DID I HAVE A BRAIN TRANSPLANT?

So I’ve been reading around the blogs I love — Mom 101, Been There, Time Goes By and others and they’re full of election news and celebrating both the outcome and the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi. And I realize that I – former political producer of the TODAY SHOW and general political junkie – have barely mentioned the election here. What’s THAT about?

News92_1I DID mention the growing youth turnout – but that makes sense – I care so much about younger people – both how they see the world and how the world sees them — and about my old friend Jane Harman.

I just wasn’t as jazzed as everyone else about this victory. So very much that I believe in has been undone in these years and so much that I worked for is gone. I think the next two years will be about maintaining as much as remains of the progressive perspective and pushing through little advances since more than that will bring about a Bush veto and we have nowhere near the votes to beat that. SO. It was a start – but we have a long way to go and still haven’t come up with a perspective that’s a compelling alternative when there isn’t a war and a pedophile to help us over the hump. We need not to fight with each other – the NYT today talks about the pragmatic nature of current Dem victors compared to some of the ideological leanings of the establishment. It will be interesting to watch but call me crazy — I’m not ready to party yet.

MY BAD

Nablopomo_yoda_120x90 All you NABLOPOMO visitors — my deepest apologies.  I blithely signed up for NABLOPOMO and promptly ended up in the hospital for two days (just a scare – I’m fine) which right away made me fail my pledge.  But I also forgot – or didn’t think about — the fact that I can’t use a computer on Shabbat.  Saturdays are no writing, no typing, no computers, TV, radio, telephone days (I know, it sounds weird if you’re not into it and before I started doing it I thought it totally bizarre.  It turns out to be a real pleasure – but I digress.)  Anyway I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to bait and switch.  I just didn’t think.

Oh – and I promise to post AT LEAST 30 posts this month -just not on Saturdays. — And to stay out of the hospital — at least this month.

Fini Bi Bi

Ed_bradley Ed Bradley died today – of leukemia.  He was not a usual man — not at all.  Good, funny, gifted, fierce, loving and decent, he was a gentleman to the core. For two political convention seasons in the 80s I was his CBS News floor producer.  In the midst of one of them, his mother had a stroke and was very ill in Philadelphia.  She wouldn’t let him miss work though – insisted that he be on the convention floor every night.  The convention was in New York , so Ed drove to Philadelphia after we were off the air each night, sleeping in a limo on the way to Philly – spending the night and morning with his mother and then returning in the limo the next day.  He was there for her — and for his work, as she insisted that he be.

If you saw him on 60 Minutes, interviewing Aretha Franklin in the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder, chopping while they talked, or jamming with Aaron Neville, you saw another, wonderful Ed — no pretense, no baloney.  And if you saw him with his godchildren – daughters of the wonderful Vertamae Grovesnor, you saw yet another part of this wonderful man.

Somehow though, when I read the CNN Alert just an hour ago — what I remembered at once was that night in 1975 when Saigon fell.  I was just back from maternity leave and alone on the overnight for the foreign desk at CBS.  As a long-time CBS correspondent in Vietnam, Ed was the last guy out — or just about.  What I can’t get out of my head is his account of walking down the deserted embassy hallway — where almost all the lights were out except one far down the hall — and his description of thinking of “the light at the end of the tunnel” — and then – as he signed off for the last time from Saigon – ending with the words of Saigon hookers “fini bi bi.”  I’m not sure I can describe the sensitivity and sadness of this report – but I do remember sending him an email “Ernie Pyle, move over.”

The thing is – he was at least as wonderful as he was gifted and as talented as he was dear. It’s just so sad to think of him gone and of such a miserable disease.  He’s leaving a beautiful legacy but that doesn’t make it OK.  Not at all.

OH GROW UP! (ARE YOU SURE?)

Jerry_rubin_1 I remember when Jerry Rubin said “Don’t trust anyone over 30.”  Of course as all of us aged, that went out of fashion fairly quickly.  But maybe we should all reconsider.  Look at what Rolling Stone quotes from Rock the Vote:

The Youth Vote: Kingmakers in the Senate

“Young voters increased their turnout over 2002 and favored Democrats by large margins,” said Hans Riemer, Rock the Vote’s political director.  “They played a major role in the Democratic victory.”

A sample of exit polling from close Senate races around the country shows that the youth vote was key to the Democratic victory.
US Senate    18-29 yrs

Dem.    Rep.

Virginia            52%     48%
Rhode Island    65%   35%
Pennsylvania    68%     32%
Ohio              57%       43%
Missouri         49%       48%
Montana         56%      44%

Let’s give them a call-out and stop acting like we’re the only ones who care!

VOTING — VICTORIES AND A MISTAKE – REMOVING JANE HARMAN

OK.  These results are pretty exciting.  But even as we are pleased to see change, ugliness emerges.  I admit it.  I went to college with Jane Harman.  But I never see her; we don’t go to lunch – we don’t even go to the same fundraisers.  In fact, I see her sometimes at college events and that’s it.  But I’ve been very proud of her. 

Jane_harman She has been honorable, smart and fierce in protecting the US through her work on the House Intelligence Committee as its Ranking Member and now, as the Democrats emerge as a majority, the FIRST WOMAN SPEAKER wants to dump her from her chance to Chair of the entire committee.  This is a critical job – not a "woman" or "minority" opportunity but, if anywhere in the House, a place for the best possible PERSON to hold the job.  And she’s going to be pushed aside because of a falling-out with Nancy Pelosi and because of her ability to work across the aisle on the issue where it’s most important to do so.  Am I crazy?  I don’t know the subtleties of this but in my bones it feels wrong.  Speak up please.  I need to know why this is OK if it happens.  It just seems so wrong to me – not only for Jane but for — to be corny — the country.

WONDERFUL WILLIAM STYRON

Styron

In 1968 I was a volunteer in the Eugene McCarthy anti-war presidential campaign.  Most of the time I took care of the press, riding on the press bus and handling logistics for filing stories and getting to the plane on time.  Frequently, when celebrities were campaigning with the Senator they’d ride for a while on the press bus, so I got to meet some pretty amazing people, from Robert Lowell to Tony Randall to William Styron, who died this week.

Nat_turner_1I had just read The Confessions of Nat Turner, his 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, which I had loved.  I knew of his close friendship with James Baldwin, whom I really admired, and imagined that the book was written partly as a cry for justice for his friend and other black Americans. (OK I was 20, what do you want?)  I sat down beside him on the bus and was able to let him know how much I admired him and his work.

The next day, literally, there was a horrible piece about the book and Styron’s “racism” in some lefty publication (can’t remember which one)  He walked down the aisle of the bus and dropped it in my lap – “see — see what they’re doing to me?” he said sadly.  I have never forgotten that day – the punishment he took for imagining the rage and longing for justice on the part of a charismatic slave — and the sweetness of the man himself.  Only later did I learn of his battles with depression.  I don’t know if it’s true that one must suffer for one’s art, but he certainly did.

Of course, people know him better for Sophie’s Choice and the Meryl Streep film — again about the unimaginable persecution of a minority.  I guess it’s no accident that his wife Rose was so closely tied to Amnesty International for so long.

Anyway I am thinking of him today — of his deep moral sense so well communicated in his work – and of the amazing privilege of knowing him, if only for a little while.

9/11 AND ART

Pattern_recognition One of my favorite books is William Gibson’s PATTERN RECOGNITION.  It’s the story of a "cool hunter" named Cayce Pollard .  Her job is to help worldwide companies evaluate their logos and design for "coolness ."  She’s a gypsy, finding Pilates studios in the cities she visits and completely engaging the reader (at least this one.)  Behind her quite remarkable self, however, lies her grief of the loss of her father in lower Manhattan on September 11.  It’s a shadow that haunts all the elegant activity, spectacular writing and remarkable plot lines that are part of any Gibson work.  Published in 2003, it was one of the early novels dealing with the horrors of that day in 2001.

There have been several since then, as well as, in the past year, three movies including Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center.  IMDB lists 11 altogether, not counting Stone’s new film.  Apparently, at least to those I know who’ve seen them, several of these films are pretty good.

Emperor Last night I finished a book saved, in its last chapters, by that terrible time.  THE EMPEROR’S CHILDREN, by Claire Messud, got spectacular reviews — front page in the Sunday Times Book Review — and sounded great.  What it is is a kind of lesser BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES about lefties living on the West Side (the Beresford is on the cover — not too subtle, right?), their offspring and several other 30-somethings who went to Brown.  The whole point of its 431 pages is to reveal the phony side of the lives of the politically correct with their Central Park West apartments, their kids – haunted by parental successes they can’t match, and the rest of the crew ten years out of college and aimless.  It’s all OK – but not great.  Then, in the middle of a serious act of betrayal by Grand Old Man liberal and a friend of his daughter, two planes hit the World Trade Center — right outside the window of her apartment.  Everything that felt so false for all those pages is rendered just as superficial as we thought it was.

I’m not sure it’s enough for me – maybe if I hadn’t lived 20 years on that very West Side and admired many of those people myself – all the while realizing that maybe many of them weren’t who I wanted them to be, it would make more sense.  I’m not sure why the book irritated me so and maybe that makes it better than I’m telling you it is – but it’s in my head and it’s making me mad.  Can someone else can help me figure out why?

MIRACLE CENTRAL

I know it says “Miracle Central” up there but this is NOT about religion. At least not exactly. I’m at the Cleveland Clinic – one of the most amazing hospitals in the world — so my husband can have his yearly checkup. Why do we fly to Cleveland every year? Even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wouldn’t bring us more than once.

We’re here because at this hospital four years ago a doctor cut open his chest, and then his heart, and saved his life. It pretty much was a miracle. So we like them to get a look at him once a year — to make sure he’s ok. It’s harder for me to walk into the hotel here than it is for him, I think. He was in congestive heart failure and scared but kind of beyond reality the day we arrived, and then he stayed in the hospital while the boys and I stayed at the hotel. After the surgery he was on medications and then struggling to get his strength back. The small details of illness, and families hoping for the best, were lost on him. Two years ago, when we made an extra trip to go through the same surgery with a good friend and his family, we were so focused on the particulars of his situation that the human dramas beyond them faded well into the background.

But tonight, sitting in the “club lounge” of the hotel attached to the hospital, listening to people with cancer and heart disease and weird combinations of neurological and heart problems and their families – and watching them laugh and tease one another and struggle to be brave, I was just knocked out. First of all it’s a beautiful thing to see — we see it every year when we come here — the way families take care of one another and support each other — and the other families they meet over breakfast or coffee — through what is a truly terrifying experience. Until you see a loved one on a gurney, being wheeled down a long hall toward life-and-death surgery, as alone as he will ever be — as you stand with your kids trying to smile for him — you can’t imagine.

Secondly – it’s an outrage to see such magnificent health care and realize how few people get it. This hospital is run so brilliantly and with such pride; each staff member so competent, confident and gracious that you just want to hug all of them. It’s still possible to offer good health care in the US — and it’s as much about good management as it is about money. I wish you could see it. We should NOT be allowing the wonders of American health care to fade away without a fight. If you want to see what we’re losing, come to Cleveland. Don’t give up those miracles without a fight!

PUMPKINS, HAYRIDES AND MICKEY MOUSE

Mickey I’ve wanted to go on a hayride since Annette Funicello did – in maybe "Spin and Marty" or maybe "Annette" — not sure which (these were Mickey Mouse Club stories, for those who are too young to recall.)  Today I got my hayride – but it wasn’t the romantic kind with the guitars and the moonlight.

Hay_ride

Instead, we went with two amazing children and their equally amazing parents to a pumpkin festival.  There was a hayride (pulled by a tractor, not horses.)  There was a petting zoo with goats and lambs and pigs.  There was a simple wooden climbing thing in the shape of a train, with a tunnel and a caboose and a dining car (picnic table in a kind of box.)  It was just wonderful and, nostalgic as we are for the early years of our own kids, we were ridiculously grateful to be included in this family adventure. 

We also were amazed that there were no souvenirs.  No muzak.  No fancy, produced play apparatus.  The same stuff at this orchard/pumpkin patch/pre-school heaven must have been there for 25 years.  And the kids were having a blast.  They didn’t need fancy stuff or animated stuff or even stuff with fresh paint — just a gorgeous fall day, parents (and their friends) who loved them and their imaginations.  I know this sounds really corny but after years at Disneyland and Disneyworld and Universal City (and we had fun — we did) I was just so struck by the simplicity of this place and its impact on these very very happy kids running around in a big field, putting pumpkins into wheelbarrows to take home, eating popcorn and racing their parents up and down the paths.

No moral to this except if you have friends you like who love your kids, bring them along.