Much Ado About Mostly Nothing

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.)

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 “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.

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?

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!”

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.

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*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.

I Believe

With my holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur, less than a day away, and my happiest season of the year, autumn in New York, only a week away, it’s that introspective time of year for me when I start asking myself again what I believe.

With all respect to God, Torah and the Ten Commandments, I have discovered that what I most believe in is Respect For All. That doesn’t necessarily mean I personally respect all people, it means I show respect for all.

High up on my two tablets is “Character is destiny.” Because I consider plagiarism a sin (against man) I’ll be quick to tell you that “Character is destiny” is not my line,* it’s Heraclitus’s, a 6th century Greek philosopher. I resolutely hold that “Character is destiny”—for good or ill. Abraham Lincoln’s life exemplified it. Gandhi’s embodied it. We learn it as children, but improvidently put it aside with “childish things.”** Pinocchio personifies the ancient adage, conversely and dramatically, as his nose grows longer with every lie he tells.

Heraclitus, as quotable as the prophets, Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, may also have said, “Know thyself.” Knowing a good aphorism when he saw one, Socrates prescribed it. The Oracle of Delphi billboarded it. I wish it on others like a blessing or a curse. We know he didn’t know much, but if George W. Bush had only known himself he might have applied himself. He would have made a fine baseball commissioner. If a sober Mel Gibson would come face to face with himself, it’s likely as not he’d either cut out his tongue or his heart.

Some time ago, I was surprised to discover in retrospect that every screenplay I’d written during my misspent Hollywood tenure had a theme in common: “power corrupts” (credit to Lord Acton). How did I fail to recognize in time that every person in a powerful position in Hollywood necessary to deal with was corrupted by power? If “character is destiny,” irrefutably, I know where every executive and producer in Hollywood is bound in the afterlife.

In the absence of the aggregate—respect for all, “character is destiny,” “know thyself” and “power corrupts”—what we get is unavoidably whom we get, and that is the antithesis of what I believe, the exemplarily bereft George W. I have always thought of people as rudimentary empty vessels you can fill with good or evil. The danger resides in their sheer emptiness: who pours what into the void, and to what purpose. W’s trouble auto-started at the top—his empty head filled his shallow heart with comfy platitudes. That left far too much room in his heart for the snake in his garden, Dick Cheney, to ply it with poison.

Is that all I believe? Not in the least. I believe in helping others when I can. I believe in always trying to see the other side. I believe in recognizing what’s more important to someone than it is to me. A legacy from my father, I believe in giving the other guy just a little more to make sure he feels he has half. I believe, with all my heart, in the words of Thomas Campbell, “To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.”

Finally this day, my cardinal “commandment” is an imploration to myself and one and all always to think. Think before you act, think before you speak. Before you do anything, pause… to think. So many of the world’s problems, so many of our personal ones, could be averted by just a little prior thought.

Time to atone.

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Footnotes:
*Nor is it John McCain’s, who used it for a title, but not only didn’t put it in quotes, but also gave credit for chapter-by-chapter aspects of it to everyone from Joan of Arc to Wilma Rudolph, from Gandhi to Mark Twain, from Darwin to Mother Teresa—but never, it appears, to Heraclitus, the man who said it. How’s that for character?

**Paul of Tarsus.

A Wonderful Town, Installment Two

A man boarded an elevator in a Los Angeles building and chose the button for his floor. Even before the elevator had climbed to the second floor, he pushed the button three more times. A lady on the elevator said, “You must be from New York.”

New York, New York is “A Wonderful Town.” It’s a small town where Adolph Green, co-lyricist with Betty Comden of the song, “Wonderful Town” (not from the show “Wonderful Town” but from “On the Town”—got it?) became a wonderful New York chum. Adolph Green was a Jewish leprechaun to me, “spritely” and mentally mischievous. He was the best “drop-the-needle” player I ever encountered, meaning he could identify a piece of classical music faster (I suspected) than even the composer of “Wonderful Town” and “On the Town,” his collaborator on both shows, Leonard Bernstein. Adolph once sang a movement of Mahler for me (unsolicited) on the corner of 63rd and Central Park West. That’s not likely to happen at Hollywood and Vine.

A tourist from L.A. stops a New Yorker to ask, “Pardon me, could you tell me how to get to Times Square or should I just go fuck myself?”

My friend Herb Graff and I shared passions for New York quirks [see “A Wonderful Town” entry below], New York anecdotes and incomparable New York characters like Adolph Green. Profiled in The New Yorker for being one of the city’s great raconteurs, Herb could break up any room with his punchy, borscht-belt delivery, but when we dined with Adolph, it was Adolph who provided the often-suppressed laughter, often inadvertently. When Adolph typically couldn’t make up his mind—in this instance about what entrée to order—he looked at the next table to see what they were having. But he didn’t stop there. First he praised the way a certain dish looked, then asked what it was and was it good, and then, only faintly commended by the uncomfortable diner, he ordered it.

Herb dined out for years on this one: A man approached Adolph saying, “I’ll bet you don’t remember me.” Adolph screwed up his face and whined, “Don’t make me guess.” According to Herb, Robert Redford, on the town, when asked exactly the same question by a fellow who prefaced it with challenging remarks like “You’re a big man now” and “After all, you’re a star,” and the capper, “We went to school together,” replied, with initial feigned warmth, “I DO remember you! You were an asshole then and you’re an asshole now.”

It is a wonderful town. Herb had two California acquaintances who came to New York, excited because someone had given them, gratis, an unoccupied East Village pad to use. An un-air-conditioned pad. In the dead of August. On their first night here they tossed and turned until dawn in a one-hundred degree chamber until one of them suggested they put on the clothes they’d strewn, piece by piece, from beds to floor and go for a walk to get some air. Ninety degrees outside felt good to them when suddenly, at the crack of dawn, a man came charging down the street toward them… and past them… in a low-cut evening dress and stiletto shoes. These two Californians had never seen such a thing! They couldn’t wait to see Herb to tell him and couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Herb’s reaction? “He was probably late for work.”