Clearly, in targeting Iran a generation after we thought we could shift the power dynamics of the Mideast for the better, this country did not learn a major lesson of the Iraq War: the folly of what
historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called replacing “a policy that aimed at peace
through the prevention of war by a policy aimed at peace through preventive war.”
Donald
Trump distinguished himself from the rest of the Republican candidates for
President in the 2016 primaries by declaring the Iraq War a disaster. Many of those
who voted for him in the next three fall Presidential elections assumed that he
would keep the nation out of future conflicts.
But after his nearly half a century in the public eye, could anyone reasonably assume that a personality so bellicose in dealing with others would not sometime, somewhere resort to an actual war putting lives at risk?
And can anyone now
assume that, after he loudly dissed our allies since January 20, 2025, we will be
strong enough to go it alone and never need their support again?
Mike
Conovan [played
by Spencer Tracy] [to his friend Barney]: “You see her face? A real
honest face. The only disgustin’ thing about her.”— Pat and Mike (1952), screenplay by Ruth Gordon
and Garson Kanin, directed by George Cukor
But I
couldn’t help but smile when I saw these figures. They evoke what so many of
us—including current and former librarians like me—know: that the best time to
foster a love of reading is when children are young.
Nowadays,
it’s even more urgent that we realize this, as so many digital distractions
exist, far beyond what our parents and grandparents feared with the rise of
television.
.jfif)
Vince Ricardo [played
by Peter Falk]: “Involved? That was my idea.”—The In-Laws (1979), screenplay by Andrew Bergman, directed by Arthur Hiller
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.
The
trouble is, a mischievous man ends up the ruler of the country, with similar
men as his minions.
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.
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
The image
accompanying this post, The Transfiguration, was created by the Italian
Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael (1483-1520).
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.
Paul
Verrall [played
by William Holden]: “Harry's a menace.”
Billie
Dawn [played by
Judy Holliday]: “He's not so bad. I seen worse.”
Paul: “Has he ever thought of anyone
but himself?”
Billie: “Who does?”
Paul: “Millions of people, Billie. The
whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the
unselfish.”
Billie: I can hear you.
Paul: “All that's bad around us is bred
by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a - a cause, an
organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you
understand that?”
Billie: “Sort of.”
Paul: “Well, think about it.
Billie: You're crazy about me, aren't ya?”
Paul: “Yes.”
Billie: “That's why you're so mad at
Harry.”
Paul: “Listen, I hate his life, what he
does, what he stands for—not him. He just doesn't know any better.”
Billie: “I go for you, too.”—Born Yesterday (1950), screenplay by Albert Mannheimer and Garson Kanin
based on Kanin’s play, directed by George Cukor
Then came
the news that four weeks to the day of that big storm, another, with maybe even
more snow and higher winds, was going to hit.
I wasn’t
in the best frame of mind, then, when I drove out to Overpeck Park,
not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, for the kind of walk I hadn’t been
able to take in weeks. Despite large puddles in spots, many other area
residents felt similarly and circled the large track on the field.
If
anything heartened me as I thought of what was to come within 24 hours (and
even as I type this, I can see the flakes following), it was that earlier this
winter, the days would have been shorter and I wouldn’t have able to take the attached
picture of the glorious late-afternoon sky—and that it might take less time for
traces of this latest brutal storm to disappear.
-WC.jpg)
This cropped
image of Tom Robbins, in San Francisco at a reading sponsored by Booksmith, was
taken on Sept. 24, 2005, by 48states (talk).
Sir
Humphrey Appleby [played
by Nigel Hawthorne]: “Oh, what about, Prime Minister?”
Hacker: “About the Americans.”
Appleby: “Oh yes, well, we're all
worried about the Americans.” — Yes,
Prime Minister,
Season 1, Episode 6, “A Victory for Democracy,” original air date Feb.
13, 1986, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby
Forty
years after this episode in this hilarious series aired, the British have even more
to worry about their partner in the “special relationship” than they did back
when it only concerned Americans going crazy about Communist subversion.
Now, the
Prime Minister has so much more on his mind—like whether the current American
President will destroy the transatlantic alliance, subvert representative governments around the globe, spark a trade war by
ratcheting up tariffs, or use Royal Air Force bases for potential unilateral
strikes on Iran.
Moreover,
the Prime Minister and King Charles are sweating over what else the Americans
have in the Epstein files—like whether they could make matters even worse, if
possible, for the former Prince Andrew, and, with more revelations spilling out
about additional cabinet ministers, whether the government of Keir Starmer
could fall.
It had
been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business,
and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical
acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and
liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in
technique as square in outlook.
But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive.
He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative
director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror
he held up to it on injustice at home.
Coming of
age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his
mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually
made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film
industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was
interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.
The
fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone
like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his
early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its
sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally
considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in
seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.
A five-year
contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951
guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of
being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as
“vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”
High
Noon, a taut
western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented
perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship
and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s
convictions.
After his
producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had
known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and
would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for
protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.
A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date.
But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The
Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped
convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic
encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during
that time.
Over the
next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach,
1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism
(Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his
atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and,
most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967,
in the image accompanying this post).
What The
New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly
self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But
with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and
itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence
at the 1961 Oscars.
But after Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described
New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more
radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had
been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good'
era.”
I don’t think
that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary
camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required
movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate
and Bonnie and Clyde.
I question
whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions
on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated
performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his
influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:
*Aaron
Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and
The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing)
owes much to him.
*Quentin
Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K.
auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.
*And, with
Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s
searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.
Today, the
Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that
highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and
Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.
The many
obituaries and career assessments of Jesse Jackson since the
announcement of his death earlier this week have understandably focused on his impact
as the most important African-American leader between Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. and Barack Obama.
But more
broadly, he may have been the most radical major party candidate in American
history since William Jennings Bryan. His concerns touched on not just the
problems faced by this nation’s working class but those abroad.
Over the
last decade, in writing (with Rob Polner) a biography of Paul O’Dwyer, An Irish Passion for Justice, I became fascinated with why this
Irish-born New York radical lawyer, politician, and activist supported Jackson’s insurgent Presidential bids in 1984 and 1988.
Particularly
since 1969, with the start of the sectarian “Troubles” that convulsed
Northern Ireland, O’Dwyer had sought Democratic politicians aiming for national
office who would aggressively press Great Britain for a negotiated settlement
to the conflict.
Rather
than George McGovern, an antiwar liberal who might have normally won his
endorsement, he ended up supporting Shirley Chisholm in the 1972 Presidential
primaries because, unlike the Senator from South Dakota, she took an
unequivocal stance favoring Irish unification.
Additionally,
in the U.S. at large as well as in New York State, O’Dwyer had long felt uncomfortable
with the party’s lack of Black leadership. With Jackson’s ringing oratory on
behalf of a “Rainbow Coalition” of white and Black voters motivated by economic
unrest in the Reagan era, O’Dwyer saw a charismatic candidate who could break
through.
To an
extent not always understood by many who focus on particular countries, the
struggle for civil rights has taken inspiration from around the world. Henry
David Thoreau’s concept of civil disobedience profoundly shaped Mahatma Gandhi’s
strategy of passive resistance to British rule in India, which in turn
influenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the segregated American South.
In the late 1960s, civil-rights marches staged by Ulster Catholics drew on the non-violent protests of African-Americans under the leadership of Dr. King.
And, as civil rights activism moved to a different spot on the globe in the
Seventies and Eighties—South Africa—many Ulster nationalists and their American
supporters glimpsed another, economic model with potential for exerting
pressure on a recalcitrant regime: the Sullivan Principles.
In 1977, as a tool against apartheid, the Rev. Louis Sullivan of Philadelphia conceived non-discrimination guidelines that companies investing in South Africa should follow to ensure fair employment.
Seven years later, the Irish National Caucus fashioned a similar cudgel against the “the systematic practice and endemic
nature of anti-Catholic discrimination” in Protestant-dominated Northern
Ireland since partition in 1921, naming the MacBride Principles after Sean MacBride, a Nobel Peace
Prize laureate and co-founder of Amnesty International.
These
nondiscrimination and corporate codes appealed to O’Dwyer. Peter King, a
conservative Long Island Republican who made common cause with the progressive
Democrat on Ulster, remembered about his ally, in an interview with Rob and myself for our
biography:
“Paul was
really a lawyer at heart, and saw things through the vision of a lawyer. Even
though he was in politics, and ran for office a number of times, he had that
legal direction— how can this be done, how can the law be changed, how can we
put certain protections in. Even in the frenzy of a political or nationalist
moment, he was at his core a lawyer.”
Jackson,
along with another 1988 Democratic Presidential candidate, Senator Paul Simon,
responded to a questionnaire from the Ad Hoc Congressional Committee on Irish
Affairs, with the response above on the MacBride Principles.
A few
weeks later, just before the Democratic Presidential primary in New York,
O’Dwyer introduced Jackson to Irish politicians and lawyers at a fundraiser,
extolling the candidate’s interracial vote-getting potential.
Though the
party’s eventual nominee, Michael Dukakis, had endorsed this corporate code of
conduct as governor of Massachusetts, he did not discuss it much on the
campaign trail after securing the nomination.
In any
case, his failure at the polls that autumn meant that it would take another
four years before O’Dwyer found, in Bill Clinton, a candidate willing to
endorse the MacBride Principles and appoint a special envoy to facilitate the
peace process in Northern Ireland.
With
Jackson’s passing—and access to his papers and the recollections of friends and
family members—the time is ripe for historians and biographers to investigate
and weigh the legacy of this complicated but critically important American
progressive. His advocacy on behalf of Northern Ireland should be a part of
such research.
(The
portrait of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that accompanies this post was
taken during the 1980s by Jesse Jackson for President, Inc.)
