Stephen Rivele's blog

Why Write?

2012-02-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

I was asked recently by the mother of a seventeen-year-old boy to write a letter to her son explaining why he should write. I must admit, I procrastinated for some time before I complied. I do not like writing about writing, do not like to think about the process, which has always come naturally to me. It's rather like trying to concentrate on your golf swing - you can only suffer from self-consciousness. However, since this was to be about purpose and not process, and as I had promised her I would do so, I set about it, and I reproduce the result here for anyone else who may be interested...

Why Should a Seventeen-Year-Old Write?

Every human being is a universe. We spin on the axis of our own ego; our perceptions, thoughts, desires, fears and hopes embracing a cosmos that, so far as we can tell, is eternal. We are all that we see and seem; a dream within a dream as Poe mused. Indeed, we spend our entire lives dreaming – whether asleep or awake. Our night dreams are pure introspection – the collision of a waking consciousness with a subconscious awakening. The result defies logic, experience, even our own will and better judgment. Nightmares are a sort of inner social commentary on our worst fears and darkest expectations; pleasant dreams are a gift which our subconscious offers to our waking mind. Guilt and generosity, damnation and delight – these are the fabric and function of our dreams. Shakespeare said that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” As usual, he was right. Life is a dream – the soul’s dream of reality – and we spend our entire life dreaming.

Dreams have no hard substance. They lack height, weight, depth, taste and temperature. They exist only in time and the mind’s experience of it. Life, since it is a dream, is essentially insubstantial. The suspicion that what we call reality is, after all, merely an illusion, has been thudding around philosophy from the beginning, its “mighty footsteps echoing in the corridors of time,” as Longfellow put it. What is real, in the sense of: What can be proved to be reality? The Beatles said that nothing is real. Tolstoy believed that “only that which is spiritual is real.” And St. Exupery’s fox tells the Little Prince that only those things you cannot see are essential. I am convinced that they are all correct. And you do not have to believe in Sixties rock or the soul or spirituality to agree with them; you need only believe in dreams.

And so we reach the conclusion that each of us is a universe, and that our universe consists of dreams – either consciously thrust upon us while awake, or unconsciously synthesized by us while alseep. Our whole life passes and is passed within a dream, either conscious or unconscious. Given a certain looseness of logic, the two are perfectly interchangeable; indeed, there was a tribe of Native Americans who believed that only night dreams were real, while waking consciousness was an illusion. Again Shakespeare: “Thou hast nor age nor youth, but as it were, an after dinner sleep dreaming of both.” Like ice and water, solid and liquid, night dreams and day dreams are merely differing phases of the same truth – that life itself is a dream.

Now, what does all this have to do with seventeen-year-olds and why they should write? The answer is simple: Dreams have no substance, but words can give them substance. Words are the bones and sinews of dreams; phrases are their blood, sentences are their muscle and tissue, paragraphs their flesh and emotions, and insight, emerging from them, is their mind. Think about it: What do you do when you awaken from a particularly vivid dream? You tell someone about it. Your natural instinct is to give voice to your dreams – to express them in words. You don’t just lie in bed re-dreaming – in fact, you can’t force yourself to re-experience any dream. But you do have an immediate and instinctive need to put your dream into words, so that you, and someone else, can experience it and try to understand it, to puzzle out its symbols. In other words, you want your dream to live, to last, to have a meaning.

To experience and understand, to create something that lives and has meaning: That is what words enable us to do. Words lift us, momentarily, out of the dream state and give to it a lasting form – the height and weight and depth and taste and temperature which dreams lack. Words allow us to live our dreams – indeed, they compel us to. Words are the substance of dreams, and writing is the most enduring form of words. Writing makes dreams survive; it enables them to live and last. Writing makes our dreams meaningful to ourselves and to others. And since we are, each of us, a universe of dreams, writing releases our lives from the constraints of time – it makes our dreams eternal.

Because writing enables us to do this, it makes it possible for us to gain knowledge of, and insight into, our inner selves, the meaning of our lives. It enables us to outlast the time which is the only context of dreams. It enables us to join our personal universe with the multiverse of others – to meld our dreams with theirs. And because of this, writing enables us to live and last and love.

Without words, your private universe would be a dark, cold, sterile place. With words, it comes alive both to yourself and to others. And in written words, it takes on its most lasting, thoughtful and intimate aspect. There is nothing in this world so intimate as sitting down with a pen or at a keyboard and writing from your soul, writing your life out, writing to someone else, connecting your separate minds in a mutual galaxy of thoughts and words. There is nothing more beautiful and wonderful, and difficult and frightening than the process of putting your dreams on paper. The great Irish poet W.B. Yeats told his beloved that he longed to give her a cloth of gold, “But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

When you open your private universe to others in writing, you are making the ultimate act of faith and hope and love. You are saying: Here are my dreams, for both you and me to see and understand; here is myself. This is what my private universe looks and sounds and feels and sings like. This is me – the real me. Such is the power of the written word: To turn a cold, dark universe inside-out, and open our inner selves to the light of understanding and the warmth of love.

Writing is dangerous, it is difficult, but it is essential if we are to learn and grow and become larger than ourselves. If we are to understand and express ourselves, if we are to dream in eternity and love in time and space, we must confront who we are, each in his private cosmos, and we must express the truth of our discovery to others, for all time and for all to see. That is why we write; that is why you, a seventeen-year-old must write: Because you are a universe roiling and rocketing through space-time, searching for a cloth of gold in which to wrap your dreams.

Three Young Masters

2011-11-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

I have been going to concerts at the Disney Hall in downtown L.A. more often these days. I find that as I grow older I need the live experience of music, and the hall is a wonderful venue for concerts of all kinds. Actually, I rather love the space, which is eclectic, welcoming, acoustically brilliant, and clad in wood, which, being a man of the 19th century, I enjoy.

Recently I had the pleasure of hearing three young masters of their crafts. The first was the wonderful Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, whose performance of the Bach Chaconne in D minor from the second partita for solo violin (which is my favorite piece of music), impressed me very much when I heard it by accident on the radio. I was so taken with her interpretation that I had to remain in the car long after I had turned off the engine to find out who the violinist was.

Now let me say that the great Chaconne is unique even among Bach's works. Each of the pieces for solo violin, the partitas and sonatas, is a dance form, and they average three or four minutes in length. Then there comes the Chaconne, which is nearly fifteen minutes long. It is breathtakingly complex and beautiful, and just given its length, it is clear that Bach knew that he was doing something special, something completely different from all the other pieces in those extraordinary suites.

What he was doing was paying tribute to his predecessor Biber's exquisite Guardian Angel Sonata, which is the capstone of Biber's Mystery Sonatas for violin and continuo, which Bach admired. In them, Biber - a truly great and much overlooked composer of the early Baroque - wrote one sonata for each of the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. He then added a passacaglia for solo violin as a tribute to the guardian angel, and this was his masterpiece. It was an evocation of the Guardian Angel Sonata, in the more complex and challenging chaconne form, that Bach intended when he wrote the great Chaconne in D minor for solo violin.

For me, the Chaconne is the litmus test for any violinist, and Janine Jansen played it masterfully on that radio performance which I listened to in my driveway. So when I heard that she was playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at the Disney I rushed to buy tickets.

She did not disappoint me. Much larger a woman than I had expected, she took powerful command of the stage, communicated expertly with Gustavo Dudamel and the orchestra, and played the Mendelssohn (one of the five great violin concertos) beautifully. Her size enabled her to muscle the instrument in a way I would not have expected. She is strong, clear in her voice, brilliant in her technique, and supremely confident. I have never heard the cadenza played more feelingly and touchingly, a real accomplishment for a violinist of her power. She could easily have bullied her way through it, but instead she expressed it with true reverence and delicacy. It was a wonderful performance.

A week or so later, I heard on the radio that Hillary Hahn was coming to Los Angeles. For several years, she has been one of my favorite violinists, and I jumped at the chance to see her perform live in concert again. I had heard her some years ago, on my birthday, play the Sibelius Concerto (perhaps my favorite violin concerto) with the L.A. Phil when she was still a teenager, and had been wowed by her talent. And her solo Bach, which I had heard several times on the radio, is among my favorite interpretations. I was looking forward to seeing her again, no longer a girl, but a grown woman.

Her program of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms was interspersed with pieces by contemporary composers - she announced from the stage that all had been written in the past few months, and some expressly for her. In each she was accompanied by a young Russian pianist who was also marvelous. It was a brilliant program, highly intelligent in its choice of material, provocative, and, at points, beautiful and moving. But I think most of us were there for the war horses, and especially for the Bach.

She played the first sonata for solo violin, which, she said, she had performed in part in her first major solo recital twenty years before (she is only 31!). It was flawless Hillary Hahn; perfect in technique, filled with reverence for the music but also with original ideas and personal insights. It was, in short, a joy. I said to my companion afterwards that hearing Hillary Hahn play solo Bach in person is one of the greatest artistic experiences we can have in our lifetimes. I compared it to taking my girls to see Ian McKellan's King Lear. I truly believe she is on that level; one of the greatest interpreters of Bach of our times.

I paid her the homage of waiting in line after the concert to have her sign my program for my son. My reason was simple: I wanted to look into the eyes of a genius. Now those who follow this blog will know that I use the word genius very sparingly. But I attribute it unhesitatingly to Hillary Hahn. She is a true genius of violin performance, and her playing of Bach is an experience not to be missed by anyone who appreciates great art.

She was much smaller than I expected - as petite as Janine Jansen was robust. Still with the allure of a teenager, she has, nonetheless, grown into one of the consummate artists of this age. Her program notes bespoke a keen intelligence, and her choice of program an enthusiasm for the modern as well as the traditional. She told me that she had graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia; I mentioned that that was my hometown and that I had lived at 19th and Spruce. She smiled and said she had lived at 18th and Locust, just down the street. I must say that I was charmed.

The third artist whom I went to see was the young Chinese pianist Lang Lang. I had heard about him and had once heard a recording of his playing a Liszt rhapsody, but I had not thought much of it as it seemed to me rather exhibitionist. However, a dear friend was in town and there was nothing else to do, so we went.

I learned a good deal from the experience. Lang Lang is much more than the Liszt recordings and video for which he has become a sort of Asian cult figure -- he is an excellent pianist. He played solo Bach, and did so respectably, though not with great insight or originality. Then he turned to one of the late Schubert sonatas, and acquitted himself with great aplomb and feeling. I love the late Schubert, and was, frankly, anxious about what he would do with it. He did wonders. His technique was exquisite, admirably suited to the Schubert, and his ideas and feelings were spot on.

What came across to me especially was his deep love for the music, and his intense personal involvement with it. In performance, he gives everything to the piece, which is clear from both his playing and his body language. He is very enjoyable to watch, and since he never makes a false gesture or plays a false note, one can relax and enjoy the music with him. The Schubert showed me that he is, indeed, a genuine master of his art.

But it was in the second half of the program that he came truly into his own. He played twelve Chopin etudes, and played them about as well as anyone could, expressing himself with tremendous confidence, skill and feeling. The Schubert had been wonderful; the Chopin was his element. He was at turns delicate and soulful, powerful and bombastic. But all was measured precisely to the music; nothing was gratuitous, no matter how far he took the material. The audience loved it, and with good reason. Lang Lang is a master of Chopin.

In his encores, too, his peculiar talent shone. He played Liszt, for which, I think he is especially famous; and a piano transcription of Paganini's Campanella, which was exuberant and delightful in its unvarnished virtuosity. Though I knew little about him beforehand, it was clear to me that it is with the late romantics that he feels most at home, and it would be difficult to imagine anyone more in tune with them aesthetically and temperamentally than he.

Blaming the Victims

2011-11-16T12:45:00.000-08:00

I listened in dismay the other night as the lawyer for the Penn State pedophile declared that the allegations of the children made against his client are false, which was only to be expected. What troubled me in that interview, however, which was conducted by a photogenic young TV reporter, was that, when the reporter asked why eight boys would all claim falsely that the coach had molested them, the lawyer replied: 'Why does anyone make false allegations? You wouldn't; I wouldn't.' He then went on to accuse the boys of wanting fame and money, thus making exactly the kind of allegation he had just claimed he would never make. And the handsome young TV reporter was too stupid to call him on it.

The same sort of blame game, observed by the media with bland indifference, is being played by President Obama. First it was George W. Bush, then the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, then the Arab Spring, then the Tea Party, then the financial crisis in Europe, then "bad luck," then "messy democracy," and now, presumably having run out of things to blame for the failure of his economic policies, Mr. Obama is blaming us. That's right: The president says it's our fault, the fault of the American public, because we are unimaginative and lazy.

Which raises a few questions that seem to have escaped the mainstream media: When will this president take responsibility for his own failures? (Never.) When will he change his ideologically-driven course and try to correct the situation? (Never.) When will the blame game stop? (When he is removed from office.)

Meanwhile, this affable incompetent wanders the nation campaigning for re-election at taxpayers' expense, while the so-called Super Committee deadlocks, and a further downgrading of the U.S. credit rating looms. (And on the point of the Super Committee: What led anyone to suppose that an elite group culled from among the very political hacks who presided over the collapse of the American economy would be able to resolve it?) Earlier this year I heard a report that Belgium had for some time been operating without a government; well, we are doing the same. I think that it was Woody Allen who quipped that Dwight Eisenhower proved that America could function without a president. Mr. Obama is offering further proof.

Has anyone alive today ever seen such a woeful abdication of presidential leadership? Mr. Obama has spent more time on vacation than any other president. He has spent more time campaigning than any other president. And he has spent virtually no time actually governing. This is because he does not like the business of governing. And that is because he has no talent for it. He is good at campaigning, good at making speeches (when he has a prepared text), good at smiling and shaking hands. But where has he been during the many economic and international crises that have confronted his presidency? Why was he absent and silent during the alleged debt ceiling crisis? Why is he not leading the Super Committee in its deliberations? Where the hell is he?

He is, apparently, enjoying himself on the golf course and in Hawaii and at basketball games and on Martha's Vineyard. Is this what we elected him to do? Has he said anything profound or to the point recently about America's worsening economic crisis? His own party in Congress did not want to bring his sham of a jobs bill up for a vote. His own party voted unanimously against his budget. And his own party members seem to be distancing themselves from him as the 2012 election nears.

It is time for even Mr. Obama's most fervid supporters to admit it: He has been an unmitigated failure as a leader. The lone accomplishment of his presidency has been the forcing through Congress (without a single Republican vote) of the health care bill, which most Americans do not want, which most of his union supporters have opted out of, and which more than half of the states have challenged in court as unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court has now agreed to take up that challenge, which turns on the relative relation of the federal government's power to that of the states and the people. At stake is the question of individual liberty, the very principle upon which this nation was founded. A lower court has found that the general welfare trumps individual liberty, and this is a terrifying prospect. It does nothing less than cancel out America's philosophical birthright; and if that decision is allowed to stand, America, as we know it, as we inherited it from past generations, will be finished.

I will say it again: If the Supreme Court decides that the power of Congress to promote the general welfare trumps the people's right to individual liberty, the experiment which we call the United States of America will be over. And Mr. Obama may well win re-election on the shambles of its demise.

And Now Penn State

2011-11-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

Those who have followed this blog will be able to anticipate what I am going to say about the child abuse scandal at Penn State University. All of those involved, both in the molestation and in its cover-up, must be punished. It matters not what positions they held nor how long and distinguished their service. Everyone who committed the acts and knew about them and said and did nothing to put a stop to them - and by that I mean intervening directly or alerting the police - are equally guilty.

What astonishes is the similarity between the Penn State scandal and that involving the Roman Catholic Church. In both, boys were being systematically molested and raped, persons in authority knew about it - had even witnessed it - and the hierarchy conspired to contain the truth and cover it up. What struck me as different is the statement by the Pennsylvania Attorney General, who declared that no one in any position of authority who was complicit in the abuse should be sheltered from the law. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than I was shouting at the television: Arrest the bishops!

This has not been done, though the pattern and longevity of the abuse and the conspiracy to cover it up by the Church hierarchy far exceed those of the authorities at Penn State. If the university officials are not beyond the reach of the law for their silence and lies, then neither should the bishops and cardinals be. The Attorney General is being praised for her courage in not allowing herself to be intimidated by the prestige of the university and its football program. Yet so long as she remains intimidated by the Catholic Church, she should be branded as a coward. I, for one, demand that she apply to the Church in Pennsylvania the same standards which she enunciated regarding the Penn State scandal.

But let me go farther... The underlying point here is that nothing is more important than the safety, innocence, and well-being of children. Not the football program at Penn State, not Joe Paterno's legacy, not the reputation of the university. Neither is the hierarchy of the Catholic Church more important than children, nor the liturgy, reputation and power of the Church. And neither is feminist ideology, liberalism, and a woman's right to choose. NOTHING is more important than the life, safety, welfare, and innocence of children.

Now in the last case - a woman's right to choose - apologists will argue that the fetus is not a child. Of course they will; they have to. In order to protect themselves from being charged with a great moral wrong, they will pretend, they will lie, that what we are talking about is not a child. They do this precisely to insulate themselves from the knowledge that they are doing evil. It is a hideous reversal of Pascal's famous wager. We cannot prove that God or the afterlife exists, he wrote, and so we should act as if they do. Because otherwise, if they do not, we lose nothing, but if they do, we stand to lose everything. And so, he argued, we should bet that God and the afterlife exist. That is only rational.

The abortionists make the opposite wager. We cannot prove that the fetus is or is not a child, and so we should act as if it is not. This is irrational. Reason demands that we act as if the fetus is a child because, if it is not, we lose nothing, and if it is, we avoid a great moral evil. The pro-choice position, is, therefore, absurd, and yet its advocates wish to codify it in the laws of the nation. That is, they wish to incorporate into our body of law the possibility of committing a great moral sin without punishment. This, too, is absurd.

Let me repeat: NOTHING is more important than the health, safety, welfare and innocence of children. Nothing. Jesus said that those who violate children should be thrown into the sea and drowned. I would not go that far; but they must, whoever they are, be punished as severely as the law allows. And in the case of abortion, we must act as if the fetus is a child if only to avoid the possibility of committing a grave moral evil. That, it seems to me, is only rational, and humane.

A Man Out of Season

2011-10-25T18:32:00.000-07:00

There is a very troubling trend developing in our society, and it is being directed from the top.

I wrote earlier about my concern that the president had authorized the murder of Osama bin Laden in what appears to have been a violation of established American law prohibiting any government official from engaging in a conspiracy to assassinate a foreign leader. Now, I would like to make myself clear: I do not regret bin Laden's death. He was a homicidal religious fanatic of medieval world view, and his death renders us all, in civilized society, that much safer. But the question that does concern me is precisely that one of a civilized society.

Since the death of bin Laden, we have seen the administration engage in the killing of two Americans associated with terrorist causes living abroad. The decision to murder them, via high-tech drone aircraft, was authorized at the highest level of government, and carried out with deliberation and precision. Their murders, though once again unregrettable, appear to have been undertaken in violation of American law; namely, the basic Constitutional prohibition against government depriving any American citizen of life and liberty without due process of law.

In these cases, the president appears to have arrogated to himself the role of judge, jury and executioner. The fact that at least one of the two men was included on the government's list of most wanted criminals makes no difference: The Constitution is clear, and the president is bound by oath to respect it. That President Obama appears to have authorized the killing of these two Americans seems to me to represent not only a violation of the law forbidding political assassination, but also of his oath to uphold the Constitution.

Now, this is not a popular issue, and for that reason it has received relatively little attention. I have read the administration's legal opinion rationalizing the murders, and, frankly, I find it insidious in its intent and pathetic in its reasoning. It says, in effect, that the killings were legal because we did them. That is it. Because the president ordered them, they were legal.

This reminds me of Richard Nixon's declaration during Watergate that anything the president did was legal because he did it. That argument was specious then, and it remains specious today. In my view, unless someone can persuade me to the contrary, by authorizing these killings, the President of the United States has violated the law, the Constitution, and his oath of office.

The identities of the victims are irrelevant. The rationale for the killings is irrelevant. The effect achieved is irrelevant. The only question for a civilized society is whether the actions of the president were in accordance with law. If they were not, then the president must be held accountable, if not in the courts, then at least in the court of public opinion.

I am reminded, too, of the argument put forward by Sir Thomas More in the play "A Man for all Seasons" when he asked the ardent servant of the king the following question: If the devil came to Britain and hid behind the law, would you be justified in destroying the law to get at him? His point was that, once you begin dismantling the protective barrier of laws which alone separates us from evil, then what will save us when evil turns around and attacks? He knew that the answer was: Nothing. We will be exposed and made vulnerable by our very zeal to destroy the devil.

The terrorists are devils; of that there can be no doubt. But in suspending or violating our own laws in order to to destroy them, we make ourselves that much more vulnerable to them, since they know or respect no law but violence.

A little more than kin and less than kind

2011-10-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

I rarely get excited. Which is odd since I work in the film business, wherein everyone seems to exist on a continual diet of excitement. "I'm so excited," is the phrase I hear most often, or, "This is so exciting." But no one means it. You can hear it in their voices, see it in their eyes. Excitement, in the film business, means: "I perceive the prospect of actually getting a film made, and of thereby making money."

Nonetheless, this morning, I felt genuine excitement. Why? Well, it happened like this... (ripple dissolve to:)

I was driving my son to his horseback riding lesson this morning, at the ungodly Saturday morning hour of 8.30. I was thinking about Hamlet, as I often do. It is, as I have said before on this site, my favorite play; perhaps my favorite piece of literature. In particular, I was thinking about Hamlet's first line in the play: A little more than kin and less than kind. I asked my nine-year-old son: What is the first thing Hamlet says in the play? And with this ineffable sense of humor, he replied: Which play? (He is, verbally, a very clever boy.)

Now, the first thing that Hamlet says in the play, after the appearance of the ghost, and after we watch him sitting in somber silence on stage for several minutes while King Claudius goes about his bureaucratic business (for which he appears to have been born, rather like a member of the Senate), he says in response to his uncle/father's prompting, that he regards the king as being: A little more than kin and less than kind.

That is his first line in the play. Now, I have lived with that line since I was sixteen years old. And the sorry truth is that I had never really thought about it until this morning. A little more than kin and less than kind. It is a pun, on the words kin and kind. Everyone understands that. You can read it in any book or essay about the play. I am my uncle/father's kin, since you are married to my mother and you are now both my uncle and my step-father; but you are not kind since you married my mother and (I suspect, and we will soon learn) you killed my father. A little more than kin and less than kind.

Those words kept rolling around in my head as I was motoring up Altadena Drive in search of the stables. And then it hit me: My singular contribution to Hamlet scholarship, after my obsession with the play for over forty years...

A little more than kin and less than kind... Hamlet's first line in the play.

Now, I have been a professional writer for thirty-five years. I have written millions of words. I have examined and experienced virtually every permutation of the English language (which I love) imaginable. I have discovered hidden meanings, obscure implications, impossible contradictions, and unexpected riches. I have defied every rule of grammar and punctuation, and illuminated (at least to my own mind) every deep mine of possibility of syntax and meaning which it not only contains but implies. I have learned to laugh at books of style and usage, and have learned to be in awe of the endless possibilities of expression that English presents. (I am reminded of something I discovered while writing a film about Bobby Fischer, the world chess champion: After the seventh move in a chess game, the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.) And I know that, when a genius such as Shakespeare introduces a character like Hamlet, he gives him an opening line of considerable significance.

A little more than kin and less than kind... That was when it hit me.

Where was Hamlet before the play begins? At college. And where was he at college? The University of Wittenberg in Germany. And what does that mean? That Hamlet spoke German.

Now, consider his first line: A little more than kin and less than kind.

What, in German, does the word "kind" mean?

Child. It means child, as in kindergarten.

Hamlet is saying that, with regards to the king, he feels himself a little more than kin (since his mother has now married his uncle) and less than kind (since, as he suspects, his uncle has killed his father), but also, he feels less than "kind" in German (since he has just come from Germany), meaning he feels less his uncle's child since he was not his father, but his brother was his father. Kind is therefore a double pun, when we understand that Hamlet must have spoken German.

And there it is... the thing that has excited me more than anything else in recent days; my unique contribution to Hamlet scholarship. A little more than kin and less than (German) kind.

Use it in your next term paper. I don't care. My life is now complete.

Fire Them All

2011-10-20T10:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that "private sector jobs are doing just fine" and that the priority should be on government jobs. This is madness. Later that day, Vice President Biden declared that if Congress did not pass the administration's jobs bill - which had already been defeated and was not supported even by members of his own party - the result would be rape and murder. This is madness. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the president can think of nothing to do but campaign for re-election. This is madness. Meanwhile, the Republican Party offers us a field of candidates none of whom can garner the enthusiasm of even a third of Republican voters. This is madness.

There is a crippling lack of leadership in Washington. Our economy is bankrupt, our nation is in decline. Our preeminence in the world is slipping rapidly away, and we are being overtaken by a monolithic communist dictatorship, to which we, even now, are mortgaging our futures. The president, the administration and Congress are devoid of ideas, integrity and honesty. People across the country are suffering; they are anxious, frightened for the future, and growing desperate. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I am proposing one:

Fire them all.

In the 2012 elections, I propose that we unite as a people to defeat every incumbent who runs for re-election. Every one. All of them, from the top down. Throw them out and replace them with new faces and fresh ideas. But not randomly or arbitrarily. Listen carefully to what the candidates say and judge for yourselves whether they are speaking frankly and sincerely about the problems the nation, the states, the cities and counties now face, and the measures that will be necessary to solve them. If you hear the same worn rhetoric, the sycophantic platitudes, the hackneyed political jargon, find someone else to elect. Or run for office yourself. And vote only for candidates who will term-limit themselves, that is, who pledge to serve for only a definite period of time, and then retire.

This extends to the Republican presidential candidates as well. Fire them all, now, and draft someone who will speak honestly to the American people about the crisis we face, and propose real world solutions, no matter how dire and demanding. Someone who can inspire and unite us, instead of scaring and dividing us, as is now being done.

Send a signal that we will stand for this short-sighted, self-serving political nonsense no longer. And send it to the media as well: Expunge the political agendas from your reporting. Give us facts, raw and unbiased, and let us decide for ourselves. Stop cheer-leading for one party or another, or one candidate or another, and dispassionately investigate stories and report what you have discovered. Treat us like intelligent consumers, not wayward children whose minds needs shaping.

We must take control of our nation and our destinies again. We must act as the Union soldiers did at Gettysburg when, after two years of corrupt and incompetent military leadership, and knowing that their cause was on the verge of defeat, ignored their generals and rushed to the center of the line to repulse Pickett's charge. That spontaneous gesture of popular intelligence and outrage, perhaps more than any other, saved the Union. And that is what we must do now, politically.

I think we all understand that the solutions to our current crisis are relatively simple: We must reduce the size and power of the Federal Government, severely cut its spending and curb permanently its ability to grow, adopt a flat and fair tax, impose term limits on all elected officials, break the power of the lobbyists and special interests whatever they may be, freeing government to carry out its Constitutional duties, and pass a balanced budget amendment as quickly as possible.

The politicians will not do these things, and so we must. And it begins with the coming election. Send an unmistakeable message to government and to the world:

Fire them all.

11905; 12333

2011-09-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

I am sorry to bring this point up once again, but I feel that someone should. The other night I watched a documentary about the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the course of it, a government official stated what I had suspected to be the case: The raid was never intended to take bin Laden alive; it was intended to kill him. If this is so, it means two things. First, the Administration lied in the aftermath of the raid when it insisted that the idea was to capture or kill bin Laden. I recall clearly Administration spokesmen stating that an effort was made to capture bin Laden, and when he and his thugs resisted, he was killed in the gun battle. (Whatever the intent of the raid, no such battle took place, as the Administration now admits.) Second, if it is true, it may mean that President Obama and his national security team are guilty of violating U.S. law.

President Ford's executive order #11905, reiterated by President Reagan's order #12333 made it the law of the land that "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Ford's order, reinforced by President Carter, was in response to revelations about what President Lyndon Johnson referred to as "a damn Murder, Inc." the CIA was running in the Caribbean.

This continuing program of political assassination began in North Africa during WWII (under the CIA's predecessor, the OSS) with the American-led assassination of the Vichy French collaborator Admiral Darlan, continued with the murders of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Raphael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, perhaps the murder of Salvatore Allende of Chile, and at least fourteen attempts to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. In the course of these programs, the CIA entered into contracts with the worst sort of scum in the world: international contract killers such as QJ/WIN and WI/Rogue (Jose Mankel and David Dato), and the American mafia. (All of this, in my view, led eventually and inevitably, to the murder of President Kennedy.)

It was in order to prevent such lethal political activities that Ford, Carter and Reagan banned any effort by any U.S. Government official to conspire to assassinate any foreign leader. Yet this is precisely what Obama's team did. Now I understand that President G.W. Bush issued an "intelligence finding" marking bin Laden for death, but it is unclear whether this had any legal validity, and whether it overrides the three previous executive orders.

So far as I know, no one in the mainstream media is examining this possibility, in part because no one regrets bin Laden's death, and because it was ordered by a liberal Democrat president. Nonetheless, it is not the nature of the victim that matters, in this or any other case: it is the integrity of the law; law established by three former presidents and, it seems to me, violated by the present one.

Scared to death

2011-09-22T22:55:00.000-07:00

I listened tonight to the Republican presidential candidates' debate. There is not a single one of them I could, in good conscience, support. Let me make this clear: I am scared to death.

I am scared for my children's future and for their children's future. Our nation is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the current administration seems utterly incapable either of understanding that fact or of doing anything to prevent it. Today I read three articles from separate sources declaring that we are facing another recession as part of a global economic collapse, and all three stated that the leaders of the Western World can do nothing to stop it.

We fought a sixty year war against international communism, and now I see our nation selling its economic future to one of only four communist dictatorships left on the face of the Earth. Today I watched our president being rebuffed, indeed, humiliated, before the United Nations (which we created in the aftermath of World War II), the unemployment rate remains above nine percent (the effective rate is eighteen percent), the national debt has tripled to an unimaginable number, and I learned that one in six Americans are now defined as being below the poverty level. And the current administration appears to have no new ideas, no new insights, no new solutions.

I am scared to death. And so should you be.

I think...

2011-09-22T22:04:00.000-07:00

I think that all of us will die but few of us will survive.

I think that the glorious experiment that was the United States of American is on the verge of extinction.

I think that our children and their children will be poorer than us, have fewer opportunities than we had, and will execrate our memories. And it will be our fault.

I think that the current crop of political "leaders" is the most venal and scabrous in American history.

I think that the Founding Fathers would not recognize the nation they created, nor would we recognize them if they were suddenly to reappear. Indeed, I think that if that were to happen, we would mock and malign them into insignificance.

I think that no one in the current political structure has the courage or the will to fix the problems we have created.

I think that the President of the United States is an incompetent.

I think that Lincoln would be shocked and shamed at what the nation he suffered so much to preserve has become.

I think that our national future will be worse than our national past.

I think that those who predicted we would become a nation of sheep were right. And that this is largely due to the state of public education in America. And that is largely due to the influence of the teachers' unions and their alliance with the Democratic Party.

I think that America has relegated itself to the position of a second-rate power. And, ironically, after a successful sixty year war with international communism, we are selling ourselves to the Communist Chinese.

I think that the Tibetan people have every right to curse us, but that, given their stoical, spiritual nature, they will pray for us. I think we need their prayers now more than ever.

I think that organized religion has failed us monumentally; and that "salvation," if the possibility of it exists any longer, resides with the individual. And yet, few of us, as individuals, are capable any longer of embracing it.

I think that our hope is indicated in the purity of the animals. And yet, we eat them.

I think that the Mayans were right: The world will end in 2012 -- it deserves to.

Bad Luck?!

2011-08-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

I sat slack-jawed in disbelief this evening as I listened to the President of the United States assert that our current economic crisis, which grows worse by the hour, is due to "a run of bad luck." Having exhausted the Arab Spring, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the situation in Europe and every other imaginable excuse for the failure of his policies, Obama now falls back on "bad luck"?! Can you imagine any other president attempting this, let alone expecting to get away with it?

When I was born, Harry Truman was president. In my lifetime, I have never seen such a comi-tragic abdication of presidential authority. Bad luck?! Is Obama the Diviner in Chief? Did we elect him to prognosticate, to calculate the odds, to read the Tarot, or did we elect him to lead? Bad luck?! Does it never occur to this man that it is what he is doing and not what is happening that is causing the problem? The fault, dear Barack, is not in our stars, but in us, that we are ideologues.

Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln after the defeats at Manassas, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville declaring that the Union had merely suffered a run of bad luck? He took responsibility - personal and political - and made the changes necessary. He did not go on a campaign tour; he did not go on vacation. And yet the nation now faces a crisis analogous to, if not of the magnitude of, 1863: We face the threat of the collapse of the American economy.

The situation in Europe, as in the United States, is proof positive that creeping socialism leads only to bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of the human spirit as well as of the economy. Americans are tired, they are frustrated, they are exhausted. We cannot continue paying bills run up by politicians in search of votes for re-election, and debts accumulated that our grandchildren will not be able to pay. But the president and his cronies are oblivious to this.

The much anticipated jobs plan which the president has graciously withheld until after his vacation on Martha's Vineyard from a nation whose effective unemployment rate is 18 percent will, by all accounts, represent nothing but another government stimulus package. But where will the money come from? Shall we borrow more from Communist China, which already upbraids us (the U.S.!) for fiscal irresponsibility, or shall we merely print more money as Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke suggests? Either way, we saddle our descendants with the onus of a debt they cannot hope to repay.

I ask again: Who will vote for Obama next year? Who wants four more years of these inane policies, this vacuum of leadership? Who but those so steeped in the cult of "social justice" that they will drink the Cool-Aid of pseudo-socialist ideology until we all choke to death, will mark their paltry ballots for this man?

The Ghost Factory

2011-08-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

More young Americans have been killed in Afghanistan today. I have just been looking at their pictures on line. And they remind me of nothing so much as those of my high school classmates killed in Vietnam.

I used to write in my yearbook each time I learned that another one had died. Above their photographs I would hand print "Killed in Vietnam" and below, the date. Five, ten, fifteen... eventually I lost count. But what haunts me is the fact that the faces now are so much the same: young men, boys really, smiling, earnest, innocent. In the past, every time I visited Washington, I went to The Wall to look for their names, and each time I traced them with my fingertips. Not just names -- memories of boys I knew, with whom I shared lockers, classes, laughs and the hysterical agonies and joys of growing up. Dead. All dead. Forever.

It's happening again. Now at this point in our history, and at my age; and though politicians and pundits can explain at length the necessity of it, still no one can express the loss. The poignant inevitability. The emptiness. The senselessness. Walt Whitman, a Civil War nurse, wrote: Think how much, and of importance, has been lost forever, buried in the grave, in eternal darkness. They had parents, they had promise, they had lives and loves. To which they were entitled. Just like you and me.

And our "president" enjoys a ten day vacation on Martha's Vineyard.

Killing the Wrong Guy

2011-08-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

I learned yesterday that the unofficial Democratic Party strategy to re-elect President Obama is to "kill Romney." My reaction to this inadvertent revelation is threefold.

First: This concept is coming from some of the very same people who reared up in righteous indignation after the shootings in Tucson, blaming the Republicans in general and Sarah Palin in particular, for having "targeted" certain Democratic incumbents for defeat. Their high dudgeon then was irrational, given the fact that neither the Republican Party nor Governor Palin had anything to do with the shootings, and that the shooter was certifiably insane. But these facts did not concern the critics on the left, which just proves my point that not even reality can sway an ideologue. This sort of hypocrisy is beyond breathtaking; it is asphyxiating.

Second: The enunciation of this strategy simply lays bare the fact that the president has nothing to run on. He cannot boast of his record, which consists of record spending, record deficits, record unemployment and record national debt and the downgrading of America's credit rating. There is an old adage in the law which holds that if you have the facts on your side, then argue the facts; if you do not have the facts, then argue the law; and if you do not have the law, then attack your opponent. This is the position in which the forces that have created and have sustained Obama find themselves. They have no recourse but to assassinate the character of whomever runs against him. It is not a strategy; it is a confession.

Third: Relieved now of the threat of Sarah Palin, the Democrats propose to kill Romney. I do not believe that Romney can get the nomination, and so I am pleased that all of their venom is focused upon him. They are killing the wrong guy. In the debt ceiling debate, Romney was silent, as were most of the Republican candidates. There is a vacuum of leadership in this country, and Romney had neither the courage, the independence nor the insight to step into it. That demonstrates to my satisfaction that he is not the antidote to the poison of Obama. We do not need to replace one vacuum with another.

Barack Obama is an utter failure as a leader and as a president. His is the most tragically ineffectual presidency since -- no, not Jimmy Carter -- James Buchanan. That pudgy, milquetoast president presided in the late 1850s at a time of imminent danger to the nation, and still he managed to do nothing. The result was the Civil War -- the nation torn apart, 612,000 Americans killed.

What I believe we have to look forward to here and now is what we see in silhouette in Europe: widespread discontent erupting into civil disorder in the streets. For generations, politicians on the left in Europe and America have sold their electorates a bill of goods; namely, that pie in the sky can not only be afforded, it can be expanded indefinitely. My fear is that what we see in London and Birmingham today will soon play itself out in the streets of New York and Chicago.

What we suffer from in the long term is the creeping sickness of socialism in our society, coupled with the current lack of leadership, vision and integrity in Washington. Meanwhile, the president enjoys a ten day vacation on Martha's Vineyard. And Rome burns.

Reply to Comment

2011-08-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

Occasionally it is necessary for me to reply to a comment at great length, which is not possible given the limitations of the comments section. I wish to take all comments seriously, and so I shall reply to a recent one here...

--Thank you for your comment. Let me respond to each point in turn:

You find my analogy wanting.
Then let's return to the crux of the matter: cherry-picking.

--Cherry-picking is the crux of your matter, not mine. I did not say that I would withhold taxes for programs I disagree with or do not benefit from; rather, that I am prepared to pay a reasonable amount of tax to support legitimate activities of government. I do not consider 50-plus percent of my income reasonable. Neither do I consider many, perhaps most, of the government's activities legitimate.

You don't think you should have to help pay for the California public school system your "entire lifetime." Is not some of that tax money going to what is generally thought of as a rather good state university system? One you would presumably not be ashamed to enroll your own children in?

--The same point applies. I will support public education to a reasonable degree, which is not now the case. But the fact that the elementary and secondary school systems in California rank near the bottom in the nation for quality of education regardless of how much we are taxed rankles, and speaks to a larger problem. For too long public education in this state and in the nation at large has been the hostage of the teachers unions and their cronies in the Democratic Party. That iron grip must be broken before educational standards can rise. (On the subject of state universities: I learned recently that over fifty percent of the employees in the state system are administrators and not teachers. This is an absurd and disgraceful waste of money.)

On the non-university level, you might argue that substandard schools are not in the common good. Ok, they're in the common less-than-ideal. But what would you have your fellow citizens do? Stay home and work their way through Wikipedia entries -- assuming they learned how to read on their own at some point? (Assuming they have a paid-up electric bill and a computer, too.)

--Your alternative to government-sponsored education is glibly ridiculous. But the larger and more relevant point is this: Every argument you make contains the same erroneous assumption, which lies at the heart of the malaise from which our nation suffers; namely, that if government does not do it, it will not get done. This is the true crux of the matter, and it is a numb, counter-productive way of thinking into which too many of us have slipped. Lincoln said that the government should do nothing the people can do better for themselves. I agree emphatically. I consider myself the chief educator of my children – that is my primary responsibility. I taught them how to read, write and do math. That is part of my job as a parent, and part of the joy of parenting.

--Which brings us to the second crucial point: personal responsibility. It is my responsibility (and no one else's) to see to it that my children are well educated and well trained. That is every parent’s responsibility. What I resent is public interest groups using government to force me to take responsibility for other people’s lives, and using the cynical tactic of confiscating my income to do so. Government should be the educator of last resort, providing a quality education to the children of those who cannot provide it for them. Every statistic available shows that private schools do far better with far fewer resources than public schools. Thus, everyone should have access to private schools, and the way to do that is to work hard, save money and plan for your children's futures. Sacrifices must be made, priorities must be set, and that is the individual's responsibility. Those who cannot achieve such access for reasons beyond their control have a right to expect a good quality public education for their children, which is simply not now the case. Government is a failure as an educator, and again, I resent being forced to pay an exorbitant amount of tax to sustain that failure.

You think it's an unfair burden on your finances to help pay for stuff you don't personally use unless it's outstanding and/or of direct use to YOU? What a strange standard.
Does that mean that your taxes should not go for public libraries that may contain books that you, personally, have no interest in reading or have already read?

--Again, your point is so glib as to be absurd. I am prepared to pay a reasonable amount of tax to support the legitimate activities of government as outlined in the Constitution. I have that duty as a citizen. What I resent is being compelled at the risk of imprisonment to support the pet projects of special interest and activist groups whether they work or not and whether I agree with them or not.

In a recent posting you say that people who are unwilling or unable to care for children should not have any. Excellent advice -- but not compatible with your anger in saying "I am now told that under Obamacare, I will be paying for strangers' birth control pills?"

Surely you agree that the pennies of your earnings that might go toward making birth control available to all women is a far better investment than having to terminate or carry to term an unwanted pregnancy?

--No, I do not agree. (And bear in mind that those “pennies” will be on top of everything else I am compelled to pay for.) In effect, you are saying: Young women are getting pregnant and can't help getting pregnant, and so government must take money from me and give it to them. Viewed as this simple schematic, the idea appears preposterous. The logic of it (if there is any logic at all to it) breaks down at the point where you imply that they cannot help getting pregnant. Yes, they can, and they have a responsibility to do so. It is not my responsibility to see to it that you do not get pregnant or to pay for it if you do. That is your responsibility, and again, I resent the advocates of planned parenthood or any other special interest group using government to make it my responsibility.

So, in the interest of constructive exchange, if the nation were to return to these values you find so denigrated, how would you see to it that children are educated? What measures would you propose so that no unwanted child is ever born?

--The answer to both questions is: Take responsibility for your own life and the behavior of your children. Work hard, save money and put your children into private school, school them at home or, in any case, lower taxes and allow people to use the money to provide vouchers for private education. This last will reduce public school enrollment and allow competition to compel the public schools to do a better job, rather than using the tax laws to force me to support a failed system of public education.

--As for your question, How do I propose to see to it that no unwanted child is ever born? Again, it is absurd. No one can do that; certainly not government. What I can do, and what every individual can do, is to take responsibility for his or her own behavior and train their children to do so. And, if the unwanted happens, to take responsibility for that too, rather than shunt it off onto the government and the taxpayers. Once more: I am not responsible for your life and behavior. It is not my responsibility to provide for your birth control – that is your responsibility, and government should not be used to force me to become responsible for it. Confucius pointed out that if every person swept the sidewalk in front of his own house the whole city would be clean. If there is a solution to the question of unwanted pregnancies it lies in that – people taking responsibility for their own behavior and that of their children. But further on this point: To be born unwanted is not to lack value as a human being. Unwanted children may lead valuable, productive, even exceptional lives. Again, it is a matter of taking personal responsibility, and not simply blaming others and relying on government to run one’s life.

--As I said: Inherent in all of your arguments is the reflexive, mind-numbed assumption of the liberals that government is the answer, and that government should substitute its power for the responsibility of individuals. For too long we have lived this way, and now we see where it leads: to the bankruptcy of the economy, the denigration of personal responsibility and dignity, and to the depletion of the spirit of society.

P.S. -- P.O.'d

2011-08-08T20:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'll just come out and say it: I'm pissed off. I have in my lifetime done just about every job you can imagine, from agriculture to publishing, from working in a butcher shop to working for an NFL team. I have mopped floors, emptied trash bins, milked cows, pumped gas, taught school, written novels and screenplays. I got my first job when I was thirteen, and I have not stopped working since. I worked through high school, college and grad school. And I expect to go on working until the day I die.

In college I vacuumed floors at the Ben Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia (I once calculated that I vacuumed no less than three miles of carpet in one summer.) While I was at film school in Paris, I worked as an apprentice butcher. My first job was to go into the meat locker every morning, get down on my hands and knees, and mop up the frozen blood from the carcasses that hung overhead. Later, when I graduated to cutting meat, my hands became so frozen during the day that, while I sat in lectures at film school in the afternoon, they would thaw and blood would flow from dozens of cuts I had unknowingly inflicted on myself. My mother committed suicide when I was fifteen and my father drank himself to death. My family left me nothing. I started out my adult life with nothing.

At one time in my twenties I moved fourteen times in two years because I could not afford to pay the rent. There were many months when I had to choose between food and rent, or between eating or paying the phone bill. I was even homeless, briefly, on two occasions. Anything I have now I acquired through unremitting hard work, a stubborn refusal to give up, and a talent with which I was born.

I am not wealthy, largely because the government will not permit me to be. Currently, the government confiscates over fifty percent of my income in taxes of various kinds. And yet, despite this, the president tells me that I am not "paying my fair share." He pontificates that I have been lucky, and because of that, that I have a moral obligation to contribute more. I have four children. I have put one through college and grad school, I have two more in college currently, and the fourth is in private elementary school. None of my children attended public school, since I consider it a form of child abuse to put a child into a public school in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, I am forced to pay taxes to support the public school system, which I cannot in good conscience make use of.

And still the president, this smug, sanctimonious son of a bitch, insists that I must contribute more. For what? I am now told that under Obamacare, I will be paying for strangers' birth control pills? With Nancy Pelosi's twisted logic, I must fund years' worth of unemployment benefits that actually pay people not to work? Under the new California law, I will have to subsidize a college education for illegals, who cannot even work legally once they have graduated? I am certainly willing to pay a reasonable amount in taxes to support the legitimate activities of government, but over fifty percent of my income? The American Revolution was fought because the nominal tax rate under the British was twelve percent!

I own a small business. I would like to hire an assistant, someone to answer the phone, handle the scheduling, take notes at meetings, and learn the film business from inside. I would like to, but I cannot afford to because I must pay so much in taxes. I would gladly create a job for someone who needs a job and wants a career, someone who would pay taxes, and I would do it if the government would get off my back and out of my way. Don't they understand this? No. They keep demanding more to fund their criminal overspending on programs the Founders never envisioned when they wrote the Constitution. Programs that, as often as not, waste money, accomplish nothing, indeed, produce the opposite of the intended result - programs the main purpose of which is to buy votes for professional politicians.

The government did not generate the wealth I have created - I did. The government did not earn the money I have worked my entire life for - I did. It is not their money, it is mine, and Bill Clinton's bald assertion to the contrary, the government does not know better how to spend my money than I do. I feel like a fool. I play by the rules, I obey the law, and yet everywhere I see scoundrels and wastrels flourishing - at my expense. It has to stop.

I see this country becoming a shadow of itself, spending itself into oblivion, utterly bereft of leadership, cut from its spiritual, philosophical and political moorings, drifting toward a bleak future in which my children and grandchildren will have to labor under the debt my generation has accumulated, and for this they will rightly upbraid me. Obama promised change, and he gave us more of the same, and worse. In short - he lied. It is now time for a true change: a return to the values which made this nation preeminent on Earth, the dream of all those who, like me, feel cheated of their liberty and opportunity and the rewards of their labor by a cynical system populated by buffoons, liars, toadies and worse.

Starring Obama as Reagan

2011-08-07T22:51:00.000-07:00

I think it has now become clear that the current administration's policies have been a disaster for the American economy. Never in my lifetime have I seen such a vacuum of leadership at the top in Washington. Only the lamentable presidency of Jimmy Carter comes close. As I watch President Obama attempting, pathetically, to assign blame for his failures to George Bush, earthquakes, tsunamis, drought, fires, the Arab Spring and the economic crisis in Europe, I wonder when he will simply chalk everything up to the idea that God hates the United States. I have never witnessed such a despicable attempt on the part of a chief executive to shirk responsibility and deny that his policies, driven by an inane and futile ideology, have failed. His behavior is a disgrace, and in face of it, it is no wonder that the credit rating of the U.S. has been downgraded.

In watching this farce of a presidency, I notice that Obama more and more quotes from and refers to Ronald Reagan. This, I think, is telling. When Reagan was elected president, left-wing pundits pontificated that he was nothing but an actor playing the role of president. History has proved them wrong. But as I have watched Obama, whose miserable failure to lead the nation becomes clearer with each passing day, I began to wonder whether he actually wants to be president.

Then it occurred to me that the truth is that all he wants is to be president. He does not want to lead and he does not want to govern, simply because he is incapable of doing so. Whereas Reagan was accused of being an actor who merely wanted play the role of president, Obama is, in fact, merely playing that role. He is the actor-in-chief, incapable of actually exercising the duties of the presidency, concerned only with his re-election. He looks the part, he reads well from teleprompters, but when he is obliged to speak on his own, he is confused, uninformed, nearly incoherent. This is the man who claimed that he had campaigned in "fifty-seven states," who wrote in the guest book at Windsor Palace that the year was 2008, and who could not remember his own daughter's age. This is the president who submitted his budget to the Senate only to see it defeated 97 to 0. During the critical debt reduction debate, he presented no plan of his own, was largely absent, and when, briefly, he intervened, he only made matters worse, blowing the deal he had himself made with Speaker Boehner. Mr. Obama has proved amply that he cannot govern; he knows only how to campaign.

At Tucson, after the tragic shootings there, he delivered a campaign speech. In the wake of the so-called debt-ceiling deal, he delivered a campaign speech. After the downgrading by S&P he delivered a campaign speech. Now he is on a "jobs" bus tour - paid for by the taxpayers - delivering one campaign speech after another. He does not have a clue what it means to be an executive, let alone the chief executive. Before being elected to the presidency, he ran nothing, was the executive officer of nothing, governed nothing. He is not an authentic leader, nor an authentic president, but merely a political shill whose only skill lies in running for office.

In the meantime, as he poses for photo-ops and delivers the same pointless, prepared speech over and over ("Americans voted for divided government, not dysfunctional government"), American servicemen are being killed in the Middle East (30 were killed yesterday), the deficit grows by billions each day, the jobless rate remains above nine percent, the nation's credit rating is downgraded for the first time in history, and all Mr. Obama can think to do is to go on a bus tour, celebrate his birthday, and play golf.

(Just now, this evening, I see that today Obama suggested that the federal government should pay unemployed construction workers to repair the nation's aging infrastructure. Where will the money come from? We are broke, and he still does not seem to understand that. But, further, the federal government does not create jobs - only the private sector can do that, and so how does making unemployed construction workers de facto employees of the government help solve the unemployment problem? Better for the government to get out of the way, as Reagan said, and let the private sector do what it does best - create jobs and produce wealth. Lower taxes, relax regulations, and provide incentive which translates into opportunity. But Obama and his cronies on the left cannot or will not see this, because they believe in the power of government and not in the power of the private sector and of individuals.)

I ask you: Who wants four more years of this? Who will vote again for this man, regardless of the color of his skin? Who has confidence in his "leadership"? When are even his most ardent supporters on the left going to admit that Obama and his pseudo-socialist agenda have failed, and failed miserably?

Never, I suspect, just as Obama himself will not admit it since he is incapable, ideologically, of facing the fact that he has failed. Treasury Secretary Geithner and all of his ivory-tower economic advisers should be fired. Attorney General Holder and his corrupt Justice Department staff who refuse to enforce the laws of the United States should be fired. But they will not be, because this administration is not driven by concern for the long-term interests of the United States, nor for the near-term welfare of its citizens, nor even by reality. It is driven by a left-wing ideology which, even in the face of its own failure, insists upon the correctness of its policies. And Obama is driven, apparently, by nothing more than his desire to be re-elected. This is madness, of which even Richard Nixon in the depths of Watergate would not have been capable.

Some Passing Thoughts

2011-07-05T19:18:00.000-07:00

Children: If you are not prepared to raise them, don’t have them. If you do not enjoy them, don’t have them. If you are not ready to love them, don’t have them. You are much better off living without them.

Love is finding yourself in another person. Loneliness is the inability to do this. The deepest, most destructive and pathetic form of loneliness is atheism. Atheism is the inability to find yourself in anything but the material. I do not despise atheists; I pity them.

It is important to have animals near us. They are pure, innocent and without guile. They neither deceive nor do they have pretensions. They remind us how we should live. For this, we should love and respect them; and it follows, of course, that we must not abuse, torture, kill and eat them.

The Founders were right: Government is the greatest threat to personal liberty. Unless we do something radical and soon, we will have no personal liberty left – at least, none worth defending.

A friend recently said that the challenge we face is whether democracy can survive with deficits. I think he is correct. Excessive government spending – and the chronic inability of politicians to resist it – is undermining our democracy.

A recent poll indicates that the majority of Americans believe that the nation is in decline. They are correct; it is. I believe that this fact not only does not trouble the current administration; but, worse, that some members of the administration actually welcome it. They do not see America as an exceptional nation, in fact, they attack and deride the idea. Our decline suits their ideology and their world view; they prefer that America be one among many, rather than first among many.

It is absolutely essential for the future well-being of the nation that the present administration be defeated at the next election.

We have reached the point in our slide toward collectivism and centralized authority where the very suggestion that we should revert to our founding principles, that government should play the smallest possible role in the affairs of the citizens and that its power must be carefully proscribed, and to Lincoln’s dictum that the government should do nothing that the people can do better for themelves, is met with puzzlement, derision and bemusement. Yet doing so is the only way to resolve the current debt crisis, and to preserve our liberties and our birthright as Americans.

As Chekhov said: Above all, do good. As Tolstoy said: Kindness can be added to anything. Look for truth, not in a church or in religion or in vague metaphysics, but deep within yourself. For it resides there, as surely as you embody a spirit that breathes love and yearns for eternity.

The human soul is a being in exile. For a few moments, it inhabits a body, experiences the joys and sorrows of the world, finds love, suffers loss, learns, wonders, despairs, and deepens its nature thereby. But always it longs to return to that timeless essence of which it is a mirror. Remember: You are not sad or happy, not full or empty, not alone, fearful, nor doomed to die – You are eternal.

Life and Death Redux

2011-06-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

Somerset Maugham wrote in his memoirs that the idea of reincarnation was the only meaningful solution he had ever found to the problem of evil, suffering and death. (Now, since it is possible to argue that death is the ultimate form of evil and suffering, we may shortcut that formulation to speak solely of death.) In other words, death becomes a problem only if we assume that any individual life is a unique event, with a beginning, middle and end, implacable and unrepeatable.

That life is a continuum from conception to death would seem to be a given. (This, by the way, is the ultimate argument against abortion: The continuum of life stretches from conception to death. That continuum does not begin at birth nor at some arbitrary point in gestation. The process of life and living and dying begins where it begins: at conception. It is a continuum unbroken though not unbreakable, and to argue otherwise for personal or political purposes is pernicious.) To put the matter more simply: Death becomes a problem when we believe that we live only once.

As Maugham pointed out, the idea of reincarnation provides a solution to this problem since it posits that individual life is not a unique event, confined to a single nexus of space and time; but, rather, that it is a part of a chain of being that stretches throughout time and space, offering the soul (which transcends time and space) the opportunity to free itself from death. Thus, any given life is groundwork, as it were, for the soul's self-liberation.

There are three components to this proposition: life, the soul and liberation. In contrast to this, the Western or Christian point of view offers life, death and salvation. The difference is critical, since reincarnation removes death as a problem if not as a fact. If one lives and dies and never lives again, then the idea of salvation is all one has to sustain hope. But no matter how we conceive of salvation, it still leaves us with the problem of death. All those who have gone before and died, whether saved or not, are simply gone once and forever. They may live in our hearts and memories, and we may believe they are in some sort of paradise, but the fact remains that they are dead, and will not live again until the purported resurrection of the body at the end of time.

The Western view thus makes us the victims or slaves of time, wholly at its mercy, unable to liberate ourselves from it. And what becomes of space? The Christians do not say. Time, they tell us, will end at the Second Coming of Christ, but what of space? Herein has always lain a contradiction, for if the resurrection of the body which they posit occurs at the end of time, it must nonetheless occur in space. And there can be no space in the absence of time. The resurrection of the body is a silly, pointless and meaningless idea, and it fails utterly to solve the problem of death. In fact, it serves merely to place death at center stage - the focal point of the relation between life and salvation. To put it another way: The Christian view of life makes life impossible without death, for salvation is impossible without death. Death thus becomes the determining factor, as crucial as it is final. For that which must follow death in this schema is not life at all, but some contradictory, mutant form of life, a fantasy that exists in space but out of time.

The Western, Christian, view of life, death and salvation does not solve the problem of evil, suffering and death. And there is a further contradiction: As Tolstoy pointed out, Christianity is unique among the world's religions in insisting that the individual can do nothing to achieve his own salvation. Instead, Christianity posits that Christ accomplished this through his suffering, death and resurrection, and so, all that we can do is to make ourselves worthy of a salvation which Christ has already achieved for us. Far from liberating the individual from the problem of death, this view makes him entirely helpless in the matter of his own survival of death. It shifts the responsibility for salvation from the individual to Christ and, conveniently, to the church which he is said to have founded. Believe and you shall be saved, the church says; or, in other words, Refuse to believe and you shall die. Thus not only does this approach make us slaves to death, it also makes us slaves to the church, wholly dependent upon it for our salvation.

And so the alternative, as Maugham realized, lies in the idea that we do not possess one, unique lifetime, but that our lives are part of a much longer chain of being stretching through time and space, and offering us the possibility, through greater spiritual insight and self-realization, of liberating ourselves from them. In this view, it is the soul which lives, and the soul which experiences evil, suffering and death through consciousness as a means of self-liberation. Evil, suffering and death thus take on a positive, teaching role (as it were) in human experience, neither malign by nature nor neutral in effect. They are cast as opportunities for self-liberation through understanding, spiritual struggle and growing enlightenment.

This latter is key, for it is essential to self-liberation that one profit by the experience of evil, suffering and death (as well as that of rebirth, joy and hope) to work out one's own salvation. This idea, that the responsibility and opportunity for salvation lies with the individual, is potentially terribly liberating, and does offer a solution to the problem of death. For it posits that salvation lies, not with some misty, dependent relation to a church, but rather with the education and realization of the soul. Because the soul survives any particular death, it says, it may survive death entirely, by using death as a means to rebirth and, so, to the re-experience of life and the attainment of enlightenment.

One implication of this idea which does not exist in Christianity is that of the relation of love and life. If one believes that death is the unique end to the unique event of life, and that salvation is its goal, then it follows that one must despise one's life and hope for that which follows life. We can enjoy life, of course; but, ultimately, life has no intrinsic purpose beyond the experience of becoming worthy of something which lies outside of life; namely, salvation. And so Christianity teaches us to despise life (certainly in Catholic school I was taught to do so), and to prefer and cherish and hope for that which lies beyond life.

Reincarnation, on the other hand, implies that one should embrace and love life fully since any given life is part of the process of liberation from the cycle of suffering and death and rebirth. Life, instead of the trial and transit toward salvation which Christianity posits, becomes a hope for freedom and a celebration of the endurance of the soul. In this view, we are continually moving towards self-realization and self-liberation as we move through the process of life, death and rebirth; understanding and accepting the role of death as a transitional experience, rather than dreading it as an end point from which there is no hope of return. In other words, Christianity makes us fear death and despise life, while reincarnation offers us a means to understand death, and to love life.

Now, I think it should be needless to argue that the Christian view of life, death and salvation is utterly inadequate to offer a solution to the problem of death. This should be evident on its face. There is no heaven - that is a primitive child's fairy tale which every thinking person ought to have shrugged off by adulthood. There is no celestial reunion of the long deceased, resurrected at the end of time by a triumphant Christ, and invited to bask in eternal bliss (at least, those who have not been condemned to eternal torment for sins committed in their paltry few years on earth). This is nonsense, and no thinking person can entertain the idea seriously, let alone take solace from it.

But, on the other hand, reincarnation contains within it, if not absurdity, at least a conundrum. One part of this conundrum lies in the question of the relation of one consciousness to another in the chain of life, death and rebirth. Can the soul be said to be individuated, at least to the extent that it can recognize itself from one life to the next? To believe this suggests that the soul retains consciousness, and I am not convinced that this is so. Consciousness, it seems to me, is the product of the soul's interaction with organic life, heightened to its grandest extent in man. But does the individual soul carry this consciousness with it after death? And does the concept of "the individual soul" even have any meaning?

Yet if the soul does not retain consciousness after death, how is it to profit from successive rebirths? Would not death break the chain of consciousness, forcing the individual to begin the process of learning and the movement toward enlightenment over again with each rebirth? How, then, is enlightenment ever to be achieved, and liberation of the soul realized? Yet, if consciousness, or some part or form of it, remains with the soul after death, why then are we born, as it were, clean slates? And how, exactly, does consciousness remain with the soul in the absence of a corporeal substrate, such as the central nervous system and brain? Is not consciousness the product of corporeal incarnation of spirit, and, thus, must it not cease to be when that incarnation ceases?

The second part of the conundrum is more subtle, pernicious and dismaying. What impressed Maugham about the idea of reincarnation was that it alone, in his experience and thought, offered a solution to the problem of death. That solution, it seems to me, appealed to him because it was so rational; in other words, because it was an intellectual solution. Reincarnation makes sense of suffering and death; it gives us a way to understand them; it puts them into perspective. But is it the truth? For we know from our experience that that which make sense is not always true. May reincarnation merely be a forlorn hope in the presence of death; yet another grasping at straws?

Here one is tempted to ask for evidence, for proof, and indeed, there are some proponents of reincarnation who try to offer this. They point to the possibility of the knowledge of the existence of past lives as evidence; but I find such tenuous and tendentious recollection no more satisfying than the Christian notion of heaven. There is no proof that reincarnation is the truth, and the fact that the majority of the world's people accept it does not make it so. And so we are (or at least I am) left with the possibility that reincarnation, though it makes good sense, may not in fact be true. Rather, it appeals to us and offers solace as an intellectual proposition only.

On the other hand, the absence of evidence does not necessarily render an idea false. Before Columbus there was no hard evidence that a New World existed, but that did not mean that Europe, as a continent, was unique. And so we are thrown back on the question of belief, full in the knowledge that believing something, likewise, does not make it true. What, then, are we to do?

To abandon hope for a solution to the problem of death is to despair altogether; to submit to the idea that life has no purpose and that death is the end. And while this may, in fact, be the truth, there is no joy or meaning or solace in it. To accept death as the absolute end of life is to cancel out life itself; to render it null and void, arbitrary and pointless. Love, hope, joy, suffering and death all become empty since they are transitory and death is terminal. Nothing endures, and the soul, if it exists, disappears into some eternal ocean of its own substance. There is no individuation, no salvation, no liberation. As Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych realized to his horror: There is nothing but death, and death ought not to exist.

Can one live under these conditions? Can one survive with this suspicion? In fact, many people do, meandering through their lives as if they had meaning, while all the time suspecting that they do not. They are like skaters on the most delicate film of ice trying to blind themselves to the possibility that the depths beneath it are infested with sharks. Logic, emotion, instinct suggest that there must be an alternative; that this vast and deep experience of life must possess some purpose.

It seems to me that life itself may be the evidence that death is not the end point, not the negation of consciousness and hope and life. It is irresistible to my mind that life itself, and the consciousness which it engenders, argue for something which transcends them; that life is the problem which must be solved, not death. What is the meaning and nature of life; what is its purpose and point? What is its destiny? And so I come back to Maugham's conclusion: that rebirth, renewal and self-realization, perhaps uniquely, offer an opportunity for the soul's liberation, and for a freedom finally, from death.

Tree, Weiner, Sarah and Donne

2011-06-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

Here are some thoughts in passing on matters of the moment...

Tree of Life

The three film directors working today whose work I most admire are Ang Lee, Peter Weir and Terrence Malick. Recently I saw Malick's new film, Tree of Life, and I found it breathtakingly beautiful and brilliant. It is not a film for everyone; you must have a certain level of film culture in order to understand its intent and appreciate its execution. This is a film about the tragedy and travails of a Waco, Texas, family in the 1950s that includes dinosaurs and the Big Bang. In short, it is an art film, the kind of film I watched when I was in film school; the kind of film that is rarely if ever made these days. But it is a masterpiece, and when it was over, I was speechless.

Malick is a visionary, a poetic filmmaker who reminds us that film is essentially a visual medium. He never hesitates to stop a film cold and demand that we look at an image, indeed, meditate on it. His cinema is almost mystical in its quest to find the most profound meaning in the most mundane image - a bird in flight, a young woman in love in flight, a child's imagination in flight. Tree of Life is a magnificent visual poem about life and hope and love; the kind of film which only a visionary of Malick's talent and integrity could have conceived and accomplished. Credit must also be given to Bill Pohlad of River Road Films for having had the courage and independence to bring this work of art to the screen.

Weiner's Dilemma

I do not share the incipient delight of most conservatives at the auto-destruction of Congressman Anthony Weiner, though I do welcome his imminent departure from the political scene. The embarrassment caused by him to his constituents and to his family, and the deepening sense of cynicism which his arrogant stupidity must engender, are not a cause for celebration. I have long felt that Congressman Weiner, in his hubris, self-righteous elitism and nasty-minded behavior represented a threat to the nation. We now see that they represent a threat to himself.

Weiner's smug, bullying far-left politics are, in my view, dangerous to the Republic. Weiner, and those like him on the left, despise the United States and the values upon which it was founded, and seek nothing more ardently than to transform it into their elitist concept of a socialist oligarchy over which they alone will have control. He has not learned the lesson of history, that those who erode democracy in favor of centralized control in the name of ideology become the first victims of the concomitant loss of liberty. While I take no joy in the manner of his demise, I do welcome his disappearance. If he is capable of feeling shame about his own misbehavior, and compassion for those whom he has injured by it, he will resign.

Palin Obsession

Why is the mainstream media so obsessed with Sarah Palin? I heard a report recently that even they now admit that their absorption with her is excessive, and like addicts, they are trying to wean (or Weiner) themselves from it. That the media is shamefully biased toward the left is indisputable; but the unceasing reportage on everything to do with Governor Palin, her family and her aspirations is, quite frankly, bewildering to me. She does not hold public office and does not appear to be seeking to hold public office, yet the leftist press covers her as if she were the Empress of America gone berserk.

Now let me be clear: I am not a fan of Governor Palin. Though I find her generally sincere, in my view she has turned herself into a joke, and I earnestly hope that she does not enter the presidential race. But for the press to demand the release of thousands of her emails as governor, and to send dozens of reporters to Alaska to comb through them looking for scandal or dirt, for the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post to ask its readers to help them to sift through the massive release and report back to them, goes far beyond any normal interest in a former public servant. In fact, it strikes me as a new low in journalistic standards.

I can only imagine that the self-important poohbahs of the press hate Sarah Palin, and that they hate her because they fear her. Yet given her lack of official standing, surely this fear is irrational. But the fact is that she speaks to average Americans with an earnestness and a plainness which the mainstream press have long since eschewed in their elitist righteousness, and in their firm conviction that they own the news in America, and only they have a right to shape public opinion. Sarah Palin, for all her missteps and shortcomings, threatens their ossifying grip on opinion in our society, and they cannot forgive or forget her for it.

Bin Laden

In much the same spirit in which I wrote about Anthony Weiner, I felt no need to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden. In fact, I found the spectacle of people cheering in the streets at the news troubling. It reminded me of reports I had seen of Palestinians dancing publicly in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Both demonstrations, I thought, were inappropriate to the point of being repulsive. As the poet, John Donne, said: Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

I learned the news of bin Laden's death with a feeling of relief, and a rather grim sense that justice had at last been done. He was a murderer, a lunatic, a religious fanatic. He made a sham of the faith he claimed to propound, and, as all cowards do, he sent young, brainwashed followers out to die, while he remained in safety. His death was the inevitable end of a despicable despot.

That said, I continue to be troubled by the official reports of the circumstances surrounding it. At first the Administration claimed he had been killed in the course of a fierce and protracted gun battle, and only after having refused to surrender and having lunged for a weapon. As the hours and days went by, all that changed. There was no gun battle, evidently no attempt to take him into custody, and no resistance on his part. It seems in the end of it that he was simply shot to death, unarmed, in front of one of his wives. The public lack of will to learn the truth in this killing is understandable given the subject of the story; nonetheless, I believe that history demands it.

If, as it now appears, the raiders simply burst in on bin Laden with orders to kill him, then the President has violated American law. I refer, of course, to the Presidential directive issued by Jimmy Carter prohibiting the United States from engaging in the assassination of any foreign leader. As far as I know, no one in the media or the political establishment has raised this question. We would, I suppose, prefer just to forget the matter. But my reading of history tells me that such matters reawaken eventually and at great cost. Perhaps, rather than boast of the event, we ought to be examining it soberly and, as bin Laden never would have done, in the light of reason and the law. That is the best way to put his lethal legacy behind us.

Envy

2011-05-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

Over dinner with my older son tonight, to celebrate our respective birthdays (they are three days apart), I listened with barely concealed delight as he told me about the books he has been reading lately. They are all the books I could not induce him to read when he was younger: Maugham, Waugh, Tolstoy (of course), Dostoevsky, Joyce, Hemingway, and to my great satisfaction, Babel. I think Isaac Babel was the most talented of the post-revolutionary Russian writers, and therefore, the most tragic. A brilliant young Jewish intellectual, he served, incongruously, with the Red Cavalry in the Russian civil war (though he did not know how to ride a horse), participating in the invasion of Poland, which gave rise to his greatest work, the cycle of short stories entitled "The Red Cavalry."

I based my own book, "Lt. Ramsey's War," structurally on "The Red Cavalry," which is a work I admire very much. It is wonderfully made, expressive, moving, and profound. My son said that he had done a bit of research on Babel prior to reading him, and was dismayed to learn that he had been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and finally executed in the Soviet camps. But that was inevitable. The Bolsheviks could not tolerate so lyrical and liberated a soul. They killed, tortured or silenced all of the great talents of the Soviet era, including Mandelshtam, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Tarkovsky and, perhaps most touchingly of all, Yuri Olesha.

Olesha, who is little known or read these days, was, after Babel, I think, the most talented of the Soviet writers. A chubby, spectacled little man, he was essentially a romantic of the 19th century who found himself in the nightmare world of communist Russia. His greatest work and his only novel is entitled "Envy," because he saw the new world, and the new "Soviet Man" who was to inherit it, and he knew he could never be part of that. That was what he was envious of: a new generation of super-men of the communist state, with their steely eyes and sledge hammers who served the state slavishly -- lived, labored, sacrificed and died in its service.

They were creatures of the new collective government, these New Men, its minions, its mice who ran its tortured labyrinth their entire lives, ceding to it their freedom, their individuality, their very souls. They gave their children to state orphanages to be raised in the principles of Marx and Lenin, married when they were told whom they were told, and devoted their lives to the greater good of the communist populace. They were, in short, the ants of Dostoevsky's ant hill, that massive, inhuman, impersonal collective of which he warned the Russian people in the 1870s. Fortunately he did not live long enough to see it come into murderous reality.

As I thought of Olesha, that timid, tender soul who also tried to warn the Russian people of the cliff over which they were rushing, and whose brilliant promise was cut short when he was warned by the secret police to write no longer, I could not help but think (forgive me) of our own nation in our own time. And so I feel moved to warn my fellow Americans, as Olesha did his fellow Russians, that we are in the process, very gradual but unmistakable, of selling our souls to the government. In return for what? "Free" health care, cheap prescription drugs, entitlements, and a phony sense of fairness.

My fear is that our children may be the last generation of what the world would recognize as Americans -- those unique people who created their own government, constructed their own nation, lived their own lives, possessed their own souls and died in the certain knowledge that their children would be better off for their having done so. Like Olesha, I envy those who came before me in my land, and I fear and despise those who are usurping it in the name of greater social justice, greater collective good, greater dependence on a government which even now has swollen to proportions that can absorb us all.

We must resist. We must reinvent ourselves. We must restore our nation to what its Founders intended: a land of opportunity, where great accomplishment is possible because great risk is inevitable. We must be free to fail even if that means some of us fail miserably. The goal of this nation was the greatest good for the greatest number, not a mediocre level of satisfaction and security for everyone at the expense of liberty and individuality. America was meant to be, as Jack Kennedy said, the last, best hope of mankind. We must not barter that hope away for a phony fairness and a false promise of security from cradle to grave. In short, we must once again begin behaving like Americans.

One-offs

2011-05-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

I have been listening a good deal lately to the Cesar Franck violin sonata, which I have enjoyed for many years. It is, in some ways, perfect. That is, for at least one time in his career, Franck got everything right. The first two movements, taken together, are huge for such a small form, filled with colors and textures, and possessing great strength. The third movement is wonderfully inventive and modern-feeling, while the finale contains one of my favorite themes in all of music, beautifully crafted and balanced, irresistible in its lyrical delicacy and expressiveness. It is a great work of musical art.

This led me to reflect on other composers who got it right at least once. Bizet is an example, with 'Carmen.' It is a wildly successful opera, and stands almost alone in his body of work for its achievement. Everything is right; it is dramatic, entertaining, and contains some of the most famous melodies in all of music. Now, I admit that Bizet wrote one very good symphony (when he was 17 I learned recently), which among other things contains a wonderful oboe solo; and the suite from l' Arlesienne remains popular, but 'Carmen' stands apart as a magnificent anomaly.

I find as I get older that I appreciate more the work of Jean Sibelius, whom I now regard as one of the best composers of the twentieth century (I think Prokoviev is the best), and I listen more often now to his music. He was an enormously talented man, but, I think, he was limited by the fact that he rarely transcended the confines of his national character. Much of his music sounds vaguely like a Finlandic winter to me, although his work, especially the symphonies, contain themes of great beauty and power. The problem is that the listener has to wade through so much turgid and tedious development to get to them; rather like trekking across the tundra to reach a few wonderful resorts.

The exception in Sibelius is the Violin Concerto, which, like the Franck sonata, is perfect. In that one work, everything comes together, everything is right. The piece has all that a great violin concerto should have: a big, powerful first movement, a lyrical, moving second, and a wonderful, exuberant thrill ride of a third. I love the Sibelius Violin Concerto, indeed, it is one of my favorite pieces of music, and it represents, to me, the best example of a composer getting it all right at least once in his career.

Vivaldi wrote a large number of pieces, some of which are wonderful, many of which are virtually indistinguishable from one another, but in the Four Seasons, he created one of the icons of Western music. Carl Orff was an important musicologist and pedagogue, but he is primarily remembered for one work, the oratorio Carmina Burana, which is absolutely brilliant. Biber's great accomplishment is the Mystery Sonatas (the pasacaglia from which inspired Bach's great Chaconne in D minor for solo violin, my favorite piece of music), and Guillaume de Machaut is remembered for his Messe de Notre Dame, which is one of the jewels of the pre-Renaissance.

There are other examples that I could cite, but the larger point is that such unique outbursts of brilliance serve to remind us of those composers who got it right over and over, year after year, in masterpiece after masterpiece. Bach is the greatest example of this. The sheer of volume of his masterworks is almost incomprehensible. That one man could produce works of such genius over so long a period defies imagination. Mozart is another, and Beethoven, too, of course. Brahms produced a very large body of masterful works during his lifetime, as did Schubert, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, and, to a lesser extent, Prokoviev and Ravel. For such composers, 'getting it right' was the norm, and the occasional misses were the exception.

All this leads me, in turn, to reflect that there are two modes, if you will, of genius: sustained and punctual. Some artists are capable of moments of genius, while a few, a very few, seem to dwell in genius as a nearly permanent condition. Where, I wonder, in our own time, are the latter kind of artist? I don't see any. Perhaps some of you can suggest them.

Posting Redux

2011-05-09T12:37:00.000-07:00

I have been absent for a while because I have been struggling with illness, work, and depression, but I shall make an effort to resume posting.

Someone asked recently why I was silent during "the most deplorable period in American history." While I do not think this period is our most deplorable - I would have chosen the period immediately preceding the Civil War for that distinction - I remain deeply concerned about the current condition and the future of the nation. I heard recently that the International Monetary Fund had informed the European Economic Union, by way of warning, that the United States has "no viable plan" to deal with its debt, and that China would overtake us as the world's leading economy within five years. I fear this is true, and it means, among many other things, that we are witnessing our nation's deterioration into a second-rate power, and that we will leave our children and grandchildren a country less prosperous and dynamic than the one we inherited. The great irony of course is that China is succeeding by adopting the methods which we are abandoning as we seek to become more like the nation that China no longer wishes to be - centralized, collectivist, socialist.

This is a sad state of affairs, and I feel that I must take a bit of the blame for it, since I was a leader in a generation of youth that believed that government was the solution to the nation's inequalities, and that socialism was the cure for its economic injustices. And while I think we were right insofar as the Civil Rights struggle and the campaign to end the war in Vietnam were concerned, we were wrong in just about every other regard. Nonetheless, through our strident activism, we left a legacy of the growth of government and the corresponding diminution of individual liberty, and of reliance on the power of government as a first and not as a final resort.

We now see the effects of that philosophy: More Americans are dependent on government assistance than ever before - fully 20 percent by some estimates - and government is the single biggest employer in the nation; the tax code in its baroque illogic punishes achievement, enterprise, and the desire to excel, while making it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth; our health care system is being collectivized and nationalized under a bureaucracy infamous for waste, incompetence and indifference; the public education system, which is the prisoner of the teachers unions and their servile cronies in the Democratic Party, is a disgrace (I heard yesterday that 47 percent of the people of Detroit are illiterate!); the nation's infrastructure is decaying at an alarming rate; and mediocrity and cynical self-interest have become the chief virtues of our political system.

It is no wonder that we are in the dire condition in which we find ourselves. And all this in pursuit of a phony ideal of fairness which exists only in the minds of the left-wing elite, and which they use government to impose on the rest of us whether we agree or not. Has it not become amply clear that this "fairness" is always purchased at the price of freedom? And while we, in my generation of youths, fought for fairness in race relations, we never intended, indeed, never even imagined, that that goal would one day be so inflated and distorted as to result in such atrocities as the government rationed health care and the death panels of the new health care law. For if everyone is guaranteed the freedom to live by the government, under the liberals' fairness doctrine, we must all also accept the responsibility to die when the government decides that our lives are no longer of any value. That is the ultimate form of leftist fairness: The right to life, liberty and happiness, so long as the government bureaucracy decides it makes actuarial sense for us to possess it.

The Constitution is being stood on its head by the left, for whom Cuba is a better model of fairness than America. Now the rights which the Founders declared came only from God are depicted as coming from government, in which God no longer plays a part. The left in this country has succeeded finally in doing what the Bolsheviks did from the start: secularize the nation's public life, substituting their own ambitions, values, and power for that primary source of power from which all rights flow. It is the collectivist inevitability of which Trotsky, of all people, warned - the substitution of central power for popular sovereignty - and, excuse me my friends, but President Obama is the convenient stooge of that ideology.

The left has now succeeded in realizing the socialist vision which we, as twenty-year-olds in the '70s intoxicated ourselves with, and the result is that our system is poorer, more unfair, less dynamic and productive, less innovative and entrepreneurial, more unequal, more destructive of the human spirit, and makes far less sense politically, socially, and economically than did the one against which we were struggling. My generation has won, and I apologize for it.

The Lie Lives On

2011-03-13T22:06:00.000-07:00

Two friends have sent me links to an article that appeared in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer which reports that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia has suspended twenty-one priests for the sexual molestation of children. This after the cardinal had stated that there were no guilty priests currently in the ministry in that diocese. The suspension is said to be the largest thus far in the priest sexual abuse scandal.

The report simply confirms what I and others have known for some time; namely, that the lies, the cover-up and the systematic protection of pedophiles among the Catholic clergy continue. Cardinal Rigali now brands himself as an active co-conspirator, having first attempted to deny the existence of these monsters, then having covered up for them, and only now having admitted to their crimes. As I have said before: If Rigali admits to twenty-one, then there are twenty-one more whom he has not yet exposed, and twenty-one more of whom he is not yet aware. The pattern is disgustingly consistent and predictable. The Catholic Church remains a conspiracy against the innocence of children, and the 'penitential Mass' which Rigali promises makes no difference, and only adds to the mounting hypocrisy.

Recently I wrote a screenplay on the subject of priest sexual abuse of children, and in the course of it, I found myself meditating on the extent of the clergy's criminal culpability. The Church continues to insist that the number of priest pedophiles is tiny, and their crimes, the rare exceptions. This is simply a lie, as the figures show. But there is a further lie beyond this numerical one. The character in my screenplay, a convicted priest molester, asserts that all of the Catholic clergy are guilty. His lawyer responds, surely, not all. To which the priest replies that those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them, and those who did not know about them did not want to know. Priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, all are guilty.

I surprised myself when I wrote those lines, but upon reflection, I realize the truth of them. Catholic priests live in close-knit communities, sharing the same residence, the same meals, the same free time, the same common rooms. They eat together, pray together, play cards and talk and drive and get drunk together. In short, they live together, just as intimately and casually as does any family. Is it conceivable that in such a community, child rapists could exist unknown to the others? Ask yourself: When a community of priests finds a man suddenly transferred into its midst bearing with him the stench of scandal, watches his interactions with the boys of the parish, notes his behavior, his interests, his associations, and then sees him transferred out again just as suddenly, is it possible that they have no idea why?

To put it another way: Could you have a child rapist living in your home for months or years without knowing or at least suspecting what he was? Yet every rectory, every residence was a family, and in each and every one, pedophiles lived and prayed and ate and played and got drunk with the other priests. Those who did not commit the crimes covered them up, and those who did not cover them up knew about them and those who did not know about them did not want to know.

This last group is nearly the worst. They are moral cowards, accomplices to the molestations every bit as much as if they had lured the boys in or drugged them or held them down. Their stench almost equals that of the rapists, because they forfeited their vocation, their manliness, their morality, their humanity and their souls in turning their backs on what they knew or suspected was happening. They cannot hide behind their ignorance since their ignorance was willful. They left the innocent to their molesters, and now they claim they knew nothing. They are, in effect, like the Germans who claimed they knew nothing about the trains, about the camps, about the ovens. And, if Dante is correct, the hottest places in hell are reserved for them.

When will the scandal end? When the Church as it is currently constituted ends. When will the slate be wiped clean? For all the penitential Masses in the world, it will remain smudged with the tears and the tortured memories of violated children until the Church is cleansed of its clergy. To my mind, the only hope for the future of the Roman Church lies where it began: with the spirit of the Gospels in which Jesus said that if anyone violates a child it would be better for him that a stone were tied around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. All of the guilty lot of the Catholic clergy must be submerged beneath their collective guilt, they must be exposed, punished and repudiated by the faithful, if the Church is ever to emerge again pure and cleansed, and reclaim its right to minister to innocents.

Changes

2011-03-08T21:29:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school some friends dragged me to see Phil Ochs in concert at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. I had never heard of him and had no idea what he was about. That concert proved to be a turning point in my life.

I remember the ushers at the Academy, mostly retired men, yelling, booing and cursing as Ochs performed his songs, alone on stage, and I thought: "This is interesting. This guy must be onto something." He was. I thought then and still think that Phil Ochs was the purest, most honest and most talented of the protest singers of the Sixties and Seventies. His impact on me was profound; in a word, he radicalized me that night at the old Academy of Music.

He sang about the war in Vietnam, America's imperialism, economic injustice,the hypocrisy of liberals, the numbing effects of mass media and the individual's alienation from society in a voice that was clear, delicate and, to my ears, pristine and powerful in its warbling timbre. The consciousness his singing and his earnestness engendered in me remained a part of my psyche and my identity for decades.

Phil Ochs set me on a journey into political activism, social consciousness and radical thought that helped define me as a person in my young years. I joined the student protest movement, inspired by his song, "I'm Gonna Say It Now," I enlisted in the Civil Rights struggle under the influence of his "Mississippi," and I threw myself headlong into the anti-war movement, singing his "Draft Dodger Rag" and "I Ain't Marchin Anymore." Having heard him sing "Small Circle of Friends," I wrote a play about the disease of detachment which was plaguing society in those days. The play was put on television, launching my career as a dramatist, which I follow to this day. And I still find myself singing his lovely ballad, "Changes," and his haunting signature song, with which he closed that concert, "While I'm Here," to my little boy.

I saw Phil Ochs once more in person, at the Vietnam Moratorium protest rally in Washington D.C. A fully committed student radical by that time, I caravanned with friends down to the capital and camped out by the Reflecting Pond. There was a big elevated stage on which speakers harangued the crowd and bands performed. I can still see Phil Ochs in a capacious plaid Jeff cap singing "Mississippi," the refrain modified to make it a condemnation of President Nixon: "Richard Nixon, find yourself another country to be part of." As he sang, I glanced up past the Lincoln Memorial to see a regiment of National Guardsmen marching towards us in perfect alignment. We were soon surrounded, hemmed in by bayonets and tear-gassed by taunting D.C cops. Hundreds of kids were rounded up and crowded into RFK Stadium. I narrowly escaped arrest - I was on the back side of the stage hoping to meet Phil Ochs as he exited.

The other night I saw the new documentary about Phil Ochs, and it was both an informative and emotional experience for me. I went in order to learn more about this young man who played such a large part in my life, and I was not disappointed. I did not know, for example, that he was a Jew, that his father was a failed physician and manic depressive, that Phil Ochs never intended to be a musician and acquired his first guitar by winning a bet with his college roommate who taught him to play. I did not know how he hungered for fame, about his intense rivalry with Bob Dylan, and the details of his untimely death.

The last time I saw Phil Ochs perform was on a children's television program about poetry. He sang his version of Poe's "The Bells," which had been a favorite poem of my childhood, and "The Highwayman," a maudlin little saga, but one that lent itself well to his musical setting of it. It must have been near the end of his life, and I thought as I watched him that his career must be in sorry shape. However, the film made it clear that Ochs was always available to sing for a good cause, no matter how humble, and I suppose he could not resist the opportunity to bring his music to a new generation of children.

I lost track of him as I graduated from college, lived in Europe, volunteered in Africa and returned to Paris to attend grad school. It was then, while I was studying at the Paris Film Conservatory and working part-time in a grocery store, that, on my way to work I picked up the International Herald Tribune, and read of his suicide at the age of thirty-five. I was deeply struck by the news, and I could not help but mention it, as I held the paper, to my boss, the owner of the store. "Quelle idée," he remarked, genuinely unable to understand why such a talented young man should kill himself. I supposed, as many people did, that Ochs had found himself increasingly irrelevant, a rebel without a cause. And while that is undeniably true, the film made it clear that there was more to it than that. Though I am far removed from the politics of my youth now, I found this rediscovery of Phil Ochs oddly moving. Indeed, I choked up as the film recounted his gradual descent into manic depression, drunkenness and despair. He was, as he says in his song, "the victim of the vine of changes." As I myself have been.

In a real sense, Phil Ochs' music was my youth, my vocal vibrancy, my political consciousness, my social conscience, and my conviction that all that was wrong about America had to and could be put right if only enough of us joined together in a spirit of righteousness and hope. I suppose it was for the memory of that belief that my throat tightened and I had to fight back tears during the film. Those days, that spirit, are gone, but my re-encounter with Phil Ochs makes me realize that I, and my country, were permanently changed by the experience which he sang and we lived. Changed for the better I think; at least I hope, for the better.

Brothers keepers

2011-02-20T16:18:00.000-08:00

I attended a Catholic high school in Philadelphia run by the Christian Brothers. Known best, I suppose, for their undrinkable swill of wine, the Brothers are a very old teaching order of men who conduct a network of schools, colleges and reformatories around the world.

When I was a student at West Philadelphia Catholic High School for Boys in the 1960s, the Brothers still wore black cassocks and a peculiar little white celluloid collar in the shape of a pair of tombstones. They affected religious names like Pius and Fidelis of Mary, lived communally in a rectory adjacent to the school, and observed a vow of celibacy.

Most of us boys were in awe of them, as we had been conditioned to regard all members of the clergy, male and female, as a special species apart from humanity. In fact, when I was very young and in a Catholic elementary school, I thought there were four types of human beings: men, women, priests and nuns. The Brothers were no exception. As Catholic clergy, they seemed to us, and to our parents, to exist in a world apart; celibate, sequestered, indeed, secretive in their daily routine and communal activities.

We boys also feared the Christian Brothers, and with good reason. In those days (though I understand that this has changed) they enforced discipline with intimidation, bullying and brutality. That some people still look back on such behavior with a kind of grim fondness is a curious and, in my view, pitiable practice. Often I witnessed the brow-beatings and physical beatings which misbehavior or lack of respect provoked. I watched a Brother slap a friend of mine so hard that the boy was propelled out of his chair, hitting his head on the chalkboard, nearly knocking him out. I witnessed another Brother hit a boy across the buttocks with a two-by-four plank (which he called the Board of Education), and when the boy, at the last instant, put his hand behind him to shield himself, the blow crushed his graduation ring on his finger, so that he had to be taken to the hospital to have it cut off.

Insults, mockeries, slappings and beatings were part of the routine of the school. In fairness, however, I must add that we received a good quality of education, and many of us were fond of the Brothers who taught us, considered them friends and advisers, and remain grateful to them for the sense of discipline and self-control which their treatment of us engendered. It was not all fear and trembling; the Brothers seemed genuinely to enjoy teaching us, could be great fun, and made deep and lasting impressions on most of us.

But there was one aspect of the Brothers' lives that, while apparent to a few of us at the time, did not become clear until much later. Many of the Brothers -- I would say, most of them -- were gay. Some were so flamboyantly so that their homosexuality, in some cases their femininity, was evident to even the most thick-headed and naive among us. Others were more adept at concealing it. But in the decades since my graduation, it has become clear to me that most of them had entered the order either to deny their sexuality, or to gain access to boys.

Looking back on my years at the Brothers' school, I can recall that there were one or two incidents which must have involved sexual scandal between Brothers and boys. I remember that one Brother simply disappeared from the school, which was then flooded with rumors that he had seduced a boy. If that was so, it was quickly and thoroughly covered up. That others did so I have no doubt, and either got away with it or had their crimes concealed, as is the long established practice of the Church. There can be little doubt, as well, that Brothers engaged in homosexual activity within the confines of the communal residence. Personally, I know of at least one such incident. When we add to this the fact, of which I am aware, that alcohol was widely and lavishly used by the Brothers, sexual activity would seem to have been inevitable.

Some years after I left the school, in the Eighties I think it was, the Christian Brothers imploded. The order dissolved in a whirlpool of self-examination and self-scrutiny; most of the Brothers left, and many of the others dispersed into communities of laymen outside the strict control of the archdiocese. They changed their names, abandoned their clerical garb, and the order itself seemed paralyzed by self-doubt and a desperate search for identity.

Why this was so I never learned. Even the former Brothers with whom I remained in touch would not discuss it. It was as if what had happened was some shameful secret, some mutual admission of concupiscence, that none of them wanted to disclose; indeed, it was almost as if they had sworn an oath of secrecy.

In looking back on my experience with them, however, I think that what probably happened was that increasing instances of sexual molestation of boys caused the Brothers (who may have been more honest among themselves than were the priests) to examine as an order their behavior and the reasons for the members assuming their vocations. I suspect that in the course of that self-examination they were forced to admit that the motives for their having joined the brotherhood were grounded more in their sexuality than in their spirituality. In short: They had to confront the fact that they had become Brothers for the wrong reason.

And so a large number of them quit the order and returned to lay life. There, I expect, they either married in order to continue their self-deception (I know of one or two instances of this), or admitted finally to their homosexuality and entered that lifestyle. But this is only what I surmise; I do not claim to know it for a fact, and would appreciate hearing from former Brothers or people close to the order who can throw light upon the subject.

However the larger issue does seem clear: Like the priests and nuns with whom they served, the Brothers' vocations were motivated in large part by a conflict over their sexual identities which they strove either to legitimize (indeed, to sanctify) by their religious service; or, more diabolically, their joining was nothing less than a calculated attempt on their part to gain easy access to adolescent boys in order to satisfy their own bestial appetites. In concert with this, the Church of course displayed its habitual crass and cruel cynicism by concealing, abetting and even spreading the disease of child abuse, while holding up the Brothers as pure examples of the celibate service of God.

Let me state again that I do not say that all of the Brothers were either gay or pedophiles, but in my experience, a large number were gay and a few, I suspect, were pedophiles. Of some I have nothing but fond and grateful memories, since those men, whose vocation to educate boys was true and noble, expressed a genuine desire to teach and guide us. I could name them here (some undoubtedly were gay), since they remain in my memory and in my esteem. But it seems to me that they were in the minority, and that the sense of guilt suffered and crimes committed by their fellows, together with the heinous efforts of the hierarchy to aid and protect them, unfortunately must outweigh the selfless service of the remainder.

Once again, I do not claim to know these things; only that I have reason to believe that they are so. Therefore, I invite anyone who knew the Brothers in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties to write and inform me. Is my recollection that most of the Brothers were gay correct? And why, in fact, did the Brothers undergo such seismic shaking as I was aware of in the years following my experience with them? I would very much like to know.

Hardly Biutiful

2011-02-06T15:06:00.000-08:00

Last night I saw Inarritu's new film, "Biutiful," starring Javier Bardem. I won't say much about it except that my greatest regret is that I did not walk out after the first excruciating hour (of two-and-a-half). I don't know who thinks this sort of film edifying, enlightening or beautiful, I but am not one of them. I found it self-indulgent, plangent, over-wrought and utterly lacking in either insight or revelation.

Leaving aside the fact that fully forty minutes of this hyper-depressing tale could have been cut without loss, I find myself still wondering what it was all meant to be about. There was absolutely no logic to the structure, which meandered from doldrum to doldrum apparently without concern for either the characters or the audience, leading me to observe to my companion that the film might never actually end. There was no reason for it to do so, since there was neither plan nor point in its interminable concatenation of scenes. "We could be here until next year," I whispered, and, indeed, by the time the film finally panted to a conclusion, it felt as if we had been.

I don't want to devote much more time to it. Bardem, who has shown himself to be a very good actor, was inexorably blue (literally and figuratively), maintained an unchanging dreary expression, unshaved, unrelieved, and uninspired. His wife, as a character, is not to be mentioned: so utterly worthless and hapless as to be comical in her more plaintive moments. A whining bipolar whore who alternately dotes on, beats and abandons her children, she claims resurrection by virtue of staring into a light box. This would have been funny if there were not children involved.

As for the two-score Chinese peasants washed up on the shores of Barcelona (one of whom ends up stuck to the ceiling in the main character's apartment); the main character's claim to be able to speak to the dead (for money), a subplot that goes nowhere; the homosexual subplot of the Chinese sweatshop managers that goes nowhere; the politically correct subplot of the Senegalese drug traffickers, that goes nowhere (the wife of one is last seen taking a train from Barcelona to Senegal - a train!); and the repeated scenes of domestic eating, bloody urination, counting and recounting Euros, the less said the better.

To those of you who may have seen the film I offer this warning: Forget opening the fridge in your bare feet -- watch out for the damn space heaters.

Decline and Fall

2011-02-06T14:38:00.000-08:00

Somehow I had managed to get through my entire education and the decades since without having read Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Such gaps in my learning sometimes assault me, and remind me that I am not nearly as smart as I allow myself, at the best of times, to think. But when my son mentioned that he was reading it, I realized my deficit and resolved to redress it.

Unfortunately, the very large volume of reading I have to do for work leaves me little time to read for pleasure. Then, on a visit to a record store (Remember those?) to buy my little one some Beatles and Stones to feed his growing appetite for what he thinks of as classics, I wandered over to the spoken word section, and found there a six-CD recording of Gibbon's masterwork. This was my chance, I realized: "Decline and Fall" in the car during my commutes, with scarcely an effort on my part. I bought it, and put it into the CD player.

That was six-CD's ago, and I am much the better for it. The book is, in fact, a monument; itself a kind of Coliseum of history and literature. How I missed it for so long I cannot say, but I wish that someone in my endless years of education had forced me, or at least encouraged me, to read it.

The prose, alone, is worth the time, and the reading, by a Welsh actor named Philip Madoc, makes it even more so. The book was written between 1770 and 1790, and the sad fact is that no one writes like this anymore. It is quite simply the most elegant, lyrical and lucid prose I have read in a very long time. In American literature, only William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience" and Grant's "Memoirs" come close for clarity and beauty of expression. Gibbons' prose reminds us of the vast riches of the English language, and Madoc's reading, of the lustrous beauty of it. If God had a voice and could speak, this is what he would sound like.

As for its historicity, I have some reservations. Gibbon engages at times in such sweeping generalizations of so breathtaking a scope as no modern historian would permit himself. Nonetheless, his portraits and insights, his judgments and conclusions evince a wisdom and depth of reflection that set the work apart. It is beautiful literature and compelling history.

That said, I find, regretfully, that I must agree with those who cite "Decline and Fall" as a cautionary tale to our own civilization. Gibbon, of course, did not have America in mind when he wrote his history, but some of his more insightful observations seem to have been written as if he had. When Gibbon reflects that Rome had lost its spirit of vigor, that its citizens had chosen the common level over the pursuit of excellence, and that their focus on pleasures and material comfort had sapped the empire of its strength, he may as well have been talking about us. Continual involvement in foreign wars, together with a complacent and comfortable life at home contributed to the empire's fall. Not to mention the accumulation of debt which made Rome weak internally, and vulnerable to its barbarian neighbors; the systematic destruction of the best in society together with the punishing of excellence and initiative, and the increasing laxity and ignorance of its citizens marked the empire for inevitable doom.

Foreign wars, domestic laxity, debt, popular ignorance, and the pursuit of the common and comfortable instead of the fostering of excellence... it sounds all too familiar. I think that Gibbon would recognize the symptoms today, and that he would offer his opinion that the decline of our civilization is as unmistakable as the fall is inevitable.

Dance with me

2011-01-31T20:11:00.001-08:00

I have a subscription to the dance series at the Music Center in Los Angeles. Last Friday I attended a performance by the Brazilian company, Grupo Corpo. It was rather extraordinary. They manage to combine classical ballet with modern and traditional forms of Brazilian dance, in a synthesis that, at moments, is breathtaking in its virtuosity. Some of the moves which characterize their style I had never seen before, a sort of bossa nova-tango-rumba gliding bow-bend articulation of the body which is typically rounded in its execution and spiked with lifts that appear to defy both muscularity and gravity. I found it all fascinating and revealing.

Prior to that I had seen Corella Ballet Castilla y León, a youthful Spanish company, and they were superb. Their vigor, inventiveness and almost gleeful energy was infectious, and the audience, including my eight-year-old son, cheered them heartily. In a program that spanned a very traditional tutu-ruffled choreography of Bruch's Violin Concerto (one of my many guilty pleasures) to an electrifying Flamenco pas de deux, to a post-modern evocation of the French high speed train, they displayed the kind of courage, creativity and exuberance that only a troupe of young dancers is capable of.

Before them the Hubbard Street Dance Theater of Chicago brought a truly wonderful program of modern and interpretive dance to the Ahmanson Theater. One number in particular, which opened with an apparently endless line of dancers simply stepping one foot at a time to their right as they crossed the stage reminded me of a Samuel Beckett play, spare, eloquent, almost silent in its simplicity. After this they did a comic rendering of Ravel's Bolero, in which a female tries to crash a party to which she has not been invited. I would not have thought there was any life left in the Bolero, which was originally written as a dance piece, but Hubbard Street, by not taking it seriously, revived it to the delight of the audience.

Next comes the Nederlands Dans Theater, and after them the Alvin Ailey. I have never seen the Nederlands, though I hear they are very good, but I make a point of seeing Alvin Ailey every time they are in town. They always offer something new, as one year, for example, they interpreted Charlie Parker's enforced stay in the state mental institution at Camarillo, and they usually close with their venerable Revelations, which, though performed for some twenty years, is invariably as welcome as the Spring.

My point in mentioning all this is twofold. First, it seems to me that some of the most interesting and exciting work being done in the performing arts today is taking place in dance. And second, I want to urge everyone to support the dance, which is in danger of strangling to death in this country on shoestrings of budget. Dance is as ancient and omnipresent as the human race itself, perhaps the oldest art form of all. Every culture, every society, has danced; indeed, I daresay, whether we do so in public or not, every human being who ever lived has danced at some point in his life. Movement to music, or simply to rhythm, is a natural part of the human experience -- it is in our blood and bones, and there are moments in life, of exaltation, awe, abstraction or despair, when we can do nothing other than move to the ebb and flow of emotion, ideas and expectation.

And so, I ask all of you who are kind enough to read this blog, to attend dance, support dance, and get up off your duffs and dance. Our nation and our souls will be better for it.

Pure Art

2011-01-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

I have said that music is the highest form of art, and that poetry, being the closest to music, is the highest form of literature. This morning, as I was engaged in my quarterly chore of cleaning out the garage, I began to wonder why this should be so.

The answer, I think, must lie in that which music and poetry have in common. At first blush, this would seem to be rhythm. And while rhythm is at the heart of music, and may be said to be its essential quality, it is an aspect of poetry merely, though an important one. It may not be too much to say that this is why music is a higher art form than poetry: because, as it is essentially rhythm, music is purer than poetry, which is essentially language. But that language always and importantly embraces rhythm, and that, together with its intensity and the clarity and aptness of its images, is what raises poetry above the other forms of literature.

Now music, too, can contain images, and there are many wonderful examples of this, such as Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Debussy's 'Images,' Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition,' Ravel's 'Le tombeau de Couperin,' and Vaughan Williams' Arctic Symphony. But when music sets out deliberately to paint a picture, it becomes program music, and to my mind, this form is inferior to what is often called pure music. It is for this reason that I consider Beethoven's Sixth to be the least important of his symphonies, since it is the most specific and concrete. In contrast, the organ music of Bach or the late Beethoven string quartets, especially the 0p. 131, are, to my mind, pure music; that is, unrelated to any material sense or experience. Because this is so, they are essentially spiritual in nature, and represent the highest realization of art.

It is when poetry approaches to a pure form -- that is, when the language is either so rarefied as to be almost detached from the images it seeks to convey to the mind, or when the language itself becomes almost one with those images -- that it finds its highest incarnation. This is seldom attempted, and even less often achieved.

I think G. M. Hopkins comes closest to achieving it in his spiritual sonnets, such as 'When kingfishers catch fire, when dragonflies draw flame,' and in 'God's grandeur.' In such works, the purity of language and the intensity with which words and images are interwoven renders the poetry pure in a musical sense. On one level the language is itself a kind of music, while on another, words and images become nearly the same thing. It is not that Hopkins' poetry is pure because it is spiritual; it is spiritual because it is pure.

And so, I suppose, as I was filling up the rented Dumpster in my driveway, I concluded that it is purity, spirituality and rhythm which the greatest music and the greatest poetry have in common. It is to these qualities that the best art attains, and this, in turn, raises the question: Why?

The answer is, I think, that the true nature and aspire of great art lies not in any sense experience or even in any idea, but, rather, in a reality that lies outside of those. What I am suggesting is that art is not born in the human heart or mind, but in the human soul, and represents a longing to embrace that soul's essential nature, and express the truth which the action of that nature in life implies. Art is truth in action, and in music and poetry, it is truth in rhythm. For life is made of rhythms: the rhythms of nature, the seasons, the revolution of the Earth, the beating of the heart, breathing and crying and laughing. It is the eternal cycle of coming into being, becoming being and going out of being -- life is rhythm. This is why music is such a natural and universal experience for man, since it echoes or replicates the inherent rhythm of living.

The best music -- and the best poetry -- reproduce this essential organic rhythm in its purest and most revealing form. For this reason, program music, being reflective of specific images or events, is inferior to pure music; since we sense in the purest music that native rhythm which in an undeniable way forms the foundation of our existence. This leads me to the assertion that the creation of art is not essentially a matter of expression but of inspiration; that is, the highest artistic impulses derive from outside man, and do not spring from inside him. They are, if you will, inhaled from a rarefied atmosphere which is the soul's natural domain. This, in turn, leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is a spiritual reality which transcends the material, and to the expression of which all art aspires.

Pure art lies closest to our souls. We recognize ourselves in its forms, and it reminds us, indeed, I think, proves, that we are essentially spiritual creatures, with a spiritual consciousness, and a spiritual destiny.

From Gettysburg to Tucson

2011-01-13T11:23:00.001-08:00

In the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln was asked to speak at a memorial for the soldiers who died at the battle of Gettysburg. On the train from Washington to the site of the event, he wrote out a brief speech on scraps of paper. The famous orator, Edward Everett, preceded him on the podium, and spoke for over two hours, his address punctuated by applause and followed by an ovation. Lincoln then rose to deliver his remarks, which lasted only a few minutes. There was no applause, and there was silence as the president returned to his seat. That silence lingered for some time.

Today no one can remember anything Everett said, while all of us (I hope) can quote from Lincoln's address. Every school child is required to read it, and, in private schools at least, to memorize it. The mainstream press of the time derided the Gettysburg Address, calling it silly, trivial, and disrespectful. They offered it as proof of Lincoln's unfitness for the office he held, and dismissed it out of hand. Yet it is now regarded as the greatest speech in American history.

The listeners at Gettysburg knew it if the self-appointed experts did not. Their silence throughout the speech, and especially after it, was not only a fitting response to Lincoln's words, which perfectly summarized the meaning of the event, but that silence was also a perfect tribute to the sacrifices and memory of those whom they had gathered to honor.

In Tucson yesterday, another president who, for reasons I cannot fathom, has been compared to Lincoln, spoke at a memorial for fallen Americans. The atmosphere, and his management of it, were quite different. There were cheers, hooting, shouts and whistles as he spoke; the event had more the character of a pep rally than a memorial service.

Now, of course, the behavior of the largely college-student audience was not the president's doing; but to my mind, as soon as the raucous reaction started during his speech, he had an obligation to quieten it, politely but firmly, as we do with misbehaved children. Instead, he chose to ride the wave of adolescent enthusiasm, and to encourage the entirely inappropriate aura of celebration in the wake of tragedy. He treated the memorial as though it were a campaign rally, which it quickly became, because, I suppose, that is the forum in which he feels most comfortable. And not only that: After the speech, he descended from the podium to shake hands, exactly as if it were a campaign whistle stop, and to pause for photo ops with members of the audience, smiling, hugging young women and backslapping supporters. To my mind, this went beyond disrespect; it was disgraceful.

Whatever you thought of the speech, whatever you think of the president, I ask you to try to imagine Lincoln having behaved in this way at Gettysburg. Can you conceive of that president whipping up the audience, eliciting and reveling in their cheers, and then moving down among the crowd to press the flesh and pause and grin while Brady or O'Sullivan flashed their magnesium? And what would history have recorded of the fact?

Presidential remarks at a memorial service for murdered Americans call for solemnity, grace, and the head of state's obligation to put current tragedy in the perspective of the nation's history not only in his words, but by his demeanor. That is what Lincoln did, and what Obama failed utterly to do. It is not what Obama said that I object to (though whereas Lincoln wrote his speech himself, Obama's was yet another oration by committee); it is the manner in which he comported himself and the shameful way in which he allowed this solemn occasion to become just another campaign stop that I found not merely disappointing, but disturbing.

In my view, Obama's speech was the equivalent of Edward Everett's, and Lincoln's, alas, was not heard, for there was no one to deliver it. I suppose that, just as every nation gets the politics it deserves, every generation of the electorate gets the president it deserves.

Westboro and Speech

2011-01-11T23:05:00.000-08:00

I have just read that the Arizona legislature has passed an emergency bill restricting the right of the Westboro Baptist Church to picket at the funeral of the nine-year-old girl murdered in the Tucson massacre. The bill was passed and sent to the governor for signature in a matter of minutes.

I have read much about this bizarre religious group and its hideous protests at the funerals of soldiers, and have listened to many debates about the free speech implications of their activities. I even watched a documentary film, made by British television, about the sect. I have my own views concerning them and their peculiar beliefs, but whatever I or anyone thinks about them, they raise an important constitutional issue regarding freedom of speech in this country.

Let us be frank: What these religious fanatics do is repulsive, inhuman, disgraceful. But is it constitutionally protected speech? That, as Hamlet would say, is the question. On the one hand, all decent human beings are revolted by the efforts of these people to defile the funerals of honorable Americans, and horrified by their violation of the sanctity and grief of the victims’ families in order to make an abstruse, even absurd, theological point. On the other, their protests are precisely the kind of repugnant speech which the first amendment was written to protect. Now they propose to desecrate the funeral of a nine-year-old girl to make their inane point. This child, this innocent, died as a result of a madman’s raving, translated into horrific action, and the members of the Westboro Church, in their perverted logic, see fit to use her funeral as a platform for parading their odious ideas. That much is clear. But the question remains: Is it protected speech?

On this score, I would invoke the words of Lincoln: The question is a difficult one, and good men do not agree. Some argue that the activities of the Westboro Church are so repugnant to basic human decency that they must be suppressed, at least in their public expressions. Others would say that this kind of hideous speech is, and must be, included in the first amendment protection of all speech no matter how divisive and distasteful it may be. As Voltaire said: I may not agree with what you say, but I will protect to the death your right to say it. If ever there was speech with which we disagree, it is that of the Westboro Baptist Church. And so the question becomes: Are we prepared to defend its members’ right to protest this little girl’s funeral?

The convenient and politically expedient response is No. What the church members propose to do violates everything we understand about the innocence of children and the right of parents to grieve for their loss. The point is so obvious that even lawmakers can grasp it: This must be prevented, at all costs. But what is the cost, ultimately? Is it the abridgment of free speech for the sake of personal grief or of a communal sense of decency? Surely, that is too high a price to pay. Under that standard, the Ku Klux Klan would have been exonerated by its local constituencies for cross burning, on the grounds that local standards of fairness would have been violated otherwise. We embark on abridgment of free speech at our peril. Precedents will always come back to haunt us.

And so, what of the threatened Westboro protest of the little girl’s funeral? It seemed to me, initially at least, that the question should be framed thus: Do we hate what the Westboro Church stands for more than we love freedom of speech? If that is the correct way of phrasing it, then the answer is clear: No. We love freedom of speech more; indeed, we value it above all other freedoms, since all other freedoms flow from it: freedom of the press, of religion, of assembly to redress grievances against the government. In these terms, the answer is equally clear: The Westboro Church must have the right to protest the little girl’s funeral. What is at stake ultimately is not the grief of the family or even common decency, but something much greater and more far-reaching – it is the right of every free man and woman in this country to express views that the majority may feel to be repulsive. Such is the nature of free speech; such was the intent of the Founders, who, themselves, expressed views that were considered treasonous at the time. Indeed, they were views for which they could have been, and expected to be, hanged.

But as I continued to reflect on this thorny question, a subsidiary issue occurred. To my way of thinking, the Westboro Baptist Church members are the victims of systematic and unremitting brainwashing. Only such brainwashing could produce the hatred and despite which they display at their protests of the funerals of soldiers. How else to explain the fervent need which they feel now to protest at the funeral of a little girl murdered by a lunatic as she waited to meet her congresswoman, with whom, as a recently elected member of student council, she must have identified? How could the human psyche become so distorted? How could people comport themselves with such callous disregard for even the aspirations and death of a child? How can people behave in such a bestial manner?

The answer, it seems to me, is that they are not legally sane. Their religious indoctrination has distorted their view of reality to such an extent that they can no longer distinguish between right and wrong. Indeed, so brainwashed have they become that they actually see wrong as being not only right, but sanctimonious. I am reminded of the behavior of the priest-molesters of the Roman Catholic Church, who convince themselves that child rape is a blessed prerogative reserved to themselves alone. And so they indulge their bestial appetites at the expense of the innocence of children, content in the belief, religiously inspired, that what they were doing was not only right, but holy.

To my way of thinking, the Westboro people are no different in this case than the molesting Catholic priests – their view of reality is so distorted by their own neuroses and religious indoctrination that they cannot but behave in a criminal manner. And so the issue becomes, not whether we love freedom of speech more than we hate their actions, but, rather: Is the speech of brainwashed lunatics protected by the Constitution? Put this way – which I believe is the correct way – the answer, emphatically, is No. By virtue of their indoctrination and lunacy, the Westboro Baptist Church members forfeit their right to protection of their speech in protesting the funerals not only of the little murdered girl, but those of fallen servicemen as well.

Is insane speech constitutionally protected? Do lunatic ravings fall under the umbrella of the first amendment? Is that what the Founders intended? Certainly not. Indeed, they would, themselves, have to have been mad to protect such speech. The ravings of self-deluding lunatics is no more a legitimate form of speech than is the right of the Tucson killer to express whatever demented views he held by killing innocent people. Looked at from this point of view, the Westboro Christian Church has no more right to its form of expression than did Jared Lee Loughner to his.

To be or not to be clueless

2011-01-11T12:01:00.000-08:00

"Hamlet" is my favorite play; indeed, it may be my favorite piece of literature. I have been fortunate to have seen many great productions, including John Gielgud's, Richard Burton's, Christopher Plummer's, Lawrence Olivier's and, my personal favorite, Derek Jacobi's. I own several dvd versions of the play (among them the not-so-great Mel Gibson and Ethan Hawke, and the rather disappointing Kenneth Branagh). I have memorized much of the text, and rarely does a day go by that I do not find occasion to quote from it. Thus, every time I have the opportunity to see a production on stage, I make a point of going, because "Hamlet" like every truly great work of art, reveals new insights and secrets with each experience of it.

When I learned recently that UCLA's graduate theater department was doing "Hamlet" in downtown Los Angeles, I was, frankly, excited. My favorite play performed by the best young actors from one of our finest universities... I imagined that, no matter how uneven the performance, no matter how odd the staging, the sheer energy, talent and youth of the actors would make it worth seeing.

Now, I have put all of my children through "Hamlet" school, watching with each of them several versions of the play; and the youngest one, the eight-year-old, is no exception. He has seen Olivier's "Hamlet" twice with me, and is able to tell you how every member of the cast of characters dies. But he had not yet seen the play on stage, and suddenly I had a chance to expose him to my favorite work of art, interpreted by actors only twelve or fifteen years older than himself. What an opportunity! So I got tickets.

To quote Polonius: I will be brief. As the audience, a handful of friends and relatives of the actors, was filing out after the performance, my son asked me what I thought. I answered that, while I had seen many versions of "Hamlet," this was the first time I had seen a clueless version.

No one connected with this production had the slightest idea what to do with the play. There was no insight, no innovation, no vision, no revelation. The UCLA graduate theater department nearly managed to do what four hundred years of history have not: kill an immortal work of art.

The acting ranged from adequate to miserable. To call the staging minimal would be a bad joke: apart from a few battered chairs and a table, there was none. Now this might be alright, as the Burton "Hamlet" proved, if the acting is brilliant and compelling. At UCLA this was not the case. The girl who played Opehlia was the best of a sorry bunch, and her mad scene was well done. This should have been the bar above which the rest of the performance soared but, alas, it was the high point of the production. The only other spark of life was the gravedigger, played by a young man who affected a Brooklyn accent. And while this was entertaining, it was entirely out of step with the rest of the performances.

Hamlet, himself, was utterly clueless. The young actor who played him was a muscular black fellow with a shaved head and goatee, and when I first saw him I thought: This is going to be interesting -- Tupac Shakur as Hamlet. Far from it, he seemed more intent on getting the lines right than doing anything with them. He brought nothing of himself to the part and got nothing from it in return. There was no depth, no style, no nuance or intensity, and he committed virtually every mistake against which Hamlet warns the players in his admonitions to them. This was, of course, not entirely his fault. To paraphrase Laertes: The director... the director's to blame. Whether he was a professor or a student I do not know; but whoever he is, he ought to turn in his card.

I could go on... The lighting was amateurish, the sound effects silly, and the costumes were a sorry admission that either the program could not afford period ones, or that the director hadn't a clue how to set the play in any other era. The whole thing gave new meaning to the idea that "Hamlet" is a tragedy.

I will say this: If this is the best that the UCLA graduate theater department can do, then they should shut the program down and use the money for something useful -- like landscaping or more parking spaces. Shakespeare would be better served.

Hate Speech

2011-01-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

I had intended to say nothing about the tragedy in Tucson. It was madness, and in the sorry way of mad acts, it does not lend itself to the discovery of meaning. To try to find enlightenment in such travesties reminds me of the efforts of religious zealots to ascribe some discernible meaning to earthquakes and solar eclipses. We all scoffed and were repulsed when fundamentalist Christians read the will of God into the attacks on 9/11, and when fundamentalist Muslims did so after the tsunami in Southeast Asia.

Now we see observers on the left of the political spectrum attempting to interpret the shootings through the distorting prism of their ideology. Before we even knew the name of the killer or anything else about him, two prominent columnists, one at the New York Times and the other at Newsweek, declared that the shootings were animated by the political rhetoric of the right. This goes beyond irresponsible journalism -- it is itself a form of madness. And now this morning I find a colleague of mine, an active campaigner for liberal causes, posting on Facebook her conviction that "Sarah Palin bears a special responsibility for the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords." I submit that such irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric is precisely the kind of hate speech which she apparently seeks to condemn. This sort of hysterical, ideologically-driven nonsense must stop if the political discourse in this nation, which has become dangerous on both the left and right, is to be defused.

The hysteria goes beyond irresponsible speech, however; the next step is always irresponsible legislation. Yesterday I heard of a Pennsylvania congressman who is proposing a ban on the kind of extended ammunition clips which the killer is reported to have used. I have learned to expect such puerile behavior from members of Congress. It is as if the congressman is saying: "We can't stop the lunatics from shooting innocent people, but we can make it difficult for them to shoot more than seven or eight at a time." This nonsense, like the hysterical rhetoric, also has to stop.

The sad fact is true that, as Harry Truman said, any nut who can afford to buy a suit can kill a president. On the very eve of his assassination, Jack Kennedy observed that if somebody with a rifle wanted to kill him, there was no way to stop it. What is needed now, in the wake of this monstrous, irrational act, is mature, rational response. None of us, of any political persuasion, dampens the flames by fanning them.

Insanity Pleas

2011-01-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Increasingly, watching the news is like seeing a road company production of Marat/Sade. I hear politicians mouthing the same stale platitudes and offering the same pointless proposals that I have listened to my entire life. May I make one point clear? We are going bankrupt.

That fact, unmistakable and urgent, should be dominating our political discourse. Instead, the hacks in Washington and Sacramento are behaving as if business as usual will get us out of this mess. California is broke - desperately so - and Washington is very nearly broke, and persisting in the same rhetoric and the same tactics is not going to fix it. We will be the first generation in American history to leave our children impoverished, having saddled them with a debt they cannot hope to pay. And in the face of this, the so-called leaders of our state and nation continue to argue for increased spending, more government regulation and higher taxes as if the bus of our economy were not already dangling over the cliff.

The same inane arguments between liberals and conservatives continue regardless. The simple fact is that there is a vacuum of leadership at every level of government which is becoming more acute and lethal as generation after generation of politicians refuse to speak the truth to the public, and implement the painful policies of austerity and sacrifice that will be necessary to save our prosperity from extinction. On one level the solution is simple: Government has grown far too big and intrusive and it spends far too much money on programs that were never imagined or intended by the Founders. The size of government is the problem, and so the solution begins with reducing it radically. This will not only be salvation for the economy, but for personal liberty as well.

It is in the details that the devil devours everyone who comes near. All right, let me begin with this: Reduce the size of government by ten percent across the board and impose a freeze on any new government spending. Since fraud and waste are endemic in government programs, simply eliminate as many as possible. Personally, I would start at the federal level by eliminating the Departments of Labor, Education, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services and Commerce, and by privatizing the post office. Beyond that, I would dump the current tax code and replace it with a universal flat tax on individuals and corporations of no more than fifteen percent, and enact balanced budget legislation requiring federal and state governments to live within the means provided by the tax. Needless to say, Obama Care must be repealed and the new corporate regulations rolled back as well.

We must free the economy to do what it does best -- create jobs, opportunity and wealth. Give every disincentive possible to the growth of government and offer every incentive possible to private enterprise. Reward risk, innovation and excellence. Return to our faith in the power of the free market, personal liberty and individual initiative, and cleanse our society of the debilitating lie that government is not the problem but the solution.

Exposing "Exposure"

2011-01-02T00:44:00.000-08:00

I had enjoyed the poetry of Wilfred Owen since I first discovered him in high school, and regarded him as one of the most important of the Great War poets. However, recently, I bought a CD of readings of World War I poetry, and among the works read was Owen’s poem, “Exposure.” I was stunned. I had somehow missed this poem, and when I first listened to it, could hardly take in what I was hearing. I played it over and over, finding more in the lines each time. The first thing that struck me, besides the power and intensity of the language, was the fact that the rhyme scheme seemed to consist entirely of slant rhymes; that is, words that nearly rhymed but were not true rhymes. Beyond that, the verse had a ragged, half-eaten rhythm which bespoke a meter both uneven and breathless. The imagery was haunting, as in much of Owen’s work, the metaphors darkly original, the use of onomatopoeia stark and rattling, and the tone, again as in his best work, not infectious so much as infected.

I looked up “Exposure” in my volume of Owen’s work, and read it for myself to determine whether what I was hearing on the recording was, in fact, on the page. It was. I regard “Exposure” as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century – perhaps the greatest –and my estimation of Owen has risen with it. I now place him among the greatest recent poets of the English language, alongside Eliot, Auden, and G.M. Hopkins, and I cannot help but feel that, had he lived (he was killed one week before the armistice), he would have surpassed them.

I would like to attempt an exposure of “Exposure” here in order to try to explain why I think the poem is such a signal accomplishment; powerful, moving, original, beautiful in its own somber way, and as tightly crafted as the Enfield rifles which the Tommies carried in the trenches.

The setting of the poem is the trenches of the Western Front in 1917. Owen is an officer in a regiment which holds a trench in a salient. Surrounded on three sides by the enemy, these salients were among the most dangerous places in the front line. It is winter, dawn, snowing. Owen writes:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us...
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent...
Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient...
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire,
Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.
Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumbles,
Far off, like a dull rumour of some other war.
What are we doing here?

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow...
We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.
Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army
Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,
But nothing happens.

Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.
Less deathly than the air that shudders black with snow,
With sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause, and renew;
We watch them wandering up and down the wind's nonchalance,
But nothing happens.

Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling for our faces -
We cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams, and stare, snow-dazed,
Deep into grassier ditches. So we drowse, sun-dozed,
Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses,
- Is it that we are dying?

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed
With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there;
For hours the innocent mice rejoice: the house is theirs;
Shutters and doors, all closed: on us the doors are closed, -
We turn back to our dying.

Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn;
Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.
For God's invincible spring our love is made afraid;
Therefore, not loath, we lie out here; therefore were born,
For love of God seems dying.

To-night, this frost will fasten on this mud and us,
Shriveling many hands, puckering foreheads crisp.
The burying-party, picks and shovels in shaking grasp,
Pause over half-known faces. All their eyes are ice,
But nothing happens.

Before I undertake a detailed analysis of the poem, I should make a few general comments. A brief scansion of the verses reveals the jagged meter of the lines. The first three verses are characteristic: in verse one we find the number of syllables as 14, 13,13,14 and the refrain of 5; in verse two, 12, 13, 14, 12 and 6; in verse three, 12, 13, 13, 12 and 5, and so on through the poem. This is, of course, a deliberate choice on Owen’s part. The salient represents a jagged edge to the forward line, irregular, uneven, ugly in a formal sense. What is more, it is night, freezing, the men can see nothing through the thick dark and snow. There may be movement, there may not; there is wailing wind tugging at barbed wire, twitching, brambled, there is tense silence and rumors – nothing is certain. And for this reason, nothing about the metrics of the poem is certain. All is obscure, jagged, uneven. Just as the salient should never have occurred, is demanding dangerously to be smoothed and made regular and even, so, too, the meter of the lines is irregular, uncertain, and studded with the truncated refrain like the snouts of rifles pointing into the icy darkness.

My initial impression on hearing the poem was correct: there are no straight rhymes in the poem; all are near-rhymes. The rhyme scheme itself is regular, but odd: a/b/b/a/c; d/e/e/d/f, and so on throughout. Thus the two outer lines of each quatrain nearly rhyme, as do the two inner ones, while the fifth line depends, naked and exposed. “Exposure” contains some of the most original, daring and jarring slant rhymes I have ever read. Consider, for example: knive us/nervous; silence/nonchalance; snow/renew; faces/fusses; their/theirs (a truly daring rhyme); fruit/afraid; crisp/grasp. These near-rhymes, – we might almost call them anti-rhymes – strike like bullets, or glare out like the flares that confuse the men, failing, like the salient itself, to offer the protection and predictability of a straightened front line. Again, Owen makes the deliberate choice to rough up, or even to make ugly, his verse so as to bring it closer to the reality he describes. Nothing about this poem is comfortable, predictable, secure. Everything is exposed.

This raises an interesting point about the poem. Owen originally planned to title it “Nothing Happens,” but changed it at last to “Exposure.” The title has several implications; first among them, the exposure of the men to the elements and to imminent danger, but beyond that, the exposure of the insanity, futility and precariousness of their position. A third level of meaning of the title will become clear as we read of the men’s exhausted musings, indeed, hallucinations, about home: they know that even if they survive, they can never return. They are exposed mentally, morally, spiritually. Their condition, the violence of their role, has carried them beyond safety, comfort, even love. Yet for this unconscionable task they “were born,” Owen says; and with it, “love of God seems dying.” These men are exposed utterly and ultimately – their souls are stripped naked to the fingering of the black snow.

Thus everything about this poem, from the meter of its lines, to the anti-rhymes which cap them, to the layers of meaning of its title, speaks of exposure. The poem is itself the experience which Owen describes. It is not art imitating life: it is art breathing the putrid stench of despair and imminent death.

The opening words, “Our brains ache,” are, of course, a morbid reference to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense). I think it may not be too much to point out that Owen puts a comma after the first three syllables, though strictly speaking a comma ought not to be there. But it is there in Keats, and so Owen breaks the line as and where Keats did. The reference is additionally apposite in that Keats describes a drowsy numbness, brought about by melancholy, while Owen’s men also feel a drowsy numbness, though brought about by the much more pressing experience of exhaustion and fear. Like Owen’s Tommies, Keats, too, feels “The weariness, the fever, and the fret /Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.” The invocation of the romantic poet’s lethargy thus feels completely, though ironically, apt.

The remainder of the line contains our first sound effect: “in the merciless iced east winds that knive us…” The alternation of sibilance with hard consonants invokes the sound of the winds, which become the enemy's bayonets. There is a nice internal slant rhyme in “iced east”, and the use of “knive” is telling. Most poets would have written “knife” (and at least one editor of the poem uses "knife"), but Owen chooses the more unexpected form, which produces the desired effect. We are “knifed” suddenly by this choice of word, which is much more dramatic than it would otherwise have been.

I should point out here that my favorite poet, Gerard Manly Hopkins, often creates similar effects in his work. I think, in particular, of a wonderful example of using an unexpected word form which occurs in his beautiful poem, “God’s Grandeur.” Speaking of man’s strident assault on Nature, he says: “And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Again, any other poet would have written “freshest,” which would be the correct form; but Hopkins, like Owen, uses a deliberate distortion to shock the reader, heighten his consciousness, and create a dramatic effect. It is as if we are sentries nodding off, and suddenly jolted back to awareness by an unnatural sound.

Again, the first line of “Exposure” is an odd length, fourteen syllables; not ten or twelve, or fifteen or even sixteen, which would feel more finished. Immediately we feel that something is not right, something is unnatural, though because it is in the meter, we do not at first know consciously what it is. We are uncertain, we feel a tension, which puts us at once into the mental condition of the men. Thus, in the very first line, we have an ironic, apt, and soulful reference to romantic poetry, a howling onomatopoeia which puts us immediately into the scene, a deliberate use of an unexpected word form to produce a visceral effect, and an irregular metric scheme which creates the tension that infuses the entire poem. This is brilliant dramatic poesy.

Owen goes on to state that it is the silence of the night that keeps the men awake. This is ironic since silence would normally induce sleep. But just as with the rhythm scheme, tension is everywhere, and silence is entirely unnatural here. We have a wonderful near rhyme in silent/salient, followed by another sound effect: “Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous”. This low sibilance suggests the whispers themselves, curious and nervous. And then comes the refrain: “But nothing happens.”

It would be hard to imagine a more powerful denial of the tension inherent in the poem. The men are freezing, exhausted, confused, worried and nervous, expecting an attack at any moment… but nothing happens. This is the persistent irony of the poem, introduced here as a motif that will recur, though not exclusively (in Owen’s words, it will “flock, pause and renew”). For just as with everything else in “Exposure,” the refrain is subject to uncertainty, and to annihilation at a moment’s notice.

Our attention is next called to the wind and the barbed wire. Gusts tug at the wire “Like twitching agonies of men among its brambles.” We have already heard this wind; now we are reminded that men, some still alive, may hang upon it as the soldiers look out across the salient. Owen refers to the barbs as brambles, an adumbration of his references to home and its fields and vegetation which will come later. To the north is the rumble of guns, “Like a dull rumor of some other war.” The reference here is to the New Testament (Matthew, 24:6): “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars.” With this, Owen places the men’s experience of exposure within a biblical context; one which presages the Second Coming and the end of the world.

At this apocalyptic moment, Owen asks the question, in place of the refrain: “What are we doing here?” To me, this is one of the most powerful moments in the poem. So simple a question, so apparently mundane; yet it is THE question – the one every soldier is asking himself but none dares to ask aloud. The question in the minds of everyone involved in the war – the ultimate existential question posed by the war: What are we doing here? The line is devastating in its frankness and simplicity, and represents an act of poetic courage on Owen’s part. Siegfried Sassoon tried something similar in his touching poem, “The Redeemer,” when he remarks that the boys in the trenches have “learned that nights are very long.” It is a homespun phrase, an ordinary sort of observation, but it falls flat like a dud shell. It lacks utterly the power of Owen’s question – What are we doing here? – which throws everything into a sudden stark relief of quandary and bewilderment as it cuts straight to the heart of the matter.

The next line contains one of Owen’s most moving and disturbing turns of phrase: “The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow…” Dawn should represent a reawakening, a hope for day, an end to night. But here it is a poignant misery bringing with it only another day of suffering, exposure, uncertainty and death. He describes dawn as “massing in the east her melancholy army” which “Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray.” Of course, the Germans lay to the east, their uniforms field gray, and so the image and the reality are one. As I have said, this is a characteristic of the poem: metaphor and meaning are so close as to become the same thing. Reality lies exposed, as close to the surface of imagery as it is possible for a poet to render it. This is one of the hallmarks of the greatest art – that expression and language are wedded into a single dramatic experience. Such is the nature of the late Beethoven string quartets, for example, in which the language of the quartets was created to mirror the spiritual insight which Beethoven was attempting to express. We see it, too, in the last sculptures of Michelangelo, in Turner’s paintings, and in the late plays of Samuel Beckett, which strip imagery down to the very shape of the ideas the artist wishes to dramatize.

The fourth verse begins with a sound effect typical of Owen’s poetry: “Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence.” We think of his wonderful poem, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and the line “Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle,” which imitates the clatter of the firing. In “Exposure” the shots do not stutter; instead, they hiss and whistle, rather like the wind. Lethal as the firing is, the bullets are, as Owen says, “Less deadly than the air that shudders black with snow.” It is the elements that pose the most immediate threat. The men may hunker down in their trench against the bullets, but they are not safe from the cold and storm, the “sidelong flowing flakes that flock, pause and renew,” an onomatopoeia which creates a brilliant evocation of the swishing snowfall. “We watch them wandering up and down the wind’s nonchalance,” he observes, “But nothing happens.”

Owen continues his musing on the snow in the next verse, suggesting that the flakes have fingers which “come feeling for our faces.” The storm is deliberate, malicious, a lethal presence with fingers that seek them out more stealithy than the Germans’ bullets. Against this threat, the men “cringe in holes, back on forgotten dreams,” Owen says, and with this he introduces the next major gesture of the poem: home. Dazed by the cold and snow, the men stare “Deep into grassier ditches,” where they lie in the sun and are covered with trickling petals “where the blackbird fusses.” Suddenly the scene is shifted – violently, we may say. We are wrenched from the snow-blown trenches to the petal-blessed field, and the freezing black air is replaced with the fussing of blackbirds. This is the single, central breathtaking movement of the poem: this macabre, miraculous shift from the trenches to home; from the present to the past, and it comes upon us nonchalantly like the flakes’ fingers feeling for our faces.

On the heels of this startling shift, the refrain also changes: “Is it that we are dying?” Owen asks. The answer is, yes, of course they are dying, from the storm if not from the bullets. But Owen’s query has a deeper purpose. The men must be dying if they are gazing into the fields of home. Indeed, the only way they can return is as dead men, as we shall soon see. Yes, they are dying, not just dreaming, and their dying takes them inexorably, ineffectually back home. They know the truth of this: that they must die in order to go home.

Owen makes this explicit in the next verse: “Slowly our ghosts drag home,” he says, admitting that, in fact, they are dying. There they find sunk fires “glozed With crusted dark-red jewels.” The use of “glozed” which conflates glow and glazed is beautiful. It has been suggested that Owen coined this word, but I find it in my linguistic bible, Chambers Dictionary, as coming from Greek, Latin and old French, and being related to the word “gloss.” One of its meanings is “to deceive with words,” and this would fit in an eerie way with the tone of the poem. For the poem is, in a sense, meant to palliate the reader and even the soldiers; to distract them in its verses from the truth which they face across the wire: that death is coming with the dawn, and to escape it, they must return home as ghosts. It is their only hope for survival, which is, in fact, a non-survival. They, too, have been glozed, turned to dying blood red embers, glazed by the snowstorm, glossed over by those who have left them for dead. This is an example in Owen (which we also find throughout Hopkins) of choosing or creating a word ripe with what is called deep structure, or hidden meaning. “Glozed,” as Owen uses it here, is such a word, simmering with intent; cratered with implication and force.

The home fires, tellingly, have sunk, for the men were not there to tend them, and now only coals the color of blood remain to welcome them. Like the men, the hearth, too, is dying. The house, abandoned, swarms with jingling crickets and rejoicing mice; “the house is theirs,” Owen says. But worst of all, the shutters and doors are closed, “all closed; on us the doors are closed.” They have been given up for dead by those at home; all that they were and had and hoped to return to is gone. Unable, thus, to go home, Owen concludes, “We turn back to our dying.” It is all the men have and are and can hope for now in the fingering dark and fear of the salient.
In the opening of the next verse, Owen ruptures the spell of the poem with a stentorian declamation. “Since we believe not otherwise can kind fires burn,” he asks. It is a jarring interruption, wholly out of tune with the rest of the poem, and one feels that this verse could be dropped without great loss. I can imagine that Owen may have considered dropping it, but chose to retain it, and I must ask myself why. The answer lies, I think, in the sudden shifts and jagged uncertainties of the piece. I cannot help but feel that Owen deliberately wanted to step outside the atmosphere of the trenches for a moment, for what can only be called an intellectual rumination. This is more likely when we realize that this is the penultimate verse, setting up in an almost formal, one may even say, literary way, the final lines of the poem.

“Since we believe not otherwise…” It is a difficult assertion to understand. To what does it refer? To the fact that they are dying? To the fact that their homes are closed to them? To the fact that they are ghosts and home has become an echoing dream? Yes, to all of that, I think; but to something else as well. What do they now believe? That question, like “What are we doing here?” imposes itself on the poem. The men do not believe otherwise than that there is nothing left to believe in. They have no belief left at all, having died, become ghosts, dragged themselves home and found their homes abandoned. The Great War which started in England at least as a crusade, has been stripped of belief, leaving the men to wonder what they are doing here? Again that existential query echoes through the poem: What are we doing here? now that there is nothing to believe in.

I think we must approach this verse, which, as I suggest, is at odds with the tone of the rest of the poem, as a sudden intrusion planned as deliberately as everything else in the piece. For just a moment, for a few lines, Owen emerges as Owen, the gentleman officer, the public school graduate, the scholar of antiquities and of literature, to reflect on what all this confusion, misery and fear may mean. And indeed he does so. Home fires can no longer burn, he has said, and he goes on: “Nor ever suns smile true on child, or field, or fruit.” This reminds us of his poem, “Futility,” in which he laments that the sun upon the fields of home which always had wakened the dead soldier boy can do so no longer. “Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth’s sleep at all?” he famously concludes.

The sun, like the fire, is burnt out, its reviving warmth exhausted, as the men are exhausted. There is nothing more to hope for from it, and so, no hope of rebirth remains. “For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid,” he continues. The year is dead, the earth will never be reborn; and the men fear the fact. The love which ought to have animated their homes and kept them alive in its memory, is dead – and with that love, they died. They have nothing left to believe in nor anything left to live for, and so “Therefore, not loath, we lie out here,” Owen declares; “therefore were born.”

This is the ultimate admission of doom: These men were born for death – for this meaningless, fruitless death among the wired brambles and black snow and before the grey armies of the deadly dawn. Yet they acknowledge the fact; they embrace it, “For love of God seems dying.” This statement is double-edged: It means both that their love of God is dying, and that God’s love of them is dying. They no longer can bring themselves to believe that God loves them; neither can they anymore love God. If one is born for death, then why be born at all? Owen is saying here that he and his men are creatures of death, and can look forward to nothing but extinction, like the fire, like the sun, like the spring.

With this, the final verse returns us brutally to the trenches, invoking once again the bitter, killing cold. “To-night this frost will fasten on this mud and us,” he writes, making no distinction now between the men and the mud, since they are nothing but the cold clay of that star which the sun once so fatuously awoke. Then, finally, he turns our attention to the burying parties, “picks and shovels in shaking grasp,” who brave their way into No- Man’s Land in search of comrades, and pause over half-known faces. “All their eyes are ice,” he notes, in recognition of the fact that the dead have themselves become mere elements of the winter. It is a chilling, horrifyingly sudden image of death – not their bodies, not their limbs, but their eyes, open, staring at the storm, and like it silent, frozen. And again he adds: “But nothing happens.”

The refrain, introduced, abandoned like the home fires, brought back to brief life and then forgotten again, returns at last with hollow force. Like a theme and variations in Bach or Beethoven, it is repeated at the end, having thickened and deepened with the revelations which it prompted and which preceded it. It is no longer the idle, ironic observation of the first verse; it is now a general condemnation of the race, for which spring is dead, love is dead, God is dead. It is for this, Owen declares, that “we were born.”

We are reminded of Hopkins’ sonnet, “Spring and Fall: to a Young Maid,” the conclusion of which is the poet revealing to the little girl, Margaret, who weeps at the fading of summer, that death “is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret you mourn for.” In “Exposure,” the revelation is broader: in the salient trench of this black dawn, it is humanity Wilfred Owen mourns for.

Response to a Comment on Abortion

2010-12-29T01:28:00.000-08:00

Recently one of my readers posted a lengthy and passionate rebuttal to my conclusion that abortion is a great moral wrong. I will try to respond to that posting in a systematic way.

First, the idea that a man is not entitled to have an opinion about abortion because he cannot experience pregnancy and menstruation is absurd on its face. All of us have opinions, even strong ones, about things we cannot personally experience. You have never owned slaves or been a slave, but I am quite sure you have opinions about slavery. It is not necessary to have been in combat to have strong opinions about war. One does not need to commit rape or murder to have opinions about them. I could suggest dozens of other examples. And so your first point, which in some ways is the premise of your entire argument, is demonstrably false.

I find your remarks about bloodletting puzzling. I doubt that any man gets through his life without seeing blood, and given that combat has traditionally been a man's role, most men have, I daresay, seen a good deal more blood than most women have throughout history. As for the arduous nature of pregnancy... well, no one doubts it, but no one also doubts that billions of women have chosen it, endured it and even found joy and love in it. In general terms, the fact that something is difficult, even impossible, has never been and ought never to be a rationale for destroying the possibilities inherent it in.

Now we move on to your point about the fetus being unwelcome in a woman's womb. We must ask: How did it get there? Apart from immaculate conception, its presence is the result of sex, and sex, most often, is a choice. You cite rape and violence as counter arguments, but statistics show that pregnancy as a result of such violation is quite rare compared to the number of pregnancies which result from consensual sex. (In cases of violence, there is, I think, the strongest argument in favor of abortion.) Since pregnancy is usually the result of consensual sex, then we must ask ourselves why the sex is welcome but the result is not. If you are claiming that the irresponsibility of the couple is the explanation, then I must ask whether such irresponsibility is resolved or compounded by terminating the pregnancy. In other words, does one make up for an irresponsible act by inflicting death on an innocent child?

I find it curious that you do not question whether the fetus is a child, is human, as is usually done in such arguments, even in the case of your own abortions. I applaud you for this. Given that, we must ask ourselves under what conditions is it acceptable to end the life of a child? You cite poverty, the inability of the parents to pay for the child's upbringing, the unfit nature of the father. I submit that none of these is a rationale for killing an unborn child. Many children, indeed, historically, most children, have been born into poverty and deprivation. If the possibility of poverty and neglect were sufficient cause for abortion, the world would be a much poorer place, lacking many of the greatest minds, talents and spirits which have graced it. I will not bother you with a list of the names of such people; I am sure you can compile one as easily as I. I am equally sure that many of those who read these words were themselves born into poverty, or into dysfunctional families, but that did not mean that their lives had to be ended before they began. And I am sure, too, that they are grateful for the fact.

You then move on to paraphrase the hackneyed argument of couples who are too immature, self-absorbed or fearful to have children; namely, that the world is a hard and evil place. It is hard and evil, as everyone knows, but if that were a cause for children not to be born, then none would be born at all. If we actually believe that the world is such an evil place that innocent children should not be consigned to it, then we must ask ourselves: Do we make the world a better or more evil place by killing those innocent children?

Instead, I would argue that if there is any hope for the world becoming a better place, it lies with children who have been well and lovingly raised, and even with those who have not, but who manage nonetheless to make for themselves lives of dignity and purpose. But no matter how impoverished or loveless a child's life may be, he or she will never have the opportunity to create such a life if the mother cuts it off before birth on the grounds that to do so would be impossible. Life is stronger than death, and even a life which lacks caring and resources in its early years may still create love and richness in adulthood. That is why life is the basic sacred possession of all people, and why life, liberty and happiness are the cornerstones of our society.

I do think that carrying to term and adopting out, no matter how trying for the mother, is preferable to taking the life of the fetus. In this way, the mother avoids the possibility of committing a moral wrong, and, if she genuinely does not want the child or cannot care for it, she still offers it a chance at an authentic and fulfilling life. She, or those responsible for placing the child, have a duty to ensure that the adoptive parents are people who can, in fact, provide for such a life. The fact that they are strangers does not mean that they cannot be capable and caring parents. Further, if you would argue that the conception of the child was irresponsible, then adoption offers the mother the opportunity to rectify that irresponsibility by acting responsibly in the child's interest. Again, life is the primary value, and in choosing adoption, she is choosing life over death and humanity over the prospect of inhumanity. And so, none of these arguments of yours carries any weight, I am afraid.

You then go on to tell us that you have had two abortions. You chose that course because the father would have been a drug addict and deadbeat, which raises the question: Why did you become pregnant by him in the first place? A woman’s inability to choose a suitable father for her child is her fault, not the child’s, and the child should not be made to pay for it. We do not, as a matter of morality, compel others, particularly innocents, to pay the price of our mistakes. You had options, which I need not enumerate here, and you did not take them. All of them would have been morally acceptable, but you chose instead an option which many regard as immoral.

You say, courageously, I think, that you carry the souls of your unborn children with you; you feel their absence and even mark their birthdays. You suggest that they may be in heaven, but if that is true, who put them there, and did she have that right? The world can be a cruel place, but it is the place where our souls find their salvation, where they are tested, matured, where they experience joy, wonder, sorrow, ideas, poetry, music, heartache and love. All this, while it may be challenging, is wonderful, and none of it can be experienced by children who were denied the opportunity to live even before they were born.

You take it upon yourself to suggest that unwanted children or children born to difficult circumstances will live lives of misery and failure, but what gives you the right to make such a judgment? We do not know what may come of any young life, no matter the circumstances of its conception; but if we are to be people of dignity and worth, we must assume the best, not the worst, let alone use our assumption of the worst as a rationale for the killing of children. No evil can come from joy, but great joy can come even out of evil. Life must come first, and then everything may follow, for life is endless possibility. But in choosing abortion we choose death, and nothing can come from death inflicted on the innocent but regret, remorse and haunting, even as, I suspect, you feel it, based on what you have said.

You are correct that children do not ask to be brought into the world, but neither do they ask to be killed before they reach it. You argue that some aborted children would be grateful for their deaths – but, really, who, given the choice between life and death would be thankful to be killed? What child would prefer to be dead rather than alive? What species of rationalization is this? Your assertion is obscene. Just as children have no choice in their conception, so parents have no natural right to choose to prevent them from living. The general principle is that if we are in doubt in matters of life and death, we must always choose life over death, especially in the case of innocents. Otherwise we place death above life, and when we do that, even our own lives are put at risk. For if the innocent can be killed in their mothers' wombs, which of us will be safe outside of them?

You then go on to talk a good deal about hormones and premenstrual syndrome and the inability of men to experience them. All of this, while it is important to women, is irrelevant to the discussion of abortion. However, you neglect to acknowledge one fact which is both relevant and important to men: We are fathers. Our children are just that: our children. They are us; they are ours – our flesh, blood, spirit, future and responsibility. Now, in my essay on abortion among these postings, I concede that since the woman must carry the pregnancy, she must have the prevailing view in this matter; however, hers is not the only view. I for one take my role as a father extremely seriously – it is my first, most important and most sacred responsibility, the source of my claim to humanity and my greatest joy. A father helps create the child, and he is not a man if he does not care for, love, nourish and protect it. Given that, he certainly cannot stand silently by while the mother chooses on her own to kill it. He is entitled to a voice, to an opinion if you will, and to some power in the making of the decision whether or not to terminate the pregnancy in his role as co-creator and co-parent. I would support the right of any man who insists on allowing the child he helped create to have a chance at life even over the objections of the woman. That, it seems to me, should be a matter for the courts to decide, if, indeed, there is a dispute. As for myself: no one is going to take the life of a child of mine if I can possibly prevent it – not even its mother. Such is my duty as a father and as a man.

This brings us to your final point; namely, the “ownership” of the fetus. I submit that, as the fetus is a human being (a point you do not dispute) then no one “owns” it. As a race, we stopped claiming ownership of humans a long time ago – men even shed their blood to ensure that that concept was wiped out of our society. You do not own the child because it grows inside you, nor I because without me, that could not have been the case. It is not a question of ownership, as if the child were a car or a piece of furniture: it is a question of life, of humanity, of what it means for us to be human. And just as we, no matter how welcome or unwelcome we were as children, how impoverished or how privileged, how loved or neglected – just as we have had a chance at life, a chance to live and grow and learn and suffer the exquisite pain of love and heartache, of joy and loss, so should the infants we create, whether intentionally or not, be allowed to have that chance.

For life is what is sacred – not our comfort or convenience or our need to erase an irresponsible mistake. Life, once created by us, must be nurtured not destroyed, if we are to call ourselves human. And that is an aspect of the debate that the pro-abortionists always ignore: not the question of whether or not the fetus is human, but whether or not the parents are. For to create a life from your own lives and then willingly to destroy it runs the risk of negating your humanity. What is in question then is not only the humanity of the fetus, but that of the parents as well. Kill you own child, and how can you regard yourself again as fully human?

I do concede in my essay on abortion that there may be circumstances under which abortion must be considered. In such extreme cases, the decision to terminate the pregnancy must be made only after the greatest thought and soul-searching, for the most compelling, even overwhelming reasons, and as early in the pregnancy as possible.

Some argue that the fetus is not human during the first trimester, and so abortion during that time raises no moral question. To that sophistry I reply: Why is it not morally wrong to terminate a pregnancy on the 89th day, yet it is a moral wrong to do so on the 91st? And why it is morally acceptable at 11:59 pm on the 89th day, but morally objectionable at 12:01 am on the 90th day? Besides, are not all pregnancies different? And so how can one find a dividing line in any particular case, or in general? As an alternative, I offer the presence of the heartbeat as a guideline, though even there I have great reservations. I do so, however, in acknowledgment of the fact that women bear the primary burden of pregnancy, and, in rare cases, abortion may be necessary. What I object to, however, is the fact that abortion is the most common elective surgery performed on women in this country. That, to my mind, is a shameful tragedy which cannot help but have implications for the moral condition of our culture.

You conclude by wondering rhetorically how I can “have this specific opinion about something so personal and detached from you as a man, when all your other points seem to direct your philosophies in a completely opposite direction.” While I am not sure what you mean by this, since something that is personal to me cannot be detached from me, I gather that you wonder how I can have so strong an opinion about an experience (pregnancy) which I will never have and a procedure to which I will never be subjected. I state again: We not only may, we must, take firm moral positions on matters of common interest, whether they are first-person experiences or not; and as fathers, men must have a say in the fate of the children they create.

It has been said that for evil to flourish it is necessary only that good people remain silent. In such critical questions as abortion, none of us - man or woman - can remain silent. But the ground of any decision regarding the treatment of children must always be a moral one, taking into account the fact that it is life that is the fundamental sacred value in our society, and that in matters of life and death, when there is doubt, we, if we are to retain our humanity, must choose life.

Wuerl of Lies

2010-12-26T11:59:00.001-08:00

I just witnessed a sorry Christmas spectacle: the Archbishop of Washington being interviewed by Chris Wallace. Cardinal Wuerl's demeanor can only be described as milquetoast, and his performance as mealy-mouthed.

As one of the authors of the Catholic Church's new guidelines on priest sexual abuse of children, he was asked if this has solved the problem. He replied that it was "one of the Church's great accomplishments." To behave as decent human beings? To prevent the rape of children? To act with basic humanity as an institution? To desist from facilitating the most heinous crimes against innocents? This is "one of the Church's great accomplishments"?! It is as if he were saying: "We no longer officially countenance, encourage, facilitate and cover up pedophilia and that is one of our chief moral accomplishments"!

Not content with this shameful assertion, Cardinal Wuerl went on to characterize the sexual abuse scandal as being a phenomenon of "the past ten, twenty, even thirty years." This is a despicable lie, but one to be expected from a mouthpiece for an amoral institution. Priest sexual abuse of children goes back centuries, has occurred in generation of priests, and continues, doubtless, to this day despite the new guidelines. It has occurred at every level of the Catholic clergy, as was demonstrated by the admissions of hundreds of priests, the collusion of dozens of bishops and cardinals, and the alleged culpability of the present pope. To suggest, as Wuerl has done, that the new guidelines have extinguished the problem is pernicious nonsense. Written guidelines do not change pathological criminal nature. They may force it deeper into the shadows, but if Wuerl actually thinks that the problem has vanished he must be a fool.

The fact, of course, is that he is not a fool. He is a witting apologist for a Church the official behavior of which and the unstated policy of which for centuries has been to enable and to protect child molesters among its own ranks. Wuerl is no better than the official spokesmen for the old Soviet Union, for Cuba and North Korea and Hussein's regime in Iraq: paid liars whose principal job is to protect the criminals they serve so sanctimoniously.

During the course of the interview, we were treated to images of Wuerl's investiture as cardinal at the Vatican. These images reminded me of nothing so much as those of the Nazi rally at Nuremberg, with the clergy ranged in neat rows, each section wearing the colors of its own brigade. And presiding at a defiled altar was the leader of this vast conspiracy to protect child rapists, a man whose own priest- brother stands accused of the abuse of the children under his care, and the pope who, apparently, helped to cover up his and others' bestial crimes.

At the end of Arthur Miller's powerful play, "All My Sons," the main character realizes that every boy who flew in the flawed aircraft he helped produce were his own children, and that he, personally, was responsible for their fate. "They were all my sons," he admits, accepting with that statement his personal guilt in their deaths, and he then goes on to do the only thing a man in his amoral condition can do - he kills himself. In exactly the same way, those thousands of innocents who were molested with the collusion of the members of the Catholic hierarchy were all their children, and each and every one of them should at last take personal responsibility for his guilt.

Swan Song

2010-12-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

The other night I saw the movie 'Black Swan.' I thought it was brilliant; intense, almost unbearable at times, but eloquent and lyrical in its more ethereal moments. Now, I must mention that I love the ballet and have a subscription to the dance series at the Music Center in Los Angeles. But I did not admire the film for that: indeed, while set against the ballet, it was, essentially, a study of a frail and gifted young woman under enormous, even lethal, pressure. And as such, it succeeded wonderfully.

Natalie Portman's performance was, to my mind, perfect. She did something I have rarely seen an actor do: She hewed her acting style so close to her character that at times her acting seemed flawed. But that was in the nature of the character - a woman so fragile and so delicately balanced on the edge between ambition and insanity that her perception of reality became that of the audience. We identify so closely with her that even her most macabre imaginings become plausible, indeed, inevitable to us. We are with her wholly as she navigates the knife-edge of art and madness. If she does not win the Oscar for leading actress, there is no justice in the world.

Rarely does an actor take such chances. Recently, I saw Forest Whittaker do something similar in his guest appearances on the TV series, 'The Shield.' Playing an internal affairs officer brought in to investigate Vick Mackie's corrupt strike force, Whittaker's acting style was so at odds with that of the strike force members that at first I thought he had made a serious error in judgment. But as his role went on, I realized that he had, in fact, deliberately chosen a style intended to throw off the performances of the closely-knit group, because that was the nature of his character. He had been brought in precisely to disrupt the strike force, and his acting reflected the fact. It was a brave and brilliant choice, and it worked beautifully. (To my amazement, he was not even nominated for an Emmy for his performance.)

In much the same way, Natalie Portman's performance was meant to convey the very delicate inner condition of the ballerina, and with great skill and courage she played her part so near to the edge that the effect is mesmerizing. We rarely have an opportunity to identify so closely with an actor, and feel so intimately the depth and power of the performance. It is for this reason that I say that her performance was perfect - the perfect instrument to realize and incarnate her character.

Additionally, the film is brilliantly directed, well-written, and impeccably edited. Darren Aronofsky made choices just as daring as Natalie Portman's; for example, the persistent use of black, white and grey, the use of sound effects to heighten certain moments and gestures; and the tattoo on the back of the rival dancer, Lily, a pair of skeletal black wings, is so close to the edge as to be outre, if not for the strength of Mila Kunis's portrayal and Aronofsky's vision. There are moments in the film of such horrifying intensity as to rival the most frightening shocks of the best of horror films. At such moments, the audience gasped, and some people had to turn away; a young woman next to me even cried at one point. And yet all of this is in service to a tale of the artistry, rivalry and terrible beauty of the ballet, and the crushing pressure of pressure compounded with insecurity, desire and ambition. 'Black Swan' is an act of sustained vision and courage, containing performances of the greatest boldness, skill, and intense delicacy.

The Summing Up

2010-12-03T16:23:00.000-08:00

I am borrowing the title of Somerset Maugham’s memoirs for a catalog of some conclusions I have reached on matters of general public interest. The thought processes behind these conclusions are long and complex and I will endeavor to explain them in any instance for which a reader desires an explanation. Stated here are the simplest forms of the results of those processes. They will, I know, be controversial, but please bear in mind that these ideas are works in process, and I will expand and modify them from time to time. I offer them in no particular order of subject matter or importance, for your interest, your bemusement, and your comments.

1.The concept of god is meaningless, and the conceptual god is the single greatest obstacle to the achievement of spiritual truth. That said, I believe that everyone possesses a soul, a spark of the animating force in the universe that gives rise to life. Given that, every individual, and the race as a whole, has a spiritual destiny. I believe the closest that any religious thinker has come to describing this destiny and the means to attain it is the Buddha.

2.Human personality does survive bodily death, but only for a short time in proportion to the degree of spiritual advancement achieved during life.

3.Abortion is a great moral wrong.

4.Government is the greatest enemy of personal liberty and as such must be limited in size and restrained in power as far as possible. The U.S. Government, as it currently exists, increasingly threatens our freedom, and must be reduced in size and influence in our lives radically. If this cannot be done – if it has grown too large to be reined in – then a second American Revolution is necessary to preserve individual liberty.

5.U.S. Senators should be limited to two six-year terms, and members of the House of Representative, to five two-year terms.

6.Anyone who commits a murder with special circumstances should be put to death. Such convictions should be subject to no more than two appeals, and the time taken by those appeals should be no more than five years. Evil exists, and it is possible for a human being to behave with such evil that he or she forfeits the right to live among us.

7.The United States tax code should be eliminated and replaced with a flat tax (both individual and corporate) of no more than fifteen percent per annum.

8.The United States is gradually becoming a Western-European style socialist democracy in which personal liberty and individual initiative are being replaced with collective welfare and dependency on government. If this process continues to its conclusion, this nation will have ceased to be as it was founded and as precedent generations of Americans have known it. And the last, best hope for the survival of individual liberty in the world will have been traded for comfort, “fairness” and low-risk mediocrity.

9.Public education, and the left-wing agenda which has infused it, are destroying the intellectual, political and cultural life of the nation.

10.Marketing is devouring the arts.

11.In the near future of this country there will be, essentially, two classes of citizens: those who have fostered their own individual intellects, characters and souls through hard work, education, initiative, creativity and ambition, and those who have not. The first class will be quite small and will be increasingly isolated from the much larger remainder who, since their numbers will so outstrip the others, will be at war with them (through jealousy and resentment of their achievements and prosperity), and will eventually drag them down through the corruption and manipulation of the political process. We are seeing this taking place right now.

12.Children must be raised to be rugged individualists if this nation is to survive.

13.There are no excuses for failure or bad behavior, either in one’s own life or in the life of society. For too long in this country we have sought to rationalize and excuse the failure and bad behavior of classes of people, and the result has been a general degradation of our society.

14.Every individual is responsible for his or her own success or failure regardless of circumstances. It is simply not possible to shift responsibility for one’s failings onto others.

15.Love is the measure of all things. How we love and are loved tells everything about who we are.

16.Animals cannot be said to have rights, except the right not to be abused. Rather, humans have responsibilities with regard to all living creatures. How one treats animals is an index of the condition of one’s soul.

17.It is wrong to kill animals for food, except in times of desperation.

18.Every human being should have the right to live the life he or she chooses with dignity and without interference from outside. Identity is the private property of everyone.

19.Humans are bi-sexual by nature; sexual orientation is largely a matter of cultural prejudice.

20.Death is not the end of life, but rather, a return to the essence of life.

21.We should protect our personal liberty as though our lives depend on it, because they do. We must resist the allure of dependence on government and submission to it.

22.Music is the highest form of art, and poetry, being the closest to music, is the highest form of literature.

23.Liberalism is a charming romantic prejudice of youth, and all youths should embrace it. However, with age comes wisdom, and wisdom, by its nature, is conservative.

24.The Roman Catholic Church is a conspiracy against the innocence of children.

25. Love survives death. It has to.

Into the Lists III

2010-12-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

And so I go farther into the lists. My last two posts have prompted a friend to ask whom I regard as the greatest writers who ever lived. I've already dug myself into two holes, so why not a third? In no particular order, but in two ranks, they are:

Shakespeare
Tolstoy
Dostoevsky
Sophocles
Homer

They clearly fall into the front rank. To that I would add:

Kazantzakis
Anton Chekhov
James Joyce
Hemingway
Joseph Conrad
Mihail Bulgakov
T.S. Eliot
Samuel Beckett
G.M. Hopkins
John Donne

So, as Tupac Shakur said, "Holler if ya hear me."

Into the Lists II

2010-12-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

A comment on my post about the greatest artists in the Western tradition, which points out that none of those named lived in the twentieth century (Tolstoy died in 1910 at age 82 and was, essentially, an artist of the late nineteenth century) has prompted me to examine whom I regard as the greatest artists of the past century.

I offer these thoughts, again referring only to the Western artistic tradition, in no particular order. It is, of course, subject to revision.

Sergei Prokofiev
Samuel Beckett
James Joyce
Nikos Kazantzakis
Pablo Picasso
Andrei Tarkovsky
John Coltrane
Rudolf Nureyev
T.S. Eliot
Frank Lloyd Wright

I should add that while I have the greatest regard for these men, I do not consider them geniuses on the level of those in my earlier list. This list will, I am sure, provoke some comment, so please feel free.

Into the Lists

2010-11-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

Someone recently asked me who I thought were the greatest artists who ever lived. It is a fatuous question of course, and nothing but mischief can come from an attempt to answer it. Nonetheless, it set me thinking. If I had to assemble a list of the greatest artists, whom would I put on it? And so, unable to restrain my imagination, I began in idle moments to do so.

I offer my initial response here, in a vaguely descending order, with the absolute certainty that my readers, who are above average in intelligence, culture and erudition generally, will have strong opinions in reply. But here we go, bearing in mind that I speak only of the Western artistic tradition, since I know so little (alas) about the arts of the East. All this, of course, is done with great reservation and the full intention of revision as my mind clears and my embarrassment deepens.

To my mind, the ten greatest artists of the Western tradition are:

Johann Sebastian Bach
Michelangelo
Leonardo
Beethoven
Shakespeare
Tolstoy
Sophocles
Rafaello
Mozart
The Master Builder of the Cathedral of Chartres

So there it is. I invite comments, suggestions, derision. Please let me know who you think should and should not be on my list.

The New Book

2010-11-10T09:00:00.001-08:00

My son has just called to my attention the fact that my new book, "Vice: One Cop's Story of Patrolling America's Most Dangerous City" can now be pre-ordered at a discounted price on Amazon.com.

The link is:

http://www.amazon.com/Vice-Story-Patrolling-Americas-Dangerous/dp/0312596871

I mention this since some of you have been kind enough to ask how they may obtain a copy. Of course, I will be happy to sign anyone's copy (and have Rick Baker sign as well) if it is sent to me with a return envelope.

It will be available January 18. Thanks again for asking.

The Rope Business

2010-10-25T20:57:00.000-07:00

I have just learned that the Washington Post columnist Juan Williams has been fired by National Public Radio. This was done, apparently, because he regularly appears on Fox News, and because he dares to present less-than-far-left views in public. The official of NPR who fired him has said, according to reports, that Williams needs psychiatric care. This sent a chill down my spine.

I did Russian Studies in college and I was for some time a student of the old Soviet Union. Towards its final days, officials in the USSR were in the habit of condemning dissidents to psychiatric institutions on the grounds that anyone who openly disagreed with soviet communism must be insane. Indeed, they maintained that dissension in the USSR was de facto evidence of mental illness. And so we saw leading dissents such as Vladimir Bukovsky and Leonid Plyushch condemned to the silent nightmare torture of the mental institution simply because they dared to disagree with the prevailing ideology. At the time this reminded me, and I wrote of the fact, that such behavior was characteristic of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition, which declared that heresy was proof of demonic possession. Though the theories behind the two systems differed, their methods did not.

When I was a student at the Paris Film Conservatory in the late 70s, I had the privilege of meeting Bukovsky and Plyushch, and I can assert with confidence that they were not insane, despite what the soviet authorities and their servile psychiatrists declared. They were, in fact, erudite, passionate, and open-minded political, artistic and social thinkers who had the courage not only to form independent views, but to express them in a public way. Now, it seems, their example has been followed lamentably in our own country by Juan Williams and NPR.

NPR, which is supported by taxpayer money, has declared Williams to be mentally ill because of his political views. The irony, of course, is that his views, though voiced on Fox News, remain unabashedly leftist, though clearly not so far left as NPR requires. That our taxpayer dollars can be used to censor and malign an honest, sincere, and well-respected journalist is an index of how far out of touch the mainstream media is with the basic decency of the American public. I do not often agree with what Juan Williams says, but in the spirit of Voltaire I will defend to the death his right to say it. That, in my understanding, is the American way.

It is not, evidently, the way of National Public Radio. A recent survey has shown that there is not a single conservative commentator on NPR, and even such a liberal spokesman as Williams has been cast into exile for having the audacity to voice opinions not sufficiently far to the left, and to appear on Fox News. But not content to fire him, the officials at NPR have felt it necessary to declare him mentally incompetent for having insufficiently espoused their prevailing ideology. This is Stalinist behavior - this is the antithesis of what America stands for, and it is what we fought a sixty-year-long Cold War against sovietism to defeat.

But it seems that the Bolshevist spirit is alive at NPR, and that our taxpayer dollars are paying for it. Lenin said that when the communists are ready to hang the capitalists, the capitalists will sell them the rope. NPR is now firmly in the rope business.

Unreal Time

2010-10-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

I recently heard Bill Maher on Larry King's show ranting about the Tea Party. He was spewing the usual hate: that Tea Party members are buffoons who have crawled out of the backwaters onto the national stage, that they are reactionaries, retrogrades; racists with little education and less political acumen. As I was listening, I began to wonder what he might have said about earlier backwoods upstarts.

Imagine now that it is 1860; America is at a crossroads, disaster looms, and so do elections. And imagine that Maher is being interviewed on a proto-television show by a mid-19th century Larry King...

King: There's a lot of talk about a fellow named Abe Lincoln running for president on the Republican ticket--

Maher: Oh, come on! Who can take that stovepipe shyster seriously?!

King: Evidently the Republicans can--

Maher: Well, that should tell you something. I mean, he's a perfect fit for them, isn't he? This guy spent so little time in school, he mistook the back of a shovel for a copybook. The only book he ever read was the Bible and he thought it was a history book. I mean, do you really want a president who thinks that a slide rule is something you post on a playground?

King: Are you saying he's ignorant?

Maher: Ignorant? Hellloooo?! He didn't even graduate from grade school! He tried to get a GED because he thought it meant Get Even Dumber. Just look at the guy -- those gangly arms, that droop-eyed expression, that rag of black hair -- he looks like an anorexic gorilla on a banana binge. And he must be, what?, eight feet tall. I'd say he couldn't play basketball 'cause he's white, but have you seen him? His skin is green! He's got some kind of disease; probably whatever was killing off the elm trees in Sangamon County when he was born.

King: Folks say he's a good orator--

Maher: Come on, Larry! Have you ever heard him speak? His accent is so thick you could put it on your hoecakes - if you ate hoecakes, which I don't but I'm sure he does. He doesn't seem to know any words of more than two syllables, and his voice -- well, all I can say is I've heard asthma attacks that sound better than he does. I mean, Larry... the guy should be running the Hicksville horse and buzzard show, not running for president.

King: What about his views on slavery--?

Maher: Oh, come on! He says right out in public that the Southerners have the Constitutional right to keep their slaves! And that the Congress has no right to take them away!

King: Isn't he legally correct on that, Bill? I mean, the Constitution--

Maher: Who cares if he's legally correct?! Slavery is morally wrong, so what difference does it make what the Constitution says? If a president feels like something's unfair and the Constitution stands in the way, then he should have the power to say damn the Constitution. If Horace Greeley were president - which he should be - he'd go right in and take those slaves away and to hell with the Constitution! Lincoln clings to the Constitution like it was one of his split rails in a Mississippi flood.

King: But Lincoln agrees with you that slavery is a moral issue, doesn't he? Hasn't he said so all along?

Maher: Yeah, but have you heard why he says it? I mean, have you heard what he says about religion? Come on! This guy actually believes that God is involved in running the country's affairs. That God manages things like some Georgia plantation owner. And by the way, those Georgia peanut guys are doing a heckuva lot better job with their slaves than God is doing with his.

King: So you don't accept Lincoln's views on religion in public life--?

Maher: Come on, Larry, what are we talking about here?! It's the middle of the 19th century. I mean, sure, if you think that medieval superstition is a valid political point of view, then I guess I'd have to agree. Look, this Lincompoop character comes straight from the backwoods, right outta some hick town in Kentucky. I mean, he was born in a log cabin that had hot-and-cold running inbreeds. He gives bumpkins a bad name. What else would you expect?

King: He has a lot of political experience--

Maher: If you call two terms in the House a lot, yeah! And remember, he wasn't even re-elected in his own district. I mean, even the boonies turned against him. He lost to Steve Douglas for Senate after people heard him try to debate. Debate? It was more like sedate; I mean, I couldn't keep my eyes open. The only government job he was qualified for was postmaster in his hometown, where half the people couldn't read and the other half thought a stamp was something you did to a roach. And that wife of his... have you seen that broad?

King: Mary Todd--

Maher: Mary Odd, if you ask me. Built like a whale and spends like the sailor that harpooned her. And she's a Southerner! Are we really gonna elect as president a man who's married to some shiksie from Dixie? Her family probably sold ice skates to Simon Legree.

King: Do I get that you're suggesting Lincoln is Jewish?

Maher: C'mon, Larry...anybody named Abraham... I mean, draw your own conclusions.

King: So you don't think Lincoln should be elected?

Maher: Look, Larry, I think the minimum qualification for president should be that you've managed to evolve successfully from a lower species. Which leaves old Abe somewhere in the Jurassic. Come on... with that green skin and those long, bony fingers, he looks like he just crawled out of some mesozoic swamp in search of oxygen. I mean, look at those ears -- they look like gills.

King: So you're saying you'd vote for Douglas?

Maher: I'd vote for my granny's cat before Abe-baboon Lincoln. And frankly, Snuggles has more of a chance of being elected. I mean, Steve Douglas may be bland, boring and bald, but he's a like a fifty-year-old hooker: at least you know what you're in for. Look, Larry, this Republican Party is nothing but a bunch of backwoods baboons. They think we ought to return to the 18th century when men were white and slaves were three-fifths and women were knickknacks and a bunch of old guys in powdered wigs thought that amounted to equality.

King: But if Lincoln is elected, he'd be the first Republican president--

Maher: I may not have an overinflated view of the intelligence of the American people, Larry, but really, they're not that stupid. This whole Rebooblican Party gas attack will blow itself out, and Lincompoop will be gone with the wind.

King: Is that a prediction, Bill?

Maher: Larry, you want a prediction? I'll make a prediction: If Clueless Abe gets as far as the front lawn of the White House, somebody's gonna shoot him. Hell, I might do it myself.

Revolution and Devolution

2010-10-12T19:47:00.001-07:00

As I sit here I listen to one political ad after another. All are cynical, all are lies, all are crude, petty and accusatory, and none addresses the core problems that face our state and our nation. These are not the clear-eyed and noble declamations of statesmen; they are the ramblings and rantings of pedants and poseurs who crave power and the spotlight; these are the insane bumblings of crass buffoons. I recall advice from some comic pundit: Never vote for anyone who actually wants to be elected.

Both parties have failed us. Indeed, there are no longer two parties in America, but only one -- two wings of the same spendthrift, hypocritical cabal of bloody-minded power-grabbers who have little or no regard for the founding principles of this nation or the sacred liberty of its people. They pander to interests and purchase votes at the public's expense and make a mockery of our democracy and the sacrifices our forbears made to preserve it. They are, by and large shallow, venal, puerile, small-minded, cowardly and driven by narrow self-interest and I, for one, am fed up with the lot of them.

Elections, which used to be exciting bouts of ideas and personalities, have now devolved into shoddy spectacles of recrimination, venom and greed. There is only one value now in American politics: to get power, buy it if you can, and hang onto it for as long as possible at any cost and any sacrifice of honesty and virtue. The debates of Lincoln and Douglas would not be tolerated today; indeed, Lincoln himself would be laughed off the national stage by those arbiters of political taste, Leno, Letterman, Stewart and Saturday Night Live. One can only imagine what such hucksters of political bias as Olberman and Matthews would have to say about Abe's gangling back-woodsmanship, his quaint accent and his adherence to a set of principles based on the Constitution, God and human liberty. They would malign and demonize him, bowdlerize his ideas and mimic his traits, and public opinion would be poisoned against him before he had a chance to speak.

Our republic is in very dire straits. Ideas have been trampled by self-interests, the public good is being consumed by petty ambitions, and individual liberty is being sold daily on the auction block of collective submission to the authority of the central state. I was struck to read that a recent poll found that, for the first time in our history, a majority of the American people believe that their government does not represent them. This is shocking, it is troubling, it is a signpost for anyone to read who knows the history of this nation and of its founding. If such is true, then it is time for a revolution - a second American revolution. And it is not just I who say it; the Founders said so, and they had the intellect and vision and courage to bring it about.

What disturbs me most is the possibility that our society has been so numbed by decades of crass political propaganda and so dumbed by a system of public education that fails to teach our children how to think for themselves but, rather, indoctrinates them in the politically correct culture of the time, that our people are no longer capable of mounting such a revolution. Indeed, they know so little now about the first American Revolution that they may not even be able to conceive of it. I hope it is not so.

For if it is, I fear that the future holds for us what it has for so many societies whose citizens sacrificed their freedom on the pagan altar of collective comfort: mediocrity, submission, capitulation to the dictates of the state, economic and cultural bankruptcy, the withering of the human spirit and the death of initiative and creativity - the very initiative and creativity that propelled our civilization to the highest levels of achievement, prosperity and liberty the world has ever known.

What to do about Petya?

2010-10-11T20:15:00.001-07:00

The other day as I was driving to work, the Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony was on the satellite radio. I subscribed to satellite radio, quite simply, because having access to classical music twenty-four hours a day helps keep me sane. Also, the channel provides a text prompt that tells who the composer is, which I find very useful in the case of pieces with which I am not familiar.

As I listened to the symphony I was reminded of several things. First, of how much I enjoy Tchaikovsky's work, of how wonderful the melodies are and what a master of orchestration he was. I cannot think of another composer who uses instrumental colors to create sonic and emotional effects who can surpass him. Second, of what an extraordinary personality Tchaikovsky must have been. It is difficult to imagine living life with such wonderful melodies streaming continually in one's head. But beyond that, I was struck again by the puzzle which Tchaikovsky has always presented to my mind.

That he was an important composer is beyond dispute; indeed, I suppose he must be considered a great composer. And yet, to me, his music is almost entirely devoid of that spiritual dimension which I believe characterizes truly great art. With the possible exception of the Sixth Symphony, Tchaikovsky's music is, to my ear, purely secular; driven by emotion rather than by enlightenment. Only in his last symphony does he attain toward something like spiritual insight, and this, I think, only because the symphony is in large part a meditation on death. That he knew he was near the end of his life, that in some sense he could feel it coming, moved him, apparently, to reach for a deeper truth in his work. And though the Pathetique, as it is called, does aspire to such heights, it nonetheless remains as moving, as emotionally driven, even as excessive, as all of his other work. I consider it to be his most significant accomplishment. The Fifth Symphony, for all that it is thrilling, even bombastic, is a far less erudite work. It is vintage Tchaikovsky, filled with energy, exuberance and pathos, and in listening to it I understand (though I do not agree with) those dilettantes who maintain that Tchaikovsky's music is tasteless and even vulgar.

That Tchaikovsky was an extraordinarily gifted artist is undeniable. He wrote some of the most moving and beloved melodies in Western culture. He produced a large body of work, much of which is of a very high quality, and some of which has become a part of our cultural consciousness. And yet, he is far from the formal perfection of Bach, the intense spiritual insight of Beethoven, the intellectual and aesthetic virtuosity of Mozart, even the powerful and lyrical humanity of Brahms. Where Bach's music, to my way of thinking, reflects something like divine logic, Beethoven's, divine presence, Mozart's, divine intellect, and Brahms', divine humanity, Tchaikovsky's music reflects for the most part his own personality. That he was brilliant, intense, passionate, and sensitive to the point of delicacy is clear. That he was emotionally and sexually tormented is apparent. He was almost certainly homosexual and suffered greatly for the fact. Indeed, it may have led to his death which, some sources suggest, was a suicide ordered by the emperor of Russia to avoid scandal.

But his work, for all that, is universal, accessible, and vastly entertaining. There is nothing in his work that challenges us like, for example, the solo violin Chaconne of Bach or the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven. In another post I tried to make a distinction between art that is entertaining and that which goes beyond entertainment toward genius. Was Tchaikovsky a genius? By my definition, since his work lacks a spiritual dimension, I must say no. I cannot place him in the same category as Beethoven and Bach. Yet... does Brahms belong in that category? Does Mozart?

To my mind, Mozart was undeniably a genius, though I have never thought of him as a spiritual artist. I feel much the same way about Brahms. Yet the scope, depth and quality of their respective canons must be called genius, for its invention, creativity, brilliance, and beauty. And so, I think now that I must speak in terms of levels of genius or kinds of genius, and not of genius as an absolute. Mozart and Brahms, though to me more secular than spiritual artists, are most certainly geniuses. Yes, their work is entertaining on a very lofty level, but so is that of Beethoven and Bach. However, in that it lacks the profound spiritual insights and implications of the latter, I must make a distinction between them. I must say that Brahms and Mozart possessed a kind of genius which sprang from the deepest and highest levels of the human spirit, intellect and experience, and which translated into work that, in Mozart's case, was something like the height of intellect in art, and in Brahms, something like the breadth of humanity.

Having said this, the questions remains: What to do about Petya? I think there is a form of art which, and a kind of artist who, documents the human character more vividly and movingly than others, and to this category belongs Tchaikovsky. Where Beethoven is a spiritual artist, Tchaikovsky is a personal one, drawing on the depths and nuances of his character and translating them into art which is wonderfully entertaining because it touches us so. And it touches us precisely because it reflects so much about us as human beings. Tchaikovsky was a uniquely intense and passionate person, filled with conflict and contradictions, aspirations and disappointments, and in laying bare his uniquely sensual soul, he speaks to that in all of us which is vital and lyrical, but which would otherwise not have a voice. His work is the song of our longings, sufferings, hopes and heartbreaks.

Beethoven reaches for the soul; Mozart reaches for the mind; Tchaikovsky reaches for the heart. Each in his own way expresses and embodies the spirit of genius which, I think now, is not homogeneous, but diverse.

Darkness and Light

2010-09-07T07:35:00.000-07:00

A number of experiences and reflections lately have tended to confirm in me my suspicion that the understanding of life and of the meaning of life lies in the concept of rebirth. It seems to me now that the purpose of living is a movement toward the extinguishing of the self, not through death, which does not have that power, but, rather, through a chain of living during which the soul is presented with the challenge to free itself from life and achieve union with its true nature, which is what we call the divine.

There are two tendencies in the process of living, I think now, which may be characterized as an attraction toward darkness and an attraction toward light. The more we move in the direction of darkness, the thicker and more lugubrious the self becomes, resisting the inflow of and outflow toward the divine. By contrast, as we embrace the light, the self becomes less substantial and the soul becomes airier, more ethereal, more reflective of its essential nature, which we may call love.

Loving may thus be seen as a movement toward the liberation of the soul, a sort of practice, if you will, for its detachment from the self. But loving in a worldly sense can only occur within the context of the self, and, this being the case, loving on the plane of corporeal existence becomes, at best, a metaphor. It is a metaphor for the deepest longing of the soul, which is to liberate itself from life in order that it may achieve its destiny.

I have said heretofore that I believe the soul has a destiny. Now I accept the idea that the destiny of the soul is to grow and mature and rarefy itself through the process of living – reiterated living – until it has achieved the strength and purity to leave the living self – the self of lives – behind. The living self is thus a vessel which may carry the soul towards its fate, which is its re-absorption into that divine essence from which it emerged.

In this sense, death is merely a doorway through which the soul passes, one of many in a corridor that must inevitably lead to its liberation. But how may the soul pass beyond death and make progress toward the fulfillment of its destiny? That much, at least, is clear to me. The process by which the soul progresses in its journey toward enlightenment is one of self-extinguishing through non-wanting.

Wanting is the great impediment to enlightenment. The more we want in life the farther the soul retreats from its destiny. The progression of the soul, then, must be a process of stripping each subsequent iteration of life of its desires. Liberation from desire is the key to the soul’s liberation from the self. In wanting all, we achieve nothing; in wanting nothing we may achieve everything.

In this sense, love becomes a two-edged sword. Loving another human being, as I have said, is at best a metaphor for the soul’s striving for its destiny. But that love may be so intense and blinding that it actually becomes an impediment – perhaps the strongest impediment – to the attainment of that from which its draws its meaning. The meaning of love in life lies in its power to illuminate the meaning of love beyond life; yet if we do not see this clearly, we see nothing but the face of the beloved. And that face is nothing but a self which, itself, is seeking the liberation of the soul.

When we love another, then, we love that for which we and the other are striving: freedom from life and death; the realization of the soul’s true nature. Only in that sense does corporeal love achieve its meaning, as a signpost toward another sort of love which it mirrors and reflects. To love in life is necessary – it is perhaps the surest and clearest way to the attainment of Truth, which is the nature of the soul. In corporeal love, the soul expresses its longing to be free from time and space, and to wed itself to that from which it sprang and in which it finds its meaning – the meaning of life. That meaning is the result of the progress of the soul towards non-life, which is the soul’s authentic life, freed from the continuum of corporeal life and death. It is this that Kazantzakis meant when he said that the purpose of life is the transformation of flesh into spirit.

Death is not in the nature of the soul, nor is it in the nature of love. That is why we speak of undying love and love that outlasts time. These, too, are metaphors, but they indicate an instinctual understanding on the level of the soul of the meaning of love, and its importance as a guide toward non-life. This is why the experience of true love runs so deep: It reaches into the very essence of our beings, not as a reality but as a desire. However, in that love – even the deepest love in life – is a desire, it is an obstacle to the soul’s progress unless it is seen in its true light. Love can become darkness when we fail to understand, finally, that it has no meaning in itself, but, rather, that its meaning lies beyond itself in the striving of the soul to be free of desire. Love thus becomes ironic: it is the deep desire that, having shown us its depth, must extinguish itself.

The extinguishing of love in life is a vital part of the process of achieving enlightenment since love is the deepest of all human desires. It represents a need to move beyond the self, to meld with another, to be free from isolation, loneliness, and the sense of individuated selfhood, and in this it is a perfect metaphor for the soul’s desire to liberate itself from life. Yet in that very statement lies the contradiction: If the soul has a desire to free itself, then it becomes an impediment to its own liberation. The soul may thus have no desires – it must be stripped of desires, even the desire for its own destiny. For so long as the soul lusts after its destiny, it remains a victim of life.

Life is wanting, desire, hunger insatiable; freedom from life, which is the soul’s intent and the meaning of life, is liberation from every form of wanting – even the desire for liberation from life. The soul might, then, become its own obstacle, and as such, the soul must also be extinguished. I think this is what the great mystic Marguerite Porette meant when she spoke of the need to annihilate the simple soul in order to achieve union with the divine. For the soul, conceived of as a kind of entity inhabiting the body is itself a form of self, and that self, though more subtle and elusive than the corporeal self, must also be removed if liberation from life is to be achieved.

To put it another way: So long as we conceive of the soul as a kind of self, with its own character, identity, and desires, then the soul becomes a thing which, like any other thing that we desire or which has desires, can never be freed from life and death. No, I think it is necessary to free oneself even of the concept of the soul – just as I have argued elsewhere that we must free ourselves from the concept of god in order to make spiritual progress. For if we conceive of the soul as a particle or reflection of god, and if god is (as in my view) the single greatest obstacle to enlightenment, then it follows that the concept of the soul must likewise be destroyed.

We are not, as I had previously thought, a concatenation of body and soul, a synthesis of the corporeal and the divine; rather, I think now, we are made of light and dark, which are two forces that, held in dynamic tension, sustain us in the ongoing experience of life and death. If we are to escape that experience, if we are ever to achieve our destiny as living, loving beings, we must move away from darkness toward the light, which glows in our souls as conscience, the ground of our sense of right and wrong – the voice of god within us, as Tolstoy would say – the frail, unfailing flame that illuminates not only what we are, but what we were born and destined to become. It is the light that leads us home.

A Word About Love

2010-09-02T23:14:00.000-07:00

I would like to say a word about love.

To this point in this blog I have not written a great deal about love. Indeed, in my post on religion and spirituality, I carefully avoided the mention of it, since it seemed to me a convenient way of avoiding a discussion of that meaning which gives to life its purpose. I did not understand love – it was a distant, alien concept to me, rather like the syntax of Swahili or the tenets of the Tantra.

Yet now I think that love was simply too close to my eyes for me to see it, as if a fish were asked to describe the sea. It was not a phenomenon apart from me, but rather the element in which I exist, and for that very reason, I failed to recognize it. I had always considered that Truth (with a capital T) was the breadth and depth and meaning of life, and so the purpose of life was to arrive at an understanding of the Truth. Bur recently, that assumption has been shaken, like dice are shaken before being cast upon a felt.

I think that now I see that love is Truth; that love is at the core of that which I had always prized and sought as Truth. But since I did not feel that I was capable of love, it followed that I could not grasp the Truth. And so both Truth and love eluded me, no matter how diligently I searched for them, because I conceived of them as separate entities, distinct and unrelated. I thought that it was possible to reach an understanding or experience of Truth without the presence of love; but that was, I now see, rather like thinking that you can learn to swim on land. You can achieve a theoretical knowledge of it, can master and mime the movements of it, but until you immerse yourself in it, feel the force and freedom of it and risk the drowning in it, it remains a distant puzzle, like a map of stars in Braille.

There is a further realization I have grasped in these past days. I had thought that the attainment of Truth was the key to happiness. But now I understand that, since love is Truth, then love is happiness. Love is happiness. It is a simple enough equation, which, for all my introspection and my erudition, accumulated as carefully as some people accumulate full runs of magazines, I had somehow missed. Love is the key to happiness, and happiness is Truth and Truth is love. It is a circular argument, perfect in its symmetry, and beautiful in its form and implications.

It is not esoteric; indeed, it is within the grasp of every human being who will open his or her heart and make it vulnerable to rebirth or to breaking, daring to run the risk of trusting one’s soul and destiny to another. Whether that being has arms and hands and eyes, or is an idea of God does not matter. I think now it is the gesture of surrender – the willingness to believe and to have confidence that that belief will be productive of Truth – that makes the difference; indeed, all the difference in the world.

I had reached the conclusion that Truth could only be attained in solitude, within the context of a solitary search of mind and heart and soul. I had resigned myself to such a search in preparation for my death. But now I think that that was wrong. Now I believe that, as we are selves, as we are beings in the world, Truth can only be attained in concert with another; that it was for this we were imbued with mind and will and emotion. Emotion is the pathway to love, the first frail steps on the way to love, which is the key to Truth. Emotion is the bait that lures us to love, and mind is the choice to embrace love. In loving we transform ourselves into that eternal substance which is the essence of Truth. We know Truth even as we love and are loved. And in that way, we receive Truth through the opening of ourselves to the bright, deep, terrifying and vivifying possibility of love.

Salt and Sleepers

2010-08-01T23:12:00.000-07:00

I did something recently I have done less and less in the past few years - I went to the movies. Twice. First to see 'Inception,' and then 'Salt.' I had nearly forgotten how pleasant it is to see a film in a theater with popcorn and plush seats and the company of others, and I think I will go more often. Since the movies are something I know a bit about, I suppose I should begin writing my impressions of the films I see. I will start with those two.

I very much admired the work of Christopher Nolan - 'Memento' was a wonderful film - and so I was looking forward to 'Inception,' especially given the lavish reviews it had achieved. And indeed, as with his other work, I found that 'Inception' contained some very promising ideas concerning the relation between the dream and reality, between the subconscious and conscious behavior. I was disappointed, however. The film was, in my view, twenty minutes too long, and the third act was repetitive and muddled. Though I was impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio's performance (he continues to grow and deepen as an actor), I had the impression that Ellen Page was in a different film, and I could not quite understand what Marion Cotillard was trying to accomplish by her characterization, which I found flat and uninteresting.

But my greatest reservation was the amount of violence and number of cliched action sequences in which, in true Hollywood fashion, the bad guys can't hit anything and the good guys never miss. In short, what might have been an absorbing and thought-provoking examination of some very good ideas was lost in the industry's current obsession with mayhem and noise.

'Salt' on the other hand, had no pretensions to anything approaching an interesting idea. It was a silly, wholly improbable mishmash of action-adventure, thriller, and superhero film in which so little of any substance or credibility occurred that it lost, for me at least, nearly all of its entertainment potential. There were so many questions left unanswered, so many holes in the plot, so many improbabilities and impossibilities that I felt embarrassed even discussing them with my companion afterward. Because the bottom line was that none of it mattered. That said, Angelina Jolie acquitted herself well and Liev Schreiber was suitably grave and menacing. The production values were excellent, the computer effects impressive, and the action sequences, while absurd, skillfully shot. But there was far less here than met the eye, and my ringing ears.

What is troubling about it all, however, is the absence of good, intelligent, provocative drama in the theaters. It is no secret in Hollywood these days that the studios are shying away from serious films, preferring action, romance, fantasy, and thrillers instead. In my own fifteen year career I have seen my corner of the business, that is, historically based drama, shrink nearly to extinction. But I believe that there remains a strong audience for drama and ideas on the screen, and I wish it would make itself heard by those in power in the biz.

The Figurehead

2010-07-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

I am increasingly dismayed by the direction this country is taking. The move toward centralization, which began after the Civil War, was enabled by the federal income tax, and institutionalized by the New Deal, is now accelerating toward meltdown at a rate that would make the global warming crowd gasp in awe. The collectivist impulse, which is the pulse beat of leftist ideologues, the socially guilt-ridden, and the chronically underachieving has now acquired a momentum that may be unstoppable. We are, in short, being shoved down the primrose path toward socialism, and soon we may not be able to return.

As I watch this dreary course of events, a thought strikes me about our president. Mr. Obama has quickly proved himself to be both incompetent and corrupt, a true fabrication of the old Chicago-style political machine, but that is only what is evident. What is less clear is the possibility that he may not be a legitimate president at all, but, rather, that he is merely the congenial face and charming mouthpiece of the people who put him in power. We all know now that when Obama reads a speech, he does well, even admirably, but that once off the prompter, he is uncertain, inarticulate, and sometimes just plain wrong. It is this fact, together with his embarrassing lack of experience, that has inclined me to think that he is nothing but an amiable figurehead.

The real owners of power are the far-left oligarchs and ideologues who discovered Obama, molded him, and boosted him into the presidency. They were fortunate that he is young, personable, can be articulate when prepared, is attractive, and ran against one of the oldest presidential candidates since Reconstruction. I continue to think that the socialist power brokers would have preferred Hillary Clinton, but her baggage was such that she had to be left at the station, and the Obama express fitted onto tracks to the White House that she was convinced ought to have been hers. However, Hillary is the most prolific liar in American politics since Richard Nixon, and her strident self-aggrandizement and monomaniacal lust for power made her unreliable in their eyes. In short, the architects of the 2008 victory concluded that, much as they would have liked to seem enlightened by forwarding a female candidate, they could not trust her.

Of course, the fact that Obama is half-black more than compensated for the loss of Hillary's gender in their eyes, and so that, together with his near total lack of executive experience and his pointless rock star appeal, made him the clear choice to run against John McCain in the chum-filled wake of George Bush. Thus far, the far-left cabal has managed to use Obama's popularity (and the fear of being branded a racist if you oppose him) to push through the most sweeping socialist legislation in the nation's history, while at the same time imposing the most onerous debt in its history. But what do the billionaire leftists care? They are fixed for life, and now they can bask not only in their wealth and privilege, but also in the vicarious sense that they are moral to boot. (This is their chief psychic drive: their wealth makes them feel guilty, and so they seek exculpation by using the government to do what they define as good.) After all, did they not provide health insurance to millions (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), did they not take over several major profit-hungry industries (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), did they not, in effect, nationalize the evil banking and finance industry (at the taxpayers' expense - not their own), and have they not begun a full frontal assault on the bogey of free market capitalism - the very same capitalism that enabled them to acquire their wealth in the first place?

This, I fear, was their true agenda from the start: the utter transformation of American society through the destruction of free market capitalism - a system that has provided more prosperity and more freedom to more people than any other in history. Ironically (one might say grotesquely), the far left oligarchs who created Obama hate the source of their own success - the free market and the capitalist system. They want to dismantle it and replace it with European-style socialism, and using Obama as their figurehead, they are well on the way to doing so. The massive debt with which their vast and fruitless spending programs has burdened the economy is not meant to achieve economic stimulus or social justice, but, rather, to bankrupt the capitalist system, leaving America with no apparent alternative but central, collectivist control and a command economy. That command economy, of course, will be dictated by them, through the smiling offices of people like President Obama, who spends much of his time these days insisting that he is not, and his programs are not, socialist. I think he doth protest too much. Or even worse, I suspect he may believe what he is saying, which means that he does not understand what he is doing.

That Mr. Obama is being manipulated by a neo-socialist agenda and may not even suspect it is, of course, the most disturbing prospect of all. But with a pessimism bred by decades of observing the American political experience, I cannot shake the fear that it is true. How else to explain the administration's obsessive need to spend us to the looming brink of bankruptcy, and the president's bland assurances that it is not doing so, or, even if it is, that it does not matter? I am afraid it does not matter to Mr. Obama, but to those who created and control him, it is a socialist wet dream coming true. While to our children and their children, who will inherit this debt and a nation so unlike the one entrusted to us - effectively stripped of the blessing of liberty, the challenge of free enterprise and the fruits of personal initiative - there will be left nothing but nightmare.

Leprosy and Castles

2010-05-11T19:22:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that since I posted about being a survivor of priest sexual abuse, the number of people who comment on my blog has fallen off. This is due, I suppose, to the stigma which attaches to those of us who have been molested as children, the ranks of which I now gladly join. Those who have not been so abused shy away from those of us who have, as if we suffer from some unspeakable disease which they dread to contract. It is a perfectly understandable reaction, and since my postings I have witnessed it first-hand. People with whom I have daily contact now tend to shy away from me, and others, whom I have known for many years, are also falling off. It is as if they are frightened of being contaminated by me, and so they distance themselves for the sake of their own comfort.

This is nothing but guilt and insecurity, of course. Guilt in that many of them, being Catholic, they feel a kind of corporate shame, since they continue to adhere to an institution which has dedicated itself (and continues to dedicate itself) to the violation of the innocence of children. And insecurity, since they cannot help but wonder whether they share in some part the collective blame for the sins of their spiritual mentors.

As I have mentioned heretofore, I worked in a leper colony in the Congo when I was in my early twenties. Among those poor people I felt, at first, an instinctual revulsion, a dread of contact, a loathing of contamination. But this I eventually I managed to overcome. Each morning I went out to the gates of the Trappist monastery in the desert where I lived and met the people - blacks who were almost gray with their disease - and I tended to them as best I could, bringing them food and medicines, and treats from the monastery's kitchen. As I spent more time among them I felt a kind of kinship with them, realizing that they bore on their bodies the same sorts of scars that I bore on my soul. Alienated and stigmatized as they, eventually I came to embrace them, hugged them, laughed with them, taught them, and gave them challenges to perform, set by my own example. For I knew instinctively that I was a leper every bit as much as they.

I still have a photograph of a sand castle which I built with the children of that leper colony. I rarely look at it any more, but I suppose it is one of my most cherished possessions. One morning I went out beyond the monastery gates, where the Trappist monks were not permitted to go, and found a score or more lepers waiting for me. I was in the middle of the desert of southern Congo, surrounded by desperately sick people, many of whom were children, and I felt utterly helpless. Then I asked myself: What do you do in the desert? And so I knelt down and began to do what I had done as a child in New Jersey - at the very same Jersey shore where I was molested: I began building a sand castle.

I worked alone at first, palming up the ramparts and the battlements as I had done as a child. But it was not long before the Congolese children joined in, scooping up sand with their twisted fingers, chattering and working busily around me. Within minutes I found myself surrounded by a dozen of them, all of whom were intent on constructing the biggest, grandest sand castle ever.

Soon the adults, too, were joining in, shouting suggestions in Kikongo (which I had learned), and offering directions, and arguing with one another about how this or that should look, even though none of them had ever seen such a thing in their lives. The energy which the project had generated was as infectious as the disease, and within a matter of an hour or two we had made a sand castle to rival anything on Sea Isle City beach, where the monster, Father Rogers, took the altar boys to molest them.

But the real coup was yet to follow. When the Trappist monks (most of whom were Congolese) saw what I was doing, they came crowding to the gate. Caught up in the sheer childlike creativity of the thing, they began calling ideas from inside the wall, which they were not allowed to cross. Then finally the abbot arrived, a formidable shave-headed monk from Belgium. He watched us for a moment, listened to his monks calling their encouragement, and for the first time, ordered the gates of the monastery to be opened, and allowed the monks to file out to help with the construction. Indeed, he led the way himself, as I shall never forget, plucking a desert grass and "planting" it near the castle keep, declaring, "There is the forest of the seigneur."

At that all the monks joined in at once, and together with the adults and the scab-skinned children, we all set to work at the castle. It was an act of spontaneous creation - a flight of imagination such as I, in my decades since in the arts, have never seen duplicated.

Until tonight and this writing I had never understood the importance of that moment - of that photograph. Though then, at the age of twenty-three, I was deeply set in denial of my molestation, nonetheless I understood on some primal level that I needed to share my grief, to bask, if only for a while, in the innocence of creation with other children who were as poxed as I. And I did. And in their poor, transcendent spontaneity, those leper children in the Congo gave me the strength to carry on for years. Though whether to life or death I still do not know.

But let me tell you this: I learned that day in the Congo that it is no danger to embrace those who are stigmatized - in fact, such an embrace can be liberating. To take in your arms people whom the world rejects, to offer them the simple kindness of human contact, to clasp them to your body just because they are human, may be the greatest saving grace you can offer in your life.

The Catholic Church talks a great deal in its hypocrisy about salvation, but salvation is not a matter of rituals or sacraments - it is a simple gesture of compassion: a saying to those who have been made to feel ugly or exiled that you are like me, that you are wanted, that you are welcomed: that the disease you suffer from has nothing to do with the humanity which we all share. That you are treasured. That you are loved. This is all that we survivors of childhood sexual abuse are asking: Accept us in our common humanity, for we, like you, were innocent once, and we did nothing wrong.

Then perhaps you, too, may be released from the sanctimonious walls which enclose you, to go out and build a castle among lepers.

Food Fun

2010-04-29T18:41:00.000-07:00

I was thinking today about food. In our popular culture, increasingly food is being regarded as a form of entertainment, and this strikes me as odd. Food is sustenance, it is fuel; why it is now being seen as a source of fun is a bit puzzling to me. I do not cook, but I understand the enjoyment of mastering a certain cuisine or just in making a good meal, and I certainly admire truly talented chefs, even if it is only because I admire just about anyone who does well something I cannot do at all. I also understand the social value of food, both in its preparation and in its consumption. But the current fascination with food and its preparation as a form of entertainment is undoubtedly having a deleterious effect on our culture.

Obesity, of course, is a very grave problem in America today. That this should be so is a serious indictment of the state of our education and self-respect. That people should eat to such excess in such numbers speaks of a character deficiency in our population, and a woeful lack of education on the subject of health, nutrition, and exercise. Also, the nature of our diet as a people is nothing short of disgraceful. From an early age we become addicted to fats and sugars, and to the easy practice of consuming junk food. Our children are taught virtually nothing about nutrition, with the result that their health and the quality of their lives are put in jeopardy. Ignorance about what we put into our bodies is nearly as debilitating as ignorance about what we put into our minds and souls.

But I suppose what bothers me the most about this cultural fascination with food is what it says about our attitude toward that which we eat. The other night I had steak for the first time in years, and, frankly, though it was filet mignon, I found it disgusting. The very idea of eating the seared muscle and flesh of a dead animal is off-putting, and, not having tasted it in so long, I found the flavor horrible. Yet in our current fascination with food as fun, the rendering, cooking, and consuming of animals is being raised almost to the level of a cult.

This cult of animal eating cannot help but have a dehumanizing effect on our culture. I have never been a vegetarian, though I have tried to avoid any form of red or pink meat for both dietary and ethical reasons, but it cannot be denied that a meat-free diet, at least for adults, is a healthful thing. Nature provides us with more than enough vegetable and fruit products to maintain a nutritious diet, yet we continue not only to raise animals for slaughter, but now, increasingly, to treat their flesh and organs as sources of entertainment. Someone said that you can judge a society by how it treats its animals. If that is so then we stand convicted, since our attitude toward animals increasingly is that their deaths are a source of fun.

I have read that other countries will not import chickens from us because of the inhumane way in which we slaughter them (as if slaughter could assume a humane form). And I am as familiar as everyone else who cares to learn with the harmful effects of hormones and diseases associated with animal food products. Thus, I think that the combination of ethical and dietary arguments against at least an excessive use of animals as food are compelling. I am not suggesting that we all become vegans (in fact, I find such extremists tedious), but I do side with the argument that we ought to rely less on animal products and more on vegetables and fruit.

I have sometimes been asked whether I think that animals have rights. I can think of no right that an animal might possess except the right not to be abused. If it were possible to use animals as sources of food without abusing them, then I suppose the ethical argument against animal eating would be weakened or disappear altogether. I do not object to the use of animal products such as milk and eggs, for example, but I draw the line at slaughter, and the consumption of muscles, flesh, and organs. This, I think, is taking us in the direction of inhumanity. And humanity, even in the best of societies, is in chronically short supply.

Courage and Capitulation

2010-04-24T12:15:00.000-07:00

I suppose on some level I started this blog in order to make it possible, perhaps inevitable, for me to write the last two posts. My experience of priest sexual abuse is a demon that has haunted me my entire adult life. Until my heart surgery a year and a half ago, I was able, more or less, to keep it at bay, though it was always moving as motivation just beneath my conscious behavior like a river rumbling in a cavern.

Some people have commented that my surfacing the truth has been an act of courage on my part. I do not see it that way. It has been an act of capitulation. My heart surgery weakened me, physically, mentally, and spiritually, to the point where I could no longer restrain the truth of the molestation. That, I think now, is why I dreaded the surgery so much -- not for what it would do to me, but for what it might reveal about me. I felt instinctively that it would be impossible to undergo such a procedure and emerge from it the same person as I had been before. I was right. I viewed the coming surgery as a form of rape, as I wrote at the time. And to me it was a second rape, because it stripped me of the defenses, no matter how rigid or tenuous, which I had built up against the truth.

And so I have capitulated, finally, before the power of the past. I had always counted myself a strong person; now I know where that strength came from and why it was necessary. It was not a noble strength but a desperate one. I have always regarded courage as one of the highest virtues and demanded it of myself and others. But it was not courage I was evincing; it was a reflexive effort of denial and self-preservation.

You cannot call a person courageous when he fails to recognize danger - only when he confronts and overcomes it. The soldier who is too drunk or stupid to understand the peril he faces is not a hero; he is a self-deluding tool of circumstance. Courage is grounded in reality - a sober assessment of circumstance - and expresses itself as a conscious choice not to be intimidated by it. I never made such a conscious choice, indeed, all my choices in so far as the memory of the molestation was concerned, were unconscious, or semi-conscious at best. They were not acts of courage any more than finally surfacing the memory now is one. They were acts of capitulation.

In the months following the surgery I insisted to people that I wished I had not had it done; that I wished I could go back and undo it. I was quite sure in my mind that I meant this. For even then I could feel the beams and braces of my dam of denial coming apart. I remember telling a doctor acquaintance of mine that, if I had it to do over again, I would not do it. He then explained to me clinically and in some detail what it is like to die from congestive heart failure, concluding that it is not "a pleasant way to go." Even as I listened, I felt deeply that I would still have preferred to die. "At least the death would be mine," I told him. Because the alternative, which was muscling itself upon me even as I said it, was worse: an admission that the molestation also was mine, a part of me, a truth of my life. So, as I have said earlier, the survivor prefers death to life.

I suppose that if I had never had the surgery I might have continued to find the psychic resources to resist the truth. I might have lived out the rest of my life on the same terms on which I have lived it heretofore. I see now that that might have represented some form of peace. For not knowing the truth, or not allowing yourself to admit the truth, is a form of peace - the peace of the anesthetist. I might have continued to endure with the numbing mask of denial on my face, just as I endured the surgery with the anesthetist's mask. Yet... I suppose it is always necessary to reawaken at some point. But to what reality? To what self-knowledge? To what truth?

Perhaps that is a valid way of looking at the relationship between daily life and truth: Life is a kind of sleep, and truth is an awakening. Truth tears us from the solace of conscious sleep and thrusts us into a reality beyond quotidian reality. Truth puts an end to the daily dreaming of life, and demands that we face, consciously and with courage, that which ultimately is real.

I suppose the choice for me now, as for all survivors, is to decide that while the molestation belongs to us, we do not belong to it. While it is a part of my life, it is not my life, nor even the prime motive in my life. While it is a fact and a force, it is not my fate. I did not fight then; I must fight now. I cannot let the demon devour me; truth does not destroy... in the end, I still believe, it liberates.

Writing the Legacy

2010-04-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

It took me several years to reach the point where I could write the post of last night. When I had finished it, I went to bed, but I could not sleep. I got up, came back to the computer, and read it through again. When I had done so, I found myself shouting at the top of my voice, "I want my life back! I want my life back!"

That is the legacy of priest sexual abuse; indeed, I suppose of any sexual abuse of a child. When a child is molested, he or she is stripped of the life he or she might have had, or, as I suppose romantics would say, ought to have had. For when your innocence is torn from you as a child, you are deprived of the foundation upon which a normal, healthy adult life must rest. Without that foundation of innocence, trust becomes impossible, the exquisite risk which is intimacy becomes impossible, the attainment of balance, insight, self-awareness becomes impossible, happiness becomes impossible. When innocence is ripped from a child's life, life itself, in any natural or authentic sense, becomes impossible.

What you are then compelled to do, assuming that you have the will to make any sort of life for yourself, is to engage in a continual struggle to build something approaching a life from out of the ruins of your psyche. T.S. Eliot said, "Consequently we rejoice, having to construct something upon which to rejoice." This is what the victim does: He builds an artifice resembling an authentic life out of his fear, shame, and imminent despair, and if he is clever and if he is strong, that life may fool himself and others. And so as a victim, your life becomes a fabrication, an artificial synthesis of hope and suspicion, of fear and desire, of anger and need, of truth and denial. Your life becomes a tortured contradiction. It becomes a lie.

That was what I realized, beginning five years ago when I first suspected the truth - that my life, all of the life I had been forced to live, had been a lie. For the entire foundation of my existence from the molestation to that point, had been a sustained, debilitating effort of denial. Denial of the pivotal truth of my life. Denial bred by shame and fear. Denial wattled together from disgust, mistrust, self-loathing, and a desperate need to escape the realization of what had been done to me. During decades when I should have been discovering myself, I was, in effect, hiding from myself. When I should have been gathering the rays of illumination and focusing them on my identity, I was, instead, slipping among shadows, trying to avoid any sudden, chance confrontation with a mirror image of my past. All of my energies, or nearly all of them, were devoted to avoiding the truth even as I carefully cultivated the writer's ethic that truth was the highest, the purest, the most beautiful of realities. But my reality was that I was terrified of the truth - the truth about what had happened in that summer of 1962.

And so my life became an elaborate, seething, festering contradiction, in the throes of which I struggled to do good and be good, while at the same time believing I was evil and corrupt and deformed, and, because of this, inflicting great harm on others. I have had dozens of relationships with women, and not one has endured. Rather, in those relationships I caused much needless pain and heartache to those women to whom I tried to become close. But because of the molestation, proximity was threatening to me. Would she find out? Would I have to admit to her? Would I have to admit to myself? And what if she, taking advantage of the nearness and the confidence between us, turned on me and abused and defiled me as the molester had done? And so, every woman I hoped to love and tried to love inevitably took on the dark, threatening form of the priest in his black cassock, and out of fear of a repetition of the molestation, I shoved them all away.

Only in that way, I instinctively felt, could I protect myself from a second molestation. This, too, is a legacy of sexual abuse of children: The child develops, in later life, a manic need for control, which translates inevitably into a need to inflict pain on anyone who threatens to come close. And so the abused child lives a life of isolation bred by fear, and of loneliness inspired by betrayal.

With the perverse logic of suppressed violation, the victim wants to be betrayed, wants to be abused, since they are the formative facts of his consciousness. Consequently, he seeks out, and even demands, that he be betrayed, abandoned, reduced to bitter isolation, forced over and over into regret, remorse and shame, for such are the emotional and spiritual conditions under which he has built his life, in the absence of innocence and trust. To put it simply: Since his life is based on the abuse, he seeks out abuse in every relationship, finding it if he can, manufacturing it if he cannot. And this is one of the cruelest residues of abuse: Survivors struggle most violently against those who most wish to love them. We recoil at the risk of intimacy; we feel threatened by the revelatory power of love.

Much of my behavior as an adult was driven by a profound sense of betrayal, though until five years ago I could not have said why. But somewhere deep inside me, I felt that the world had failed me, and, worse, had tried to destroy me. That all that I most valued and believed in and trusted had recoiled on me like some hideous snake and sunk its poisonous fangs into my flesh. That for some reason which I could not begin to fathom, good had suddenly become evil, and singled me out for punishment. The world was turned upside down and inside-out, and I was utterly helpless either to understand it or to protest it. I don't deserve this, I kept telling myself; I'm a good boy. Why is this being done to me? I haven't done anything wrong. I don't deserve it.

The result of this was anger, a deep, unquenchable fury at the world that grew over time, and which I channeled into political radicalism, anti-social attitudes and demeanor, habitual egoism, haughty intellectualism, philosophical abstraction and detachment, and into my writing. I think that my writing talent has always been driven by a sense of betrayal, of disequilibrium, of a profound need to put things right, or, failing that, to denounce them as incurably wrong.

Someone once said to me, "You have always been drawn to misery." That is true. I sought out misery in the world in a vain effort to sooth the pain with which I was living twenty-four hours a day. I became fascinated by war, by prisoners of war, by the sufferings and sacrifices of World War I pilots; I went to the Congo to work among the desperately poor, and did, in fact, work with lepers and the dying. And I became obsessed with death. I remember one of my college professors remarking to me that it was odd for someone so young to be so focused on death. But it is not odd for a survivor of sexual abuse - it makes perfect sense. Once stripped of innocence - and stripped by a man whom one has been taught to trust and revere, almost to worship - death begins to seem an attractive alternative to living with guilt and shame and the fear of exposure.

The survivor longs for death, both because he feels in his shame that he has deserved it, and because it is the ultimate antidote to the achievement of insight. Shakespeare said, "And death once dead, there's no more dying then." The threat of the revelation of the truth of molestation looms within the victim's subconscious as a kind of death - to encounter the truth is, in some way, to die. To die to the life which one has been forced to construct, to die to the lie which one's life has become. And so I longed for death, courted it, occasionally sought it, as an escape from the truth about myself.

All my life since the molestation, I have wanted to die. I still do. But all my life, I have found reasons, sometimes enduring, sometimes ephemeral, to remain alive. With the example of my own mother's suicide before me, I kept telling myself that by dying I accomplished nothing, whereas, in living I might yet find some form of peace. And so, staggering from rationale to rationale, I remained alive. Only my children provided me, finally, a solid footing for continuing to live. Only they brought happiness into my life. Yet even they, at times, were nearly not enough. Death became my only hope for salvation, and I studied it and worshiped it and made love to it over and over. In fact, every intimacy I experienced with an adult wore a mask of death, and the prospect of losing myself in another person, which is what love is, was fraught with the possibility that I might have to loosen my grip upon the lie I was living. And so, out of fear of discovery, I chose the lie over love.

The victim of childhood abuse, above all, is angry. Angry at what happened, angry at the failure of those close to him to protect him (his parents and guardians), angry at the failure of the world to exact justice - and this is the subtlest and most difficult form of anger to grasp - angry at himself for having absorbed the molestation and yet continuing to live. The very fact of his existence becomes a source of rage for the survivor: I ought not be alive and yet I still am. I do not have the courage to die, yet I ought to be dead. I am betraying myself just as I was betrayed. Life itself becomes a kind of continuation of the molestation. And so you begin to think of yourself as a coward, simply for continuing to live. Life becomes an indictment - every day that you go on living is more and more proof that you have failed in your principal duty in life - to die. And so you long for the death you cannot have, just as you mourn the innocence you have lost and will never recover.

You mourn that loss every day, every hour, with every breath, with every lost love and pointless hope. And so you come to hate yourself, not for anything you have done, but for what you have become - a liar and a coward, betraying himself simply by being alive. And the whole time, of course, you are tortured by the fear that what you suspect may be true, but have not the strength to face. The survivor shrouds himself in a self-imposed exile and a self-sustaining ignorance. And why? Just to be able to go on living. But the irony, of course, is that that living is a form of self-molestation. In this way, your whole adult life becomes a continual re-enactment of the crime committed against you as a child. You never stop living the rape.

Fear, death, shame, loneliness, betrayal, self-hatred, isolation... these are some of the legacies of childhood sexual abuse. And guilt. My God, your whole life, or whatever you manage to construct as your life, is shot through with guilt like a corpse before a firing squad. As a child, when some tragedy occurs, your natural instinct is to blame yourself. I must have done something wrong to be punished in this way, you tell yourself. It must have been my fault. I must have deserved it. And in the case of priest sexual abuse, this guilt is compounded a thousand times by the indoctrination of Catholic education which drums into your head the belief that you are a sinner, filthy and corrupt with sin, who deserves no happiness in this life, and, most likely, will face damnation in the next.

This represents yet another form of the Church's abuse directed at children. It is what I call spiritual terrorism. From my earliest childhood, I was taught, day in and day out in Catholic school, that I was evil, corrupt, a sinner unworthy of salvation and the sacrifice that Christ made for my sake, a hapless soul destined for an eternity of torment in hell... unless I submitted to the authority of the Church. Only through the Church, and its dogmas and its rites and its clergy, could I ever hope to avoid the endless suffering which awaited me as surely as my death awaited me. But I was a child - a tender, sensitive, imaginative child - and in my imagination, these threats became realities. Realities that shaped my thinking, my character, my whole attitude toward life. I absorbed the teachings utterly; I became their product. I was, in some sense, the ideal Catholic school child - a perfectly achieved artifact of the Church's monstrous, uncaring arrogance.

I was taught to hate and distrust life, to scorn happiness, to long for the afterlife, for which only the Church could prepare me. And so I surrendered my soul to the Church, and, in that surrender, my body also became vulnerable. Vulnerable at a time when all children are deeply vulnerable - at puberty. And at that moment, there came the priest to take advantage of the fact (having been transferred yet again in the wake of his pedophilia), and the bishop to cover up for him, and the Vatican to protect them both. The entire, massive structure of the Church, with all its dogmas and its wealth and its solemn rites and its red-robed hierarchy, was in that summer of 1962, ranged against me in a conspiracy to strip me of my innocence.

Was it done consciously? Of course not. But was that the effect on me and on tens of thousands of victim-children like me? Yes. As Solzhenitsyn says, in comparing communism to fascism: It doesn't matter who's holding the gun or why, the effect is the same: a nine millimeter bullet in the back of your head. I will not say that the Catholic Church was intended as a conspiracy against childhood; of course it was not. But it became that through the culpability of its clergy and hierarchy, who used its dogmatic demand that Catholics submit absolutely to its authority or face eternal damnation, in order to place children in a position in which there was no risk of exposure to the criminals. As a child, I never felt for an instant that I had the right to resist or to protest my molestation, and neither would my parents had they known of it.

Denouncing the Church, accusing it of evil, was simply out of the question, at least among that generation of Catholics. Was not the Church founded by Christ himself? Was not the pope infallible? The Church was incapable of error, and the clergy were Godlike creatures who were seen as being above all moral culpability. And so children were made to submit and suffer in silence, and their parents, if they knew or suspected, would rather have sacrificed the innocence of their own children than challenge the sanctity of the Church. In this way, the criminals got away with it - priests and bishops and popes - for decades, for generations, for centuries. Now, at last, that brickface of silent submission is being broached.

Such is the truly pernicious nature of the sexual abuse scandal: In their bestial acts, the priests were, in effect, confirming the worst fears of Church dogma imposed brutally on the minds and hearts of Catholic children. That is why the priest molester tells the victim (as I was told) that you must submit to this, that it is God's will, that it is for your own good. All my life I have detested and fought against that concept - of someone doing something for my own good. All my life I have rejected that suggestion - rejected it with revulsion and contempt. Not until five years ago did I understand the reason why. It is the phony rationale of those who would usurp and strip you of your life, your integrity, your free will; whether mouthed by politicians or priests, it is the mantra of the molester. That was the rationale the priest used in molesting me, and, being a good Catholic child and an exemplary altar boy, I believed him and submitted, and then buried the experience in my psyche, when any normal, right-raised and right-thinking child would have resisted, rebelled, fought back. Or, having been forced to submit, would have at once informed his family and started the process of reprisal. I did none of these things, so conditioned was I by Church teaching to submit unquestioningly to the dictates of the clergy, even to the violation of my body and my soul.

This is what I mean when I say I have concluded that the Catholic Church is a vast conspiracy directed against the innocence of children. Catholic education indoctrinates children to submit absolutely to the authority of the Church and its clergy using the most vile threats. And then that same Church exposes those children to the hideous appetites of pedophile priests - many, many priests, and not just a tiny minority as the Church is now trying to claim. I say again that it is my belief that fully a third of the Roman Catholic clergy have either molested children or have actively covered up the molestation. The abuse of children, not only sexual, but psychological, emotional, and spiritual, is an integral part of the institutional fabric of the Catholic Church. It is an evil institution, which should never have had, and should not now be allowed to have, the care of little children. The scandal is much wider than we know (perhaps than we will ever know), and now, finally, we are seeing proof that it goes much higher than we ever suspected. The current pope was, I am quite certain, himself involved in protecting pedophile priests, and for that he and his minions ought by any civilized norms to be made to suffer the consequences.

Yet he is not, the bishops are not, even many of the priests (like the one in my case) are not. They were, and continue to be, allowed to evade the law and justice. Only the victims are made to live with the consequences of the molestation. And we live with them every day, and often dream about them at night. And when at last we permit ourselves (or simply lose the strength to forbid ourselves) to recollect them, our lives are suddenly stripped naked in the light of truth, much as we were stripped naked by our molesters. And that is another aspect of the horror of molestation: After years of destructive, debilitating efforts to deny the truth, the inevitable recollection of it becomes, in effect, a second molestation. We are raped anew. The truth is every bit as crushing as we suspected it would be - every ounce as devastating.

When I first realized consciously what had happened to me, my immediate uncontrollable reaction was to vomit. Then, like a tsunami of realization, all the meaning of the molestation began crashing over me in wave after wave of revelation - why I had felt so isolated all my life, why I could not form bonds of intimacy, why I felt so alone and lonely and alienated, why I had never found happiness, why I had lived with thoughts of suicide. Even little things about me began to make sense. Why, for example, I obsessively buy flashlights: I am afraid of finding myself suddenly in the dark, without the ability to enlighten my surroundings. Yet I had lived in the dark for forty years, fearing precisely the prospect of enlightenment, all the while cluttering my surroundings with symbols of the means to attain it.

So much, so very much about the way I had lived and felt and thought suddenly began to make sense. It was as if I had been groping in some vast unlighted natural history museum for most of my life, when suddenly the lights snapped on. All at once I could see dioramas framed upon the walls, each lighted in its own lurid glow, depictions in miniature of scenes from my life; in the center, the carefully assembled skeletons of my relationships, grotesque, gaping fossils of failure; and not only that, but other people in that light, and even the floorboards and ceiling tiles and exits and extinguishers hanging on the walls. The revelation was blinding in its scope and intensity and detail. I am still reeling from it, still trying to take it all in.

That is why I am writing these posts - perhaps they will help me to make sense of all this new insight; perhaps they will help others as well. I have only just begun. As a survivor and as a writer I feel that I have a moral duty to do this - to give a voice and a face and viscera to this terrible truth for the sake of everyone who has suffered it. I have been blessed with the ability to put truths into words - that is what a writer does, it is what he is. And that is what I will try to do, for my sake, and for the sake of all those others - my brothers and sisters in spirit - who understand in their flesh and in their souls what I am now striving to put into words.

Coming Clean

2010-04-04T22:12:00.000-07:00

I think it will come as little surprise to those who have read my postings carefully that I am a survivor of priest sexual abuse. The incident occurred in 1962, when I was an altar boy at Saint Carthage parish in West Philadelphia. The priest in question was Father Francis P. Rogers, who, ironically, was a high school classmate of my father. I will not go into the details, which remain indistinct in my memory to this day, since I suppressed any recollection of the event for over forty years. How it emerged is as follows...

When the priest sexual abuse scandal first broke into the press, I found myself unduly fascinated by it. I read everything that appeared and followed developments closely. Finally, I began to hunt for the confessions of priests in my parish, and then, about five years ago, I found that of Rogers, who described how he had molested an altar boy at his family's home in Sea Isle City, New Jersey. As I read the confession, I gradually realized, to my horror, that the altar boy was me. When I finished reading, I vomited.

Rogers' house in Sea Isle was where he took the best of the altar boys for a reward every summer. That summer of 1962, he took me and some of my friends. How many of us he molested there I do not know, and as I have said, I would not even admit what had happened to me for over forty years. Nor could I recall it in any detail. Though I had had a visceral sense that something had happened, I could not or would not allow myself to remember what had happened. Then, as I prepared for my heart surgery, which occurred January a year ago, I began to have flashbacks - brief, searing re-enactments which were like needles jabbed into my brain. As the surgery drew closer, the flashbacks became more vivid and prolonged, and for the fist time in four decades, I saw again the beach house, the screened porch, the priest, and heard his voice telling me that this was a Godly thing, and that it was for my own good.

Finally, when I was recovering from the surgery, I lay in my hospital bed fitfully unable to sleep. The night nurse came to check on me and found me nearly delirious.

"Do you know where you are?" she asked, as they are trained to do.

"Yes," I replied. "I'm in New Jersey."

"Do you know what year it is?"

"It's 1962."

"No, you're in Los Angeles in 2009," she gently insisted.

I growled at her, "No... I'm in Sea Isle City, New Jersey, and it's 1962." She asked what was happening. "I'm with a priest," I answered in a voice I scarcely recognized. She asked what he was doing. "He's raping me."

Alone in the darkness of that hospital room I was back - back there in that time and place, though I knew perfectly well where I really was. But my current reality was being overwhelmed by my childhood one - the present was utterly irrelevant; only the past was real. I could no longer hold the dam against it - it flooded over me. I was back there.

After my recollection, I went through the usual experience of shock, self-revulsion, bitter recrimination, guilt, and finally, of the desperate effort to convince myself that I was not to blame. I am still going through that phase.

Rogers was a monster, a criminal of the worst sort, preying on the children entrusted to his care. But equally criminal were the pastors and the bishop who knew of his crimes and covered them up, moving him from parish to parish so that he could avoid exposure and prosecution, and so that they could avoid scandal. And in this way Rogers' path crossed mine - a twelve-year-old child. The bishop who facilitated his crimes was Cardinal John Krol, widely regarded as a prince in Philadelphia, and by some, even as a saint. But he was as filthy and vile a creature as Rogers himself, making it possible for the so-called priest to sate his vicious and disgusting appetite on the innocent children of Krol's archdiocese. I do not believe in hell, but Krol did, and I am certain that, if he was right and I am wrong, he is luxuriating in its fires as I write.

Krol made it possible for Rogers to molest me, and, I am quite sure, to molest other altar boys at Saint Carthage and other parishes in that house of horror in New Jersey. If any of those boys read this post, I earnestly hope that they will get in touch with me so that we may help one another to sort out what was done to us at that most vulnerable moment in our lives.

Among the many ironies of this story is the fact that when Cardinal Krol came to our parish to administer confirmation, I was chosen to bear his miter, the gilded shepherd's crook which is a symbol of the bishop's office. At one point, while I was clutching it, my hands wrapped in a golden shawl as I was not considered worthy to touch it with my bare hands, Krol approached me and said, "You are a very serious boy." Perhaps he knew, or did not care, that I was so serious because I had been raped by a priest whose crimes he had enabled and was even then in the process of covering up.

Many years later, Rogers confessed to the Philadelphia District Attorney. He was never prosecuted nor even punished. Instead, he was allowed to retire. And where did he retire? To his family's home in Sea Isle City, the very site of his crimes, where he died several years ago. He abused me, stripped me of my innocence, and died, so far as I know, peacefully in bed.

Do I blame the Church? Yes. Do I blame its hierarchy? Yes. As I read today the statements by Catholics who declare that they will not abandon their Church even in face of these mounting scandals, I cannot help but feel that they would do exactly as Krol and the other bishops did: They would sacrifice the innocence of children rather than admit that their religion is a lie and their faith is a fraud. Such is the evil of which the true believer is capable.

I will have more to say about my experience, now that I am coming clean. For, most of my life, I have felt dirty, defiled, a leper among my fellow men. When I worked in the Congo as a volunteer after college, I served a time in a leper colony. Among those Biblical sufferers I felt a kind of peace, a kind of release. They bore on their flesh the same scars as I bore on my soul, and for that I found them pathetic and beautiful. I had no qualm about handling them, even closely, since I was, myself, a lifelong leper, and in their company I experienced a kind of kindred. I was a brother to them in a way I have never been to my own brother. Those lepers and I were brothers in spirit.

I cannot write much more on this subject now, since it is for me a catharsis even to admit it. I cannot help but feel stigmatized, and ashamed. But I have tried to speak of it to others, without much success, and though it occurred over forty years ago, it is still very much a part of the fabric of my mind. Indeed, since I admitted the possibility to myself only five years ago, it remains an open wound, with which I have to deal. I am trying to deal with it now, tonight, this evening, and this admission is part of that process.

Let me say only that the experience of having been abused as a child by a man whom I was taught to believe was a representative of God on Earth was devastating to me, as it must be to all my fellow survivors. Since that time, when I had my childhood innocence torn violently away, I have been subject to chronic depression and thoughts of suicide, which have dogged me my entire adult life. I have found it difficult, indeed, almost impossible to form a bond of trust with any adult, I have always despised and mistrusted authority figures, I have had dozens of failed and destructive relationships with women, including failed marriages, I have felt alienated, isolated, alone and sad, as if I were a creature from another planet exiled in a strange land, as if I did not deserve the company or solicitude or understanding of anyone on Earth.

Happiness has been an ongoing crisis for me. I have never been happy in my life, except in the company of my children, who alone can give me happiness. Indeed, the only people I have ever been able to trust are children, over whom I exercise a doting care which some have called over-protectiveness. But I know what kinds of predators lurk out there, and what heights of authority protect them, and so, of course, I am protective of my children. I would not wish on them or any innocent the bestial abuse to which I, a child, an altar boy, a tender, trusting acolyte of God was subjected. And so I have labored ever since I gained the sacred state of fatherhood to protect my children from harm with a solicitude driven by the darkest form of human experience. I love my children dearly, and I do not want them to come to harm, as I came to harm at the filthy fingers of a consecrated priest of God.

The molestation to which I was subjected changed my life forever, as it cannot help but change the life of anyone who falls its victim, especially since the molester, a priest, is held out to us as an example of virtue, a paragon of trust, a repository of God's intent for us on Earth. And when this creature proves to be a monster, a hellish, heartless fiend, how are we to reassemble the ruined fragments of our violated lives?

I have done the best I could. I have created a career, I have raised four extraordinary children, I have tried my best, within the shattered mirror of my consciousness, to do good and live a purposeful life. I have striven to help those in need who came to my attention; I have been as charitable as I could. But through it all, happiness was closed to me as a possibility, and true intimacy became an alien thing. I could never get close to other adults, since I always felt, deep in my soul, that they were holding something behind their backs, some hideous secret, that they would suddenly spring on me to the annihilation of my soul. This is how survivors of priest sexual abuse feel: That at any moment our souls may be annihilated by those whom we should trust. Such is the legacy of priest sexual abuse: Our innocence was corrupted into bitter mistrust.

This is the first time I have spoken of my experience in a public way. I do so for two reasons: First, because the scandal has finally come to light for what it is - the revelation that the Catholic Church is a vast conspiracy directed against the innocence of children. And second, because my few faltering attempts to confide my truth in others have met with scant response. I simply cannot live with this truth in silence any longer. I must come clean. And in that effort I dearly hope that cleanliness may yet ensue for me - if not for my flesh, then finally, for my soul.

Bach, Straight Up

2010-03-31T19:02:00.000-07:00

The other morning I was in a hurry to get somewhere (the fact that I cannot remember where shows just how vital it was). I shoved half a dozen CD's into the player in my car and drove off. Just by chance, I happened to put Gustave Leonhardt's recording of the Bach Italian Concerto next to that of Glenn Gould. It proved to be what has often been called "serendipity."

I had always thought that Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach represented the quintessential interpretation of his keyboard works performed "straight." That is, exactly as Bach intended them, without the interposition of the performer's ego. Yet, in listening to Leonarhardt's version immediately followed by Gould's, I was amazed at the difference.

To my mind, Gustave Leonhardt is the authoritative interpreter in our time of Bach's keyboard works, not least because he performs them on the harpsichord, for which instrument they were written. The piano had not yet been invented in Bach's time, and so only on the harpsichord, that exquisite instrument for which Bach wrote, can we hear his keyboard works as that great genius intended. And in that regard (in my view, at least) Leonhardt is unsurpassed. (I note in some puzzlement and alarm that Leonhardt actually played Bach in a French movie I once saw in film school. He was dreadful in the role, and it was one of the worst films I have ever seen.)

But I think that if you want to know what Bach truly intended, you must go to Leonhardt's performances. They are tasteful, balanced, ego-less, and beautifully executed. And so I listened to his Italian Concerto which, as I remarked to some callow youth recently, is as close to perfection on Earth as you will ever come. And then, immediately after, somewhere on the 210 Freeway between Pasadena and Studio City, I listened to Glenn Gould.

For the first time in my life, I heard his playing in contrast - in contrast to Leonhardt. And for the first time I realized just how stylized Gould's playing is. It is not "straight up," but, rather, very personal, even romanticized, though Gould derided the romantics as inane and self-indulgent. But the fact is, as I heard it, that Glenn Gould takes tremendous liberties with Bach, molding and shaping his keyboard works in a way that can only be described as romantic, as deeply personal. I then went on to listen to his iconic recordings of the Inventions and the English Suite with this in mind and, sure enough, there was the romantic in Gould impressing itself on Bach whether Bach wished it or not.

The difference lies, I have to assume, in the instrument. The harpsichord is a plucked instrument, more akin to the guitar than it is to the piano. When a key is struck, its action rises with a slender membrane of quill and plucks the string, then retires back around it (the origin, by the way, of the eccentric cam movement which made the film projector possible). There is no sostenuto in the harpsichord, no chance for shaping and sustaining a note. The note has sounded, and that is all. Whereas, in the piano, which is essentially a percussion instrument (as Stravinsky famously pointed out), more linked to the drum than to the guitar, the note can be sustained, shaded, colored and shaped. And so, the piano lends itself naturally to the expression of feeling, of self-indulgence, even of excess, whereas the harpsichord is an instrument of logic and precision. The harpsichord note, once struck, cannot be un-struck, cannot be shaped and shaded and made to express the performer's momentary passion. The harpsichord note is what it is - what the composer made it. While the piano note is a palette, that of the harpsichord is an assertion - a punctual statement in time and space which cannot be mitigated. In my hearing, Glenn Gould, great artist and analyst that he was, because he was a pianist, could not resist the temptation to reflect himself in his playing - Bach be damned.

As the music went on, I pointed out to my seven-year-old that, if you listen carefully, you can hear Glenn Gould humming as he plays. Sometimes he is humming the melody and sometimes the counterpoint. But whichever, he is singing along with Bach, and in that lies a clue. Glenn Gould was in love with Bach's keyboard works, and as with any poetic lover, he could not resist the temptation to comment on his love, to rhapsodize on it, to harmonize with it, and, finally, to change it. Gould was essentially a poet - a poet of the keyboard - and all poets seek to change that which they love, since they see reflected in it something of themselves. And they hope, by changing the beloved, to make themselves more complete and more beautiful - fatuous as that hope may be. For the poet, the reality of the beloved is not the ultimate experience - the poetic response to the beloved is.

It was an enlightening experience; not a distressing one. Gould injects himself into his performance of Bach as much as Ashkenazy does in Rachmaninoff and Rubinstein does in Chopin. He just does it more subtly and more clinically. He cannot help it - his instrument and his exquisitely bizarre poet's ego demand it. It is the fact that Gould is playing Bach on a piano that mandates the intrusion of his ego into Bach - and that is wonderful, since Glenn Gould's ego was unique, and it challenged all of us to think more deeply and more vividly about works that we thought we knew, because we have lived with them all of our lives.

Can the Pope Swim?

2010-03-31T11:55:00.000-07:00

I watched two discussions of the pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church on television last night. In one, there was a lay spokesman for the Church, a horrible fellow named William Donohue, who actually defended the bishops and the pope in their handling of this criminal behavior. At one point, he even seemed to suggest that the sexual abuse was partly the fault of the children for being "post-pubescent." There was, too, a newly ordained priest, a young, fresh-faced man, who talked about how bright the future looked for the Church now that the scandals were forcing institutional reforms. The implication, of course, is that thousands and thousands of children had to be raped in order to compel the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to behave like decent human beings.

The import of these discussions was that the wagons are being circled around Pope Benedict, whose own record of collusion is slowly coming to the surface. It is now being claimed repeatedly that Ratzinger did not know anything about the sexual abuse of children when he was a priest, a bishop, and a cardinal. But given how widespread that abuse was, and that it was occurring in his own diocese, one can only conclude that, if he did not know, he was either a fool or an incompetent. How, then, did he achieve such high office within the Church?

The truth, of course, is that he did know, that he had to know, since priests under his authority were committing the crimes and being protected and transferred from parish to parish, and among those priests was the pope's own brother. If we are to believe that Cardinal Ratzinger was ignorant of the crimes, then we must believe that he did not know what the priests under his authority were doing - the crimes they were committing (including one priest's molestation of over 200 deaf children, of which Cardinal Ratzinger was aware) - nor even what his own brother had done. This is nonsense. It is much easier to believe that he did know, and in keeping with the practice of the hierarchy, he covered it up. This cover-up included transferring priests from parish to parish to prevent their prosecution, thereby not only concealing their crimes, but permitting the abuse to continue and to spread to more and more children. This Ratzinger almost certainly did as bishop and as cardinal, and his current behavior as pope continues the cover-up - this time of his own criminal collusion.

In a statement at the beginning of Holy Week, while the first suspicions were swirling around him, the pope said only that people should not listen to "the chatter of dominant opinion." Chatter? These are serious accusations based on the tragic experiences of little children - people who have suffered the effects all their lives, and whose stories are multiplying by the day. Opinion? The molestations are facts, and the facts, too, keep multiplying. Also facts are the confessions of pedophile priests, whose numbers are growing, and the admissions of bishops and cardinals that they aided these criminals by conspiring to shield them from exposure and prosecution. As I said in an earlier post: If the Archdiocese of Boston, for example, admits to 400 pedophile priests, then it knows of 400 more, and is not yet aware of 400 beyond that. The scandal is three or four times greater than the authorities know, or the Church is willing to admit.

And there is another point: In both of the discussions last night, it was suggested by Church spokesmen that the sexual abuse of children by clergy dates back only to the experience of the victims who have recently come forward; that is, that it dates back only about fifty years. Yet a moment's reflection will show that this is absurd. Priest sexual abuse did not suddenly spring up in the 1950s. It goes back much farther than that - indeed, it probably has been a fact of the life of the Church for hundreds of years.

What I am saying is that the abuse of children by priests (and nuns, too) has long been part of the institutional structure of the Catholic Church, reinforced by the fact that so many priests have been guilty of it or have colluded in it, and that some of these guilty priests became bishops and cardinals and even popes. In this way, the cover-up mentality spread upwards as the sexual abuse spread outwards, and pedophilia and its official sanction thus became woven into the institutional fabric of the Church.

That this is so is indicated by the recent discovery of a 1962 Vatican document, which was a set of instructions sent to every bishop in the world regarding sexual misconduct by priests. In it bishops are instructed to bind both priests and victims with a solemn pledge, in writing, of absolute secrecy, which enjoins them not to discuss the allegations of abuse outside of the Church under penalty of excommunication - that is, of being exiled from the Church. (Given that the Church holds - or held at that time - that salvation of one's soul was possible only through membership in the Church, this means that accusations of sexual abuse by priests were to be concealed from secular authorities under threat of eternal damnation - the Church's inevitable trump card.)

Instantly, of course, the Church responded as it has done to every revelation in the sex abuse scandal - it launched a public relations campaign. It claims, incredibly, that although the document was sent to every bishop on earth in 1962, the bishops were unaware of its contents until Vatican instructions on handling sex abuse allegations were revised in 1984. Yet how likely is it that a top secret document which provided instructions on the most sensitive subject in the Church remained unopened and unread by the bishops to whom it was sent? Of course, the Vatican is lying about this, just as it has consistently tried to cover up, rationalize, and minimize every aspect of the sex abuse scandal.

On one of the television discussions, the odious Church spokesman Donohue waved this document at the camera claiming that reports that it was an order for bishops to cover up abuse allegations was a lie. It applied, he insisted, only to solicitation of sex by priests in the confessional. But it was Donohue who was lying, since, as The Guardian reports, "the instructions also cover what it calls the 'worst crime', described as an obscene act perpetrated by a cleric with 'youths of either sex...'" This specific mention of pedophilia proves two things: 1) that the Vatican was aware of the abuse and, in sending the instructions to every bishop in the world, of how widespread it was, and 2) that it engaged in an international criminal conspiracy to aid and abet pedophiles in concealing their crimes and silencing their victims.

Now these facts are emerging onto the world stage, as the pope himself is being drawn into the filthy cauldron of the scandal of sexual abuse and its institutional sanction. Leaving aside the question of whether Pope Benedict himself abused children, it is almost certain that he knew of it, conspired to cover it up, and, in so doing, facilitated the further spread of the disease. He is what the law calls an accessory after the fact, through aiding and abetting some of the most heinous and vicious criminals known to humanity. And as such, he should be stripped of his white robes and consigned to a mendicant's sackcloth, if not a prisoner's denims.

That, at least, would be more lenient than the remedy suggested by Jesus, who said that anyone who "gave scandal" to children, should have a millstone tied around his neck and be thrown into the sea.

Return to the Sea of Spirit

2010-03-23T21:20:00.001-07:00

In my last post, referring to Myer's book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, I said that I would devote some time to the question of how the spirit inhabits the body. It is an important question, I think, if we are to arrive at a meaningful understanding of the relation of body and soul, of the nature or life and that of death, and of what happens after death.

Let me begin by restating the conviction I have offered here previously that the human being is an amalgam of body and soul. Strict materialists would deny this, of course, but, not to put too fine a point on it, I think their position is foolish. The inability to see farther than the senses can reach or than science and mathematics can calculate simply shows a want of imagination and a corresponding lack of vision. The idea that only that which can be directly experienced by the senses, or that which can be counted or analyzed, is all that exists is shortsighted nonsense. Such a contention represents concrete thinking at its worst, not to mention that it simply denies or even derides the collective wisdom of humanity over the ages, which has held consistently from generation to generation and from culture to culture that man is more than the sum of his parts. And that this is true - that there are dimensions to life which transcend the merely physical, ought to be self-evident to anyone who has ever lived or loved or felt nobility or kindness or inspiration. To deny the spiritual dimension of life is to deny life itself.

Having said that, I return to the question: If man embodies a spirit or soul, how are the two related? In traditional terms: The soul inhabits the body, gives it life and expresses itself through it. But in what way does it so inhabit the body? How are the two "connected?"

Myers relates the testimony of several near-death experiences in which the person recalled that his soul "unzipped" itself from his body, as it were; that threads connecting the two were snapped or severed, and the spirit then drifted free, though remaining tenuously connected in such a way that it was able to return. For this reason, the witnesses seem to suggest, they did not die. This echoes the averment of others with which we are all familiar - those who state that in the near death experience they witnessed themselves floating free, connected frailly to their physical bodies.

Affecting as these assertions may be, I am afraid they do not impress me as being true. Rather, I think, they are like the statements of those who claim to have seen aliens from other planets: more the products of a collective memory of popular images of such creatures than of an encounter with the creatures themselves. All such stories have salient aspects in common, because, I think, all come from a common pool of a popular culture of books and films which implant in the minds of susceptible people a preconceived notion of the experience they will claim to have had.

Another problem with this view is, of course, the idea implicit within it that spirit is, in part at least, corporeal, in that it is linked by threads or tissues which, if they are to be severed, must be physical. And yet, in my view (as well as the conventional one), spirit is non-corporeal - it has no physical component. If it does, it is not spirit. If the idea of spirit is to have any meaning, then it must mean that it is distinct from the physical; something entirely different in nature and action. There can be no physical link to a non-physical entity, or that entity becomes some sort of hybrid substance, the nature of which as spiritual or transcendent is thus compromised.

And so the questions remains: If there is no such physical link - no thread or tenuous tissue connecting soul to body - then what does constitute the connection?

To the extent that I have thought about it, it has begun to seem to me that the question itself may be at fault. If we ask, How does the soul inhabit the body?, then we are assuming that the relation is essentially one of corporeal containment of spiritual essence. We imagine that the body is a vessel of some kind which holds the soul, or within which the soul dwells, for so long as life persists, and until death overtakes and debilitates the vessel until it can no longer retain the soul. It is as if a wineskin has worn out or an amphora has fractured and decayed. Weakened, disintegrating, the body can no longer support the indwelling of the soul, which then departs, resulting in death.

While I think there is some truth to the latter part of this argument, it does, in my view, depart from a false premise. The soul does not inhabit the body, I now think; rather, the body inhabits the soul.

I have said elsewhere that we live in a "sea of spirit." It seems to me now that that may be something more than a fanciful phrasing - more than just a metaphor. Tolstoy says, "That which gives life is the same in all things." With this I emphatically agree. The animating force, or spirit, or soul which gives life to me, to animals, to plants and fish must be the selfsame force in all living things. Life is variegated; spirit is not. Life is manifold in its forms; spirit is a single, undifferentiated entity. The search for the relation of the one to the many which was the preoccupation of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers was the same as our question of what constitutes the relation of body to spirit: How do many living forms emerge from a single, unified spirit? How do lives come from life itself?

It seems to me now that spirit, or what we in the context of corporeal existence call the soul, is universal; that it is an essential aspect of all that exists physically without itself being physical. It is the first principle - the implied but ineffable origin of Russell's paradox - that which enables all to exist but is itself not part of existence. It is the first necessary condition for life to exist in any and all its forms.

Without such generative force (which lies outside of existence) nothing that lives could have life; and once it is gone, all that lives dies. It does not "inhabit" us; rather, we as corporeal beings intersect it on the plane of existence, dwelling together for a time, generating life and raising consciousness, in somewhat the same fashion that television waves or radio waves give rise to coherent signals in appropriate apparatuses. We are not so much vessels of spirit as we are vessels immersed in spirit, which contains us and penetrates our being, and vivifies us for so long a time as our physical bodies are capable of surviving immersion within its life-sustaining environment. We are, in a sense, fish in the sea of spirit.

Precisely because spirit is so much a part of our existence - because it is the medium in which we move, and breathe, and express and experience ourselves - many very intelligent people do not recognize it, or they deny it altogether. It is not that spirit is too close to our senses - it is our senses; it is not that spirit is too much a part of us - it is us in the most essential way. We are spiritual beings; our spiritual essence is our very nature, enabling us not only to realize its presence in us, but also, ironically, to deny it. It is for this that I have said elsewhere that the very act of denying our spiritual nature is, in effect, an affirmation of it.

On this planet the preconditions for organic life occurred, and as life itself evolved, the measure and meaningfulness of spirit likewise evolved. Our consciousness of the presence of spirit developed as its ability to express itself through us enlarged and deepened. But does this mean that spirit had a plan for us, and possesses a will and desire for us? I do not think that this naturally follows. The question of the "intent" of spirit for sentient life is quite another matter, and one on which my thinking is still divided.

To suggest that the animating spirit which exists as an integral part of the physical universe is itself conscious and has will and desire for any living creature is farther than I am prepared to go at this point. And yet that it should possess such intent seems irresistible if we are to impute meaning and purpose to life. That would be the easy way of ascribing meaning - to locate it simply but exclusively in the realm of spirit, and to argue from that assertion to an operational meaningfulness of life, with its attendant moral codes and religious implications. And this I am not yet willing to do.

If life does have meaning, then I continue to think that such meaning arises from the fact that the experience of sentient life somehow moves forward the nature and destiny of man and of spirit. That their destinies are, in fact, linked by their very natures. That, as Kazantzakis said, man is, in an important sense, the savior of God, every bit as much as God is the creator of man. The two have neither meaning nor purpose without each other.

Ghost of a Chance

2010-03-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I referred to F.W.H Myers' book, "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death," which I had read in college (rather by accident), and the impression of which has never left me. My reading of it having been so long ago, I bought a copy and have begun reading it again. I am nearly finished, and it has, once more, prompted me to think, which is what any good book should do.

I had not recalled (or did not realize) that Myers was one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, a defunct body of investigators of psychic phenomena some of whose reports I had read in my research for a screenplay about Houdini. That great debunker of all things spiritualist had often interacted with SPR representatives, most famously in the case of "Margery" the spirit medium. Their epic battle, carried out in the attic room of her home at Number 10 Lime Street in Boston, formed the basis of our script.

Re-reading Myers after all these years, I remain impressed by the serious nature of his scholarship and the elegance and probity of his prose. His many case histories, while seeming dated now, their narratives archaic in a quaint late-Victorian way, are nonetheless worth considering if we are at all interested in the question of what he calls "immortality." He makes the point that conceptions and accounts of survival after death are a constant in human experience, and ought not be dismissed out of hand as superstition or just so much nonsense. And I find myself forced to agree. After all, as a dramatist, I must take seriously the fact that the premise of my favorite piece of literature, "Hamlet," is that young Hamlet is given knowledge, which he could not otherwise have had, by his father's ghost (the sort of thing Myers calls a sensory automatism).

Myers makes the general point that consciousness can experience varying degrees of disintegration, or insanity; and, by extension, ought therefore to experience equivalent degrees of integration. His primary example of this integration is genius, which, as readers of this site will know, is a subject that interests me greatly. In the sort of syntactical flight of which we no longer in this country seem capable (because of the sorry state of public education) he defines genius as "...a power of appropriating the results of subliminal mentation to subserve the supraliminal stream of thought."

Now this is just a fancy way of saying that genius accesses the unconscious mind in ways that burst forth into the conscious mind, and of which the average person is incapable. Genius, then, in his thinking, is the ability of the conscious mind to tap the unconscious at will, whereas most of us can do that, if ever at all, only in the dream state. What is interesting in this is that Myers locates the source of artistic inspiration (and by genius he refers only to artistic inspiration) in the subconscious mind.

This squares with my own experience as a writer, humble as that may be. When I am working, and totally absorbed in a project, I am unaware consciously of the source of the ideas that come to me. When those ideas are flowing, I am often at pains to write them down as quickly as they come, my typing skills being preternaturally limited. But when that is happening, I feel truly alive - perhaps the only time, in the absence of my children, that I do feel truly alive. These ideas are coming from somewhere, and it is decidedly not from my conscious mind; or I would have to continually think about them, in which case deadlines would go past like express trains that do not stop at my station.

Myers also attributes great importance to the experience of dreams. When we are asleep, and our distracted consciousness is at rest, the spirit, or soul, is, in his view, much more active than in the conscious state. This has been true in my experience as well. It is when I am asleep that the characters of my writings have free reign over my attention, and many times I have experienced the annoying phenomenon that they speak to me in my sleep and even wake me up. Indeed, some of the most useful and profound expressions of my characters have come to me in sleep, and many is the time I have awakened with their "instructions" in my head. So specific have these instructions been that I have frequently gone into work and dictated to my writing partner whole scenes and dialog transmitted to me by the characters in the piece we were working on. Two cases stand out in my mind: Kleopatra, telling me that when she visited Rome at the urging of Julius Caesar she went to see her sister, who was then a captive working as a prostitute in the city; and Marilyn Monroe, who insisted to me that I was avoiding the fact that she had been abused by a boarder in the house of one of her many foster parents.

Now, these may have been mere subliminal concatenations of my conscious mind; but the fact remains, as Myers would argue, that the unconscious mind orchestrated their integration, and made it available to me in sleep. And this helps to answer a question I have had for many years: What the hell is the purpose of sleep, in which we spend fully a third of our lives? Myers would say that sleep, in addition to its recuperative power, represents the opportunity for the spiritual in us to express itself through its habitual access to the subconscious mind.

I find that I do not disagree with this idea. The residence of genius probably does exist in the subconscious mind, which, in turn, draws its strength from the spiritual nature of man. How else to explain Mozart or Mendelssohn or Bach or Beethoven, or any of the prodigies of art whose fruits we have enjoyed? Their unconscious minds must have been drawing upon a wellspring of inspiration which transcends the natural, and which is inaccessible to the rest of us. But what is the source of that spring? It must lie elsewhere than in the ordinary categories of conscious existence. It must lie in the spiritual nature of man.

I had an experience of this myself. Having declined to cooperate with the Selective Service during the Vietnam War, I was ordered to spend two years teaching brain-damaged and emotionally disturbed children. Among them was a twelve-year-old girl named Stacey. Stacey was a mess; one of the most disturbed of all the children I taught. Occasionally she would disappear into an epileptic fit - sometimes in the middle of as sentence - when she would become catatonic. Then, emerging from that fit, she would draw pictures of such beauty and exquisite organization as one would have thought her incapable in her "normal" state. For a few lyrical moments, Stacey was a sort of "genius." Clearly, I thought, she had been in touch with some force that inhabited her poor, crippled consciousness, and was suddenly capable of producing works of beauty, which, otherwise, would not only have been beyond her ability, but beyond her comprehension.

How to explain this extraordinary phenomenon except to say that in those fits she was in touch with a source of mental integration and artistic inspiration which lay outside her conscious mind? Though I knew Stacey thirty-five years ago, I have never forgotten the impact her behavior made on me. Myers would offer her as evidence for the assertion that genius or inspiration is rooted in the subconscious mind, which draws in turn upon the spiritual essence of man, freed to express itself in sleep or hypnosis or epileptic fit.

If such a source of inspiration exists, then it is also a source of cognition, or of consciousness. And if that form of consciousness exists, then it exists outside the realms of quotidian conscious life. Indeed, Myers would argue that conscious life suppresses the subliminal, in its obsession with what W.H. Auden called the "headaches and worry" in which "life vaguely leaks away." But on this other level of the subliminal-spiritual awareness of man, we are all, potentially, Mozarts.

As Myers says: "Within, beyond, the world of matter - as a still profounder, still more generalized aspect of the Cosmos - must lie the world of spiritual life... [T]he world of spiritual life does not depend upon the existence of the material world... What does not originate in matter originates there..."

He argues from this, citing many examples from case histories, that it is possible for this spiritual life to exist both within and outside of the body. This is what he calls, "Dissociation of personality, combined with activity in the spiritual environment..." The idea that we exist in both a corporeal and a spiritual environment is implicit in his argument, and, once again, I find that I do not disagree. From this Myers will, I expect, continue on to the conclusion that the human personality can exist after death, and express itself or make itself manifest in some way posthumously.

If you have been kind and attentive enough to follow this site, you will know that I have some problems with this idea. For as I persist in my reading of Myers, I find that he argues for the existence of ghosts in some form (though by no means the conventional ones), and for the idea that the spirit, insofar as it survives death, remains individuated. Here is a line which, thus far at least, I have not been willing to cross. That the individuated spirit, reflecting a specific personality, survives death is a proposition which I am not yet able to accept. But that in some un-individuated form the spirit which animated individuals survives is an idea which appeals to me with irresistible force. Survival of death which is relevant to, or an echo of, individual life experience must occur, if only to render that experience meaningful.

One of the questions which Myers forces me to pose is this: How, exactly, does what I have called the animating force inhabit the body? How is it manifest in individual life; what is the means by which it occupies a body and brings it to life and sustains it? And, by extension, by what means does it depart the body, resulting in bodily death? As those will know who have read in my essay on Religion and Spirituality my reflections on the death of the old woman in the Congo which I witnessed - I have, with my own eyes, seen the spirit leave a body. I have been present at the moment of death, and been powerfully impressed by the fact that "something" left the body, almost visibly being lifted out of it, and that that separation represented the fact of the woman's death.

I will try in future posts to systematize my thinking on this point. At the moment, I am struggling to find a metaphor to explain it - since making metaphors is my instinct, and what I do for a living. But in the meantime, I would like to invite my readers to share with me their experiences of death and of survival, so that I may benefit from them in my further thinking.

If you have experienced the death of a loved one, and have had any inkling of survival after death, I would appreciate it if you would post your recollections here. It would be of great help to me, and, perhaps, be of some comfort to others as well.

Benny the Rat

2010-03-14T23:34:00.001-07:00

It is with absolutely no satisfaction that I find that I was right about the priest sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. I asserted in an earlier post that there were three reasons why the Church has reacted so severely against the allegations of sexual abuse of children: 1. Because of the financial cost, 2. Because of the fact that prominent members of the hierarchy were themselves involved either directly or indirectly in the abuse, and 3. For doctrinal reasons; namely, that it is impossible for any Catholic to accept the idea that the priest who performs the miracle of transubstantiation at Mass has, with the very same consecrated fingers, violated the innocence of a child. The child sexual abuse scandal therefore threatens the very heart of the liturgy itself.

Now it is beginning to appear that the abuse scandal reaches to the highest level of the Vatican. From early reports, Pope Benedict XVI may have covered up not only abuse by priests under his control in Germany, but that of his own brother. This man, a priest, was, evidently, director of a church boys choir in which there were cases of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, which were concealed by his brother, Cardinal Ratzinger, now the pope of Rome. The investigation has only just begun, and revelations continue to occur. For my own part, I have little doubt that the current pope did hide instances of sexual abuse of children by priests under his authority (and instructed others to do so), and thereby made further sexual predation possible, indeed, inevitable, given the pathology of the pedophile.

I believe that in the coming weeks and months (unless the investigators are bribed or cowed into relenting), we will discover that the current pope was, in fact, implicated in a history of priest sexual abuse, the discovery of which should render him unfit to hold that, or any other office of authority. Indeed, it ought by any civilized lights, to subject him to legal sanction. Thus, we may yet witness the spectacle of a pope forced to resign rather than face prosecution and imprisonment.

But another possibility occurred to me as I read of the investigation of the pope's brother's misconduct. It may just be possible that Cardinal Ratzinger orchestrated his own ascension to the throne of Saint Peter in order to avoid the very kinds of accusations that are now beginning to close around him.

Think about it: Ratzinger was the prefect of the College of Cardinals, the body charged with choosing the new pope. When the College gathered in Rome to select a successor to John-Paul II, it was Ratzinger who set the agenda for and presided over their secret conclaves. And what was the result? Ratzinger himself was chosen. This, it seemed to me at the time, was nothing less than a coup. Ratzinger, a very powerful and influential cardinal, carefully stage managed his own ascension to the papacy, and for what? For the power and glory, of course. But might it also not have been to insulate himself, in the midst of the sex scandals, from his own past?

If so, it is beginning to appear that he failed in this attempt. The pope who was once photographed in the uniform of the Hitler Youth, may have displayed no more moral insight or courage later when he covered up and facilitated the crimes of pedophiles under his own purview. If this proves true, then he was as complicit in their crimes as he was, de facto, in the crimes of the Nazis. As I said at the time of his elevation to the papacy, Ratzinger was, and apparently remained, a moral coward.

What the public must understand is that the sexual abuse of children by priests (and perhaps also by nuns) is far more pervasive in the history of the Church than even the recent scandals have indicated. I am prepared to offer the opinion that fully a third of all priests may have been guilty of such abuse, and that most of the children in Catholic schools during my time there (the Fifties and Sixties) were exposed to such abuse.

Pedophilia, alcoholism, hypocrisy, and mediocrity were the hallmarks of the Catholic clergy as I experienced it, and that legacy remains a part of the Church's ethos to this day. The hierarchy is now consumed with the struggle to contain and therefore control the scandal, but it will not succeed. Now that it is lapping at the very doors of the Vatican, there is hope that the whole filthy mess will one day come to light, and that those who suffered at the hands of this heinous and predatory religion may yet find justice, and the peace which that may entail.

Why Death Has Lost Its Charm for Me

2010-03-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

To my surprise, I found myself explaining in a meeting the other day why I have such a "bubbly and effervescent" personality. I didn't mean to launch into the soliloquy; it just came out. Most of my life I have been asked why I do not smile, why I seem so angry and gloomy all the time, why I seem so sad. I have been asked these questions so often for so long that I only reply with jokes. But it is the truth, I know, and there does not seem to be anything I can do about it.

Yet in this meeting, which involved some seven or eight colleagues and was about a television series whose main character helps people escape from dangerous cults, I felt quite spontaneously and without intending to, the need to answer. The reason was, in part, I said, that I was an altar boy in Catholic school in Philadelphia in the Fifties and Sixties. I was the best of the altar boys, the most saintly and dutiful, and for this I was rewarded by the priests and nuns by being put on the funeral team. Odd as that may sound, there was a logic to it, for it was only at funerals that we altar boys were likely to be tipped. Serving wakes and funerals was our only way of making a little money for ice cream, or for the wonderful water ices that the Italian vendors sold in the summer in Cobbs Creek Park, near where I lived.

But what it meant, I went on, was that between the ages of nine and fifteen, I saw two dead bodies every week. Every Tuesday and Thursday night I stood over open caskets, grasping a golden candle stick, and gazed down at the waxen faces of the dead, stark still and silent as they, for hours at a time. And then every Saturday afternoon I served a funeral mass, with all its melancholy and morbid ritual, accompanied by a faltering soprano who sang the direful hymns.

I remember distinctly, one Saturday in sixth grade, when I was serving a funeral mass with Tommy Schwartzman, one of my classmates and friends. Not a particularly brilliant boy, he was a good, solid kid whom everybody liked. And then, during that mass, I saw him begin to cry. A tough, West Philly twelve-year-old who had attended almost as many wakes and funeral as I - he suddenly and without warning, burst into tears. Why? I wondered. Was the deceased a relative of his? And then I realized that if it were, he would be in the pews with the family and not on the altar with me. To this day I do not know the reason why Tommy Schwartzman cried, except that, perhaps like veteran soldiers after years of war, his spirit could not take any more abuse. His childhood could not absorb any more death.

I did absorb it, though of all of us I think I was the brightest and most sensitive, the boy with the deepest feelings and most active imagination. The priests and nuns must have known that, and yet they exposed me week after week to death, to more corpses than a medical student sees, immersed me in the rites and trappings of mortality, and thought... what? That it would have no effect on me?

Well, it did. I stopped smiling, stopped focusing on life and became obsessed with death. A child, in the wellspring of his innocence and youth, I became an acolyte of death. And that experience has remained with me ever since, etched in my expression. Just yesterday, when I was walking from the parking lot to the gym, a young woman called to me from her car, "Smile! It' won't hurt." Many times in my life I have had this experience - when strangers call to my attention the fact that my face is a mask of grimness, habitually, without my even realizing it. It is a specter that has haunted me my whole life.

I used to take a morbid pride in it. I was the one who understood the full meaning of mortality, while others pranced their ways through life, grinning and vapid. I alone felt the weight of death, carried it on my shoulders, embodied it in my very posture and demeanor. I thought this gave me what is now called gravitas - a seriousness and heaviness that implies ponderous thought. And that sense, wrongheaded as it was, gave me pleasure. Yes, thanks to the Catholic Church, the idea of death gave me pleasure as a child.

For that is what the Church taught us little children: That it is better to be dead than alive, that life is nothing but a prelude to death, that your purpose on earth is to prepare yourself for your leaving of it. I was thinking this morning that the Catholic Church is a dangerous cult - a cult of death, which does not spare even its most vulnerable members the crushing weight of impending mortality followed by the menace of eternal doom.

As I spoke in the meeting, I began to feel myself becoming more heated and more emotional. "Someone should have gotten me out of there," I heard myself say. "That kind of thing should never happen to a child. Someone should have cared enough to help me escape." But no one did. I nearly cried, but, of course, being a professional, I checked myself. Yet the experience of that outburst shook me. And though I tried to cover by saying that having freed myself, I understand the meaning of the show viscerally and very much want to write it, I was not convinced. I am still there, still on that funeral team, still frocking myself in a black cassock and white surplice embroidered with black crosses, and clutching up my gilded candlestick. I am still that funereal child, caught in that cult of death.

But lately I am finding that death is losing its charm for me. I would like to shake off its stench, I would like to smile and to enjoy my life or what is left of it. I would like to feel alive, without the barrel of instantaneous extinction pointed at my heart. I would like to laugh easily and happily, to relax the knotted muscles of my face, which bears a permanent frown, and talk casually and congenially with people, even with strangers whom I might encounter once and never see again.

But I cannot. When death has gripped your heart at the age of nine, and held it in its gelid grasp for six years unrelenting, through childhood and puberty and teenage turmoil, it remains there, its fingers curled around that most sensitive of organs (yes, the heart is the most sensitive), and you can never escape. All that you can hope is that someone, some day, will care enough, not to free you, but make that first and vital gesture toward your freeing of yourself - that someone will care enough to understand.

Consciousness and Death

2010-03-06T11:25:00.000-08:00

(Endeavoring to reply to a comment under my Faith and Reason post, I found myself becoming a bit more discursive than I had intended. And so, since the length of a comment is limited, I will post my reply here.)

I am inclined to think that consciousness in some form survives death but I have not yet decided what that form might be - that is, I have not yet reached a conclusion that makes sense to me.

I was thinking yesterday that the confluence of the animating force and the corporeal is rather like that between heat and ice. When heat comes into contact with ice, water is produced. In much the same way, when the animating force becomes corporeal, consciousness is produced.

But this would imply that consciousness cannot exist in the absence of either the animating force or the corporeal. In that sense, consciousness is a phenomenon unique to corporeal life. Absent the corporeal substrate, and in what form might consciousness exist?

I have been disinclined to think that the animating force itself is conscious, but it is possible. Recently I have been musing about this possibility. It may be that the animating force is pure consciousness, which is reflected in a shadow form in organic life. That would answer a number of questions, not the least of which is the meaning of life. Life then becomes an ongoing attempt to understand the nature of this pure consciousness and to bring corporeal consciousness into harmony with it. This is, of course, what many religions teach (in a bowdlerized form), and it may well be true (which is why I do not reject organized religion out of hand).

If there is a "cosmic consciousness" (so to speak), then it is likely that its existence represents what we look for as meaning in life, and life then becomes a process of growing closer to an understanding of this consciousness. Yet, with death, what becomes of individual consciousness?

The problem as I see it is not mind = brain (I don't think any serious person accepts this purely materialistic concept), so much as the idea that consciousness = personality. It is very difficult for me to believe that personality survives death. Yet this is the concept behind most conventional notions of heaven, which I, for one, find comically absurd. The idea that we will all be floating around in our clothes in some eternal cathedral communing with our ancestors is nonsense. Yet this is, apparently, what most people believe. But that is simply because they have not examined the question, and because religion has encouraged them not to.

Some years ago I read with great interest Myers' book, "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death." His research makes a persuasive case for the idea that individual personality does survive death if it has become strong enough in life to do so. For Myers, death is a trauma like other traumas in life; some personalities survive and some do not, depending on their preparedness to meet the trauma. To me this means above all a practice of spiritual and mental exercise which strengthens the soul and integrates it more tightly with personality. Such a strengthened soul thus carries personality with it after the experience of death.

The idea has some merit, but I continue to believe that personality is more an artifact of existence than part of its essence. As I have said elsewhere, I am prepared to believe that individual personality, as a form of energy generated over decades of experience, may survive death briefly - perhaps a few hours or even days - but the idea of permanent survival makes no sense to me. I believe that personality is the flotsam and jetsam of life, and that it will be discarded shortly after death, if it survives at all.

Thus we have three levels of phenomena to consider: personality, consciousness, and spirit or soul. In my current thinking, personality is transient, spirit is eternal, and consciousness falls somewhere in between. I am inclined to believe that, in order to survive in some form, consciousness must undergo a change at death, drawing closer to the spirit which animated it, becoming more akin to it, melding with it, if you will. Yet where is the meaning in this? What meaning does life have if individual consciousness is simply absorbed by eternal consciousness after death?

The only conclusion I can come to is that this cosmic consciousness (for lack of a better term) is itself changed by the absorption of individual consciousness, and so, man's life has a cosmic destiny to the extent that it deepens or broadens or expands this cosmic consciousness. This is rather reminiscent of Kazantzakis' concept in his spiritual exercises that we humans are "the saviors of God." This is the idea that, instead of asserting that man could not exist without God, rather, we should understand that God could not exist without man. Without consciousness of God, the idea of God is empty. And so, man's consciousness "saves" or enables the existence of God.

Kazantzakis, of course, was a dramatist (and a wonderful one), and his concept is a bit melodramatic. But I am inclined to think he was on the right track. What would be the nature and purpose of a cosmic consciousness without individuated consciousnesses to reflect on it, give it presence, render it meaningful? And so, human life may give meaning to eternal consciousness, just as eternal consciousness enables human life to exist. There is, therefore, a symbiotic relationship between the corporeal and the eternal through which each enables and gives meaning to the other. Thus, we temporal beings are at one with the timeless just as the timeless is at one with the temporal. This very relationship would, in itself, represent a kind of meaning for life, which, in its nascent form would be passive, but which, as individual consciousness grows and deepens over time may become more active and self-affirming.

The goal of life, then, would be to develop individual consciousness to greater and greater strength and purity so that it becomes closer to and more reflective of eternal consciousness. And in doing so, I think at this point, may lie our hope for survival of death in some form.

Ify vocabulary

2010-03-05T11:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my seven-year-old asked me the difference between putrefy and petrify. I explained, and then started offering him more words that end in 'ify.' Off the top of my head, I thought of:

amplify, beautify, beatify, codify, certify, classify, clarify, crucify, calcify, disqualify, deify, daintify, diversify, demystify, emulsify, fortify, fructify, falsify, glorify, glassify, gentrify, gratify, humidify, horrify, indemnify, intensify, identify, jollify, justify, mollify, modify, mortify, nullify, notify, objectify, ossify, purify, pacify, personify, qualify, quantify, ratify, rectify, reify, ramify, rigidify, scarify, solidify, signify, typify, terrify, testify, transmogrify, vivify, vilify, and verify.

Being seven, he asked for more. If you can think of any others off the tops of your heads (no cheating; no looking them up) to extend his list, please send them to me. Since many of these words refer to 'making something into something,' he asked whether there is a word that means 'to turn into ice.' I suggested 'gelidify.' Is there one?

Faith and Reason

2010-01-31T21:34:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, while engaged in my quarterly task of cleaning out the garage, I was thinking about the relationship between faith and reason. It is, I realized, a dynamic relationship which spans all of life.

When we are children, we live in a world of faith. We take most things on faith - the love of our parents, the goodness of existence, the benevolence of Nature. As we grow, and as we begin to experience more of reality and to use our reason, the field of faith diminishes. Things that had been mysteries become puzzles, and those puzzles demand answers. Maturing is, therefore, a movement away from faith toward reason, until many of us reach the point where we banish faith altogether. An intellectual arrogance sets in, in the garish light of which everything seems susceptible of explanation. The world becomes disenchanted, the comforting precepts of religion fall away, and we are left to confront the true mysteries of existence: Why am I here, Who am I, What is the meaning of my life, What happens to me after death? In face of those corroding questions, we often become cynical, surrendering to hopelessness, to the growing conviction that such questions can never be answered.

It is at this point that the rationalist succumbs to doubt - the disheartening certainty that Truth does not exist, or if it does, that it can never be attained. Faith is killed in us, and we surrender ourselves to a mortal existence which, we fear more and more, will be extinguished with death. Most of my acquaintances are in this condition: Either they do not allow themselves to think about such overwhelming questions at all, busying themselves with quotidian cares which they convince themselves are of utmost importance, or they abandon the idea of faith altogether, and content themselves with mocking it in the cleverest possible terms for the benefit of others who are as lost as they.

What is missing in all this, I think, is a kind of balance: a balance between faith and reason which understands that the two are not at odds, but must, in fact, be embraced together if resolutions to those abiding questions are to be wrought. Faith without reason is little more than superstition, and reason without faith is, more often than not, simply solipsism. Those who argue for the preeminence of faith over reason make the same mistake, in mirror image, as those who use reason to dismiss faith.

For as we grow older and near the end of life, we begin to feel inexorably the tug of that instinct of faith in the warm bath of which we began our lives. We do, or ought to, understand that reason can take us only so far in the search for Truth. That, like any other corporeal entity, reason has its limits; indeed, could not exist without limits. But the Truth of which we are in search transcends limits, and so, reason, no matter how comprehensive or well honed, is an inadequate tool for the attaining of it.

The faith of childhood is a naive faith, and the reason of mature age is a circumscribed reason. But the reason of advancing age yearning as it does for faith, coupled with a faith which reflects a lifetime of experience and reason, may together be adequate to the task which confronts us at life's end: obtaining insight into the enlightenment which only death can bring to life.

Flesh and Spirit

2009-12-26T19:56:00.000-08:00

I was reading this morning in 'The Calendar of Wisdom' Tolstoy's reflection that life takes on meaning only as we begin to convert the physical into the spiritual. This is the same sentiment expressed by Kazantzakis in his spiritual exercises, 'The Saviors of God,' when he said that the purpose of life is to convert flesh into spirit. As a proposition, this seems to me indisputable.

Tolstoy also wrote that so long as we continue to view life only as a physical phenomenon, we will find ourselves in the midst of contradictions that cannot be resolved. Escape from meaninglessness, then, lies in our ability to perceive and to grasp the spiritual essence of existence. The older I get, the clearer this idea becomes to me, and the more urgency with which it presses itself upon me. To remain in the physical realm to the very end is, I think, to condemn oneself not only to insignificance, but to extinction. The longing for some form of survival after death is thus embedded in the very nature of our existence as corporeal beings, and it begins to assert itself more and more powerfully as we approach the end of our physical lives.

But there is another dimension to life; one that is not confined to the physical realm, and, therefore, which offers the hope not only of meaning but of survival. What form that survival may take is, of course, shrouded from our view. But if the two concepts - meaning and survival - are linked, as I think they are, then some sense of the nature of survival may be found in the meaning with which we invest life. This is the essential insight of Beckett's great play, 'Waiting for Godot,' when Vladimir declares, against the bleak backdrop of empty time and space, that life does have meaning with which we have the power to invest it. Even Beckett, aesthetic and moral anarchist that he was, could not restrain this insight. And I reach out for it, as do his characters, desperately, as a form of lifeline.

That lifeline ought to lead us past life itself into some other state of meaning and life which lies beyond time and space. That much is clear to me. Yet I see every day everywhere around me people who have no such thought, no such expectation. They are devoted to the physical realm, and apparently see or feel no possibility of transcending it. Religion, of course, offers some comfort, but this is a sort of pre-fabricated comfort, designed and built by others, in which the souls of the faithful huddle, protected from the winds and storms of fundamental questions such as How should I live? and What follows death? I sometimes think that religions were created precisely to prevent people from asking such questions in their hearts, or to help them avoid doing so. 'Give me a patent answer, and I need never confront the question.' Such is the motto of the religionist.

But some of us cannot content ourselves with other people's solutions to the questions that contain and consume our lives. We must devise or discover the answers for ourselves, and first that means facing the questions squarely and with a clear mind. This is what religion teaches us not to do, and in this way, it stands as an impediment to discovering the truth. To my mind, most religion is not a path to truth, but an obstacle on that path. Shove it aside, and though you may experience fear and trembling, at least the pathway will be open, whether or not you choose to take it.

All this is not by way of saying that people should simply reject religion. As I have written elsewhere here, religion is a necessity for most people, and, on balance, its presence does more good than its absence in the life of humanity. But once you have perceived that religion leads inevitably to contradictions that cannot be resolved - that it is directed at the physical and not the spiritual - then it is necessary to move beyond it, and its concept of god, and seek the truth where it lies: not in the church, but in the individual human soul.

The Set Up

2009-12-16T19:27:00.000-08:00

I was informed today that a script we recently finished for an independent producer has been set up at a studio. This happened because everyone is thrilled with the work we did. The note from the director said that the set up deal is done, the studio plans to fast-track the film, and "the rewrite starts after the New Year."

This is typical. The studio loves the script so much, the executives want us to write it again. Does it ever occur to anyone in this industry to make the movie that the writers write? I am aware of only one instance in recent years in which this was done - Clint Eastwood making Paul Haggis' first draft of 'Million Dollar Baby.' The result was Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Hollywood films are written, rewritten, and re-rewritten a dozen times by writers, executives, producers, and directors, with the result that most of what is in the theaters is crap, worth neither making nor watching. The remedy for that dismal fact - just on the basis of the odds - is simple: Make the movies the writers write. Just as an experiment - just to see what would happen. Because whatever happens, it couldn't be any worse than it is now.

The main culprits in this mindless muddle are, of course, the producers and the studio executives, none of whom could write a coherent screenplay if the Taliban were holding their sisters hostage. But another culprit is the Writers Guild, which does nothing to protect the aesthetic integrity of its members' work. Yes, they do a pretty good job of looking out for our economic interests - but that is only half the job of representing writers. The other half, which they fail miserably to do, is to stand up for the artistic integrity of the work we create.

I have already recounted how, on one occasion, I asked the Guild to intervene to prevent the secretaries in the typing pool at Warner Brothers from making changes to a script we had written. I was told solemnly that doing so was outside the Guild's jurisdiction. Money is in - aesthetics are out. Well, it can call itself a Guild if it wishes, but it ought not call itself a Writers Guild, in my view.

Among other things, this raises the question: Why would anyone who wants to take himself seriously as a writer write screenplays in the first place? To me this remains an impenetrable mystery. The screenplay is a hybrid literary form, the integrity of which is up for grabs the moment it is submitted to the studio. Everyone on a film has the right, either acknowledged or implied, to change a screenwriter's work at any time, with no regard for the writer at all. On 'Ali,' a twenty-two year old production assistant (a gofer, as they are called, because they go for coffee and donuts) was asked to rewrite one of our soliloquies. And there was nothing we could do about it, not least of all because we had been banned by the director from the set.

If you want to take yourself - and be taken - seriously as a writer, write plays, novels, short stories, or poetry. Write anything but screenplays. But that rarely happens these days, since most young writers - and many of the older ones - are seduced by the promise of wealth, fame, glamor, and the chance to have lunch with movie stars. I have had lunch with movie stars, and pleasant as that experience can be, it is not worth the sacrifice of your artistic integrity.

Finished at last

2009-11-10T23:34:00.000-08:00

I am relived, and pleased, to announce that tonight at 10:50 I finished writing my book - the memoirs of a retired Compton police sergeant.

It has been an enormous and exhausting undertaking (505 pages), but I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to write the story of this 120-man police force that managed to keep order in a city with 10,000 gang members. Their courage, skill, and raw humanity have moved me deeply.

I hope you will enjoy the book one day. I will keep you posted as it proceeds toward publication by St. Martin's press next Fall.

Unexplained Absence

2009-10-31T22:06:00.000-07:00

I have not posted here recently because I have been laboring mightily to finish my new book. It is the memoirs of a retired Compton police sergeant who spent twenty years on the streets of Compton. Some of the stories he tells about that tiny police force's efforts to maintain order in America's most dangerous city in the 1970s and '80s nearly defy belief. It is a vast and human document, the writing of which has consumed all my free time. I am 470 pages into it now, and hope to finish in the next two weeks. At that time, I will resume posting on this site. Meanwhile, I apologize to all who follow it for my absence.

However, I hope that I will produce a book which you all will find as absorbing in the reading as I have in the writing. It will be published next Fall by St. Martin's Press.

See you again as soon as I surface...

Mulkey

2009-09-22T22:36:00.000-07:00

Today, we finished a screenplay about Louis Mulkey, a Charleston fireman whose passion was coaching high school basketball. When his boys were eighth graders, he promised them that if they worked hard and believed in themselves, as seniors they would win the South Carolina state basketball championship. It was an unlikely prediction: Their school had never won a state championship, had never even come close to it. But Louis Mulkey believed in those boys, and he inspired them with the idea that the force of history was nothing compared to the power of faith.

Three years later, on the eve of his team's senior season, Louis Mulkey was killed in a fire. He died as he had lived - for others. He refused to leave a burning building so long as his men were inside. He gave his life trying to save them. But what he did for his fellow firefighters was no less heroic than what he had done for his boys - he gave his life for them, he shared with them his dreams of victory, his faith that love and hope and sacrifice must triumph in the end.

The next season, in their senior year, Louis's boys worked their hearts out to make his promise real. They struggled their way to the state finals, where they met a team that was much bigger and better and more qualified than they. But they had a dream and a motivation that came from beyond themselves, and they fought, and pushed themselves to the limit and beyond... and they lost.

At the buzzer, an opposing player made a miraculous shot - a desperation throw, an eighty-foot effort in the final split second that arced its way the length of the court and went in. Louis's team had lost his promise by a single point. It is what happened then, after they lost, that makes the story so special - a miraculous ending to a heart-rending season which no one could have predicted, and which I, certainly, could not have invented. In fact, if I had tried to invent it, no one would believe me. But it was true - it was fact - and facts have a way of altering our perceptions.

My way of looking at things has been changed by the experience of writing this film. (I am a writer because the best of what I write always changes me.) Many of my old beliefs, long jaundiced by life, have been resuscitated by this project. It has reminded me that one man, with faith in his heart and a single-minded devotion to the humanity of others, can make a difference, no matter what the coruscated purveyors of cynicism who fill so much of our culture now may say. My buried belief that sainthood is possible even for those who have been taught that only that which is material, that which is profitable, that which can be reckoned on the bottom line has value, finds a new breath in this story.

Louis Mulkey, in many ways a flawed and self-doubting man, changed the world. One of his players, a freshman at Georgia University when I met him, said to me: "If it wasn't for him I'd be mopping floors somewhere." It was the testament of a humble young man whose life had been touched by pure selflessness; by a simple caring and compassion that altered forever the course of his destiny.

Those of us who live can still, by having the courage and the selflessness to intervene in the lives of others, change not only those lives, but our own as well. The task of telling the story of Louis Mulkey has reminded me that each of us can, through faith in humanity, achieve in our lifetimes a kind of immortality.

Looking Back on Death

2009-09-06T12:06:00.000-07:00

I have always been fascinated by war. I have read a great deal about it, and written a good deal about it. I view it not as an isolated phenomenon, a subject for scholarly study, but, rather, as an integral part of history, and as a revealer of human nature and the human spirit. For I have long believed that violence is a spiritual disease, and so these massive acts of violence have much to teach us, for better or worse, about the soul of man.

I have been particularly drawn to World War I, both for its unutterable vapidity and the scale of its human waste, but also because of what its horrors taught about man’s capacity for endurance, courage, sacrifice, and even poetry. World War I produced some extraordinary poetry, and lately I have been listening to a recording of “Poets of the Great War,” a truly beautiful and wonderful compendium of the best poetry that came out of that uniquely European cataclysm. And some of it is great indeed. My deepened appreciation for Wilfred Owen who was, I think, one of the finest poets of the twentieth century – indeed of any century – and my discovery of Richard Aldington, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, and a rediscovery of Siegfried Sassoon, have been a great gift of the experience.

One cannot listen to an anthology of such poetry without feeling that one has, in some sense, penetrated to the heart of the experience of war. From the poets' portrayal of the soldiers’ minds and souls, of their sufferings, sacrifices, and even of their shortcomings, one derives a portrait of humanity at the very edge of existence (Owen wrote in “Spring Offensive" that the soldiers knew “their feet had come to the end of the world"), seen in the lurid light of flares and artillery barrages and gas attacks and machine gun bursts. You cannot but take such insight to heart; you cannot help but be changed by it. By the time I reached the final poem, Laurence Binyon’s famous elegy, “For the Fallen,” accompanied as it was by the stately and powerful variation from Elgar’s “Enigma,” I was moved to tears.

But I was moved also to reflection. For you cannot, I think, look into other men’s hearts and souls (as poetry always compels you to do) without peering into your own. And what I saw, reflected in the shifting glow of that beautiful and melancholy, and at times terrifying verse, was my own experience of war.

When I was in college, our political leaders, in their monstrous wisdom, offered me the chance of war. In that case, it was the War in Vietnam. At eighteen I dutifully lined up with other youths of my era and registered for the draft. (I will never forget the young woman who took my information – a rather pretty, full-skirted girl name Julie Gueri, who, though I saw her only for minutes and never saw her again, proved to be one of the most important women in my life.) And then, as the prospect of war drew close, I did what I have always done, and which I continue to do: research. What I learned about the history of the West’s involvement in Southeast Asia, and in particular what the French and now my own nation had done there, troubled me to my soul. I came to the conclusion, as did millions of others, that the war was both illegal and immoral, and that I could have nothing to do with it, except to protest.

Meanwhile, friends from high school who were not astute enough in the ways of academia to gain the safety of college, were being swallowed up by the war. I followed the growing lists of the killed with morbid regularity, and I noted in my yearbook the name of each of my comrades who died. “Killed in Vietnam,” I wrote beneath their pictures, “July, 1969” or “December, 1970”, or “April, 1971.” And as the war wore on and the casualty lists lengthened, and my yearbook became littered with notes of their deaths, my doubts about our involvement turned to hatred, and my hatred, to a determination to do something to stop it. And so I became active in the anti-war movement, which was growing almost as fast as the war itself. I protested, organized sit-ins, marched on Washington several times, but was careful never to break the law, for I understood that breaking the law to oppose evil, while sometimes necessary, was simply not in my nature. My feeling was that law – sane, humane, democratic law – was, in an important sense, what we in the movement were hoping to preserve; that we were not just fighting against something horribly wasteful, but fighting for something vitally necessary.

However, war allows no reprieve for the young; it devours them as hungrily as a hurricane devours the trees. When, at last, I was drafted, a line was drawn – not by me, but by the government. It was my moment of decision – I was being forced to break the law – and though I agonized over it, my decision was never in doubt: I refused. (The rest of that story is not important now, though I will add that I did not, thank God, have to go to prison, though I suppose I was prepared to. Instead, I was ordered to teach mentally disturbed children for two years.) What matters now, and mattered to me then, was that I had hoped to live my life without committing any great evil, without murdering anyone, without ransoming my soul for some diktat or some benefit of power. And so I refused to participate in what I saw as the greatest corruption of power – an illegal and immoral war.

That I had to do so was as clear to me as the fact that I was born and had to live and must be a part of humanity. It was, I believed then and still believe, a question of saving my soul. For I felt with all the depth of my being that the life of my spirit was at risk, and that, if I made the wrong decision, I would lose my eternal identity forever. And so I refused the war for the sake of my immortal soul. It was with me as it had been with Hamlet when he said, “My fate cries out!” My soul was telling me that I had no choice but to say no.

But now, forty years later, listening to these poems which dramatize the sufferings and sacrifices of an entire generation of boys, and feeling the power of that poetry in my soul, I have wondered for the first time in those four decades whether I made the right decision. At the time, I saw it as my duty to try to save my school friends’ lives by stopping the war; now I wonder if my duty was not to have joined them in that war, and to have taken upon myself their sufferings and sacrifices.

Camus famously said that war teaches us to be losers; I think now that he was wrong. War teaches, or can teach us, what it means to be human, in all its strengths and weaknesses. I was offered the chance to learn those truths about myself, and I turned it down. I was offered my own war, and I refused it. What it may have taught me once and forever about myself I will never know. And I will never know exactly how my high school classmates, who did not refuse, lived and suffered and died. I will never know their sacrifices and their terrors and the comradeship that only war can engender. I will never know who they truly were.

In “For the Fallen,” Laurence Binyon writes: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old/Age cannot weary them, nor the years condemn/At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them.” And in a closing tribute to their immortality in death, Binyon compares them to the stars, saying: “As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust/Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain/As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness/To the end, to the end, they remain.”

I was one of those who were left, and now I am growing old. Age has most certainly wearied me, and the condemnation of the years is fast approaching. But I do remember those of my young friends who went to Southeast Asia in the Sixties and Seventies and did not return, and whose names I always touch when I visit the Wall in Washington. I remember them, if not every day, at least every time I look at my yearbook, or chat with a graying school chum on the phone. And in listening to these poems I cannot help but wonder whether it was not I who was lost in that terrible tempest of violence which swept through our young lives; and if it is not they, more so than I, who remain.

Family Ties, Family Lies

2009-08-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I spoke with my cousin Charles. It was an extraordinary experience. Why? Because until last week I did not know he existed.

Five years ago I began doing genealogical research in order to find out where in Europe my people came from. What I learned in the process affected me profoundly. For a start, I discovered that I never knew my mother's real name. She had always told me that her name was Parisi, and that her father was an immigrant barber from Italy. This, it seems, was not true. Her real name was Goldsmith, and both of her parents were born in England. All through my childhood my mother insisted, and my father did not demur, that she was an orphan who had no brothers or sisters, and, thus, that I had no aunts, uncles or cousins. In fact, she had three sisters - my aunts - of whose existence I was, until my research, unaware, and whose names I had never heard. It appears, although it is still not clear, that her mother left or divorced her husband, and moved in with or married the Italian barber, to whom my mother always referred as her father.

Why my mother should have denied her parents and her siblings I cannot imagine. But according to government records, it appears that, when she was about fourteen, her mother and her older sister left Parisi's home, and my mother never spoke of them again. Her younger sister had by that time died in an automobile accident, and the youngest sister had long been dead from influenza. Whatever the cause of the rupture, it was a defining moment in my mother's life. She stopped using her father's name and disowned her mother and older sister. The split was so deep and so enduring that even my father, who apparently had known them, likewise never mentioned their existence or their names.

I was thus in my fifties before I learned that I had, in fact, had aunts, uncles and cousins. But that it seems is the practice in my family: When it becomes inconvenient to do so, we simply stop acknowledging and speaking to one another. The family has thus filled up with lies, implicit or explicit, which form a crusted substitute for family history.

My niece was able to determine that my surviving aunt had died in 2004 at the age of ninety-nine, in Arizona. This was a painful discovery for me since it meant that, had I known of her existence, I could have spoken with her, and gotten the truth about my mother and the destructive dynamics of her family. But the secret which my mother imposed had persisted, and the person best placed to tell me had taken the truth to her grave. My niece was also able to determine, however, that she had a son, whose age, while advanced, suggested that he might still be alive. He is, and with my niece's dogged assistance, I found him.

We spoke on the phone for over an hour. He knew who I was - he had been aware of me, if I not of him - and he gave me much information about my mother, her family, and her early years. For they had been close as children - although Cousin Charles was my mother's nephew, they were only two years apart. He has, he tells me, many family documents, which he has offered to share with me when I go to visit him in Tucson. I am looking forward to it, as a sort of adventure into my own unexplored past. He also says he has several photos of my mother as a girl. When he told me this, I nearly cried: I have never seen a picture of my mother as a girl, indeed, I have no idea what she looked like before illness, obesity and my father's drinking had taken their toll. I think that seeing those old photos will be both a revealing and a draining experience.

For my mother chose to end her own life when she was thirty-nine, a decision which has affected the entire course of my life. The suicide of a parent is a traumatic experience for any child, and for a child as sensitive as I was, with as vivid an imagination and as brooding a nature as mine, it became a force which shaped my life forever after.

I do not remember her very well - we take our parents for granted so when we are children, assuming that they will always be there. I recall her as a rather rambunctious woman who liked to laugh, who enjoyed trying new things, and who suffered from chronic illness throughout my childhood. Indeed, some of my enduring memories of my mother consist of sitting in a hospital waiting room doing my homework and watching for her to be discharged. It was, I suppose, the combination of her illness and my father's utter failure in his profession and his deepening alcoholism, that pushed her over the edge. And because of her decision, I have spent most of my life at that edge. Only the knowledge of what her death meant to me has restrained me from following her example, and imposing that burden likewise on my children.

BE-12 Healthcare

2009-07-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

Reading about World War I aviation has been one of my continuing passions since I was a child. I possess a very large library, mostly of pilots' memoirs and diaries, and of fact books about aircraft and tactics. I think there is much to learn from the accounts of the early aviators, especially those who had to test themselves and their machines in war, and not all of the lessons are confined to aeronautics.

This morning, I made a point of reading about the Royal Aircraft Factory's creation, the B.E.12. The Royal Aircraft Factory, or RAF, was the government's official supplier of aircraft for the military, and as such, had a near monopoly on aircraft design, if not on production. It was run by government appointees, whose primary purpose (as is the goal of all government bureaucrats) was to protect their own jobs and privileges. Few had any experience of front-line flying and, what is even more extraordinary, they were determined to adhere to their preconceived notions of what the army needed despite all evidence and all reports of fatal failure. It was this mindset which produced the B.E. 12.

This was a purpose-built airplane designed to replace its predecessor, the B.E. 2. The B.E. 2 was the Royal Flying Corps' standard reconnaissance plane during 1915 and 1916, and at the outset of the war it filled its role well. It was a tractor bi-plane (it had the engine in the front), with a high-set top wing and a fan-shaped tail that gave it rather the appearance of an ambitious box kite. Though very slow, it was valued for its stability, a prime asset in its role of photographing enemy installations and helping to range artillery fire. However, as the war went on and the German air service developed new and better technologies, the B.E 2 acquired the macabre sobriquet of "Fokker fodder." This was due to the fact that the Fokker monoplane, a relatively speedy little fighter equipped with a machine gun synchronized to fire through its propeller, made mincemeat of the old, slow, inadequately armed B.E.'s.

Nonetheless, the Royal Aircraft Factory was wedded to the idea of a slow, steady observation plane, and against all evidence and reason, continued to build the B.E. 2's and to equip the RFC squadrons at the Front with them. The slow, slightly armed B.E. 2's were being shot down at an alarming rate, causing a member of Parliament to declare that the RAF's insistence on obsolete technologies was killing British pilots, and that their deaths were 'murder.' The Factory's response was the B.E. 12.

Now I took the time this morning to read about the B.E. 12 because I had read previously that it was one of the worst fighter airplanes produced during the Great War, and I wanted a detailed account of its design, manufacture, and performance at the Front. And, indeed, it appears that the 12 was everything I had previously heard about it.

Based on the obsolete B.E. 2, the B.E. 12 was intended as a front-line reconnaissance aircraft which could also be used as a fighter. A number of modifications were made to the old B.E. 2 to create what was to be an answer the lethal challenge of "the Fokker scourge." For example, the front seat was removed, and replaced with a fuel tank, thus putting fifty gallons of kerosene directly in front of the pilot, indeed, at his feet. This meant that if the tank were struck by a bullet and set on fire, the pilot was bound to be burned to death. Indeed, since the airplane, having been shot down, would be in a dive, the flames were sure to be blown back onto him. And since the British Government steadfastly refused to provide its pilots with parachutes (even though they had been available for years, and were issued to German aviators), the result of this modification was to ensure the pilot an agonizing, fiery death. But this was not enough for the institutional wisdom of the Factory. They slung a second fuel tank from the underside of the top wing, exposed for all the world to see. When this was set ablaze, it burned off the wing, causing a fatal crash.

The old B.E. 2's had originally not been armed, and it was only when the Germans began blasting them from the skies that the RFC began to put machine guns on them. But the British had no synchronizing gear at the time, and so the guns could not be made to fire forward. Instead, several complicated mechanisms were tried to enable the pilot to shoot over or around the propeller, all of which were woefully unsuccessful. Still with no means of firing through the propeller, the designers of the B.E. 12 mounted a machine gun on the side of the airplane's nose, and attached metal plates to the propeller tips, hoping that any bullets that struck them would be caromed away. (Of course, a bullet striking a prop blade square-on was bound to shoot it off.) The offset position of the B.E. 12's gun meant that the pilot could not just point the plane at his enemy and fire. Instead, he had to aim through sights mounted on the outside of the struts above the gun. He thus had to lean out of the cockpit in order to aim and fire his gun, while still performing the aerobatic maneuvers of the dog fight.

Now bear in mind that the chief purpose of the B.E. 12, as with its predecessor, was reconnaissance. The solo pilot was expected to fly the airplane and take photographs with the view camera hung on the outside of the cockpit. These primitive air cameras used glass plates - yes, glass - which had to be changed by hand with each exposure. Thus, the pilot had to lean over the side, view through the camera, take a picture, offload the glass negative, put it into the storage bin inside the cockpit, take out another, lean out again, and replace the plate, all while flying the airplane. And not just that - he also had to be on the lookout for enemy aircraft which might sneak up on him at any moment and try to kill him.

While it might have been possible to fly the B.E. 12 with one hand and take pictures with the other, a division of attention among three critical tasks was, simply, impossible. Yet this was precisely the challenge which was handed to British pilots when the B.E. 12 was forced upon them by the government bureaucracy. (Remember that the average age of a fighter pilot on the Western Front was nineteen or twenty years; thus, boys, many of them scarcely trained to fly, were being asked to undertake this impossible task.) And all of this was to be accomplished in an airplane that was almost certain to catch on fire and burn its pilot to death.

Yet this was the best that the government could do to address the slaughter of British pilots: Tanks of kerosene at the pilot's feet and over his head, a machine gun placed so that it was nearly impossible to aim, a camera that required an extra pair of hands to operate; and it was still slow and inadequately armed.

Now why do I raise all this? Because we, in this nation at this time, are about to have forced upon us the B.E. 12 equivalent of health care reform. It is a program designed by bureaucrats whose agenda is their own power and perquisites, and not the health and lives of the citizens. A program that is being cobbled together in face of a crisis using old solutions that were proved no longer to work, exactly as was the B.E. 12. And though members of Congress have not even read the 1000-page-plus bill, the president demands that it be sent to him in a matter of weeks. This is nonsense, it is idiocy, it would not be tolerated in any rational system of government. But in the past decades, the left has so stirred the populace to near hysteria regarding health care that no one dares challenge anymore the wisdom of the government taking charge of it, on any terms at any cost. Instead, only aspects (and precious few aspects) of this monster, life-altering legislation are being debated, for the simple reason that almost no one knows what is in the bill, nor what to expect if it passes.

But we do know what to expect, based on prior experience with massive government programs such as this: waste, fraud, incompetence, indifference to individuals, more bureaucracy, higher taxes, the substitution of statistics for humanity, and, as with the B.E. 12, unnecessary suffering and death. When the government takes over health care in this country (which it will do given the climate of hysteria, and the craven response of the opposition), it will cease to be health care and will become health corruption. It will be a government power-grab disguised as a humanitarian effort; it will be the B.E. 12 in which all of us will be forced to fly, whether we like it or not.

Uchida Unique

2009-07-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should just say it: Mitsuko Uchida is the most skillful, intelligent, eloquent and tasteful pianist performing today. I have been listening to her recordings of the late Beethoven piano sonatas, which I found quite by accident. I had long admired her recordings of the Schubert sonatas and of Mozart, and I was not entirely sure what she would do with the Beethoven. As those who have followed this site will know, I consider the last Beethoven piano sonatas to be among the greatest achievements of our civilization, and I have loved and studied them for much of my life. So when I noticed the Uchida album on the shelf, I grabbed it.

I was not disappointed; indeed, far from it. She plays these sonatas with all the power, intelligence and clarity which she brings to everything else. Unlike many female pianists, who evince delicacy of touch and finesse of technique (which are unsuited to late Beethoven), Uchida plays the sonatas with all the strength of Rudolf Serkin, all the passion of Ashkenazy, and all the precision of Glenn Gould. But more than that, she brings such intelligence and such profound understanding and original ideas to the pieces that she shows things in them of which I had been only vaguely aware before. She does not try to make them her own, as so many pianists do; I am sure she believes that the sonatas belong rightly to Beethoven. But her vision of them and the potent tastefulness of her performance are unique.

Her revelations come in very small but salient moments. The way she ends a phrase, how she approaches an idea, her manner of using pauses, silence, elongations, compressions, bring out truths in the material which only she and her special talent can expose.To hear her play the Beethoven is like hearing Olivier or Gielgud voice Shakespeare. She is meditative when she must be, masculine when the music calls for it, insightful always, and she is capable (which many pianists are not) of enunciating the spiritual content of the sonatas, which is, after all, what they are about.

Uchida, to my mind and ear, combines supreme talent with profound sensitivity; a combination of power and delicacy that is rare; above all, an intelligence and a sensibility which, it seems to me, are unique to her. She is, I think, the finest pianist of our time.