays for four years, then entered a world in which essays were not much valued anymore. Still I am grateful for the legacy. It is useful and enjoyable to be able to improvise thoughts, to find their unseen relationships, and inherent structure. I do it whenever I can. Memory sustains life, but so does practice.

Memorial Day, the Premature Summer Holiday

2008-05-23T00:20:00.019-04:00

Memorial Day weekend has likable qualities but the weather usually isn't one of them. Of course, any long weekend has a claim to public affection, as an atoll of leisure in an ocean of work. Memorial Day is one in a series of rest-stops in the calendar that includes Labor Day, Columbus Day, and President’s Day--secular holidays whose solemn, original meanings have been obscured by the universal need for respite and relaxation that they partially fulfill.

What makes Memorial Day special and endearing is that it is such a screw-up. With its sibling holidays you know what to expect. M.L. King Day is solemn and cold. President’s Day usually brings the first foretaste of spring, longer daylight, and winter clearance sales. Labor Day is the last summer holiday, when the shadows of shorter days fall earlier and more profoundly, a harbinger of cooler seasons ahead, regardless how humid the air or how high the heat. But you never know what to expect of Memorial Day because it has been forced to overachieve in play a role for which it may not be qualified.

Memorial Day is the prodigal child of holiday weekends. It makes no grandiose claims for itself, but carries our impossibly high expectations. Memorial Day is like most children--hopeful, impatient, and eager to please those implacable adults who pressure it to be what they want it to be. We ask Memorial Day to be the first summer holiday when it is more apt to be the last holiday of spring, falling as it does squarely in the milder season. We ask Memorial Day for beach weather while the ocean is still chilling after a long winter. We ask it for barbecue skies when over the past century, it has rained on Memorial Day one day out of three.

Perhaps the most confusing quality of Memorial Day is that its name denotes solemnity, mourning, and a mood more conducive to houses of worship, yet it has become a major symbol of summer frivolity and spending, inducing somber reflection only by seaside merchants lamenting poor business when Memorial Day is a rainout. In essence Memorial Day is when we drink and grill hotdogs to honor the dead.

I remember Memorial Day before it was the last Monday of May, packaged for a convenient holiday weekend. In those days it was specific to a date, May 30, and was celebrated inconveniently in mid-week, like the 4th of July, if that was when it fell, . Because it was one isolated day, it was a good sleeping day, not much for cook-outs and get-togethers. Falling at the end of May it was usually steamy and warm, a 75 degree soup, and overcast. The languor I associate with Memorial Day, a bilious boredom, is doubtless due to these first impressions of childhood. It was a day off when the weather was depressing and nobody was around to play with--a wasted day.

Since that time there have been some good Memorial Days. I once attended a fine barbecue in the surprising concrete backyard of a tenement building in the west 30s. That was a Memorial Day weekend that lived up to its summery expectations. It was also a funny occasion because it was the last time I saw men cling so tenaciously to their role as barbecue cooks. The anointed few stood over the open charcoal grill in white aprons and snowy toques and did not cede or share for a moment the priestly task of turning the drumsticks every few minutes. It occurred to me that cooking, boiling and all preparations involved with water might fall to women, but men were still consider ourselves the masters of flame, the stokers of the fire.

In some way, Memorial Day is Rorschach for how one feels about summer, especially the summer ahead, for which it is the ceremonial portal. When I was in college, Memorial Day marked the start of a long, hot summer of menial work to earn college tuition. Thus Memorial Day was unavoidably tainted by the summer that ensued. It was like Sunday evening before a dreaded workweek that in my case would last twelve weeks.

As an adult, I recall another Memorial Day that produced acute anxiety. I was in a rock and roll band that was breaking up after a busy but fruitless May. On Memorial Day I woke up at 6 AM, acutely and prematurely alert as only fear can make me. I was immediately aware of how long the summer stretched before me and had no clue what I would do without a band or a job or friends to hang out with. There would be little opportunity or money with which to continue my pursuits. Memorial Day marked an off-season for rock and roll, a recreation of the night and an on-season for the beach and other wholesome places. People who had places out of the city to go to went and the city, usually a magnet, was now abandoned to those who were trapped here. On that Memorial Day I grieved for the career that had not taken off and took stock of my situation. I was broke and alone, and I knew I would need to find a job under difficult circumstances.

Memorial Days have had their share of drama. I lost two wallets on Memorial weekend--both were found. On the first occasion, I found it between my car seat and the door. On the other, I roamed the entire neighborhood looking in trashcans the night I discovered it lost. The next morning, the finders called me. When they gave me the wallet they lamented that there was no money in it. I lamented with them. Of course, I was teaching at the time.

With a school age child, Memorial Day becomes just another long holiday in which the final projects and reports must be done. One of my best Memorial Day memories as a parent was when my daughter was wrapping up her kindergarten year. I had just started a new career and my daughter was doing her final science project--a wetlands diorama. We went to the park and foraged in the grass and under the trees for twigs, handsomely shaped stones and curious artifacts to put in the environment populated by plastic alligators, snakes and frogs. It was a warm, sultry day like the ones I remembered as a child, but it felt so much better now. I was able to exorcise some of those bad old feelings. Being with my family, I realized that Memorial Day was never at fault for how I felt back then. It was always loneliness.

Since I am more settled in my wage-earning ways, Memorial Day has become more of a spectator sporting event. I listen to people’s plans for this holiday, and watch them pull their suitcases to taxis en route to glamorous destinations. Then I watch to see what the weather will do. In the past thirteen years it has rained more often on Memorial Day than it has not. I meanwhile catch up on things I need to do--like sleep and laundry.

What I like most about Memorial Day is that it is such an absurd hero of the calendar, assuming its gratuitous place in the year, struggling to be what it cannot be, and to do what it can do only with luck --provide a worthy introduction to the summer for which it comes a month early. Memorial Day is the holiday that pushes and overachieves. It demonstrates the American penchant for coaxing nature into a new order that is unnecessary even if it might be more convenient, like damming great rivers and draining great swamps. Dedicated to freedom, rooted in chaos, steeped in stress, we retain a poignant attachment to order and balance, an affinity which Memorial Day expresses. Do we need an unofficial start to summer that is a month early--a marker to balance The 4^th of July and Labor Day? No, but it would be nice. So we force an unreliable spring day to be the first unofficial day of summer. Then we proceed to feel miserable and betrayed when it lets us down.

Memorial Day is a thoroughly human invention: paradoxical, whimsical and grim. It gratifies our need for pleasure while calling itself a day of patriotic mourning. It bespeaks the child in us that cannot, will not wait, that demands a summer holiday NOW although summer is a month away. It springs from the stubborn need that compels boys to play basketball in darkness and rain and grown men to hit golf balls in the snow. This holiday does not commemorate youthful romps any more than it honors fallen heroes. It epitomizes the rashness, impatience and hopefulness with which we view ourselves and our lives, as well as our frivolous genius for bending anything to our stubborn will. The failure of Memorial Day to fulfill the puerile yearnings we force upon it may be what the memorial is all about.

Vote for Others, But Vote Yourself

2008-04-19T16:03:00.007-04:00

Candidates tell us who they are by crafting autobiographies to win our support. Yet, regardless how artfully they shape our perceptions, the monologue ineluctably becomes a dialogue, as political autobiographies are translated and transformed by the electorate. Candidates are like distant stars whose light comes to us from so far away that we can never be certain who and where they are, so we stuff the ballot box with our own resumes, superimposing ourselves and our lives on political figures. In a Utopian democracy, citizens would assess the contenders, their experiences, and positions on the issues, sift through their records and vote for the individual most likely to do the best job. But voting is self-expression; we vote who we are. Politicians want us to vote for their autobiographies but we vote our own.

I relate to Hillary Clinton. This was not always the case. When she was First Lady, I had a chance to see her make a public appearance at a local hospital, but I never made it. Over time, Hillary Clinton has shown great intelligence, courage, and perseverance. She is a diligent and ambitious individual who works toward goals and takes nothing for granted. She is sincere in her commitment to public service and causes that matter to her. She is remarkably resilient. When she fails in one initiative, she finds other ways to be effective. Although often characterized as deceptive, Mrs. Clinton is as trustworthy as you would want your attorney to be—shrewd, meticulous, discreet, and cool under fire. You want Hillary Clinton on your side, never against you.

Often depicted as arrogant and ruthless by her critics, Hillary Clinton has heroic attributes. She has risked substantial rewards for greater ones and has sacrificed simple pleasures and security for public service. Mrs. Clinton has a long record of subordinating self-interest for causes and people she believes in. She is a politician of surprising skill, who has shown quick thinking, supple wit, and sharp timing in various circumstances. She is also a warrior—brave, strong and resolute before a fusillade of attacks that would waste a more fragile individual. Despite her many admirable traits, Mrs. Clinton most of all evokes sympathy because she has incurred the anathema of most of the media. Like the furies of Greek myth, pundits swarm about her, belittling her accomplishments and gauging at her smallest mistakes.

Mrs. Clinton has compared herself to “Rocky,” the dogged underdog, an almost laughable persona for such a dignified, studied and intelligent woman. But the comparison is surprisingly apt. Like Rocky, one of the most appealing aspects of Mrs. Clinton is her capacity to overcome. Her greatest obstacle is her failure to live down to general expectations of women. One subtext to Hillary-bashing is that she is more than a woman and not woman enough. She is perceived as too smart and tough to be feminine and maternal, too calculating to be likeable; Like Rocky, she is viewed as a plodder, who compensates for a lack of natural talent by working hard and wearing down her. The list of her real and imagined defects is long--not a great orator, too detailed, too divisive--yet, Mrs. Clinton has always been more than equal to every fight she has been in. Since she is frequently underestimated, she plays the thankless public role of striver, climber, and over-achiever. Regardless how well she does, her detractors cannot bring themselves to believe it. At each phase of this primary season she has been counted out—even after she repeatedly postponed her political obituaries.

Apparently, many in the media hate the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming her party’s nominee. She is treated like a party-crasher who has overstayed her welcome, or worse, as a contemporary Lucretia Borgia. The irony is that Hillary Clinton is who our country needs now—a steely and efficient leader who will take being president as seriously as running for office. Like Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Mrs. Clinton has the stature, strength and gender novelty to lead her nation in a new direction. Yet despite her eagerness to serve and a character that thrives in the kind of adversity we face, the media despises her for reasons more relevant to how they feel about women than to Hillary Clinton’s qualifications.

Senator Obama evokes the image of a precocious lad who studied hard and behaved well so that he could make his family proud. When I look at a picture of myself as a six year old with a wise expression on my face, I see this same quality. It is a desire to be more, to make others proud, to save myself, my family and the world. The photograph of Obama in African garb was interesting not because he looked like a Muslim, but because he resembled a child on a field trip. He has retained a youthful quality, a whimsical air, and a childlike stubbornness to have the world conform to his specifications, which is different than it is. All of this may explain his appeal to young people even though he is middle-aged.

I feel I know Barack Obama from early school days. He evokes for me every class rival I had, whom a teacher preferred for intangible factors that I could not quantify, like temperament and personality―likeability. When I was in school, I smarted under this favoritism, sometimes in very real ways that would bear on my opportunities and my future, and I see an intrinsic unfairness in Senator Obama’s ascendancy. When he does well, Senator Obama seems to be appreciated more for who he is than for what he does. When he errs, he receives indemnity. When he loses—as in Texas and Ohio—he wins. When his judgment, on which he stakes his superiority, is debunked, by his twenty year friendship with a vituperative minister, he is allowed to repair it with a speech, and his advocates tell the public to forgive and forget.

Barack Obama seems more comfortable as a writer than as a politician. When he runs into trouble, his impulse is to write a speech. Since I am a writer, I like this quality, but how well would it work in a chief executive? A writer and a politician are designed differently. The politician is responsible to others; the writer to himself. The writer must reflect; the politician must act. The writer is a loner by temperament; the politician must be a 24/7 extravert. Most importantly, the politician must either hide his moral failings and dilemmas or be close to perfect; he must be unwavering in what he professes to think and believe. The writer is the eternal skeptic, turning thoughts, feelings and attitudes over and over like a barbecue, exploring, indulging, and exposing self-doubts, ambivalence, and moral crises.

When I was fifteen I exchanged the role of the student politician—a precocious “fine young man”—for the dark, ironic persona of a modern writer. Senator Obama never made that transition. He continues to play the role of good citizen required of the politician, although in his heart he may wish he were a writer. When he faces a crisis, he tries to defuse it with words rather than decisive action. How does his ambivalence play out? If President Obama faced a calamity would he retreat to his study like a literary Nero to write a speech while the nation burns?

I also see race in Barack Obama’s story, although I am told I should not do so. His autobiography is supposed to be about a man who beat enormous odds, but Senator Obama has been promoted in part by the collective social guilt of private and public institutions like colleges, universities, and media organizations. When Senator Obama made his “race” speech, the media issued a predictably favorable review. They described it as if they were teachers extolling an “A” paper—although he failed to address the assignment. While falling over themselves to praise his summary of racial conflict in America, the media ignored that Senator Obama did not explain how he—a socially aware and intelligent adult—could associate so closely and for so long with a man who expressed bigoted invective to hundreds of people every week.

Finally, I cannot separate Senator Obama from my indignation at the media’s favoritism toward him. My view of him has more to do with how he is perceived by others than with who he is. Of course, this opens a paradox: without the media and the money behind him, why would I know about him at all?

Of all the candidates with stories, John McCain gives me the most hope for my own life. This uplift has little to do with his ideology, party affiliation or stand on specific issues. John McCain’s appeal is not primarily about politics. He is trans-political in the same way that Natan Sharansky; Nelson Mandela and Lech Walesa are trans-political. All are freed men, who walked out of prisons intact and contributed to their countries. McCain's stature overflows the banks of politics because he sees a world and a reality beyond polls, elections and sound-bytes. His world-view appears to be derived from the world—a reality beyond politics, which government plays only a part. Because Senator McCain has seen life and death and survived in that corner where government rarely goes, he can separate himself from politics, to speak as himself, not as a public figure, to possess an ironic distance from the scene and moment he occupies. His wryness, candor, and occasional pique--very unpolitical behavior--suggest that his political performance is superimposed on an internal soundtrack. He treats politics as something less than life and death, and can make the distinction between living and dying and winning and losing.

Although John McCain endured a circumstance that we have no right to think we can imagine, his story strikes us powerfully real. Perhaps this is because reality imposed itself on his life. John McCain was transformed and nearly destroyed by circumstances. The Republican nominee stands as an icon of redemption, not the moral redemption of a man who took campaign contributions from a dishonest businessman only to co-write a campaign finance reform law. His life was redeemed from captivity and death and extended to serve its current purpose. He is not the hero of victory, but survival. In this sense he offers hope to everyone.

The arc of John McCain’s life is tragic. An ordinary man with common flaws—the resume of a classic tragic hero—McCain had every reason to be confident—a military pedigree, an Annapolis degree, the ability and training to fly planes—until a tragic event nearly took it all away. John McCain’s pedigree and privilege could not save him from the harsh vagaries of war—being shot down, wounded, captured and held in a POW prison. He might have died and never been heard of again. Instead, he survived five years of incarceration and torture and returned to the United States to enter public life. He stands before the American people as a guileless survivor, stripped of artifice, who sees beyond politics because his most powerful experiences were outside of it. What draws me to Senator McCain is his status as the prisoner who escaped. It gives me hope that in my own life I can escape the prison that holds me, even if it has bars that others do not see.

John McCain offers himself as proof that one should never surrender, regardless how hopeless a situation. His candidacy demonstrates why courage and perseverance matter. Pundits talk about a political life, about political death, about politics as a blood sport, but McCain’s presence on the political stage belies those claims. McCain reduces politics to its appropriate, often trivial proportions. McCain casts an ironic shadow over the process because his experience belongs to a reality that exposes politics as an artful simulation of life produced by light and shadow. He has been able to weather political tempests like the Keating scandal that would have smashed less resilient figure precisely because he has seen worse.

Distance is a rare quality in a politician that would seem indispensable for high office. But like any quality it is a question mark. It can take the form of needed perspective or self-righteous detachment. With John McCain this is the risk the voter takes. However, he has proven a capacity and willingness to cooperate with politicians who differ in ideology, to work for reform, and to assume positions unpopular with his party, so there is reward with the risk. Ultimately, what makes McCain an intriguing candidate is that he does not take politics too seriously or as an end in itself, but as a means to get to something beyond it. His prior experience has taught him the brutality and randomness of life, left scars and given him a sense of what is real. In the virtual world of sound-byes and spin, his authenticity seems more important than ever.

I vote myself. But once I have projected my story on the candidates, I turn on the lights and look in the mirror. How can I vote myself until I can see myself? When I look at my situation I no longer see Clinton, Obama, or McCain. I see a man in a world no candidate can see, imagine, or positively change, a world as many light-years from these luminaries as they are to me. I live in a world where government seems to be ubiquitous when you step out of line or look at your paycheck. But government is invisible when you drive on the shoddy roads, need to ask a question, or solicit help of any kind. Each day, I struggle for basic needs, while I am aware that many people face more difficult circumstances. I have no illusion that presidential candidates cannot deliver to me anything I need.

Once elected, over whom and what does the president preside?

Is the United States the new Rome or the new Holy Roman Empire? Can one political figure, with duties adumbrated in our constitution, bring coherence to our palimpsest of governments, regions, communities, markets, industries, interest groups, ethnicities? How did they live, work, and procreate without coherent political and social structures and institutions? Now I understand that long epoch because despite all of our technical advances, we are now in a dark age of omnipresent danger, of warring elements at every level of existence. I do not feel I belong to a coherent and cohesive order. I pay taxes to several layers of government. But if a problem arises in my life for which I need help from higher temporal powers, I am routed to web-sites, 1-800 numbers; I leave messages and am left to my own devices—and prayers. Computers and the internet have given us the illusion of a community, by bringing us so close to information, opinions, products and services, but they are rendering obsolete the human contact on which actual community and social order are based. Perhaps all periods in human history have been characterized by a fluctuating balance of order and disorder, control and chaos. I was always mystified and amazed that people survived the dark ages. We are now in a period of controlled chaos.

Will the political sphere and my world ever intersect? Or are they meant to remain parallel, one reflecting the other, like the mythic world of the constellations the ancients gazed upon for nocturnal entertainment? Maybe if we act as it is a democratic society it will be one. Maybe if we act as if our votes matter, they will assume the power we wish they had. Perhaps the government will do more than collect taxes and wage war.

Ultimately, politics is the alpha and omega of reality shows. Like any competitive spectacle I choose my favorite, hope he or she wins, am mildly satisfied if they do, am temporarily irritated if they lose, and push my life forward regardless of the outcome. This may sound cynical and passive, but I can do no better from my remote vantage point. I am unable to see the true candidates from behind their handlers and the media and so I am mistrustful of the entire process. This criticism may sound like the unreasonable critique of an amateur astronomer who complains that he cannot see the stars for the street lights. If we only become familiar with the candidates through the dark, distorted lens of the media, how can we complain? Without the media, we would know them less.

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself,” Michel Montaigne wrote in “Of Husbanding the Will.” This is the psychology of the average voter. We vote for others, but ultimately we vote ourselves—our needs, hopes, and aspirations. We view our politicians as instruments or impediments to our will, but at the end of the day, they are like the constellations the ancient star-gazers saw in the night sky—avatars of the imagination who provide entertainment and help us dream.

Hair Piece

2008-04-11T13:43:00.003-04:00

Hair, a.k.a. human plumage, may be dead stuff on our head, but it is also the original status symbol, a hood ornament indispensable to the car’s value. Having good hair is critical to success. When I started losing mine I was young. Issued a standard older image, I needed to adjust. From being the hero of my own story, I became a sidekick to no one in particular, a bit player in a blockbuster epic titled “Everyday Life.” Hair loss is a life-changing injury. It does not alter how you walk or talk, but how you are perceived, thus damaging your social persona, which informs and motivates all that you do. When your hair goes, you are demoted from the physical elite, exposed as defective, abased by nature, spoiled by age. It is a social law. I have heard men say they look at woman’s body, not her face, and women often focus on a man’s eyes—but both genders care about hair.

Hair loss is fate made manifest in a first impression. Other flaws escape censure—for awhile. Bad teeth can be whitened, capped or hidden—if they are molars. Obtuseness can be muted by reticence or improved with coaching. If you are mean, incompetent, witless, or insane, people might not catch on if you are discreet. But hair loss is public and in plain sight, a matter of record. People you meet may not remember your name or the color of your eyes, but they will recall if you had hair. You cannot hide or run from hair loss. Try at the risk of ridicule.

Americans believe in human perfectibility, but hair loss is that curious exception. With most defects, people appreciate any effort to improve. If you are ignorant they admire your initiative to read a publication or to do a word puzzle. When you have halitosis, you are respected for using mouth wash, chewing gum or popping mints. But the mere attempt to improve or mitigate hair loss with hair weaves and toupees heaps abuse on men who wish to thus elevate their status.

This is no abstract law of human behavior, but based on empirical evidence. I once stood in a Kinko’s behind a distinguished Asian man in a suit and tie. He had the nervous manner of a junior professor running late for the key presentation of his career. He also had a hair weave puffing up in back like the neck of a mating frigate bird. The hair to which it attached had grown and now the weave was levitating off his head. He needed it “restrung” like a tennis racket. Other customers on line, hardened by boredom, pointed, tittering, at the weave in limbo between hair and hat. Fortunately, the distinguished man was too nervous to discern their mirth. His preoccupation with color copies and lateness shielded him from humiliation. However, a day of reckoning was on this professor’s agenda. He was on a collision course with a grim discovery—his hair weave was stabbing him in the back.

Toupees are also objects of ridicule. They are called “rugs” for a reason. A floor covering now sits on your head. If a man wears a toupee two things must be true: he has great fortitude and confidence; and his toupee is imperceptibly natural. Otherwise he will suffer great torment, since people are ruthless about outing a toupee. An incident comes readily to mind. A corpulent, ugly man I know with mephitic breath and poor social skills, considers himself superior to bald men because he has a full head of hair—and he has no compunctions about “pulling rank.” At a Barnes and Noble “Meet the Author” reading, this hair supremacist heckled the popular author of a self-help book because the man wore a toupee. During the Q&A, the hirsute lout asked the speaker, “How dare you give people advice when you have a dead musk rat on your head!”

Why will people let you improve your mind but not your head of hair? This prejudice does not apply to women with dyed hair, wonder bras, and compressing body shapers. We do not care if the results are factitious; to the contrary, we credit these women for valiantly trying to improve their assets and make themselves more appealing. However, bald men are held to a higher ethical standard. We are compelled to flaunt our flaw everyday. It must be a conspiracy to oppress the masculine majority, who share this common defect, and to uphold a hair-centric social order. Hair might seem an odd and impractical organizing principle, but it has one powerful attribute—simplicity. Hair is a symbol for power, a sexual marker, and a symbol of youth. Hair retention and loss therefore is a fast and easy test of natural selection and a sign of divine favor. A full head of hair on a man is rare enough to suggest genetic election to nature’s elite, while hair loss is common enough to provide a massive under-class, essential for paying taxes, making war, and doing the menial tasks that keep society running.

Why do we need such an arbitrary social marker? Because there is too much equality in the world and it confuses people and makes us unhappy. There is a surfeit of educated men, strong men, men with jobs, cars, a proficiency in foreign languages, a taste for good food and wine. A quick and easy way is needed to separate wheat from chaff. If men are allowed to cheat on their appearance with fake air, how can women weed out the losers?

Of course, hair is more complex than having it or not. Among hirsute, young men more subtle comparators rule—good hair, bad hair, weird hair, irresistible hair, hair better kept short. However, such distinctions fade as follicles die and their mention can arouse memories and regrets in men wish they could still make them. My hair is now sparse and though I want to claim I once possessed a magnificent mane, the Polaroid documentation does not exist. Even when my hair was abundant it was a mixed metaphor—doing too much at once. It was a bramble, not a rolling meadow—dense, difficult, tortuous. It was turbulent and wavy as high tide on a rocky shore with cowlicks, like eddies and water-spouts, in inconvenient places. It was never neat and attractive, or even as straight, greasy and uncomplicated as the rock star hair I tried to emulate. In short, my hair never served me; it was not my extension, just dead stuff on top of my head. Maybe that was not such a bad thing because it saved me from missing my hair too much when it started to go. You’re hurt less by what never helped.

Such a matter must seem too trivial to ponder in detail, and I am the first to wish the quality of a man’s hair were not more important to most people than the quality of his mind. And while the cosmos is more profound than a mosquito, a can of Raid will do more good in woods than a telescope. Surely many people have held my hair against me until wrinkles and eye circles shared the weight of negative attention. Conversely, I might have more success with better hair, but I am reluctant to use hair as an excuse.

It would be unfair to my other flaws.

Is Felafel Patriotic After 9/11?

2008-04-01T13:49:00.005-04:00

The attack on the World Trade Center prompted me to question many aspects of my life, including my conduct, manner of relating to others, the work I was doing, and even my habits and lifestyle choices. These self-doubts and inquiries, ethical and ontological in nature, imposed themselves on the minutiae of my day. Every decision was fraught with political implications and security considerations, including what and where I would eat for lunch. Casual pleasures hitherto simply chosen and easily enjoyed were now cast in murky suspicion. Whether I should eat falafels in a nearby Middle Eastern fast food joint, for instance, became politicized—a clash between the part of me that separates state and sandwich, and the other, which says you are what you eat—and you don’t want to eat anything that is even symbolically anti-American. I wondered whether enjoying a fat pita filled with deep-fried mashed chickpeas coated with yogurt and hot pepper sauce constituted an act of disloyalty or treason.

Such misgivings led me to a Turkish falafel restaurant in the village. It was a political compromise since I had previously patronized another middle-eastern take-out place that was now off-limits in my mind because of the Lebanon and Syria tourism posters on its walls. Turkey is an American ally so I believed that eating Turkish falafel would be more harmonious with American interests and values. This in itself was a huge step for me and it I needed to work through many issues to take it. For months after 9/11 I had lost my taste for falafels. They had fallen off my personal menu. Finally, I rationalized that what I ate for lunch bore no relation to recent events, and that eschewing one of my favorite lunch foods would only be caving in to terrorism.

But the copper plates engraved with Arabic inscriptions on the wall, that once lent authenticity to the décor, now looked portentous. Their exoticism and strangeness, which had once been such pleasant aids to digestion now hindered my appetite. I started to imagine if the counterman could have tainted my falafel, by spitting in it, for instance.

Patrons entered the restaurant, speaking a middle-eastern tongue. Heretofore, their presence at a falafel restaurant would have reassured me about the quality of fare. Now they made me feel not merely disloyal but endangered. Was it possible to eat the wrong sandwich in the wrong restaurant and disappear? I asked myself if I was taking too great a risk for of my favorite lunch foods, over and beyond the potential damage the deep-fried falafel would do to my cardiovascular system.

But it was not merely a sense of peril that changed the experience of eating the falafel in a middle-eastern restaurant. I had experienced danger when eating in deserted Italian restaurants with immaculate tablecloths, sepia photographs of mustached men, and no apparent business but that which I provided. The strangeness of the décor and language could not keep me away—they added to the flavor as much as the harissa on the table. What had changed was a quality unique to middle-eastern restaurants, a form of brotherhood among the patrons. In a falafel restaurant, you would typically find hungry people of many origins all coming together for hot, spicy food of good quality that is honest, nutritious and delicious. Felafel-eaters, shwarma-tics, baba ghanoushers, and chummus-enthusiasts consume with fervor and enthusiasm and end their meals feeling satisfied. That camaraderie had been lost. Now we were once again strangers, even belligerents, who happened to like the same food, like competing predators around a watering hole. Maybe our mutual enthusiasm for one food posed an ambiguity, an identity problem. Did my love of falafels reveal something subversive about me?

The same mistrust infiltrated other commonplace decisions. A fruit stand where I purchased cherries and bananas was now suspect. Was the vendor perhaps a Muslim who sympathized with terrorists? Did he tithe to their organizations to fund their conspiracies, or was this modest fruit-stand an elaborate front for enemies of the United States? Before, such thinking would have seemed paranoid and absurd—and completely anachronistic in a city like New York, predicated on immigration and diverse people. But the ambiguity of this form of terrorism, its banality, how it creeps into everyday places and mundane activities, and is practiced by apparently normal people in customary clothes, with such innocuous items as shopping bags, has made no second thought absolutely ridiculous.

When something is blown up and obliterated, its residue and dust hang in the atmosphere much longer than we know. The event lingers in our hearts for longer still. For many months I would pass Falafel King, my favorite falafel place on MacDougal Street and not go in. This little restaurant, as narrow as a straw, had the best food of its kind. The sandwiches, built by the equable, young counterman—built because the sandwiches were too large and complex to be merely made—were copious and wholesome, the pitas bulged with fresh, healthy salad and spicy condiment. Your mouth could feel the the cold, heavy lumps of baba ghanoush in the pita, would savor the earthy crunchy goodness of deep-fried chickpeas, and the mint in the tabouleh. There were even large bowls of red, oily harissa on the tables, the hot sauce that performs the internal version of a sauna. I loved this place so much that I had walked a mile from one of my jobs to eat there. I liked it so much that I had even written my own ad for it. It was always delivered in my version of a middle-eastern accent, which sounded suspiciously like Boris Badinov in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon series. It went like this: “Why settle for pizza peasant, when you can be a falafel king?”

For all of these reasons I was sad to walk by Falafel King and not climb its golden stair for lunch. I hoped that the mellow, young counterman who had served me so many fine falafels would not notice my passing. In my heart I knew that he and Felafel King had nothing to do with 9/11 or the emotions that it evoked in me. I was miserable, even embarrassed, about how life had changed for me and everyone. Events had altered my view-point. Nevertheless, I could not deny the change, or be sure that my response to it was invalid. Still, a part of me always believes in dialogue, in making oneself clear, in being honest. And being silent and evasive is just a discreet form of dishonesty. Still, I didn’t know what to tell him, and I imagined that he would be offended if I told him anything. On the other hand, he probably didn’t want me to come in. Somehow, the World Trade Center attack had become for me the subtext to what all middle-eastern people thought of America—I had translated this specific, catastrophic event into a general intention, on which many people would not act, but which they secretly endorsed. I was a walking ambivalence.

Yet, one day I glanced up at the store, and he saw me. I nodded and kept walking, but then turned back. I realized that I was going to have a falafel, needed to have a falafel, not just for my belly, my taste buds, or the comfort the food gave to me, but for my psyche, to regain that one enjoyable routine I had that the events of 9/11 had taken from me. I was going to take the risk that the quiet, young counterman would not poison me, I would hold a more rational belief that his falafel would be as good as it had been a hundred times before. And maybe I wouldn’t have to explain myself.

He gave me his usual salutation, “Hey,” a friendly, low-key statement, that essentially contained a “I know you”, “How are you?”, and “Long time, no see” and placed on pressure on a response.

He made my falafel as I watched, asked if I wanted a hot pepper, which I did, and poured the spiced tea. I sat at a formica table in the back and stared out at the window. The music was on, a wailing voice, with the rush and tumble of Arabian arrangements. On the walls were posters of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt. As I expected they would, these innocuous relics of exotic climes that once transported me back in time to my youthful travels were making me nervous. The good-natured counter man had little business, so he walked back to the kitchen area behind a swinging door to bring a case of sodas to the cooler in front. He must have noticed my discomfort because he stopped near my table, and asked if there was something wrong. “No,” I lied.

“That’s a relief. A few days ago a customer was having a little difficulty. You know, chest pains. I thought it was a heart attack. Or heartburn. Either way, it’s not a good thing for a customer to be sick.”

I told him I wasn’t sick, just a little uncomfortable. Ever since 9/11 I had been anxious.

“Yes, I know. Me, too. Business is slow. Not just for me, but everybody. I know how people feel. I feel the same. But nobody believes that. I been here for fifteen years, on this street. But people forget. I understand. Maybe they will remember. I hope so.”

I hoped so, as well. It’s much easier to remember the carnage, the pain, the loss, than the hundreds of good falafels that came before, or to realize that the people you thought were good were as good as you thought they were.

I sat down at a table in the back, watching the door, tucking into the heavy sandwich cradled in my hands, while on alert. I chewed with delight the crusty chickpea balls, the sweet, marinated grape leaves, and crunchy lettuce, drenched in white tahina and red harissa. I sipped the sweet mint tea and scanned the tourism posters from Lebanon, Tunisia, Jordan—all countries that I would never be able to visit. Yet, I was tasting them in a way. As I was taking the last bites of the pita , two Arabic speaking young men came in and chatted with the counterman with voluble good spirits. They ordered and looked back at me. For a moment, my gut constricted and I went on alert, wondering how I would be able to get out of there if I needed to, since there was only one way out, and they were standing before it.. But the customers then turned back to their friend, the counterman, and they continued to talk in their musical dialect with the boisterous, high spirits of men in their early 20s. When he had prepared their sandwiches and they had paid, they shook his hand, gave him a salutation and left.

I could not help smiling at the peaceful resolution of this moment, at its normality. My reaction had been unnecessary. Was I merely lucky? Perhaps. After all, many Mafia rub-outs have occurred in restaurants. Or just maybe a good little restaurant is a little like a sacred place. Yes, this is a place foremost about food, and maybe food trumps hate.

In Rick Seback’s whimsical and informative documentary about sandwiches, the Palestinian-born owner of Sepal, a middle-eastern restaurant in Cambridge, MA, famous for its falafels, said that he has many Jewish customers with whom he often sits and discusses the political situation. He expressed his conviction that sharing good food could be a start toward understanding and peace. Maybe one day we will all find a way out of our post 9/11 dilemmas.

Baby Boomers Rule

2008-03-24T11:26:00.016-04:00

I only recently understood what the message of "change" signifies in this election and why only one candidate--the youngest--gets to send it. Change, which is true of any election in which the incumbent cannot stand for re-election, means a generational change in this context. Baby Boomers are being given notice.

This seems an unfair and premature dismissal from political power. After all, if the previous generation was the "greatest" we definitely rank as the "largest", as well as the most "boisterous" and "opinionated." We're definitely not done yet. We deserve more time at the top.

The "Greatest Generation", which served during WWII, gave America several presidents, from JFK in 1960 to George HW Bush in 1988. For thirty years one generation ruled this country and as great as the generation may have been, that succession of presidents had mixed results--a major war, several skirmishes, a smattering of scandals, and enough economic ups and downs for a new ride at Disney World.

For three decades, Baby Boomers attended schools, protested wars, submitted to the brutal rehabilitation of "going straight", went to work in the real world, raised families and waited patiently for our collective turn to elect our presidents and test once and for all if our generation and its elected leaders would do better than their predecessors.

Finally, we saw Bill Clinton occupy the White House. Our first Baby Boomer in the Oval Office 0penly expressed his generational bent. He appeared on late night TV wearing shades and blowing a sax, crisscrossed the country in a bus like a rock star, consumed fast food, and had extramarital sex. But if Bill Clinton dabbled in the Dionysian excesses of the post-war generation, his first lady, Hillary, channeled a more sober, idealistic vision of the 60s--the political activist working within the system to make a difference--Joan Baez, not Janis Joplin.

It has often been suggested of the Clintons that they are avatars of their generation--political idealists and moral relativists. They are brilliant, charming, and tenacious, but ruthless and self-absorbed. However, much of the opprobrium the Clintons have endured is not due to their foibles but to anti-Boomer backlash. In some quarters, Boomers will never be forgiven for opposing the Vietnam War, regardless how misguided it was; for enjoying drugs other than alcohol; and for accepting or practicing a broader range of social behaviors than any previous generation. The Clintons have been scapegoated for the perceived sins of their generation.

The Clintons had their share of political scandal, much of it fabricated by their political enemies but if the Clinton administration had flaws, it was also effective. Despite a staunch and frequently virulent Republican opposition, the Clintons presided over an era of prosperity, innovation, fiscal responsibility, and peace.

George Bush, a conservative and anti-intellectual counterpart to the Clintons, is the second Baby Boomer in the White House. A former athlete and alcoholic, George W. Bush was packaged as a new political prototype--the compassionate conservative. He proved himself to be a pragmatic governor, and presented himself to the electorate as a "regular guy", humble despite his wealth and pedigree, relaxed in demeanor and gifted with great people skills.

President Bush has also demonstrated invincible convictions and insufficient patience to master the details to support them. He represents the Young Republican Baby Boomers who were pro-war, clean cut and proud to be Okies from Muskogee--in short, the junior varsity Silent Majority. They wore red-white-and-blue armbands in school and were fond of shouting, "Love it or leave it" at the ungrateful, Commie-influenced, anti-war students with black armbands.

Now, after having two Boomers as president, millions of voters in the Democratic primaries have expressed an urgency for change, which is a euphemism for a generational take-over. The change-cravers want to usurp the Baby Boomers, who have ruled the U.S. for a mere 16 years. It is sizing up to be a clash of demographics.

The new millennium liberals are tired of the ethos in which the aging Baby Boomers cut and lost our political teeth. They wish to escape the dialectic of the '60s, the burden of taking sides, the anxious conflict of opposing ideologies. They seek a moratorium on the lore of hard-fought battles, when hundreds of thousands marched together, yet could not end a war. They embrace hope but not the torment and hardship that make a hope "a thing with feathers." They pursue an end to the polarization that results when an issue is so fraught that it splits a society in half; they believe it is possible for the poles to meet at the equator. They want us to come together without knowing who we are or what it means to unite in a chaotic, multi-layered, multi-scheduled society. Unite around what?

Barack Obama is the first presidential candidate to represent the post-Baby Boomer generation that matured in the Reagan revolution. He articulates a desire to move way from the dichotomies that characterized the '60s-- feminists/chauvinists; pro-war/anti-war; white/black; young/old. This yearning to transcend society's divisions is a conceptual blunder. Dualities are not of the past, but immutable and inescapable units of reality, as hard-wired as gender, race, class, conflict. The differences we are enjoined to overcome are not political but biological and cultural in nature. We can no more overcome them than we can cease to be human.

Baby Boomers understand the social dialectics probably better than any generation before or since. We clashed with our parents only to endure thirty years of their governance. For three decades our destiny was in the portfolio of a generation that neither understood nor appreciated our unique historical place and perspective. We have now only had power for half of that time.

Hillary Clinton and John McCain both represent the Baby Boomers. McCain may be a little older, but he is an honorary Boomer since he served in Vietnam and is part of the 60s conversation . Hillary Clinton is a Baby Boomer through and through.

Regardless who the candidates are come November, we will probably elect a president who represents the "Largest, Loudest, Most Innovative Generation." Others may stand for change. The Boomers have the math.

We Honor What We Destroy

2008-03-18T15:11:00.009-04:00

Giving to worthy causes should make me feel good, so why doesn't it? Non-profit organizations raise issues that arouse my sympathy and concern—supporting one law, opposing another; ending war, poverty, genocide, hatred; saving extinct species; preserving wilderness; freeing political prisoners; defending free speech; promoting love; instilling hope; fostering community; building affordable housing; supporting cultural institutions, public television and radio.... Commercials and direct mail assure me that I can make a vital difference by contributing to a cause. Yet, the philanthropies present the situation in such dire terms that I find it hard to believe that my paltry contribution can make the slightest difference. Clearly something is not working. Giving money ought to at the very least give me the sense that I am doing something constructive and worthwhile, but it doesn't.

To some extent, eleemosynary appeals breed a sense of futility by design. Giving becomes like eating, providing temporary satisfaction that soon relapses to hunger and craving. This is due to the genius of charitable organizations. They cultivate a feeling of inadequacy in do-gooders and well-wishers they solicit so that they can make the same pitch next year. They perpetuate themselves by reminding me that the challenges are greater than ever and that the work is never done. Perfectability is not as I always believed an end but an infinite process.

However, much of my ambivalence toward charitable giving is prompted by the nature of the causes themselves, something intrinsic, a ghostliness or self-defeating paradox at their core. My intuition prods me that the causes have been lost and that my contribution is purely symbolic, a token of mourning and guilt, rather than a constructive act. While the charitable organizations purport to improve the future, they dwell on errors of the past. They encourage action but focus on atonement. They claim to save and protect but they lament what is lost. As Aristotle once said, "Even God cannot change the past." And if God can't do it, how can my donation?

No doubt, all good causes are founded and funded not on optimism but on guilt. Do we believe that we can make things better or fix what we’ve broken, or do we give money in the same spirit as relatives who bring flowers to a grave and have a picnic with the deceased, or strangers who place teddy bears and candles at a murder scene to express regret for those events which cannot be remedied?

As a species we have an atavistic habit of offering sacrifices for what we want and for what we have subjugated and destroyed. We indulge nostalgia for what we have forced into hiding and pay homage to what we fear and despise. Once we establish a fund to save this or promote that you can be sure that this and that have already disappeared. If absence makes the heart grow fonder, extinction brands it with eternal longing.

Each year I receive appeals for money from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the same people who run the Bronx Zoo. There is a guilt-paradox in this: the jailers and purveyors of wild beasts in civilization as entertainment crusade for more wild territory for the beasts they have not yet encarcerated for our approval. Are they sincerely trying to save the animals for their own sake or for the legacy of future zoos? I like making faces at the gorillas as much as the next zoo patron and often indulge in the pathetic fallacy that we are having a meaningful social exchange but I cannot couch these regressive tendencies in a misguided liberal notion that the gorilla is having as much fun as I am.

Despite these reservations, saving wildlife and wild habitats seems worthwhile by any moral metric. Yet, the dire situation the Society asks its members to address is depicted as so hopeless and grim that no monetary sum would seem adequate to rectify it, or to expiate the guilt our species should feel for driving other animals into extinction.

In the spirit of remorse, we continue to beatify what we destroy. The savage becomes noble only when he has been conquered. Saturday morning TV programs, extending from morning to afternoon, admonish an audience of bug-eyed tikes to read books. We support conservation while driving SUVs that could do battle with prehistoric mastadons. We fund cancer research while creating the conditions in which cancer occurs. And we exercise our right to vote in record numbers to preserve and honor our democracy while our government wire-taps our phones, secretly tape our movements, and monitors our cash transactions when they are deemed suspiciously large--undermining many of the rights on which our democracy is based.

Symbolism is a beautiful thing.

Spitzer Reconsidered

2008-03-17T20:21:00.010-04:00

My first reaction to Eliot Spitzer’s involvement in a call girl ring was surprise. I still do not have a sharp image of Governor Spitzer or an auditory memory of his voice. He was perhaps the most behind-the-scenes public figure one could imagine. He only seemed to come forward when he had a major conquest to report—a crime ring broken, a conspiracy smashed. It was as if Governor Spitzer needed a dramatic pretext to come before the people. He set out to win our approval since he could not win our affection. He made enemies because he could not tolerate opposition or frustration. He was tightly strung, narrowly focused and intolerant of the imperfection that marbles human nature.

But it wasn't only Spitzer's credential as an Olympian prosecutor that made his new role so incongruous. He did not seem to be a man of uncontrollable appetites. On the contrary, he was too controlled, too serious, too cold to lose himself in frivolity or vice, and too intelligent and aware to indulge and rationalize a deviant act. Governor Spitzer had a keen intellect and was doubtless aware of his actions. That he based his reputation on a radical revulsion for crime and vice made his downfall ironic, but his vicissitude is only a fresh variation of a very old story.

The familiarity of Eliot Spitzer’s trajectory makes one wonder about the disproportionate outcry against his act. Hypocrisy spices any crime and Spitzer was a hypocrite. But politics breeds hypocrisy and we do not clamor for every politician’s ouster. Lubricity, likewise, is not a quality we admire but we have tolerated it in other public figures. The Kennedy brothers all were permitted their indiscretions. JFK swam nude with young women in the White House pool and dallied with Judith Exner and Marilyn Monroe out of media censure and public view, although he was married to a worshiped first lady. Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge and his young female companion, a secretary in his office, drowned in Chappaquidick. Still, he was able to weather this mysterious and sordid incident to become the unofficial dean of Senate Democrats. President Clinton’s public lechery has been documented, yet he remains one of the most popular public figures the world over. And our society’s attitude toward sex combines hypocrisy and lasciviousness to which the Spitzer scandal gives eloquent proof. In the same week that we demanded the downfall of a governor for seeing a prostitute, five million people visited the prostitute's website and hundreds of thousands paid to listen to her music, enriching her by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So why did we pillory Eliot Spitzer?

In the media, broadcasters and people in the street wondered aloud how Spitzer could shame his wife and family, and why his wife would stand by him. These incredulous people overlook the obvious—that Spitzer paid for sex precisely to protect his family and to show his love for his wife—albeit in a twisted way. By paying for sex Spitzer thought he was ensuring that there was no ambiguity to the act. It might have been unethical, it was definitely illegal, but it could not be construed as love—it was sex simple. That was all it could ever be. Spitzer’s wife might be humiliated by the act, but her place and her family could not be threatened by it. Would it have been preferable for him to have sex with an intern, a reporter or a pole dancer and have the woman later sell her story to a tabloid, or hold press conferences in which she claimed that he loved her?

There is a difference. A man who has an affair with a subordinate or another woman might be a cad, but he is no criminal. Prostitution is illegal in most states and considered depraved and pathetic by most people. And this underscores Spitzer's blunder. His most calculated rationale for buying sex rather than having a clandestine relationship with a consenting and amateur party was the most naïve presumption a former prosecutor could make. By limiting sex to a business transaction, Spitzer probably believed it would be kept quiet since it would be in both parties’ interest to be discreet. But this inference was the ultimate irony for a former prosecutor—he forgot his alter-ego, Spitzer the Inquisitor, , and other law enforcement professionals like his former self driven by an unquenchable zeal to flush out and eliminate vice.

The archetype of the flawed prosecutor transcends our era and is one with which we are familiar. We do not need to go far to find a fraternity brother for Eliot Spitzer in the Who's Who of inquisitor-rogues--Rudolf Giuliani will serve nicely. Eliot Spitzer bears an uncanny resemblance to the former U.S. attorney and mayor. Both were implacable crusaders bent on purging society of miscreants and parasites from the white-collar world of Wall Street and the sleazy streets of dealers and prostitutes. Both had highly publicized extra-marital sex. However, we ignored Giuliani’s peccadilloes. It could be that the romantics in us sanction infidelity with female subordinates and divorcees but revile paid no-strings sex with professionals. Or we practice a moral double-standard, approving sexual indiscretion by an Italian American but not a Jew on the basis of ethnic stereotypes. Or did Giuliani's cross-dressing antics on stage and later his stolid leadership at 9/11 give him a toe-hold in our hearts? If Eliot Spitzer had done a turn on Saturday Night Live, would we have liked him enough to have forgiven him his indiscretion?

A clue to our attitude to Eliot Spitzer at his moment of weakness comes not from American politics but from France. There was a French prime minister in the French fourth republic who did not last long although his regime was no less successful than those that came before or that followed. This was Pierre Mendez-France. He was noted to be an intelligent and able leader. But the French did not like him. He was a Jew for one thing and he did not drink, for another. Rather than raise a glass of red wine like a good Frenchman, he drank milk. It was no wonder that Mendes-France could not last as a leader of the French.

Eliot Spitzer had a similar problem in American politics. Most New Yorkers voted for him almost out of a sense of gratitude and admiration for the corruption he fought. Most considered him bright, capable—and incorruptible. Yet, it was hard to remember any good works that Spitzer had done for ordinary folks. No public projects, no popular initiatives, no visionary schemes. He was more like an action hero clashing with corrupt titans than an actual leader of people. It was almost as if he were a prosecutor for its own sake. It was hard to remember any light Spitzer moments or any Spitzer speeches. The kind of natural, affable gesture at which Mayor Koch excelled, like “How’m I doin’?”, which raised no one’s standard of living but lifted spirits instead, was alien to Spitzer.

History is full of powerful men abusing sex. Nobles had the right to sleep with virgin brides before their husbands, a practice so inveterate that is documented in Gilgamesh, from ancient Sumer as well as The Marriage of Figaro, in pre-Revolutionary France. Austrian nobles meanwhile supported “arbor maidens”, young women from their domains whom they housed in cottages in their wooden lands and visited at their pleasure. King Louis IV had his notorious deer park, an estate populated by nubile young women, and our own JFK had his swimming pool of women from the secretarial pool.

Eliot Spitzer is in many ways an improvement over these figures. His act was illegal, irresponsible and tragic in its consequences for his career. But it was honest, it was neat, and it left no victims but himself.

Pride in President? We Can Manage Without It

2008-02-27T12:42:00.008-05:00

I have heard celebrated people say that they want to vote for someone who inspires them, who makes them feel proud once again to be an American.

How many people actually feel proud of their president? Do they wake up each morning, stretch, and crow,"It's a good day to be alive because of my president!"?

It is understandable, even commendable, if Americans are proud of their own achievements, of their families, of their communities, of what others have been able to achieve, of the majestic and varied American landscape. I would be proud if at least one American actor won an Oscar, especially with all the universities, colleges and acting schools charging young hopefuls prohibitive tuitions to teach them precisely that. I would also be proud of America if Americans did not prefer to hire aliens to well-paying jobs that Americans would love to do, to say nothing of the jobs Americans will not or cannot afford to take. But the president cannot increase or diminish my pride in America--even if he stumbles on a word or falls off a stage or belches in public. For me being a proud American has nothing to do with the president. This is a good thing, too, because even from my pre-voting days, I have never been happy with our elected presidents.

Of course, pride-in-president should not surprise anyone who has studied mythology or seen Joseph Campbell on PBS fund raisers. People clearly need heroes to worship, icons to venerate, presidents to generate pride, mythological figures to lead us through individual and collective darkness. Frederick Douglass tells us in his Autobiography that even slaves were often proud of their masters and argued with the slaves of other plantations over which had the better master. Russians today support the autocratic ways of Vladimir Putin because they like the way he looks bare-chested.

There are many ways to interpret this puzzling tendency. It may be a psychological mechanism, introjection, that allows the weak to incorporate the notions of the strong. Or it is a collective response to a deep-seated longing for family relationships in a society that subordinates these relationships to personal goals, ambitions, and achievements. By bonding with figures we will never meet and whose images are manufactured for our approval we can belong to something abstract when we watch the news.

But in America we should know better than to trust our fates to figures of myth and speech. The frontier was not settled with oratory. Our major wars were not fought with speeches. Our significant inventions and discoveries were not made with grandiloquence. Cyrus McCormick filled our bellies, not Johnny Appleseed; Vanderbilt built the railroads, not John Henry; Bessemer and Carnegie were men of steel, not Superman. Resolve, not pride, enabled waves of immigrants to root and spring forth hearty generations. And it was a quiet courage and survival instinct that enabled New Yorkers to go back to work in downtown Manhattan and endure months of acrid air, unexplained train stoppages, and the constant threat of more attacks after two of our architectural icons were blasted off the earth's surface at Ground Zero.

New Yorkers showed the practical wisdom to elect Michael Bloomberg in the aftermath of the worst tragedy to afflict this city since the draft riots of 1863--not because he was a great guy, but a resourceful manager. Largely forgotten in all that happened on 9/11 was that it was the city's primary day. Democrats were as always prohibitive favorites to win the city's highest office. A Republican tycoon and political neophyte opposed them. Despite running commercials recounting his generic rags-to-riches story, he remained widely unknown. No one gave Mike Bloomberg a chance. He was not a native New Yorker, did share New Yorkers' experiences, sensibilities or their party affiliation, and was not charismatic enough to overcome these liabilities.

Then two things happened. Terrorists slammed jets into the World Trade Center and the Democratic candidates, Mark Green and Fernando Ferrer, engaged in a fratricidal struggle for the nomination that ruined the eventual nominee's prospects in the general election.

At that moment Mike Bloomberg's political assets matured in the public eye. A shocked and anxious city and a divided opposition forced New Yorkers to coldly assess the city's needs. These transcended political affiliations, the Democratic sweet talk of entitlement and social programs, and a candidate's charisma. Excellent management and an entrepreneurial flair were top priorities. People who ordinarily voted for the promise of Democrats now selected the resume and proven business acumen of a man who amassed billions building a financial empire in less than twenty years. They expected him to do likewise for New York. At times, the hopes Bloomberg's supporters foisted on him sounded like day dreams. One executive I knew speculated that because Bloomberg was a businessman, he would create more jobs--as if this were within a mayor's powers and job description.

Yes, at times the expectations on Bloomberg seemed excessive, even naive. But at least, New York voters were using our heads, not our hearts, to elect our leader. We saved our hearts for the city. We looked dispassionately at what New York needed most--to heal, to improve, to revive--and we chose the individual best equipped to accomplish this. We were willing to be analytical about our vote, to sacrifice some of the fun of choosing.

This is this sacrifice that American voters should consider making when we vote for president. One of the aspects of presidential politics that bothers me and has always bothered me is that Americans en masse fail to be as practical as New Yorkers when evaluating our candidates. So often, they revert to high school political considerations--who they like, who has the best smiles, who they might want to be friends with--instead of being adults and choosing the person who is best equipped to run our country.

Hope, change, pride, the future, points of light--they are all good but they do not illuminate or solve our problems. Marx called religion the opiate for the masses. Presidential politics is our crack binge. We get high on candidates, rather than scrutinize them. We like the twinkle in their eye, the mischief in their smile, their party tricks. We like to see them in hipster shades and hear them play licks on a saxophone, or hear them tell jokes. We want them to be nice above all. No intellectuals, no angry people. We prefer a candidate who stumbles and bumbles to one who challenges us to think.

We get the government we deserve. This is because we make our political system out of our character and needs. We believe in individual liberty and initiative and deep down most of us have as much faith in government as we do in hospitals and courts. We do not expect government to solve our personal problems or the burdens of society, and we only hope to minimize those it may cause. Yet, democracy and voting are a part of our tradition and must retain their importance in our lives. And to do so they must fulfill other needs. And no need is as insistent in today's American citizen as the appetite for entertainment. If our political figures cannot address our concerns or improve our lives, at least they can excite our days by providing drama, comedy, spectacle, catharsis. Our election campaigns have become endless gladiatorials with a few campaign rally revival meetings thrown in, with choirs, incantatory sermonizing and witnessing.

This perversion of presidential politics needs to stop if the American people are ever to get the right candidate elected president, the one who will finally do a good job. We need to pretend that we are interviewing somebody for a position instead of choosing Mr. America. The problem is that most voters have never interviewed anyone for a job. They have always been on the job-seeking end of the exchange. They do not see themselves in the boss position, even when it is their vote, their decision.

In New York, when hope is called for, we call upon a manager, a go-to, can-do person who has proven himself in the dull, consistent, work-a-day business of running things smoothly. Rhetoric is sweet but it won't buy a ride on the subway. America--it's time to get on board with this sober concept.

A Tale of Two Shishkabobs

2008-02-22T16:24:00.007-05:00

I had a good lesson today ordering a shishka-bob from a street vendor. Actually two shishka-bobs from two vendors.

Usually I buy a shishka bob from a vendor on 23^rd Street. He broils large chunks of skewered chicken on a charcoal grill, takes his time, pressing the meat with a hand press so that it gets a savory sear and is cooked throughout. When the meat is done he puts the skewer on a small hotdog bun and hands it to you wrapped in a sheet of foil. He does not bother to remove the stick. This you must do for yourself without letting any of the chunks fall out of their white doughy bed.

While I enjoy the vendor’s charbroiled chicken shishka-bobs, there is something in me that wants something more, a bit of finesse, a nice presentation for the meat. This explains why I tried a shishka-bob from another cart, the one parked downstairs in front of the building where I work. It is operated by two elderly foreign people. They have a metal sheet griddle on which they heat hotdogs and shishka-bobs. However, before you scrutinize their techniques, you cannot fail to be won over by their marketing skills. They advertise real sandwiches on hero or pita. I walked by their stand, as I usually do, without stopping. But then I paused and thought: this is a better value than my usual vendor. I can have skewered chicken bits on a pita, maybe with vegetables and sauce. So I retraced my steps back to their cart to give their product a try.

These vendors immediately demonstrated their sensitivity to consumer preferences by removing the meat from the skewer before they reheated it on the griddle. They proceeded to chop the chicken into small strips and cubes. They asked if I wanted onions, which I declined. Just hot sauce for me. They threw the pita on the fire to make it warm, piled on shredded lettuce and diced tomatoes, squirted on red sauce and white sauce, just the way the halal vendors do on Broadway in the 20s. They finished by wrapping my sandwich tightly in two sheets of foil and stuffed the whole production in a small paper bag.

But despite the scrupulous precision of their packaging, I should have known that the result would not taste like the halal sandwiches of the 20s and 30s because these vendors were sautéing the chicken on a griddle occupied by hot dogs and who knew what else? Sure enough, the moment I bit into the sandwich, I realized that there was nothing authentic or tasty about this street food. The white sauce was diluted , watery mayonnaise. The meat had an offputting, ambiguous fried flavor. I hate to waste food but I tossed half of this sandwich and expelled the sour taste in my mouth with the righteous, unaffected shishka-bob of my usual street vendor. He handed me my chicken skewer without a bun and when I protested, he apologized. “Oh, somebody told me no bun…” When I first sampled his primitive sandwich I also wondered about the bun and if it was necessary, but now I see it as part of the whole presentation, quirky as it is, and the vendor's character, and I treasure both. When I left his stand yesterday, I raised the sandwich as if to salute and said, ”Good!” to show my appreciation.

I learned several things from this lunch comparison. For one, that it is possible to know what is good through intuition and sensory perception although just how good may not be apparent except by comparison to what is bad.

I felt sorry for the poor technical students who are trapped into eating that vendor’s food and do not know how bad it is. Then I wondered if they are unaware of its poor quality. It is certainly possible to be so habituated to something that you are unaware of its quality in relation to other things. People go through life thinking love is brutal, for instance. But if people tend to accept what they are accustomed to, how can it be explained that people who have been used to abuse, are aware that they have been abused, and seek a better relationship? How do people who have been used to menial labor determine that they want something better for themselves and go about getting it?

Some people must have an innate faculty that perceives quality, good and evil, etc. and is able to transcend habit and custom.

This tale of two shishka-bobs also raised an old but intriguing cognitive question about the producer’s conception of quality. The two vendors downstairs believe that quality lies in the appearance of the meat and the packaging of the sandwich, and ignore taste as a criterion for the quality of the sandwich—a puzzling omission, considering the nature of their business. When these vendors made their pilgrimage to the center of the halal sandwich universe in the W 20s, to analyze the quality of a successful sandwich, they only factored in the components and their appearance. They had doubtless observed the popularity of the Halal vendors and sought to emulate their success by imitating their product in every respect but the most important one—how to season and prepare the food, and how it should taste. This was probably because this was all the information they could gather simply with their eyes. Of course, their culinary ignorance is understandable if not forgivable. The Halal vendors are unlikely to give away their recipes.

Meanwhile, the charbroiling shishka-bob vendor-in-the-rough is taste-centric. He believes that quality lies exclusively in the meat and its preparation, and ignores all other aspects of his product as superfluous. He has an excellent instinct for quality in food and how to maintain it. He knows well enough, for instance, to boil his hot dogs rather than mix meats on his grill. Yet even if his heart is in the right place, his eyes are blind to how his product appears to those in the public uninitiated to its taste. He inserts a long skewer of meat in a short bun, exposing his customer to the danger of choking on the stick or poking an eye. Even so, his product has an excellent taste, which is the quality of food that matters most. I only wish that he would learn what the inferior vendors already know—that we taste with our mouths but often choose with our eyes. He would be more successful. On the other hand, maybe the inadequacy of his packaging is part of what makes him so good because it conveys his fine character and appropriate priorities. With his limited time and resources, he shows what he values most. And that is why I wanted him to give me the bun.

Can You Divorce Your Dentist?

2008-02-21T14:16:00.004-05:00

First of all, I must tell you that I did not choose my dentist. It was an arranged hand-to-mouth relationship. My old dentist retired and sold his practice and list of patients to another practice.
What followed was a courtship of post cards announcing the transfer of my files and phone number to the new dentist. It was fairly easy. I consented but I did not choose. There was never even one of those patient-to-patient referrals wherein one employee of a company cries out to his colleagues for a dentist.

I went to the new dentist with an open mind. She seemed earnest, quiet and sincere. She was new school. No astringent formula shellacked on the gums to tighten them--that was stinging but ineffective. No, she used probes and took measurements of periodontal recession. She was a thoroughly modern "mouth" dentist who believes that oral health is more than a good bite or white smile--it's the entire environment of the mouth that must be cared for. Before my dentist came along I did not know that your teeth could fall out without one cavity or abscess; simply because the gums supporting them were diseased.

I must giver her her due. But in the first few visits, other problems surfaced, of a personal nature. I hated the Jerry Seinfeld poster in her waiting room, in which he lectures about how important a clean mouth is to him since he is always using it. Then I openly voiced my resentment that she was making me wait even though I was taking off from work. She also had her issues with me. She did not appreciate the fact that I boasted that my deep pockets (recesses between the tooth and the gum caused by bacterial erosion) were shallower than my wife's, that my gums were in better shape. She probably took a dislike for me at that time, seeing me as the brash, nasty boy who always tried to make women look bad. From that time on, I discerned a cold formality in her manner. She moved her probes roughly in my mouth, drawing blood, and not even asking me to spit out. She also spared no opportunity to tell me that the back of my teeth were stained and that I could be flossing more or better. And most unkindly of all, she did not give a parting gift of a tooth brush or cute little floss dispenser.

The only time that my dentist has smiled was after she told me that my gums were in good shape. I told her that I had taken a special seminar in flossing techniques sponsored by
J&J. She believed me, too.

Other than that, seeing my dentist has been the same kind of torture as a visit to my in-laws. I have to see her, I don't see her often, and there is no really not much we need to say to one another. Yet, it is painful. When I see her, I am reminded that one other person in the world hates me and there is nothing I can do about it, and no time to find out what to do. My dentist wears a mask when she works on my teeth. This I can understand. She needs protection from the potentially toxic fumes from my mouth. But she wears her mask when she greets me at the door. That is a clear sign that she does not like me.

You're probably asking yourself why I don't bother to change dentists. It is a good question. Like many ordeals, when the visit is over, I am relieved and grateful. "That wasn't so bad," I lie to myself. At any rate, I won't have to do it again for a while. The fact that I see my dentist so seldom, and that my teeth are in good shape, means I am never sufficiently motivated to go out of my way to find a new dentist.

There is another, more affirmative reason for our ongoing relationship, a bond between us, one shining moment in which she earned my gratitude, a more valuable bauble that it would seem. A few years ago, while I was eating hot and sour soup on the marshy river bank in downtown Westport, CT I suddenly felt a hole where my molar had been. At first I thought it was just something stuck between the teeth. I ran miles of floss through the area. But my tongue finally reported the unthinkable. A big chip of my molar had simply floated down my throat on a river of hot and sour soup. (The real cause for this was a crack in the molar which I had made by obtusely biting on a turkey wing during a Thanksgiving celebration some months before).

For months I did nothing. Then, in August I bit down on a healthy pistachio in Ben & Jerry's bright-tasting pistachio ice cream. This time I felt the shards of molar on my tongue and the enlarged space where my molar had been. But now, I had no dental coverage. The cost of capping that tooth was a thousand dollars. I needed to wait until January of the following year to treat this. When I saw my dentist she gave me two options--crown the tooth or she would fill it in with fast-drying cement, in effect sculpting me a new tooth. The second option cost under $300, the first, over a thousand. But the second option was less invasive. Crowns can hurt or fit poorly and they require destruction of the tooth that still remains. Whereas a sculpted cement tooth would just become part of the tooth. "I can't guarantee how long it will last," she warned me with her usual pessimism.

I took my chance and I still marvel at the work she did. Despite herself, she is an artist, although she will never admit it.

So my relationship with my dentist plods along every six months to a year like a very bad marriage in which there is mutual enmity but not enough to prompt an inconvenient separation.
She asks me if I want x-rays. I tell her, "No." They cost $100 extra and they pump damaging radiation into my head. So she tells me in her suffering deadpan that she can't diagnose what she can't see, with the tacit threat that if anything is going on inside my mouth that she cannot see, it's too bad for me. How I hate her for saying this time and again, in exactly the same weary, withering, guilt-inducing tone.

How I wish that she would actually do something to provoke me! But no.

My last visit to the dentist was a revelation. Just as I thought she could not hate me more I found myself in the care of her dental hygienist. This was one of the oldest psych-outs in the book: when I arrived I dreaded seeing my dentist, but due to her maneuver, she had me feeling slighted that I wasn't seeing her. But her Russian hygienist was a very worthy surrogate. She was serious, with intense eyes and the determination of a Nobel scientist. The Russian hygienist focused on my mouth as if it were a fascinating ancient text. She probed and polished it with dour precision like an archaeologist handling rare artifacts . She seemed to be doing more than just cleaning my teeth. She was scraping and poking at my gums. So I asked her coyly if she was taking over for the dentist. She replied that dental hygienists now are called upon to do a little bit of everything. So I thought, my dentist hates me but something good has come of it. She has put me in the care of this conscientious Russian hygienist and because I am seeing the hygienist my bill will be lower.

After forty-five minutes of rigorous mouth-care, the hygienist left the room and in lumbered my estranged dentist with her grim eyes over her surgical mask. She leaned over me, scanned my teeth, asked if I wanted x-rays, answered my predictable no with her standard rejoinder that she could not diagnose what she could not see, and announced that my teeth looked fine.

"Any medical issues since you were last here, any problems, and sensitivities? No? You're good to go."

For that she charged me an extra $100. So she was able to snub me, show her hatred, to spend as little time with me as possible, and to make as much money as she possibly could on a patient who uses her services as little as possible. I was doubly insulted--that she was unwilling to give me her full time as a dentist, yet scammed me into paying the full price. It as if she was mocking me, "You don't want to see me but I don't want to see you either, but I'm going to make you pay through the nose anyway."

Of course, she could really make it count by subjecting me to a gratuitous tooth pulling or some rough gum cleaning. But she is middle-class enough not to want to wreck her reputation on a minor irritant such as myself. I probably should take action soon to find a new dentist. It probably isn't healthy to continue seeing a dentist who has it in for me. Shouldn't one's professional/ patient relationships be mutually supportive, cheerful, civil at the very least?
But a voice tells me that liking my dentist, or her liking me, is irrelevant. All that matters is that she is professional and conscientious and that I take good care of my teeth.

While I sort this out...do you know a good dentist?

Zardoz: Prophecy, Fallacy and Truth

2008-02-20T11:51:00.008-05:00

Back in the day, the 70s per se, there were several motion pictures that attempted to predict what the future would be like. The most successful of these was Star Wars. However, one now obscure film had far more influence than is usually known. Zardoz was made by John Boorman, the English director best known for Deliverance and Hope and Glory. Starring Sean Connery, in one of his first departures from the James Bond character that has and will always be his franchise, Zardoz was flamboyant, opulent, and at times intellectually flatulent (no scratch and sniff, smellovision, just needlessly perplexing). However, given that the most successful speculative movies that preceded Zardoz were 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Planet of the Apes and its spawn of driveling sequels, Boorman could be commended for synthesizing these two cinematic speculations into a compelling collision and vibrant debate about the future of the world. Would it be controlled by computers and their super-rational human masters as metaphors for meta-reason or by the atavistic core of human experience--emotional, sexual, and animal?

In Zardoz, Boorman provided a vision of the future which, given the pre-PC anxieties about computers turning everyone into sedentary robots and the Soviets gaining momentum in their methodical slouch toward Orwellian 1984, teetered on the highwire that profundity walks before it falls off into pretentiousness and camp. Even though I mocked it at the time, I saw Zardoz twice. I used to joke that I viewed it once in English and once in French and understood it in neither language. However, the last laugh is on me because recently Zardoz came back to me in a strangely prescient flash from the past as I seemed to be living some of its truth in the present.

As with photography and cinematography, where aperture and shutter speed must come together to create the clear image of truth, revelation requires two factors to synchronize for it to come into being. In this case, I had the two components of Zardoz that made the most impact on me, coinciding in my present life. They are Beethoven's 7th Symphony on the radio and the ubiquitous power of internet chat rooms and blogs in which I poked in my head for a few moments this week to partake of the incesssant and often puerile Democratic primary group spew.

The second movement of the Beethoven's 7th gushes up in the final montage of Zardoz like the Mississippi River out of an underground spring. In that passionate denoument we see our skin-clad savior mating, having children and growing old with his spouse. The music is the sound-track and symbol for the irrepressible, ineluctable surge of human destiny, which coincides with and depends upon the courage, vitality and innate goodness of the eponymous hero, Zardoz, a savage super-hero charged with saving humans from our morbid rationality. Human survival, Boorman maintains, is predicated on the visceral power of sexuality, activity, and emotion that characterize the primitive human. By contrast, the futuristic world of Zardoz is one in which people all over the "civilized" world communicate, vote, fight, judge and condemn via an intricate and efficient system of computers and web-cams that would make Logitech proud and rich.

Fast forward to now. People all over the world at their computers, participating in polls, talking seriously and facetiously about all kinds of topics, spreading rumors, dis-informing and threatening each other like crazy. And there in the midst of it is Beethoven's 7th Symphony--the emotional current that flows powerfully underneath all of the minutiae and the over-thinking and the over-talking and the over-sitting.

Yes, Boorman predicted that future perfectly. But Zardoz contains a major fallacy. The blind spot in the vision of this landmark film, which would be reprised twenty five years later in the Matrix movies, is the decadent romantic notion which Boorman borrowed from DH Lawrence, another Englishman, that modern, hyper-rational society can be saved by a noble savage, a caveman messiah, who can smash our crippling machines and return us to a more authentic existence based on sex, procreation, subsistence, and troglodyte survival. Perhaps, some reactionary religionists from all faiths would agree with this strategy, those who for instance speak of people in democratic liberal societies as "crusaders" and others closer to home who wish to abrogate the theories of natural selection and evolution for the sake of a biblical metaphor.

Such a salvation seems more like a hiccup of frustration than an actual solution to our society's salient ills. To the contrary, whatever vitality we humans seek will need to emerge from these relatively new but well-established accessories to our beings. If we wish to lead more vital lives, and become more in touch with our atavistic cores, we will need to find the courage and energy within ourselves to either break through from our sedentary dependencies on our electronic antennae, or learn to live more fully through them.

There is a Jewish maxim that after the destruction of the Temple the gift of prophecy has been the domain of children and fools. We need to free ourselves from this prejudice and trust again the gift of prophecy, a much maligned intuition that may be as useful as historical knowledge. We can start by acknowledging the accurate auguries of the past. Zardoz did not save us from our futures, but it showed us the way.

Nowhere to Turn in the Voting Booth

2008-02-03T11:25:00.000-05:00

I was in a social interaction my elementary school principal, Miss Carpenter, advised me strongly to avoid--the political discussion. My friend, the only person in the world I can call that anymore, never revealed his darker, political side. That was why we were friends.

But this election was confusing me. I didn't know my own my mind anymore. There were so many choices. I was trying to break my own internal deadlocks by exploring my fellow human being's thought processes. It did not go as planned.

"So, who you voting for?" I asked.
"Don't know."
"What about Hillary?"
"No way. She reminds me of my mother. She is Cybele, earth-mother-castrating-goddess."
While I always admired my friend's mythological erudition, he clearly had issues with women.
"Why do you think she's a castrating earth-mother?"
"Just a hunch. You think Vince Foster killed himself for nothing? That the McDougals went to prison for nothing? Hillary demands human sacrifice."

I wasn't going down that memory lane or indulging my friend's revealed misogyny, so I changed candidates.
"What about Obama?"
"He's like the dollar bin at the old Filene's. Everyone's looking for their dream in him."
"And that's a bad thing because..."
"Who is he, really? He's like Lionel Ritchie trying to be P.Diddy. Or the Wizard of Ox talking through a megaphone."
"What about John McCain?"
"He'll be snoozing in cabinet meetings."
"What about Romney?"
" Big Love in the White House."
"He's a Mormon but he has one wife."
"Yeah. That's what he wants you to think. There's a tradition of philandering Democrats with girlfriends on the side--FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton. But here's a Republican who can have multiple wives. What's gonna stop him?"
I was at my wit's end.
"Okay, what about Huckabee?"
My friend started singing, "Give me that old time religion!" in a surprisingly rich baritone.
"He's a Baptist minister, but he's also a populist. He plays bass in a rock band."
"Prayer in the schools? Every state of the union, press conference and televised speech invoking Christ? He'll set the first amendment back three hundred years."
"Our nation is only 220 years old."
"Precisely my point. Huckabee would bring us back to the colonial period. Only Christian property owners could vote."

This conversation deeply shook my confidence in friendship. You never really know anybody until you hear their political views. It also made me realize that in this election prejudice lurks in every choice. Any vote can be interpreted as a bias crime when we vote archetypes rather than issues. You are either a sexist, a racist, an ageist, or a religious bigot.

Change is such a difficult proposition. It was so simple when it was just two white guys in suits talking tax hikes and cuts, strong military, more social programs....Every candidate looked the same and the only symbols were the elephant and the donkey. Now the collective unconscious is running wild and we are voting our hearts, our dreams, our wishes.

It's all become so complex. Maybe the United States is finally growing up.

No Representation Without Agitation

2008-02-01T12:24:00.001-05:00

Elections bring out the worst in me. They are a palimpsest of conflict. Layered on top of the internecine battles between Democrats, among Republicans and the ultimate intramural between the two parties is the conflict I have with myself, between the boy who cuts his teeth on competition and the mature man who ought to see beyond it.

In election years, I cannot resist the spectacle of victory and defeat, even though I admit it is better for everyone to cooperate than to compete. Like all addictions, my need for political combat comes at a price. Elections reintroduce me to the features of my fellow human that I find most regressive and resistant to change. I receive a triple-dose of the mass psychology of my fellow humans--the sloganeering and campaign buttons, the swelling crowds hanging on every aspirational word and cheering reflexively the same platitudes they have heard for years, like fans at a Golden Oldies concert. But the worst irritant of the presidential election seasons is, perhaps unbelievably, the most rational one. Our presidential elections force me to confront the inherent constitutional ambiguities surrounding the presidency. I find myself wondering what the president does or can do in our government and what the fuss ultimately is all about.

If the oracle of Delphi were still in business she would tell me that I will never attain true wisdom until I renounce my juvenile interest in box scores and other trivial applications of arithmetic and statistics. I must stop scouring the sports pages for results of games contested between teams I have never seen and with which I have absolutely no connection. This preoccupation with competition results and numbers first surfaced when I was five and awoke to the thud of the morning newspaper landing on the door mat. I would peel the sports section from the rest of the paper and pore over box scores with fascination, although I had never attended a game.

This passion for abstract results of far-off events prompts me to forage for information about the presidential election and wonder which candidate will carry on. I even congratulate my prescience of months ago for accurately predicting a certain candidate's resurgence. Such efforts lead to more ambitious ones until speculations spin out of control. Suddenly, I am handicapping upcoming primaries--for both parties--and setting up a hypothetical general election for which I have predicted the outcome. Although I am in suspense over the particular course of this election, I have calculated according to arcane equations who the next nominee will be for the party that loses in 2008.

My fascination with presidential elections might qualify as pathological since beneath it all lies a reservoir of ambivalence about politics, government, and their impact on most everyday lives. I deeply distrust the political process, candidates, and media coverage because the elections are more spectacle than civic necessity and the candidates are more like actors than public servants, promoted by a shadowy consortium of political operatives, strategists, and contributors. The process is veiled in mystery and conducted with the stagecraft of presentation and concealment. Like Mayer, Warner and Zanuck of the Hollywood studio system, today's political operatives forge candidates, myth by myth. And because the election is packaged as a hybrid of entertainment and sport, I am more like an audience member than an information-seeking citizen. Candidates spend more time and effort manipulating and distorting their opponents' positions than promulgating their own, and ultimately I follow and get lost in the moves rather than accrue a base of knowledge.

Instinctively, I do not believe that presidential candidates will keep their promises. It disturbs me that they continue to make them. They are after all shrewd professionals who know they will not or cannot realize the collective wishes they espouse. Of course, promises are to a political candidate what love is to a popular songwriter. No politician can avoid them and expect to win. However, the talent our presidential candidates demonstrate for spewing empty promises without a twitch of guilt or a smile of irony is amazing. This is probably due to a state of protective, temporary denial or selective amnesia-a politician's special gift--the survival mechanism without which they cannot function.

This is how it works. When candidates make promises they are sincerely stating their wishes, while shrewdly suppressing their knowledge that such wishes cannot come true, not due to any defect of their own but because of the world we live in. Since they did not create the world, they can take no responsibility when it squashes their best intentions later on. So they continue to make promises without compunctions and "fight the good fight" without appreciable effect.

Politics is a secular world, and presidential candidates are as close to prophets as a social science can spawn. They are charged with providing hope. Although I know they are doing their job by telling us beautiful lies, it rankles me when I hear a political candidate promise to bring jobs back from overseas. How can a president do this within the framework of the constitution? Will he as president stage a hostile takeover of every corporation that farms out jobs overseas? Does he believe that presidential powers can reach into the boardrooms of multinational corporations, in particular the same ones contributing generously to his campaign?

Election time requires a long and willing suspension of disbelief. In order to enjoy it, you almost need to convince yourself that it is a board game or a fantasy. For a few months or years--the election season has expanded to fill the vacuum of our routinized lives--we pretend that somebody supported by millions of dollars in special interest money will change the lives of the hundreds of millions of people who are desperate for something good to happen to them. The huddled masses who suffer from overwork and under-love, from injuries, diseases and the health care costs required to treat them, from loss of husbands, wives, children to war, seek the messianic figure who will wave a wand and relieve them of all of their problems. It is a time of mass appeal and mass hysteria and it confounds me. Do the thousands who wait for hours to attend political rallies believe that any candidate can fulfill their longings or make an iota of difference in their lives? Or is this moment of anticipation reward enough? They seem to be standing there, whispering the words of Captain Kirk, "Beam me up, Obama!

This year's mantra of change is a case in point. The possibility of change is the essence of open, free elections, so it stuns me that a candidate can claim "change" as a campaign theme. The election of any of the candidates from either party would constitute a change since the incumbent president is leaving. Yet, because change is a word buzzing in millions of voters' heads every candidate tries to own it--or at least to time-share, it. So the contest assumes a new side-bar: which candidate represents the greatest change. My daughter devised an ingenious formula to determine who deserves consideration as the greatest agent of change. Since Barak Obama is half-black and Hillary Clinton is all woman, electing her would effect the greatest change. It sounds like a logic question on the SATs, doesn't it? Ridiculous, perhaps, but when you make change an issue it takes you down the path of petty distinctions that lead nowhere.

It is probably unfair to blame presidential candidates for dispensing empty panaceas. Or to chide the electorate be for electing a president using the criteria reserved for American Idol. The entire mess is due to the historical circumstances in which our nation started. When we separated from Great Britain we decapitated the traditional head of government--the monarch--and had no alternative model to replace it. The presidency is an embryonic, sketchy concept for a head of government. It is a collocation of powers including military leadership (commander-in-chief), foreign affairs, signing legislation into law, and administration of government. A president can inspire and prod by using the "bully pulpit" to promulgate policies, but can bring no laws into effect. He can dispatch soldiers to distant lands without formal declarations of war, but Congress is ultimately the branch that drafts and passes laws and makes budgets. In this scheme, the president is one largely symbolic cog.

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Look at Canada. It has a parliament with a prime minister who is not directly elected but is the head of parliament, leading legislation. Fusing the legislature and administration in this way makes for a more effective form of government, not nearly as confrontational and divisive as our own. When the electorate wants change they know how to get it top to bottom by sweeping out the ruling party, not peacemeal the way we do it in the United States. It makes one wonder what would have been if we had not fought the war of independence. Would we have adopted the parliamentary system of Great Britain and had a government like Canada's? If that had come to pass, we would currently have universal health care and no war in Iraq.

We may wish that the president can fix everything in our lives, but he or she is more important to us as a symbol of our aspirations. It is no coincidence that the same privacy exists in the movie theater, the voting booth, and the living room. We vote our dreams. The presidential elections, in which we choose a powerful figurehead, answers emotional needs, not a rational direction for government and society. The power to vote is not about obtaining concrete results, but participating in the pleasure of symbolic choice.

Ultimately, my grievance against presidential elections has nothing to do with our political system per se or the candidates. My problem is internal. Elections compel me to look inward and confront an internal paradox--the childish fixation on box scores and political outcomes against the mature wisdom that says it is a waste of precious time. After all, government, even at its best, cannot solve the most important problems in our lives, never could, never will.

Give Me A Tribune

2008-01-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

I never realized how much real life politics I was experiencing in elementary and secondary school. Then, as now, we voted for our leaders on the basis of intangibles--likability, intelligence, speaking ability, humor. Then as now we pitted intelligence vs. popularity. Popularity was like a "secret ingredient" barbecue sauce--you knew what it was even if you didn't know what was in it.

In school, you voted against candidates because of how they smiled or talked, or out of envy, or because you wanted to hurt them in a symbolic way. And you voted for their opponents because you liked what they carried in their lunch-bags-- Fritos and Hostess snowballs--or because they possessed a special homespun gift, like stuffing a whole cupcake in their mouths or sticking a carrot stick up their noses. When the media analyzes and dissects the candidates they focus on similar matters-- a smile, a laugh, a voice, a cry, a loss of temper, a personality flaw.

It makes one wonder what public office means to people. Do we--should we--care how our presidents look, sound, laugh, or tell a joke? If a president needed to preside over a late night talk show, such considerations would be germane. But we are unlikely to see enough of our president to care how pleasant, witty or charming he or she is. All we should care about is what they can do to help or hurt us, and how they will manage our government. Admittedly, much of this is speculative so we focus on what we sense--mannerisms, hair, speech patterns. We may have stopped trying to process the content of their ideas and backgrounds, so we play a game we know much better--high school politics--where the formula is simple--Get a laugh, win an election.

Voters have trouble voting on substance because the weight and nature of substantial matters change over time--and candidates change with them. Four months ago the Iraq War and immigration were the issues that mattered most and every candidate had a plan for dealing with them. No sooner did the electorate digest these positions than the economy became the primary issue on everyone's minds. So the candidates must contort themselves and become economic doctors.

Vagaries of historical circumstance can result in stunning political reversals of fortune. Two great examples of this are with us today. In the summer of 2001, Rudolf Giuliani and George Bush each experienced political stagnation. New York's mayor was a lame-duck whose enemies had circled to discredit his policies and ridicule his family background (eg. his late father's jail record and chronic constipation) while the newly-elected president had given many constituents ample reason to believe that the Florida chads should have been recounted in his opponent's favor. But 9/11 turned Giuliani into a hero and Bush into the stalwart commander-in-chief who would be re-elected as if to spite our enemies abroad.

The most pernicious affront to substance in the electoral process are the media. Rather than play the role of the fourth estate, informing us about the most important issues and the candidates' positions, the media sell trumped-up controversies to attract our prurient interests. They also assess which candidates are serious and which ones are wasting everyone's time, who debates and who should quit the race. The criteria on which the media base these evaluations are not candidates' virtues, vices, backgrounds, ideas. There is only one criterion for seriousness as far as they are concerned--how much campaign money the candidates raise.

It is a self-serving benchmark since the money candidates raise will be plowed into campaign commercials to pad the media's bottom line. In elementary school and high school, any serious candidate for class or school office knew the value of having colorful posters, a catchy tag-line and campaign buttons--even if they were made of construction paper. Media mattered even then. The 2008 professional political equivalent is the paid political advertisement, a costly upgrade. The total cost of media spending on all political campaigns will be $2.5 billion for this election year, as opposed to $.6 billion in 2004. Presidential candidates are expected to have more than $100 million in their coffers. When the media tell us that a candidate is not serious because he does not have $100 million in campaign funds they are speaking for their own interests as if to say, "Money talks. BS walks." For the media "serious" signifies a candidate's ability to serve the media's needs.

What should gall the American voter is that we are told that we should vote because it is a right and privilege. Where is the privilege in voting for one of two candidates who has received money from special interests and been certified as worthy by a media that reaps enormous profit from the same candidates' capacity to raise capital? We are enjoined to vote for candidates who are good for media and for special interests. What do we gain beyond the vain hope that at the end of the day these multinational moguls will do a good deed for us?

Without doubt I expect more from government and the political process than they can ever give. My critique is out of step with history. Have governments ever been better than the one we have? Governments are "best which govern least" because they have usually been leviathans which ordinary people had reason to fear and depise. Governments have waged war and imposed taxes, killing sons and expropriating property and income. They have often been charged with two constructive functions, to protect their people from enemies and rescue them in catastrophes. When they failed to provide these services government collapsed (see "Mandate of Heaven", Louis XVI, Herbert Hoover, etc.)

For many years I have seen a parallel between Rome and America--two nations built on engineering, commerce, war, and conquest. Rome loved gladiators and Americans love football. In fact, we are as so enamored of blood sport competition and its pungent vernacular that we have injected them into most of our institutions, including law, business, and politics. We are a society of adrenaline and sleeping pills, of great roads and tawdry spectacles. The chariot race has been worked into the daily commute and SUVs are the chariots.

If we are indeed 21st century Romans staring at our own decline let us at least have our tribunes--politicians who represent common people's interests and address our problems. Clearly the $100 million dollar politicians cannot be counted on to do this for us. We need a system to elect popular ombudsmen who set the common peoples' agenda and ensure that it stays hoisted in the public conscientiousness and in the bought politicians' faces. Our tribunes would have no other role or obligation than to ensure that politicians, media, and the electorate never forget when the peoples' interests are forgotten or violated, and to muster public opinion to have them upheld.

Until our political system and government incorporate authentic political advocates for the common people, the vast majority of citizens will have no other role in our government but to pay taxes, give up sons and daughters to war, and make our system look democratic to the world by voting in empty popularity contests, bloodless gladiatorials, between candidates of like persuasion and support. Our republic will persist as an oligarchy of powerful individuals, institutions and interest groups collaborating on a multimedia series titled "American Political Elections."

The United States was founded upon such slogans as "No taxation without representation." We could be chanting the same mantra. Our tax codes do not represent the interests of the vast majority on which this democracy claims to be based. Until the common people receive true representation and legitimate public advocacy, we should refuse to participate in the charade titled "Election Day."

News & Celebrity,History & Myth, Affirmation & Suffocation

2008-01-07T21:36:00.000-05:00

Do you ever have the sensation that your mental processes are choked and suffocated by an ozone cloud of media? I worry that much of the information I receive, many ideas and issues I consider, and emotions I feel are not actually my own, but have entered my brain from the radio, television, newspapers and magazines to which I am exposed. Due to the support I get from a willing network of media-addicts, I am encouraged to go about my life and let the media think for me. It seems like a cozy arrangement, but the danger is apparent. I may be abuzz with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and believe I am their author, when I am only their conduit. If I stop thinking on my own for any period of time, can I do it again? This is no cantankerous, luddite concern, but one based in physiology and pharmacology.

When a man has prostate cancer he can be given a course of luprolide acetate, an androgen blockade, more bluntly called “chemical castration.” This is how it works. By flooding his system with a drug that induces a surfeit of testosterone, the androgen blockade tricks the pituitary into shutting down the patient’s own testosterone-production, thus depriving the tumor of one of its favorite foods. But once the therapy is over, there is no guarantee that the patient’s testosterone factory will resume production. Good for the patient, not so good for the man.

A steady infusion of media can have a similar effect on a human brain. If I depend too heavily on the media to deliver food for thought, what happens when the power shuts down and the infusion stops? Will my thinking revive? Will I be able to produce one original idea? If no thoughts or feelings come, will I be lost? Or will I recall and recycle tatters of thoughts and feelings left over from media feasts and through repetition and fragmented memory remodel the information as my own? If so, I will be in the company of my ancestors, the cave painters and story-tellers, because this is a plausible model for how history and myth evolved in their minds aeons ago.

The media also fulfill this role. They serve--appropriate--a natural purpose, feeding and relieving our imaginations, reminding us always of what is real and possible. They are our collective shamanic storytellers, whose daily sap hardens into the amber of enduring truth. For this reason, I am less rancorous about media, its productions, deceptions, and creations. I am enthralled to witness history and myth being formulated from the news and celebrity gossip which media provide. The Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, Aztecs and other peoples created figures and stories and we cannot be certain how long it took them to devise. We call them myths, suggesting they were fictitious. But they must have been based on actual people and situations, like OJ's white bronco or baseball players' steroid use. Later Sigmund Freud gave the tales credence when he cited them as paradigms of behavior and relationships. Now, in the daily barrage of media news and celebrity making I see in real time how the history and myths were made.

According to Freud and other observers, America is a society whose culture suffers from a deficiency of history and myth. Yet, what America lacks in tradition, we more than compensate for with industry. Freud did not estimate the power of American media to create out of the immense, raw resources of America a history and mythology in the same manner that the robber barons laid rails and poured steel. In the venal and practical task of informing and entertaining us, the media serve a greater purpose than they know. They feed our bottomless appetites with the stuff of which our history and myths will be made--if we and our descendents remember them. Under the “truths” they sell is the truth they tell. Even their trivial stories bely a mundane profundity because they tell us what we want, what we fear, and what we are.

Today’s media makers may be no less than scribes of this culture’s sacred texts, inscribing for the ages what our culture holds most dear and most true. However, many thoughtful people have reasons to doubt it. They adduce the inordinate focus on the vacuous exploits of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, of Tom and Katie and Brangelina, and Bill and Hillary as worthless gossip that pander not to intelligence but stupidity, not to pyschic wealth but moral bankruptcy, Similarly, the generations who rolled out of the previous century as if it were no more than a teenager's dissheveled bed, roll their eyes at the Vietnam War and the 60s. The media critics in both cases deny, ignore or resist the transformation of news and celebrity into history and myth in real time.

Decadent pop stars will never need to rent a place in the pantheon; they own their spot. These mortal avatars of reckless gods bring us a new message of an old truth, that creativity is wrapped in destruction. Dissipation is the self-sacrifice artists make on the altar of society; their excesses spurn and confirm the restraints of an obedient public. It is the awful price of being different. By the same token, anyone who witnessed the transformation of Vietnam from news to history understands how history is made. We’ve been on the field trip, seen the documentaries and visited the monuments, spoken to the survivors and heard the testimony of a presidential candidate.

Vietnam’s historical prominence rests on its status as a template and taboo. America’s greatest test of virtue is competition; we venerate success and despise failure. By this token, Vietnam is a taboo event, a war lost at terrible cost. There is no larger tragedy in America than the paradox of giving so much for nothing, of crushing, irredeemable loss. Meanwhile, Vietnam is the prototype for a succession of similar conflicts—in Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan—characterized dubious objectives, loss of life, and nebulous results. Vietnam fulfills a requirement of history—it is both factual and symbolic.

Equal to the immediacy and speed with which the news travels to us is the speed with which it degrades to trivia. The velocity of the present propels past events into distant memory. Ten years feels like a hundred and recent history by academic standards is prehistoric on the street. For this reason, history must be compiled, compounded, compressed from multitudes of reports and impressions. History results from a constant renewal of news—headline upon headline, bulletin by bulletin, story after story, repeated day after day and every decade.

History is no residue, but a chiseled imprint on collective memory. Interminable repetition is necessary to fortify memory since without it, information dies, leaving traces, but no voice. And with no voice, facts are mute artifacts. They no longer witness truth, but invite interpretation. Americans have been cited for having a short collective memory, and the media’s insistence on dumping tons of information on our minds each day places a huge burden of time, space, and energy on memory. The media gives us history by day, and forgetfulness by night. What are we left with? To maintain memory, and interpret history becomes an individual challenge and responsibility. Each of us must transmit what we remember to anyone willing to hear.

Our insatiable need for news and celebrity is the sensational, preliminary phase of a more powerful need to create myth and history. It is a relationship parallel to sex and procreation; ripping immortality from the loins of our titillated minds. Like any human I am fascinated by the process, yet fearful of how easily media bypass and override my thinking apparatus. Although the brain may be a permeable and interactive medium like the psychologist, Herbert Meade’s “Looking Glass Self”, in constant exchange with the media, the myth-and-history making machine is so loud and ubiquitous that it does not permit interaction and evaluation, but compels submission to its messages. It forces consciousness undercover for protection.

Alzheimer’s and dementia are duly frightening. Memory and consciousness determine who we are as other body organs do not. They define identity, individuality and freedom. Yet, physiological illness is not the only threat to our minds. The ways in which our thinking can be infiltrated and controlled are insidious. There are no blood tests, EKGs or stool samples to determine a loss of thinking or emotional autonomy. No doctor will ask if you have had an original idea or ask you to think into a cup. You must be able to diagnose it yourself, not with a stethoscope to your ear, but by waiting for the words that emerge from darkness.

Bringing the World Closer

2007-12-25T17:13:00.000-05:00

My resolution for the coming year is to simplify living and business arrangements as much as they will allow. Yet, the more I consider this objective, the more presumptuous and foolish it sounds. Yes, it is a noble, self-preserving ambition, but utterly futile, given the amount of cooperation I would need from so many other individuals trying to simplify their own lives. What hubris to believe I can coax the world into accommodating my failing memory, flagging energy, dwindling patience! What will I propose next? To slow the earth's rotation to give us that extra hour we only borrow during daylight savings?

This resolution of mine plods hopelessly against the riptide of the zeitgeist. Thought leaders and moral authorities will enjoin me to embrace complexity, accede to time management strategies, learn meditation or a martial art, get a better attitude, overcome my neuroses, become more supple in body and spirit. I will be expected to comply with and even master the edicts of society--to become smarter, stronger, more self-reliant, slimmer, more youthful and more fit--even while time and age work their silent sabotage on my feckless efforts.

My humble life, so small in scale and simple by contrast with those who race across this country and the world in their own vain pursuits, has become so complicated that I can barely keep it in order. I find myself devoting increasing amounts of time and intellect devising schemas for staying organized and functional--otherwise I would squander days and weeks seeking or replacing things lost or misplaced.

My everyday affairs must be tied to my memory by strings of verbal reminders. For instance, I have a cheat sheet on my desktop with every ID and password that I need for various aspects of my life. Various accouterments must be kept in specific places for me to remember them. And I must follow a protocol or risk omitting a crucial item. Some of the passwords differ by a mere keystroke. If I add or subtract a character from any of these passwords, or mistake one for another, I will lose a good half hour, any serenity I had, and call computer-literate friends, and rack my brain for alternative solutions. And this is only my computer.

Even when something good comes to me, it comes at the price of complicating my life. I was at a store yesterday, redeeming a coupon for 25% off a single item. I had brought in the advertisement, not realizing that in order to obtain the coupon, I needed to click on a small red message in the center of the advertisement. The worker at the cash register was congenial and allowed me to use someone else's coupon. I said ruefully that I must have done something wrong. No worries, he reassured me, many customers did not go that extra step. I felt like an idiot for not reading more carefully; on the other hand, why should I have to read an ad more carefully? This was not fine print--it was 24 pt type. It is unjust to expect someone to open your email and click a second time for a coupon.

But this is the status quo. You must be willing to solve puzzles at every turn. And you must be willing to endure growing complications, unless you wish to pay others to do so for you. To live simply today is to abdicate a large portion of what is considered a life worth living. To live simply is to eschew the possibilities of ownership, success, fame, power. To live simply is to live outside society.

Yet to be caught in the endless nuances of identities and passwords, surcharges, percentages, roll-overs, warranties, acronyms, helplines, deadlines, peak-times, off-line, exclusions is to barely be alive at all. Since I devote so much attention to holding my own against the present, large tracts of the past and future are left unattended, dreams are relics in perfect condition but unusable, and future plans are jettisoned. Who has time to pick up an old story when EZ-Pass must be corresponded with several times about a toll mistakenly unpaid and a parking ticket must be fought against?

In trying to avoid variations of human contact that bleed me of precious time--physically going to offices and stores, talking to people in person, waiting in lines, etc.--I find myself losing equal amounts of time wandering farther for everything, even into a world of greater abstraction. Are people easier to deal with when they are e-mailing or talking from across the world? There is no greater feeling than when someone on a phone call solves your problem, but no worse frustration than explaining your problem to someone who cannot understand you regardless how hard you both try, and lacking the contact or concrete reference point to bridge the gap.

In the new year, I want to become more provincial, more grounded, more aware of my immediate surroundings. I want to break the internet addiction that makes me crave the news every ten minutes and I want to stop feeling that I need to be connected to a greater world that exists out there. In fact, I want to disabuse myself of the idea that there is a greater world than the one I experience first hand. Because ultimately, even if there is such a world, where people live and die and suffer more dramatically than I do, I don't know if I trust the news media to deliver it to me in any semblance of what it really is. The news seems more like the gossip of a door to door salesman--they're telling me something I don't need to know in order to sell me something I don't need to use.

In the year that is passing, I have worked at a distance, shopped at a distance, purchased major items at a distance, I learned at a distance. Gradually I have started to draw these activities closer to home so the they become tangible again, because if I continue to conduct the essential business of my life at greater distances from myself, my participation in those essential acts will be minimal, leaving little memory of these transactions. The past will become as abstract as the present and I will be reduced to a noun, a few adjectives-- and no verbs...surrounded by other nouns of uncertain origin. When this happens I will have lost not only activity, memory, and connection with others and the world--but language, as well.

The Myth of Mass Transit in New York

2007-08-28T15:28:00.000-04:00

A neighbor once told me that a couple she knew, who came to the city from elsewhere and moved to the suburbs, never belonged in New York because they drove everywhere and hated the subways.

"Doesn't everybody hate the subway?" I asked. Her immediate reaction was a look of such profound disgust that I believed I had done something to merit it. I immediately allayed the affront with earnest rationales. "I mean, what is there to like?"

I pointed out that the subways were often crowded, hot, smelly, and unreliable. Of course, they had improved over time.

Several years ago, most subway cars were filthier, without temperature control or shock absorbers. The daily commute had an amusement park sensation, without the fun or safety straps. Trains rocked sideways, banging along. Lights were sporadic, miscreants smoked, and turds melted on floors, as if by some perverse miracle that made you shake your head and wonder how someone had been relaxed enough to do their business and then to do it without intervention.

Now, subway cars are generally clean, consistently lit, and air conditioned more often than not. But subway system has retained its dehumanizing qualities. During rush hour trains are packed and you are forced to thrust your body against other passengers to board. The oxygen content of underground air is hypoxic. You find yourself yawning and so exhausted that it is hard to resist the yearning for immediate sleep. At first you may interpret this fatigue as the normal effect of a long day, perfectly normal. But as soon as you climb above ground your exhaustion leaves you.

The trains also never run as often as they should. You're always looking at your watch, cursing yourself for not giving yourself an extra half hour you don't have to get where you need to be.

But the trains themselves are only part of what is wrong with the system. In most places, people dress for work and New York is no exception to this behavior. But New York may be the only place where people dress for transit. In the summer you cannot wear anything crisp and light in color because the heat of the subway platform will turn your sharp garment into a wet mess. And because trains rarely run as often as they should, the ordinary commuter spends a lot of time on platforms.

Before dressing for the day, you must account for the subway heat or face the consequences of passing through a sauna and looking a sweaty, bedraggled mess when you arrive at your destination. I was never a junior Kowalski but the subways have made the t-shirt my preferred torso covering. In my adaptation to the harsh climate of the subways, I always choose jeans over dress pants, cotton over wool or silk, and crew neck over collars. I also carry a small towel to dry off my face, shoulders and any other body part I can reach without untucking shirt-tails or ripping buttons.

The train also influences people's work habits. How many times have I and colleagues stayed an extra hour in the office just to wait out the rush hour?

My resentment and outrage against the congestion pricing scheme proposed in New York is due to my subway experience. Taxing drivers in this way imposes the greatest burden on people with the longest subway rides. Worse, the proposal has been sold to New Yorkers on a false premise: that there is room on the subway for commuters driven off the roads into Manhattan by the prohibitive expense of driving there. This is either a wishful delusion or an unforgiveable lie because the mass transit I know is squashing room only, so stuffed with humanity that it often violates safety codes for occupancy. The rush-hour subway is more than dangerous to health--it is dangerous to life because the air is in such short supply that if the train pauses for any length of time in a tunnel, people gasp desperately for breath, competing for oxygen.

Last week I found myself on the steaming platform with that same woman who years before had made subway usage and acceptance a qualification for living in New York. She was shvitzing and shpritzing with perspiration. For years I had ruminated angrily on her strange snobbery and rehearsed in my mind what I would say in the sequel.

"So, you like this?"
"What?" She looked at me like a rude stranger.
"We once had a conversation about Susan and John. You said that they didn't like the subway so they really didn't belong here. Do you like the subway?"
"It meets my needs," she said as she shook her head and showered me with her sweat.
"You need to sweat? To turn your clothes into wet rags?"
"Sweat is good. It's how we get rid of toxins and wastes. I'd rather sweat a little now than be the cause of global warning," she said.
"You're not going to tell me this hot, fetid air is good. That it's healthy to go from 110 degrees to 75 degrees in seconds."
"I'm not going to tell you anything."

Her tone of voice said I had transgressed, that it was time to retreat. I realised how far I would go to prove a point; I had made an extravagant effort to aggravate someone as uncomfortable as I was, who carried the extra baggage of pretending she was not. And why was I so intent on changing her mind? What difference could it make? If she wanted to believe this was the way life had to be, why should I interfere with her?

I guess I cannot reconcile myself to the reality that in order to get anywhere you must suffer. Because this seems to be the subway system's underlying message. I want to believe that the journey is as good as the destination. And I need to believe that I am not just a petulant child for believing this. If the subway system could not provide a fast, comfortable, reliable ride, what made me think it would give me affirmation?

I didn't get any affirmation on the subway that evening. But I got a seat.

A Perfect Day for a Colonoscopy

2007-07-12T16:24:00.000-04:00

My doctor had advised me to have this procedure done but I resisted. First, it was an act based on typical denial--of age, of the possibility that I had neoplasms growing inside my rotting guts, of the decline in my physical power, of my mortality.

Then it shifted to a child's fearful resistance against an unpleasant procedure and preparation. Prostate exams were humiliating enough with their drop-trow, bend-over, finger-butt protocol and the memento of vaseline on cheeks. The prospect of having a tube snaking a few yards up my bowel signified the end of dignity, the portal of emasculation. And if that was not enough, there came a day of fasting on the eve of the procedure like an act of contrition for the sin of eating, and a purge of vile-tasting osmotic GI flush euphemistically labeled"Golitely" (as if you could visualize Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly of Breakfast at Tiffany's evacuating her guts ad nauseum while singing Moon River).

Finally, a television feature on the number of New Yorkers presenting with advanced colon cancer due to a lack of screening convinced me that I was letting my fear of unpleasantness interfere with my responsibility to my wife and under-college-age daughter. I called my family physician and a gastroenterologist and scheduled a colonoscopy for five days later.

In the days between the set-up and the lie-down (which I identified in a countdown to the big day, as in 5 PC, or 5 days pre-colonoscopy) I was filled with speculative thoughts of how this procedure would play out and where it might lead me. Every passing moment increased my dread of impending death and each of my pleasant pastimes made me elegiac. By projecting myself into a hypothetical future of polyps, tumors, Gleason scores, and carcinomas I was indulging in premature nostalgic for the life I loved and would surely lose. Two days before the fateful diagnostic I met a woman while swimming who said she was afraid of getting jostled during lap swim because of her breast cancer operation. Of course, I interpreted this encounter as a portent of my fate. Had I set in motion a series of disclosures that would change my life forever?

Of course, I had no signs or symptoms of illness of any kind. In fact, I had never felt healthier. I swim a half-mile a day and eat lean protein and salads. I do not drink or smoke. (My mind is another story--that is pretty sick--but I keep a firewall between mind and body. Being Cartesian has its advantages.) However, instead of building my confidence about the test ahead, my robustitude intensified my sense of vulnerability and disaster. I have always subscribed to the pessimistic theory (irony-based) that every good day is followed by a bad one, every gain subtracted by a loss, and that you are most susceptible to catastrophe when you feel your best. "Of course, I am due for terrible health news," I thought, "I feel great."

I became more nervous by the day. But I also longed for the C-day to come so it would finally be behind me. On the eve of the colonoscopy, or 1 PC on my new calendar, I fasted. Despite the prohibition on eating I bought a pound of Napoleon cherries that I would forego for a day. Even the daily specials listed on the window of a greasy-smelling diner made me salivate. But I was strong and ate nothing. That evening I imbibed my preparation cocktails, two liters of "Moviprep." Why do they give these liquid purges Hollywood-sounding names? Is it a perverse joke to remind you how far you are at that moment from your dreams?

Colonic cleansers, such as Sonne's, work on the principle of gravity, evicting stools with heavy bulk. By contrast, osmotic sugar-and-electrolyte cleansers like Moviprep draw water out of the intestines and flush out the solid wastes. It's like pissing out of your ass. Even in the middle of the night, I was summoned out of my dreams to the lue by the inexorable pressure in my gut.

Finally, this morning I awoke, showered, and put on my best pair of underwear, which I had saved for the occasion (an epileptic co-worker once advised me to wear clean underwear in case I had to go to a hospital; as if hospital workers practiced a strange triage, treating people with good underwear better). I arrived at the GI clinic forty-five minutes early, did the paper-work, filled out a sheet on which I had to report whether my stools were solid, cloudy, or clear, and retired to the treatment area. There I was told to take off my clothes, underwear and personal effects and place them in a locker. I put on two hospital robes, one with the back open, the other with an open front, so I wouldn't have to walk around with my buttocks showing. I slipped on the little brown booties they gave me to keep my feet warm on the cold linoleum.

As I trudged out to the large room I felt like a true patient...stripped of clothes, without pockets, something now to be looked at and treated. Then I went to the chairs facing the Hudson River and looked out at the majestic view while a young nurse inserted a catheter into a vein in my hand. It popped out, so she tried it again. Another patient remarked what a beautiful day it was. To which I replied, "A perfect day for a colonoscopy."

I had never been in a hospital gown. I had never been under sedation and I did not know if I would be allergic to it. With my propensity for imagining the most twisted outcomes, I thought it would superbly ironic if I had no colon problems but went into a coma because of the sedative. So I asked the doctor to put me on the least amount and he agreed to give me only enough sedative to make me comfortable. I was eager to watch the whole procedure on the monitor. I was really enjoying it. And then it was over. And I felt sure that I had seen it all. But it went by so fast that I could not be sure. I probably went in and out of consciousness like an exhausted cinemaphile fighting to keep his eyes open for a 3 AM broadcast of Citizen Kane. At any rate, I saw enough pink muscle, yellow surfaces, and dark tunnels to know that I was looking at my guts.

The doctor pronounced that my colon was perfect. No polyps. I was wheeled out into the recovery room, which was also the dressing room and the IV-and-blood-pressure room. My wife came and I opened my eyes and read the sports section. The sedative they gave was great. It made me feel relaxed and sleepy in a warm midsummer under-the-trees rustic meadow way.
Now I feel great. I am a believer in colonoscopies. I recommend them to everyone. And the hospital where I underwent the procedure does indeed put patients first as their motto proclaims on nearly every wall. This is what a favorable diagnosis can do, how it can make you feel. This is also what happens when you approach the terrifying figure you see ahead only to realize that it is a shadow in which you have protected your fear.

Rejecting Media To Save Self

2007-07-11T20:43:00.000-04:00

Almost every morning I read at least a part of the newspaper and every night I watch at least a segment of the television news. I guess I'm putting my existence in historical context. Each day I experience my life and add another page to my personal story; by paying attention to the news, as specious as it may be, I acknowledge that I am part of a larger story.

For a long time I have known that the media version of the world is as authentic as the flavors in fast food. It is easy to obtain but does not stay. I lose interest and walk back to my life, without having been truly affected. My connection to the world has been symbolic, ritualistic, and empty. I return to my solitary path, the unremarkable unfolding of my day.

Lately, the constant tide of new names, faces, reviews, plaudits and recommendations about who is important and whom I should be paying attention to has imposed a crushing on my self-hood. It is unbearable, this bombardment of news and opinions...I must remind myself that it is posted by press agents, public relations firms and people at dinner parties. It is not real. For if I broke down and believed it was real, I might capitulate and finally accept what the media want me to believe, that these people, these events, these names, these minds are more important than I am, and that what they say is more important than what I am trying to say, than the words that are formulating in my head. Sometimes the thoughts in my head are like those poor turtles who come ashore to waiting throng of predators.

No, it is not precisely a conspiracy because there is no one agenda. Rather, it is the elaborate construct of an oligarchy in which all parties know each other and cooperate for the good of the group. The show must go on, and it does not really matter who or what, so long as it does not undermine the political and economic order. The objective of the group is to make everyone stop what they're doing and look and listen to them and to believe that this is absolutely natural. They mean to establish an iconic aristocracy to represent the ruling class.

Plato's cave comes to mind. The artful puppeteers perform a shadow play for the cave dwellers who are too bored to protest, too ignorant to know that they are not gawking at reality. For Plato, a philosopher eager for truth, art without truth was a fraud. For the cave dweller, whose lives were circumscribed by sedentary darkness, the distinction may have been meaningless; the puppet show was the only escape.

The media show encarcerates my mind, while for others, it is an aid of the imagination. I am in a dilemma. To share my creative work with the world I will need the media. That is the market place. By staying outside it, I mute my voice, cut myself off, renounce my life objective. I know the media is not entirely real, but as a writer outside the media and cut off from an audience am I entirely real?

Is Writing Still Important?

2007-07-08T00:20:00.001-04:00

I recently attended a writers conference. It was my first: interesting and predictable, enjoyable and painful, for reasons having less to do with the event than with my feelings about writing, publishing, success, failure, and the place of writing in today's world.

For years I avoided writers conferences because they sounded like an oxymoron. Writers are solitary by nature or constraint. It is an internal conversation with an imaginary audience, with characters, voices in one's head. Solitude is the fourth wall, the amniotic membrane protecting the internal conversation from external noise. I can write in any environment, even a bus station, because I can be alone anywhere and move in my own silence. But to be congregated with other writers, as if we are all siblings in a trade union, seems strained. Of course, others do not agree with me.

One speaker, an earnest thriller writer, claimed that writers who stay to themselves are condemned to breathe their own air, whereas writers who attend conferences and read writing magazines imbibe fresher air from a larger supply. This is an invidious metaphor, and opposite from the truth. For a writer must foremost be original, always listening to his own mind and heart. When writers congregate, others' opinions can permeate our osmotic brains. Suddenly, unwittingly my great new idea is really someone else's great old idea. Originality is the only gift each of us has and it is hard to develop and to preserve. Mingling does not make this easier.

Aside from the inherent paradox of a writer's conference, I am ambivalent about agents, publishers and the publishing process. This business is less about books than about other things, social, political, for which I have limited interest, ability and time. When I decided to be a writer, I resolved to do so in good faith, to write constantly, truthfully and well about subjects important to me. I vowed to write out of my natural inclinations, and not like a skeet shooter, aiming at a target. Why bother to write something I didn't care about? There is too much refuse in too many landfills and there are too many trees being felled to write useless books.

I have done my part. I have written novels, short stories, essays, poems, articles, screenplays, and some radio plays, and would submit anything I have done with pride to anyone. Because I did the work, the thinking, writing, and revising. I know what went into everything I have done.
To express the foregoing thoughts at a writer's conference would be heresy. People who attend them may secretly believe them, but they are also crying out for a pay-off, the validation, adulation, even money that prompted them to make the sacrifices which writing categorically demands. To voice the opinion that marketing is secondary cause people to wonder why I bothered to attend.

No doubt, publishing is about marketing, about selling books as if they were tires or baby bottles. But is this appropriate? I studied English and American literature for my BA and MA and also taught it, so I still have a perhaps antiquated and romantic view that literature should do more than give people what they expect. A woman I know brought in several best-sellers of the last decade. She announced that she would throw them out if nobody took them off her hands. When I asked her what one of the books was about she could not recall. Her reaction was, “Oh, it was some trashy thing I read at the beach.” This was a best-seller, the pinnacle of success, what most writers aspire to. Yet, even the most valued writing had little value to a reader who went to a book store and paid $25 per book. So why did I bother to write?

The answer to that question is easy. Each writer must have his own reason to write, must find the meaning in it, and write out of that core.

Marketing is about who the writer is, not what he has written. It is about “credentials”, or “platform”…what right do you, the writer, have to be writing a book and why should anyone read it? That question is irrelevant and any answer, speculative. The proof of the value of a book is in the reading. And anyone who reads my work will understand its value.

It may sound arrogant, but it is the healthy arrogance any writer of conviction must have–and has probably earned.

Independence Week

2007-07-01T13:56:00.000-04:00

It may be a projection of my spiritual state, but the world around me seems confused and in disarray. Institutions and services aren't functioning well, and the proposed remedies seem to yield more problems than they solve. Meanwhile, the "good guys" who are working out our puzzles seem impervious to the collateral damage their brainstorms will doubtless produce.

Congestion parking in New York is one example. A city that needs tourism and retail intends to penalize the very people who feed those industries--the bridge and tunnel people who pour in to see shows and eat out, and the vans and trucks that transport goods to stores and from warehouses. However, many non-driving New Yorkers, who relish the excitement of a bold idea that does not seem to affect them, support the proposal, without seeing what a catastrophe it will be for them as well.

The immigration issue is another example of an intractable problem that inspires unpopular solutions and a cacaphony of confusion. Most Americans are now celebrating the defeat of the amnesty bill that would have granted citizenship to some 12 million illegal aliens, but no one can deny that these visitors remain among us, blasting at our building facades, stocking our food shelves, caring for our children and cleaning our homes--doing the work that native-born Americans presumably are unwilling to do. And while the bill's opponents can be satisfied that the aliens have been denied citizenship, all that has been proven is that neither individuals nor our government has the will to oust or welcome these foreigners among us, to tax them or give them benefits.

We use and watch their efforts but pretend they don't exist. Underneath it all is the plain, selfish fact that the individuals and companies that hire these foreign workers could as easily hire native born Americans, but would prefer to pay less. Local union members have handed out fliers protesting all over the city protesting against one construction or engineering firm after another for using illegal workers to build or renovate their properties, but their efforts are unavailing. The work moves forward. Most people who receive these fliers do not care much or know what they can do. They see this as an economic terf war war between two sets of workers--one closed and clannish group (the union) noted for violence and corruption against another group, who is quiet, cheap and obedient. We don't like either party enough to raise our voices.

But if Americans are serious about doing more about the immigration problem than snubbing the immigrants, if we are serious about closing our borders and job markets to aliens, we will need to decide whose side we are on in these "labor disputes." Because the demand a segment of our population (the upper classes, the employers, etc.) puts on the commodity of cheap labor is what keeps the aliens coming and staying. Merely voting not to give them rights is not going to prevent them them from taking their cut of the gross national product or exerting the pressure of their needs on our fragile infrastructure. Yet, rather than discuss this problem openly and logically, Americans prefer to talk at each other through the metaphors of congestion pricing and immigration--one group in effect telling the other that their needs have become inconvenient and harmful. Until we deliver this news to one another directly, the problems we attempt to solve will fester.

BC and AD Have New Meanings

2007-06-27T07:07:00.000-04:00

Two facts have become clear as I assemble my web site--my work has evolved and so has the computer.

The computer's development has become a timeline for my own evolution, demarcating the phases and projects of my life by whether I was using Word Perfect or Word, 5.25 floppies, 3.5 floppies, e-mail attachments, zips or flashdrives for storage and transfer--and in some embarrassing instances, if what I wrote predated the advent of the computer in my life.

Yes, there are very good manuscripts that I would like to include in my opus that were never digitalized. Digitalized--turned into 0s and 1s, reduced to a boolean essence--is a word repurposed by our present way of thinking to signify purification, a rebirth. "Your work, my son, was once only words on a page, ink on paper, a mechanical and merely physical process, but now it is reborn as data..." Blast of child soprano voices, a thunderous Hallelujah!"). These pagan manuscripts must now pass through a scanner.

Although I have a new scanner, and purchased it as soon as the previous one died--demonstrating its indispensibility--I rarely use the flat bed. In fact, I dread using it. I know that I should not feel this way. The scanner is familiar hardware, dating back more than twenty years, and it runs more or less like a copy machine. Yet, as sleek and inocuous as it is on my desk, the scanner might as well be an inquisitional rack.

For using the scanner to transform massive physical into fluid digital is torture. The process incorporates the tedium of xeroxing with the cruel finality of "the wizard"--a program that intermittently asks the user if he wishes to save his changes while warning him portentously that if such changes are saved, original formatting will be irrevocably lost.

Such a dilemma triggers traumatic effects. Once, while digitalizing my first book, all 500 pages of it, I came to the crossroads where the Wizard asked if I wished to save my changes and warned me of all that might be lost. Unwilling to sacrifice anything of my first book, I clicked Do not save changes, which meant that the previous hour of fixing typos and messy keystrokes on the newly scanned manuscript was wasted, the work irrevocably lost.

The scanner is not my friend because it makes me face the two blunderers within--the mechanical moron who misfeeds pages into xerox machines as a rite of passage and the digital dunderhead who stumbles through simple formatting procedures.

Worse, the scanner makes me confront the new BC and AD that chalk off my lifespan with ruthless candor--Before Computer and After Digital.

I fall somewhere between.

Cancer Has Entered My Dreams

2007-06-26T08:36:00.000-04:00

I awoke prematurely, i.e. before I needed to, due to strange dream. I was on the basketball court with some very aggressive cancer survivor/basketball players. They were giving me tips on life, which was reason enough for concern, even consternation.

But what really bothered me was that I was missing lay-ups. Despite the fact that I was nearly touching the rim when I left my feet.

This is what comes of living across from one of the most popular playground basketball courts in upper Manhattan, a magnet to every team of feral young men in the vicinity.

After a day of "Next!" and rough and raucous play, they pile into cars, Toyotas as well as jeeps, flush with victory, or simply flushed from exertion. I used to be one of them. But now my basketball is in retirement in the trunk of my car as I have become a semi-aquatic animal--going to the pool every day.

It is a habit I learned from Oliver Sachs, the neurologist par excellence. I saw him on a documentary some years ago and the cameras followed him to his health club, where he swam and explained that it was his therapy, that it must be some atavistic pull back to the origin of all animal life, his philogenic, ichtheological (sp) ancestry calling him to the water. I am hyper-paraphrasing here. His explanation was simpler, but delivered in a British accent.

At any rate, swimming does relax and energize me. When I enter the pool area I am sluggish and tired and dispirited. After my session I am no longer sluggish and tired. So I can return home and work for another four hours.

Swimming is the only exercise in which you don't sweat. This appeals to me. It's multitasking: I can be fit and clean at the same time.

Later...

Just Passed The Biggest Mental Stone in Human History

2007-06-25T23:25:00.000-04:00

For the past ten days I have been digesting the indigestible...a long pharmaceutical advertising project. It is like a mental marathon across a wide, dry erg.

At first, procrastination conquers all...I balk, circle the project warily as intuition whispers what I am about to suffer.

Then I hurl my brain into the void, write furiously headlines and copy, as if trying to dig a hole in the massive dunes of labor that surround and envelope me to escape through the other side.

After a few days I am halfway done. I draw a deep breath of relief. The rest will surely be easier, I will be working downhill. But exhaling, I have no more energy than before. That pause does not refresh, it reveals to me how little is left in my waterskins. How tired I am! The inspiration has evaporated into the sauna that surrounds me and my work. I push myself but my mind is slowing. I must work the weekend, clear away hours in which to write for minutes at a time. I must concentrate...concentrate. But my mind is working so hard and the words are coming so... slowly.

This is not a writer's block. It is a writer's breakdown. This is what happens when the glutinous brain matter turns to glue. This what happens when...

But excelsior! Or is eureka! I have done the improbable. I have digested the indigestible. I have done what no one but some diminutive Japanese man in Coney Island has done for 3 consecutive years...

No, I have not scarfed 50 hotdogs in 10 minutes! But I have written 70 pps of pharmaceutical copy in eight days! I have poured over slides and managed to make comprehensible statements...Is this a sense of achievement I feel or the sort of relief a person feels after passing the largest mental stone in all of human history?

Hopefully not to be continued...

Eric

Drivers Going the Wrong Way

2007-06-22T15:26:00.000-04:00

Last week before sunset, I was driving through the park when a car came toward me. The driver had decided that he didn't care for the appropriate path around the museum, so he took a shortcut into on-coming traffic. He was so penurious with his time that he was willing to enter a headlong collision to save a minute or two. The only rational aspect of his act, the only hedge on his reckless gamble, was that we were in a relatively tame 25 mph zone.

Last night, my friend Evelyn was driving north on the Garden State Parkway when a car sped toward her and oncoming traffic. She steered safely to the shoulder while the wrong-way driver shot by. Since no tragic update was reported on this morning's news, no shrill descriptions of a spectacular, senseless accident, I assumed that the wrong-way driver had somehow failed his audition as the angel of death.

In Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson a character named Windpeter Winters inexplicably drives his horses and carriage into an oncoming train, earning himself a posthumous reputation for mad and gratuitous courage.

Could a nascent cult of daredevilry be celebrating itself? Do its members deliberately drive the wrong way on small streets and superhighways in order to achieve suicidal exhilaration, conquer the ultimate fear, or prove their brazenness to friends?

This is a new sub-species to avoid, along with muggers, escaped convicts, and serial killers.

Soaking the Riff Raff...I'd rather soak in the tub

2007-06-22T15:09:00.001-04:00

Fortunately, the powers of stagnation in New York always overcome the bad ideas for change.

Mayor Bloomberg, who almost foisted an albatross of a stadium on the west side of Manhattan in 2005 before he was stopped just in time to save his chances for a second term, was at it again with his big ideas that hurt little people, when he promulgated the congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street, a measure which would have crippled out of town commuters, uptown commuters, outer borough commuters, small businesses with vans, neighborhoods which would have been dumping grounds for motorists seeking free parking, and businesses that thrive off of all of the above.

Thankfully there is a man named Sheldon Silver, much maligned, who has what the Jews call "seichel"--common sense. He has been our David with a slingshot saving Bloomberg and the other big thinkers from themselves.