The K.F. Stone Weekly

It's Getting To Be Howard Beale Time

   I hope you all remember who Howard Beale was.  To refresh our memories, he was the insane newscaster played by the great Peter Finch in the 1976 Sidney Lumet film "Network."  If you will recall, when Beale's bosses, the executives of the fictional UBS television network decided their star anchorman was getting a bit long in the tooth, they handed him his pink slip.  Well, old Howard took to the air ranting and raving, threatening to commit suicide on camera, and, in a classically memorable, maniacal peroration, proclaimed: "I want you to get up now.  I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window.  Open, and stick your head out, and yell, I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!" 

The upshot of Beale's on-camera meltdown was that he became an American icon, got his own daily half-hour program, and proceeded to "tell it like it is" until ultimately, his utter honesty did him in.  "Network," of course, is pure satire which, as Molly Ivins reminds us is "the weapon of the powerless against the powerful."  Well, I'm feeling a might powerless these days, and really want to do something about it.

   "And so," you may well ask, "what's making you feel powerless this fine day?  What's different about today than yesterday or the day before?"  Let me tell you.  While hovering over my word processor, busily sketching out an article on Global Warming -- the issue to end all issues -- I got a text message to call my cellular phone company ASAP.  I knew exactly what they wanted.  You see, I've been fighting with them for more than six weeks now.  Back and forth we go, them claiming that I am in arrears on my February payment, and me trying as nicely as possible to explain that according to my records [backed up by the good folks at my local bank], they received the payment weeks and weeks ago.  Moreover, in a three-way conversation between me, my banking agent and one of the cellular company's drone-like representatives, we seemed to have nipped the snafu in the bud.  That is, until today.

   After listening to the recorded ten-minute list of options ["Press twenty-four to detonate nuclear device . . ."], and the disclaimer that "for purposes of efficiency, this call may be monitored" I finally reached a human being.  Well, I think he was human.  First he verified my cell phone number, which obviously had shown up on his I.D. caller.  Then I told him my name, immediately after which he asked me to give him my name. How's that you ask?   Why would he ask me for my name just a nano-second after I had given it to him?  Probably because that was step #2 on his list of things to do.  Remember, this is a person who likely makes little more than the minimum wage, probably hates what he does, and blindly follows orders. Next, he informed me that "for purposes of identification" I would have to supply him with the last four digits on my Social Security number. 

   "No thanks," I told the hapless drone.  "I'm not going to give you any part of my Social Security number. I don't give out that information to anyone but the I.R.S., and then only under duress."

   "Then I cannot speak with you about your account," he answered mechanically .

   "By law, you cannot require my Social Security number as a means of identification." I waited for a response . . . a word, a cough, a sneeze . . . anything to let me know he was still on the line. 

  "Are  you still there?" I asked.  Hearing what I took to be an affirmative grunt, I continued:  "And besides, if you have my cell phone number, you undoubtedly already have my home address, marital status, the names of my pets, my Social Security number and, for all I know, my blood type as well." I told him all this with as much politesse as I could muster under the circumstances.

   "Then I cannot speak with you about your account," he repeated.

   "Look," I remonstrated, "I'll tell you why you called me, and that will prove that I am who I claim to be."  I then gave him a quick twenty-twenty on the situation with the bill snafu, the three-way conversation we had had a few weeks back, and the cellular representative's conclusion that yes indeed, the problem must be on their part.

   "If you will check the computer file under my cell number, I'm positive that you will find a record of this conversation," I said, with not quite so much politesse. 

   "One moment," he said, and put me on hold.  I was on hold for precisely 13 minutes and 42 seconds, before I heard breathing on the other end of the line.  Eureka!  I thought.  We're making progress!!

   "So what did you find out?" I asked, a slight note of victory in my voice.

   "I'm sorry, I cannot discuss this matter with you unless you give me the last four digits of your Social Security number."

   At this point, I figured I had but two options: to put a hex on him, his ancestors and the company that employed him, or to merely say "thanks for nothing fella," and quietly ring off.  Although I'm sure Howard Beale wouldn't agree, I chose option number two.  Believe me, option one would have made me feel quite a bit better, but one does try to be a gentleman . . .

   I am sure that most everyone has been through contretemps like this, and no doubt feels just as angry, just as powerless.  It's not just a cell phone lackey mindlessly reading from a prepared script.  It's not just being asked for the umpteen thousandth time to give someone my Social Security number [which I do not give out.]  And its not just being made to feel like an ultra-microscopic germ in the vast corporate body politic.  No, its an overarching, overwhelming feeling that we -- the great collective "we" -- have all become bit players in someone else's tragicomedy. Nothing seems to work anymore.  Our leaders only listen to those who have bottomless pockets.  Teachers can't teach and students don't learn.  Our foods are saturated with fat, sugar and petrochemicals.  Our balance of payments is totally out of whack.  The federal minimum wage hasn't been raised since Ben Franklin was in grade school.  The entire globe has become just another venue for Wal-Mart.  The people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast continue living in dire want while the folks in Washington continue sitting on their duffs. And on and on and on . . .

   Poll after poll shows that we, the great American majority, are dissatisfied, disgruntled and suspicious.  And yet, do you know what they're debating about this very week in the United States Senate?  Whether to enact one Constitutional amendment that would make it a federal crime to burn the flag, and another that would make it illegal for any state, county or municipality to permit two people of the same sex to marry.  Excuse me?  This is what matters?  Who in their right mind would ever believe that Congress would even consider Constitutional amendments that seek to limit individual freedoms?  And at a time like this?  Does the expression "Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" come to mind?

   I for one think it's Howard Beale time; time for all of us to get out of our chairs, go to the window, and shout out that "WE'RE MAD AS HELL AND WE'RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE!!"

   In this case, however, I am sure that Howard would want us to do a heck of a lot more than merely screaming out into the night.  He would want us to roll up our sleeves, pick an area of concern, and then find like-minded people who also want to enact positive change.  We cannot wait for some visionary to come along and give us a national challenge, for that challenge may never come.  We cannot sit back and wonder just who we're waiting for to lead us out of the morass. 

   As a very bright fellow back in the Berkeley days use to say, "WE'RE THE PEOPLE WE'VE BEEN WAITING FOR!"

   

Of Prophets and Priests

   They [whoever "they" may be] say that death always comes in threes.  Sometimes they're right, and sometimes they're wrong.  The first time I ever recall hearing this so-called truism given voice was way back in 1958, "the day the music died."  That's when a plane went down, taking in a single horrific instant, the lives of rock icons Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper. Sometimes its in twos: back on November 22, 1963, in addition to JFK, the British writer Aldous Huxley had the great misfortune of shuffling off this mortal coil.  I say "to his great misfortune, for as a result of passing away on this precise date, his death -- which under any other conceivable circumstance would have been front-page news -- was, as Grandpa used to say, "buried beneath the truss ads on page 64."

   Now mind you, deaths [whether in threes or twos] don't have to be on the same day in order to fulfill the nameless oracle's bit of wisdom.  Back in late 1960/early 1961, within a matter of weeks, the world lost cinematic titans Clark Gable and Gary Cooper and popular singer ("The Ballad of New Orleans") Johnny Horton.  And just this week, two giants of the religious world, The Rev. William Sloane Coffin and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, both went to their great reward. 

   The rabbi and the reverend; the reverend and the rabbi.  Sloane Coffin and Hertzberg; Hertzberg and Sloane Coffin.  On the surface, they were two very dissimilar types: Hertzberg, an eastern-European Jew who immigrated to America in the late 1920s, and Sloane Coffin, the scion of an American family that could trace its lineage back to colonial days.  Hertzberg, who spent his early years studying at an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva in Baltimore, and Sloane Coffin, who prepped at Phillips Andover and graduated from Yale. One became a Conservative rabbi, the other a Presbyterian Minister.

   And yet, despite these -- and many other -- surface differences, the two men were remarkably similar in a host of other, vastly more intrinsic ways. Both spent years preaching from pulpits: Hertzberg at Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, New Jersey, and Sloane Coffin, first as Chaplain at Yale, and then, for many years at New York's magisterial Riverside Church.  Both men burned with the fire of prophetic vision.  Neither could sit on the sidelines, idly observing society's ills.  Both firmly believed that their respective religious traditions -- Judaism and Christianity -- commanded them to be proactive agents of progressive change.  As a result, both men became focal points in the American Civil Rights movement; both marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and rode busses with Southern Freedom Riders; both became voices for the voiceless; both were fearless in their pursuit of justice, mercy and equality.   

   Neither man could resist the arena of combat.  According to Hertzberg, "A rabbi should be where the real issues of society are, not where the safe platitudes are to be preached."  Sloan Coffin's take was much the same: "The prophetic role is the disturber of peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire social order under some judgment.  If one plays a prophetic role, it's going to mitigate against his priestly role.  There are going to be those who will hate him."

   William Sloane Coffin became an icon to the entire generation of 60s anti-war activists.  He was tireless in helping a generation of young men resist the draft, and unstinting in his efforts to bring about an end to nuclear weapons.  For his efforts, Sloane Coffin was arrested, tried and convicted [along with the late Dr. Benjamin Spock] of conspiracy to aid and abet disobedience of the Selective Service Act.  [Their convictions were later overturned.]

   Arthur Hertzberg -- who lost most of his family in the Holocaust -- was instrumental in promoting and establishing the Catholic-Jewish dialogue that became one of the hallmarks of the papacy of John XXIII.  In the early 1970s, the good rabbi chaired the first Jewish delegation to meet formally with Vatican leaders and discuss the Church's complicity and silence in the murder of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

   Today, our airwaves are filled with the faces, voices and cadences of a generation of preachers who, in comparison to Hertzberg and Sloan Coffin, have lost their moral compass.  Their understanding of God, Jesus and Scripture often leads them to side with the so-called "haves and have-mores" while neglecting God's command that we clothe the naked, feed the hungry and provide for the homeless.  Far too often, these blow-dried prophets of profit use religion as a wedge that essentially turns one segment of society against another, rather than as a compress that helps heal our wounds.  Where Hertzberg and Sloane Coffin were always striving to improve a nation and a people for whom they had boundless love, the current crop seems to continence love for the unborn and disdain for those living in need. 

   From the perspective of 2006, its hard to believe that not so long ago, religious leaders were at the forefront of progressive movements; that men and women of faith put their faith on the line in order to make the world a better place for everyone.  The way the Robertsons, Falwells, Dobsons and Kennedys carry on brings to mind an old bromide of Mark Twain: "Christianity's a fine religion that's never been tried."

   Without question, the world is greatly impoverished with the passing of these two spiritual giants.  Their courage, conviction and compassion made them ceaseless warriors in the battle for equality and human dignity.  Its sad to report that were they just beginning their respective careers in the early 21st century, they probably wouldn't be able to hold a job.  For today, in-house religious leaders are often expected to be a combination of institutional executive and entertainer.  To Hertzberg and Sloan Coffin -- the rabbi and the reverend -- the job (or calling, if you will) was one part prophet, and one part priest.

   May their names, their memories and their achievements, be honored for generations yet unborn.  And may a new generation of rabbis and reverends arise who, like Arthur Hertzberg and William Sloane Coffin, will burn with the fire of prophetic vision.  As Sloane Coffin often said, "God loves you the way you are, but knows that you can do better . . ." 

Behold: This Is The Dread of Conviction

   For Jews the world over, this is the paschal week, the springtime festival when family and friends gather round a festive table and recount the Exodus from Egypt.  Without question, Passover's overarching message -- that freedom beats slavery hands-down -- is universal in scope. As the great Laura Nyro wrote years and years ago, "All the world over it's so easy to see, people everywhere just just gotta be free."  It ain't brain surgery.

    As every Jewish schoolchild knows, each object on the ceremonial Seder plate is fraught with symbolic meaning -- from the bowl of salt water, which reminds us of the tears our ancestors shed while enslaved, to that sweet concoction called charoset, which represents the mortar the Hebrew slaves used in building all those ghastly monuments to the pharaohs of Egypt.  Standing supreme over all these and other symbols is, of course, matza, the flat, brittle, and entirely tasteless bread our ancestors made in the haste of their final liberation.  In Aramaic, it is called lachma anya: "The bread of affliction."

   To a non-Jew, the Passover table ritual might seem to be a bit of a snooze.  After all, the pre- and post-meal service has remained remarkably constant for more than 2,000 years.  Year in, year out, we recite the same prayers, read same passages, and sing the same songs.  A snooze?  Not on your Tanta Frumeh.  For despite the familiarity and similarity of the Passover ritual, each year can and should be different. In what for me is the most Seder's most compelling passage, we are told: ". . . even if we were all of us wise, all of us people of knowledge and understanding, all of us learned in the [Jewish] Law, it nevertheless would be incumbent upon us to speak of the departure from Egypt . . . and all of those who [do so] are accounted praiseworthy."         

   And so, we ask questions.  Always questions.  One question which arose at last night's Seder was particularly trenchant.  "Why," our daughter Nurit asked, "if it took the sons of Jacob a mere six weeks to go from Egypt to Canaan, bury their father and then make the return trek from Canaan to Egypt, why did it take the Israelites forty years to make that same journey?"  Why indeed?  The answer, fortunately, is provided by the rabbis of old.  And within their answer we find an incredible lesson that should be emailed to he who currently resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

   According to the rabbis, God caused the Israelites to spend forty years in the wilderness because Co* [see below] wanted to insure that none of those who entered Canaan -- the land of freedom -- would have been from the generation of the enslaved.  Period.  End of lesson.  What does that mean?  What's so incredibly brilliant about the answer?  As we say, Vell I'll tell 'ya:

  The rabbis of old recognized that between turning a free person into a slave and transforming a slave into a free person, the latter was the vastly more difficult [though praiseworthy] task.  Freedom to slavery?  Simple.  Just point knives, spears, lashes, guns or bombs at a people, instill the fear of death into them and voila!  . . . you've got instant slavery. But the opposite -- creating free people where once there was slavery -- that involves years -- perhaps generations -- of patient, deliberate instruction and role-modeling. And here is precisely the lesson that I wish to God our benighted president would have learned before setting his horrendous foreign-policy/military juggernaut into action.  In terms that are simple enough for even "W" to understand, there is no way on earth that you can expect the slaves of Saddam to become democrats overnight.  Merely toppling the task master does not make the enslaved free.  Without intelligent, deliberate, and thoroughly well-conceived plans for how to proceed once tyranny has been expunged, any future deed is little more than an act of fatuous sand-castle building.

   One  might hope -- even expect -- that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Republican brain trust would have consulted something more than their own ego-driven, self-serving crystal balls before going into Iraq.  It might have saved us from all the lies, kept hundreds of billions of dollars from disappearing down a bottomless rat hole, and spared thousands upon thousands of human lives. If only they had been thinking clearly, if only they had actually sought out the advice of those who truly understand how the world works, if only they hadn't believed their own lies -- like turning a mobile trailer for making weather balloons into a facility for manufacturing WMDs -- they might have actually stood a chance for transforming slaves into free men and women.  But as things stand now -- and for what I fear will be years and years to come -- they have managed to turn Saddam's slaves into Rumsfeld's rebels.  Yes, it was without question a positive good to depose Saddam. What has occurred since is, of course, a horse of a different colour.

   Passover has long served the Jewish people as a goad; an eternal reminder that people everywhere just gotta be free. From generation to generation we have been warned that forgetting this lesson -- that taking our freedom for granting -- is tantamount to planting the seeds for future enslavement.  Perhaps that is why we Jews have always been at the forefront of liberation movements -- whether it be as abolitionists in the mid-19th century or as civil rights marchers in the mid 20th.  Each year, we eat the bread of affliction, taste the bitter herb of enslavement and seek new answers to age-old questions.  And likewise, each year we rededicate ourselves to the liberation of those who are oppressed.  But we are taught -- year in and year out -- that freedom comes with a patient price.  That is something of which the Bush White House is blithely and willfully ignorant.

   And because of that willful ignorance, they eat not the "bread of affliction," but, rather, contemplate the "threat of conviction."

   Chag samayach l'culahm -- A Happy Passover to one and all!

   And best wishes for a happy, meaningful Easter to all our Christian brothers and sisters.

* Co is a gender-inclusive pronoun that I use for the Divine.  It replaces the clunkier "He/She" or "He or She."   

   

   

 

June Cleaver For President?

   Ever get that eerie feeling that you must have been asleep at the switch; that somehow you missed out on a bunch of stuff that everybody else seems to knows about?  Well, that's how I've been feeling of late.  Every time I read my local paper or listen to talk radio, it seems that somehow I must have slept through the 2006 midterm elections; that it's really April 2008, and we're now in the midst of presidential fever.  Yikes!  I must have been asleep for two years!  Twenty-four months!  One-hundred and four weeks!  Seven-hundred and thirty days!  Is it true?  It must be.

    How else to explain the Republicans' virtual kamikaze assaults on the person of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton?  Why would so many Republicans be wasting so much ink and hot air on attacking a woman when, in reality, all she's running for is reelection to the United States Senate?  If this is truly 2008, then perhaps it is understandable; after all, Republicans hate Senator Clinton the way a hasid abhors lobster.  But its not 2008.  It's 2006, and yet the good senator is nonetheless being accused of everything from duplicity and menopausal insanity to monomania and utter, contemptible hubris.  Is this the best strategy the Republicans can field in their benighted attempt to hold on to the House and Senate in the upcoming elections?  Is this a national strategy, to run against Hillary Clinton?  What about issues?  What about Iraq, the deficit, immigration, ethics in government, global warming and a thousand-and-one far more crucial matters? 

   Oh yes.  I forgot.  They can't run on these issues because they would have a tendency to remind the American voting public of what an execrable job they've been doing these past 6 years.  Merely serving up the "Remember 9/11!!" fastball won't cut it. Democrats can score a lot of runs by taking aim at the likes of Tom DeLay, Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham and Dick Cheney , and likely clinch victory by running better, more honest, less imperial candidates than the GOP. 

   And yet, from the Republican perspective, it is 2008.  They're trying to convince Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that a vote for any Democrat is a vote for Senator Clinton.  Boy oh boy: talk about a strategy from hell! 

   Of course, bashing Hillary Rodham Clinton is nothing new.  Back in the latter 70s, when I was a student rabbi down in McGehee, Arkansas, I remember how Hillary was pilloried for her coke-bottle glasses, her absolute lack of style sense, and for using her maiden -- rather than her married -- name.  Well, she got the message, got a pair of contact lenses, started wearing more fashionable clothes, and asked the press to begin referring to her as Hillary Clinton.  [The "Rodham-Clinton" appellation would not come about for many years].  Then there was the bashing that took place when, during the 1992 presidential race, Mrs. Clinton told Barbara Walters that she simply wasn't a "cookie baking sort of mom."  That went over like condoms in a convent. For weeks, the so-called "liberal media" hashed out whether it was better to have regal Barbara Bush or Ivy-educated Hillary Clinton as First Lady.  Even the white-haired matriarch from Texas added her two cents, claiming that "I'm too much of a lady to tell you what I think about her, but it is a word that rhymes with w-i-t-c-h."

   Then, when she did become First Lady, Hillary Clinton continued to be lambasted; for being too strident, too impatient, too authoritative.  What America needed -- and expected -- we were told, was a First Lady who would stand by her man and perhaps take up an issue like highway beautification or the plight of the Ruby-throated Sparrow.  What, and waste degrees from Wellesley and the Yale Law School?  Not on your life. 

   As Senator -- and a darned good one at that -- she has continued to be the favorite target of radio talkers from Washington to Winnetka.  And as speculation about her running for president in '08 increases, the volume and intensity of attack has manifestly increased. Just the other day, Joe Scarborough devoted an entire segment of his MSNBC program -- "Scarborough Country" -- to an expose on Senator Clinton; of how she had essentially trashed the White House.  What?  Trashed?  According to Ronald Kessle, author of Laura Bush: An Intimate Portrait of A First Lady, Mrs. Bush was "quietly dismayed by the decor the Clintons left behind in the White House."  Now there's an indictment!

   Moreover, Scarborough and Company let us in on a deep dark secret: that Laura Bush "thought that not only were the [White House] carpets and furnishings fraying and in disrepair, but that the Oval Office was done in loud colors -- red, blue and gold -- and that the Lincoln Bedroom was outdated and needed updating."  How's that for an overly repetitive redundancy?

   Another Scarborough guest, Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus, firmly asserted that "taking care of the White House and the decor and keeping it in order is basically what the first lady does."  Jacobus went on to claim [first-hand knowledge coming up here] that Mrs. Clinton "didn't want the job" because she wanted her husband's job."  Scarborough agreed that Laura Bush is far more in keeping with the "traditional" First Lady model -- a model that Mr. Scarborough no doubt believes came down from Mt. Sinai.  Haven't they ever heard of Eleanor Roosevelt, the archetypal First Lady who won over the nation with her energy, determination and political savvy? 

   To listen to all those who've been harping on Senator Clinton these past thirty years, one would think that America's feminine paragon was June Cleaver -- a woman who never had a hair out of place, always wore an apron, and seldom left the house. For my money, women -- whether they be doctors, lawyers, senators or First Ladies -- have come a long, long way since the days of Beaver Cleaver's mommy.  As the not-so-old bumper sticker said: "A Woman's Place is in the House -- and the Senate!"

   Personally, I'm not sold just yet on the idea of Senator Clinton running for president.  At this point in time, I would rather see her remain in the United States Senate; as I said above, she's one heck of a fine Senator.  Perhaps I will change my mind by 2008; perhaps not.  Nonetheless, I think its high time for America to see the Republican "Bash Hillary at every turn and any cost" strategy for what it is: a wet blanket thrown over the ashes of a politically, intellectually and morally smoldering heap of failure.

   Perhaps its the Republicans who have been asleep . . .