Thursday, February 28, 2019
Waiting for the Sun
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 6/1/2007
... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him…We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
- Willa Cather
We bound off the evening ferry onto land toward Market Street as fast as our legs will carry us with rush hour rhyme and reason. Across the Embarcadero, over the red brick road to the first major downtown intersection. People zip around in all directions like smashing atoms, and in the middle of it all a middle-aged homeless man with a stubbled grimace stands by the curb wiping his ass with one of those dinky little white napkins they stash in the old school silver dispensers at the diner, right in front of the swank Hyatt Regency and the cable car turnaround which shoots bubbly tourists up California Street just like you’ve seen on those pristine sunny blue sky day frozen moment postcards. Nobody seems to notice, except two cable car operators who stand and laugh as the next ride loads up.
I walk a block to the Embarcadero Center , a downtown mall and insanely expensive commercial real estate, and wait for a bus due west, toward the Pacific Ocean. About twenty yuppie worker bees from the financial services sector are randomly strewn inside and around the bus shelter. No one talks or laughs or reacts; all eyes are glued to the turn ahead.
The clumped network of wires above that guide the electric system shake a little when the bus arrives. A few people herd like cattle at the door, but most are tired and civilized enough to fall in line. As I board I hold up my bus pass. The driver stares through me and the formality and on to the next rider. A sign in the front of the bus reads:
INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
It’s the first stop on the route, so we all have a choice of seats. I sit near the back, next to a window, and listen to the low steady hum of the electric bus as it pokes along.
Within a few downtown stops we are jammed tight, the aisles full of feet, hands taloned to the overhead bar. Here and there someone reads but most just stare into their laps, the space in front of them, or off into the distance. There’s not a lot to see outside: tall buildings, chainstores and the slate gray sky. Denying golden silence is the sound of heavy metal pounding through someone’s headphones.
Sitting next to me is a tall man in his early thirties that I’ve seen around town several times throughout the years, but can’t recall where. Through the ride he bounces a knee up and down, shifts in his seat, and puts his head in his hands, his anxiety exacerbated by the snail’s pace at which overloaded clean energy can move.
When we come to his stop he escapes out the back door and is replaced by a middle-aged man in a suit. My new companion carries himself with a certain slow exactitude, sitting down carefully so as not to bump me, then reaching into a black sidebag from which he removes a book I recently read, All the King’s Men. I have an urge to ask him what he thinks about the book, but I drop it when he pulls an IPOD out and inserts the headphones into his ear holes. I wonder how the hell he can concentrate on long-form prose when listening to music – or is the IPOD just a way of cordoning off humanity?
The bus comes to a stop and those exiting thread their way through to the back exit while new passengers file in through the front.
Suddenly a pungent odor drifts through the crowded space. I wonder where it comes from. The man next to me turns the pages of his novel, oblivious.
A few moments later there is a muttering that seems addressed to no one in particular. I search for the voice and find the source of the funk a few seats ahead - a homeless man in his fifties whose face is red-tanned, cracked, and bloated. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a worn black leather coat and a baseball cap, his eyes open halfway in a woozy drunk fashion as he cradles a fifth of Jim Beam like a baby in coarse, leathery hands. The seats on either side of him are open.
“Turn the heater up,” he yells to the driver.
Many of the other riders stare at him out of curiosity, the pornography of raw poverty, then look away when he turns toward them, lest they be lured into listening. To fill the space, he converses with himself, then hums, then laughs:
“Ah, that cracks me up,” he says, and slaps his palm to his head, as if why didn’t I think of that before.
At the next stop a college-aged girl with a natural look – long straight brown hair, no makeup, jeans, jeanjacket – gets on. She winds through to the back of the bus, sees there are no other seats, and sits down next to the homeless man.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he says. “She was pretty like you.”
The girl looks over and mouths thank you. She is a little nervous, if nice, probably new to these parts. He feels it and continues to talk to her; she fights the urge to look away.
Just as everything is settling in, the poles that connect to the wires above that power the bus come undone. The driver stops the vehicle, lurches out of his seat, and walks behind the bus to re-attach the poles as we sit in the dead air of a collective gasp. One minute goes by, two minutes, five, and the driver’s still out there, but no dice. Finally he comes back into the bus and tells us we have to get off.
The electric poles are tucked and tied down when we pour out on to Van Ness Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. I look up Van Ness a few blocks and see a southbound bus coming. It’s going away from the ocean, but by now I’m ready to slip back into my pod.
The driver of the 49 Van Ness-Mission could care less when I flash my pass; fifteen people just piled in through the middle and back doors without paying and he just closes the front door and hauls ass in his long gas-powered accordion bus, like he just wants to be done with it all.
I see an aisle seat toward the back of the bus. The Hispanic man in the window seat next to me slides a leg that straddles the dividing line back into his square.
Dead center in the middle of the bus is a big metal wheel that spins one way, then the other, as the accordion that connects front and back crunches up while the bus whips around corners like a snake with no nerve endings at the back, then expands back to its full length on the straightaways. The seats in the wheel are empty; no one wants to face one another.
As we come to a stop at the turn onto Mission Street , a homeless woman in a wheelchair with rotted teeth and stringy strung out long hair panhandles window-to-window at a divider. The bus turns right and the buildings become gray and brown brick, like in a black and white movie.
With no human voices to fill the air, public service announcements drone on over the intercom:
“Eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited on all transit vehicles.”
At the next stop, as the bus is about to take off, a large man with grocery bags in each hand flounders up with a look of desperation; no one wants to have to stand at a bus stop for ten or fifteen or who knows how many minutes. This time the driver waits and re-opens the door. When the bus starts up again the intercom reminds us:
“Please hold on,”
then, a moment later,
“Remember on a crowded bus, always protect purses and wallets.”
High up and off to the side is a St. Pauli Girl billboard that features a snow white buxom Minnesotan of the kind rarely seen in these parts, which reminds me that I’m one of the only Caucasians on the bus, which makes me again wonder how much social progress emerging polyglot demographics will bring (or will majorities of people of color follow whitey's lead and become more selfish and short-sighted once they get a bigger piece of the pie?).
I come out of my head into the floor of the bus, strewn with newspapers, trash, candy wrappers, a red plastic grocery bag, blue powder from a capsized capsule and squiggly spraypainted signatures, when I hear someone say “Spare a quarter?”
Ten feet forward a gaunt and frazzled addict with jeans hanging down past his ass crack bounces from person to person with his pitch. The riders shake their heads; they so just want to be home. The man looks up at me as the bus stops and The Voice comes on:
“Please exit through the rear doors.”
Empty-handed he turns around and bolts out the back door as a young woman gets on with her kids and finds two spots in the front of the bus. The bigger of the two sits next to her, the smaller sits in her lap while she holds a plastic shopping bag with one hand. The kids must have read the script: the younger is quiet and subdued, while the older turns around with his knees on the seat and looks out the window with mute enthusiasm. Once every one is on, the driver puts his foot to the floor.
Minutes later I step down and through the rear door onto a corner with a subway station where people are very friendly. First up is a bible-wielding Spanish-speaking preacher (with a bible-wielding double stepping in stride, translating in English to the best of his ability), then a Socialist Worker pusher, and an elderly Hispanic woman standing back from the subway entrance cooing a soft sell: “Ro-ses, flo-res?”
As I walk along I look at the cracks in the sidewalk old and gray as the day and the few faces that come past me, long and self-contained. A little ways down the block I encounter one of my next door neighbors, who continues to talk into his phone as we brush elbows.
Just before going home, I stop at the corner store for evening provisions. The man behind the counter gives me a nod of familiarity when I enter. We’ve known each other for five years - a decent amount of time by San Francisco standards - and grown increasingly familiar since we discovered we had a shared need to gripe about the dumb and dangerous piece of work that occupies the Oval Office.
I set a bottled water on the counter as we talk about our summer weather (gray, windy, mild) and wonder aloud when the sun will come out again, until another customer steps up and foreshortens our discussion. As I head for the door, the store owner says goodbye, but does not address me formally; he does not know my name.
... in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him…We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
- Willa Cather
We bound off the evening ferry onto land toward Market Street as fast as our legs will carry us with rush hour rhyme and reason. Across the Embarcadero, over the red brick road to the first major downtown intersection. People zip around in all directions like smashing atoms, and in the middle of it all a middle-aged homeless man with a stubbled grimace stands by the curb wiping his ass with one of those dinky little white napkins they stash in the old school silver dispensers at the diner, right in front of the swank Hyatt Regency and the cable car turnaround which shoots bubbly tourists up California Street just like you’ve seen on those pristine sunny blue sky day frozen moment postcards. Nobody seems to notice, except two cable car operators who stand and laugh as the next ride loads up.
I walk a block to the Embarcadero Center , a downtown mall and insanely expensive commercial real estate, and wait for a bus due west, toward the Pacific Ocean. About twenty yuppie worker bees from the financial services sector are randomly strewn inside and around the bus shelter. No one talks or laughs or reacts; all eyes are glued to the turn ahead.
The clumped network of wires above that guide the electric system shake a little when the bus arrives. A few people herd like cattle at the door, but most are tired and civilized enough to fall in line. As I board I hold up my bus pass. The driver stares through me and the formality and on to the next rider. A sign in the front of the bus reads:
INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION
It’s the first stop on the route, so we all have a choice of seats. I sit near the back, next to a window, and listen to the low steady hum of the electric bus as it pokes along.
Within a few downtown stops we are jammed tight, the aisles full of feet, hands taloned to the overhead bar. Here and there someone reads but most just stare into their laps, the space in front of them, or off into the distance. There’s not a lot to see outside: tall buildings, chainstores and the slate gray sky. Denying golden silence is the sound of heavy metal pounding through someone’s headphones.
Sitting next to me is a tall man in his early thirties that I’ve seen around town several times throughout the years, but can’t recall where. Through the ride he bounces a knee up and down, shifts in his seat, and puts his head in his hands, his anxiety exacerbated by the snail’s pace at which overloaded clean energy can move.
When we come to his stop he escapes out the back door and is replaced by a middle-aged man in a suit. My new companion carries himself with a certain slow exactitude, sitting down carefully so as not to bump me, then reaching into a black sidebag from which he removes a book I recently read, All the King’s Men. I have an urge to ask him what he thinks about the book, but I drop it when he pulls an IPOD out and inserts the headphones into his ear holes. I wonder how the hell he can concentrate on long-form prose when listening to music – or is the IPOD just a way of cordoning off humanity?
The bus comes to a stop and those exiting thread their way through to the back exit while new passengers file in through the front.
Suddenly a pungent odor drifts through the crowded space. I wonder where it comes from. The man next to me turns the pages of his novel, oblivious.
A few moments later there is a muttering that seems addressed to no one in particular. I search for the voice and find the source of the funk a few seats ahead - a homeless man in his fifties whose face is red-tanned, cracked, and bloated. Dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, a worn black leather coat and a baseball cap, his eyes open halfway in a woozy drunk fashion as he cradles a fifth of Jim Beam like a baby in coarse, leathery hands. The seats on either side of him are open.
“Turn the heater up,” he yells to the driver.
Many of the other riders stare at him out of curiosity, the pornography of raw poverty, then look away when he turns toward them, lest they be lured into listening. To fill the space, he converses with himself, then hums, then laughs:
“Ah, that cracks me up,” he says, and slaps his palm to his head, as if why didn’t I think of that before.
At the next stop a college-aged girl with a natural look – long straight brown hair, no makeup, jeans, jeanjacket – gets on. She winds through to the back of the bus, sees there are no other seats, and sits down next to the homeless man.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he says. “She was pretty like you.”
The girl looks over and mouths thank you. She is a little nervous, if nice, probably new to these parts. He feels it and continues to talk to her; she fights the urge to look away.
Just as everything is settling in, the poles that connect to the wires above that power the bus come undone. The driver stops the vehicle, lurches out of his seat, and walks behind the bus to re-attach the poles as we sit in the dead air of a collective gasp. One minute goes by, two minutes, five, and the driver’s still out there, but no dice. Finally he comes back into the bus and tells us we have to get off.
The electric poles are tucked and tied down when we pour out on to Van Ness Avenue, one of the city's main thoroughfares. I look up Van Ness a few blocks and see a southbound bus coming. It’s going away from the ocean, but by now I’m ready to slip back into my pod.
---
The driver of the 49 Van Ness-Mission could care less when I flash my pass; fifteen people just piled in through the middle and back doors without paying and he just closes the front door and hauls ass in his long gas-powered accordion bus, like he just wants to be done with it all.
I see an aisle seat toward the back of the bus. The Hispanic man in the window seat next to me slides a leg that straddles the dividing line back into his square.
Dead center in the middle of the bus is a big metal wheel that spins one way, then the other, as the accordion that connects front and back crunches up while the bus whips around corners like a snake with no nerve endings at the back, then expands back to its full length on the straightaways. The seats in the wheel are empty; no one wants to face one another.
As we come to a stop at the turn onto Mission Street , a homeless woman in a wheelchair with rotted teeth and stringy strung out long hair panhandles window-to-window at a divider. The bus turns right and the buildings become gray and brown brick, like in a black and white movie.
With no human voices to fill the air, public service announcements drone on over the intercom:
“Eating, drinking and smoking are prohibited on all transit vehicles.”
At the next stop, as the bus is about to take off, a large man with grocery bags in each hand flounders up with a look of desperation; no one wants to have to stand at a bus stop for ten or fifteen or who knows how many minutes. This time the driver waits and re-opens the door. When the bus starts up again the intercom reminds us:
“Please hold on,”
then, a moment later,
“Remember on a crowded bus, always protect purses and wallets.”
High up and off to the side is a St. Pauli Girl billboard that features a snow white buxom Minnesotan of the kind rarely seen in these parts, which reminds me that I’m one of the only Caucasians on the bus, which makes me again wonder how much social progress emerging polyglot demographics will bring (or will majorities of people of color follow whitey's lead and become more selfish and short-sighted once they get a bigger piece of the pie?).
I come out of my head into the floor of the bus, strewn with newspapers, trash, candy wrappers, a red plastic grocery bag, blue powder from a capsized capsule and squiggly spraypainted signatures, when I hear someone say “Spare a quarter?”
Ten feet forward a gaunt and frazzled addict with jeans hanging down past his ass crack bounces from person to person with his pitch. The riders shake their heads; they so just want to be home. The man looks up at me as the bus stops and The Voice comes on:
“Please exit through the rear doors.”
Empty-handed he turns around and bolts out the back door as a young woman gets on with her kids and finds two spots in the front of the bus. The bigger of the two sits next to her, the smaller sits in her lap while she holds a plastic shopping bag with one hand. The kids must have read the script: the younger is quiet and subdued, while the older turns around with his knees on the seat and looks out the window with mute enthusiasm. Once every one is on, the driver puts his foot to the floor.
Minutes later I step down and through the rear door onto a corner with a subway station where people are very friendly. First up is a bible-wielding Spanish-speaking preacher (with a bible-wielding double stepping in stride, translating in English to the best of his ability), then a Socialist Worker pusher, and an elderly Hispanic woman standing back from the subway entrance cooing a soft sell: “Ro-ses, flo-res?”
As I walk along I look at the cracks in the sidewalk old and gray as the day and the few faces that come past me, long and self-contained. A little ways down the block I encounter one of my next door neighbors, who continues to talk into his phone as we brush elbows.
Just before going home, I stop at the corner store for evening provisions. The man behind the counter gives me a nod of familiarity when I enter. We’ve known each other for five years - a decent amount of time by San Francisco standards - and grown increasingly familiar since we discovered we had a shared need to gripe about the dumb and dangerous piece of work that occupies the Oval Office.
I set a bottled water on the counter as we talk about our summer weather (gray, windy, mild) and wonder aloud when the sun will come out again, until another customer steps up and foreshortens our discussion. As I head for the door, the store owner says goodbye, but does not address me formally; he does not know my name.
The Honest Republican?
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 4/15/07
He stands with his waders submerged in mud above the article title “Prisoner of Conscience,” clad in beat up old blue jeans, a blue denim shirt under a green hunting vest, a black baseball cap on his head. To his left is a fishing pole, perched on a rock pointing away; at his feet his loyal springer spaniel looks with master directly into the camera. He is everyman. He is Republican Senator John McCain, a.k.a. Straight Talkin’ McCain, and he is running for president.
In the opening paragraphs of “Prisoner” the writer says of his subject: “In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human.” The burning question of the 10,000-word love letter in February’s Vanity Fair is: does John McCain possess the guile necessary to be a successful candidate? And would McCain even want the presidency if he has to sell his soul to get it?
Throughout his 24 years in Congress, McCain has gained a reputation for speaking his mind, consequences be damned, often in opposition to the Republican Party line of the moment. McCain has bucked the GOP – sometimes loudly – on gun show loopholes, lobbying reform, HMO reform, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, climate change, gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, seeking compensation from tobacco companies and upholding the filibuster. In a party long run with and on authoritarian discipline, this is a novelty that the press can’t get enough of.
In his 2000 presidential run, McCain rambled around the early primary states aboard a bus famously dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his direct attacks on the ideological orthodoxies of both major parties and the extraordinary level of access given to the media, a way for McCain’s cash-strapped campaign to get free and favorable press coverage.
McCain giddily attacked the Republican establishment candidate George W. Bush from the rhetorical center and clobbered Bush in the vital early primary state of New Hampshire by almost twenty points, only to get buried in South Carolina by an evangelical militia backed by a shitstorm of slanderous attack ads. Along with the above-ground assault were whisper campaigns claiming that McCain was a nutcase due to his five years in captivity as a POW in Vietnam, that his wife was a drug addict (she had had an addiction to pills following surgery), and that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)
Bush’s victory in South Carolina was the beginning of the end for McCain, who marched on to Pat Robertson’s home town and denounced Bush as “a Pat Robertson Republican” and Robertson and Bush supporter Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”
While McCain lost the primary, he piqued interest among a substantial block of independent voters thereafter known as “McCainiacs.” More importantly, McCain won the media, whom he later referred to as “my base,” which was not much of a stretch. Opposite Al Gore’s funereal seminars and George W. Bush’s scripted platitudes, McCain’s shake and bake liveliness and equal opportunity willingness to upend both major party platforms cemented a reputation for integrity that has become conventional wisdom in the national political dialogue. Our lazy media corps love labels that save them from doing their homework (i.e. the tedious and unsexy task of sifting through voting records to see what candidate X is really about), and the labels attached to McCain are uniformly flattering: “maverick”, “insurgent”, “rebel”, or “icon.” The press’s favorite adjective for McCain is “defiant.” McCain’s autobiographies play on this handy image with titles such as Character is Destiny, Worth the Fighting For and Why Courage Matters.
From early 2001, McCain became the media’s go-to guy in the Senate, as he was quick with a quotable quote and often likely to mix it up with someone, thereby creating an artificial controversy guaranteed to rattle around the hollow media chamber for a day or two until the next flavor-of-the day came along. Still smarting from Team Bush’s manhandling in the presidential race, McCain leveled populist attacks on Bush’s tax cuts (“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us”), 40% of which went to millionaires, and in July 2001, a McCain aide talked to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about the possibility of McCain leaving the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. The assumed benefits would’ve been the committee chairmanship of his choice, a louder megaphone through which to project his voice, and revenge on Bush. Then came 9-11.
When it comes to picking presidents, many Americans favor instinct to empiricism, reducing presidential elections to popularity contests. Despite the dire and dramatic events of the past few years, 55% of respondents in a March AP poll of American voters valued subjective personality traits such as honesty and integrity more than objective observations on policy positions and credentials.
The most obvious shortcoming of this mode of assessment is that politicians are professional chameleons: they thrive and survive by adapting to shifts in public opinion, while concealing that they are doing so. Judging a politician by their honesty is like tipping a hooker on the sound of her sweet nothings. Moreover, when most Americans rely on corporate network news, content-starved newspapers with bite-size AP dispatches, and cable programs that revolve around horse race stories and Kabuki quibbles, public perception of who’s telling the truth will often be out of line with factual reality, sometimes wildly.
Playing on this, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, like many Republican campaigns before it, ran on a ‘character-first’ platform. Messy details about the far-reaching results of Bush’s decisions were discarded in favor of a contrived dialectic positing Bush’s stubborn resolve against John Kerry’s alleged weakness of will. Bush, who had pulled strings to get into the National Guard and then ditched his commitment, was strong, firm, and constant as the tides, while Kerry, who had volunteered for service in Vietnam and gone on to win three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star and one Silver Star, was weak and indecisive. The subtext was that a president should be respected and rewarded for certitude, no matter how terrible his or her judgment.
Though Karl Rove & Associates had put a serious hurting on John McCain in 2000, McCain was only too happy to bolster this charade with the knowledge that loyalty to the king would go a long way toward giving him first dibs on the fundraisers and campaign staff from Bush’s well-oiled machine in 2008, while helping to repair McCain’s image among rabid right-wing Republican primary voters.
In a tv spot, McCain said that Bush, the same president who had: 1) stepped into office on the backs of minorities his brother had purposely disenfranchised in Florida; 2) done as little as possible to stop 9/11; then 3) relentlessly manipulated the fear spawned by 9/11 to start a disastrous invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in order to 4) seize Iraq’s oil and commandeer the framing discussions of close 2002 senate races while 5) accusing opponents of being unpatriotic, had “led with great moral clarity and firm resolve.”
At the GOP convention in New York City, held unusually late to milk the third anniversary of 9/11 to maximum advantage, McCain added that Bush “has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time…He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we.” Lest anyone question his newfound genuflection before President Bush, in September of ’06 McCain told attendees at a dinner hosted by The American Spectator that “Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
In late September of 2005, as the city of New Orleans lay in wake following Hurricane Katrina, John McCain held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee in which he hit his desk as he doled out heavy-handed cross-examination to the central witness: “You were told more than five months ago to come up with a tougher proposal. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it…Don’t you understand that this is an issue of transcendent importance that you should have acted on months ago.”
The source of McCain’s outrage and indignation? The most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon? An invasion of choice that had started a civil war in Iraq? The most extreme income inequality since the Great Depression? 45,000,000 Americans with no health insurance? The skyrocketing costs of a college education?
Nope. Steroids in sports.
Along with the show trial hearings, McCain (who likes to refer to himself as a “limited government conservative”) proposed urgent federal legislation to regulate drug tests in sports, only to let the (non) issue go a couple months later when Major League Baseball made token concessions.
Earlier in the same year, as bloodshed and chaos grew in Iraq, the Republican Party showed its respect for the sanctity of human life by trying to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest. McCain backed Republicans’ attempt to force Schiavo’s husband to keep his wife on life support, quality of life and multiple court decisions be damned. When the public saw through the publicity stunt, the GOP brought their ace in in a pinch to do damage control. Of the breathtakingly crass sketch, McCain told ABC with grandfatherly earnestness: “I think that the motivation of my colleagues is that we want to give this young woman’s family a chance to care for her as long as she lives.”
Both incidents demonstrated the decoy tactics the Republican Party has used for decades, from McCarthyism forward, to distract the American public from more important matters, including in this day and age the fact that most of us are working longer hours for less pay and shrinking benefits while the rich gorge on ever bigger portions of America’s economic pie. McCain’s response to our fraying social contract has been to oppose unions that would reverse these trends at every step, to back Bush’s plan to privatize (i.e. draw and quarter) Social Security, which would do little to solve America’s retirement problems (it could potentially make them worse), and to support brutal cuts to the tiny portion of Congress’ budget that goes to discretionary spending programs such as Headstart, school lunches, childcare subsidies, infant nutrition programs for the economically disadvantaged and other programs that actually help people. Healthcare? McCain doesn’t talk about it. An urban agenda? McCain doesn’t have one.
While expecting sacrifice from the poor, McCain has recently reversed his opposition to Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In November of 2005 he told Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal: “I just thought [Bush’s tax cut] was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do…We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me.” Yet in recent months, McCain has gotten over petty concerns about bloated budget deficits and basic economic fairness and now supports making these huge windfalls to investors, inheritors of wealth, and other beneficiaries of America’s 21st century brand of predatory capitalism permanent, just as he seeks deep pockets for the most expensive fundraising season in world history.
McCain followed his Shakespearean performances in 2005 with more partisan water-carrying in 2006, when he made 346 campaign appearances for Republican candidates, endorsing many who were to the right of Genghis Khan, and with the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, McCain’s carefully crafted image of independence proves increasingly farcical as he panders time and again to the hard right, though sometimes quietly.
At the end of February, on the same night he announced his candidacy on Letterman (generating the autopilot McCain-as-maverick headline “In Newly Unusual Way, McCain Says He’ll Run”), McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to skip the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly meeting of conservative activists. McCain’s spokesman cited a scheduling conflict, but it later came out that McCain’s people had tried to set up a media-free private reception for attendees, a way of appeasing the right without doing so publicly.
CPAC rejected the offer, but as McCain’s spokesman pointed out, his candidate’s 20-year voting record should be more than enough to bring right-wing Republicans into lockstep with McCain’s bid. For while McCain gets major mileage out of his handful of differences with the GOP (on issues on which Republicans are out of step with public opinion), he votes with his party more than 90% of the time. A study of McCain’s votes in 2005 by professor Keith Poole found McCain to be the 4th most conservative senator in Congress, while voteview.com ranked him as the second most conservative senator for the whole 109th.
McCain has buttressed this distinction with craven 180 degree turns to the right. Though McCain had said in 2004 that a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he did television ads in favor of a measure that banned gay marriage at the state level in 2006. Though McCain said in 1999 that he supported Roe v. Wade (“…I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations”), he now says flatly that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jerry Falwell, once labeled an “agent of intolerance,” now gets on famously with Mr. McCain, who gave the commencement speech at Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University in May of 2006. Falwell returned the favor by inviting McCain to the Religious Broadcaster’s Convention (held in 2007) and offering up Brett O’Donnell, Liberty University’s debate coach, for McCain’s communications team.
As he’s crisscrossed the country on the weathered Straight Talk Express Bus, McCain has traveled back in time to a land of back alley abortions and legal machine guns, where public funds go to the teaching of intelligent design and abstinence education, big powerful weapons blow missiles out of the sky, and Cuba policy is stuck like groundhog’s day in 1961.
Against this backdrop, John McCain recently made a trip to Miami to speak before a group of right-wing Cubans, including veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the speech, McCain decried the rise of ‘socialism’ in South America, or more accurately, the election of leftists supportive of the redistribution of economic spoils to long-exploited indigenous people and opposed to US-imposed free trade agreements. A surprisingly blunt AP dispatch mentioned that McCain “said all the right things about Cuba for [the] audience,” including stating his opposition to ending the embargo until Cuba has free elections and basic human rights, and releases all political prisoners. McCain’s stance on behalf of freedom would be believable and maybe even noble if only he could reserve the same degree of indignation for vastly more oppressive U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but of course their expatriates don’t control 25 electoral votes.
As the 2008 campaign heats up at this sad, early date, the question is not whether McCain can find within himself the guile to compete, but just how low he is willing to go. Down the campaign stretch in 2006, Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee led his opponent Bob Corker in most polls, giving Ford the potential to become the first African-American to win a Senate seat in the Deep South since Reconstruction. As ever, when backed against the wall, the GOP aimed low with character assassination and innuendo, with an ad in which people “off the street” make crass statements (ex: “terrorists need their privacy”) in defense of views falsely attributed to Ford. The implication of the ad was that the safe-as-milk Ford, one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress, was out of touch with mainstream values.
Playing to the most deep-seated, residual white Southern racism, the ad was roundly condemned, by John McCain among others. Terry Nelson (known for his connections to disgraced former GOP operator Tom Delay), who birthed the ad for the Republican National Committee, was fired by Wal-Mart, for whom he worked as a consultant. But the ad worked – Corker went ahead in the race and never looked back – and Nelson got a promotion not a month later when McCain hired him as his campaign manager. (Joining Nelson will be the ad firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Pothold, who produced the notorious Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign, which McCain said at the time were “dishonest and dishonorable.”)
The one issue that has most contributed to McCain’s image as a man of unshakable principle is campaign finance reform. Todd Purdum’s sycophantic “Prisoner of Conscience” channels this conventional wisdom with the blithe assertion that McCain “has always loathed the cozy and corrupt culture of Washington D.C.” Though McCain has been in front on many of the baby steps to clean up Congress, in the eighties he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal, in which he engaged in a quid pro quo with a crooked S & L chairman whose failing S & L cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and McCain wasn’t above using his recent Commerce Committee chairmanship to steer favors for contributors. Purdum gets away with this distortion because DC’s pay-to-play culture is off limits to mainstream political discussion.
Much more in line with the mainstream media’s antiseptic national narrative is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill which banned soft money in federal elections. McCain deserves some credit for being one of the only people in his party to support the measure, but the truth is that McCain-Feingold is a toothless ‘reform’ measure of the kind loved in D.C. – a great way for politicians to prance before the cameras and claim to be concerned about an issue that is rotting our republic while actually doing very little. If McCain-Feingold really had bite, George W. Bush, second to none in trading dirty deeds for dirty money, never would have signed it.
In the past, McCain could be counted on to cry from the rooftops about campaign finance (ex: “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash”), but now that he’s focused on becoming president, he’s singing a different tune, one much more harmonious with his current motives. In 2006 McCain supported a measure to make 527 donations illegal, but upon receiving flack from conservative grass-roots groups, he backed off, and in fact has taken a good deal of money from 527 leaders and organizers, according to a recent Washington Post article by investigative reporter John Solomon. The same article pointed out in detail that the long-time crusader has received money from lobbyists – a source of many of his rhetorical fusillades in the past – and a good number of Bush’s biggest fundraisers, including those who McCain criticized in the past for their lack of ethics and pollution of the political system.
The Post article that showed the gap between the mythological Citizen McCain and the shifty candidate McCain was one of the biggest signs that the media’s refusal to question the eternally earnest senator’s sincerity may be at an end. On signs of a breakup, McCain responded ferociously, calling Solomon’s truth serum the “worst hit job that has ever been done in my entire political career,” while failing to cite any factual inaccuracies.
McCain’s twenty fundraisers in March, and the 20 he is doing in April fail to make him any more of a money-grubber than the other candidates, but they do signify that he ought to lose the soapbox that has so long been a part of his act, and give us some real straight talk. We don’t need heroes. We just need someone that can clean up the mess.
He stands with his waders submerged in mud above the article title “Prisoner of Conscience,” clad in beat up old blue jeans, a blue denim shirt under a green hunting vest, a black baseball cap on his head. To his left is a fishing pole, perched on a rock pointing away; at his feet his loyal springer spaniel looks with master directly into the camera. He is everyman. He is Republican Senator John McCain, a.k.a. Straight Talkin’ McCain, and he is running for president.
In the opening paragraphs of “Prisoner” the writer says of his subject: “In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human.” The burning question of the 10,000-word love letter in February’s Vanity Fair is: does John McCain possess the guile necessary to be a successful candidate? And would McCain even want the presidency if he has to sell his soul to get it?
Throughout his 24 years in Congress, McCain has gained a reputation for speaking his mind, consequences be damned, often in opposition to the Republican Party line of the moment. McCain has bucked the GOP – sometimes loudly – on gun show loopholes, lobbying reform, HMO reform, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, climate change, gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, seeking compensation from tobacco companies and upholding the filibuster. In a party long run with and on authoritarian discipline, this is a novelty that the press can’t get enough of.
In his 2000 presidential run, McCain rambled around the early primary states aboard a bus famously dubbed the Straight Talk Express for his direct attacks on the ideological orthodoxies of both major parties and the extraordinary level of access given to the media, a way for McCain’s cash-strapped campaign to get free and favorable press coverage.
McCain giddily attacked the Republican establishment candidate George W. Bush from the rhetorical center and clobbered Bush in the vital early primary state of New Hampshire by almost twenty points, only to get buried in South Carolina by an evangelical militia backed by a shitstorm of slanderous attack ads. Along with the above-ground assault were whisper campaigns claiming that McCain was a nutcase due to his five years in captivity as a POW in Vietnam, that his wife was a drug addict (she had had an addiction to pills following surgery), and that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains have an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)
Bush’s victory in South Carolina was the beginning of the end for McCain, who marched on to Pat Robertson’s home town and denounced Bush as “a Pat Robertson Republican” and Robertson and Bush supporter Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”
While McCain lost the primary, he piqued interest among a substantial block of independent voters thereafter known as “McCainiacs.” More importantly, McCain won the media, whom he later referred to as “my base,” which was not much of a stretch. Opposite Al Gore’s funereal seminars and George W. Bush’s scripted platitudes, McCain’s shake and bake liveliness and equal opportunity willingness to upend both major party platforms cemented a reputation for integrity that has become conventional wisdom in the national political dialogue. Our lazy media corps love labels that save them from doing their homework (i.e. the tedious and unsexy task of sifting through voting records to see what candidate X is really about), and the labels attached to McCain are uniformly flattering: “maverick”, “insurgent”, “rebel”, or “icon.” The press’s favorite adjective for McCain is “defiant.” McCain’s autobiographies play on this handy image with titles such as Character is Destiny, Worth the Fighting For and Why Courage Matters.
From early 2001, McCain became the media’s go-to guy in the Senate, as he was quick with a quotable quote and often likely to mix it up with someone, thereby creating an artificial controversy guaranteed to rattle around the hollow media chamber for a day or two until the next flavor-of-the day came along. Still smarting from Team Bush’s manhandling in the presidential race, McCain leveled populist attacks on Bush’s tax cuts (“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us”), 40% of which went to millionaires, and in July 2001, a McCain aide talked to Senate majority leader Tom Daschle about the possibility of McCain leaving the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. The assumed benefits would’ve been the committee chairmanship of his choice, a louder megaphone through which to project his voice, and revenge on Bush. Then came 9-11.
When it comes to picking presidents, many Americans favor instinct to empiricism, reducing presidential elections to popularity contests. Despite the dire and dramatic events of the past few years, 55% of respondents in a March AP poll of American voters valued subjective personality traits such as honesty and integrity more than objective observations on policy positions and credentials.
The most obvious shortcoming of this mode of assessment is that politicians are professional chameleons: they thrive and survive by adapting to shifts in public opinion, while concealing that they are doing so. Judging a politician by their honesty is like tipping a hooker on the sound of her sweet nothings. Moreover, when most Americans rely on corporate network news, content-starved newspapers with bite-size AP dispatches, and cable programs that revolve around horse race stories and Kabuki quibbles, public perception of who’s telling the truth will often be out of line with factual reality, sometimes wildly.
Playing on this, George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, like many Republican campaigns before it, ran on a ‘character-first’ platform. Messy details about the far-reaching results of Bush’s decisions were discarded in favor of a contrived dialectic positing Bush’s stubborn resolve against John Kerry’s alleged weakness of will. Bush, who had pulled strings to get into the National Guard and then ditched his commitment, was strong, firm, and constant as the tides, while Kerry, who had volunteered for service in Vietnam and gone on to win three Purple Hearts, one Bronze Star and one Silver Star, was weak and indecisive. The subtext was that a president should be respected and rewarded for certitude, no matter how terrible his or her judgment.
Though Karl Rove & Associates had put a serious hurting on John McCain in 2000, McCain was only too happy to bolster this charade with the knowledge that loyalty to the king would go a long way toward giving him first dibs on the fundraisers and campaign staff from Bush’s well-oiled machine in 2008, while helping to repair McCain’s image among rabid right-wing Republican primary voters.
In a tv spot, McCain said that Bush, the same president who had: 1) stepped into office on the backs of minorities his brother had purposely disenfranchised in Florida; 2) done as little as possible to stop 9/11; then 3) relentlessly manipulated the fear spawned by 9/11 to start a disastrous invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in order to 4) seize Iraq’s oil and commandeer the framing discussions of close 2002 senate races while 5) accusing opponents of being unpatriotic, had “led with great moral clarity and firm resolve.”
At the GOP convention in New York City, held unusually late to milk the third anniversary of 9/11 to maximum advantage, McCain added that Bush “has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time…He has not wavered. He has not flinched from the hard choices. He will not yield. And neither will we.” Lest anyone question his newfound genuflection before President Bush, in September of ’06 McCain told attendees at a dinner hosted by The American Spectator that “Campaigning with George W. Bush was one of the proudest moments of my life.”
In late September of 2005, as the city of New Orleans lay in wake following Hurricane Katrina, John McCain held a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee in which he hit his desk as he doled out heavy-handed cross-examination to the central witness: “You were told more than five months ago to come up with a tougher proposal. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get it…Don’t you understand that this is an issue of transcendent importance that you should have acted on months ago.”
The source of McCain’s outrage and indignation? The most corrupt administration since Richard Nixon? An invasion of choice that had started a civil war in Iraq? The most extreme income inequality since the Great Depression? 45,000,000 Americans with no health insurance? The skyrocketing costs of a college education?
Nope. Steroids in sports.
Along with the show trial hearings, McCain (who likes to refer to himself as a “limited government conservative”) proposed urgent federal legislation to regulate drug tests in sports, only to let the (non) issue go a couple months later when Major League Baseball made token concessions.
Earlier in the same year, as bloodshed and chaos grew in Iraq, the Republican Party showed its respect for the sanctity of human life by trying to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state for fifteen years following cardiac arrest. McCain backed Republicans’ attempt to force Schiavo’s husband to keep his wife on life support, quality of life and multiple court decisions be damned. When the public saw through the publicity stunt, the GOP brought their ace in in a pinch to do damage control. Of the breathtakingly crass sketch, McCain told ABC with grandfatherly earnestness: “I think that the motivation of my colleagues is that we want to give this young woman’s family a chance to care for her as long as she lives.”
Both incidents demonstrated the decoy tactics the Republican Party has used for decades, from McCarthyism forward, to distract the American public from more important matters, including in this day and age the fact that most of us are working longer hours for less pay and shrinking benefits while the rich gorge on ever bigger portions of America’s economic pie. McCain’s response to our fraying social contract has been to oppose unions that would reverse these trends at every step, to back Bush’s plan to privatize (i.e. draw and quarter) Social Security, which would do little to solve America’s retirement problems (it could potentially make them worse), and to support brutal cuts to the tiny portion of Congress’ budget that goes to discretionary spending programs such as Headstart, school lunches, childcare subsidies, infant nutrition programs for the economically disadvantaged and other programs that actually help people. Healthcare? McCain doesn’t talk about it. An urban agenda? McCain doesn’t have one.
While expecting sacrifice from the poor, McCain has recently reversed his opposition to Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. In November of 2005 he told Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal: “I just thought [Bush’s tax cut] was too tilted to the wealthy, and I still do…We have a wealth gap in this country, and that worries me.” Yet in recent months, McCain has gotten over petty concerns about bloated budget deficits and basic economic fairness and now supports making these huge windfalls to investors, inheritors of wealth, and other beneficiaries of America’s 21st century brand of predatory capitalism permanent, just as he seeks deep pockets for the most expensive fundraising season in world history.
McCain followed his Shakespearean performances in 2005 with more partisan water-carrying in 2006, when he made 346 campaign appearances for Republican candidates, endorsing many who were to the right of Genghis Khan, and with the 2008 presidential campaign already well underway, McCain’s carefully crafted image of independence proves increasingly farcical as he panders time and again to the hard right, though sometimes quietly.
At the end of February, on the same night he announced his candidacy on Letterman (generating the autopilot McCain-as-maverick headline “In Newly Unusual Way, McCain Says He’ll Run”), McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to skip the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a yearly meeting of conservative activists. McCain’s spokesman cited a scheduling conflict, but it later came out that McCain’s people had tried to set up a media-free private reception for attendees, a way of appeasing the right without doing so publicly.
CPAC rejected the offer, but as McCain’s spokesman pointed out, his candidate’s 20-year voting record should be more than enough to bring right-wing Republicans into lockstep with McCain’s bid. For while McCain gets major mileage out of his handful of differences with the GOP (on issues on which Republicans are out of step with public opinion), he votes with his party more than 90% of the time. A study of McCain’s votes in 2005 by professor Keith Poole found McCain to be the 4th most conservative senator in Congress, while voteview.com ranked him as the second most conservative senator for the whole 109th.
McCain has buttressed this distinction with craven 180 degree turns to the right. Though McCain had said in 2004 that a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was “antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans,” he did television ads in favor of a measure that banned gay marriage at the state level in 2006. Though McCain said in 1999 that he supported Roe v. Wade (“…I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations”), he now says flatly that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Jerry Falwell, once labeled an “agent of intolerance,” now gets on famously with Mr. McCain, who gave the commencement speech at Falwell’s fundamentalist Liberty University in May of 2006. Falwell returned the favor by inviting McCain to the Religious Broadcaster’s Convention (held in 2007) and offering up Brett O’Donnell, Liberty University’s debate coach, for McCain’s communications team.
As he’s crisscrossed the country on the weathered Straight Talk Express Bus, McCain has traveled back in time to a land of back alley abortions and legal machine guns, where public funds go to the teaching of intelligent design and abstinence education, big powerful weapons blow missiles out of the sky, and Cuba policy is stuck like groundhog’s day in 1961.
Against this backdrop, John McCain recently made a trip to Miami to speak before a group of right-wing Cubans, including veterans of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In the speech, McCain decried the rise of ‘socialism’ in South America, or more accurately, the election of leftists supportive of the redistribution of economic spoils to long-exploited indigenous people and opposed to US-imposed free trade agreements. A surprisingly blunt AP dispatch mentioned that McCain “said all the right things about Cuba for [the] audience,” including stating his opposition to ending the embargo until Cuba has free elections and basic human rights, and releases all political prisoners. McCain’s stance on behalf of freedom would be believable and maybe even noble if only he could reserve the same degree of indignation for vastly more oppressive U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but of course their expatriates don’t control 25 electoral votes.
As the 2008 campaign heats up at this sad, early date, the question is not whether McCain can find within himself the guile to compete, but just how low he is willing to go. Down the campaign stretch in 2006, Democrat Harold Ford of Tennessee led his opponent Bob Corker in most polls, giving Ford the potential to become the first African-American to win a Senate seat in the Deep South since Reconstruction. As ever, when backed against the wall, the GOP aimed low with character assassination and innuendo, with an ad in which people “off the street” make crass statements (ex: “terrorists need their privacy”) in defense of views falsely attributed to Ford. The implication of the ad was that the safe-as-milk Ford, one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress, was out of touch with mainstream values.
Playing to the most deep-seated, residual white Southern racism, the ad was roundly condemned, by John McCain among others. Terry Nelson (known for his connections to disgraced former GOP operator Tom Delay), who birthed the ad for the Republican National Committee, was fired by Wal-Mart, for whom he worked as a consultant. But the ad worked – Corker went ahead in the race and never looked back – and Nelson got a promotion not a month later when McCain hired him as his campaign manager. (Joining Nelson will be the ad firm of Stevens Reed Curcio & Pothold, who produced the notorious Swift Boat ads from the 2004 campaign, which McCain said at the time were “dishonest and dishonorable.”)
The one issue that has most contributed to McCain’s image as a man of unshakable principle is campaign finance reform. Todd Purdum’s sycophantic “Prisoner of Conscience” channels this conventional wisdom with the blithe assertion that McCain “has always loathed the cozy and corrupt culture of Washington D.C.” Though McCain has been in front on many of the baby steps to clean up Congress, in the eighties he was involved in the Keating 5 scandal, in which he engaged in a quid pro quo with a crooked S & L chairman whose failing S & L cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and McCain wasn’t above using his recent Commerce Committee chairmanship to steer favors for contributors. Purdum gets away with this distortion because DC’s pay-to-play culture is off limits to mainstream political discussion.
Much more in line with the mainstream media’s antiseptic national narrative is the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill which banned soft money in federal elections. McCain deserves some credit for being one of the only people in his party to support the measure, but the truth is that McCain-Feingold is a toothless ‘reform’ measure of the kind loved in D.C. – a great way for politicians to prance before the cameras and claim to be concerned about an issue that is rotting our republic while actually doing very little. If McCain-Feingold really had bite, George W. Bush, second to none in trading dirty deeds for dirty money, never would have signed it.
In the past, McCain could be counted on to cry from the rooftops about campaign finance (ex: “The voices of average Americans have been drowned out by the deafening racket of campaign cash”), but now that he’s focused on becoming president, he’s singing a different tune, one much more harmonious with his current motives. In 2006 McCain supported a measure to make 527 donations illegal, but upon receiving flack from conservative grass-roots groups, he backed off, and in fact has taken a good deal of money from 527 leaders and organizers, according to a recent Washington Post article by investigative reporter John Solomon. The same article pointed out in detail that the long-time crusader has received money from lobbyists – a source of many of his rhetorical fusillades in the past – and a good number of Bush’s biggest fundraisers, including those who McCain criticized in the past for their lack of ethics and pollution of the political system.
The Post article that showed the gap between the mythological Citizen McCain and the shifty candidate McCain was one of the biggest signs that the media’s refusal to question the eternally earnest senator’s sincerity may be at an end. On signs of a breakup, McCain responded ferociously, calling Solomon’s truth serum the “worst hit job that has ever been done in my entire political career,” while failing to cite any factual inaccuracies.
McCain’s twenty fundraisers in March, and the 20 he is doing in April fail to make him any more of a money-grubber than the other candidates, but they do signify that he ought to lose the soapbox that has so long been a part of his act, and give us some real straight talk. We don’t need heroes. We just need someone that can clean up the mess.
The Road Not Taken
This piece was originally published at getunderground.com on 3/15/07
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
By late morning I saunter out into a typically immaculate March San Francisco day: warm temperatures, a sky blue but for wispy white jet trails, a light breeze whispering in from the ocean. I buy a Sunday New York Times at a corner liquor store and head to my favorite cafe. The place spills over with twenty and thirty-something bohemians and poseurs hiding behind banks of Apples, and the line to the counter is ten people deep. Everyone's out today, doing something fun (there haven't been so many weekend mega-protests these past few years.) I see a table open up so I ditch the line, spread my newspaper over the table, and drape my jacket over the adjacent chair.
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
Date: March, 2007
Location: A parallel universe, where every vote counts
He leans over the podium all folksy with one arm braced, bent at the elbow, his head tilted at the slightest angle. A Cheshire cat grin inhabits his features, though he's quite possibly the dumbest person in the room. A member of the press stands up and asks a question about a war of choice sold on lies that has spiraled downward into bloodshed and chaos. The man at the podium tries his damndest to remove the smirk from his face as he responds in incomplete sentences littered with canned catchphrases, mispronunciations, and zombie-like repetition of his favorite word, "terrorist," a word that settles all matters in his uncluttered mind.
The assembled media dutifully stenograph the response for millions of readers on strict spoonfed diets as another so-called reporter is called on with a cute nickname, a habit the leader of the free world picked up during his time in college sports, when he watched athletes from the sidelines as a cheerleader at Yale. The nickname is meant to establish an illusory familiarity that reflects the privileged president's common touch. The question is about Medicaid cuts in the president's budget.
The man behind the podium suddenly stands up, in umbrage that he, a good Christian, could be accused of not caring about the poor. He shakes his finger in the air and preaches in fragments of how tax cuts for the richest of the rich will grow the economy and trickle down to the neediest. Moreover, he continues, as foam flecks at the corners of his mouth, a nation under attack has no choice but to shift spending from social programs to national DE-fense. "I'll stop at nothing to protect the American people," he says with a crowning fist-slam to the podium.
I bolt upright in bed and turn the light on. I've had this nightmare for going on six years now. Calmly, to restore my sanity, I recall the facts: in December of 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court, in keeping with past decisions, refused to encroach on states' rights and allowed a proper recount to be done in Florida. A later study of the ballots would show that Gore would've won by tens of thousands of votes had voter intent been directly reflected in the actual vote count, but due to the mass disenfranchisement of minorities and a faulty ballot design in Palm Beach that cost Gore 6,500 votes, Gore had squeaked into office by just 112 votes.
Not much more than a year into his presidency, Gore led the international coalition that rousted the medieval Taliban and its Al Qeada allies from Afghanistan, and kept them out with a long-term troop commitment. On the domestic front, Gore was stymied by a Republican House of Representatives, so he continued Bill Clinton's practice of enacting policy changes through administrative re-writes and executive orders. A competent, clean and open administration buoyed by the national unity received and massaged after 9/11 narrowly won Gore a second term in 2004, though the Republicans took the Senate back due to Democratic retirements in the South.
All this thinking gets me keyed up so I roll out of bed, grab a towel and walk out to the bathroom.
As my legs move freely and my bare feet feel the cold hardwood floor, the nightmare continues to recede into the bulky file of historical what-ifs.
In the bathroom the water comes on; I train the shower nozzle over my palm and turn the heat up. The warmth runs over my hand and through my body. As I disrobe and step under the flow, I touch the wall as one last check. It does not move.
---
Five minutes later I sit down with a depth charge and begin to read all the news that's fit to print. I have major concerns about the future of the planet, but the United States, at least, seems to be moving in the right direction on many fronts. On the inside of the front page, in the news summaries, I scan the latest developments in Washington. On page A6, there's an article about President Gore's unwillingness to play ball with the Republicans on a "TORT reform" measure that will screw consumers and downsize corporate accountability, a "bankruptcy reform" bill that will further victimize poor people with burgeoning health bills, or staggeringly expensive tax cuts for the rich. Gore's fiscal discipline has helped produce a growing budget surplus that is shoring up Social Security for the tidal wave of Baby Boomers about to retire.
On page A11, there's a lengthy piece on the aggressive actions Gore's EPA has taken in court to sue polluters and protect wetlands, forests and the Endangered Species Act from parasitic business interests. On page A12 there's an analysis of Gore's latest budget proposal, which includes big increases for healthcare, childcare, education, public transit, stem cell research, and alternative energy sources, and on page A16, there's a story by Linda Greenhouse on Gore's two Supreme Court picks, who have narrowly saved Roe v. Wade, Affirmative Action, labor rights, and a whole host of fundamental freedoms from the right-wing chopping block.
Once I've plowed through the news section I read the editorials, but they don't have a lot of gravity. The country is at peace, the economy is recovering, and Gore's steady centrism, with some pitches to the left, doesn't create the kind of toxic political environment that inspires pungent commentary (other than among talk radio Neanderthals and their utopiated mirror image brethren on the chimerical left).
I start in on the Book Review section, get through about half of it, and bail.
---
At home I flop down in my papasan chair and turn on the tv. I rip through seventy or eighty or who knows how many channels past sports events and cooking programs and sitcoms and reality tv and talk shows and World War II docs until I come to C-Span.
Standing at a podium is Tony Blair, the popular Prime Minister of Great Britain who is likely to win a third landslide when he calls England's next election. Not ten feet away is Al Gore, standing razorback straight and stiff in a navy blue suit with his hands folded in front of him, laughing, nodding or clapping on cue, as if by computer command.
Gore and Blair are doing a world tour to promote the Kyoto Treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. Kyoto does not go nearly far enough, but it's a start, and I'm not in the habit of blaming politicians for their constituencies' sense of resource entitlement--Gore's proposals to raise CAFE standards and the gas tax were rejected without debate by Republicans (and red state Democrats) in Congress because the majority of Americans refuse to take the higher ground until they feel a pinch in their pocketbook. This deeply ingrained cult of selfishness and the political and media organs that sustain it box Gore out on his left: much as I wish otherwise, the center of gravity in America's political sphere is peopled by Protestant soccer moms from the Midwest and Catholic NASCAR dads from the Southwest, not secular San Francisco liberals.
The Kyoto initiative is but one of many international agreements Gore has signed or negotiated, along with treaties restricting germ warfare, torture and offshore tax havens and agreements promoting sustainable development and protecting women's health in the third world. Gore's humble, cooperative stances have solidified the vast international good will generated by 9/11 and reinforced the multifaith global drive to crush Al Qeada. Like Clinton, Gore tends to encounter throngs of well-wishers when he travels abroad, and soon I can see why, as he steps up to take questions from the press.
Though Gore has won two victories at the ballot box and led an administration free of major scandals, the "liberal media's" hostility toward him continues unabated, as evidenced by the adversarial tone of the opening question, about the most recent cat and mouse game being played by Saddam Hussein, who refuses to allow inspectors into Iraq to check for nuclear weapons.
"Mr. President, Republicans John McCain and Rudy Giulani have accused you of weakness in refusing to confront Saddam Hussein..."
Gore's attention to the question trails off as he smiles to himself at the latest macho posturing from the right, yet he continues to look the questioner straight in the face out of political protocol. Gore's answer is a miniature essay on the reasons an invasion of Iraq will not work, including religious differences going back over a thousand years, a lack of resources while our troops protect Afghanistan, the enormous costs such an invasion would entail, and the fact that Saddam Hussein in no way represents an imminent national security threat.
On one level I can't help but indulge the frame of reference of all too many ADD-addled voters: he's the same old wooden, dorky Professor Gore, speaking slowly with exaggerated elocution, cautious about every word, explaining every detail like he's talking to an idiot- what comedian Will Durst once referred to as "the human dialtone."
And yet, rising above simplistic and shallow surface reads to higher truths, I appreciate that the words come in long, complete, perfectly-formed sentences, one thought seamlessly flowing into the next, reflecting a lifetime of learning and observing and questioning and expanding and most importantly, a firm grasp of the way his decisions affect the public and the grave moral responsibility that resides in this power. Would that we were always so fortunate.
Ex Post Facto
Originally published at getunderground.com on 2-16-2007
Expressing a view held by many cineastes, Jason Ankeny of Allmovie.com calls Scorsese "the most renowned filmmaker of his era" who "virtually defined the state of modern American cinema during the 1970s and 80s," yet Scorsese has not won a Best Director award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There are the obvious reasons, such as the fact that more than 90% of Academy voters reside in Los Angeles, while Scorsese is the quintessential New York filmmaker, and the Academy's lifetime membership, which guarantees that a good portion of the kingmakers will be ten to twenty years behind the curve. Then there's Oscar's tendency to favor flavor-of-the-moment movies with commercial payback for the industry over ageless art films with mere aesthetic appeal: Scorsese is joined in his Oscar drought by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman.
Though the Oscar statuette was originally referred to as the statue of merit, Oscar predictions are not unlike the run-up to presidential elections, in which substantive comparisons of the nominees is passed over for horse-race speculation on the mind of the Academy. What does a probe inside this mind reveal? Follow me on a tour of the ghosts of Oscars past.
Ambiguity bites
Authenticity is one of Martin Scorsese's trademarks. Where many lesser filmmakers fall back on implausible plot twists, diversionary romantic threads, or scenes of rigged poignancy to make disturbing subject matters more palatable, Scorsese's most moving narratives are direct and unrelenting, free of sugarcoating for the faint of heart.
Martin Scorsese's first Oscar misfortune was releasing his masterpiece, Taxi Driver, in the year of America's bicentennial. Coming on the heels of Watergate and a disastrous war that tore the country apart and killed two-three million people in Indochina, three sharp, socially-conscious movies garnered Oscar nominations: 1) All the President's Men, about two dogged investigative journalists who helped bring down an insidious and corrupt administration; 2) Network, a prophetic examination of the spoonfed infotainment that would soon render television news useless if not downright dumbing-down dangerous; and 3) Taxi Driver, the film to beat all films about urban alienation and one of its then-new by-products - the angry white man who goes postal.
Yet on Oscars night, Rocky, a decidedly middleweight Horatio Alger-tearjerker about an amateur boxer-cum-loan shark of principle (who refuses to take the coat off a deadbeat's back) swept the Best Picture and Best Director awards, against all odds and laws of nature.
Taxi Driver, the Palm d'Or winner at Cannes that features the best performance of Robert De Niro's career, Harvey Keitel as one of the most convincing pimps ever, Jodie Foster as Keitel's teenage whore, a brilliant screenplay from Paul Schrader studded with timeless lines ("All the animals come out at night: queens, fairies, dopers...sick, venal...some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street" and "You talkin' to me?"), an endless stream of colorful and dynamic camera shots, an alternately sultry and chilling soundtrack from old-school master Bernard Herrmann (who died right after he finished the score), is on every best-of list worth its salt, yet it didn't win a single Academy award, and wasn't even nominated in the Best Director, Best Cinematography, or Best Screenplay categories.
Taxi Driver's goose egg and Rocky's coronation were bound together by a bourgeois Academy's unwillingness to acknowledge that the breakneck land of opportunity had its share of casualties, in this case a Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle, just more human flotsam tossed to-and-fro by the endless ripples of imperial overreach.
Taxi Driver's ending sealed its fate. At the end of Rocky, our beloved and beknighted pugilist personifies the American dream as he stands in the ring bloodied but not beaten, hugging his loyal, kind, angelic girlfriend, and in case the viewer hasn't gotten it by that point, the music swells on cue. Subtext: a national pat on the back that anyone in America can make it if they have enough heart (even if they're a few fries short of a happy meal.)
The ending of Taxi Driver, on the other hand, was bizarre and open-ended. Travis Bickle has just killed three men, albeit cockroaches with hardware, in one of the bloodiest scenes on film, yet he comes out a media hero who pals around with the other cabbies as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Is it a happy ending? An ironic jab at the artificially happy endings Hollywood routinely grafts on to score at the box office? Is Travis reformed, or will he kill again? Seeds of doubt leave the Academy cold.
Antiheroes rarely make Oscar history
Scorsese's next contribution to the American film canon was 1980's Raging Bull, based on the life of Jake La Motta, a middleweight boxing champion from the 1940s who brutalized people in the ring and out. La Motta, played by Robert De Niro, challenges his audience's sympathies from the opening bell. He talks to his first wife as if she is a servant, then cheats on and leaves her for a 15 year-old blonde from the neighborhood. For a time it appears that maybe his new love will settle him down, but inevitably La Motta's crazed obsessions lead him to actions so violent and out of proportion that he shatters whatever mixed, if haltingly respectful, image you had constructed of him in your mind.
Scorsese offers us no back story cues into La Motta's animalistic rage, no Storytelling 101 flashbacks to make the audience feel like they can understand, after all, and La Motta shows little capacity for understanding himself or the pain he has caused.
Once out of the ring, La Motta gains a lot of weight, tells bad jokes, and flirts with underage women at his night club. Only at the very end of the movie is there any sense that he realizes the mistakes he has made, and even then you're not so sure.
Raging Bull, which like Taxi Driver has a 100% score from the critics at rottentomatoes.com, is often referred to as the best film of the 80s,but at Oscar time the only victors were Best Actor Robert De Niro (who gained 50 pounds to play the middle-aged La Motta) and Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long-time editor.
1980's big winner was Ordinary People, an honest and well-made movie with less verve. Unlike Raging Bull, Ordinary People has a protagonist (Conrad) that anyone can sympathize with: he is an introverted kid who is tormented because he has witnessed the death of his reckless older brother (who he looked up to) in a boating accident, which has saddled him with feelings of loss and guilt (because he survived) that are exacerbated by a distant mother who was very attached to her oldest son, and a sunny father who can't put everything back together again.
Conrad's suffering is plain for all to see. Where La Motta is an old school male whose pain and confusion are projected in violence, Conrad is a thoughtful, sensitive soul who feels and cares deeply, too deeply, and even agrees to see a psychiatrist to try to get his head together. By the end of Ordinary People, the psychoanalytic roots of all the family's problems have been completely explored and explained, which, along with a postcard ending, proved comforting to Oscar voters.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In the late eighties, Scorsese took on a project perfectly suited to his talents and background: an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, a non-fiction book about mobsters in 1960s and 1970s New York.
From the trunk slammed shut in the opening scene punctuated by the line "I always wanted to be a gangster," Goodfellas leaps off the screen with angular, hypercaffeinated camera shots, crisp dialogue, gallows humor and pitch-perfect characterization, down to the most minor characters.
Scorsese's tour de force won both Best Picture and Best Director at the British Academy Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the L.A. Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, yet the Academy handed Goodfellas just one Oscar, to Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor.
The big problem with Goodfellas, in Academy groupthink, was the lack of redeeming characters (though the fellas were so named for their camaraderie and loyalty to each other) and themes, the main one being that a life of crime can be a surer way to the American dream than the hallowed ground of sweat and toil and sacrifice.
1990's big winner was first-time director Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, an ambitious, epic Western with rich vista shots, a leisurely pace, and a soaring musical score. Historically and politically the film has much to offer, as the blood of Indians is invisible in American history textbooks, and is so at odds with the bullshit beacon of freedom and democracy narratives spouted by the right and too often taken at face value.
On the other hand, the film has its drawbacks, including crude dualities (cartoon-like, uncivilized white men opposite archetypal wise old Indian tribesmen), hokey symbolism (Costner's relationship with the unusually friendly wolf, who is later carelessly shot by an evil white man), and, unlike Goodfellas, which finished strong, Dances leaks air so bad over the last thirty or forty minutes that you're lucky to be awake when Costner escapes with his squaw at the end.
Costner, whose next directorial venture was the spectacular flop Waterworld, deserves accolades for bringing these subjects to light for a mainstream audience, but film awards are supposed to be given out for bravura filmmaking, not overdue history lessons, right? Not necessarily.
Penance?
This year, Martin Scorsese's The Departed is nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Scorsese's 6th nomination), the latter of which looks like a good bet, if not a slam dunk. In the months leading up to the Oscars, Scorsese has built a tremendous buzz with 14 Best Director wins for The Departed already, including a Golden Globe and The Directors Guild award, which almost always foreshadows an Oscar win, though in lacking a black-and-white good guys-and-bad guys frame or a focus-grouped heart-tugging ending (if not a clever ending), it's unlikely The Departed will win Best Picture.
As a long-time Scorsese fanatic, I'm happy to see the acclaim, and am rooting for my favorite living director to finally get Hollywood's imprimatur, yet the sudden avalanche of awards feels misplaced, like the Nobel given to Gunter Grass forty years after he wrote the seminal The Tin Drum, or the 8 Grammy awards bestowed on Carlos Santana in 2000 for an album that was but a pale and trendy ghost of the early, great Santana albums.
While Scorsese deserves commendation for being so productive into his sixties, his output since Goodfellas has lacked a certain je ne sais quoithat even his second-tier pre-Goodfellas movies like The King of Comedy, After Hours, and The Last Tempation of Christ had. It's hard to work up the excitement for Scorsese releases these days that one does for upcoming works by director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
The Departed is a slick, entertaining mainstream movie with a spring in its step, a great cast, and the usual kinetic Scorsese camerawork, but unlike Scorsese's smaller, more personal movies from back in the day, which spotlighted fully human oddballs and interesting characters, the dramatis personae of The Departed are secondary to the storyline, which is so drawn out and convoluted that it's hard to care by the end.
Where Scorsese's best films can be mined repeatedly for riches, The Departed can be fully absorbed in a single viewing. Once you put the plot together, toward the very end, there are few subtleties or mysteries to be found.
There are worse ways to spend an evening, like, say, paying ten dollars to watch 95% or more of the other mainstream movies in any given year, but, if Scorsese wins Best Director, it will be hard not to conclude that Oscar's Johnny-come-lately voters are just making up for their shameful oversight of his earlier masterworks.
In the end, a statue of merit award would be at least a small personal triumph for Martin Scorsese, a lifelong film historian, as well as a sign that maybe there is some design, some justice, to the universe, but Scorsese's real merit will shine through when his organic, character-driven narratives, arresting camera eye, snappy dialogue, knife's-edge editing and brutal honesty are reincarnated in the works of future filmmakers for whom awards ceremonies are nothing next to art for art's sake.
Expressing a view held by many cineastes, Jason Ankeny of Allmovie.com calls Scorsese "the most renowned filmmaker of his era" who "virtually defined the state of modern American cinema during the 1970s and 80s," yet Scorsese has not won a Best Director award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
There are the obvious reasons, such as the fact that more than 90% of Academy voters reside in Los Angeles, while Scorsese is the quintessential New York filmmaker, and the Academy's lifetime membership, which guarantees that a good portion of the kingmakers will be ten to twenty years behind the curve. Then there's Oscar's tendency to favor flavor-of-the-moment movies with commercial payback for the industry over ageless art films with mere aesthetic appeal: Scorsese is joined in his Oscar drought by Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman.
Though the Oscar statuette was originally referred to as the statue of merit, Oscar predictions are not unlike the run-up to presidential elections, in which substantive comparisons of the nominees is passed over for horse-race speculation on the mind of the Academy. What does a probe inside this mind reveal? Follow me on a tour of the ghosts of Oscars past.
Ambiguity bites
Authenticity is one of Martin Scorsese's trademarks. Where many lesser filmmakers fall back on implausible plot twists, diversionary romantic threads, or scenes of rigged poignancy to make disturbing subject matters more palatable, Scorsese's most moving narratives are direct and unrelenting, free of sugarcoating for the faint of heart.
Martin Scorsese's first Oscar misfortune was releasing his masterpiece, Taxi Driver, in the year of America's bicentennial. Coming on the heels of Watergate and a disastrous war that tore the country apart and killed two-three million people in Indochina, three sharp, socially-conscious movies garnered Oscar nominations: 1) All the President's Men, about two dogged investigative journalists who helped bring down an insidious and corrupt administration; 2) Network, a prophetic examination of the spoonfed infotainment that would soon render television news useless if not downright dumbing-down dangerous; and 3) Taxi Driver, the film to beat all films about urban alienation and one of its then-new by-products - the angry white man who goes postal.
Yet on Oscars night, Rocky, a decidedly middleweight Horatio Alger-tearjerker about an amateur boxer-cum-loan shark of principle (who refuses to take the coat off a deadbeat's back) swept the Best Picture and Best Director awards, against all odds and laws of nature.
Taxi Driver, the Palm d'Or winner at Cannes that features the best performance of Robert De Niro's career, Harvey Keitel as one of the most convincing pimps ever, Jodie Foster as Keitel's teenage whore, a brilliant screenplay from Paul Schrader studded with timeless lines ("All the animals come out at night: queens, fairies, dopers...sick, venal...some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street" and "You talkin' to me?"), an endless stream of colorful and dynamic camera shots, an alternately sultry and chilling soundtrack from old-school master Bernard Herrmann (who died right after he finished the score), is on every best-of list worth its salt, yet it didn't win a single Academy award, and wasn't even nominated in the Best Director, Best Cinematography, or Best Screenplay categories.
Taxi Driver's goose egg and Rocky's coronation were bound together by a bourgeois Academy's unwillingness to acknowledge that the breakneck land of opportunity had its share of casualties, in this case a Vietnam vet named Travis Bickle, just more human flotsam tossed to-and-fro by the endless ripples of imperial overreach.
Taxi Driver's ending sealed its fate. At the end of Rocky, our beloved and beknighted pugilist personifies the American dream as he stands in the ring bloodied but not beaten, hugging his loyal, kind, angelic girlfriend, and in case the viewer hasn't gotten it by that point, the music swells on cue. Subtext: a national pat on the back that anyone in America can make it if they have enough heart (even if they're a few fries short of a happy meal.)
The ending of Taxi Driver, on the other hand, was bizarre and open-ended. Travis Bickle has just killed three men, albeit cockroaches with hardware, in one of the bloodiest scenes on film, yet he comes out a media hero who pals around with the other cabbies as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Is it a happy ending? An ironic jab at the artificially happy endings Hollywood routinely grafts on to score at the box office? Is Travis reformed, or will he kill again? Seeds of doubt leave the Academy cold.
Antiheroes rarely make Oscar history
Scorsese's next contribution to the American film canon was 1980's Raging Bull, based on the life of Jake La Motta, a middleweight boxing champion from the 1940s who brutalized people in the ring and out. La Motta, played by Robert De Niro, challenges his audience's sympathies from the opening bell. He talks to his first wife as if she is a servant, then cheats on and leaves her for a 15 year-old blonde from the neighborhood. For a time it appears that maybe his new love will settle him down, but inevitably La Motta's crazed obsessions lead him to actions so violent and out of proportion that he shatters whatever mixed, if haltingly respectful, image you had constructed of him in your mind.
Scorsese offers us no back story cues into La Motta's animalistic rage, no Storytelling 101 flashbacks to make the audience feel like they can understand, after all, and La Motta shows little capacity for understanding himself or the pain he has caused.
Once out of the ring, La Motta gains a lot of weight, tells bad jokes, and flirts with underage women at his night club. Only at the very end of the movie is there any sense that he realizes the mistakes he has made, and even then you're not so sure.
Raging Bull, which like Taxi Driver has a 100% score from the critics at rottentomatoes.com, is often referred to as the best film of the 80s,but at Oscar time the only victors were Best Actor Robert De Niro (who gained 50 pounds to play the middle-aged La Motta) and Thelma Schoonmaker, Martin Scorsese's long-time editor.
1980's big winner was Ordinary People, an honest and well-made movie with less verve. Unlike Raging Bull, Ordinary People has a protagonist (Conrad) that anyone can sympathize with: he is an introverted kid who is tormented because he has witnessed the death of his reckless older brother (who he looked up to) in a boating accident, which has saddled him with feelings of loss and guilt (because he survived) that are exacerbated by a distant mother who was very attached to her oldest son, and a sunny father who can't put everything back together again.
Conrad's suffering is plain for all to see. Where La Motta is an old school male whose pain and confusion are projected in violence, Conrad is a thoughtful, sensitive soul who feels and cares deeply, too deeply, and even agrees to see a psychiatrist to try to get his head together. By the end of Ordinary People, the psychoanalytic roots of all the family's problems have been completely explored and explained, which, along with a postcard ending, proved comforting to Oscar voters.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In the late eighties, Scorsese took on a project perfectly suited to his talents and background: an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, a non-fiction book about mobsters in 1960s and 1970s New York.
From the trunk slammed shut in the opening scene punctuated by the line "I always wanted to be a gangster," Goodfellas leaps off the screen with angular, hypercaffeinated camera shots, crisp dialogue, gallows humor and pitch-perfect characterization, down to the most minor characters.
Scorsese's tour de force won both Best Picture and Best Director at the British Academy Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the L.A. Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics, yet the Academy handed Goodfellas just one Oscar, to Joe Pesci for Best Supporting Actor.
The big problem with Goodfellas, in Academy groupthink, was the lack of redeeming characters (though the fellas were so named for their camaraderie and loyalty to each other) and themes, the main one being that a life of crime can be a surer way to the American dream than the hallowed ground of sweat and toil and sacrifice.
1990's big winner was first-time director Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, an ambitious, epic Western with rich vista shots, a leisurely pace, and a soaring musical score. Historically and politically the film has much to offer, as the blood of Indians is invisible in American history textbooks, and is so at odds with the bullshit beacon of freedom and democracy narratives spouted by the right and too often taken at face value.
On the other hand, the film has its drawbacks, including crude dualities (cartoon-like, uncivilized white men opposite archetypal wise old Indian tribesmen), hokey symbolism (Costner's relationship with the unusually friendly wolf, who is later carelessly shot by an evil white man), and, unlike Goodfellas, which finished strong, Dances leaks air so bad over the last thirty or forty minutes that you're lucky to be awake when Costner escapes with his squaw at the end.
Costner, whose next directorial venture was the spectacular flop Waterworld, deserves accolades for bringing these subjects to light for a mainstream audience, but film awards are supposed to be given out for bravura filmmaking, not overdue history lessons, right? Not necessarily.
Penance?
This year, Martin Scorsese's The Departed is nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director (Scorsese's 6th nomination), the latter of which looks like a good bet, if not a slam dunk. In the months leading up to the Oscars, Scorsese has built a tremendous buzz with 14 Best Director wins for The Departed already, including a Golden Globe and The Directors Guild award, which almost always foreshadows an Oscar win, though in lacking a black-and-white good guys-and-bad guys frame or a focus-grouped heart-tugging ending (if not a clever ending), it's unlikely The Departed will win Best Picture.
As a long-time Scorsese fanatic, I'm happy to see the acclaim, and am rooting for my favorite living director to finally get Hollywood's imprimatur, yet the sudden avalanche of awards feels misplaced, like the Nobel given to Gunter Grass forty years after he wrote the seminal The Tin Drum, or the 8 Grammy awards bestowed on Carlos Santana in 2000 for an album that was but a pale and trendy ghost of the early, great Santana albums.
While Scorsese deserves commendation for being so productive into his sixties, his output since Goodfellas has lacked a certain je ne sais quoithat even his second-tier pre-Goodfellas movies like The King of Comedy, After Hours, and The Last Tempation of Christ had. It's hard to work up the excitement for Scorsese releases these days that one does for upcoming works by director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).
The Departed is a slick, entertaining mainstream movie with a spring in its step, a great cast, and the usual kinetic Scorsese camerawork, but unlike Scorsese's smaller, more personal movies from back in the day, which spotlighted fully human oddballs and interesting characters, the dramatis personae of The Departed are secondary to the storyline, which is so drawn out and convoluted that it's hard to care by the end.
Where Scorsese's best films can be mined repeatedly for riches, The Departed can be fully absorbed in a single viewing. Once you put the plot together, toward the very end, there are few subtleties or mysteries to be found.
There are worse ways to spend an evening, like, say, paying ten dollars to watch 95% or more of the other mainstream movies in any given year, but, if Scorsese wins Best Director, it will be hard not to conclude that Oscar's Johnny-come-lately voters are just making up for their shameful oversight of his earlier masterworks.
In the end, a statue of merit award would be at least a small personal triumph for Martin Scorsese, a lifelong film historian, as well as a sign that maybe there is some design, some justice, to the universe, but Scorsese's real merit will shine through when his organic, character-driven narratives, arresting camera eye, snappy dialogue, knife's-edge editing and brutal honesty are reincarnated in the works of future filmmakers for whom awards ceremonies are nothing next to art for art's sake.
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
Peace and the Global O
Originally published at getunderground.com on 12/15/06
The Christmas and the New Year come upon us and we feel peaceful, at ease. We think of family and friends and fireplaces and new beginnings and new paradigms and new presents and things that you could buy but it’s so much nicer when someone else does, and as you load your eggnog heavy with brandy (ten days shy of January 1st) and stir it in the swirl forms at the neck of the spoon and you realize denial will never work.
Tip the cup and the rum warms your throat as you look out the window and mull over the fact that other than the occasional wire story that blips on the edge of your consciousness, like the yellow light that you just sped through, invisible in the major media and scarce in the alt-media…
…an American armada known as the “Ike Strike Group,” with cruisers and destroyers and the Eisenhower, a nuclear aircraft carrier, stands at the ready in the Persian Gulf off Iran’s west coast, able to rain hell on Iran within 24 hours of Calamity George’s order. {Rumor has it that American and Israeli Special Forces have already worked into the Iranian interior.}
Iran has begun to enrich uranium, a potential gateway from initial developments of peaceful nuclear energy to fearsome nuclear armaments. Western powers want to force Iran’s hand with economic sanctions, but Russia and China are blocking sanctions in the UN. At the same time, as he (threateningly) waves his blooded and blunted sword aloft, George W. Bush refuses to talk to Iran unless they agree to stop enrichment. Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, refuses to kneel in fear, claiming the centrifuges are for peaceful purposes, while playing on anti-US nationalism born of the 1953 CIA coup that replaced a democratically-elected leader (who wanted to nationalize oil) with 26 years of the brutal Shah of Iran. Adding fuel to the fire, Ahmadinejad struts and swaggers on the world stage, holding conferences questioning the Holocaust and throwing off comments about his desire to wipe Israel off the map, which only increases the likelihood that Israel will do the dirty work with U.S. financial and logistical support, as Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is (hot) to flex his muscles after his dissatisfying invasion of southern Lebanon.
To destroy Iranian nuclear sites, the U.S. is considering using ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, known as ‘bunker busters’ for their ability to sheer through rock, where the Iranians have hidden their sites. The use of nukes has been strongly opposed by many top military brass, including the Joint Chief of Staff, some of whom have leaked confidential information to veteran reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker to raise public awareness before it’s too late. As one four-star general told Seymour Hersh: “The system is starting to sense the end of the road and they don’t want to be condemned by history. They want to be able to say ‘we stood up.’”
If the first use of nuclear weapons in 60 years doesn’t trigger that little voice in your head, there’s always a simple, reliable cost-benefits analysis. Against whatever benefit can be gained by killing a nascent Iranian nuclear program (that the CIA determines is nowhere near to producing a nuclear bomb), assuming the U.S. or Israel is successful finding the installations, is the potential to inflame the long-dissed and long-pissed Muslim world even more than we’ve done over the past six years, which would render the (nuclear) non-proliferation treaty instantly obsolescent while causing widespread environmental damage in Iran and triggering vastly accelerated death and destruction across the Middle East, from the Israeli cities getting bombed by Hezbollah to a steep increase in brutal attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq to Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf’s control of nuclear weapons teeters on the brink. Iran’s contributions to the world oil supply would be seriously disrupted, which could greatly weaken world markets, while the over one million refugees in Iraq would be joined by untold numbers in Iran. Whatever legitimacy the U.S. ever thought it had as a beacon of democratic values would slip even further down Calamity George’s slippery slope, while the shot in the arm provided to suicide recruitment could very well play in a city near you.
You stop pacing and (drain) the rest of the nog. Looking into the bottom of an empy cup, you ask yourself: now that he’s getting his ass kicked, would Bush really do something this reckless to distract the public? You kick yourself for asking the question, or maybe you don’t. Game, set and match?
---
Paul and Donna have a plan.
Three years ago, not long after Saddam’s statue tumbled on the half-hour at CNN, Donna Sheehan (no relation to Cindy) led a group of women from the group Baring Witness in a war protest in which they laid out naked on a San Francisco beach and spelled ‘make love, not war.’ An accompanying article in the S.F. Chronicle presented the protesters as fun but out of touch, with comments like ‘Despite the waning conflict in Iraq” and “while the war in Iraq is winding down” that may land the writer on the dunce of the decade honor roll.
In the time since, these nude actions came to number 75 and spread to 26 countries around the world, as it became ever more obvious just how right the war critics were and are to oppose future colonial power moves.
As novel as these actions were, Donna and her partner, Paul Reffell, have topped themselves with their new event, whose organizing prowess is reflected in coverage on CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, and 26,000 hits a day at their web site.
The First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace is a call to peaceniks (and anyone else with a modicum of sanity) around the world to have an orgasm on December 22nd, the end of the winter Solstice and the longest day of the year in Iran. Participants are to focus on world peace during and after climax.
Paul and Donna, students of evolutionary psychology, see war as a ‘distinctly male phenomenon,’ a case of ‘my missile is bigger than your missile,’ wherein men throw their weight around to impress potential mates. Through the Orgasm for Peace they hope to drain much of this aggression December 22nd by transforming the earth’s energy field. As Paul describes it: “It sounds naïve. But most people believe in the power of positive thinking, or prayer, or meditation. And when you walk into a room full of people, you can sense the ‘vibe’ of the place, which is the result of how people are thinking, feeling and interacting. Who knows what could happen on a global scale?”
The Global Consciousness Project out of Princeton, which has measured consciousness variation after large events like 9/11, will measure the, er, results of the Global O. by collecting data from a global network of random event generators in five minute increments. As the event planners say: “We hope the effect will be at least a lightening of the global mood. We wish that the effect could be so great as to cause the energy field to become so positive that people will begin to think and act less negatively.”
---
Not everyone is convinced. Even Paul and Donna don’t want to assume victory over the warmongers just yet. Asked whether recent developments indicated a shift toward anti-war sentiment in the U.S., Paul said: “I don’t see anti-war sentiment growing, I see anti-spending-our-money-on-them-instead-of-us sentiment growing. The American majority will not be anti-war as long as there is the perception that war is an honorable solution, that men who are trained to kill to order are heroes and that every war we fight is for the betterment of humanity.”
But no matter what you think, unless you really see an attack on Iran as a good idea, you can’t blame ‘em for trying. Is there a better way to spend the Friday before Christmas?
One thing we can count on: around September 22nd there will be a small boom in (sign) births, the sign that brought us peacemakers like John Coltrane (list…),
A reminder that no matter what happens this time around, perhaps some day a new generation can get this shit right.
Sea Change
Originally published at getunderground.com on 12-1-06
Accountability is a bitch, especially when you're the poster boy for centuries of white male Affirmative Action.
Rejected by the University of Texas Law School in the early seventies, George W. Bush was taken in by Harvard Business School. In the late seventies, Bush dipped into his trust fund to set up Arbusto, an oil company. A few years later, after George Bush Sr. had been chosen vice president, Arbusto was about to go under, so some of daddy's friends came to the rescue and brought Arbusto under Spectrum 7's wing. When Spectrum 7 hemorrhaged money, they were acquired by Harken Energy, who put W. on the board and gave him loads of stock that he conveniently dumped two months before the shares plummeted. The money Bush happened on in his business ventures helped him become owner of the Texas Rangers. After he successfully sold a ballot measure that made the public pay for a new stadium and traded future Hall of Famer Sammy Sosa, Bush sought out the commissionership of pro baseball without result, so decided to run for governor of Texas as a fall-back. With the help of a Rovian whisper campaign claiming his opponent was a lesbian, Bush won the race and began his public service. Six years later, after increasing incarcerations, executions, pollution, and debt, Bush became president after a Republican Supreme Court discarded the will of the voters.
The dubious nature of his ascension to power notwithstanding, Bush governed as if he were a king from moment one. When he refused to go along with tax cuts for the rich and other administration policies, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords was purposely left off the guest list for the Teacher of the Year ceremony, though that teacher was also from Vermont. Not long after, Jeffords switched parties and gave Democrats control of the Senate, but just as Bush was starting to reel from this setback and a general lack of legitimacy, 9/11 happened, thanks in part to Bush's having done as little as humanly possible to stop 9/11, and his kingly powers were restored manifold.
Five years later, this presidency's unprecedented destruction of American institutions had become so widely known that the boy-king was for once in his life in danger of being held responsible for his actions. To elude the colossal cosmikarmic boomerang, Bush's army of ghouls pulled out all the right's election season golden oldies, including the scapegoating of gays and immigrants, questioning opponents' patriotism, passing voting "reform" measures intended to disenfranchise minorities, and delaying the release of unflattering public reports, all while outspending the Democrats by over a $100 million with ads light on the issues and heavy on personal attacks of unfounded innuendo.
As if by magic, Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity the Sunday before the election, just as the GOP bombarded registered voters in key districts with a million robo calls. When the phone was answered, a message about the Democratic candidate came on, making it appear that the Democrats had paid for the call. As the message got further along, the Democrat was slimed, but for the many that hung up right away and got another robo call soon after, it appeared that the Democrats were pestering them over and over.
By November 7th, the Republican fog machine was firing on all cylinders, but as happened with the Great Depression, Watergate, and the L.A. riots, a GOP blunder of catastrophic proportions (next stop: Iraq) woke a solid majority of swing voters up to their kinder, better, more practical selves.
George W. Bush, meet adversity.
From time immemorial, when things fall apart due to the selfish and reckless actions of men, women come along, pick up the pieces, and try to glue everything back together. So it is now that incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Democratic-led House of Representatives takes over from a Republican House that is half of what was recently dubbed "The Worst Congress Ever."
Since taking over in 1995 on heady promises of institutional reform, House Republicans have instituted a raft of autocratic practices, such as routinely forcing up or down votes on huge, complex bills (no amendments allowed), letting lobbyists write legislation that benefits the industries they represent, holding votes open until a one-vote majority is achieved through threats or monetary lubrication, and purposely negotiating behind closed doors and scheduling votes after midnight to avoid public scrutiny. In essence, their 12-year reign was little more than one big party for the economic elite, paid for by the American public, who by and large worked harder for stagnant wages while Congress gave themselves raises and lowered their workload (to a low of 93 days in 2006.)
Pelosi appropriately plans to begin her speakership with a series of votes on ethics issues: a ban on gifts, meals, and travel paid for by lobbyists; a law that would force retiring lawmakers to wait 2 years before returning to Capitol Hill as lobbyists; creation of an Office of Public Integrity to make lobbying activities more transparent; pay-as-you-go budgeting, which would end the budget-busting GOP practice of passing tax cuts that aren't paid for; and opening House-Senate conferences, in which the two chambers of Congress work out the final contours of legislation, back up to the public and the press.
Democrats also hope to reform an electoral process endangered by Republican shenanigans and public obliviousness or indifference.
Like clockwork, come election time minority voters around the country receive suspicious calls or fliers falsely telling them they're ineligible to vote, providing them with erroneous election dates, or purposely directing them to the wrong precinct. Senator Barack Obama's Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act would make these actions a felony.
Also of widespread concern is the use of electronic voting machines with no paper trail. Currently (and fittingly), in Florida, in Katherine Harris's old district, a Republican House candidate is ahead by 369 votes in a race where 18,000 votes (in a solidly Democratic part of the district) disappeared. A hand recount would make the Democrat the victor, but the district uses electronic voting machines with no paper trail, so those 18,000 votes are gone, and the Republican has declared victory while the case works its way through the courts. Democrat Russ Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act would put this banana republic scenario behind us for good by making voting districts with electronic voting machines use a paper trail.
Though Mr. Bush has a habit of trampling on other people's privacy in the name of "national security," he has always been very touchy about having anyone look into his public business. For nearly all of six years, he has had the luxury of a Republican congress of enablers that has not issued Bush a single subpoena, despite glorious heights of corruption, though the same Congress issued 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton Administration for skimpy land deals gone awry and fellatio eagerly offered and publicly denied.
Come January, there'll be a new sheriff in town, whose first order of business will be holding public hearings in which the record will be played backward in order to unmask the demonic intentions behind the administration's actions.
Soon-to-be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton plans to revive the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Pentagon that Republicans killed when they took over Congress in 1994. Skelton will also look into getting an Inspector General at the Pentagon, which has gobbled up half a trillion dollars in public funds without an internal watchdog since August 2005.
Skelton's colleague, Henry Waxman, a fervent advocate for government transparency whose crack investigative staff has produced roughly 2,000 reports over the past 8 years, looks to do much of the heavy lifting as head of the House Government Reform Committee. Waxman's overflowing plate includes passing the Clean Contracting Act, which would put a leash on the unaccountable subcontractors and gravy train no-bid deals that have become a way of life in the Bush era in Iraq, Gulf Coast rebuilding, and the Homeland Security Department. Waxman is also likely to put porcine oil company executives on the stand for a vigorous public grilling, as he famously did to tobacco execs in 1994.
Also likely to land on the war and death and destruction investigation docket are the small matters of pre-war intelligence, torture, domestic surveillance, detentions without trial at Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons in Europe, forged Niger docs that falsely posited Saddam Hussein's intention to acquire uranium, the Bush Administration's disastrous lack of postwar planning in Iraq, and the FEMA fiasco in New Orleans.
The change in committee leadership and introduction of oversight will also extend to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where committed enviro Barbara Boxer will replace Big Oil stooge James Inhofe, who secured his place in the frontispiece of the Climate Change Hall of Shame with the comment that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Boxer will have her hands full shining sunlight on the worst environmental record in modern history, with an emphasis on the EPA's meddling with global warming reports, their lax controls over deadly mercury emissions, punitive measures taken against EPA whistleblowers, and the Bush EPA's hard turn away from the scientific method. Boxer also will look at Bush's dogged attempts to open publicly-owned lands to commercial exploitation and his quiet change in funding for Superfund toxic waste clean up from "polluter pays" to "public pays."
The committee shifts will prove most momentous in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be headed by old pro Patrick Leahy. Since coming into office, George W. Bush has appointed the most extreme right-wing judges he could find. When Republicans controlled the Senate, Democrats filibustered a handful of exceptionally loathsome choices, but now that they control the Judiciary Committee, Democrats can kill a judicial pick effortlessly by simply not holding a vote. In addition, majority control will give Democrats at least some leverage should the Supreme Court's oldest (86) and most progressive judge, John Paul Stevens, decide to step down (I am not alone in hoping Mr. Stevens keeps to fruits and vegetables until at least January, 2009).
While Iraq was foremost in voters' minds, economic insecurity was not far from the surface for the legions of middle class voters who are falling further and further behind in a brutish economy in which business interests increasingly shed social responsibility and shift risk onto the back of America's working class.
To show these voters she means business, Nancy Pelosi has scheduled four big votes as part of her opening gun 100-hour agenda. The first vote would increase the minimum wage, which has not been raised since Bill Clinton was president, from the current $5.15 an hour to $7.25/hour. The second vote would overturn a Republican-authored law forbidding the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices, as the VA currently does, to the tune of drug costs that are half of Medicare's. The third vote would repeal tax breaks for oil companies. The fourth vote would slice student loan interest rates in half.
These measures reflect the fresh tenor of economic populism of the new Congress as it returns public focus after a 12-year banishment to affordable housing, a progressive tax structure, education and healthcare.
One of the unseemly realities of the Republican privatization model are endless middle men (a.k.a. Republican campaign contributors) who are more concerned with profit margins than delivering public services. Where Bill Clinton did what he could to cut banks out of the federal student loan process to bring down costs, the Republicans brought costs back up by pulling banks back into the mix, which is why Republicans received 80% of loan financiers' donations over the past election cycle.
Ted Kennedy (soon to be head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) best communicated the new congressional m.o. when he said: "It's time to throw the money-changers out of the temple of higher education." Democrats will try to remove banks and their pound of flesh from the process in favor of government-direct lending, while making college tuition tax-deductible and increasing grants to economically-disadvantaged students. Kennedy and George Miller, the new head of the House Education and Workforce Committee, also promise to push hard for generous funding for K-12 education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Now that Democrats have regained some power in Washington, healthcare is back on the public agenda, and the rapacious pharmaceutical companies are target number one. As Ken Johnson, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America put it, "We woke up the day after the election to a new world." Not only are major critics of the pharmaceutical industry likely to schedule public hearings on price-gouging and predatory advertising, but Democrats will push legislation to allow imports from Canada and encourage development of reasonably-priced generic drugs.
In other areas of healthcare, Democrats will increase spending on Medicaid and Medicare, and will keep an eye on Bush and his penchant for allowing states more "flexibility" in Medicaid administration, which is too often a euphemism for giving mean-spirited red state governors the green light to slash benefits and raise co-pays for vulnerable populations. Democrats will also decrease the number of children with no health insurance by boosting funding for CHIPS (Children's Health Insurance Program), with the eventual goal of covering all 8,000,000 children currently uninsured.
As you read this, you may be wondering why the Democrats' healthcare goals are so modest when 45,000,000 Americans are without health insurance, and those who have healthcare pay significantly more than anyone else in the world, and you will come upon the inevitable fact that we have a divided government led by a Republican president.
Republicans and the health insurance middle men (currently composed of HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies) who help fund their campaigns have a blood pact to fight healthcare reform to the death, as corporate Republicans have been doing ever since Harry Truman first proposed universal coverage nearly sixty years ago. Despite the painfully obvious fact that free market healthcare has largely failed us, Republicans cloak their opposition to healthcare - and every other attempt to soften the rough edges of capitalism - in robotic gospel about the magic of the marketplace, because they're addicted to the racket. The racket is their pulse.
In fact, to swing this a little wider, it's likely that Bush will order his congressional henchmen in the Senate to try to kill virtually all populist (and popular) Democratic legislation before it reaches his desk. And though Bush will be pressured publicly by an empowered and vocal opposition, it's doubtful Democrats will be any more successful than previous Congresses in effecting foreign policy hatched in and implemented by the executive branch, no matter how disastrous the policy is to America's future.
Add in the monstrous Republican money and media machine, doing what they do best (distorting public debate and getting dedicated stenographers in the mainstream media to give any and all talking points equal time), the feral loyalty of the Republican base, the legendary discipline of the Congressional Republicans that is the fruit of the authoritarian mindset, and the possibility of an Iran distraction, or a successful suicide mission on American soil that would rile up red and purple voters who live hundreds of miles away from the action, and you may ask yourself how far forward will we go?
It's a good question, but let's take one step at a time. Barring another turncoat move by Joe Lieberman that would give Republicans control of the Senate, there are many things we can be sure of over the next two years. Lobbyists won't turn the clock back to the early twentieth century with re-writes of environmental and labor laws. The telecom giants will have a hell of a time imposing toll lanes and unequal access on the Internet. Hundreds of billions of dollars won't be pissed away on new tax cuts for millionaires. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the corporate orgies known as free trade agreements are deader than Michael Richards' diversity counseling credentials. The taxpayer-funded dog-and-pony shows of flag burning and gay marriage votes Republicans have staged every two years since 1994 will not occur before the next elections in 2008. Last but not least, a huge number of ignorant, jingoistic, homophobic Republican swine, the ones who weren't voted out of office, will be shrunk to minority status, where their idiotic comments are unlikely to be heard abroad, sparing those of us who value human progress the head-scratching and condescension that understandably came from more advanced corners of the world following the 2004 election.
Has America really got her groove back? Stay tuned. Now it is the time of the show when we shall dance.
Accountability is a bitch, especially when you're the poster boy for centuries of white male Affirmative Action.
Rejected by the University of Texas Law School in the early seventies, George W. Bush was taken in by Harvard Business School. In the late seventies, Bush dipped into his trust fund to set up Arbusto, an oil company. A few years later, after George Bush Sr. had been chosen vice president, Arbusto was about to go under, so some of daddy's friends came to the rescue and brought Arbusto under Spectrum 7's wing. When Spectrum 7 hemorrhaged money, they were acquired by Harken Energy, who put W. on the board and gave him loads of stock that he conveniently dumped two months before the shares plummeted. The money Bush happened on in his business ventures helped him become owner of the Texas Rangers. After he successfully sold a ballot measure that made the public pay for a new stadium and traded future Hall of Famer Sammy Sosa, Bush sought out the commissionership of pro baseball without result, so decided to run for governor of Texas as a fall-back. With the help of a Rovian whisper campaign claiming his opponent was a lesbian, Bush won the race and began his public service. Six years later, after increasing incarcerations, executions, pollution, and debt, Bush became president after a Republican Supreme Court discarded the will of the voters.
The dubious nature of his ascension to power notwithstanding, Bush governed as if he were a king from moment one. When he refused to go along with tax cuts for the rich and other administration policies, Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords was purposely left off the guest list for the Teacher of the Year ceremony, though that teacher was also from Vermont. Not long after, Jeffords switched parties and gave Democrats control of the Senate, but just as Bush was starting to reel from this setback and a general lack of legitimacy, 9/11 happened, thanks in part to Bush's having done as little as humanly possible to stop 9/11, and his kingly powers were restored manifold.
Five years later, this presidency's unprecedented destruction of American institutions had become so widely known that the boy-king was for once in his life in danger of being held responsible for his actions. To elude the colossal cosmikarmic boomerang, Bush's army of ghouls pulled out all the right's election season golden oldies, including the scapegoating of gays and immigrants, questioning opponents' patriotism, passing voting "reform" measures intended to disenfranchise minorities, and delaying the release of unflattering public reports, all while outspending the Democrats by over a $100 million with ads light on the issues and heavy on personal attacks of unfounded innuendo.
As if by magic, Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity the Sunday before the election, just as the GOP bombarded registered voters in key districts with a million robo calls. When the phone was answered, a message about the Democratic candidate came on, making it appear that the Democrats had paid for the call. As the message got further along, the Democrat was slimed, but for the many that hung up right away and got another robo call soon after, it appeared that the Democrats were pestering them over and over.
By November 7th, the Republican fog machine was firing on all cylinders, but as happened with the Great Depression, Watergate, and the L.A. riots, a GOP blunder of catastrophic proportions (next stop: Iraq) woke a solid majority of swing voters up to their kinder, better, more practical selves.
George W. Bush, meet adversity.
---
From time immemorial, when things fall apart due to the selfish and reckless actions of men, women come along, pick up the pieces, and try to glue everything back together. So it is now that incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Democratic-led House of Representatives takes over from a Republican House that is half of what was recently dubbed "The Worst Congress Ever."
Since taking over in 1995 on heady promises of institutional reform, House Republicans have instituted a raft of autocratic practices, such as routinely forcing up or down votes on huge, complex bills (no amendments allowed), letting lobbyists write legislation that benefits the industries they represent, holding votes open until a one-vote majority is achieved through threats or monetary lubrication, and purposely negotiating behind closed doors and scheduling votes after midnight to avoid public scrutiny. In essence, their 12-year reign was little more than one big party for the economic elite, paid for by the American public, who by and large worked harder for stagnant wages while Congress gave themselves raises and lowered their workload (to a low of 93 days in 2006.)
Pelosi appropriately plans to begin her speakership with a series of votes on ethics issues: a ban on gifts, meals, and travel paid for by lobbyists; a law that would force retiring lawmakers to wait 2 years before returning to Capitol Hill as lobbyists; creation of an Office of Public Integrity to make lobbying activities more transparent; pay-as-you-go budgeting, which would end the budget-busting GOP practice of passing tax cuts that aren't paid for; and opening House-Senate conferences, in which the two chambers of Congress work out the final contours of legislation, back up to the public and the press.
Democrats also hope to reform an electoral process endangered by Republican shenanigans and public obliviousness or indifference.
Like clockwork, come election time minority voters around the country receive suspicious calls or fliers falsely telling them they're ineligible to vote, providing them with erroneous election dates, or purposely directing them to the wrong precinct. Senator Barack Obama's Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act would make these actions a felony.
Also of widespread concern is the use of electronic voting machines with no paper trail. Currently (and fittingly), in Florida, in Katherine Harris's old district, a Republican House candidate is ahead by 369 votes in a race where 18,000 votes (in a solidly Democratic part of the district) disappeared. A hand recount would make the Democrat the victor, but the district uses electronic voting machines with no paper trail, so those 18,000 votes are gone, and the Republican has declared victory while the case works its way through the courts. Democrat Russ Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act would put this banana republic scenario behind us for good by making voting districts with electronic voting machines use a paper trail.
---
Though Mr. Bush has a habit of trampling on other people's privacy in the name of "national security," he has always been very touchy about having anyone look into his public business. For nearly all of six years, he has had the luxury of a Republican congress of enablers that has not issued Bush a single subpoena, despite glorious heights of corruption, though the same Congress issued 1,000 subpoenas to the Clinton Administration for skimpy land deals gone awry and fellatio eagerly offered and publicly denied.
Come January, there'll be a new sheriff in town, whose first order of business will be holding public hearings in which the record will be played backward in order to unmask the demonic intentions behind the administration's actions.
Soon-to-be chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Ike Skelton plans to revive the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Pentagon that Republicans killed when they took over Congress in 1994. Skelton will also look into getting an Inspector General at the Pentagon, which has gobbled up half a trillion dollars in public funds without an internal watchdog since August 2005.
Skelton's colleague, Henry Waxman, a fervent advocate for government transparency whose crack investigative staff has produced roughly 2,000 reports over the past 8 years, looks to do much of the heavy lifting as head of the House Government Reform Committee. Waxman's overflowing plate includes passing the Clean Contracting Act, which would put a leash on the unaccountable subcontractors and gravy train no-bid deals that have become a way of life in the Bush era in Iraq, Gulf Coast rebuilding, and the Homeland Security Department. Waxman is also likely to put porcine oil company executives on the stand for a vigorous public grilling, as he famously did to tobacco execs in 1994.
Also likely to land on the war and death and destruction investigation docket are the small matters of pre-war intelligence, torture, domestic surveillance, detentions without trial at Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons in Europe, forged Niger docs that falsely posited Saddam Hussein's intention to acquire uranium, the Bush Administration's disastrous lack of postwar planning in Iraq, and the FEMA fiasco in New Orleans.
The change in committee leadership and introduction of oversight will also extend to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where committed enviro Barbara Boxer will replace Big Oil stooge James Inhofe, who secured his place in the frontispiece of the Climate Change Hall of Shame with the comment that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Boxer will have her hands full shining sunlight on the worst environmental record in modern history, with an emphasis on the EPA's meddling with global warming reports, their lax controls over deadly mercury emissions, punitive measures taken against EPA whistleblowers, and the Bush EPA's hard turn away from the scientific method. Boxer also will look at Bush's dogged attempts to open publicly-owned lands to commercial exploitation and his quiet change in funding for Superfund toxic waste clean up from "polluter pays" to "public pays."
The committee shifts will prove most momentous in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be headed by old pro Patrick Leahy. Since coming into office, George W. Bush has appointed the most extreme right-wing judges he could find. When Republicans controlled the Senate, Democrats filibustered a handful of exceptionally loathsome choices, but now that they control the Judiciary Committee, Democrats can kill a judicial pick effortlessly by simply not holding a vote. In addition, majority control will give Democrats at least some leverage should the Supreme Court's oldest (86) and most progressive judge, John Paul Stevens, decide to step down (I am not alone in hoping Mr. Stevens keeps to fruits and vegetables until at least January, 2009).
---
While Iraq was foremost in voters' minds, economic insecurity was not far from the surface for the legions of middle class voters who are falling further and further behind in a brutish economy in which business interests increasingly shed social responsibility and shift risk onto the back of America's working class.
To show these voters she means business, Nancy Pelosi has scheduled four big votes as part of her opening gun 100-hour agenda. The first vote would increase the minimum wage, which has not been raised since Bill Clinton was president, from the current $5.15 an hour to $7.25/hour. The second vote would overturn a Republican-authored law forbidding the government from negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices, as the VA currently does, to the tune of drug costs that are half of Medicare's. The third vote would repeal tax breaks for oil companies. The fourth vote would slice student loan interest rates in half.
These measures reflect the fresh tenor of economic populism of the new Congress as it returns public focus after a 12-year banishment to affordable housing, a progressive tax structure, education and healthcare.
One of the unseemly realities of the Republican privatization model are endless middle men (a.k.a. Republican campaign contributors) who are more concerned with profit margins than delivering public services. Where Bill Clinton did what he could to cut banks out of the federal student loan process to bring down costs, the Republicans brought costs back up by pulling banks back into the mix, which is why Republicans received 80% of loan financiers' donations over the past election cycle.
Ted Kennedy (soon to be head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee) best communicated the new congressional m.o. when he said: "It's time to throw the money-changers out of the temple of higher education." Democrats will try to remove banks and their pound of flesh from the process in favor of government-direct lending, while making college tuition tax-deductible and increasing grants to economically-disadvantaged students. Kennedy and George Miller, the new head of the House Education and Workforce Committee, also promise to push hard for generous funding for K-12 education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
Now that Democrats have regained some power in Washington, healthcare is back on the public agenda, and the rapacious pharmaceutical companies are target number one. As Ken Johnson, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America put it, "We woke up the day after the election to a new world." Not only are major critics of the pharmaceutical industry likely to schedule public hearings on price-gouging and predatory advertising, but Democrats will push legislation to allow imports from Canada and encourage development of reasonably-priced generic drugs.
In other areas of healthcare, Democrats will increase spending on Medicaid and Medicare, and will keep an eye on Bush and his penchant for allowing states more "flexibility" in Medicaid administration, which is too often a euphemism for giving mean-spirited red state governors the green light to slash benefits and raise co-pays for vulnerable populations. Democrats will also decrease the number of children with no health insurance by boosting funding for CHIPS (Children's Health Insurance Program), with the eventual goal of covering all 8,000,000 children currently uninsured.
---
As you read this, you may be wondering why the Democrats' healthcare goals are so modest when 45,000,000 Americans are without health insurance, and those who have healthcare pay significantly more than anyone else in the world, and you will come upon the inevitable fact that we have a divided government led by a Republican president.
Republicans and the health insurance middle men (currently composed of HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies) who help fund their campaigns have a blood pact to fight healthcare reform to the death, as corporate Republicans have been doing ever since Harry Truman first proposed universal coverage nearly sixty years ago. Despite the painfully obvious fact that free market healthcare has largely failed us, Republicans cloak their opposition to healthcare - and every other attempt to soften the rough edges of capitalism - in robotic gospel about the magic of the marketplace, because they're addicted to the racket. The racket is their pulse.
In fact, to swing this a little wider, it's likely that Bush will order his congressional henchmen in the Senate to try to kill virtually all populist (and popular) Democratic legislation before it reaches his desk. And though Bush will be pressured publicly by an empowered and vocal opposition, it's doubtful Democrats will be any more successful than previous Congresses in effecting foreign policy hatched in and implemented by the executive branch, no matter how disastrous the policy is to America's future.
Add in the monstrous Republican money and media machine, doing what they do best (distorting public debate and getting dedicated stenographers in the mainstream media to give any and all talking points equal time), the feral loyalty of the Republican base, the legendary discipline of the Congressional Republicans that is the fruit of the authoritarian mindset, and the possibility of an Iran distraction, or a successful suicide mission on American soil that would rile up red and purple voters who live hundreds of miles away from the action, and you may ask yourself how far forward will we go?
It's a good question, but let's take one step at a time. Barring another turncoat move by Joe Lieberman that would give Republicans control of the Senate, there are many things we can be sure of over the next two years. Lobbyists won't turn the clock back to the early twentieth century with re-writes of environmental and labor laws. The telecom giants will have a hell of a time imposing toll lanes and unequal access on the Internet. Hundreds of billions of dollars won't be pissed away on new tax cuts for millionaires. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the corporate orgies known as free trade agreements are deader than Michael Richards' diversity counseling credentials. The taxpayer-funded dog-and-pony shows of flag burning and gay marriage votes Republicans have staged every two years since 1994 will not occur before the next elections in 2008. Last but not least, a huge number of ignorant, jingoistic, homophobic Republican swine, the ones who weren't voted out of office, will be shrunk to minority status, where their idiotic comments are unlikely to be heard abroad, sparing those of us who value human progress the head-scratching and condescension that understandably came from more advanced corners of the world following the 2004 election.
Has America really got her groove back? Stay tuned. Now it is the time of the show when we shall dance.
Positive Vibration
Alan Sitomer began teaching English at Lynwood High School, in inner-city Los Angeles, in 2000. Unsurprisingly, the Standard Dead White Male Curriculum failed to resonate with Alan's economically-disadvantaged minority students.
In the fall of 2001, while sweating over a Dylan Thomas plan late into the night, Alan was struck with a novel idea: using analysis of themes and techniques in hip-hop, his students' cultural currency, as a way of sparking interest in and appreciation of the use of similar themes and techniques in classic poetry.
The new verse methodology took off with students, but growing an interest in long-form fiction was still a challenge, for the same reason: a musty canon of books that on the distracting, always moving surface appeared to have little relevance to at-risk urban teens in the 21st Century. With this obstacle in mind, Alan wrote and published his first Young Adult fiction novel, The Hoopster, about a high school student in inner-city Los Angeles, in 2003. All of these efforts, and the enthusiasm and test results they helped produce, netted him California Literacy's 2003 Teacher of the Year award.
In 2004, while working on a follow-up to The Hoopster, Alan put his successful, unorthodox lesson plan into Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics: for the Classroom, an instruction book which sang thematic and linguistic harmonies in hip-hop and classic poetry. Included were follow-up questions and answers for students, worksheets, writing exercises and classroom activities. Also in 2004, Alan began teaching Trends Teaching English in the Secondary Schools part-time at Loyola Marymount University to budding junior and high school English teachers, and won the Southland Council Teachers of English 2004 Award for Classroom Excellence.
The momentum from the awards and books continued when Hyperion-Disney signed Sitomer to a trilogy book deal in 2005. The Hoopster was re-published by Hyperion as the first in the series. The second book in the series, Hip Hop High School, was released in April 2006.
Currently Alan is nominated for the California State Department of Education's 2006 Teacher of the Year award. In between finishing his newest book, burping his baby daughter, and flying around the country to give instructional speeches to other teachers, Alan picked up his phone for the following chat.
Get Underground: I understand you're a California transplant. Where are you from originally, and what brought you out here?
Alan Sitomer: New York City. I came out here to go to USC. Have stayed in Cali ever since.
GU.: What do you think about California now that you've been out here a while?
A.S.: I love it. It's completely insane, but I think that's why we all stay here.
GU: I understand you originally came to L.A. with the intention of becoming a screenwriter?
A.S.: I tried my hand at greeting cards, plays for a hearing-impaired children's theatre group, Hollywood. A writer's path sometimes zigzags. And now look at where it has taken me.
GU.: How did you decide to go into teaching?
A.S.: I always was the kind of kid who liked helping other people. Books click for me. Even in college. A lot of people got jobs flipping burgers, but I got a job tutoring student athletes. It's always been something I've liked to do.
GU: Where do you teach?
A.S.: I'm a professor at Loyola Marymount University and a teacher at Lynwood High School in inner-city L.A.
GU: What are the demographics of your students in terms of race, economics and age?
A.S.: Economically we're classified as Title 1; over 70% of our students are entitled to free lunch. How can I put this delicately; we have pretty much no white students. There are a lot of teenagers at my school whose very existence is at risk due to a host of troubling issues in the community.
GU: What is your student-teacher ratio?
A.S.: My English classes are immense, roughly 38-1, five days a week. When I assign a paper I get a phone book to take home with me and read over the weekend.
GU: As someone from a different background, how do you gain the trust of your students?
A.S.: I actually ended up going to a high school that was racially mixed when my parents divorced, with many African-Americans in particular. I don't see the dividing line. We're all human beings. Before ethnicity are more basic needs: everyone wants to be healthy, happy, well-educated. All people view themselves as intelligent, and if you speak to their higher nature, you'll get a favorable response.
GU: At any given moment you're facing children living with poverty, single parents, drugs, gangs/violence, along with the usual host of teenage problems' how do you get someone struggling with so many immediate real world issues to warm to the learning process?
A.S.: We don't teach in a vacuum. However, high school students in the modern era have to appreciate education and the choices they make, even if the world is going to pot around them. I try to be the biggest cheerleader I can be. Kids who graduate high school and college almost always break the cycle of poverty - these teens themselves want to escape.
GU: How do you deal with disruptive students?
A.S.: I'm kind of the cool, easy-going teacher so I approach them like a regular person. If you don't want to learn, hey, there are 37 others who do. There's the door, feel free to leave. I'm not gonna come after you, karma will. No one ever leaves. The truth is, despite what the media portrays, I rarely have disciplinary problems. Yet I'm a taskmaster: we work hard in my class. Of course I'm not dealing with angels all day long either. I guess I just really like my students and I find a way for all of us to get along. Behavior problems are not anything I'm afraid to deal with, so in a way, I guess that's why they don't come up. Plus, we're really learning something in my class, and when kids realize what you're doing is for their benefit and not your own, they are usually pretty cool about things.
GU: What are the biggest misperceptions about public education?
A.S.: That most teachers are buffoons, most students are lazy and worthless and most administrators are either corrupt or incompetent. The truth is there are many, many people working extremely hard to make a difference in an arena that is just being ravaged by budget cuts, politicians and a general lack of public support. The way things are always negatively portrayedmakes for good tv, but if a kid makes it to Stanford, you'll be lucky to see a byline on page 18 of the local newspaper. But let there be a gang fight and the helicopters will start to swarm, praying that they can get some juicy footage to boost their ratings. The media is looking for the bad. And when you look for the bad anywhere, where won't you find it?
GU: What classes do you teach? What's your area of focus?
A.S.: Last year I taught English 10, Creative Writing and AVID (a special course not yet available at all schools across the country, though I think we'd all be better off if it were). I've also been a Mock Trial coach, chaired the poetry club, done a bunch of things. It varies year to year. At its core I teach English Lit. every year. It's my bread and butter.
GU: What's AVID?
A.S.: Advancement Via Individual Determination. It involves taking middle-of-the-road achievers and pushing and challenging and really requiring them to reach down deep so they can get into college. Kind of like the tortoise and the hare. I make tortoises in AVID. And in the end, we all know it works out for those who are tenacious enough to take that road, don't we?
GU: One of the major criticisms of public education is the standard, one-size-fits-all curriculum. How do you draw up your curriculum?
A.S.: Students need to be internally motivated to succeed. You can't threaten kids to be successful. If you get them engaged and enthusiastic, and marry it to standards, you will succeed. Passion and theatrics are in the teacher's tool belt I carry. Marrying academically challenging, standards-based objectives to zest-filled, highly engaging and exciting lesson plans is my greatest challenge. However, I love it when my class is demanding but it's also fun. I feel students learn best that way. Ask them to reach deep but make it joyful to do so. Hard work gets a bad rap in this world. Giving a great effort and reaping the commensurate rewards is something which is incredibly personally satisfying. My students laugh, but they also reach and stretch. It's what makes being a teacher magic.
GU: What is your typical lesson in a reading class? How much time is given to reading aloud, sustained silent reading, phonics, grammar, journaling, etc?
A.S.: Essentially, as a teacher you have a full year to paint a canvas, so you're going to use a whole host of colors. My base paint is reading; we read all the time in my class. For example, we read 14 books in my class last year; many students hadn't read that many in their whole life. Like I said, we read, read, read. It's the number one way to enrich literacy skills. However, we also, write, we discuss, we think, we chat, argue, debate, joke around and challenge one another. Shakespeare, hip-hop, Powerpoint presentations; we cover a lot over the course of the year.
GU: In I Won't Read and You Can't Make Me, the experienced reading teacher Marilyn Reynolds repeatedly mentions that the key to reaching reluctant readers is to present them with books that are relevant to their experiences and interests. In addition to penning two urban high school novels, you have put this idea into action by pioneering the promotion of literacy among at-risk youth through comparisons of universal themes in hip hop lyrics and the classics. How did this method evolve?
A.S.: It evolved almost out of a desperate effort to reach my students where they were. When looking at the typical poetry curriculum students put up a defense mechanism, you know, Yuck!, I hate poetry. I realized that if I made the work relevant and accessible to their lives I could build a bridge to the classics and really turn on some light bulbs. It has worked better than I ever dreamed.
GU: The first lesson in your book, Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics: For the Classroom, shows how alliteration is used by first John Milton, Edgar Allen Poe, and Emily Dickinson, then by LL Cool J and Run-DMC. When you first began using this technique, before it was successful, did this cross-cultural pedagogy cause friction with fellow teachers and administrators?
A.S.: Absolutely. First of all, it took me years to get across the message that this is not MTV that I'm doing here. The establishment looked down their nose at me for quite a while and thought I was merely entertaining the students -- until the students started learning the classics and my standardized test scores were smoking hot. I mean, I still get friction from the old guard at times. There's a segment of teachers who are all about the canon." And the truth is, I am fine with that. After all, I love the canon. Heck, I'm an English teacher. I'm a novelist. I have a Master's Degree in Cross-Cultural Language Arts. I laugh when people act as if I'm against the great books of society. What a joke. I love them. However, there are people who will fail 83% of [an English] class because they've raised the bar so high and then think it's the students' fault that the demands of the curriculum are not being met. I'm sorry, but if a teacher is failing 83% of their class, it's not the kids who are failing; it's the person at the front of the room who needs to take a look in the mirror. My feeling is that if the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad's gotta go to the mountain.
GU: Do you have any idea how many teachers around the country are using your book?
A.S.: Hip-Hop Poetry and The Classics has gotten so successful I have no idea. I speak to sold out teacher's conferences all the time. Every educator who takes five minutes to look at my book is sold; even if they don't think it's for them, they tip their hat and tell me that it's very original methodology which is excellently executed. Plus, it's standards-based. Nobody's done anything like this before. There's no profanity, no homophobia, no misogyny. What we've done is create a book that demystifies classic poetry for teens while at the same time demystifying hip-hop for many teachers and adults. The results and feedback have been nothing short of fantastic. From the Midwest to the East Coast, out to California and all across the nation, teachers everywhere with reluctant readers in their classes have reaped excellent results by using my book. It's been quite humbling really.
GU: Apart from the enthusiastic responses you've received from students and teachers who've used your books, how do you measure student progress? Has there been an improvement in test scores? Have these methods created more lifelong learning and/or interest in the classics than would have been the case with a standard curriculum?
A.S.: Yes. The ultimate goal is to create lifelong learners. My students excel. To graduate high school in California one must pass an exit exam before they conclude their senior year. I have a phenomenal pass rate for my sophomores that runs circles around the state averages. And my scores have been consistently high for years. This is why I'm trying to empower other educators, so they can be successful as well. Teaching is not like capitalism in that if I win, I don't want someone else who is doing the same thing I am (by being an educator) to lose. That's what I'm aiming for, to help out as many other folks as I can.
GU: Currently some SAT preparation courses run to $1,000 and more, giving a big advantage to the well-off. To right this imbalance, you provide free SAT test preparation. What are your thoughts on standardized testing? What are the alternatives?
A.S.: Standard testing is a different barrel of monkeys altogether. Inequity is a pet peeve of mine. My own students can't afford ritzy prep classes. Does this mean they shouldn't be well-prepared? The testing industry polarizes student performance into rich and poor when materials to succeed are only offered to the wealthy and not everyone else. I'm not trying to bring the rich down, what I am trying to do is hoist some of the impoverished up by means of using education as a ladder whereby they can lift themselves. And the more folks like myself are successful in this regard, the more crime will rescind, society will improve and others will start to think of being of service instead of solely spending their days thinking about what they can get for themselves. Sure, it's David vs. Goliath in many ways, but then again, wasn't America built on underdogs?
GU: What do you see as the keys to improving public education?
A.S.: If I had to choose one thing it would be class size reduction. Student-teacher ratios are preposterous. The simple truth is teachers can be more effective with twenty students then they can when they are charged with teaching 40. You certainly don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
GU: In Hip-Hop High School, Theresa, the protagonist, goes to a good college while her friend, Cee-Saw, gets pregnant in high school. Behind these different trajectories is their differing family platforms: Theresa has an academically successful older brother and two supportive parents, while Cee Saw lives in a single parent household without much in the way of role models or positive reinforcement. Who were the nurturers and mentors who helped you to become the person you are today?
A.S.: I'm really fortunate. My parents were college-educated, and so were my grandparents. Education was always a part of my family; it's been passed down from the prior generation. I always knew I'd go to college. My sister and my brother both went to college. My daughter, who's only 2 months old now, we've already opened a college savings account for her. The value of education is already being cemented into her life as I am strongly aware that an education is something no one can ever take away from a person once they have it. People who are educated understand this; that's why they are so emphatic about making sure their own children become educated themselves. I would never presume to tell my daughter what to do for a career, what to study, where to live, etc., but no matter what she chooses, I am adamantly convinced that her being an educated woman will serve her best in whatever pursuit she chooses. Essentially, when it comes to schooling, I drank the kool-aid and still continue to gulp.
GU: In times of continually lean education budgets and an unfortunate indifference among too many voters to poverty, it's not surprising that self-empowerment runs through much of your work, from the inclusion of the Rudyard Kipling poem "If" in Hip-Hop and the Classics to Theresa's eureka moment in Hip-Hop High, when she becomes turned on to reading through the original self-help Bible, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. What were the first books that woke you up as a human being and gave you inspiration to keep reading, thinking, and learning?
A.S.: That's a great question. The theme of self-empowerment kicks back to the core of what America was founded on. We're a can-do people; when we get lemons we make lemonade. When funding dries up as a teacher, are you gonna complain and moan or are you gonna do something about it? I've been educated in the school of hard knocks, and books have always been light posts which have shown me the way. Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Alchemist, books like these (and so many more) to me, that's what a real hero is - someone who picks themselves up, dusts themselves off, and creates a brighter future for themselves regardless of their setbacks and adversities. Self-empowerment is a major theme in my work I guess because it's a major theme in my life. As a writer and a teacher you quickly learn that no one really gives you any breaks. If you can't deliver, then it will be a cold hard world. You have to claw and work and hone your skills and give your best effort and be tenacious and suffer rejection and bounce back and work through adversity if you are going to make it. It's a quality in which I firmly believe.
GU: What do you read for pleasure these days?
A.S.: I try to read all the time. I read a lot of YA (Young Adult) novels to keep up with my students. I read magazines. I still haven't read nearly all the classics I would like. How much I would love to be a student once again and be told that my job is to read this or that. There are some true gems out there. Really, I can't keep up.
GU: What do you see in your future?
A.S.: My ambition right now is to publish a book a year for the next 20 years while still continuing to teach and speak. I get so many new opportunities, you don't know where it's going to go or where they will lead me. But I tremendously enjoy writing books and novels, I love teaching, and speaking is a third element to my professional life which I enjoy quite a lot. Doing things in which I find value, which I enjoy, is tremendously important to me. And even if I could financially afford to retire, I wouldn't. I just love it all too much. I'd probably take nicer vacations if I could, but the grass is not greener for me right now. I am incredibly fortunate to love what I do and my plan is to continue to do it. That's how it is when you put your focus on trying to use your own talents and abilities to serve the needs of others.
In the fall of 2001, while sweating over a Dylan Thomas plan late into the night, Alan was struck with a novel idea: using analysis of themes and techniques in hip-hop, his students' cultural currency, as a way of sparking interest in and appreciation of the use of similar themes and techniques in classic poetry.
The new verse methodology took off with students, but growing an interest in long-form fiction was still a challenge, for the same reason: a musty canon of books that on the distracting, always moving surface appeared to have little relevance to at-risk urban teens in the 21st Century. With this obstacle in mind, Alan wrote and published his first Young Adult fiction novel, The Hoopster, about a high school student in inner-city Los Angeles, in 2003. All of these efforts, and the enthusiasm and test results they helped produce, netted him California Literacy's 2003 Teacher of the Year award.
In 2004, while working on a follow-up to The Hoopster, Alan put his successful, unorthodox lesson plan into Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics: for the Classroom, an instruction book which sang thematic and linguistic harmonies in hip-hop and classic poetry. Included were follow-up questions and answers for students, worksheets, writing exercises and classroom activities. Also in 2004, Alan began teaching Trends Teaching English in the Secondary Schools part-time at Loyola Marymount University to budding junior and high school English teachers, and won the Southland Council Teachers of English 2004 Award for Classroom Excellence.
The momentum from the awards and books continued when Hyperion-Disney signed Sitomer to a trilogy book deal in 2005. The Hoopster was re-published by Hyperion as the first in the series. The second book in the series, Hip Hop High School, was released in April 2006.
Currently Alan is nominated for the California State Department of Education's 2006 Teacher of the Year award. In between finishing his newest book, burping his baby daughter, and flying around the country to give instructional speeches to other teachers, Alan picked up his phone for the following chat.
Get Underground: I understand you're a California transplant. Where are you from originally, and what brought you out here?
Alan Sitomer: New York City. I came out here to go to USC. Have stayed in Cali ever since.
GU.: What do you think about California now that you've been out here a while?
A.S.: I love it. It's completely insane, but I think that's why we all stay here.
GU: I understand you originally came to L.A. with the intention of becoming a screenwriter?
A.S.: I tried my hand at greeting cards, plays for a hearing-impaired children's theatre group, Hollywood. A writer's path sometimes zigzags. And now look at where it has taken me.
GU.: How did you decide to go into teaching?
A.S.: I always was the kind of kid who liked helping other people. Books click for me. Even in college. A lot of people got jobs flipping burgers, but I got a job tutoring student athletes. It's always been something I've liked to do.
GU: Where do you teach?
A.S.: I'm a professor at Loyola Marymount University and a teacher at Lynwood High School in inner-city L.A.
GU: What are the demographics of your students in terms of race, economics and age?
A.S.: Economically we're classified as Title 1; over 70% of our students are entitled to free lunch. How can I put this delicately; we have pretty much no white students. There are a lot of teenagers at my school whose very existence is at risk due to a host of troubling issues in the community.
GU: What is your student-teacher ratio?
A.S.: My English classes are immense, roughly 38-1, five days a week. When I assign a paper I get a phone book to take home with me and read over the weekend.
GU: As someone from a different background, how do you gain the trust of your students?
A.S.: I actually ended up going to a high school that was racially mixed when my parents divorced, with many African-Americans in particular. I don't see the dividing line. We're all human beings. Before ethnicity are more basic needs: everyone wants to be healthy, happy, well-educated. All people view themselves as intelligent, and if you speak to their higher nature, you'll get a favorable response.
GU: At any given moment you're facing children living with poverty, single parents, drugs, gangs/violence, along with the usual host of teenage problems' how do you get someone struggling with so many immediate real world issues to warm to the learning process?
A.S.: We don't teach in a vacuum. However, high school students in the modern era have to appreciate education and the choices they make, even if the world is going to pot around them. I try to be the biggest cheerleader I can be. Kids who graduate high school and college almost always break the cycle of poverty - these teens themselves want to escape.
GU: How do you deal with disruptive students?
A.S.: I'm kind of the cool, easy-going teacher so I approach them like a regular person. If you don't want to learn, hey, there are 37 others who do. There's the door, feel free to leave. I'm not gonna come after you, karma will. No one ever leaves. The truth is, despite what the media portrays, I rarely have disciplinary problems. Yet I'm a taskmaster: we work hard in my class. Of course I'm not dealing with angels all day long either. I guess I just really like my students and I find a way for all of us to get along. Behavior problems are not anything I'm afraid to deal with, so in a way, I guess that's why they don't come up. Plus, we're really learning something in my class, and when kids realize what you're doing is for their benefit and not your own, they are usually pretty cool about things.
GU: What are the biggest misperceptions about public education?
A.S.: That most teachers are buffoons, most students are lazy and worthless and most administrators are either corrupt or incompetent. The truth is there are many, many people working extremely hard to make a difference in an arena that is just being ravaged by budget cuts, politicians and a general lack of public support. The way things are always negatively portrayedmakes for good tv, but if a kid makes it to Stanford, you'll be lucky to see a byline on page 18 of the local newspaper. But let there be a gang fight and the helicopters will start to swarm, praying that they can get some juicy footage to boost their ratings. The media is looking for the bad. And when you look for the bad anywhere, where won't you find it?
GU: What classes do you teach? What's your area of focus?
A.S.: Last year I taught English 10, Creative Writing and AVID (a special course not yet available at all schools across the country, though I think we'd all be better off if it were). I've also been a Mock Trial coach, chaired the poetry club, done a bunch of things. It varies year to year. At its core I teach English Lit. every year. It's my bread and butter.
GU: What's AVID?
A.S.: Advancement Via Individual Determination. It involves taking middle-of-the-road achievers and pushing and challenging and really requiring them to reach down deep so they can get into college. Kind of like the tortoise and the hare. I make tortoises in AVID. And in the end, we all know it works out for those who are tenacious enough to take that road, don't we?
GU: One of the major criticisms of public education is the standard, one-size-fits-all curriculum. How do you draw up your curriculum?
A.S.: Students need to be internally motivated to succeed. You can't threaten kids to be successful. If you get them engaged and enthusiastic, and marry it to standards, you will succeed. Passion and theatrics are in the teacher's tool belt I carry. Marrying academically challenging, standards-based objectives to zest-filled, highly engaging and exciting lesson plans is my greatest challenge. However, I love it when my class is demanding but it's also fun. I feel students learn best that way. Ask them to reach deep but make it joyful to do so. Hard work gets a bad rap in this world. Giving a great effort and reaping the commensurate rewards is something which is incredibly personally satisfying. My students laugh, but they also reach and stretch. It's what makes being a teacher magic.
GU: What is your typical lesson in a reading class? How much time is given to reading aloud, sustained silent reading, phonics, grammar, journaling, etc?
A.S.: Essentially, as a teacher you have a full year to paint a canvas, so you're going to use a whole host of colors. My base paint is reading; we read all the time in my class. For example, we read 14 books in my class last year; many students hadn't read that many in their whole life. Like I said, we read, read, read. It's the number one way to enrich literacy skills. However, we also, write, we discuss, we think, we chat, argue, debate, joke around and challenge one another. Shakespeare, hip-hop, Powerpoint presentations; we cover a lot over the course of the year.
GU: In I Won't Read and You Can't Make Me, the experienced reading teacher Marilyn Reynolds repeatedly mentions that the key to reaching reluctant readers is to present them with books that are relevant to their experiences and interests. In addition to penning two urban high school novels, you have put this idea into action by pioneering the promotion of literacy among at-risk youth through comparisons of universal themes in hip hop lyrics and the classics. How did this method evolve?
A.S.: It evolved almost out of a desperate effort to reach my students where they were. When looking at the typical poetry curriculum students put up a defense mechanism, you know, Yuck!, I hate poetry. I realized that if I made the work relevant and accessible to their lives I could build a bridge to the classics and really turn on some light bulbs. It has worked better than I ever dreamed.
GU: The first lesson in your book, Hip Hop Poetry and the Classics: For the Classroom, shows how alliteration is used by first John Milton, Edgar Allen Poe, and Emily Dickinson, then by LL Cool J and Run-DMC. When you first began using this technique, before it was successful, did this cross-cultural pedagogy cause friction with fellow teachers and administrators?
A.S.: Absolutely. First of all, it took me years to get across the message that this is not MTV that I'm doing here. The establishment looked down their nose at me for quite a while and thought I was merely entertaining the students -- until the students started learning the classics and my standardized test scores were smoking hot. I mean, I still get friction from the old guard at times. There's a segment of teachers who are all about the canon." And the truth is, I am fine with that. After all, I love the canon. Heck, I'm an English teacher. I'm a novelist. I have a Master's Degree in Cross-Cultural Language Arts. I laugh when people act as if I'm against the great books of society. What a joke. I love them. However, there are people who will fail 83% of [an English] class because they've raised the bar so high and then think it's the students' fault that the demands of the curriculum are not being met. I'm sorry, but if a teacher is failing 83% of their class, it's not the kids who are failing; it's the person at the front of the room who needs to take a look in the mirror. My feeling is that if the mountain won't come to Muhammad, Muhammad's gotta go to the mountain.
GU: Do you have any idea how many teachers around the country are using your book?
A.S.: Hip-Hop Poetry and The Classics has gotten so successful I have no idea. I speak to sold out teacher's conferences all the time. Every educator who takes five minutes to look at my book is sold; even if they don't think it's for them, they tip their hat and tell me that it's very original methodology which is excellently executed. Plus, it's standards-based. Nobody's done anything like this before. There's no profanity, no homophobia, no misogyny. What we've done is create a book that demystifies classic poetry for teens while at the same time demystifying hip-hop for many teachers and adults. The results and feedback have been nothing short of fantastic. From the Midwest to the East Coast, out to California and all across the nation, teachers everywhere with reluctant readers in their classes have reaped excellent results by using my book. It's been quite humbling really.
GU: Apart from the enthusiastic responses you've received from students and teachers who've used your books, how do you measure student progress? Has there been an improvement in test scores? Have these methods created more lifelong learning and/or interest in the classics than would have been the case with a standard curriculum?
A.S.: Yes. The ultimate goal is to create lifelong learners. My students excel. To graduate high school in California one must pass an exit exam before they conclude their senior year. I have a phenomenal pass rate for my sophomores that runs circles around the state averages. And my scores have been consistently high for years. This is why I'm trying to empower other educators, so they can be successful as well. Teaching is not like capitalism in that if I win, I don't want someone else who is doing the same thing I am (by being an educator) to lose. That's what I'm aiming for, to help out as many other folks as I can.
GU: Currently some SAT preparation courses run to $1,000 and more, giving a big advantage to the well-off. To right this imbalance, you provide free SAT test preparation. What are your thoughts on standardized testing? What are the alternatives?
A.S.: Standard testing is a different barrel of monkeys altogether. Inequity is a pet peeve of mine. My own students can't afford ritzy prep classes. Does this mean they shouldn't be well-prepared? The testing industry polarizes student performance into rich and poor when materials to succeed are only offered to the wealthy and not everyone else. I'm not trying to bring the rich down, what I am trying to do is hoist some of the impoverished up by means of using education as a ladder whereby they can lift themselves. And the more folks like myself are successful in this regard, the more crime will rescind, society will improve and others will start to think of being of service instead of solely spending their days thinking about what they can get for themselves. Sure, it's David vs. Goliath in many ways, but then again, wasn't America built on underdogs?
GU: What do you see as the keys to improving public education?
A.S.: If I had to choose one thing it would be class size reduction. Student-teacher ratios are preposterous. The simple truth is teachers can be more effective with twenty students then they can when they are charged with teaching 40. You certainly don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this out.
GU: In Hip-Hop High School, Theresa, the protagonist, goes to a good college while her friend, Cee-Saw, gets pregnant in high school. Behind these different trajectories is their differing family platforms: Theresa has an academically successful older brother and two supportive parents, while Cee Saw lives in a single parent household without much in the way of role models or positive reinforcement. Who were the nurturers and mentors who helped you to become the person you are today?
A.S.: I'm really fortunate. My parents were college-educated, and so were my grandparents. Education was always a part of my family; it's been passed down from the prior generation. I always knew I'd go to college. My sister and my brother both went to college. My daughter, who's only 2 months old now, we've already opened a college savings account for her. The value of education is already being cemented into her life as I am strongly aware that an education is something no one can ever take away from a person once they have it. People who are educated understand this; that's why they are so emphatic about making sure their own children become educated themselves. I would never presume to tell my daughter what to do for a career, what to study, where to live, etc., but no matter what she chooses, I am adamantly convinced that her being an educated woman will serve her best in whatever pursuit she chooses. Essentially, when it comes to schooling, I drank the kool-aid and still continue to gulp.
GU: In times of continually lean education budgets and an unfortunate indifference among too many voters to poverty, it's not surprising that self-empowerment runs through much of your work, from the inclusion of the Rudyard Kipling poem "If" in Hip-Hop and the Classics to Theresa's eureka moment in Hip-Hop High, when she becomes turned on to reading through the original self-help Bible, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. What were the first books that woke you up as a human being and gave you inspiration to keep reading, thinking, and learning?
A.S.: That's a great question. The theme of self-empowerment kicks back to the core of what America was founded on. We're a can-do people; when we get lemons we make lemonade. When funding dries up as a teacher, are you gonna complain and moan or are you gonna do something about it? I've been educated in the school of hard knocks, and books have always been light posts which have shown me the way. Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Alchemist, books like these (and so many more) to me, that's what a real hero is - someone who picks themselves up, dusts themselves off, and creates a brighter future for themselves regardless of their setbacks and adversities. Self-empowerment is a major theme in my work I guess because it's a major theme in my life. As a writer and a teacher you quickly learn that no one really gives you any breaks. If you can't deliver, then it will be a cold hard world. You have to claw and work and hone your skills and give your best effort and be tenacious and suffer rejection and bounce back and work through adversity if you are going to make it. It's a quality in which I firmly believe.
GU: What do you read for pleasure these days?
A.S.: I try to read all the time. I read a lot of YA (Young Adult) novels to keep up with my students. I read magazines. I still haven't read nearly all the classics I would like. How much I would love to be a student once again and be told that my job is to read this or that. There are some true gems out there. Really, I can't keep up.
GU: What do you see in your future?
A.S.: My ambition right now is to publish a book a year for the next 20 years while still continuing to teach and speak. I get so many new opportunities, you don't know where it's going to go or where they will lead me. But I tremendously enjoy writing books and novels, I love teaching, and speaking is a third element to my professional life which I enjoy quite a lot. Doing things in which I find value, which I enjoy, is tremendously important to me. And even if I could financially afford to retire, I wouldn't. I just love it all too much. I'd probably take nicer vacations if I could, but the grass is not greener for me right now. I am incredibly fortunate to love what I do and my plan is to continue to do it. That's how it is when you put your focus on trying to use your own talents and abilities to serve the needs of others.
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