The End Times

First Lines - There's Probably an App for This

2011-04-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

So does a great novel need a killer opening line? Are some great openings wasted on terrible novels? I collected the four opening sentences below at random over the past few months, just to see how they stack up - to each other, to the books they begin, and on their own. Of the four, the one that struck me the most forcefully was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the title short story in a collection by the 20th-century English writer Alan Sillitoe. In one smooth, uncluttered sentence, Sillitoe sets the scene and at the same instant gets the story off and running - a model of grace and economy. Hemingway nearly does the same thing, but he's really jamming stuff into the sentence. Orwell's can't help but grab the reader. I considered including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but its first sentence is a fragment. No dice. Good book, though.

"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." The Old Man and the Sea

'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984

“As soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner.” The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.” Don Quixote

So send me your favorite first lines - best and worst. But no Dickens ("It was the best of times...") or Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night.")

This Week's Trivia

2011-04-16T18:47:00.000-07:00

I've been collecting interesting trivia (is that an oxymoron?). Once I reach ten items, I'll post them. Here's the first installment. Read on and learn...if you dare.

Ho Chi Minh, the father of modern Viet Nam, left what was then French Indochina on a steamship in 1911, at the age of 21. He did not set foot in his native country for another 30 years.

Most people recognize the name of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—the Enola Gay—but not that of the B-52 that dropped the bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki a few days later: Bocks Car.

Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town is staged, on average, somewhere in the world every night.

The longest English word that you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand is “stewardesses.”

Massachusetts voters have not elected a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years.

Some of the names that the Beatles considered (and rejected) for their seventh studio album were: Beatles on Safari, Pendulum, Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle, Magical Circles, Abracadabra, and After Geography. The band eventually agreed on Revolver.

In Elizabethan England, about a quarter of the male population was named John. The pool of common first names numbered fewer than 40 for each gender. 70% of men were named John, Thomas, William, Richard, or Robert.

In German, the equivalent of the phrase “It’s all Greek to me” (meaning “I don’t understand the subject”) is “It’s all Bohemian villages to me.”

No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of British Prime Ministers since the 1700s, contains about 100 rooms.

Rock n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry now holds the copyright to the Beach Boys’ first #1 single, “Surfin’ USA,” because the band stole the entire song from the Berry composition “Sweet Little Sixteen.”

Another Viet Nam? You bet.

2009-10-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

CNN is reporting the results of a new poll that 6 in 10 of Americans questioned feel like the American commitment in Afghanistan could turn into another Viet Nam. That has already happened.

A few weeks ago my toddler knocked a bunch of books off a low shelf, one of them being Stanley Karnow's excellent Viet Nam: A History. So I re-read parts of that.

(I am in the camp contending that the central folly of our Viet Nam War was the belief that Ho Chi Minh was essentially a Communist, when he was in fact a nationalist. If the Best and the Brightest had viewed the Viet Cong--and Viet Minh before them--through that prism, they would have rightly judged the war unwinnable. )

The US support of Diem in the late '50s and early '60s is what really caught my eye. He was corrupt in the way that such a leader in such a circumstance needs to be corrupt to survive. He also stuffed ballot boxes, all with the acquiescence of the US government, including the Democratic Administration of JFK. He was our puppet.

You may not remember a certain news story back in the heady days after the fall of the Taliban in 2002. The grandees of tribal Afghanistan gathered for their tribal loya jirga (a political convention, for these purposes), to form the Afghanistan Transitonal Administration. Hamid Karzai was trotted out on stage at one point to accept the jirga's election of himself as President. Except that the participants had not yet cast their votes. Whoops. Strike one for his handlers.

I guess that was my first clue that we were setting him up as our puppet. And now look. Opium trade accounts for, by one estimate, HALF of the country's GDP. Wow. The country is falling apart so completely that some Afghans would rather have the hated Taliban running the show than the corrupt officialdom now bleeding them dry. And Karzai can't buy himself an election.

Diem was assassinated by coup plotters in November 1963, also with the acquiescence of JFK, coincidentally only a few weeks before he met a similar fate in Dealy Plaza. What followed were increasingly corrupt and weak presidents (I'm talking about Viet Nam here.) We need to change policy but fast in Afghanistan.

The US at first raised only minimal "concerns" about what was obviously overwhelming fraud--because he is our guy. But now he may be going the way of Diem.

Have a Super Sunday

2009-02-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

Today is Super Bowl Sunday, commemorating the playing of Super Bowl XXXLCMIV. I am observing this holiday by inviting 374 of my drunkenest college-educated friends over. To avoid the usual frenzy at the supermarket, I did all my shopping yesterday, but even so I had to knock over two elderly men to grab the last 13 cases of Budweiser off the shelf. I bought a 25-pound bag of potato chips, and the batch of guacamole I made is so big that FDA agents have already visited my house 3 times for health violations and made me issue a recall.

I Thought No One Was Looking

2009-01-23T17:17:00.000-08:00

There's a rash of embarrassing behavior going around. It's called I Thought No One Was Looking. It happens when you engage in moderately sinful behavior that you think is OK because it's very unlikely you'll get caught--but when you do, you look like a grade-A ass because you have no excuse.

Exhibit A is Timothy Geithner. Cheated on his taxes. Case closed. "Careless." "Innocent." "Mistake." Whatever. He cheated on his taxes. Even President Smooth couldn't gloss this over. "It's an embarrassment," he said a couple of weeks ago. Truer words never were spoken.

(Note to Tim Geithner: From now on, just assume the IRS is looking.)

I'm not talking about Bill Richardson and his steering of state contracts to campaign donors, or Rod Blagojevich (the Liberace of corruption), or Ted Stevens and his souped-up ski chalet full of "gifts" he alleged he didn't want, or...well, the list just goes on. That stuff is all felony worthy.

Then we have Caroline Kennedy. I'm not talking here about the ridiculous and shifting list of reasons she and her anonymous flacks gave for her "dropping out" of the New York senate sweepstakes. ("My uncle is sick." No, there are tax and "nanny" problems. No, there is an as-yet undisclosed personal reason. Meanwhile, the Governor says, I was never going to pick her anyway.)

I'm talking about the revelations a few weeks ago that she has almost never voted. That is an abdication of civic duty for any American, but just shameful for someone of her pedigree: Father was president. Uncles were US Senators. Two cousins (at least) have served in Congress. When did she not get the memo about how important it is to vote? What possible excuse could she have for not voting? I vote in every single election in my town, every city council race, every Congressional primary, every special referendum election. Her reasoning, I imagine, was: I never thought anyone would notice.

This is about white lies--and maybe a little worse--and it's about context. Cheating on your taxes is not drunk-driving wrong, or adultery wrong, or smoking-near-my-child wrong. But it looks awful dumb when you're suddenly put in charge of the IRS. And you have nothing to say except, "It was an innocent mistake."

Not voting is not the biggest sin in the world either. But for someone who wants to serve in the most select legislative body in the world, it's positively disqualifying. You simply cannot explain that away.

Tim Geithner will, I hope, still have enough credibility to serve as an effective Treasury Secretary and help lead us out of our current mess. Caroline Kennedy, though, is done in politics forever, unless she wants to put in a decade or two on her local school board to regain a shred of believability as someone who cares about public service.

That's my view from up in the frozen north of Hollywood, at least. What say my Tri State readers?

Move Over, Millard Fillmore

2009-01-22T18:01:00.000-08:00

That's my message to George W. Bush. Inauguration Day was a wonderful day for America, rare, fine, cloudless and cold. For a single day at least we could look to the future--and its enormous, planetary challenges--with hope and pride even amid our trepidation.

I was very skeptical of Barack Obama until well into the primary season because of his inexperience, but his every move over the summer and fall won me over: the discipline, the intelligence, the seriousness and lack of drama, the move towards solving our problems and away from partisan (and intra-mural) squabbling. His acceptance speech in Grant Park and the transition to the White House were further evidence of, at the very least, a basic competence that was like a tonic, throwing the cronyism and secrecy surrounding 43 into sharp relief.

His inaugural address spoke beautifully to this moment. It did everything it should have done: soothed our fears, excited our hopes, and perhaps will eventually inspire the best of us. That is no small job for a speech that must be everything to everybody. You can view it again and read the text on the BBC.

President Obama was right to challenge us--all of us--in the speech because one thing is clear now: Those of us on the left will have to accept compromise and disappointment as he and his team forge solutions. And we must work with him to do it. We all have to partake of the tough choices ahead: on health care, military spending, climate change, financial restoration and a host of other serious problems. Tuesday we woke from a long sleepwalk. America has to start living within its means.

Tom Paine started off his pamphlet The Crisis with these words:

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value."

And W.? One last thing: You would not even have made a good vice president.

Some Poet

2009-01-07T06:52:00.000-08:00

Tough times in the publishing industry, according to this New York Times article, Puttin’ Off the Ritz: The New Austerity in Publishing. Long lunches and annual retreats to Bermuda are out, replaced by web-cam meetings and (shudder) teleconferences.

Amanda Urban, an agent for Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, makes a valid point about the price point of books in general. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”

The end of this statement is simply hilarious, though, and defies further comment from me.

And this quote from the same story:

“Everybody is trying to look at acquisitions in the prism of a reduced and a hurting retail market,” said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster. “You used to buy some books and you paid X because you figured it would sell 100,000 copies. Now you have to do the math saying this book may sell only 50,000 copies.”

Talk about lazy talking and lazy thinking. These people come off as doofuses. Did publishing companies not "do the math" before September of this year? I seriously doubt that. I'm sure their corporate parents and bean-counters never let them fling around huge contracts willy-nilly.

The Great Debate

2008-09-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

Last night's presidential debate at Ole Miss was a missed opportunity. When we could have heard serious conversation about what the real opportunity costs of a $700 billion bailout are likely to be, we came away unconvinced that either candidate truly understood the bailout package, other alternatives and the causes of our banking meltdown. When we could have had serious engagement about our insane tax code, we got lowest common denominator tit-for-tat and campaign sloganeering. When we could and should have heard the candidates had , the word "Iraq" was not mentioned until 40 minutes into the debate.

Untouched were areas where America desperately needs true leadership and difficult decisions: retooling our economy to address climate change, ensuring the long-term solvency of Social Security and Medicare, fixing an inhumane health-care "system" that is crippling American businesses.

Obama should have landed several haymakers on the old gent. Perhaps it looks more presidential if he stays away from the more vicious attacks and addresses the voters in a measured way.

McCain meanwhile comes across neither as a total warmonger or a dotard. My dominant impression was of his egomania. Everything was about him and about tooting his own horn. "They called me the sheriff" because he opposed earmarks. "I'm the Senate's original maverick!" he crows about the nickname his campaign seems to have contrived for him, sounding like he's hawking New Coke. Obama, on the other hand, comes across as much humbler, in fact invisible sometimes, using the royal "we" that must be natural for all candidates, who appear alone before the voters but in reality are in conference constantly with advisers, managers and spouses.

McCain's closing statement was impressive: brief, straight-ahead and powerful. It had a strange opening, though: "When I got out of prison..." My wife and I looked at each other. Prison? Was he in a Johnny Cash song or something? Of course he meant the Vietnamese POW camp, but still, I had never heard him refer to it that way.

Avon, Phillips, Madrid

2008-09-06T07:04:00.000-07:00

The road north of Farmington to Rangeley, Maine is a favorite drive of mine. In August, the wife and I bundled up the baby, shelved our Blackberries (mine is a really cool silver color called Lunar Glow), and jumped off the hectic 24/7 whirlygig of modern life here in Hollywood to go camping in Rangeley for a weekend. (Full disclosure: I am lying. My sister and brother and their families camped; we stayed at the Rangeley Inn and joined them for 'smores.)

North of Farmington on Route 4 one follows the Sandy River, a wide stream full of boulders that weaves back and forth under the road. The forest is lush here in the summer, everything is overgrown, and one focuses on the deep green of the trees. There is not a lot going on here any longer. Rangeley is a hopping town, a "four season tourist town" with spectacular fall foliage, a ski resort and camping and watersports in the summer. (What do they do in the spring? Mud sightseeing? Mud snowmobiling? No idea. )

But driving out of Farmington, through Avon, Phillips and Madrid, this time, I was struck by the number of empty houses. The area is very slowly losing its population. There is little forest products industry anymore, once the dominant source of jobs in northern Maine. In Phillips a large logyard and sawmill sits at a fork in the road. Now the yard is empty and the mill is quiet. That's new from the last time I was there.

A few years ago the town of Madrid was "de-organized," a term of art describing the dissolution of an incorporated Maine town. The townspeople vote to dissolve their town and throw their municipal functions back onto a state agency with the acronym LURC, which is pronounced, ominously, "lurk." It's a little sad driving through this crossroads now. The sign is still there on Route 4 though: "Welcome to Madrid, 1807." (Madrid is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable here.)

(A description of Madrid from 1886 is here, including a mention of Smalls Falls, one of the reasons this drive is one of my favorites. The town then had 437 residents.)

There's nothing but trees here now; why in God's name would anyone have moved to this inaccessible wilderness in 1807? What did they think would be here in 200 years? Would they be disappointed, or were they headed up here to escape the law or a landlord or the colonial equivalent of the Blackberry?

Today there is basically only one way to get to Avon, Phillips and Madrid, and that is to drive for three hours from Portland (or fly in to the airfield in Phillips, I guess). 200 years ago the only way was over rutted and rocky wagon trails, by horse or by foot. Starting in the 1870s, a series of small railroads sprang up to serve these towns. (The founding of so many tiny railroad systems in Maine seems pretty mind-boggling, considering that, in my lifetime, it took decades for consumers and government to restore passenger rail service from Boston to Portland.)

Tall hills on either side of the Sandy River dictated that roads and railbeds follow the river valley, and the paved roads today trace those early routes. It's easier to get to, but not much easier, and there's not a lot more there.

Sometimes civilization doesn't follow a straight line. People go to one place, and it grows. People go to another, and that one doesn't grow, and they move on. The houses fall in on themselves. Eventually even the cellarholes disappear. 173 people live in Madrid now.

Independence Day

2008-04-27T19:04:00.000-07:00

I put Independence Day in the dvd player last week because I thought seeing the White House explode would make me feel better. But it was just a disappointing visit to the late nineties, when the dollar was strong and Will Smith was going to save us all.

The Last Novel

2008-03-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

"There are no second acts in American lives." You can find this epigram at the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald's last, unfinished work The Last Tycoon. In 1940, there were not. The 1930's were bad to Fitzgerald: he institutionalized his wife, saw his health ruined by alcoholism, and most importantly for the purposes of this story, made what turned out to be a permanent move to Los Angeles.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the appallingly young age of 44, ruined by his drinking, having written six chapters of The Last Tycoon. His friend and Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson edited the manuscript and appended the outline and various notes on the novel.

Despite the ambitions Fitzgerald had for The Last Tycoon, its real value seems to be its presentation of Hollywood--under the old studio system--as seen by a writer. Read it to get an inside look at the industry in the 1930s, an era so close to the dawn of the movie itself that you can imagine dust rising from the streets of Burbank. In some ways Fitzgerald's Hollywood is recognizable instantly, and he sketches it brilliantly: the pathologically ruthless producer, the forgotten B-movie actor searching desperately for a toehold, the party where the anonymous newcomer is snubbed. In one wonderfully done scene, the protagonist, producer Monroe Stahr, pulls a director off the set in the middle of filming and into his limousine to fire him. The replacement director is on the set before they step into the car. As Stahr tells him the bad news, the director is stunned, and the short ride, and the conversation, end:

"How about my coat?" he asked suddenly. "I left it over a chair on the set."
"I know you did," said Stahr. "Here it is."

Fitzgerald's comic gifts and novelist's touch are on display here. Towards the end of the finished draft, Stahr wants to meet a Communist, and to prepare for the meeting--because he never reads anything for pleasure-- he has the studio's writing staff come up with a two-page synopsis of The Communist Manifesto. The narrator, Cecilia Brady, describes the aftermath of Stahr's drunken scene with the communist:

"His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I've been out with college freshmen, but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him, but that was all."

In this work, writers are, by definition, drunks. Fitzgerald fills the early chapters with writers, starting with the "second-rate American intellectual" Wylie White, probably the closest Fitzgerald comes to an alter ego in The Last Tycoon. At one point a character asks after White and is met with the response, "Is he sober?" In Fitzgerald's Hollywood, writers come from the east lured by the movies' easy money and stay to become souses and hacks, generally in that order. Playwrights come out to the coast with the wrong set of assumptions and no idea of how to write in this new medium. If they stay, they are doomed, like the writing couple Mr. and Mrs. Tarleton, who discover too late Stahr's system (to wit, put two or three teams of writers on a project unbeknownst to each other and use the best version) and the paradox behind it: writers are a dime a dozen and yet indispensible to the movie-making process.

But what I see as Fitzgerald's brittleness as a writer--the way in which his work seems dated to me--is present here also. The Great Gatsby, now in the pantheon, I have always felt was a bit overrated: successful technically but somehow small and tinny, with the rawness of human emotion glossed over, missing grit and granularity.

Where Fitzgerald does distill some very modern-sounding human emotion into powerful writing is the set of essays collected as The Crack-Up. It is all too easy to deny our pre-post-modern antecedents the complex emotions and concepts we have, to think that sex was invented in 1963 or to imagine that your grandparents (or in this case perhaps Douglas Fairbanks) lived in a world of black and white. The Crack-Up disabuses one of that notion. It is a largely un-self-censored view of a man in despair, neither more nor less. The essays struck me much more forcefully than anything in The Great Gatsby or The Last Tycoon, more forcefully than the tell-all memoir or the self-obsessed YouTube video at the center of our 21st century sensibility.

The Pat Hobby stories are next on my list to read. Fitzgerald wrote these magazine pieces--the misadventures and humiliations of a hack writer trying to get work in Hollywood--during the last desperate years of his life in LA. Paul Greenberg wrote a nice essay on the Pat Hobby stories in relation to the recent writers' strike.

There is in the end a sadness to it. Reading Edmund Wilson's introduction, the novel's outline and the rough notes attached, you can't escape the pall of Fitzgerald's years of striving in Hollywood to regain personal and literary respectability. Hemingway movingly assesses the tragedy of his friend in A Moveable Feast:

"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless."

Hollywood was not a total bust for Fitzgerald. In 1938 he made nearly $60,000 working for MGM. That year, he wrote off $237.50 in "bad debts."

We Need Newspapers

2008-03-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

News comes today that the Blethen Maine Newspapers are for sale: viz. the Kennebec Journal, Waterville Sentinel and Portland Press Herald. The story was on the front page of the Kennebec Journal this morning. Having to print this particular story would be like me posting a blog entry consisting of my own obituary. The news is not good.

The Blethen family bought the Gannett (Maine, not the other Gannett) newspapers in 1998 for $200 million. Ten years on they will be lucky to get $100 million for them, according to the article. The new car I bought in 2001 has, I'm sure, lost half of its value since then, but somehow I don't think that's the investment model the Blethens had in mind when they bought these papers.

The company, like the entire newspaper industry, is facing declining circulation and ad revenues, especially from classifieds. A full page ad in the Kennebec Journal today from CEO Frank Blethen blames in part "disruptive technologies," by which I think he means the Internet, for foiling what used to be his license to print money. But some people, apparently none of them in the newspaper industry, have figured out how to make money from disruptive technologies, like these guys.

"In my fondest dreams," Blethen says in the article, the ultimate buyer "would be some well-heeled group of Mainers that care about local ownership." That's an ugly outcome. What that means is that these once-proud papers will be sold off piecemeal, probably to some bottom-feeding investors, whence they will eventually fall to a group of civic-minded financial "angels" who are willing to lose millions to make sure three Maine cities still have daily papers, much like the wealthy liberals who kept the old weekly Maine Times afloat for many years until it became clear the paper would never regain profitability, at which point it morphed unrecognizably into a glossy monthly magazine, and then folded for good. An unseemly end, as I said.

I admit to some schadenfraude (a German word meaning "shameful joy"; don't you love German?) on hearing this news. The sale of the papers back in 1998 was an occasion for much sanctimonious self-congratulations on the part of both the Blethen and the Gannett families, which was amply displayed by the many newspaper articles on the sale, in which the phony good feeling and Elks Lodge civic boosterism was meant to make the bitter pill of this sale go down easier for us plebs, the readers, disguising that this transaction was merely two mega-wealthy families trading huge assets and that the Gannetts, for all their noble stewardship of the papers--for which they received nothing more than the satisfaction of civic duty and generations of influence, wealth and prestige--were finally cashing out to an out-of-state company--at the right moment, we now see in hindsight.

But it's not all shameful joy here in Hollywood. We need newspapers. And the future of these are not assured.

The Rich Man's Ketchup

2008-03-01T11:21:00.000-08:00

My wife and I were having dinner, not unheard of, on the living room sofa. This night it was a meal of frozen entrees: homestyle French fries and Quorn fake chicken nuggets, with bowls of yoghurt and fruit on the side. We were nearly out of ketchup, so I brought in some mustard and an ancient jar of cocktail sauce.

"Ah, cocktail sauce," I mused. "The rich man's ketchup."

My wife looked skeptical. "Is that really what they call it?"

"Well, it sounds like something from The Simpsons. So I doubt it. But it's a good name. Maybe this is our million dollar idea. 'The rich man's ketchup' will be the slogan. We just have to invent the sauce."

She thought for a moment over a French fry. "Condiments? I don't know. It's a pretty crowded market. Think about the condiment aisle in the supermarket. Salsas. Mustards. Ketchup." She paused." And of course catsup."

"Catsup. Now that," I said, "is the rich man's ketchup."

The Hollywood President

2007-08-01T17:47:00.000-07:00

One thing is bothering me. Let me tell you about it.

I love America. I love that it's a democracy, or a republic--whatever. It's great. Quadrenially we trudge to the polls if we can get time off from work to elect a President.

On television and in the movies, Hollywood (and here I'm talking about the metaphysical construct centered in California, not my own Mayberry-like hometown here in Maine) portrays this wonderful democracy many times each year. There are the classic portrayals of past Presidents (Young Mr. Lincoln, JFK, Thirteen Days). And there are also attempts to portray a fictional current President, if the real President is not available or won't work for scale.

So you've got your Dennis Haysbert (24) , Bill Pullman (Independence Day), Martin Sheen (The West Wing), Morgan Freeman (Deep Impact), even Geena Davis, star of the cancelled Commander-in-Chief (or, as my wife's mother called it, "Lady President").

Therein lies the problem: too many Hollywood Presidents. In the last five years alone, at least thirty-five actors and actresses have portrayed fictional Presidents in movies or TV.

Don't mistake me: we have come a long way. Fifty years ago, a black man couldn't eat at a Woolworth's lunch counter in the South. Today, he can portray the President on TV. What a country.

But how can we have a coherent Hollywood foreign policy with such a cacophony, with so many shouted voices? How can we sort out the Hollywood constitutional questions on issues like abortion, Medicare Class D benefits or portraying smoking in the movies? With so many presidents, those problems are simply beyond the scope of any one studio mogul or uber-agent.

Example: Say your typical moviegoer in Bombay, London or Baden-Baden sees five different movies in a year featuring five different Presidents. They'll get confused! "Who's in charge? Who's the President over there in America? Can't they get it together? They need a strong leader who will give them more space for living," etc. America must stand together, be strong and, equally important, be seen to be strong, especially in the foreign markets--which are more important now than ever.

So, now to my idea: America needs one Hollywood President. I propose that we elect, for one four-year term, one actor or actress to portray the President of the United States in all movies and television shows during that time.

Say you need a successor to Jed Bartlet on The West Wing. You have him (or her)--no more cumbersome elections. Say a comet is threatening the earth in the latest Ben Affleck movie. You know whom to hire--and who will decamp to the giant bunker when all appears lost.

I know this raises all sorts of constitutional questions: does the Hollywood President have to be a native of the United States (thereby disqualifying Dan Ackroyd and Alex Trebeck)? Who would be the Hollywood Vice President? What is the chain of succession? How would we elect the Hollywood President--a la the People's Choice award? Modified All-Star balloting? Or should we just add it to the Oscar categories and have the Academy members vote on it? (I have always thought of the Academy as vaguely analogous to the electoral college--but more rational.)

I've gotten the ball rolling. Do your civic duty. Click here to vote for the Hollywood President.

This Old, Old, Old House

2007-07-18T13:28:00.000-07:00

The house that my wife and I bought back in 2002 is about 200 years old. We haven't researched it yet, but we believe it was built between 1800 and 1820. It still has many of its historic (and dangerously out of date) features, like original fireplace mantles and chimneys, a Dutch oven attached to one fireplace (which has a really cool brick dome), and wide pine floors.

How old is this house? When I went to the planning board for permission to replace the front door, one of the board members asked me if we were going to put the old-timey mail slot on the new door.

"Actually," someone else chimed in, "that may not be period. Did they have home mail delivery when that house was built?"

We've done a number of renovations to the house. We had 17 windows replaced one year. I've pulled up and re-lain the flooring and subflooring in two rooms so far. One of the first things I did was run new telephone wire. I built an entrance to the attic and laid some flooring down. (No, there was no way to get to the attic when we moved in.) We had a new hot water heater installed and a new chimney built so the house would safely exhale the furnace exhaust.

When you get into the guts of an old house like this--tearing apart a floor and looking at old and older electrical wiring running along the beams, for instance--you realize just how much the world has changed and how this structure has adapted to dozens of new technologies.

In 1800, there was no electricity or gas, so cooking was a very different experience with totally different demands on the house. There was no running water, so: no need for bathrooms. The chimneys were central to cooking and to heating the house. Windows were critical for daylight illumination. Even the shutters on the house, now purely decorative, had a purpose, as shown by the hooks and eyes that are still on them--covered by about 73 coats of paint and due for one more soon. And of course social conventions were different. Downstairs parlors might host a wake. The woman of the house and her female relations would certainly have given birth upstairs.

Now the house has telephone wires, electric wires, coaxial cable for the TV, metal ductwork, large flaming devices to heat both water and air, hot and cold water pipes, PVC pipes that connect to the town sewer, and metal gutters. The house is a cyborg: the wooden parts are worn, rounded, and organic with modern metal devices grafted on to keep it breathing.

But the technology under it all--beams, joists, rafters, floorboards, studs, lathe, clapboards and doors--and responsible for the house's amazing longevity, is wood: a miraculous substance that humans wouldn't be smart enough to invent if it didn't already exist. Treat it right, and it lasts forever. You can paint it, cut it, carve it, bend it, shave it, glue it, screw it, and make it almost any shape you can imagine. I have shelves full of every sort of blade and tool just for cutting and shaping wood. It flies and it floats. And, if you play your cards right, it is one of the relatively few things that actually grows on trees.

I Have a Gub

2007-05-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

Last week one of Hollywood's neighboring towns, Augusta, was victimized by an inept bank robber. A 24-year old woman walked into a bank on the east side of town and handed the teller a note demanding money. (This wasn't a branch of my bank. Here in Hollywood we bank at the local Building and Loan, run by that nice Mr. Bailey.) Apparently, the note was barely legible, because the teller was only able to make out the word "gun"--although the robber was in fact unarmed. The robber got the money and made her getaway--in her own car, whose license plate one of the tellers wrote down. Not that this quick thinking was necessary: one of the tellers recognized the woman as a high school classmate.

To her credit, the robber called the police herself, while they were still at the bank responding to the call. By lunch she was in county jail in Augusta. Not to her credit, she used her one phone call to contact her sister, telling her where to find the stolen money and to bring over $1,000 for bail. Instead of bringing over the loot, the sister called the police.

This is funnier than it is dangerous and sadder than it is funny. This woman is clearly a bad combination of desperate and poor. Augusta has many such people, unfortunately. My experience delivering meals for a soup kitchen brought me into contact with some of the poorest and neediest people in town. Too many Augusta residents are deeply impoverished, living in crummy apartments, suffering from physical disabilities, mental illness, and/or drug addiction. The rate for personal property crimes in Augusta is four times the national average. Median household income is lower than any of the surrounding towns.

The robber is on state assistance and has an 18-month old son. She got away with a paltry $1,400. This is probably less money than she will spend on postage to her lawyer from jail.

These days Augusta is taking a long look at itself, trying to hang on to its vacant downtown, reclaiming historic properties that had fallen into disuse, improving its public spaces and figuring out how to attract new businesses. Before it can truly revitalize itself, the city has to address the human needs that are going unmet here.

This Week's Trivia: U.S. Presidents!

2007-04-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

According to his college classmates, Ronald Reagan had a nearly photographic memory.

While serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Richard Nixon won thousands of dollars in shipboard poker games. He used the winnings to pay for his law school education at Duke University after the war.

Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election by about 100,000 votes, roughly the equivalent of one vote for every polling place in the country.

John Kennedy is the only President to have won a Pulitzer prize. The evidence shows that the actual drafts of the book, Profiles in Courage, published while he was a U.S. Senator, were written by his speechwriter.

George H.W. Bush was a star first baseman for Yale in the 1940s and played in the first College World Series. He threw left-handed and batted right.

The first U.S. President to be born in a hospital was Jimmy Carter.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, wrote a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce. The two had been classmates at Bowdoin College.

No U.S. Senator has been elected President since 1960.

Time to Apologize

2007-04-13T06:08:00.000-07:00

“Thank you all for coming to this press conference. I realize it’s a little crowded. I’m sorry there aren’t enough chairs for those in the back of the room.

“I am speaking to you today to answer certain allegations about my conduct that have appeared in the media this week. Reports that I used my influence to find a position for Elena Longlekova at the World Bank have caused me and my family great pain. I want to apologize to them for any distress that anything I might or might not have done might have caused them.

“No, I did not know that Ms. Longlekova was a Russian supermodel. Yes, she is qualified to oversee the Bank’s Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. No, I would not have called the President of the World Bank if I had known that his phone calls were being monitored.

“I just want to say how deeply, deeply sorry I am for this unfortunate occurrence, of which I had no prior knowledge.

“I also want to announce that, after consulting with my family, my colleagues, my attorneys, my attorneys’ families, and my campaign contributors, and after much prayerful reflection, I have decided to enter the Shady Groves Second Chances Healing and Rehabilitation Center in Barbados for treatment of addiction to sedatives.

“My arrest outside the Club Clique last Sunday night made me realize that I have a problem. I have been in the grip of a powerful addiction over which I have no control. Otherwise I would not have drunk three wine coolers and taken 30 Seconals when I got in my car that night. I realize that now. I could have seriously injured myself or any number of voters, for which I would have expressed extreme regret.

“There have been a lot of comments in the press as well bringing up what I said about Mother Theresa on the Howard Stern show. I just want to repeat what I said last month: I’m deeply, deeply sorry that the microphone was on. I thought Howard and I were just having a private conversation in his radio and TV studio with his executive producer.

“This press conference has run long, and I have to get to the chamber for a vote, so despite what we said earlier, I won’t be taking any questions. I’m really sorry about that.”

Zombie Results

2007-03-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

To those who responded to my Zombie Job Opening survey, let me say this: I've very, very disappointed in you for not taking it more seriously. And thanks for playing!

1) Most popular jobs: with 40% each, Village Idiot and Zombie Bounty Hunter. The next top finisher was Sportscaster for Zombie Football League. Honorable mention to write-ins "Ghost writer" and "Free Range Zombie Activist."

2) In answer to "I have experience nailing large pieces of crooked wood to:" the clear winner was doors. Good show. Runner-up was the suggestion (thrice made) "other pieces of crooked wood."

3) "In the event of a night-time zombie attack, I would seek shelter in:" 70% responded with "The Liberal Cup." Well done! But stay away from their beer and cheese soup. Best alternative was the new accessory store in town: "Bling It On." I would have suggested the new do-it-yourself pottery-play store, "A Time To Kiln."*

4) Overall Best Suggestions winner, hands-down: "I know how to hook up illegal:"
--bongs (twice)
--immigrants (twice)
--playgroups

Clearly I'm dealing with a bunch of criminal geniuses.

5) How would the government contact citizens during the apocolypse: Disappointing! No one chose short wave radio. Best suggestions: "The Fox Network" and "loudspeakers mounted to the tops of road warrior post-apocolyptic dune buggies."

Someone also responded, "this is very funny." Thank you--but please just answer the question.

6) Top three finishers for "If surrounded by zombies, I would sacrifice myself to save my:"
-spouse/domestic partner
-child
-comic book collection
I give honorable mentions to: "zombie escape boat-building tools" and "brother-in-law."

To those who could not be bothered to respond: when your jobless ass lands in the middle of a zombie attack and they crack your skull open to feast on your brain, then we'll see who's laughing! (i.e., it probably won't be you.)

When the Zombie Apocalypse finally hits, I'll be posting another survey, probably on the wooden message kiosk at the village green: Zombie Job Satisfaction survey.

(*Name of an actual store in Hoboken, the Hollywood of New Jersey.)

I'm Warning You

2007-02-23T03:05:00.000-08:00

The parental warnings on movie ads are terrifically more helpful than when I was a kid. The former “Restricted” R-rating was basically a yes/no toggle switch parents could look at and say to their teen, “No way are you seeing this movie.” The new advisories, listed under the G/PG/PG-13/R/NC-17 ratings, are tuned into the types of movies that are actually out there in the world: date flick, teen slasher, sci fi, sword and sandals epic, modern thriller: “Contains Some Drug Use and Sensuality.” “Contains Mild Violence.” And we know the code behind these new warnings, most of the time. Some are cryptic. One still mystifies me: “mild thematic elements.”

Mild Thematic Elements: I'm not sure what that is supposed to tell us. It may be code for: This is a thoughtful movie whose plot is not built around dinosaurs, a car chase or wise-cracking animated animals. (Which parents want to avoid this? “Three things I don’t want my 12-year old exposed to: swearing, sex, and thematic elements, or lietmotifs if you will, running through a work of fiction and tying it together into a cohesive narrative.”)

The plays of Shakespeare would seem to be, asI remember from high school and college, replete with “thematic elements” of every stripe. They are also the subject of frequent filmification. I suggest the following advisories.

Romeo and Juliet
Contains Wussy Fencing-Style Violence, Incomprehensible Sexual Innuendo and Three’s Company-Style Misunderstandings.

Henry V
Contains Bloody, Mail-Crashing Battle Scenes and Flights of Arrows That Darken the Dawn-Lit Sky. Once More Into the Breach!

MacBeth
Contains Keen Psychological Insights, Regicide, Poor Hospitality and Wee-Wee Jokes.

Julius Caesar
Contains Foreshadowing, Prophecy and Ides of March-timed Violence/March Madness.

Timon of Athens
Does Not Contain a Breakdancing Android, Unfortunately.

Othello
Contains Advice on Bad Relationships and Poisoned Wine.

Hamlet
Contains Extreme Thematic Elements, Existential Crises, and In Unabridged Versions, the Fortinbras Subplot.

The Merchant of Venice
Depicts Once-Acceptable Levels of Anti-Semitism That Do Not Necessarily Prove That Shakespeare Himself Was Anti-Semitic But More Probably Reflect Elizabethan Attitudes Towards Jews.

Richard III
Contains Civil War, Poor Governance, and Scenes of Suggested Nephew- and Brother-Killing.

Let Kafka be Kafka!

2007-01-26T05:40:00.000-08:00

Normally I don't reprint entire newspaper articles, but just so you know, not only is the end of the world nigh, so are your civil rights. The article below describes the lawsuit against the government's attempt to spy on us without obtaining warrants first. It's shocking.

The Justice Department's tactics below, if replicated on a wide scale, would spell the end of our modern justice system. Say you're being sued, and you find out that the evidence against you is in the custody of the person suing you, not the court, and the judge hearing your case doesn't have her own computer but has to use one belonging to your opponent's lawyer. It is only a couple of steps away from the kangaroo court of the military tribunals our governement has set up for the inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

* * *
January 26, 2007
Secrecy Is at Issue in Suits Opposing Spy Program
By ADAM LIPTAK

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

But now the procedures have started to meet resistance. At a private meeting with the lawyers in one of the cases this month, the judges who will hear the first appeal next week expressed uneasiness about the procedures, said a lawyer who attended, Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lawyers suing the government and some legal scholars say the procedures threaten the separation of powers, the adversary system and the lawyer-client privilege.

Justice Department officials say the circumstances of the cases, involving a highly classified program, require extraordinary measures. The officials say they have used similar procedures in other cases involving classified materials.

In ordinary civil suits, the parties’ submissions are sent to their adversaries and are available to the public in open court files. But in several cases challenging the eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers have been submitting legal papers not by filing them in court but by placing them in a room at the department. They have filed papers, in other words, with themselves.

At the meeting this month, judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asked how the procedures might affect the integrity of the files and the appellate records.
In response, Joan B. Kennedy, a Justice Department official, submitted, in one of the department’s unclassified filings, a detailed seven-page sworn statement last Friday defending the practices.

“The documents reviewed by the court have not been altered and will not be altered,” Ms. Kennedy wrote, and they “will be preserved securely as part of the record of this case.”

Some cases challenging the program, which monitored international communications of people in the United States without court approval, have also involved atypical maneuvering. Soon after one suit challenging the program was filed last year in Oregon, Justice Department lawyers threatened to seize an exhibit from the court file.

This month, in the same case, the department sought to inspect and delete files from the computers on which lawyers for the plaintiffs had prepared their legal filings.

The tactics, said a lawyer in the Oregon case, Jon B. Eisenberg, prompted him to conduct unusual research.

“Sometime during all of this,” Mr. Eisenberg said, “I went on Amazon and ordered a copy of Kafka’s ‘The Trial,’ because I needed a refresher course in bizarre legal procedures.”

A federal district judge in the case, Garr M. King, invoked another book after a government lawyer refused to disclose whether he had a certain security clearance, saying information about the clearance was itself classified.

“Frankly, your response,” Judge King said, “is kind of an Alice in Wonderland response.”

Questions about the secret filings may figure in the first appellate argument in the challenges, before the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, on Wednesday. The three judges who will hear the appeal met with lawyers for the Justice Department and the American Civil Liberties Union on Jan. 8 in a judge’s chambers in Memphis.

“The court raised questions about the procedures the government had used to file classified submissions in the case and the propriety and integrity of those procedures,” said Ms. Beeson, associate legal director of the A.C.L.U., which represents the plaintiffs in the appeal.

“They were also concerned about the independence of the judiciary,” given that “the Justice Department retains custody and total control over the court filings.” Ms. Beeson said.

Nancy S. Marder, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law and an authority on secrecy in litigation, said the tactics were really extreme and deeply, deeply troubling.

“These are the basics that we take for granted in our court system,” Professor Marder said. “You have two parties. You exchange documents. The documents you’ve seen don’t disappear.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department, Dean Boyd, said employees involved in storing the classified documents were independent of the litigators and provided “neutral assistance” to courts in handling sensitive information. The documents, Mr. Boyd said, are “stored securely and without alteration.”

The appellate argument in Cincinnati will almost certainly also concern the effects of the administration announcement last week that it would submit the program to a secret court, ending its eavesdropping without warrants.

In a brief filed on Thursday, the government said the move made the case against the program moot.

Ms. Beeson of the A.C.L.U. said the government was wrong.

At least one case, the one in Oregon, is probably not moot. It goes beyond the other cases in seeking damages from the government, because the plaintiffs say they have seen proof that they were wiretapped without a warrant.

In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.

That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.

“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”

Ms. Bernabei circulated the document to two directors of the charity, at least one of them in Saudi Arabia, and to three other lawyers. She discussed them with two more lawyers. A reporter for The Washington Post, David B. Ottaway, also reviewed the document.

The full significance of the document was apparently not clear to any recipient, more than a year before The New York Times disclosed the existence of the N.S.A. program in December 2005.
The F.B.I. learned of the disclosure almost immediately in August 2004, Judge King said at a court hearing last year, but made no effort to retrieve copies of the document for about six weeks.

When it did, everyone it asked apparently returned all copies of the document. In a statement reported in The Post in March, for instance, Mr. Ottaway said he the F.B.I. had told him that the document had “highly sensitive national security information.”

“I returned it after consulting with Washington Post editors and lawyers, and concluding that it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time,” Mr. Ottaway said.

In a sworn statement in June, a lawyer who had the document, Asim Ghafoor, said the bureau took custody of his laptop computer “in order that the document might be ‘scrubbed’ from it.”
The computer was returned weeks later.

In February 2006, the charity and the two lawyers who say they were wiretapped sued to stop the program, requesting financial damages. They attached a copy of the classified document, filing it under seal. They have not said how they came to have a copy.

Three weeks later, the lawyers for the foundation received a call from two Justice Department lawyers. The classified document “had not been properly secured,” the lawyers said, according to a letter from the plaintiffs’ lawyers to the judge.

As Mr. Eisenberg recalled it, the government lawyers said, “The F.B.I. is on its way to the courthouse to take possession of the document from the judge.”

But Judge King, at a hurriedly convened hearing, would not yield it, and asked, “What if I say I will not deliver it to the F.B.I.?”

A Justice Department lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, gave a measured response, saying: “Your Honor, we obviously don’t want to have any kind of a confrontation with you. But it has to be secured in a proper fashion.”

The document was ultimately deposited in a “secure compartmented information facility” at the bureau office in Portland.

In the meantime, copies of the document appear to have been sent abroad, and the government concedes that it has made no efforts to contact people overseas who it suspects have them.

“It’s probably gone many, many places,” Judge King said of the document at the August hearing. “Who is it secret from?”

A Justice Department lawyer, Andrew H. Tannenbaum, replied, “It’s secret from anyone who has not seen it.”

He added, “The document must be completely removed from the case, and plaintiffs are not allowed to rely on it to prove their claims.”

Judge King wondered aloud about the implications of that position, saying, “There is nothing in the law that requires them to purge their memory.”

Mr. Eisenberg, in an interview, said that was precisely the government position. “They claim they own the portions of our brains that remember anything,” he said.

In a decision in September, Judge King ruled that the plaintiffs were not entitled to review the document again but could rely on their recollections of it. In October, they filed a motion for summary judgment, a routine step in many civil litigations. In a sealed filing, they described the classified document.

Government lawyers sent Judge King a letter saying the plaintiffs had “mishandled information contained in the classified document” by, among other actions, preparing filings on their own computers.

In a telephone conference on Nov. 1, Judge King appeared unpersuaded. “My problem with your statement,” he told Mr. Tannenbaum, “is that you assume you are absolutely correct in everything you are stating, and I am not sure that you are.”

Mr. Boyd of the Justice Department said the government “continues to explore with counsel ways in which the classified information may be properly protected without any intrusion on the attorney-client privilege.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/26/washington/26nsa.html?hp&ex=1169874000&en=9044950dc6386d92&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Finest Hour

2007-01-25T06:11:00.000-08:00

See the news story below from Reuters: George Bush told a German newspaper last year that his best moment in office was catching a 7lb perch. This is apparently a true story and not a hoax; as we know Germans have no sense of humor.

Thanks to the magic of the tubes that run the Internet, I was able to find out what some other chief executives rated as the high points of their administrations:

William Howard Taft: “Getting that really big bathtub installed in the White House.”
Woodrow Wilson: “Beating David Lloyd George at whist during the Versailles Conference.”
JFK: “When Bobby tackled McGeorge Bundy during touch football and dislocated his hip.”
James Monroe: “The entire Era of Good Feelings was just a great experience.”

***

Bush's best moment in office? Reeling in big perch

Sun May 7, 2006 11:01 AM BST

BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush told a German newspaper his best moment in more than five years in office was catching a big perch in his own lake.

"You know, I've experienced many great moments and it's hard to name the best," Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.

"I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake," he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

Bush said the worst moment was September 11 when hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

"In such a situation it takes a while before one understands what is happening," Bush said. "I would say that this was the hardest moment, once I had the real picture before my eyes."

Because Bild could not immediately furnish English quotes, Bush's comments were translated from the German. The paper said the White House planned to release an authorised English version of the interview on Monday.

Zombie Apocalypse

2007-01-19T15:17:00.000-08:00

My brother, Motormouth, lives in an ordinary, white clapboard house in a quiet suburb in New Hampshire. But don't be deceived. Danger lurks there: He is building a dory in his basement.

He has a survivalist friend who is preparing for something called the “Zombie Apocalypse.” When Motormouth mentioned that he was thinking of making the dory by hand--no power tools--the survivalist said “Dude, if you do that, I’ll totally make you vice president of my Zombie Apocalypse compound.”

Far-fetched? Paranoid? Perhaps. But who am I to judge? When society collapses, I plan to make a living here in Hollywood as a maker of artisan cheeses.

What will you be doing when the Zombie Apocalypse comes? We have some job openings. Take the Zombie Apocalypse Job Survey at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=374443159353.

Wow, I have a lot of money

2006-12-29T14:07:00.000-08:00

Two periodicals that I read, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, always have full page ads for wealth management firms and private banks. Some of them are very annoying, even for ads. One has a photo of an avuncular, trimly-bearded and bespectacled gentleman, one of the private bankers whose phone numbers are included, above what I can only guess is some phony Q & A copy:

"Q. Is wealth always a burden for the next generation?
A. It doesn't have to be."

Well, thank God.

One ad that I saw in the New York Times this week for the Bessemer Trust includes the tag line that their services are for those families with a minimum of $10 million in liquid assets to invest.

I used to wonder, how many wealthy people must be out there for these ads make sense for the companies to run them? Then I found out.

The number of Americans with $30 million or more in investable assets is about 30,000. I think we can assume that a good number of these people read the New York Times. So there's the customer base.

Legalized Bribery

2006-12-09T15:03:00.000-08:00

I don't have to bribe people very often. In Maine, it's just not part of the culture. As far as I know. Maybe there's a lot of bribery going on, and I'm one of those poor chumps who is standing in the long line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, paying full price for brand names, and having the muffler on my car fixed instead of slipping the mechanic a twenty to get an inspection sticker.

So maybe a bribe gets us in the right line. But most of us here, I think, would be outraged at the thought of having to pay an official to get something done.

I started thinking about this when I met my congressman in October. Well, I'm not sure if he's my congressman; I live right near the district boundary. I volunteer on the board of the local chapter of a national nonprofit (you've heard of them). Out of the blue, a few weeks before the election, I heard from a national-level committee that our group's PAC was sending him a check for $1,000.

He hadn't asked for the money and didn't need it. The congressman was sailing to re-election against an unknown opponent who had raised less money than a church bake sale. Apparently some of our staff in Washington, DC had decided that an issue might be coming up before his congressional committee in which we had an interest. And I didn't need to be told that a $1,000 contribution would help us get a meeting or otherwise raise our profile to this member of Congress.

One of our people suggested that I find an opportunity to meet with the congressman and hand the check over personally. Good idea. I called his local office and made an appointment for me and one of our local staff people to meet with him in the nearby city of Watertown.

Now, we had planned to meet at his local district office, not his campaign headquarters. So that is technically federal property, and as you West Wing fans will remember, you can't fundraise on federal property. So after a few friendly handshakes with his staff, we toodled across the street to the coffeeshop. I presented the check and related our pleasure at endorsing his re-election bid, and we started talking about the upcoming elections. He asked us what we were working on in Maine. It was a great meeting. The congressman is a super guy, more on the ball and articulate in person than he appears on TV. This month, I got a personally signed Christmas card from him.

I'm really glad this guy is in Congress, don't get me wrong. But when you hand someone a check for $1,000, you can't pretend it doesn't make a difference in how you will be treated.

Members of congress and other elected officials will always aver that campaign contributions don't matter to them, that every constituent's call is as important as another's. Don't believe it. It matters 100%.

I spent a lot of this fall poring over election laws, political guidelines and nonprofit regulations. I researched PACs in Maine, contribution limits, Maine's Clean Election system, how I could tell our nonprofit's members what candidates we endorsed and what money I could use to pay for it. I found a complicated mishmash of state and federal regulations on nonprofits, candidates, and Political Action Committees, all of it finely calibrated to keep the billions spent on our elections from corrupting our elected decisionmakers. At that goal, it fails. It's simply window dressing that has codified a system of legalized bribery.

(For tales of countries with real bribery problems, visit Transparency International at www.transparency.org.)

-end-

The Phantom Strikes!

2006-11-28T05:44:00.000-08:00

The following notes were posted on the fridge of my mother-in-law recently. With great foresight, she saved these three hilarious samples from her daughters' childhoods. I have not yet been able to determine which one of these Zen nuggets was written by my wife. I wonder if she is the Phantom?

"The cat made a mess in the laundry room. I'd clean it up but I didn't see it."

"I will be home when I get there. If not home by the time I'm supposed to be, call and tell whoever answers that I need a ride."

"Everybody: don't lock the front door. I've lost my key again. Phantom"

Monhegan Island, Maine

2006-09-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

One could write for a long time about Monhegan Island. I will start with the junk. There is a small lot next to the fish market that certainly has not been attended to this summer, judging by the weeds growing through the lobster traps. There are rows of traps, a piece of a dock, propane tanks, plastic barrels and 55 gallon drums rusting in the salty air.

There are trucks on the island. At least one of the trucks is itself junk and in its bed is more junk—a wooden chair and a plastic red gas can.

In between the junk are well-proportioned houses, most of them sheathed in weathered gray shingles, which tie the island together thematically. The houses also shelter people and their non-junk possessions.

Manana Island, a bulge of rock across the harbor from Monhegan, is unique among land masses in my experience, in that it contains only junk: the abandoned house of a hermit, old wooden-hooped lobster traps, and an entire Coast Guard station. Now all junk.

Between two buildings near the fish beach somebody—or somebodies—has jammed into a foot-wide alley a variety of dimensional lumber and PVC pipe. Not exactly junk, but illustrative of the lack of space on the island, which may account for all the other junk being left out of doors.

On the southern tip of the island at Lobster Cove is a monumental piece of junk: the shipwreck of the tugboat D.T. Sheridan. A good part of the ship remains rusting on the shore, perhaps the largest single piece of junk I have ever seen. Strange. What if we had a car accident here in Hollywood and no one towed away the wreck?

The fish beach has not just junk—the occasional water-filled dinghy—but trash: lobster and crab shells (which I saw a waitress dumping on the other side of the jetty—perhaps for the gulls—at 7:30 this morning), as well as a number of orange halves. Trash is a big issue here, as it is on any island—deserving a serious essay, I’m sure—but junk is another matter. It is battering the image of the thrifty Yankee, of which I am one.

Some of the junk has of course been salvaged and given to the Monhegan Museum. I applaud this historical spirit. Some future junk is being sold at island gift shops, but this is I think generally taken off-island by its purchasers. Some junk is re-used. Rusty Spear—the guy who took me out to Manana yesterday—makes doormats out of old rope. The mats are attractive and look very functional.

It is expensive to take things off and on Monhegan, so it’s not a surprise that they tend to pile up on such a small island and in public. Even the trash is lined up with the recycling and the propane tanks on the dock on such-and-such a day to be taken to the mainland. But not the junk. That stays.

Voracious Intruders

2006-08-09T14:41:00.000-07:00

Dateline: Hollywood, Maine--There was a horrible intruder in my garden today. My wife and I have a vegetable garden about 12 feet square. Our tomatoes are doing very well this year—or so we thought. We were playing with a neighborhood cat near the garden when my wife noticed that some leaves on the tomato plants were gone. Eaten down to the stem. One plant was almost completely defoliated—and the green tomatos on the vine had even been chewed on.

We knew it couldn’t be the gophers we had trapped and repatriated to the countryside last summer. They would have started eating at the bottom of the plant, and eaten everything else in the garden beside. It didn’t look like a disease or a fungus. The leaves had been very neatly nipped off. We also noticed a lot of droppings under the plants that had been damaged.

My wife decided to call her dad. He grew up in the Bronx and lives in Queens, but he is a serious gardener. As soon as she described the damage to him, he said, “You’ve got something called horned caterpillar. Go look for it on the plants.” She asked what it looked like. “You know it when you see it. And call me back when you find one.”

After a few minutes of looking, I hear “Oh my god!” My wife calls me over to one of the plants and says she’s found one of the horned caterpillars. I don’t see it at first, but I keep looking at the end of the finger she’s pointing with, and finally it appears like a magic eye image. I realize she’s pointing at this finger-size thing on one of the stalks, perfectly camoflauged.

The horned caterpillar—specifically the tomato hornworm—is the Jabba the Hut of caterpillars. You have never seen a caterpillar like this monster. Full grown—having chowed down on our tomatoes for a few days, at least—it’s about as thick as your thumb. It’s the size of breakfast sausage.

The creature is actually kind of beautiful though. A pale green, it has five white stripes and a series of eye-like dots up the length of its body. I got the chance to see one of them eating: it was wrapped around a stalk of the tomato plant, its head and upper body leaning out over the leaf, and it methodically, and very quickly, chomped away in neat rows—imagine someone very intently eating a corn on the cob. I could see how these voracious eating machines could defoliate a plant in just a couple of days.

In an hour of searching, we eventually pulled ten of the beasts off our tomato plants. It was amazing, we took a lot of pictures, and I also realized how beautiful our sunflowers are.

We decided to get the hornworms off of our property, so we filled a grocery bag with weeds from the lawn and several of the half-eaten tomatoes they had gone to town on, and went for a walk. We took them to a field in the woods and left them with their groceries.

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My Question for Stephen Hawking

2006-08-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

Special to the End Times

Jul. 28, 2006, Beijing--The physicist Stephen Hawking has been in the news lately because of a question he posted on Yahoo! Answers. On this website, you can post a question on any topic, to which visitors can respond. Professor Hawking’s question is: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”

Hawking had pre-emptively answered his own question a few weeks earlier at a conference in Beijing. He said that mankind was likely to make Earth uninhabitable in the next hundred years, and the best solution, he thought, was for mankind to start thinking about a new home—either man-made or on other planets.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." He also said, "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system."

You can respond to Professor Hawking’s question at www.answers.yahoo.com until July 31. Over 24,000 people have so far answered Hawking’s question, including, I believe, all of the surviving Backstreet Boys.

I have been a big fan of Stephen Hawking since the publication of “A Brief History of Time,” which I am planning to read. I have to say, though, that as I’ve rolled his comments over and over in my mind, I find his solution deeply disappointing. So I have a question for Stephen Hawking.

I’m no astrophysicist—if you took everything I don’t know about the unimaginable vastness of the universe, you could probably fill the Augusta Civic Center—but I think that if we could actually overcome the technological barriers involved in creating safe and fast interstellar travel for millions (if not billions) of humans, as well as finding a habitable planet or constructing a huge space station for said humans, we are probably capable of fixing the problems that are now making earth uninhabitable.

Let’s consider the massive emissions of carbon dioxide that are causing global climate change. The technology to lower CO2 emissions significantly is already here: fuel-efficient cars, wind turbines, solar panels and cleaner power plants, for a start. And bicycles. Lots and lots of bicycles.

And even if we were able to overcome the unprecedented technological obstacles of interstellar travel and planetary exploration, if we didn’t first address the issues that are making the human race so hard to live with, I think we would probably end up ruining our new home or homes in reasonably short order.

Issues like resource scarcity. Here’s a story about Abraham Lincoln: A neighbor came upon him and two of his sons. The boys were crying, and the neighbor asked what the matter was. “The same thing that’s the matter with the whole world,” Lincoln said. “I’ve only got three walnuts, and each boy wants two.” I would like humanity to solve that age-old dilemma before we all spend five years together in a space ship.

I’m not even sure we’d make it on board the space ship in the first place. There are a lot of warring factions right now who have trouble sharing entire countries. I predict trouble if we start handing out boarding passes and expect people to form an orderly line.

You can see how the whole project gets pretty complicated pretty quickly—and we haven’t even gotten to the question of English soccer hooligans. (I want to be on the ship that has my family, the members of my college band, and the starting line-up of the 2004 Red Sox. You know, the party ship.)

A model already exists to help us solve these problems, and it’s working reasonably well right here on Planet Earth. Bhutan is a small monarchy in the Himalayas. In 1972 Bhutan’s king decided to replace the Gross National Product and start measuring his country’s progress with something called Gross National Happiness.

He believed that a truly happy human society can be founded on four pillars: sustainable economic development; conservation of the environment; promotion of national culture; and good governance. I met someone last week who had just traveled to Bhutan, and he said he has never seen a happier people.

It seems to me like a sensible plan but not very original. I’m sure many Socialists, tree huggers, peaceniks, and other un-American elements have already proposed such a thing.

Maybe Professor Hawking knows all this, and the whole find-a-new-planet idea is just a thought experiment. He knows that, on the path to making his solution a reality, the human race would have to solve the problems that are putting us into chaos, politically, socially and environmentally: our failure to meet the basic human needs of our fellows, our selfishness and myopia, our willingness to commit violence on a vast scale. So my question back to Professor Hawking is: are you serious?

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