There Oughta Be A Law

When comic books were comic, a syndicated two-panel cartoon strip, There Oughta Be a Law, gave voice and vent to Americans’ frustrations with just about anything they thought was unfair and should be redressed by a law. Between the 1940s and the 80s, Broadway’s biggest musical, Oklahoma!—with its significant exclamation point—ran for an unprecedented five years; the Mad Ave-hyped Ford Edsel lasted for only three; but There Oughta Be a Law stayed popularly in print for four decades.

I wish “Oughta Be” were around today. I would write cartoonist-creator Harry Shorten to say there oughta be a law in New York City that states anything that isn’t good for the city is unlawful. What has me fuming right now is—brace yourself—a bedbug billboard in Times Square. That’s right, a bedbug. On a billboard. If you haven’t seen it, avert your eyes if you come to it… cover the eyes of your children (and pets)… and, by all means, do not let a visitor to New York see it. Detour, sidle past, walk backwards, but take that tourist dearest to you and to the New York economy and jay-walk the hell out of there.

A bedbug on Broadway! Mayor Bloomberg, where are you? A big, ugly, crawly bug is straddling skyscrapers half its size across a billboard sprawling above a pizza parlor! You eat pizza! The villain is an ad—a tawdry, tacky scare ad for a company called Protect-A-Bed, a crass merchant telling us, “Protect Yourself.” But who’s going to protect Broadway theaters and Manhattan hotels and city restaurants from Protect-A-Bed?

Protect-A-Bed claims its same mattress covers protect against bedwetting. Will people come from all over the world to be sobered by a display of a man pissing on a New York skyline? Above a salad bar?

I don’t believe in curtailing free speech, Mayor B., but this isn’t speech, this is visual assault. There oughta be a law! It isn’t free enterprise, it is economic depravity. Why not a bill-boarded illustration of a bedbug taking a juicy bite out of The Big Apple?!

You spent 69 million dollars—and changed a law a lot of New Yorkers thought oughta be—just to keep your job. Let your affluence do the talking. Why not buy the billboard and change it to something all New Yorkers inherently take pride in?

_____

Curious to know what you, the reader, think there oughta be a law about. That’s what the “Comments” section below is for.

Once a New Yorker, Always...

I tell those new to New York there is a point at which you become a New Yorker. It happens either in the fifth or sixth year. Until then, you tell yourself, and try to convince others, you’re visiting or exploring the options, you’re going to school or “just taking in the scene.” According to every self-spun scenario, you’re here until you can go elsewhere.

I tell them, if you’re still here after six years you’re not going anywhere. You’re here because you belong here. Waiters, students, writers, interns—lanky women, eager tyros and wannabes—you’re stuck here. Give up the ghost of coming and going or e-mailing it in. Your adopted city has adopted you, sure as by fiat. You are no longer from anywhere else. You’re a New Yorker.

In New York, you are what you do. In Boston, you are where you went to school. In D.C., you are who you know. In LA, you are what you drive or where you live.

We live fast. It follows that we have to cut through the quick and initially get to know each other in shorthand—in a New York minute. Pass that test and likely as not you’ve made a friend for life, or at least for the life of the party, even if you never see that person again.

No one gives a damn where, or even if, you went to school—you are rigorously schooled daily and nightly by cab drivers, store clerks, waiters and doorman (from all over the world) in this city. Everybody knows someone well enough to suggest making anyone who makes trouble for him regret he did. No one who lives in Manhattan is foolish enough to maintain a car: if you drive and aren’t driven, if you use a car for any other reason than getting to the Hamptons, you’re probably a schmuck.

Once a New Yorker, you can say anything you want in the most public of places, and say it more colorfully, with a sprinkling of New York vernacular. Incomparable entertainer Mark Nadler used to hold court for fans and fellow performers Thursday nights at Sardi’s. Between songs, tinkling on the ivory keys he otherwise tickled or pounded, he would conduct running commentaries on whatever came to mind. One evening, after using a Yiddishism, Mark, originally from Waterloo, Iowa, said, “I’ve started to notice myself using more and more Yiddish words recently. I began to wonder—am I becoming more Jewish? And then it occurred to me. No, I was becoming more of a New Yorker.”

During my sixth year in New York, I was enlisted to write the lyrics for a Broadway show, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.” The more I grasped who Sidney was, the more I realized how similar we were, culturally and politically. The audience discovers before Sidney does (if he ever does) that, fantasize as he may about leaving the city of steel and glass, New York, for the serenity of the countryside, he’s not going anywhere. During rehearsals, I discovered that while I had indulged in a similar fantasy, neither was I. Sidney and I were exactly where we belonged. For me, it’s been a love affair with the city ever since.

This Was A Happy Home

The morning we were moving from the apartment we’d lived in for 37 years, the glass beaker of our Bodum Chambord French Press—the same glass beaker that had served me for two decades of freshly brewed tea—cracked as I poured boiling water onto the Keemun tea leaves in it. That afternoon, as our cleaning lady prepared the apartment for the buyer, the vacuum quit. Inanimate things know.

I lived in my apartment long enough. Long enough to see the trees in Central Park grow so tall with 37 springs that their leafy tops threatened to obscure my view east to Fifth Avenue. Will its new residents gaze at what I looked forward to daily?— the reflection, at sundown, of the sun setting in the west, producing a transitory bronze blaze in the panes of the windows facing us from across the park.

I lived in my apartment long enough to identify and associate the nicks in the woodwork and walls with my two daughters’ growing-up years. The ever-so-slight indentation in a baseboard from Haley’s three-wheeled bike. The brief trail of indentations in the parquet floor from Lauren’s stiletto heels (a phase that passed quickly, thank God). A faint, blunt impression in wallpaper from the impact of a ball after several schoolboy chums were unable to resist using a spacious bedroom as a playing field and played catch across it.

Lived there long enough for my mind’s eye still to be able to see the scorch under the wallpaper—from the night Lauren declared she was old enough to live on her own… but not before starting a fire in the mini-oven.

Long enough to see our children become adults. And our two grandchildren make it their own and romp through on foot, bike and scooter as if it were their park.

I lived in my apartment long enough to see the parade passing by—the Thanksgiving Day Parade, 37 times. For Jean and me to host rooms full of children and their parents at our windows. To wipe little hand prints and nose prints from the glass at the end of day.

We lived in that apartment long enough to start seeing it through other people’s eyes. It was home, our home, but its impression on other people eventually brought home to me how fortunate we were. Composer Cy Coleman, who moved around in fancier circles than any man I knew, would only live on the East Side of Manhattan. “I could never live on the West Side,” I’m told he would say—then add, with a glint in his eye, “Unless it was in Ray Fox’s apartment.” For me, that was like receiving the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Our daughters insisted on a farewell bash. Their friends, many of whom felt they grew up in our apartment, were the most sentimental. Lauren and Haley made speeches. By consensus, they pronounced, “It’s not the apartment, it’s the environment the people in it created.”

As the days wound down, Lauren would drop by daily to take “one more last” lingering view of Central Park in all its glory. Haley would visit and revisit the rooms. Heartwarming to witness what I already knew—theirs was such a happy childhood.

When the apartment was completely vacant, each made it a point to take a last-look, father-daughter tour with me, and each left a few tears on my shoulder. The park’s leaves turning bright with autumn didn’t make leaving easier. On the other hand, the glaringly bare walls, stripped of their art and framed family photos, and the damned echo in every room, made it time for me to go; I’d lived in the apartment long enough. Haley joined me bright and early that last morning to see the last large item, our irreplaceable piano, crated and moved.

Many, many years ago, when Jean and I were apartment hunting, I came across a small blackboard in one of the kitchens. On it, scrawled in chalk, were words that impressed and stayed with me: This was a happy home.

This was a happy home. And now we’ve left it, with no regrets, for good. My 6-year-old grandson Maddan was the wisest about it. He said, “It’s not sad, because we take the love with us.”

A Marathon Remembered

The 2009 New York City Marathon is this Sunday, November 1st.

I remember it as a crisp fall Sunday turned dark, an eerily unsteady day for a marathon. The day was October 23, 1983.

Author and leading animal rights activist Cleveland Amory had, in his inimitable fashion, not asked, but told me I was coming to “a little party” he was giving in his Central Park South apartment, which “practically” overlooked the finish line of the New York City Marathon.

I arrived to find Cleveland’s cozy living room, too small I believed to contain the larger than life Cleveland, filled with “big” people: Walter Cronkite, Arthur Schlesinger, Norman Mailer and Walter Anderson, the Parade Magazine chief. I was immediately informed that the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon had been attacked by a terrorist suicide truck bombing, killing 241 marines.

I was asked questions I wished I had answers for—I was supposed to be an authority on Lebanon—but I was as uninformed and bewildered as everyone else. You don’t venture guesses when it’s Walter Cronkite who’s doing the asking.

Cleveland had engaged a chef to prepare omelettes to order, but no one was eating. No one was interested in anything but the heartrending news. The venerable newsmen seated themselves around a television set to catch what updates they could. They talked about switching channels briefly to look in on the marathon—which one could view “live” from Cleveland’s balcony, a dozen steps away—but stayed glued to their seats and the network news. In reality, no one on TV knew enough of anything yet, and the reports became a litany of hearsay and conjecture. If you take news as something new, there was none.

Only Mailer and I took to the tiny balcony, which overlooked the final stretch immediately before the marathon’s finish line. Smitten by the display of the runners’ stamina, I said, “Look at that, Norman… 26 miles, and they look fresh as they can be!” He said, “That’s because they’re losers.” As my jaw dropped, he added, “It’s a race. They should be all out.”

The Ghost of Time Warner

If you’re wondering where I’ve been, it wasn’t China, it was waiting for service from Time Warner.

For one long week, my wife and I lived in our new apartment without the telephone, television and Internet service—“the triple package”—we ordered from Time Warner twelve days earlier. In spite of Jean’s repeated calls to customer service, her patient demeanor and sweet implorations, we had no evidence, nary a trace, of the actual existence of the world’s largest entertainment company, Time Warner Inc.

To the contrary, I began incrementally to confirm that the corridors and cubicles of the 114 billion dollar mega corp that occupies mega space in a mega building overlooking Manhattan’s Columbus Circle are occupied, as in possessed, by the Ghost of Time Warner Customer Service, an ungodly assembly of bunglers and prevaricators who swear by everything holy that you’re scheduled and they’re showing up, as they proceed to stand you up hour by hour day after day. A long week of no service call—“Someone will be there today”—and no return phone calls— “In a half hour, I promise”—for a job scheduled well in advance in a building that occupies an entire city block at an intersection so central it’s difficult to avoid. It was AOL that used to be the company everyone for good reason loved to hate. Now it’s AOL’s parent company, Time-Warner Inc., that incurs the amply-earned wrath and curses. The Ghost of Time-Warner Customer Service haunts the denizens of Manhattan. And it isn’t yet Halloween.

Sunday morning I had it with Time Warner Non-Service Inc. I called (by cell phone), coolly unloaded on Non-Service Customer Relations representative Miguel and insisted on speaking to someone who could get the job done TODAY. I emphasized, repeated and broke it down into five letters: T-O-D-A-Y. “I want someone here TODAY.”

Miguel, trying to be helpful, asked if I could go to Queens to pick up the modem the serviceman he’d yet to acquire would require for the job. I asked Miguel: “Did you ever hear of a Bad Customer Relations Department? Anywhere in the world?” Since Time Warner Non-Service Inc. apparently doesn’t teach its employees too much more than how to avoid the truth, I thought I could further Miguel’s career. “Customer Relations implies good customer relations, Miguel, not deceitful customer relations, or incapable or inept ones.” I continued the lesson by citing the obvious: "Your company has men in trucks; I, like most Manhattanites, don’t have a car. Your men are on your payroll, I am not. You’re Time-Warner and I’m…

"I’m at 79th and Broadway, 20 blocks from Time Warner headquarters. Walking distance! 79th and Broadway, Miguel. If your offices are on fire, odds are the fire-engines will pass through 79th and Broadway on their way to put out your fire, it’s that tough to avoid. I’m not calling from a farm, Miguel. Major subway and bus lines cross through here all day and night. And your installation man can’t find his way here, even by accident?"

Miguel connected me to his director, Osvaldo. In the fleeting magical moments that I had not one but two Ghosts of Time-Warner Customer Service on the phone, I told them not a single person has called back. Ever! “It must be in the manual," I said. "No matter what the problem is or what the customer says, you tell them you’ll call back in a half hour. A Footnote tells you, *Don’t bother. They’ll never be able to find you again.”

Osvaldo offered to try to get a service person for me “today” and call me back. I rationally opted to wait on the phone. Forty-five minutes later Osvaldo returned to the phone to tell me he was sorry, but he could not find anyone available “today.” To make up for it, he’d offer me two months of free service. I said we’d already been given one month of free service. And now, two more months of free service... for service we don’t have and can’t get! How can you beat that?

Before the word “tomorrow” could come out of his mouth, I asked Osvaldo to put himself in my shoes. I told him that if the situation were reversed and he need a comma or period and it were my job to supply him with punctuation, I’d leave my desk and come to his office. If no one else from Time Warner Non-Service was available, I thought either Miguel or Osvaldo should leave his desk and come to me.

Osvaldo offered again to work further on it and call me back. Having gained nothing, I had nothing left to lose.

Hours passed without a call. Naturally, I couldn’t reach Osvaldo, so I tore into the man I did reach, whose name I never heard because I was screaming over every word he uttered.

When I entered the world of having to “do business” for myself, I quickly learned that the best way to get attention—sometimes the only way—was to punctuate the important sentence with an obscenity. That’s when I learned to curse. It took me years to learn to scream. Sadly, most people don’t really hear you unless you curse or scream. (I don’t recommend doing both at the same time.) That, sadly, is the way the world works.

By and large, I gave Time Warner Non-Service Inc. the courtesy of the considered scream. Not loudly, but articulately. Yes, that’s what works: screaming articulately.

I got results.

Every story has its heroes. This one’s are Miguel and Osvaldo. Osvaldo eventually called me back. And Osvaldo delivered! All right, the day after, but he went where no one prior had tread. A service call!

I’m posting this via my newly-installed Internet service. I learned today that I have VIP status with Time Warner. Isn’t that a scream?

I want to thank Time Warner Inc., not for the service, too arduously obtained, but for the story. This will probably blow my VIP status.

Dynamite

Alfred Nobel could never have won the Nobel Peace Prize. Not, at least, in his lifetime.

Nobel, a Swedish chemist, developed nitroglycerin—not for angina, but for explosives. Having succeeded with an effective blasting oil, he resourcefully developed and patented a blasting cap—a detonator—for triggering the explosion of nitroglycerin.

After losing a brother and a factory from two separate nitroglycerin explosions, Nobel managed to stabilize his mighty explosive and give it a name that stuck—dynamite. A chemist with a head for business, he patented it. An innovator with a taste for explosion, he subsequently invented a blasting gelatin—gelignite—and a blasting powder—ballistite—to go with his blasting oil. For Nobel, who accomplished all of this and became wealthy from it in the quarter-century between 1862-1887, life was a blast.

Nobel said, “If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” One turned out to be so good it is his undisputed legacy—the creation of a prize for “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The Nobel Peace Prize.

Gandhi didn’t win it, but Arafat did. Sartre asked that his name be withdrawn from consideration, and not only did the Nobel committee award him the prize, but also ignored his refusal of it. Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho declined it because peace had yet to come to his country, but that didn’t deter his co-awardee Henry Kissinger from accepting it.

It’s fair to say that President Obama won it for being an advocate for both “fraternity between nations” and“the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” For little more because he’s had time and opportunity to do little more. What he will do regarding “the abolition or reduction of standing armies” remains to be seen. If the committee for the Nobel Peace Prize intended to encourage him; to support his honorable endeavors; to put the best light on the worst of human conditions, war; doesn’t that only serve the public good?

Alfred Nobel envisioned a future that is yet to come. “My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.” If only.

Rx: Health Care Made in Taiwan

A health scare I experienced in Taiwan, only 1/13th the size of the United States, made me zealous for services and benefits we in this country only dream about.

While at dinner with five other American journalists in Taiwan this past June, I felt a stabbing, shooting pain in my lower left arm indicating angina. I tried to deny the pain and dismiss any significance it might have, but my companions were too knowledgeable to fool. Mindful I was going to be in the air for nineteen hours the next day, they insisted I go to a hospital before we boarded our plane for New York.

At 7:30 the next morning, accompanied by Lynn, a colleague, and our Taiwanese guide, Lily, I took a taxi to the Buddhist Tsi Chen Hospital in the coastal town of Hualien. At 8:20 a.m., we entered the emergency area, which bore none of the earmarks or anxieties customary to one. Without wait, I was able to tell a receptionist in English why I was there. I wasn’t asked to fill out any forms. All I had to write was my name, once.

In less than five minutes a young woman doctor walked over to where we were seated and began asking me questions, the right questions. After I described my symptoms of the night before, she prescribed the expected EKG and a blood test, took my blood pressure and listened via stethoscope to my chest. She said I would have the results by ten a.m. In less than another five minutes, I was asked to enter double doors behind the reception desk that led to the emergency ward.

Although I was wearing a surgical mask, I was nevertheless wary of catching something. Patients lay in rows of hospital beds. A nurse, sensing my discomfort, led me to a bed on an outside aisle where I sat facing away from the other patients as she took blood from me. I scrutinized the procedure to make sure she was using a new needle, which of course she was. But I was still uneasy. I asked if I might have the EKG in a more private area, hoping for any unoccupied corner of the room. The nurse did even better; she moved the bed into a separate chamber. I was comforted and thankful.

While I subsequently waited with Lynn and Lily in the waiting room for the test results, Lynn suggested we take a poll on what time we would have them. We all lost by overestimating it. At 9:51 the doctor emerged with the completed EKG and blood test results, which she reviewed painstakingly with me. They indicated the pain wasn’t from angina or anything threatening to the heart. They revealed I had a heart murmur I didn’t have on examination a week prior to going to China. I was offered, and gratefully accepted, print-outs of all my test records to relay to my cardiologist in New York.

When we rejoined our colleagues, they, already informed I was OK, greeted me with cheers and applause. Then, one by one, they sidled over to me, individually expressing envy. I pointed out they had relaxed at a beach while I had spent my last four hours in Taiwan anxious about whether I would be on a flight home that day or not. The response could only come from journalists: “Yes, but you got the story.” And they were right.

It’s a tale of national health care. The Taiwanese government, founded “provisionally” in 1949, faced with entering the 21st century with half its population having no insurance coverage at all, started late and got it right.

The government began by consulting experts from a dozen other countries, cherry-picking and combining their finest features for inclusion in its own nascent system. It wanted one plan that covered everyone, assuring free and equal access to doctors and hospitals for all without waiting lists or “gatekeepers.” To finance it, it opted, in 1995, for a single payer government-run national insurance fund everyone is compelled to join and contribute to based on either the ability to pay or a fixed affordable premium. No Taiwanese citizen ever has to worry again about going bankrupt due to medical bills. Working people don’t have to worry about losing their insurance if they lose or change jobs. Low income households, military conscripts and veterans are 100% subsidized.

Taiwan’s NHI (National Health Insurance) system offers comprehensive benefits you can barely recite in one breath: prescription drugs, vision and dental care, maternity and child care, psychotherapy, preventive medical services, acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicines, kidney dialysis, radiation therapy, surgery, inpatient and home care, and more. Everyone has a smart card that enables a doctor to read the patient's medical history and medications. The patient’s bill, transmitted to the government insurance office, is paid automatically. It’s no wonder Taiwan has the lowest administrative costs in the world: less than 2 percent.

The taxi rides, roughly two hours to and from the hospital, came to $10 more than my hospital visit. The entire bill for my examination and battery of tests was $56.

Back in New York, I reported my experience to my cardiologist, who recommended I have an echocardiogram. The first available appointment for me was in a month.

Lebanon, the Film

This is not a review, it is a recommendation. This Thursday and Friday, October 1 and 2, the New York Film Festival will be presenting Lebanon, a feature film that takes us—by tank—into the first 24 hours of the 1982 Lebanon war, i.e., when Israel’s troops entered Lebanon in pursuit of the PLO. For anyone who thinks war is anything less than horrific, or possibly that there is something heroic about sending young people into it, this film is obligatory.

Via one tank, one day and five soldiers, the director captures the claustrophobia and terror of the dank interior of an Israeli battle tank.

This tank stalls in war, gets lost, runs amok. It takes a hit, it takes on a captured, wounded Syrian soldier. “Treat him good,” an Israeli officer says, “He’s a war prisoner.” The tank’s driver panics, its gunner freezes at the sight of his first target, closes his eyes as he fires at the second one. Its commander has trouble controlling his men.

His men are boys. One asks a superior officer to call his home and let his mother know he’s all right.

None of this is the stuff of screenplays. In Lebanon in 1982, I saw a sign instructing Israeli soldiers to do just that. “Call Home. Call Your Parents—At Every Opportunity.” Such signs appeared with telephones installed along the Israeli-Lebanon border.

While I spoke with soldiers on Lebanon’s coastal road outside Damour, I kept an eye on a friend, a seasoned woman who was a prominent Israeli journalist, as she spoke softly with a young soldier. In the day’s twilight, I saw him help her up and then help her lower herself into a tank similar to one her son had died in during the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, the “Yom Kippur War” of 1973. When she emerged, not more than five minutes later, she seemed calmer than she had been all day. “Go ahead,” she said as she approached me, “Ask your question.” She was right, I had one. “How do you deal with it?” I asked gently as I could. She answered, “If you don’t, you go mad. Yes, I think you must go mad.”

Lebanon, an Israeli film directed by Samuel Maoz. Alice Tully Hall, Broadway at 65th Street. Thursday, October 1 at 9:30 p.m. and Friday, October 2 at 3 p.m.

A Day of Awe

Every year at this time I ask myself the same question: why do I go to synagogue only at this time?

To my Jewish friends, I unapologetically acknowledge I’m a High Holiday Jew. To my Gentile friends I explain that in my religion it is every individual’s prerogative to worship God as he or she chooses; consequently, there are as many kinds of Judaism as there are Jews. That suits me. My way is to disqualify all meddlers and keep it between what’s in my head and what’s in my heart.

If one of my favorite aspects of Judaism is its limitless array of choices, one of my sources of wonderment is how all of its people tend always to answer a question with a question. Even one put to oneself. Why, I could ask, only at this time of year?—but I, of course, can anticipate my answer: Do you know a better time of year? Isn’t it because you always discover something new? A line in the prayer book you’ve been reading or reciting for years suddenly taking on deeper meaning? Incisive or provocative thoughts expressed in a rabbi’s sermon? Or, as happened on one momentous occasion, something so unexpected, so inordinate, so heart-rending and indelible that eight years later it’s still difficult to relate dry-eyed.

The congregation I don’t belong to but collegially join for the High Holidays is that of an American Reform synagogue. To my delight, it is traditionally free-thinking and liberal-minded. For most congregants, a half-day is sufficient to celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, but the most solemn day of the year, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, requires a full day.

A full day for Upper West Siders requires a break, one hour and fifteen minutes, between morning and afternoon services. Many years ago, the synagogue introduced a novel program, the “study group,” to fill the time productively (for Upper West Siders).

On Tuesday, September 18, 2001—exactly seven days after 9/11—we reentered the synagogue to find a different kind of “study group” seated in a row of eight chairs on the bima, the raised platform in front of the ark. Six men and two women—five rabbis and three cantors who had conducted the morning service visibly in mourning and in anguish. One of the women, a cantor, had unavoidably wept openly every time she sang.

The topic was 9/11. The rabbi in the first chair, a noted scholar, spoke in mature tones and cerebral terms. He was followed by another rabbi and another, faces troubled, voices lowered, emotions guarded. So it continued until it became the fifth man’s turn, a rabbi visiting from another congregation, middle aged, face and spectacles round, nondescript. Until he spoke the unspeakable. In sorrow and censure, one sentence. “Today I think it’s God who should apologize.”

Stunned silence. A Day of Awe.

Watching What's Wrong

Jimmy Fallon said it well: “Instead of showing President Obama’s health care speech… Fox aired… “So You Think You Can Dance.” I guess they wanted to give viewers a choice between hearing what’s wrong with our country and watching what’s wrong with our country.”

If you’ve been watching, Joe Wilson’s contemptuous interjection during President Obama’s address to congress is “what’s wrong with our country.” Kanye West’s rude insertion of himself at the MTV Video Music Awards is what’s wrong with our society. Jane Fonda is what’s wrong with mixing the water of celebrity with the oiliness of politics.

I’ve already dealt with Joe Wilson, but inadvertently neglected to include that he’s amply and ably demonstrated he’s a racist. I’m going to deal with Kanye West summarily: in my eyes, he’s a reverse racist, calling the kettle whitey, so to speak—and a blatant sexist, whose seizing of the microphone from a stunned 19-year-old Taylor Swift was crassly intimidating and cowardly.

Which brings me to Jane Fonda. Who just won’t go away. So what’s wrong with her (this time)? Choosing her customary motley company, she joined forces with Wallace Shawn, Danny Glover and David Byrne to protest the selection of Tel Aviv as this year’s spotlight selection for the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual “City to City” theme.

It’s really not much of a spotlight. According to journalist Stephanie Guttmann, “A look at the festival’s home page includes no mention of Israel at all.” But that wouldn’t stop Calamity Jane. You haven’t arrived in American politics until you’ve been boycotted by Jane Fonda.

Seldom is an acronym a synonym for the string of words it represents. But thanks to a handful of uninformed actors and disgruntled walk-ons, the acronym for the Toronto International Film Festival, TIFF, couldn’t be more appropriate, because they stirred up a lulu of a tiff with this one.

Actors should stay out of politics. That should have included Ronald Reagan, but just because it’s too late to stop him doesn’t mean the folly should continue. Alexander Pope said, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Some people should stick to learning their lines. I haven’t read Fonda’s biography, and won’t—I’m hereby boycotting it!— but her life isn’t exactly private, and I know of nothing in it that qualifies her for anything but acting (limited), exercise (passé) and outspokenness (unenlightened).

The subject is watching. I watched Jane in Israel in 1982. She and her husband at the time, Tom Hayden, were ostensibly there to observe “conditions.” But she mostly didn’t get off the bus. Tom did—to speak with the press, with Israeli soldiers, and one on one with me—and came off as a really nice guy. I didn’t learn until much later that he was running for the California Assembly and, here’s that uncomfortable mixture of show business and politics again, he was “back-dooring” it in Israel to get the heavy California Jewish vote. That November, he won the general election.

Two Little Words

Retired Army Reserve Colonel Joe Wilson dissed his commander in chief last night.

I can’t think of a famous one-word quote. But with two words, “You lie,” a relative non-entity, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, became deservedly infamous.

In all likelihood, his two words also made him more of a loser in 2010 than he is now. Before he could say “I’m sorry” (exactly the same number of syllables and the cadence of “jack rabbit”), Republican Party leaders were apologizing for him. Before Rush Limbaugh could say, “I was ecstatic when I heard that last night,” the campaign coffers of Wilson’s Democratic opponent in 2010, Rob Miller, had swelled from a reported $150,000 in donations in the first hour after Wilson’s outburst to $500,000 and climbing this afternoon.

Little wonder. In style and substance, by any measure of civility, Joe Wilson was outrageously out of line last night. In sharp contrast to President Obama’s mellifluousness, Representative Wilson shouted. In contrast to the president’s show of respect for all people, the congressman showed unrestrained disrespect for the president who, according to Article II, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, is the commander in chief of the United States—therefore of Colonel Wilson, a four-year reserve colonel and eighteen-year National Guard colonel (ret.). To make matters worse for Wilson, candidate Rob Miller is a former Marine. By shooting off his mouth last night, Wilson seems not only to have shot himself in the foot, but also to have taken direct aim on the other one.

With his two little words, he may have been the one who was lying (Rush the one swearing by it). Obama denied that his health care proposal would cover illegal immigrants. Section 246 of the House Democrats' proposal H.R. 3200 limits "federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States," but it’s inconclusive and still a work in progress. By no interpretation does it give anyone license to point a finger and use such pointedly strong language. Unless license is callously taken by one who deliberately intends to mislead others.

Wilson is apparently known in Congress for giving the briefest of speeches. Last night, he outdid and probably undid himself.

A Brief Labor Day Brief

How did the GOP ever agree to a Labor Day?

In 1894, when Labor Day became a national holiday, the President of the United States, Grover Cleveland, was the only Democrat to hold the highest office in the land (twice) between the years of 1860 to 1912, a half-century of Republican Party political domination.

Legislation making Labor Day a national holiday was rushed through the 53rd U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Cleveland (before Congress went on a “labor day” recess).

The inspiration and incentive for the creation of the national holiday was a labor strike, the 1893 Pullman Strike triggered by the railroad car company’s laying off of hundreds of employees—as it happens, a result of a dire economic downturn in the country.

Rioting, plundering and setting fire to railroad cars by unemployed union workers was matched by rioting, plundering and setting fire by mobs of non-union workers.

Seeking to quell the destruction and calm the fury, the leaders of the Central Labor Union of New York City proposed a labor’s day and saluted it with a parade and picnic. That they probably “borrowed” the idea from Canada might disturb today’s xenophobes, but no three-day-weekender from the Hamptons to Hawaii would object.

In addition to being a Federal holiday, a District of Columbia and U.S. Territories holiday, Labor Day is a State Holiday in all the 50 U.S. States. Can you imagine all 50 states agreeing on anything?

And that’s the end of my labor today.