tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-92160119537704447352024-03-13T00:39:20.784-04:00SON OF THE CUCUMBER KINGA NEW YORK WRITER’S CHRONICLES OF BROADWAY, HOLLYWOOD, POLITICS AND THE MIDDLE EASTRay Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.comBlogger136125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-77831018752202302842016-02-01T16:38:00.000-05:002016-02-01T16:38:55.252-05:00THE IOWA CAUCUSES: THE GOLDEN GLOBES OF POLITICS<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The Iowa caucuses are to the Presidential race what the
Golden Globes are to the Oscar Awards—contrived frippery. In tandem, they are
the tails of the horses’ asses they aspire to emulate. For all the fuss and
ballyhoo both create, they are pie-in-the-sky burlesques with no significance
other than the misplaced importance naively or tipsily attributed to them. Not
even Shakespeare, with all his uncanny insight, could have foreseen the much-ado-about-mostly-mainstream-nothing
histrionics of American political theater, but he certainly anticipated this
year’s dime a dozen clump of crass, craven GOP presidential candidates when he
likened life to “a poor player… full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
(Forget, for the moment, that he called him an idiot.) Or the measure for
measure my-experience-is-bigger-than-yours two-horse trotter race on the
Democratic side.</span>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span></div>
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Why does all this matter now? For those who take politics as seriously as they
take show business, it matters bigtime.* It’s politics and show biz, song and
dance, drama and more drama. It’s “Trumpo,” a spectacular cast of one, vying
for glory with “Mad Max: Fury Road” featuring the tireless/tiresome Cruz the
Choleric. It’s “The Revenant,” introducing the hovering specter of George W.
It’s “The Hateful Eight”… or ten… or dozen. If it adds up at all, it’s the
cynically calculated math of press agents and political consultants, of flaks
and spinmeisters.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Springing from the star-besotted minds of the Hollywood
Foreign Press Association, The Golden Globes could only have been created in
Hollywood. Where else could a mere <a href="http://www.goldenglobes.com/members-0">80-plus men and women</a> from
around the world, many of whom are purportedly neither foreign nor press,
influence America’s number one awards show—likely, one with a vastly larger
international viewing audience than our presidential elections—the Academy
Awards? Where else could 80-plus would-be foreign journalists take the lead in
swaying <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-movie-academy-methodology-html-htmlstory.html">5,765
active voting members</a> of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
qualified professionals all, to think as they do and vote as they have?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Where else? In Iowa, where 12 would-be candidates have
spent incalculable amounts of time, effort and money to influence all of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Iowa,_2012">5.4
eligible Iowa voters</a> to write one of their names on a slip of paper—with
grand dreams of ultimately impressing on 50.1% of the <a href="http://bipartisanpolicy.org/library/2012-voter-turnout/">125 to 130
million Americans</a> who may go to the polls (weather permitting) that he or
she is the heaven-sent one to lead the country from the chasm they see
themselves in to a far better chasm than they have ever known. Where an Iowa
voter has to belong to a party only for as long as it takes to vote, and can
switch parties or switch back to "undeclared" immediately after. Or a
Globes voter doesn’t have to speak English to love a performance. Imagine!
Almost rubbing elbows with George Clooney on the Red Carpet and writing home to
Liechtenstein that you voted for anyone else. Standing in line for the Ladies’
Room three bodies behind Cate Blanchett and letting the folks in Lower Silesia
know “she has to go, too!”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Emerging from the smoke and mirrors unreality in both lands
of Oz is the spectacle of a quinella of Republicans nobody seems to want and a
duo of Democrats few seem able to differentiate or choose between, en route to
being anointed to lead his or her party up or down the Yellow Brick Road to the
Emerald City, more smoke and mirrors. In both lands of Oz, Caucusville and
Stardust Fields, it’s as if a stickball game observed by three neighborhood
kids determines who goes to the World Series. As Shakespeare might have said:
My kingdom for a pair of ruby slippers!</span></div>
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UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
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“big time,” originally a term to describe the ultimate “White House” for
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Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-30595421362067286012014-06-26T12:06:00.001-04:002014-06-26T23:46:03.367-04:00Eli Wallach: The Man with the Optical Grin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: start;"><i>It took some delicious memories of the most endearingly impish man I've ever known to get me back to this blog.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Thirty years ago, I spent seven unholy days and nights in Israel with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson—a long week making a short film we knew none of us would ever deserve recognition for. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">On Day One, as we entered the Tel Aviv <i>suk</i> [bazaar], Eli dropped back several steps and said to me, in his inimitable heartfelt whine, “I don’t know what I’m <i>doin’</i> here. Annie played Lou Kaddar, Golda Meir’s sidekick, in “A Woman Called Golda”… they’ll know <i>her!</i> But no one will know who <i>I</i> am.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Just then, from their stalls and from behind their counters, the market’s vendors, consecutively laying eyes on him, started leaning forward, cupping their hands… and singing the indelibly haunting theme from “The Magnificent Seven.” As Eli broke into a slow grin: <i><b>bum</b>… <b>bum</b>/bum/bum… bum/bum/bum/ <b>bum</b>/ bum/ bum.... </i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">On Day Two, a shoot day, Eli, standing alone on a bare outdoor stage, asked me how to say a famous line of Shakespeare—in Hebrew. Cameras rolling, the dazzling Israeli noonday sun for a spotlight, he emoted: <i>“lee-hee-yot o lo lee-hee-yot.”</i> To be or not to be. Anne whispered, “Foxy, darling, does he know what he’s doing?” “That,” I failed to assure her, “is the question.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Eli was mischievous. Anne could be… mercurial. Eli would misbehave, knowing full well his Annie would react. And every time she did, I would see this fleeting, impish, glint—a split second flicker of optical grin—flash in his eyes. Anne had to live with it; all I wanted was one shot of it, one photo. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">It cost me roll upon roll of film as I tried, unfailingly in vain, to capture this, the most classic, of their shenanigans. I fell into a pattern of standing around, camera in hand, trying not to be obvious, but perched at the ready for that glint, that unparalleled optical grin, determined to catch it, trying to anticipate it whenever I saw Eli peer anywhere but into Anne’s reproving eyes. Seeing it coming… and always missing it! Peer Glynt, I began to call it under my breath in frustration. Click! I missed. There it is again! Click! Missed again. Click! Damn! I must have squandered four rolls of high-speed film on trying to capture Eli’s virtuoso “Peer Glynt.” Just once! I never did. I never wanted that shot as much as I do today. </span></div>
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Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-64809582308576558612014-01-14T03:26:00.000-05:002014-01-14T03:26:20.143-05:00At Ease in the Fields of Sharon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">No one is ambivalent about Ariel Sharon. Or ever hesitant to share strong sentiments. I’ll leave it to both admirers and detractors to give you earfuls of what they want you to know about him. Here’s what I know:</span></div>
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"Arik" Sharon knew his beloved country Israel by the inch, <i>every</i> inch, conceivably and convincingly <i>better</i> than the proverbial back of his hand. Once, to make a point to me, he reached into his back pocket, withdrew a map of Israel he evidently always carried with him, and spread it out over the front fender of a parked car. His index finger deftly indicating spot after spot of land, he said, "We can’t give this back to them because it’s high ground they can easily attack us from… can’t let them have this because it’s directly above a road we use for civilian and military transit… can’t vacate this because a rock thrown from here can stop or kill someone." A rock! He wasn’t nearly finished, but he’d made his point—life and death in the Middle East wasn’t, as commonly perceived, so much periodic and precariously seismic as it was day-to-day, hand-to-hand, inescapably rooted in biblical times. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">He was an impassioned patriot and single-minded warrior. "A tank coming through," an early but former ally of his, Geulah Cohen, memorably characterized him for me during a late-evening reminiscence at Israel’s Knesset. "He’s here, and he sees there," she pointed, "and nothing in between. He would roll over anything—even his mother, I believe—that stood in his way." </span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">In June, 1982, in response to the PLO’s persistent missile attacks on northern Israeli towns and a Palestinian terrorist group’s attempted assassination of Israel's Ambassador to Great Britain, the Israel Defense Forces, under then defense minister Sharon’s leadership, stormed across Lebanon’s southern border, subsequently sweeping north through Lebanon in a stunning victory over PLO, Syrian and Muslim Lebanese forces. When I asked him about the "game plan" and the "wisdom" of the show of force, he told me with boyish candor that it was not part of any strategy he had in mind, but that his forces encountered so little effective resistance from the PLO, "We just kept going." With an expansive shrug and his irrepressible smile, he explained, "We couldn’t stop!"</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">During the Christmas/Chanukah holidays of 1982, I accompanied Elizabeth Taylor to Israel. Prior to our departure from the United States, I promised I’d take her to Lebanon after the New Year, a prospect that particularly excited her. I would introduce her to the newly, democratically elected government officials of the country, she would be feted at the presidential palace, and, as the pièce de résistance, we would meet, possibly even <i>ride</i> with, Major Sa’ad Haddad, a hero of Lebanon’s Civil War and a friend. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">On New Year’s Day, 1983, I was taking Elizabeth to the Sharon farm in southern Israel. We rode from Tel Aviv in the back seat of a limo, following another car while an uncustomarily hard rain continued to fall. When the lead car drove suddenly into a flooded road and slammed on its brakes, ours plowed into it. Elizabeth screamed, our bodies were thrown forward, and we wound up sprawled on the floor of the limo, her leg bleeding, a finger eerily bent, I barely able to breathe. Transferred to other cars, we arrived at the Sharons’ separately, rain-soaked and battered. He stood waiting outside under a carport for me, and lifted me out of the car as if I were weightless. "We can’t get a helicopter in the air in this weather, so a doctor is driving down from Tel Aviv," he told me. "He said to keep you warm, quiet and comfortable."</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">He did his best to. Blankets and brandy were administered, the fireplace stoked as ice compresses were applied. While Elizabeth, her injured leg up on an ottoman, was, by her own description, "chewing on brandy," Arik told us about the farm, i.e., we have so many acres and so many goats and so many sheep, and… and I wasn’t in any condition to pay attention. Quite soon, neither was Elizabeth. When the doctor arrived, we turned the Sharon house into a clinic. The doctor took turns examining us on the Sharon’s dining room table, concluding we had to go to the hospital—back in Tel Aviv! </span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Elizabeth was relegated to a neck brace, a finger cast—middle-finger upright, leg and back dressings, and a wheel chair. As Elizabeth’s landing field, I sustained a side of broken ribs. Nevertheless, we were hell-bound for Lebanon. I requested a helicopter from the general, who objected vehemently. "They will shoot the copter out of the air before it is two feet off the ground! They would love the publicity!" His "they" was the PLO. Our dialogue turned increasingly heated that evening as he, from a radio station following an interview, and I, from my hotel room preceding having to face Elizabeth, continued to debate the issue. To my astonishment, I won! Or so I believed—briefly. No sooner had I prevailed than his steadfast admonishment caught up with me. In retrospect, I think he banked on it. I informed Elizabeth that we were not going to Lebanon and braved seeing her on the brink of tears. (In due time, I will relate the droll details of most of those past 48 hours. For now, I’ll just say:) I felt caught between a rock and a hard place—and suspected that Arik represented both.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">In 1983, Arik Sharon sued Time magazine for libel over a cover story alleging he had encouraged the revenge-taking that led to massacres at two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, the previous year. In 1985, the day before the federal jury rendered its verdict after 11 days of deliberation, I visited his wife Lily and him in a US District Court in Manhattan as they waited in a small chamber with several others until given word there would be no decision that day. We descended the courthouse steps into nightfall to find the sidewalk and street devoid of life but for several taxis, which Arik began hailing and ushering the others into. Before he and Lily climbed into the last of them, he asked me how I was getting home. I cited subway or bus or the possibility of walking a little, but he said it was too dark and desolate, and not safe for me. I told him not to worry, "this is my city, I live here, I’m fine!" But he would have none of that. He practically shoe-horned me into a crowded taxi headed uptown.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">The last time I saw him was in May, 2000, at a reception in Manhattan. I may have taken the only photo with him where he wasn’t smiling. Neither of us was. An opportunity to speak quietly together had given us time to commiserate with each other: Lily had died in March and I had just lost my mother. Our conversation was respectfully interrupted by a photographer I knew from these photo-op-filled occasions. Chatting earlier in the evening with him, I mentioned the irony of not having even one photo with the general. The conscientious fellow decided to amend that before he dashed to another assignment. It wasn’t an ideal time. I posted the photo above to illustrate that.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Speaking of "an ideal time," Gilad Sharon said that his father "went when he decided to go." That was the Sharon I knew.</span></div>
</span>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-83901442722609738252013-09-25T02:22:00.000-04:002013-09-25T02:28:43.340-04:00<span lang="EN"><span style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN"></span><span lang="EN"></span><i><span style="color: #660000;"></span></i><br />
<span style="color: #c0504d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><i>Originally published on</i> <span style="color: #00642d;"><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ray-errol-fox/affirming-altruism_b_3932578.html">The Huffington Post</a></span><span style="color: #660000;">:</span>
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<span style="color: #c0504d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">Affirming Altruism</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Somewhere between high school and college we argued about selfish acts. Only, we didn't call the alternative to them unselfish, we called them altruistic. (It never occurred to a single one of us deep-thinkers to question whether calling them altruistic was pretentious; optimal words came naturally to us once upon a time.)<br /><br /> The question posed was, "Is there such a thing as a purely altruistic act?" I remember thinking that all young men and women somewhere between high school and college age must be having the same considered debate we were—and, with similarly facile logic, invariably reaching the same defining conclusion: </span><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>There is no such thing as a purely altruistic act.</i><br /> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Ours wasn't a happy pronouncement. What we agreed on by surprising consensus we agreed on reluctantly rather than cynically. If a plausible corollary was "blowin' in the wind," we didn't see it.</span></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Several years after we earnest few moved on—from our lofty contemplations and from each other—I was nursing a cappuccino and gorging on the nuance du jour with friends at a Greenwich Village café when I heard a familiar voice and turned to see Bob Dylan, legs up, slouched down, amid a sprawled-out group of coffeehouse denizens in animated conversation at a nearby table. Seeing coffee and cigarettes, the prerequisites to good conversation, strewn on their table, it crossed my mind to muse: were they, by any chance, debating the same thing we had—the truly altruistic act—invariably coming to the same conclusion?</span><span style="color: #660000;"></span><br />
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<i><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">...how many times can a man turn his head<br /> Pretending he just doesn't see?</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">This was roughly a decade before the "me" generation was appropriately identified. What our generation wanted to be was unselfish: what we all in our starry-eyed idealism wanted to embody was altruism. What was "blowin' in the wind" was the dawn of an invigorating new era, and if the answer we wanted wasn't yet written on the wind, it was visible—if nowhere else, then on our earnestly unfurrowed brows. How did everyone, or anyone, fail to see it?</span></span><i><span style="color: #660000;"></span></i><br />
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<span style="color: #c0504d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="color: #274e13;"><i><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Yes, how many times must a man look up<br /> Before he can see the sky?</span></i><br />
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nothing, over the years, threatened to change my mind. Absolute selflessness, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice were mythological at best—the stuff of scriptures, literature and dreams. Clerics shock us, heroes disillusion, icons pale, leaders fail. Still, something in me clings to the utopian notion of that "purely altruistic act."<br />
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</span><i><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly<br /> Before they're forever banned?<br /> The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind...</span></i></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #c0504d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;"><i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"></span></i><br />
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">The question we should be pondering today is can we stand by and do nothing while innocent women and children are indiscriminately gassed and murdered. Not, first and foremost, should the United States intervene in yet another war on distant shores, risk American women's and men's lives to save others, although it's a valid question. Not, should we spend money in a foreign country while people are suffering in ours, an equally valid consideration. Not even, should we go to war and risk American lives to stem further terrorism and to protect ourselves and our children. There is but one paramount question, the purely altruistic one, the humane one, the morally right one, and the answer to it is being addressed by President Obama, who fathoms and feels we must do something!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><i>Yes, how many ears must one man have<br /> Before he can hear people cry?<br /> Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows<br /> That too many people have died ?<br /> The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind,<br /> The answer is blowin' in the wind.</i></span>
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<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #00642d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The president has nothing personal to gain from waging war in any manner on Syria. Someone should try to explain to Ted Cruz that Barack Obama is already the president and can't run for another term. Someone should explain to Newt Gingrich that he can never be president. Someone should explain to Fox News... no, forget it.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #00642d;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's reasonable to criticize and differ with the president's handling of Syria, but irrational to attribute his motives to anything self-serving or sinister. This man who makes Republicans stark-raving venomous may be the least selfish of any president in recorded history. Absolutely, purely altruistic? History and historians will decide. What matters at the moment is ridding the world of Syria's arsenal of chemical weapons and arms expeditiously. If negotiation succeeds, the president's reticence to strike summarily is a signature triumph. If it fails, Congress and the American people must empower him to take action against the Assad government because, after all, there just may be such a thing as a purely altruistic act! Unless you consider saving the lives of untold numbers of men, women and children—and feeling good about it—a selfish act.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #00642d;"><span style="color: #660000;"></span></span></span></span>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-52629653550920304132013-07-24T19:59:00.000-04:002013-07-24T19:59:44.444-04:00Trying Times in Florida's Courts<span lang="EN"></span><br />
<div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000;">Unless you routinely watch MSNBC or read Huffington Post, it’s likely you’ve never heard of Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old African-American mother of three who was sentenced to 20 years in jail for firing a single warning shot into a ceiling as her historically abusive husband, having already threatened to kill her, advanced toward her. Even if you have heard of Ms. Alexander, you may not know that the prosecutor in her case was Angela B. Corey, the same Florida State's Attorney whose office tried the George Zimmerman case; the same woman who was disconcertingly glib and composed, and too-readily reconciled, to the losing verdict her prosecution team received in that instance; the same woman who threw the book at Marissa Alexander, but never appeared before the court in the Zimmerman case—in spite of her team’s blatantly inadequate and inept prosecutorial performance. </span></span><span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN"><span style="font-size: large;">
<span style="color: #660000;">
</span></span></span><br />
<div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">It’s unavoidable to point out here that Marissa Alexander, whose self-defense argument was rejected, and Trayon Martin, who didn’t live to defend himself, happened to be black, and Angela Corey and George Zimmerman are white. And that it took a jury twelve minutes to find Marissa Alexander guilty and all of a day to find George Zimmerman innocent of all criminal charges.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000;"></span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></div>
<span lang="EN"><span style="font-size: large;">
<span style="color: #660000;">
<div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">You’ll be hearing a lot more of Marissa Alexander, whose treatment at the hands of the law in the state of Florida won’t be excused by fair-minded people of all colors until the rank injustice to her is rectified. A few considerations are weightier than the short, if any, shrift given them by the prosecution, judge and jury. Ms. Alexander worked her way through school, earned a Master of Arts degree and had no criminal record prior to being convicted on three accounts of aggravated assault with a pistol—for shooting a ceiling! A woman with reputed experience handling firearms—target practice with her father—stands to spend two decades in jail for taking aim and hitting her target, and by so doing, injuring no one; you can’t draw blood from plaster. The mother of a three-year-old girl who was nine days old when the altercation that led to her mother’s incarceration occurred; who, as matters stand, will be 22 when her mother, a convicted felon, gets out of jail. The mother, as well, of two older children from an earlier marriage, twins who will be 31 by the time their mother has paid her debt—to society? Tell me what society three children rendered motherless by inequitably- and callously-applied law belong to.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div>
<span lang="EN">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></span><div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">I hope we’ll all be hearing a lot more of Angela Corey, as well. She’ll have her supporters, rabid ones: for the most of us, not people we know, or want to know. They, and she, will find ways to justify the callous and irrational as they sanctimoniously dispose of another and another inconsequential inconvenience in their daily affairs. Corey is already blaming the media: "I think social media is going to be the destruction of this country." And, get this!, the public and the Internet! "I want to run my office and I want to run my cases according to the law," she said. Florida "law," that is: law unto itself. "And there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says the public has a right to have a trial by internet."</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN"><span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div>
<span lang="EN">
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">The public—that nervily opinionated sector in Corey’s eyes—will be hearing also about Jordan Davis. Jordan, 17, was seated in the back seat of an SUV listening to music with three friends, all teens, "all well-raised," according to a report, when Michael David Dunn, a 46-year-old, 300- pound white man parked next to them, rolled down the window of his car and told the boys to turn down the music, starting an exchange of words that he ended by firing ten rounds into the boys’ SUV, two of which struck Jordan and resulted in his bleeding to death. Dunn, who fled the scene of the crime without ever reporting the incident to anyone, which might have saved Jordan’s life, is pleading self-defense!</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Sometimes, words speak louder than actions. Lawmakers and jurors should heed them. Jordan Davis’s mother had the remarkable grace to say, "We are not looking at it as [a] hate crime because that's not going to honor Jordan." Marissa Alexander’s daughter, Havelin, at 11, questioned "how my mom could be beaten, but she's the one arrested." Trayvon Martin’s father counseled those gathered at a post-verdict vigil, "Senseless violence is a disease and we as a people have the cure, we just need to come together."</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">Compare those words with Michael Dunn’s 20-year-old daughter, Rebecca’s, "He just reacted." Marissa Alexander’s husband’s statements in a deposition, in which he admitted, "I got five baby mammas, and I put my hands on every last one of them except for one." [That’s] "the way I was with women… they had to walk on eggshells around me." Two of them "got hit in the mouth" because they "just wouldn’t shut up." George Zimmerman’s father’s warning in an e-book he wrote and released on Amazon, that "every American should be aware of … wholly unethical opportunists, including those in government, the legal profession, and the media"—it’s that damned irksome media again!—[who] "routinely utilize race to incite and agitate hatred and divisiveness for their own rewards." </span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><div align="LEFT" dir="LTR">
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">So who, and what’s, ultimately being tried in these Florida court cases? Flagrantly, blatantly, egregiously on trial was the defenseless Trayvon Martin, and not the stalking vigilante whose predisposition to seeing a black youth as "trouble" and whose over-eagerness to take the law into his own hands triggered the entirely avoidable tragedy. Moreover, since Trayvon Martin was, even in absentia, put on trial, wasn’t he, even in death, entitled to the <i>primary</i> stand-your-ground claim of self-defense?</span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">
<br />
On trial was civil law: man-made, consequently manhandled<b>—</b>and common law: the confluence of the wisdom of centuries of jurisprudential precedents arrogantly shunted aside by largely negligible lawmakers who think they know better. Inescapably on trial was the Second Amendment ("the right to bear arms" notably emanating from English <i>common law</i>) and "Stand Your Ground" law (a perversion of our Founding Founders’ intentions <em>and</em> the common law). Still to be reckoned with: the NRA; the presumable behind-the-scenes shenanigans unsurprising to Florida; and Florida law.</span> </span></span><br />
<BR>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-74132466441218359672013-04-16T03:28:00.001-04:002013-04-16T03:28:54.848-04:00Books: A Love Story, Part Two<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Ernest Hemingway always left an unfinished sentence in his
typewriter so he didn’t have to face a blank page the next day. </span><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> </span><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">As I reluctantly let go of the first
installment of my tell-all, between-the-pages love story, I left a two-word sentence
in my WORD file—in Hemingway fashion, a terse one. </span><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> </span><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Why fiction?</span><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"> </span><br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Perhaps it was also the influence of Joseph Heller, whose
personal Catch-22 was that he needed a first sentence to get rolling—seldom, if
ever, the sentence that would ultimately begin the book, or even lead to a
second sentence, but, to the contrary, to countless paragraphs and pages that
more often than not led to nothing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Re-sorting my unboxed books, separating Hemingway’s novels
from his non-fiction, I mull over the credit he gave the style guide of <i>The Kansas City Star,</i> where he was a cub
reporter all of half-a-year, for giving
him “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,” a list that began with, “Use short sentences. Use
short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English”—and I muse that “The Star Copy
Style,” as the guide was known, eventually became a companion to the
<a href="http://sonofthecucumberking.blogspot.com/2013/04/books-love-story.html">aforementioned <i>Associated Press Stylebook</i></a>.
So I have it in my library, as well!
(And I check above to see if my first paragraphs are “short.” My sentences often are not; Hemingway and I
disagree on that point.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And as I write, I’m discovering a la Joe Heller—but a lot
faster—that I’m not going to stay with my initial sentence. “Why fiction?” will have to wait, because at the
moment I can’t wait to cross the room to <i>Non-fiction</i>
again! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Under<i> Biography: </i>In<i> A Writer’s Life,</i> Gay Talese tells of
having been rejected by colleges <i>based on</i>
his writing! In a class by itself: tucked
inside the front cover of <i>Mila 18, </i>a
letter from Leon Uris that accompanied a transcript of a speech he’d given divulging
that he’d failed English in high school!
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">On a whim, I scan my shelves for various accounts of writers
losing manuscripts and, sometimes, writing them again. T.E. Lawrence, the one and only “Lawrence of
Arabia,” lost his one and only 50,000-word first draft of “Seven Pillars of
Wisdom” either by leaving the briefcase bearing it on the seat next to him on a
train or while changing trains at Reading Station—and, having burned his
extensive historical notes, subsequently rewrote it from memory, in my eyes
more heroic than his heroics during the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt. You’ve seen the movie.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It opens up a wholly new category: lost suitcases, valuable manuscripts and train
stations. Hemingway again! (How does one contemporary writer generate so
much “ink”?) His first wife, Hadley, had
dutifully packed all of young Earnest’s unpublished original manuscripts—he had
no published fiction at the time—and<i> all
his existing carbon copies </i>in a suitcase she intended to shepherd (all
right, schlep) from their residence in Paris to Switzerland, where opportunity had presented
itself to the aspiring author in the person of the influential Lincoln Steffens.
But Hadley’s thirst fatefully trumped
her husband’s hunger that day! She left the
suitcase on the idle train while she went to buy a bottle of water for her trip,
and when she returned, the train was still there… but the suitcase wasn’t! Hemingway went on to have great success, and three
more wives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Recalling these literary calamities has me searching for a
book with the cautionary tale of an unknown writer who, while loading his car,
put his manuscript on the car’s roof and absent-mindedly pulled away, unaware he was scattering
his prose and years of arduous work to the four winds—hence, remaining unknown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I am reminded of a John Fowles’ short story from <i>The Ebony Tower,</i> “Poor Koko,” a haunting,
disturbing tale about a writer whose house on a remote island is invaded by a
burglar who, among other thefts and transgressions, commits the most painful of
them all—agonizing for a writer to read—burning four years of writing and
research practically page by page while the bound and gagged writer watches helplessly
and wordlessly. Unable to recall the
details, but mindful of Fowles’ eloquence, I have to reread it now despite my
discomfort with it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When I finished writing my first (and last) book, <i>Angela Ambrosia</i>, I eased the manuscript
into a 9x12 manila envelope and laid it neatly on top of my typewriter (a machine
with a black ribbon and a moving carriage) for delivery to my publisher the
next morning. Jean and I were on our way
out of the apartment that evening when I doubled back to speak with our
babysitter. “Lindy,” I told her, somewhat
embarrassed, “you may not understand this, but just follow what I say. If, by any chance, there is a fire in the
apartment or the building tonight… after you get my two daughters safely out… and
yourself, of course… there’s an envelope
on my typewriter…”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Samuel Johnson said, <i>“The
greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man
will turn over half a library to make a book.”</i> I guess I did that. And if I “turn over” another “half a library,”
as I intend to do, who knows what I might produce? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What is this writers’ obsession with collecting books we’ve
read and may never open again? And
collecting more? Days before starting a
renovation, my downstairs neighbor, also
a writer and as painfully reconciled as I’d grudgingly become to having to part
with scores of books, glibly asked me if I wanted some of his. My response was, “Why don’t we trade
books? It’ll be easier for you to give
away mine and for me to give away yours.”
Neither of us was consoled. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“An
ordinary man can surround himself with two thousand books and thenceforward
have at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy.”</i> (Augustine
Birrell)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have finally managed to fill every available inch of shelf
space with a book. That done, I am left
with several dozen cartons of splendid books to find a loving home for. And I will always have many new ones to read. I could download them... but I like to hold a
book when I read it! So it comes down to
this: every time I acquire a book I have to get rid of one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Or… do I succumb to the music-to-my-ears of the quotable
Birrell? I do. <i>“Libraries
are not made; they grow. Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to
collect one.”</i> I will wedge and stack
and store when I feel I must, and leave my library to my grandson Maddan, already
a voracious reader and an expressive, imaginative writer. Turning ten this Thursday, he’s way ahead of Hemingway’s
pace—and his mother would never lose his suitcase! Maddan’s birthday present is in my safekeeping. I bequeath him “<i>at least one place in the world in which it is possible to be happy” </i>amid<i> </i>the novels and biographies, the plays
and screenplays, the volumes of humor and art and philosophy, the collections
of show scores and music anthologies, the venerable sets of H.G. Wells’ <i>Outline of History</i> and the <i>Great Events By Famous Historians</i>, the 40-volume
<i>Yale Shakespeare </i>and the 17,000 page,
107 pound<i> Encylopedia Judaica.</i> And an invaluable reference library!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">On entering the newly-completed library, my friend Mark
pronounced: “Now it’s a Ray Fox room!”
So it is.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-23650272941431852262013-04-05T03:51:00.000-04:002013-04-07T13:50:58.482-04:00Books: A Love Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Accounting for time
is futile. Where did the day go? The
month? The last decade!—did I fill it well… or leave gaping holes in my kaleidoscopic
universe? These are ponderables you can’t google. </span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
Where have I been
lately? In my head, but not at my
writing desk. Take last Friday for
example. A day at the hospital: reported
at 6:30 a.m., in deeply drug-induced dreamland (kinda like Hollywood, only the scalpels
aren’t out for your back) by 7, in surgery I’ll fortunately never remember some
four and a half hours following. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<br />
Released, at last, at
4 in the afternoon, my doting wife and I step gingerly into a serendipitously
pleasant day-after-Spring day. “Let’s
walk,” I say. Jean asks if I’m
sure. We’re in midtown Manhattan—I don’t
need Affordable Health Care to field this one:
“If it’s too much, we’ll grab a taxi.”
Done.</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">We coast up Broadway. Six blocks from home, we pass… almost… several
tables laden with used books for sale. My
eye catches one, <i>The Chicago Manual of
Style</i>! I’ve always wanted it to go
with my style bible, <i>The New York Times
Manual of Style and Usage</i>, plus <i>The
Associated Press Stylebook</i> and the classic little gem, Strunk and White’s <i>The Elements of Style</i>. But having a profusion of stylebooks already,
I couldn’t justify spending the hefty $55 list price for a hefty, near-1,000-page
tome I no longer have shelf-space for. The
effects of my surgery must have been showing: I didn’t have to bargain for
it. Marked for $12, which I would have
paid, the vendor made it $10 “for <i>you</i>.” </span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Do you see where I’m
going with all this? Not that it made my
day. Not, were it not for the surgery, I
wouldn’t have acquired a book I wanted so much that only a week before, way in advance of any gift-giving occasions, it
occurred to me that this year, unlike others, I had an answer for my family to
“What do you want?” <i>The Chicago Manual of
Style</i>. Yes, <i>The
Chicago Manual of Style</i>, please. Not
even to crow yet again about the wonder of <a href="http://sonofthecucumberking.blogspot.com/search?q=sidewalks+of+new+york" target="_blank">The Sidewalks of New York</a> and how wondrous
I find them. No, it’s bigger than any
one book. It’s BOOKS as a way of life.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Prior to moving to a
smaller apartment a few years ago, I parted—painfully, this being a love story—with
one third of what was a truly special library.
I had had everything I needed at my fingertips. In need of a fact or a quote in the wee hours
of writing, I’d go to my shelves, categorized and alphabetized, confident I’d locate
the sought-after book in seconds, place my extended right index finger on top
of its spine and tilt it toward me. I suspected
if Google and Yahoo! got wind of it, they’d come to <i>me</i>. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Adjusting to our new home,
I stood dismayed many an evening faced with the 130 cartons of remaining books
taking up the floor—and air—space of my designated library. Although every carton was methodically labeled
by category and numbered, e.g. <i>“Fiction 29 (Wilder to Zola)” </i>or “<i>Theater 14 (M. Hart to Kerr)</i>,” I knew I would have to check and then
<i>dust </i>the spine, front and back cover, top and
bottom, of every book I reverentially unpacked—in light of my lifelong romance,
anything but a brush off—before setting it in its proper place on the shelf. </span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">It was predictable
that I would impede my own progress. Ah,
here’s Moss Hart’s <i>Act One</i>! The best show business autobiography ever
written! Now what was Hart’s memorable observation
about it not being enough to be successful, you must also have the failure of
your friends? Jean regales our friends with my distractions:
“He’ll take a book from a carton… examine it… slowly drift to the nearest chair…
and start reading it!” I know just where
to find my rebuttal—via Ann Landers, in the “Quotations” section of one of my over-laden
“Reference” shelves. “No person who can
read is ever successful at cleaning out an attic.” That said, now I’m reading a book of quotations! Truth to tell, mea culpa: perusing a few
lines, letting a phrase catch my eye, I get lost in one book after another. [NB (<i>nota bene</i>) re mea culpa: <i>The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage</i>
has much to say about when it’s proper to use italics for foreign words or phrases.]</span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I came across books, pages
parched and cracking, I still have from childhood. Perused lines
and passages I commented on, lightly, in the margins—didn’t we all?—relieved to
find I never noted, “<i>How true!</i>”</span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">My timeworn copy of <i>War and Peace</i>! Twice read, twice annotated, the first time, as
a child under the covers, flashlight in hand, so my mother would rest assured I’d
be rested for school in the morning. A
book I hope to read once more in my time.
Back to the shelves for a quote from Clifton Fadiman, “When you reread a
classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in
you than was there before.” As an adult reading
“over” the covers, the child still within me hungrily anticipates seeing more in
me! </span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">In my teens, I began
reading authors, not stopping until I had read every book by many of them. Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Mann. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck. Eventually, Camus and Kafka. Burgess, Borges and
Bellow. Malamud and Roth. Davies and Doctorow, Mailer and Morrison, Updike
and<span class="apple-style-span"> le Carré</span>, both Thomas and Tom Wolfe. Still
others.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>“The Medicine Chest of the Soul”</i> was the inscription over the door
of the ancient, vanished <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% yellow;"></span>Library at Thebes. Coming from eight days in the hospital almost
as many years ago, I craved—needed a fix of—fiction. My prescription was Philip Roth, followed by
more Roth.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Why fiction in such
large doses? And what about non-fiction? I’ve barely scratched the surface, or, perhaps
more appropriately in this instance, cracked the spine.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">To be continued… </span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-70965009661418162132013-02-05T02:51:00.000-05:002013-02-06T12:22:01.361-05:00Hizzoner, The Honorable Ed Koch<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Has anyone ever passed from this world under the weight of
so many adjectives? Brash, shrewd, relentless, smart, tenacious, combative,
ebullient, flitting, charismatic, feisty, slippery, egotistical, opinionated, pugnacious,
colorful, self-promoting, private, combustible, witty, argumentative, gregarious,
callous, loquacious, irrepressible, tireless, fearless, guileless, tough,
determined, self-righteous, mischievous, confrontational, funny, petty… On and on it continues, the endless profusion of descriptions! But I’d add two I have seen nowhere. I saw him as kind. He was kind to me. And generous.
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">I knew Ed Koch through at least five different channels, so
our paths inevitably crossed from time to time.
In 1986, I produced a show for a gala dinner in L.A. saluting three premier
mayors: L.A.’s Tom Bradley, Tel Aviv’s Shlomo “Chich” Lahat and Hizzoner, New
York’s Ed Koch, but designed as a roast of the evening’s star, Mayor Koch. Laden with comic talent, the program featured <span style="line-height: 115%;">Joan Rivers as the M.C., plus top-flight comedians Jan
Murray, Dick Shawn and Slappy White.<b> </b>Wanting a little more New York on the bill,
I “imported” Dr. Ruth Westheimer, singing poet Steve DePass and the </span>cast
of “Mayor,” an Off-Broadway musical portraying one day in the life of Ed Koch.<b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">A Yiddish expression claims, "Man plans, God laughs<b>.” </b>Shortly
after waking on Tuesday, January 26, 1986, the day of the event, our weary
group working on the show stumbled into the lounge serving as our production
office to learn from a harsh TV bulletin that the space shuttle<b> </b>Challenger had “broken apart” over the
Atlantic Ocean 73 seconds into its flight, likely taking the lives of all seven
people on board. No one and certainly
not God could find a laugh in this<b> </b>unexpected<b> </b>turn of events.<b> </b>Could we cancel the dinner
gala? Its planners decided to go through
with it, but, we agreed, cancel the planned program—“the Koch roast.”<b> </b></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span></span></span></span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">Joan<b> </b>Rivers had made a point of telling me
she doesn’t like last-minute changes.
That evening, she had to live with me whispering what came next… and
next… in her right ear, as our bevy of stand-up old pros did their stock
routines and shtick. When Mayor Koch’s
turn to speak came, it was impossible to tell whether he was retaliating for a
roast that never was or speaking off the cuff: either way, he just sounded like
Ed Koch. Privately, the event concluded,
the ballroom emptied, the New York-tongued mayor warmly expressed his gratitude
and his “admiration” to us.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">In the early ‘90s, I made a 60-minute documentary about a life-threatening
new wave of anti-Semitism in the Soviet
Union. When I described it to the mayor,
he asked for a copy. In time, I received
a letter from him, excerpts from which follow:
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Dear Ray,</i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>I finally got to watch
your video “Freedom To Hate.” It’s
superb. … </i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>Why WNET hasn’t shown
it is a mystery to me. … </i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><i>If you need a
recommendation, you can always use my name as someone who saw it and thought it
was superb.</i> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">He told me I could use it any way I wanted. PBS ran the documentary.</span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Last
Thursday morning, I donned an uncustomary tee-shirt sporting a photo of the<i> </i>Mayor promoting—what else?—New York! In a near déjà vu of the L.A. morning described
above, as I walked into the next room the TV gave me the news of Ed Koch’s
death. My daughter Haley, who had given
me the tee-shirt, called to ask if I would be writing about him. </span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">I
went to my “Ed Koch” file for an answer.
I found in<b> </b></span>my notes of
long ago that the proper way to address him formally was “<span style="line-height: 115%;">The Honorable Edward I. Koch.”
</span>Now <i>there’s</i> an adjective for him we all almost overlooked! Honorable.<b><span style="line-height: 115%;"> </span></b></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">At one time or another, I suspect all of the above-listed adjectives,
and so many more, applied to him. And I
expect I and others will think of still more. Nevertheless, I believe he and his
legacy all add up to one all-encompassing noun:<b> </b><span style="line-height: 115%;">Hizzoner</span><b>. </b></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><b> </b></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Ed
Koch wasn’t the only mayor ever to be called Hizzoner, but to my mind and my
certainty, he is the last one—he owns it.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="line-height: 115%;"></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="line-height: 115%;">How’d he do it? As easily as
rainfall. </span><span style="line-height: 115%;">Broadway producer Howard Erskine told me he got on an elevator delighted
to find the mayor on it. Having never
met him and with only his trademark “How’m I
doin’?” in mind, Howard’s first words to him were, “Mayor Koch, I think
you’re doing a great job!” The mayor’s
response? “You bet your ass!”</span></span></span></span><br />
</span></span></span><br />
</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
</div>
Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-5315694730981186282013-01-17T06:41:00.000-05:002013-01-17T06:41:26.747-05:00Puttin' On The Dog<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P21LwNiMZC8/UPfMlkkQ2hI/AAAAAAAAAU4/gusuo__qbPg/s1600/bark+mitzvah+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P21LwNiMZC8/UPfMlkkQ2hI/AAAAAAAAAU4/gusuo__qbPg/s320/bark+mitzvah+2.jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
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<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">The elegant invitation read,
</span></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">WE CELEBRATE</span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Banjo
the Wonderdog</i></b></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">AS HE IS CALLED TO
BARK MITZVAH…</span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">FROM EIGHT-THIRTY
O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING</span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">UNTIL THERE IS
PEACE IN THE LAND OF CANINE.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">Last Saturday night, I went to my second bark
mitzvah. You never heard of such
things? Read on!</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>The first <i>oy</i></u><i>!</i>:
There was no “peace in the land of Canine”—nor could there be when the house on
that land regularly bursts from its rafters and studs with the talent, energy
and trigger wit of a madcap musical savant who makes Stephen Colbert look
comatose: cabaret top dog Mark Nadler, who doesn’t know what it means to be dog
tired. By no coincidence, Mark was the
host/impresario of the first bark mitzvah I participated in—for his wheaten
terrier, Admiral Rufus K. Boom, on the 6th of Tevet, 5765 (according to the
Hebrew calendar). In my date book, December 18, 2004.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>The next </u><i><u>oy</u>!:</i></span></span><span style="color: #660000;"></span><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span>The gaggle of guests, many of whom genuinely like house
pets, were assembled to render unto Banjo the things which are Banjo's, and
unto each other the clarion notes that are God’s gift to them. Arm-and-arm’d to the teeth and filled to the grandiloquent
gills with deliberately <i>trayf</i> (look it up) food and bounteous drink,
performers, cabaret and Nadler aficionados, and stray writers, 150 celebrants
in all, donned satin yarmulkes (commemoratively inscribed in the lining!) of teal,
navy blue, emerald green, hot pink, red, yellow, orange and purple—not to <i>daven</i>, but to <i>kvell</i> over Mark’s “big, charcoal-colored, fuzzy dog,” Banjo the
Wonderdog… “as he is called to Bark Mitzvah,” saith Mark. Mark was called to the piano. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><u>A bissel gossip</u>:
Banjo’s parentage is uncertain. Du
herst? Jews traditionally determine the religion of the child based on the religion
of its mother. Unless you’re a disciple
of the Todd Akin-Richard Mourdock school of biology, you’ll agree it’s easier
to identify the offspring’s mother than the father. But, when Mark claimed Banjo from an animal shelter,
the best, the only, information they could give him was, “The father was a
schnauzer.” Sha shtill!</i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u>Where there’s an <i>oy</i>
there’s a <i>vey</i></u><span style="font-size: large;"><i>:</i></span></span></span><span style="color: #660000;"></span><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><u><i> </i></u></span>Mark spared nothing for this bark mitzvah! The cake was the ultimate work of art—the
doggonedest one any of us had ever seen! A 36” x 22” life-like sculpture of Banjo, astride
and hovering over an open scroll, his name and the occasion in Hebrew letters,
some bagels and challah, and random <i>tchotchkes</i>. Pecan pie-flavored—because, Mark tenderly explains,
“Banjo tends to be a little nutty.” Banjo’s
“coat” is a dark fondant. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><u>Oy gevalt</u>! </i>Banjo’s
sculpture-tail was supposed to wag! Mark
paid extra for that! Instead, it spun…
and spun. And when the fondant started to
melt… I’ll let Mark finish the story.
Some other time. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">Cutting into Banjo the Wonderdog “the Cake” wasn’t easy
for Mark! But the filling, the fondant—maybe
the Greeks have a word for it—the Jews don’t.
I had two incomparable slices! </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">Singer followed singer for hours. The last song of the party aired at 3:20 a.m.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">In lieu of gifts, Mark asked his guests to make a
donation to ASPCA, but I couldn’t leave it there—I wrote a special lyric for
Banjo—a doggerel—to Jacques Offenbach’s “Barcarolle.” I called it “Banjo’s Bark ‘n’ Role.” Here’s a
few dog-eared lines from Mark’s
rendition:</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Pups like blues
or music that soothes, but I’d rather bark ‘n role.
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Mutts like verse,
iambic and worse!, but I’d rather bark ‘n role.
</blockquote>
</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Give me rock,
doo-wahs and schlock, and watch my <i>tuchas</i>
soar. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Screw
three-quarter, pop and Porter, I’m no dinosaur!
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">
</span>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">What I mean, I’m only thirteen, and I mean to bark ‘n
role.</span></
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"><i><span style="line-height: 115%;">Oy gevalt</span></i><span style="line-height: 115%;">, it’s in my gestalt, I do
one mean </span>bark ‘n role!…</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">
</span></span>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Today I am a hundt, unt I’ll say vat I “vunt…”</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;">Muzzle <i>tov</i>, Banjo!</span></span></span></div>
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Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-53197014491101062722012-12-21T06:00:00.000-05:002012-12-21T06:03:08.795-05:00No One More Loved or Loving<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zME2XX8d1QQ/UNQttUuLCbI/AAAAAAAAAUI/6nhy3rgpCXw/s1600/Ruth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zME2XX8d1QQ/UNQttUuLCbI/AAAAAAAAAUI/6nhy3rgpCXw/s320/Ruth.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">You’re going to see these words on Facebook frequently in
the next few days, and everywhere else people congregate on-line: “I’ve lost a
great friend.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one will be
overstating them; every similar statement of loss, grief or heartbreak will be
heartfelt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">“My beautiful Ruth passed away at 3:15 this afternoon,” wrote
her devoted husband, Ed. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“She just
quietly slipped away. She looked beautiful and at peace.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Ruth Kurtzman always looked “beautiful” and “at peace” because
she radiated more genuine warmth and affection, more regard and respect for
others, than anyone else in her hemisphere, which encompassed New York and New
Jersey, family and untold friends she made feel like family, pets and canine house
guests, cabaret and theater, good works and good books, more cabaret and theater,
music and art, anything that made the world a better place as naturally as she
did.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Unassuming and unawares, Ruth achieved fame without being conventionally
famous—significantly for her inherent support of talent, large and sometimes small,
but always unfailingly welcomed by Ruth the undeclared den mother with enthusiasm
and encouragement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world of cabaret
won’t be the same without her in the audience, seated as close to the stage and
the performer(s) as she could possibly get.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times; font-size: large;">As I lose dear friends, as I see the world lose irreplaceable good, I find myself repeatedly thinking of these eloquent words of Thomas Campbell and citing them to comfort others as well as myself: "To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die."</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times; font-size: large;">What an incomparable legacy Ruth leaves! No one was as loved and as loving. The world lost a friend yesterday. Neither she, nor the extraordinary love and devotion of Ed, and of her children, will be forgotten. Nor will the grace with which Ruth, Ed, Julie and Aaron handled her last days. If there is dignity in death, they have shown it to the <span style="font-size: large;">r</span>est of us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span></span></span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;">
</span></span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-47396717304258250562012-11-04T22:08:00.000-05:002012-11-04T22:08:01.590-05:00The Greater Pretender<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">The following scene is from “The Shock of Recognition,” the
first of an evening of four one-act plays, “You Know I Can’t Hear You When the
Water’s Running,” by Robert Anderson:</span></span> <BR>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">A hungry actor is auditioning for a playwright and a
producer in the producer’s office. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Before he even knows what the role calls for,
he’s equivocating.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I… uh… didn’t really expect to be seen by anyone… I’ve got
my hair long because I’m up for a part in a Western series… but I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can cut that</i>… And the mustache is
temporary… for a commercial.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Told it’s
for the leading role, the actor is quick to add, “I can be taller… I don’t have
my elevator shoes on . . . Or shorter! I mean… I can pretty well adapt. The
hair is dark now, but you may remember… it was blond…. I’m pretty well tanned
up because of this Western… but if I stay away from the sunlamp for a couple of
days… I… well… look more… intellectual… if that’s what you’re looking for. Also,
I have my contact lenses in now, but I do have glasses, if that’s closer to the
image. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He whips his glasses out and puts
them on. Thrown off balance by the two sets of lenses, he takes them off.</i>)
And, of course, I do have other clothes… And my weight’s variable… I mean, if
you’re looking for someone thinner.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;">
<span style="font-size: large;">When the producer tells him they’re actually looking for
someone “a little pathetic and ridiculous,” the actor’s trigger-response is,
“That’s me… I mean, put me in the right clothes… a little big for me… and I
look like a scarecrow… I can shrink inside my clothes!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He further assures producer and playwright he
can shrink inside his skin “if I think it. If I can think it, I can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> it.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He shows composite photos of himself as doctor, cowboy, soldier,
businessman, grocer. “You can’t notice it, probably, but I’m wearing a
hairpiece… I look quite different without it. Do you want me to…” He moves to
strip off his obvious hair-piece.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
producer barely manages to stop him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<br />
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">He continues to profess he can be anything they want him to
be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’ll work out in a gym and become
muscular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’ll look younger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or older!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Not only can he look ridiculous, he avers he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">does </i>look ridiculous!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Toadying and turning himself inside out, changing colors and skins, he’s
indefatigable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a zero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bring anyone to mind?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">
I trust by now I’ve made my point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it gets better:</span></span><BR>
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">The actor finally stops trying to be everyman-under-the-sun long
enough for the playwright to tell him what the part, specifically the opening
scene, calls for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’d be playing a
husband whose wife is lounging in bed while he’s brushing his teeth in an
adjacent bathroom, water audibly running from the tap as she’s talking to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Turning off the water, he emerges from the
bathroom—stark naked—to say, “Honey, you know I can’t hear you when the water’s
running.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">
“You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running,” opened
in 1967, long before nudity had raised heads in Broadway theaters or the
country’s movie houses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this actor,
who’ll say and do and agree to anything to get what he wants—a part in a play!—
is unfazed. “I can do that,” he says.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Starting to undress to demonstrate how nimbly he can humble himself, he
apologizes for the hole in his sock; he didn’t expect to be stripping.</span></span><br />
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">Note he doesn’t mind looking ridiculous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Girls have sometimes… uh… laughed or
giggled… at first.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But with eyes
accustomed to finding compromise: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Well, I’ve been turned down for parts because
I was too short or too tall… too fat or too thin… too young or too old… But I
never did or didn’t get a part because of…” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suddenly…
unbuttoning his shorts</i>) “What the hell!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: large;">
I know of someone who’s been auditioning for one role for
six years, preceded by preparing for it practically all of his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He can be tall, he can be small—or he’ll be
you-name-it, depending on audience demand or the audience at hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’ll morph before your very eyes!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shamefully dishonest and dishonorably
shameless, he’s alternately chameleon or parrot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s against everything until he’s for it and
for everything until he’s against it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
the eager-to- please actor says, “I can do that,” he’ll trump it with “I know
what to do!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ad nauseam, “I know what to
do!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s pro-this and pro-that,
extremely whatever and severely the opposite.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“All the world’s a stage?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes,”
he claims, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> said that… before
what’s-his-name did!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only thing he
stands for and stands by is what sells.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-size: large;">The actor seeking work merely lacks grace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The man who would be kingpin has no shame.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div><BR>
Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-8520886596492139362012-09-20T03:16:00.000-04:002012-09-20T03:16:59.561-04:00It's About Values<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">A Republican sympathizer commented (on Facebook) about my
last blog entry, “You are much more interesting when you don't write about
politics!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So, I’m not going to write
about politics this time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m going to write
about values.<o:p> </o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">These are not mine:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="font-size: small;"><b>"I like being able to fire people who provide services
to me." </b></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><b> “Let Detroit go bankrupt.”</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><b> “We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot… get the
education, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">borrow money if you have to
from your parents</i>, start a business.”</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><b> "I'm also unemployed."</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b> "There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was
going to get a pink slip."</b></span> Seriously?</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;"> <span style="font-size: small;"><b>"I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very
much."</b></span> But, golly, put it in a
little tin box and it adds up to </span><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/17/mitt-romney-not-much-definition-speaking-fees_n_1210522.html"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">$374,000 in one year</span></a><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">!</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;"> <span style="font-size: small;"><b>“Well, there are 47% of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax.”</b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><b> "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a
safety net there."</b></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">All from the mouth of one man.<o:p> </o:p></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">
But this isn’t about one man, it’s about values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">When Republicans were wise and reasonable, President Dwight Eisenhower,
said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses
both.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I knew some day I’d find a reason
to like Ike.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found two.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar, he
wrote, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would
not hear of that party again in our political history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a tiny splinter group, of course,
that believes you can do these things. … Their number is negligible and they
are stupid.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">All right, it is about one man.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"><o:p> </o:p><span style="font-size: small;"><b>“Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of
poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to
make our lives better than all the programs of government combined.”<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><b>
“There are 47%... who are dependent upon government, who
believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility
to care for them, who believe that they're entitled to healthcare, to food, to
housing, to you name it. … And the government should give it to them. … <o:p></o:p></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: #660000;"><b>
“My job is not to worry about those people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I'll never convince them that they should
take personal responsibility and care for their lives.<o:p></o:p></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>
“And they will vote for this president no matter what.”</b></span><o:p> </o:p></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">Which brings us back to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">values</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What would Ike have had to say about his or any
political<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>party’s schemes to deny the
right to vote to those, primarily minorities, deemed likely to vote for another
party’s candidate(s)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About one political
body’s obsessive campaign to prohibit and criminalize a woman’s right to make decisions
governing her own body?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>About a treacherous
cabal of an opposition <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>party’s elected
representatives plotting, the night before a new president’s first day in
office,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>to obstruct and quash his
ability, hence the entire government’s ability, to accomplish anything for four
years?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sound extreme?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a matter of record: a party that
represents roughly half of Americans, and would like, at any cost, to represent
all, swore, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">on the night before the
president took office</i>, to oppose every single thing the president did or wanted—in
sum, to see to it that he failed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whose
Senate leader said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for
President Obama to be a one-term president.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The single most important thing!</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What about the people’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">elected</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>representatives’ duty to make laws?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To regulate interstate commerce?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To coin money and collect taxes?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To “provide for the common defense and
general welfare of the United States?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To honor and uphold Article 1 of The Constitution of the United States!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Values!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the gutter. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">And the candidate?—the standard-bearer of “the single most
important thing…”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t stand for
anything—</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"> <span style="font-size: small;"><b>"I'm not familiar precisely with what I said, but I'll
stand by what I said, whatever it was."<o:p></o:p></b></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">—and a man who doesn’t stand for anything will perversely stand
for anything under the sun, no matter how base and unprincipled, if that will get
him what he wants. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is an empty vessel,
wide open to being indiscriminately filled and emptied and refilled ad infinitum
by anything or anybody with an agenda, at whim or will. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Since this is about values, and one of mine is making an
effort to present a balanced argument <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whenever possible, I’ll let a Republican have
the last word. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Writing for “Politico.com,”
Joe Scarborough, former congressman and current host of TV’s “The Scarborough Report,”
</span><a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81132_Page2.html"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">had this to say</span></a><span style="color: #660000; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">“Mitt Romney is in trouble. Not because of a boring
convention or a bloodless speech or a grossly inappropriate press conference,
but rather because the man refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on
the critical issues of our time. … And the lesson is clear: If we want to win
the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact
that Mitt Romney is likely to lose—and should, given that he’s neither a true
conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man.”</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span></span></span></span><br />Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-62282094772891007502012-09-03T23:40:00.000-04:002012-09-03T23:40:26.172-04:00It's Their Party<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://i49.tinypic.com/1jm6jb.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="244" src="http://i49.tinypic.com/1jm6jb.jpg" width="320" /> </a></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">How do I love the Republicans? Let me count the ways. (This won’t take long.)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A party with a mission, they gathered in Tampa to present
their candidate and themselves in the most favorable light possible. Disciplined and determined, they planned,
four years in advance, to show the
country here and now they are infinitely more fit to govern than the candidate
and the party the people had elected. You
have to ask—at least I have to—if a party that plans four years in advance to
hold such an all-important presidential-nominating national convention in a
hurricane-prone region during hurricane season <i>after</i> its previous national convention was delayed by a hurricane in
the<i> same time frame</i> is a party conceivably
capable of planning the future of this country.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">
</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Sparing no expense, the RNC staged and scripted the
proceedings ad nauseam, or possibly ad tedium.
They stifled spontaneity, silenced or ignored discordant opinion, and deemed
their recent two-term president unmentionable and their last vice-presidential campaign
darling persona non grata. As if by
fiat, they ruled out embarrassments. A
locked-down convention, with no surprises.
Until, that is, the gaff-master invited one for his crowning night. Surprise!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Party luminaries came from all four corners of the nation to
talk about themselves. They made barely standard references to the party’s
standard bearer. The only one talking
primarily about Mitt Romney was his wife, Anne.
In case you missed any of the solipsism, i.e. the self as the only
reality, Santorum served Santorum, Christie boosted and boasted about Christie,
and Newt </span><span style="font-size: large;">and Calista, obliviously
parodying a 20th century icon, “American Gothic,” babbled in
responsive tongues about relatively little.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The star of the evenings was not Paul Ryan, as expected, not
Mitt Romney, as longed for, and definitely not the “surprise guest,” as regretted,
but a relative unknown, Susana Martinez, the Governor of New Mexico, who scored
heavily by telling her unvarnished, and what I dearly want to believe was her
true, story.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Which bring us to truth-telling. Christie, a self-aggrandizing truth-teller,
had a lot to say about it, so he certainly wasn’t talking about Governor Romney—or,
as we now know, Representative Paul Ryan, who was supposed to be forthright and
honest, a veritable paragon of virtue or, at the least, the Gentile equivalent
of a mensch. In only 23 days since becoming
the person who could be the next vice president of the United States and only 35
minutes, give or take an untruth, of presenting that paragon to the largest
audience he’s faced to date, he has become, unabashedly and unapologetically, MisRepresentative
Ryan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ryan’s convention speech and subsequent lies have been
well-documented by practically everyone on both sides of the political spectrum,
so in lieu of repeating the indictments, I quote an admirable, brave
truth-teller, <span style="line-height: 115%;">Sally
Kohn, a Fox News contributor and writer, “…t</span>o anyone paying the
slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to
set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and
misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.” I urge you to read her <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/">detailed account</a>, <span style="line-height: 115%;"></span>which includes the
enlightening, “And then there’s what Ryan didn’t talk about.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On the whole, truth did not fare well at the GOP
convention. Nor was there as much as a
visible, honorable attempt to keep to
the facts. To the contrary, lying was
condoned and encouraged. Sound unfair
and outrageous? According to Mitt Romney’s
pollster, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by
fact-checkers.” According to Rudy Giuliani,
in his attempt to justify Ryan’s lies, “Well, look, when people give speeches,
not every fact is absolutely accurate.” Apparently
neither Newhouse nor Giuliani, believe it or not, a former Associate Attorney
General in the United States Department of Justice, knows what “fact” means, or
that it’s an antonym of fiction.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Lying is easy and gets easier. Irresponsible politicians, inspired by “the
stupidity of people in large groups,” easily lose sight, so it seems, of honor,
principle and truth. Seduced by the sonorousness
of their own voices, they believe in the substance of their lack of substance, wallow
in slogans, catch-phrases and rhetoric and think that saying something, anything!,
makes it so. Taking Goebbels’ famous dictum
one step further: “Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth” <i>for the liar</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now consider: If lying works so well, their fabrications may
be able to stick it to the Democrats and dupe undecided voters today, but given
the power tomorrow, what falsehoods would they be telling the country, and to
what purpose or profit?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="color: #660000; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">It’s their party. And they’ll lie if they want to.</span></div>
<BR>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-22170817041225659042012-08-02T23:54:00.001-04:002012-08-03T02:25:14.986-04:00The Romniad<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The candidate is out of the gate, but
no one’s cheering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He takes his first
step and stumbles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s certainly not a
crowd pleaser; p<span style="color: #783f04;">olitics is a spectator sport, and
even his fans are cringing.</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
he maintains a patrician smile, and not a hair on his head moves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knows: it’s a long race—he’s been running
for six years—and reminds himself he’s being tested, on earth as in heaven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His is the loneliness of the too-distant
long-distance runner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unbowed and
undaunted, he sees glory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What was the
lesson spun from his primer?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As he
construes it: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to the spoiled belongs the
victory.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Welcome to The Romniad, the fun and
games of the privileged.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">The candidate has been in training for
the ultimate contest—“My Conservatism’s Bigger Than Yours”—for at least four
years, conservatively speaking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
first qualifying round, waged on friendly foreign soil, can’t be chalked up as
a false start and restarted because one over-eager contestant put his foot in
his mouth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always seeing the bright
side, he capitalizes on his eligibility for the “Exchanging the Foot in Your
Mouth” competition, putting tactless ridicule of his host and host country
behind him, and plunges right in to the fun and games with a record-setting
breach of protocol.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Losing points and placing low, he
springs into the “Backtracking” competition, mincing words and feigning
humility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other than a major gaff or
two, nothing happened, right?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Next
event?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s shaping up to be the sporting
event of the campaign year or two or six.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There isn’t a luxury box to be had even for love of money.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Because the candidate plays his cards
so close to his chest, it’s hard to know which events he intends to participate
in, but he doesn’t seem to know either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Rumor has it he’s outsourcing the relay race because he can’t get into
step with his teammates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others contend
he keeps lapping himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Still others,
that he can’t stay in one lane.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">An exhaustive assessment of his competitive
assets offers little hope for the gold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Cherry-picking through the itemized regulatory report: “He cycles in
circles.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He’s too even for the uneven
bars and too uneven for the parallels.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“He’s about as coordinated as Gerald Ford.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lastly, “He’s unwilling to take a platform
dive—until the last week in August.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: #783f04;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Beaming and waving, the candidate-contestant
shows up for the marathon, a race he’s been running on practice tracks for an
undisclosed number of years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He claims
he can do it better, faster, and yes, cheaper, than any man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(He can deny having said it later.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Or woman!” he adds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Secretly, he’s counting on a strong tailwind
to carry him triumphantly across the finish line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The crowd reacts to his bravado and not only
applauds him at the starting line and again at the race’s midway point, but,
during the last leg of the race, also seems to be cheering for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s clear he won’t “medal,” but their
indecipherable chants serve to propel him down the stretch and toward the finish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the long-distance runner seeking to be the
long-distance closer enters the stadium for his last lap, huffing and puffing and
practically all in, the call of the excited spectators grows louder, their
words clearer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The energized throng is
chanting, “Chrysler, Chrysler!” And waving banners that read, “General Motors.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blissfully unaware, he gazes up toward the
VIP section, beams broadly and waves.</span></span></span></span><br />
</div><BR>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-57751082607734140402012-07-16T23:58:00.000-04:002012-07-17T00:01:30.064-04:00Remembering Celeste<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0W1Feq7orCI/UATBYIi1bmI/AAAAAAAAAT0/arpWnOFUqCg/s1600/Celeste+w+REF02.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="224" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0W1Feq7orCI/UATBYIi1bmI/AAAAAAAAAT0/arpWnOFUqCg/s320/Celeste+w+REF02.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Darryl Zanuck said, “Stopping Celeste’s star from rising
would be like stopping Niagara Falls from falling.”</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Luminous and darling, Celeste Holm radiated
grace and charm, cultivation and accomplishment, artistry and flair, and,
underneath it all, resolute, quiet strength. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Oscar Hammerstein told her to go home to New York, Hollywood
would destroy her.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Grateful as many of
us may be to him for his advice and to her for taking it, I can’t help but
believe Hollywood would have blinked first.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #660000; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I wish I’d taken a picture of Celeste when, just home from
the hospital after being treated for a paralyzed vocal cord, she went to the
piano to demonstrate she could sing again and chose one of the more difficult
songs for herself, “My Ship,” and stunned us (all but her husband Frank, that is) by
being able to do it, and well!</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Or when,
though quite frail, she became the biggest surprise at a surprise birthday
party for me, rising suddenly not only to sing, but to perform, “I Cain’t
Say No,” incorporating every recognizable, adorable Ado Annie gesture, while I
thought, “This is in all likelihood the last time she’ll ever sing this.”</span><span style="font-size: large;"> I was wrong; by that time I should have
learned never to underestimate Celeste.</span><span style="font-size: large;">
Several years later, she reprised it at another one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“I ain't the type that can faint,” she sang.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> Nor will her legacy.</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;">To know what those of
us who loved her (the most, I’ll add) thought kept her alive and serenely happy
in her last years, please go to <a href="http://sonofthecucumberking.blogspot.com/2011/09/september-song.html">"September Song."</a></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #660000;"> </span></span></span>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-74218287914413376402012-06-29T05:39:00.001-04:002012-07-01T03:35:55.229-04:00RX: John Roberts<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The headlines are fast and furious-making, the engine of
government careening further right… HOLDER HELD IN CONTEMPT… CITIZENS UNITED
TRUMPS STATE LAW… BOEHNER SAYS HEALTH CARE LAW HURTING ECONOMY… (a big Boehner
for the GOP!) …and suddenly, an abrupt turn to the left… <span style="line-height: 115%;">SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS HEALTH
CARE LAW and THE MANDATE CAN STAY! and ROBERTS SAVES OBAMACARE and… Whoa! Chief justice <i>John</i> Roberts, the prescription for the Affordable Health Care Act?…
for the country’s toxic political malaise?…
for what ails the Democratic Party?
Capital!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">This
is the same man who </span>made two trips to Tallahassee, Fla., in November
2000 during the hotly contested presidential election between George W. Bush
and Al Gore to assist lawyers working on behalf of Bush, to be subsequently
appointed by Bush to the Supreme Court as its chief justice. The man who, as a lawyer for the Reagan
administration, wrote legal memos defending administration policies on abortion,
and as a lawyer in the George H. W. Bush administration<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush_administration" title="George H. W. Bush administration"><span style="text-decoration: none;"></span></a>,
signed a legal brief urging the court to overturn <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade" title="Roe v. Wade"><span style="text-decoration: none;">Roe</span></a>
v. Wade. And it is the Roberts’ court,
very much the Roberts’ court at this point, that twice voted in favor of
upholding the Citizens United case, effectively characterized by President
Obama in his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_State_of_the_Union_Address" title="2010 State of the Union Address"><span style="text-decoration: none;">2010 State of the Union Address</span></a>,
as having “reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special
interests… to spend without limit in our elections.” This is a very conservative man. What got into him today?</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Many bewildered
conservatives are saying the Democrats got to him. Nonsense.
A few legal experts see his action as a reaction to the excessive
perception of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s heralded power as the swing vote. Unlikely.
Some pundits suggest that by
swinging left on such a momentous decision, he is gathering the political
capital to tack further right again during the court’s next term, when it predictably
may face a host of contentious issues doubtfully limited to affirmative action,
gay marriage and voting rights. But what
if Roberts, calculatedly clever, is seeking to keep all his options for the
future open, or, abundantly adroit, is even edging to the left? He might turn into one of jurisprudence’s
most nimble broken field runners. Far-fetched? Not if you consider the unexpected changes of
heart and politics of a number of his court predecessors, justices David Souter and Harry Blackman, and
chief justice Earl Warren, nominated respectively by Republican
presidents George H.W. Bush, Nixon and Eisenhower. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">During his Senate confirmation hearings, Roberts likened the
role as a judge to one of a baseball umpire whose "job is to call balls
and strikes and not to pitch or bat."
<span style="line-height: 115%;">With seven
years on the court and perhaps a quarter-century or more to go, he can’t help
but have his l</span>egacy and place in history in mind. A relatively young man with lifetime tenure on arguably
the most esteemed body of jurists in the world, it’s his court to save or let
sink, and I believe he was astute enough not to let it sink any lower than it
has, not, at least, in the eyes of a mere 44% of Americans<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/us/politics/44-percent-of-americans-approve-of-supreme-court-in-new-poll.html"></a> who still approve of it according to a New York
Times-CBS News poll published three weeks ago. <span style="line-height: 115%;">He looked for a way to do what he did. Constitutionally predisposed to finding acts
of Congress constitutional—he is on record stating, “we have a duty to construe
a statute to save it, if fairly possible”—he found a way.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">On a personal note, since I became aware of Judge John Roberts,
I have held he’s really Tom Hanks, and we all know Tom Hanks would go to the
ends of the earth, and beyond, for the Affordable Care Act! That consideration aired and dismissed, my
guess is that the chief justice, a learned, contemplative man, is conceivably appalled
by the nasty, loony, irrational behavior of the extremists in control of the
Republican party, and fearful of the future that foretells for the country—just
doesn’t want to see Mitt Romney as its president.</span></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-37305315019482372152012-05-04T04:52:00.000-04:002012-05-05T03:22:01.997-04:00The Logic of Malfeasance<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">What do Wisconsin, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Texas,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina have in
common? They are ten states (to date)
that require a government-issued photo ID to prevent voter fraud by
impersonation.* Not impersonation by
Frank Gorshin or Rich Little, mind you, but by evildoers who would cast a
second or illegal or unqualified vote, presumably for nefarious reasons. Sounds widespread and dire, threatening to
our particular system of government, doesn’t it? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“It is more common to be struck by lightning than be
impersonated at the polls,” according to the <a href="http://www.lawyerscommittee.org/projects/voting_rights/page?id=0125" rel="nofollow">Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law</a>. That being the case,
why aren’t Republican lawmakers—yes, it’s them again—introducing legislation to
protect their constituencies from lightning bolts rather than creating laws to
deprive far too many of them of their right to vote?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Let’s take this seriously.
Please try! In the decade between
2001 and 2010, an average of 39 U.S. citizens per year were not only struck by
lightning, but killed by it—a worst case scenario, I hope you’ll
agree. But during the same ten years,
115 people died from heat! Should we
demand to know from our elected representatives why, in the face of such
ghastly emergency, no plans are in motion to evacuate the South? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you think my disquisition is absurd, you’re right. Absurd because the thinking behind the
lawmaking, or, more accurately, the conniving behind the evil-doing, is beyond
absurd, beyond belief and beyond the pale.
It’s directly and deliberately discriminatory.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">According to the Lawyers Committee, “millions of
Americans—including an estimated 25% of African-Americans—are at risk of having
their right to vote taken away by these new voter identification laws.”</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">But what about their constitutional right to vote, you
ask? There is no constitutional right to
vote. Comes as quite a shock, I know,
but while the constitution guarantees the right to free speech, empowering us
to criticize the constitution’s failure to ensure the right to vote as openly
and angrily as we want, it doesn’t provide us with a federally protected right
to vote. Constitutional Amendments 15, 19 and 26 specifically prevent <i>denying</i>
the right to vote based on race, sex and age, respectively. But according to the Supreme Court’s 2000
decision in Bush v Gore, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional
right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and
until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to
implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral <a href="http://www.fairvote.org/right-to-vote-f-a-q#.T6IRFdVuIoE]" rel="nofollow">College</a>.” The five-judge
majority going even further, as The Center For Voting and Democracy details,
“The Court went on to say that Florida’s legislature has the power to take that
power away from the people at any time, regardless of the popular vote
tally.” We, the people, are at the
mercy, for good or bad, of our states.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">As a result of the 2010 elections, twice as many states are
under <i>total</i> Republican control (22) as are Democrat states (11), the remaining
states divided pretty evenly. In at
least 40 of our states, “Republicans
have introduced laws… that would make voting more difficult for everyone,” but
“especially for voters who supported President Obama and other Democrats in
<a href="http://www.protectingthevote.com/" rel="nofollow">2008</a>.” </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Republicans claim convicted felons in the thousands cast
ballots illegally. But they’re claiming
more convicted felons than there were illegal ballots cast —by a
landslide! Two recent studies indicate a
yearly average of all of 6 to 17 people—possibly none of them convicted
felons—who either pleaded guilty or were convicted of voter fraud. And voter ID laws would have failed to
prevent most of the violations. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Not one, but a multitude of recent studies, including a
five-year investigation conducted by the Department of Justice during the
George W. Bush administration, show that voter fraud—of any kind—is a
myth. The DOJ effort produced “virtually
no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court
records and interviews.” Those few charged
with violations by the Justice Department “appear to have mistakenly filled out
registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules.” Many cases in Miami, according to an
assistant United States attorney, apparently stemmed from mistakes by immigrants
and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">not fraud</a>. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">In a country whose bridges aren’t safe, schools aren’t
effective, lawmakers aren’t functional and citizens aren’t exercising their
right to vote, our elected representatives
prefer to squander their tax-payer time and tax-payers’ money making
sure that the paltry number of miscreants who vote illegally are prevented from
doing so.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Twenty-one million Americans apparently do not have
government-issued identification, including driver's <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/" rel="nofollow">licenses</a>. Texas law
recognizes a weapons permit, but not a Veterans Identification card or college
student ID! What’s next—a NASCAR card, yes, but an AARP card, no? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The bottom line: A country with one of the lowest voter
participation rates in the world is aggressively seeking to suppress the vote!</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="color: #783f04; font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I appeal to my Republican readers—if I have any left—why
don’t you do something? Why don’t you
let your party’s leaders and representatives know that as much as you’d like to
win, this is not the extreme you want to go to in order to. Or is it?</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04;">* Rhode Island—the only state with a
Democratic-controlled legislature to do so; South Carolina—blocked by the Justice Department;</span><span style="color: #783f04;">
</span><span style="color: #783f04;">Wisconsin—temporarily blocked</span><span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #783f04;">by <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_382191571">s</a></span></span><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><span style="color: #783f04;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws#cite_note-17" rel="nofollow">tate judges</a>.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-40982078526787513952012-04-13T03:21:00.007-04:002012-05-29T17:38:06.963-04:00An Occupational Hazard?<span style="color: #663300;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">The pain in my hand was excruciating. “Carpal tunnel syndrome!” I confirmed. I had already been warned, on buying a new desk and new computer, “You don’t want it… it’s incredibly painful!”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">It struck while I was in a theater—my own second act problem. My left hand knew what my right hand was doing—<i>screaming</i> for help—and flew to its rescue, uselessly writhing with it. At curtain call, I couldn’t applaud. At dinner afterwards with friends, I couldn’t manage to raise a tea cup without supporting it with my left hand. People high on a good show don’t note much else, fortunately.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">It kept me up most of the night. I couldn’t wait to get to my computer to learn from the Internet doctors what to expect next. If you’ve ever seen a schematic of carpel tunnel syndrome, you know it would be easier to interpret spaghetti. Mulling over lists of indications, I had enough to qualify, but somehow CTS (Any ailment reduced to capital letters sounds terminal to me.) was an uncomfortable fit. So, I deemed, was wearing a splint, or the discomforting alternative, severing the transverse carpal ligament to relieve a nerve. Unnerved about being surgically un-nerved, I foraged faster and vaster. I abruptly came to my senses at the point of reading, “Avoid sleeping on your wrists.” Who does such a thing, and why? I didn’t fit the CTS profile.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">In two googles flat, I discovered what I was suffering from! My writers guild should have warned me. My writing colleagues never broached the topic. There it was, in plain cyberslang!<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> a crmp r spzm</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">o musls o fingrz, h& + 4arm wen rytng</span>. I had </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>rytrs crmp</b>! </span>[Translation: <i>A cramp or spasm of the muscles of the fingers, hand, and forearm <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/writer%27s+cramp">during writing</a></i>.] <span style="font-style: normal;">Writer’s cramp!</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">Albert Schweitzer had writer’s cramp and a lousy handwriting, and he won a Noble Prize! Robert Schumann had a writer’s cramp physicians deferentially (and reasonably) identified as “musician’s cramp,” and should have won the distinction of having a disease named after him, like Lou Gehrig. If YouTube had existed in 1832, we could view the bereft virtuoso at the piano performing his extremely demanding, “Toccata Op. 7,” which the great composer constructed to be playable without the tragically impaired middle finger of his right hand.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">I was unable to find any writers with a history of writer’s cramp. Surely in the days of longhand—ancient hieroglyphs, the Bible, Moby Dick!— feverish story-tellers on a creative tear, grasping sharpened stones, bone styluses, bamboo reeds, goose-feather quills (The left wing was favored! ns), pencils and pens, “callously” inflicted scratcher’s cramp, drawer’s cramp, chiseler’s cramp, eventually cursive writing (and keyboard cramp?) on their blameless writing hands!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;">I’d noticed my fingers were creating more </span><span style="color: #783f04; font-size: large;"><s>tyops </s>typos than usual. Then, that objects had been flying out of my hands, particularly late at night, when they fall louder. Knowing my infirmity was writer's cramp was immaterial. Learning something new—and sharing it with you—is anything but. Bet you didn’t know: writer's cramp generally occurs without family history, but “cases of inherited writer's cramp have been <a href="http://www.dystonia-foundation.org/pages/more_info___writer_s_cramp__hand_dystonia_/54.php">reported….</a>” I remember my mother breaking a few dishes… does over her lifetime make a difference? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300; font-size: large;"><br />During the past two weeks, I wanted to write about something else—the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate; about Justice Antonin Scalia (who gives me cramps) and broccoli (which doesn’t). Contemplating my eventual choice of words for my exasperation is therapeutic—my hand is already feeling better! The day I can use my index finger again for pointing and prodding (and the one next to it for an unseen obscene gesture) is near at hand.<br /><br />Meanwhile, I’m left pondering this quandary: If Stephen Sondheim had a cramping pain or a spasm in his hand, would he have writer's cramp or musician’s cramp? Or both? It’s a handwringer.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #663300;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BJ4g5vSslGc/T4TzmPtq1qI/AAAAAAAABDs/lCzAgP6qkp4/s1600/modicon.jpg"><span style="font-family: Georgia,serif; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"></span></a></span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; line-height: 115%;"> </span>Please note: The wonderful emoticon, above, was created by blogger <a href="http://www.networkedblogs.com/blog/hyperbole_ahalf">Allie Brosh</a>. Please take a look at more of her brilliant “<a href="http://youbentmywookie.com/wtf/allie-broshs-comprehensive-proto-emoticon-pain-chart-8588">Comprehensive Proto-Emoticon Pain Chart</a>.”</span></div>
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</div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-89010555707343358972012-03-01T23:54:00.012-05:002012-05-29T17:40:40.470-04:00A Gift to New York<br />
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">When Oscar Hammerstein died, in 1960, I remember reading that the lights of every Broadway theater would be dimmed at curtain time for one full minute, and thinking how wonderful that was—the ultimate curtain call—for one man to achieve such extraordinary recognition for a life in the theater and his contribution to the art of it. Since becoming a New Yorker, I’ve noted a number of such fitting testaments to men and women whose luster illuminated the theater world. But none moved me the way a tribute to a gift to New York did this past Tuesday evening, when Broadway’s lights were dimmed for Howard Kissel. Through the din of Times Square, I could hear his mellifluous speaking voice in his measured tones, rich with irony and warm with whimsy, as he audibly punctuated his graceful prose.<br /><br />We’ve lost a cultural icon, an irreplaceable one. Broadway, New York, the world, can ill afford it. Howard knew opera and dance, theater for sure, music of all sorts, and a good film. He knew books and he knew art. And he spoke masterly in the language of all of these. He knew knowledge. <br /><br />And he could tell a great Jewish joke. Sprinkled with Yiddish. Relishing one, from his lips or another’s, he could laugh quieter and more broadly—at the same time—than anyone I ever came across.<br /><br />For years, Howard, dance critic Joe Mazo and I would join up and sit together at High Holiday services. Even in synagogue, Howard always seemed to have a better bead on things than we did. Perhaps it was a result of an early goal: you’re unlikely to find this in any theatrical who’s who, but Howard told me he initially wanted to be a Reform rabbi.<br /><br />For many months over one of those years, we three met for dinner practically every Friday night. Initially, it was to discuss and dissect the topic beloved by us, the performing arts in New York, specifically everything we could cover (plus a few books). The evenings evolved into a notion that we could collaborate on the libretto of a musical, with one of us volunteering to do the primary research, another assigning himself to a working outline, and the third designated to start tracking down the rights. I don’t remember any of us ever producing anything we could even draw a pencil line through. After apologies and excuses as we pulled our chairs closer to the table each week, we plunged into what any three people in New York who love theater do best, “talking theater.”<br /><br />Howard, whom I can’t imagine comfortable growing up in the Milwaukee of the 40s and 50s, told me he was looking through a book of Bettmann Archive photos when he came across one of a Lower East Side New York storefront shop (one of those entered by descending three stairsteps below the sidewalk), a sign above its store window bearing the proprietor’s name and the store’s merchandise—in Hebrew. “And I knew there was a place where I belonged,” he said.<br /><br />More than Broadway lights have been dimmed by our loss of him. He’ll be missed. I'll miss him.</span></div>
<br />Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-39665863832537166222012-02-26T00:59:00.008-05:002012-05-29T17:41:04.811-04:00A Night at the Oscars for Politicians<div style="color: #783f04;">
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">Taking advantage of the piddling input I have with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I’m proposing a new category for the Oscars: </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold;">Best Performance by a Politician</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">. <br /><br />Since that dynamic-duo accounting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers, must receive the voters’ final ballots by the Tuesday before “Oscar Sunday,” it’s too late for the 2012 awards, but not too late to propose deserving candidates. <br /><br />The run-up to the “Best Performance” honors in this new category featured a field of some pretty fair contenders who zoomed in and faded out—<span style="font-style: italic;">with a <span style="font-size: 100%;">BANG</span>...</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, whose artless response to President Obama's 2009 State of the Union address all but made King George VI’s speech impediment in “The King’s Speech” look like plagiarism. Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York, who earned a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his valor during the Korean War, and a “Scarlet Letter” from the House Ethics Committee six decades later on being found guilty of only 11 charges of ethics violations (out of 12)… but refused to resign—bang!—after a trial determined his means could not be reconciled with his ways. Michele Bachmann for her embodiment of every space-kook, from “My Friend Irma” through “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” to “Clueless,” who ever stumbled across the silver screen. And John Edwards and Herman Cain and [</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">your write-in here</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">] who went out with a bang!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">...<span style="font-style: italic;">or a <span style="font-size: 85%;">whimper</span>: </span></span><span style="font-size: 130%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Anthony Wiener, the poster boy for optimum exposure at flexed shutter speed. John Boehner, who stunned us with his gift for turning on the tears—and concealing the ice in his veins… a neat trick! Rod Blagojevich, the first impeached governor of Illinois!, whose “irreconcilable artistic differences” with the law led to a sentence of 14 years in federal prison. And Rick Perry—the snap, crackle and stupendous fizzle of 21st century politics’ “big picture.”</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><br /><br />Plus those serenity-sapping character “actors” who just won’t go away:</span><span style="font-size: 130%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Donald Trump, for his unforgettable portrayal of a bigger blustering buffoon than the bankably boorish Donald Trump. Sarah Palin, for her debut performance as a political has-been. Joseph Lieberman, who says he’s going away, but how far?</span></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><br /><br />Let’s CUT TO the award: <span style="font-weight: bold;">Best Performance by a Politician</span>. In light of the primaries and caucuses, the Republicans have had the field pretty much to themselves, although they insist on sharing it with President Obama, a gift for the Democrats that doesn’t stop giving. Kind of like an actress, any actress, supplicating Meryl Streep to join her for anything anywhere. (A lucky thing for politicians of every stripe that Streep would rather play one than be one.) <br /><br />DISSOLVE TO a three-ring circus and a side show. WE PAN the nominees: </span><span style="font-size: 130%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-family: times new roman;">Rick Santorum (“Crouching Kitten, Hidden Dragon”) for his memorable performance as a draconian chauvinist who’d rather be extremely right than president. Mitt Romney (“The Year of Living Dishonestly”) for overcoming type-casting with his disturbing portrayal of a multiple choice personality who’d rather be “severely conservative” than moderately truthful. Newt Gingrich (“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Also-Ran”) for his effortless emulation of all ten principal characters in “The Wizard of Oz.” And Ron Paul (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Convention”), unremitting in search of a meaningful role.</span><br /></span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">I propose that anyone voting for a candidate in this category be required to show a home-state issued Voter ID card. Credit cards will not be acceptable, particularly Platinum ones. Driver’s licenses won’t do. Vehicle Registration cards—negotiable, but since we’re talking Hollywood here, no vehicles older than last year’s. What’s that, Mitt? All right, this year’s.<br /> </span></div>
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<br /></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-39654751146594579262012-02-09T23:35:00.013-05:002012-05-29T17:41:18.975-04:00Down for the Count of Nine<div style="color: #783f04;">
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">You can’t keep a good country down. And say what you will about The United States of America, it’s a good country. I don’t have to give you reasons—in your blood and in your bones, in your fiber and your core, you know them. Malcontents and dissidents, progressives and libertarians, etiologists, animists and even bloggers know them.<br /><br />So, we’re on the ropes and our inevitability buckles, we sag and we drop… down, but not out, never out. We take the count of nine and, somehow, the spring comes back to our psyches and we start punching back.<br /><br />Six days ago, The Labor Department reported that the U.S. unemployment rate had fallen to 8.3 percent, a noteworthy return to the level of President Obama’s first full month in office after climbing to a high of 10 percent in late 2009</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">—</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">and 243,000 jobs were added in January at the fastest pace in the last nine months. Add to that good news that the jobs market had larger gains in earlier months than previously reported and the economy has been gaining strength for almost six months. And it doesn’t stop there: “Over the last year, the economy has added almost two million jobs for the best twelve months in five years. Stocks surged, with the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index closing only slightly below its high since Mr. Obama took <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/politics/improved-job-picture-poses-risks-to-obama-and-romney.html">office</a>” and the Dow Jones Industrial average at its highest since May 19, 2008, eight months before the president took office.<br /><br />You’d think that such positive news would be welcome, wouldn’t you? Why am I even asking? Because we have those among us who don’t want the country to succeed, not if a president not of their party gets any credit. Whom do you imagine would greet such good tidings with such crepe-hanging prose?, like: “This recovery has been slower than it should have been. People have been suffering for longer than they should have had to suffer. Will it get better? I think it’ll get better. But this president has not helped the process. He’s hurt it.” Does that help "the process"?<br /><br />The sour grapes comes from Mitt Romney, who, to paraphrase Henry Clay, would rather be right </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">to be</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"> president—as far right as Republican voters will buy, it’s fair to add. Romney, and Clay, who preceded him by almost two centuries, make an interesting comparison. Clay was nicknamed "The Great Compromiser." Flip-flop didn’t enter the American lexicon until 1944, three years before Romney was born. Clay was a candidate for president three times on three different “Republican” tickets, and failed. Romney, as we know, is on his second run, but doesn’t seem inclined to take no for an answer, not even by practically everyone in his own party. Clay was a dedicated conservative of his time. Romney is a chameleon, all the time.<br /><br />In lieu of roaring back, our economy may only be purring back, but it’s pure catnip, not partisan fodder, for those hurting the most. We the People feed on optimism. And optimism feeds on itself. Any sports fan, any prayer fan, any romantic (for Cupid’s sake!), can tell you that.<br /><br />Can a $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s largest banks and a hoped-for value that would stretch to 39 million and nine additional major mortgage servicers, having the potential to provide relief to nearly two million current and former homeowners, be bad? Even flawed and in flux, bad? I give it 24 hours before the first bellyacher grouses.<br /><br />In high school, I had a mentor, an inspiring English professor we used to call Uncle Joe. To this day, I think about a lecture wherein he contended that the key to the success of American pilots during World War Two was their unfailing sense of humor. The impact of his insight is reinforced every time I see a movie with the actor-pilots bantering wittily while exploding flak threatens to bring them and their planes down from the skies. I see an overkill of flak emanating from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail threatening to bring down the electorate, but a woeful dearth of wit or humor to elevate or stir. Fortunately, you can’t keep a good country down.<br /></span></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-766285332797676922012-01-16T23:42:00.011-05:002012-05-29T17:41:33.994-04:00Much Ado About Mostly Nothing<div style="color: #783f04;">
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">The Iowa caucuses were to the Presidential race what the Golden Globes are to the Oscar Awards—contrived frippery. For all the fuss and ballyhoo both create, they are pie-in-the-sky burlesques with no significance other than the misplaced importance charitably or naively attributed to them. Not even Shakespeare, with all his uncanny insight, could have foreseen the much-ado-about-mostly-nothing histrionics of American political theater, but he certainly anticipated Hollywood when he likened life to “a poor player… full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Forget, for the moment, that he called him an idiot.) <br /><br />Why does all this matter now? For those who take politics as seriously as they take show business, it matters bigtime.* It’s politics </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">and </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">show biz, song and dance, drama and more drama. It’s “Descendants” starring Mitt Romney (and, formerly, John Huntsman), sharing the bill with “Moneyball” and its supporting cast of Huntsman, Sr.; Super PACs (produced by the Supreme Court); and the debut of a new “actor” on the national stage, Sheldon Adelson, who became a headliner overnight. It’s a lower case homonym, a different kind of pack, with Mitt breaking away from the “Bridesmaids” to become his party’s strange bedfellow. It’s “War Horse” featuring every candidate. It’s “Crazy, Stupid Love”… “Carnage”… and “Shame.” If it adds up at all, it’s the cynically calculated math of press agents and political consultants, of flaks and spinmeisters.<br /><br />Springing from the star-besotted minds of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The Golden Globes could only have been created in Hollywood. Where else could a mere 80-plus men and women from around the world, many of whom are purportedly neither foreign nor press, influence America’s number one awards show—likely, one with a vastly larger international viewing audience than our presidential elections—the Academy Awards? Where else could 80-plus would-be foreign journalists take the lead in swaying about 5800 Oscar-voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, qualified professionals all, to think as they thought and vote as they voted?<br /><br />Where else? In Iowa, where 7 would-be candidates spent incalculable amounts of time, effort and money to influence all of 5.4% of Republican voters to write one of their names on a slip of paper—with grand dreams of ultimately impressing on 50.1% of the 130 million or so Americans who may go to the polls (weather permitting) that he or she is the heaven-sent one to lead the country from the chasm they see themselves in to a better chasm. Where an Iowa voter has to belong to a party only for as long as it takes to vote, and can switch parties or switch back to “undeclared” immediately after. Or a Globes voter doesn’t have to speak English to love a performance. Imagine! Almost rubbing elbows with George Clooney on the Red Carpet and writing home to Malasia that you voted for anyone else. Standing in line for the Ladies’ Room behind Meryl Streep and letting the folks in Thailand know “she has to go, too!” <br /><br />Emerging from the smoke and mirrors unreality in both lands of Oz is the spectacle of a man nobody seems to want, en route to being anointed to lead his party up or down the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, more smoke and mirrors—and another man 16 of 62 voting members of his “party” (and one hell of a party they give) didn’t want returning to host this year’s Globes after the brouhaha his blatantly barbed remarks created last year, Ricky (the wicked wizard?) Gervais. In both lands of Oz, Caucusville and Stardust Fields, it’s as if a stickball game observed by three neighborhood kids determines who goes to the World Series.<br /><br />- - -<br /><span style="font-size: 85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">*It’s noteworthy that “big time,” originally a term to describe the ultimate “White House” for vaudeville acts, was introduced as a synonym for “important” or “major” on radio, July 7, 1950, by the preeminent newscaster Lowell Thomas, in reference to the Korean War.</span></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-38232277526177867282011-12-28T23:56:00.008-05:002012-05-29T17:41:47.849-04:00Good Intentions<div style="color: #783f04;">
<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><br />I don’t usually give thought to making New Year’s resolutions because designating merely one day a year to committing to being a better person strikes me as doing the wrong thing for the right reason. I could resolve to do the right thing, which would be to dedicate myself anew every day to being that better person (or maybe every other day), but frankly, I suspect I’d lose track either of the days or the resolutions, or both. I have a day for that: it’s called the Day of Atonement.<br /> <br />Caught up in the spirit of the season’s greeting cards—doves and olive branches, lambs and lions lying together, candelabras and children’s faces glowing—I thought I’d venture into “The World of Great Expectations,” the New Year’s resolution. <br /><br />Feeling seasonally and strikingly beneficent this year, my first resolution, as I see it, should be to stop being so hard on the Republicans. I’ve stated that good intention before, but run into trouble adhering to it. How the hell can I… Oops, there I go! My second resolution ought to be not to be outraged when they go off half-cocked and… (breathe!) Well, after all, the Democrats have their foibles, don’t they? And while they’re not as loony as the Republicans… correction: not as <span style="font-style: italic;">oppositional</span>… they have been known to be ornery. Not recently, not so unpatriotically, and in no way… Enough politics!<br /><br />I resolve to give the gift of giving. I’m not playing with words, I mean exactly what I say and I mean to do it myself, and not just on holidays. I already put my gift where my gab is, and you can, too, via a marvelous non-profit organization, </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><a href="http://www.charitychecks.us/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Charity Checks</span></a>. You can “Teach The Joy Of Giving” to children (as I did, joyfully), and do countless additional, affordable deeds with your funds that money alone can’t buy. That’s my holiday gift to you, and I’m feeling so good about it!<br /><br />I resolve to be even more outspoken about incivility at any level in any form in any part of my life or the world. Not that I’ve ever been shy about making my feelings known—can you tell?—merely affirming more of what I think and feel, maybe louder. As a corollary to that, urging people, as an early role-model inspired me, to say what they mean and mean what they say, certainly to me.<br /><br />Since these are my resolutions, I’m adding a second corollary: taking people to task for using language indiscriminately, starting with words and phrases as random and far-flung and corrupted as Nazi, fascist, socialist, Holocaust, genius, awesome, no problem, and—neither last nor least—the viral, “it sucks.” <br /><br />I didn’t wait for New Year’s to resolve not to let taxi drivers off the hook when they don’t have the manners to say thank you for a tip. An actress friend gets out of the taxi and leaves the door open, but she’s diminutive and adorable, so I doubt if any driver is going to come after her. But I resolved long ago not to get punched in the nose; in fact, to try to leave this world with as much of me intact as I came into it with. So, I’ve tried waiting… just waiting… until it dawned on the driver to say thank you. I’ve tried asking, “Don’t you thank somebody when they give you something extra?” I’ve tried explaining, reasonably, “You know no one owes you anything; a tip is a way of showing appreciation for your service; a thank you is your way of showing your appreciation.” Have you noticed the change in New York taxi drivers? I haven’t either.<br /><br />For years, I’ve been mentally threatening to have self-adhesive labels made up to slap on the back of the driver’s seat as I slipped out of a taxi without receiving so much as a thanks. The label would read something to the effect of: <span style="font-style: italic;">This driver doesn’t know how to say thank you. Please don’t reward him by tipping him.</span> I’d probably be cuffed and fined for vandalism.<br /><br />I resolve to keep my resolve never to watch a reality show… or Fox News… or buy a Murdoch paper. <br /><br />As a final resolution, I will abstain from calling any other Republican contender but Newt Gingrich a megalomaniac. A puffy-faced, puffed-up megalomaniac. That’s not political, just an observation.<br /><br />I see I’m already on the brink of breaking my first resolution. </span></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-51360782176230441052011-12-14T23:53:00.012-05:002012-05-29T17:42:01.259-04:00Brown v Warren<div style="color: #783f04;">
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<span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;">Boy, did the Republicans show Elizabeth Warren! They denied her the leadership of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington—the bureau she conceived of and created—only to see her starting to run away with their Senate seat in Massachusetts. A UMass Lowell-Boston Herald poll shows her leading Republican Senator Scott Brown by a 7 percent margin, 49 to 42. According to MSNBC show host Lawrence O’Donnell, who knows politics from the inside, “That is an absolutely devastating poll for any incumbent senator. Any sitting senator running for reelection goes into full panic mode as soon as his or her polling number drops below 50 percent. The rule in politics is: an incumbent polling at 42 percent absolutely cannot win reelection…” Did they give it to her!<br /><br />It’s so beautiful it positively shines. Let’s follow the bouncing balls. Scott Brown bared himself—again—this time by defying his party’s marching orders and endorsing President Obama's nominee to lead the GOP-dreaded bureau, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray—who was aggressively going after his state’s banks for foreclosure fraud when he was ousted by a Republican challenger—who was subsequently hired for the consumer protection bureau by Elizabeth Warren, the GOP’s bete noire who’s beating the tail off Brown and on the verge of taking Ted Kennedy’s coveted seat back from the Republicans. Now, Senator Brown, that’s what I call being hoisted on your own petard!<br /><br />And why would Scott Brown do such a reckless thing? Because it wasn’t reckless, it was cynical. Both he and the GOP knew the party had the votes for a filibuster: they could easily deprive Cordray of the up-and-down vote they routinely rail about being deprived of. It’s conceivable, if not likely, that Brown’s GOP guidance counselor(s) advised him to “defy” the party to impress his constituency. See how well that’s working!</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><br /><br />Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Elizabeth Warren hasn’t won yet, not by a long shot! Be warned, Warreniks, the Republicans have her number. You’ve got to hand it to them! They’ve already exposed the college professor who’s never run for public office for being “a Harvard elitist and an </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/elizabeth_warren/index.html">outsider</a>,” and what’s more, they’re “stressing that she was born and raised in Oklahoma.”<br /><br />Where do I start? “Harvard Elitist?” Where’s the problem here? Is it with Harvard, or with being educated or skilled, or, truth be told, with simply not being ignorant? And if ignorance is so glorious, as it seems to have become—particularly to roughly 50% of American voters in presidential election years—aren’t the ignorant the Ignorant Elitists?</span><span style="font-family: times new roman;"> </span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"><br /><br />“Outsider?” With every Republican presidential candidate turning him or her self inside out to be seen as </span><span style="font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">The</span><span style="font-family: times new roman; font-size: 130%;"> Washington Outsider, while in actuality none of them qualify for being anything but insiders—an incumbent congressman and congresswoman, a former congressman who was the 58th Speaker of the House of Representatives, a former senator, a former governor and a present one, and a former ambassador—how can any Republican legitimately brand and denounce Elizabeth Warren for being “an outsider”? Haven’t they heard of the advice for people who live in glass houses? Surely it ought to be part of the platform of the Ignorant Elitists.<br /><br />Finally… this is not for the faint of heart… let’s not mix words, I’ll just come right out and say it… the audacious Ms. Warren is so outside she was “born and raised in Oklahoma.” “Okla-Okla-Okla-Oklahoma!” “Where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain,” or at least probably did when Warren was born and raised there. Can you get more outside than that? Take note, Massachusetts independents, undecideds and, lest we forget—Republicans. Do they ever have her nailed! </span></div>
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<br /></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9216011953770444735.post-78963736064236208942011-11-22T23:48:00.011-05:002012-05-29T17:42:16.558-04:00I'm Not Giving Thanks For...<div style="color: #783f04;">
<span style="font-size: 130%;"><br />I routinely have a lot to give thanks for on Thanksgiving, and this year is certainly no exception. Last year, Thanksgiving fell on the day after my 35th and last radiation treatment—perfect timing I thought… until I sat at our Thanksgiving Day table unexpectedly unable to eat anything from the beautifully-arrayed plate of food before me. In the months to follow, I felt as if I was the roasted turkey. This year, thanks to family and friends and love, and the loving care of doctors and nurses, I will feast.<br /> <br />Ungracious as it may sound, today I find myself thinking contrarily of what I won’t give thanks for. Many will take that as a definitive sign that I’m feeling better. Wanting to share my skewed perspective with you tells me I am. But before I do, I want to touch on a few of the high points of Thanksgivings past.<br /><br />For 37 years, we lived in an apartment with a large-as-life, premium view of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Families, the children the guests of honor, crowded at our oversized windows as float after float and balloon after balloon floated by, so close you felt you could almost reach out and touch something or someone in the parade. One year, I did something almost as unlikely as that. The revival of “Brigadoon” was a Broadway hit and its star, Martin Vidnovic, was perched atop one of the floats. I called to Marty, only once, from my window. And through the din, he heard me, looked up and saw me, grinned and waved. “Been too long,” I called, “let’s have lunch.” “Name it,” he said. “Russian Tea Room, next Wednesday. 12:30,” I responded. “We’re on,” he shouted. Neither of us bothered to confirm and both of us showed up as planned.<br /><br />In April of 1984, I brought a sizeable sampling of Thanksgiving from Manhattan to Tel Aviv via “the balloon man” and four of his towering Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons, leading to one of the most comically bizarre episodes of my life. You can read it</span> <span style="font-size: 130%;"><a href="http://sonofthecucumberking.blogspot.com/2009/04/mickey-mouses-pass-over-in-holy-land.html">on this blog</a>, but then please come back for what “I’m </span><span style="font-size: 130%; font-style: italic;">N</span><span style="font-size: 130%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">ot</span> Giving Thanks For….”<br /><br />As a rule, I don’t write when I have nothing to say. Too much has already been written, and, for that matter, said and sung, and if I don’t have anything new to say, or can’t think of a new way to say what may already have been said, I don’t. Having something new to say calls for passion, or something akin to it, as well as insight. <br /><br />I haven’t been passionate about anything the past month except two Broadway dramas, the exceptional “Other Desert Cities” and the mercurial “Seminar.” I haven’t been angry about anything (not even anything Republican!), nor offended or indignant. In truth, the GOP has given me great pleasure this month thanks to the presidential candidates debates. I’m giving profuse thanks for them Thursday—and every day from now until election day 2012.<br /><br />I’m not giving thanks for—or to—the 12 hopeless members of the failed special Congressional committee on deficit reduction. Nor, for that matter, do I have any thanks for anyone in the United States Congress. I think they should all go home for Thanksgiving and stay there.<br /><br />I have no thanks in me for Texas, all of it, nor Arizona—not for the grief they’ve given us (as in U.S.). Ditto, the calcified and dividedly doctrinal Supreme Court, at least 5/9ths of it. In the larger picture, I’m not giving thanks, this year or any foreseeable year to the U.N. for what it’s become: the United Nations of Hypocrisy. <br /> <br />I’m not giving thanks for a living person anywhere in the world who has, in any way, betrayed the trust of children. Or for those who robotically repeat the euphemisms of journalists, jurists and sermonizers, hollow terms like endangerment, exploitation, trafficking, abuse. A child doesn’t have to be moved from one place to another for the offense to be child trafficking. Leaving a child with no choice is slavery, plain and simple. <br /><br />I have not a shred of appreciation or compassion for any entity or organization that power has corrupted… or greed has infested and infected. “Corrupted” chiefly includes nightstick and pepper-spray wielding police, but doesn’t exclude unreasonably unruly mobs; autocrats, but also arrogant caucuses and sociopaths. The latter, “greed,” encompasses peddlers of gilt-edged schemes they wouldn’t sell to their mothers—in most cases. And other sociopaths.<br /><br />I’m withholding thanks to professional sports organizations and outrageously-overpaid athletes until they get their Ps and Qs—profits and salary quotes—in order. Not so long ago, the Minnesota Timberwolves offered and basketball player Latrell Sprewell rejected a $21 million offer to extend his contract for three years as insufficient, because, said Sprewell, "I got a family to feed." <br /><br />I’m not giving thanks to an Arab Spring that is metamorphosing into a bitter-cold Arab winter, contagious with unrest and pandemic in potential. <br /><br />No thanks to or for Jon Corzine, Bernard Madoff, Mel Gibson (self-destructing is not enough), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talk radio hosts, or anyone named Newt.<br /><br />Last, but not least: thanks but no thanks to the nation of sheep the U.S. has hastened to become. Either Erasmus, Anouilh or an English proverb (I’m not giving thanks for the lack of reliable attribution.) says, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Beware the Cyclops who emerges to lead the bleating masses.<br /><br />And this is me not being angry, offended or indignant. Happy Thanksgiving.<br /></span></div>Ray Errol Fox / Son of the Cucumber Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09244270231118696818noreply@blogger.com7