Quote of the Day (Mike Royko, on an Earlier War Over an Oil-Rich Mideast Nation)

“In two or three years, Kuwait will be close to looking as it did before Iraq looted and plundered it. But I guarantee that the West Side of Chicago, much of the Bronx, and the slums of Newark, Gary, New Orleans, and other American cities will be the same mess they are now. That’s because Kuwait sits atop an ocean of liquid gold. It can hire the giant Bechtel corporation and other globe-hopping companies to perform a miraculous rehab job. Unfortunately, nobody is drilling gushers on the West Side of Chicago or in Detroit or the Bronx. And Bechtel doesn't take our IOUs.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997), “Kuwait’s Future Brighter Than Ours,” originally published in the Chicago Tribune, Mar. 12, 1991, reprinted in One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (1999)

Operation Desert Storm concluded 35 years ago this past Saturday. The outcome made a national hero of General Norman Schwarzkopf, briefly boosted President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating, and even now retains something of a retrospective glow: a conflict with comparatively few American casualties, with a limited objective—Saddam Hussein’s occupation forces thrust out of Kuwait.

But every war has unintended, often deleterious, consequences, and the 1990-91 Gulf War was no different. To ensure that Saddam would not threaten a key oil-rich ally, Bush stationed American forces in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden saw as an “infidel” offense against Islam’s holiest sites. He launched al Qaeda in an attempt to drive them out.

Right on the anniversary of that first Gulf War, another Mideast war of choice was launched. Already there are casualties, and sites have been hit not only in Iran, but elsewhere in the Mideast.

Even if the war concludes with an outcome that President Trump proclaims favorable, we won’t know for years—as also with the replacement of a prior leader with the Shah of Iran in 1953—whether this will be in long-term American interests.

The region has a long memory, and you can bet it’ll remember that Trump told The New York Times back in 2016 how his policy for fighting the Islamic States would differ from Barack Obama’s: “I’ve been saying it for years: Take the oil.” It’s impossible to ascribe good motives to a country that’s elected a leader who so unashamedly proclaims self-interest.

I wish Mike Royko were alive to comment on all this. Long ago, when Trump was only a tabloid fixture, the columnist, in a hilarious February 1990 piece, informed readers, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, that Marla Maples was not the aspiring mogul’s mistress but, according to “a very high-ranking source in the Trump Organization,” his personal laundress:

“And that, pure and simple, is the reason Mr. Trump kept her nearby, in a hotel room one floor below his, and brought her to Aspen and took her on his yacht and had her accompany him to parties and other social events.”

But in this “Quote of the Day,” Royko got serious, pointing out what remain American problems: neglect at home while millions are spent on foreign conflicts. 

(Though progress has been made in some neighborhoods in the areas mentioned, too many remain symbols of urban decay. And before long, the pain spread beyond the inner city: from 1980 to 2016, the Great Lakes region lost ground economically, with Michigan, Wisconsin, and western Pennsylvania performing particularly badly, according to Indermit Gil’s 2019 analysis for the Brookings Institution.)

Much like “Make America Great Again,” the notion of “America First” was a chimera, a propaganda slogan conceived to create a scapegoat—aid going to foreign governments or, worse still, foreigners coming to this country—for this nation’s underinvestment in its own material and human resources.

Don’t imagine for a moment that this situation will be redressed in that den of scorpions, the Middle East. Even the quick takeover of Venezuela ended up costing $3 billion for its late August-to-early February military buildup, according to Becca Wasser, a military strategy expert at the Centre for a New American Security, a think-tank.

The Iranian campaign is already longer than that, even beyond the walkover stage, courtesy of an administration equally lacking competence and conscience. We’d better hope that this conflict won’t devolve into the quagmire that the Second Gulf War became under George W. Bush.

Quote of the Day (Anton Chekhov, on Russia)

“Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.”—Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Note-book of Anton Chekhov, translated by S.K. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (1921)

The trouble is, a mischievous man ends up the ruler of the country, with similar men as his minions.

Photo of the Day: Mountain of Snow, Veterans’ Memorial/Depot Square Park, Englewood NJ

I took the image accompanying this post two days ago, after rising temperatures had helped melt some of the 27 inches of snow from earlier in the week. To clear space in the large parking lot just north of our city’s downtown, a tractor moved all that white stuff into a mammoth pile.

Make that two mammoth piles. The one seen here was in the park. Another was in a single spot in the parking lot.

Believe it or not, these piles were even wider and higher when the tractor finished its work. I’m just hoping that Mother Nature will take care of the rest in short order and reduce it all to large puddles.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Maude,’ In Which She Praises a New ‘Hit Single’)

[Maude Findlay is alarmed as she comes into her living room to find daughter Carol dancing “The Hustle” with lecherous middle-aged married businessman Randy Cutler, who’s about to buy a store from Maude’s husband Walter.]

Maude Findlay [played by Bea Arthur] [turning off the record, picking up another one]: “Randy, Randy, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but you must hear the new album Walter just bought: “Charlton Heston and ‘The Ten Commandments.’ That's the one that has that hit single ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery.’” —Maude, Season 4, Episode 12, “Walter’s Ethics,” original air date Dec. 1, 1975, teleplay by Arthur Marx and Bob Fisher, directed by Hal Cooper

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Renee Roden, on the Continuing Memory of the Transfiguration)

“The Eucharist—the community’s shared anamnesis or remembering of Christ’s sacrifice and Christ’s revelation of himself in glory—makes Christ truly present in our world. Rather than building a monument in response to holiness, we are called to become the living stones. Our lives, our hearts, and our communities are called to become a testament to the transfiguration we have seen. The church is not real estate. We don’t need to pitch a tent. We just have to go out and share the memory.”—Journalist and author Renee Roden, “A Reflection for the Feast of the Transfiguration,” www.USCatholic.org, July 31, 2023

The image accompanying this post, The Transfiguration, was created by the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael (1483-1520).

Flashback, February 1966: Susann’s ‘Pink Trash’ Takes Publishing World by Storm

In writing Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann was biting the hand that wouldn’t feed her. A flop as an actress, she took revenge on the theater and film industries that scoffed at her talent with her first novel, published this month 60 years ago.

As an early 1980s undergrad, I nodded in agreement when one of my English Department professors confidently predicted that, though Valley of the Dolls had topped the bestseller lists, its lack of merit would eventually put it out of print. He turned out to be only half right.

At one point, the novel went out of print and stayed that way for 15 years. But a clamor must have gone up for this guilty pleasure, because in the autumn of 1997 it was reissued, leading to a phrase associated with it making its appearance in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Word Watch” column in April 1998: “pink trash,” defined as “the newly revived literacy” of Susann’s novel.

“Word Watch” drily noted the term’s origin: “reports that [Susann] typed her manuscript on pink paper.” The “trash” part of the phrase came from the book’s subject matter, “the seamy side of show business.”

Maverick publisher Bernard Geis took a flyer on the book when other, more reputable publishers, as revolted by its awful style and structure as by its tawdry content, passed when it was offered to them.

Little did he know that the author he gambled on would capitalize on changing sexual mores and her own tireless promotional know-how to push the novel to the top of the bestseller list—or that she would become so annoyed by him that she’d dump him when she got to her next book, The Love Machine.

Over the prior decade, readers had become accustomed, through novels like Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place and D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to more graphic depictions of sexuality. Now, Ms. Susann was not only including pre-marital and extra-marital sex, but same-sex relationships.

Moreover, with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians continually in the news for experimenting with hard drugs, all the pill-popping that the author included (the “dolls” of the title referred to valium) paled by comparison.

For readers actually paying attention to characters, Susann included entertainment figures that most, if not all, of her readers could have guessed at: a Broadway musical-comedy star jealous of her perch (Ethel Merman); a rising young star who becomes addicted to pills (Judy Garland); a blond beauty (Marilyn Monroe); and a reputed “good girl” who, at the start of her career, becomes involved with an older, married man (Grace Kelly).

Valley of the Dolls was a roman a clef (literally, “novel with a key”), a literary genre that over the years has figured in The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night, and The Dharma Bums. But Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack Kerouac possessed something that Susann clearly didn’t: ability.

Maybe you are among the relative few who know something of the story of Susann from the 2000 film Isn’t She Great, with Bette Midler as the obstreperous author. I stress the word “something” because, as with so many “based-on-fact” movies, it departs from reality in some respects. (For instance, the character “Michael Hastings,” stunned by the cyclonic Ms. Susann, was actually legendary editor and author Michael Korda.)

But the movie was correct in one respect: publishing staffers who dealt with her on a regular basis probably wanted to scream “Help!” whenever they heard her on the phone or, worse, saw her entering their offices.

But booksellers from coast to coast loved her. She’d come in laden with all kinds of stuff: gifts, personalized copies of her books, and, for the truckers hauling them from the warehouse, trays of Danish pastries.

And, because, through contacts made by her publicist husband Irving Mansfield, she’d appeared on “The Tonight Show” with provocative opinions on everything, crowds would be waiting on her book tours. In fact, her great innovation wasn’t her content or style but the author promotional circuit.

More than a few critical brickbats came Susann’s way, though the ones that may have hurt the most came from Gloria Steinem (who lamented her opposition to feminism) and Sara Davidson (who, after taking advantage of her hospitality and thoughtfulness in an interview—including making a call from the house and lamenting her love life—savaged the novelist and Mansfield).

Five years ago, in an interview with Literary Journalism Studies, Davidson copped to misgivings about her article. She seemed especially apologetic about making all-too-easy sport about the couple’s lifestyle, but there was a larger flaw she didn’t admit to: invading the family’s zone of privacy.

At one point, Davidson noted, “A subject Jackie and Irving never bring up is their son. When questioned, they say the boy is sixteen and in school in Arizona.”

What Davidson didn’t know—one hopes, anyway—is that Guy Hildy Mansfield had been diagnosed with severe autism/Kanner’s syndrome at age three. After treatment for cancer in 1962, Susann may have believed she was on borrowed time, so she wanted to make enough money to ensure his institutional care after she was gone.

She didn’t have very much time, but she did make it count. Before she died at age 56 in 1974, Susann penned three more scandalous bestsellers: The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough, and Dolores.

Before Susann, publishing tended to be a rather tweedy gentleman’s profession. She swept in with a different attitude: "A new book is like a new brand of detergent," she said. "You have to let the public know about it. What's wrong with that?" For a publishing industry that, especially in the 1960s, began to transition from independent houses to corporate subsidiaries, her mindset fulfilled the imperative to meet the bottom line, come what may.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1967 film adaptation of Valley of the Dolls, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke.)

Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on a ‘Close Correspondence Between Individual and Collective Crimes’)

“The mystery of evil—there are no two ways of approaching it. We must either deny evil or we must accept it as it appears both within ourselves and without — in our individual lives, that of our passions, as well as in the history written with the blood of men by power-hungry empires. I have always believed that there is a close correspondence between individual and collective crimes, and, journalist that I am, I do nothing but decipher from day to day in the horror of political history the visible consequences of that invisible history which takes place in the obscurity of the heart. We pay dearly for the evidence that evil is evil, we who live under a sky where the smoke of crematories is still drifting. We have seen them devour under our own eyes millions of innocents, even children. And history continues in the same manner. The system of concentration camps has struck deep roots in old countries where Christ has been loved, adored, and served for centuries. We are watching with horror how that part of the world in which man is still enjoying his human rights, where the human mind remains free, is shrinking under our eyes.”—French novelist (and lifelong Catholic) Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, delivered on Dec. 10, 1952, in Stockholm, Sweden