GaraLog

The Lives They Led -- A Year of Losing Too Many People Who Shaped Me

2022 was a year in which many good things happened in my life, and a few encouraging things happened in the world – election-deniers’ comeuppance in the midterms, the strong global support for Ukraine – but I’ll remember it most for being a year of considerable loss, more than any other in my nearly seven decades of living.

In a sense, it started late in 2021 with the deaths – much too young, in their sixties – of my brother’s husband Jonathon and my cousin Jackie’s husband Jerry.  Jonathon Appels, a teacher and choreographer in New York, and Jerry Desmond, a longtime police captain and boating safety official in Connecticut, lived very different lives but each was an unforgettable presence and each in his way – Jonathon with students and dancers and Jerry with the Stonington sports teams he coached – were extremely devoted to young people.  It seemed a cruel world that would take them away from the spouses and families who loved them and the many people who depended upon them and learned so much from them.  But their passings were a prelude to a season of cascading loss this year.

Almost none of the deaths among my family, friends and colleagues in 2022 was unexpected – five were in their nineties, most of the rest had been battling cancer for years – but individually and together, they hit hard.  I lost two of the very few remaining members of my family in the generation above me, moving me pretty close to the batter’s box of life, though that metaphor doesn’t seem quite right for advancing age – maybe it’s the on-deck circle for the great beyond.  I lost several professional mentors in the worlds of human rights and philanthropy who powerfully shaped my thinking and my approach, as well as a few radical activist friends with whom I felt deep personal connections and who helped me to see the world more clearly and hold both it and myself to higher expectations and standards.

The deaths came one after the other, particularly in the first half of the year, in a way that was at times numbing and made it harder for me to feel the full weight of each individual loss. But now, as this challenging year ends, I want to take a moment to recall and say a few words about each.

Barbara LaMarche

My mother was a dominant presence and fixed point in my life for its entirety, until she died at 91 on March 13 – and, of course, continuing from beyond.  I’ve written and talked so much about my Mom over the years that I have made her into a kind of folk hero among my friends, and that only grew larger with her death. She was one of a kind. In her final few years, she had increasing dementia, and my family and I lived with a great deal of anxiety about what her future held – whether she could continue to live alone (with our help and that of aides) or would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into some kind of institutional care.  As it happened, she just went to bed one night and didn’t wake up the next morning.  A blessing, but no less a loss, as despite the vagaries of her memory, she remained vibrantly herself until the end.  Here is what I said about her at her funeral, before an overflow crowd (which she would dearly have loved).

Sister Jacqueline LaMarche

My aunt, for seventy-five years a Sister of Mercy, was the last of my late father’s six siblings.  She too had dementia and spent her final years – happily, it seems, since she lived in the constant present – in a nursing home.  Only on our last visit to her, which turned out to be just a few days before she died at 93 on April 27, was her habitual cheerfulness gone,  and we had cause to wonder whether she remembered who we were.  She was ready to go – in fact, with her dark sense of humor, when in recent years we’d visit and shout out questions to her since her hearing aids were forever getting misplaced, her answer to “how are you?” would be just a gesture, pantomiming a gun to the head – but still I felt her passing deeply because, as I wrote here in her eulogy, she was the last of her generation in a remarkable and remarkably close family, and now my cousins, siblings and I will take our turn as the oldest.

Dorothy Davidson

Dorothy died at 92 in late April, within hours of Aunt Jackie’s passing.  She lived in Denver almost her entire adult life and held a series of leadership roles in the ACLU there. I met her in the mid-1970s when I was barely more than an intern in the ACLU National Office and she was the director of the ACLU’s Mountain States Regional office.  We bonded during an ACLU financial crisis when both of our jobs were on the chopping block, though we both managed to survive a round of cuts. (Me when seven part-time research associates were fired and I was rehired for the one position, paying $11,000 a year, created in their place.).  One of the early female executives in the ACLU, at a time when even in that ostensibly progressive organization the male boards of directors paid you less because they expected you to live on your husband’s salary), she did almost all of her ACLU work in rural communities where civil liberties problems were often stark and the resources to address them minimal. She was funny, and passionate about economic justice and criminal justice at a time when neither was high on the ACLU’s agenda.  I kept in close touch with her long after we worked together, and stayed with her and her husband Chuck whenever in Denver.  She saw my potential in the ACLU before many others did and helped give me a sense that I was destined for something.  I’ll miss her greatly. Here is the memorial resolution I drafted for the ACLU Board on her passing.

Florence Isbell

In one of those strange pairings of deaths, a few months after Dorothy died, so did Florence Isbell – at 99 -- another female ACLU pioneer who, like Dorothy, led ACLU affiliates in the 1960s, in Georgia and D.C. before moving on to a national post, where I met her in the late 1970s.  There are many reasons why Florence, whose long ACLU career started when she was an assistant to Roger Baldwin in the 1940s, was dear to me, but one stemmed from my first encounter with her when she was hired at the national office in 1978 or ’79 and being taken around the 10^th floor to meet the rest of the staff.  I introduced myself and she replied, “Nice to meet you, Garala!” --- since of course, there’s no reason why someone meeting me for the first time would have any idea where my first name ended and my last began.  But I liked having my name turned into a Yiddishism, and have used it many times in the years since.  She was a very funny person, and I like the line in this obituary that you would always know what room she was in at a party because that was where the laughter was coming from.  I got close to Florence and her late husband David – a longtime ACLU board member – in the 1980’s and often stayed with them in their Chevy Chase home. (That seems to be an emerging theme here – pioneering ACLU women who put me up overnight.)  As they both got deafer, that got much more challenging, and I sometimes pitied the other patrons of restaurants where we shouted to one another all throughout dinner.

Selden Hale

I hadn’t seen him in maybe thirty years, but I was sad to learn of the death this fall of Selden Hale, a West Texas criminal defense attorney who was a stalwart of the Texas ACLU (as was his wife Claudia Stravato, who was on my board when I was Executive Director there in the mid-1980s) and went on to chair the Texas Board of Criminal Justice in Governor Ann Richards’ administration.  He was a laconic man of the west, a licensed firearms instructor who would easily have fit in as a character on Yellowstone but a rock-solid champion of civil rights and liberties who was ever on the side of the underdog.

Urvashi Vaid

With Urvashi, I move into a set of friends and colleagues who led public lives of national impact and a bit of notoriety. Urv died in May at 63 after a long fight with cancer.  I knew of Urvashi, of course, before I knew her.  I was on the ACLU board, which was then, in the early 90s, still much too white and male and straight a body, and there was a vacancy triggering a kind of by-election, so I approached her – knowing that she had started her career as an ACLU prisoners’ rights lawyer – and asked if she would let me nominate her.  I did, and she won. We didn’t get a chance to serve very long together, as I soon went into philanthropy and left the board.

Not long after I started at Open Society – Urv was running the policy institute at the Task Force then – she called me up and asked to have lunch.  We went to a Thai place near the office, which was then in on 57^th Street, and talked for a few hours. She was pitching support for the Task Force, of course, which before we started talking seemed like a stretch for us, as we then had no dedicated LGBTQ program, but more broadly she was trying to educate me on intersectionality – that the silos we were building, even in our very young and progressive program – made no sense in light of intertwined identities and oppressions.  I did end up funding the Task Force, but that lunch had much larger significance in two aspects.  First, it opened up my thinking about social change and the way philanthropy should relate to it, which manifested itself in many ways down the line as I ran Open Society, Atlantic and the DA.  But more personally, it started a conversation and a friendship that continued and deepened until she left us.  That I can see so clearly in the many tributes to her since she died that Urv had this kind of relationship with many, many people, takes nothing away from this, for she had the great gift of making every one of us feel deeply special. That is certainly the way it felt to me.

Urv was always pushing me to see the bigger picture, to be bolder, and though I am afraid I must have disappointed her at times with the insufficiency of my response, she was never less than kind and loving.  Fierce as she could be, her approach was always to call in, not out.  There were many times when her advice was so distinctive it made a lasting impression, like the time I was considering applying for two jobs, one quite prestigious and the other, while not chopped liver, involved a lot of cat-herding – not to mention a big salary difference. She strongly urged me toward the latter with the argument – a correct one, I had to admit – that my marginal value in the tougher job would be much higher, if I could turn it around, which in the end I think I did.

When I had the idea for a little foundation dinner group around twenty years ago, sparked by a similar gathering of foundation leaders and friends in the Bay Area, I started with Darren Walker and Geri Mannion and as we thought of others to join us, Urv was one of the first.  My ambitions for this very informal gathering were modest – to have a social space for a small group of people with the same weird job to hang out from time to time at one another’s homes.  Over the years it became much more, and that is largely thanks to Urv, who started a tradition of going around the group where each of us can take a few minutes to talk about what is really going on with us – what we’re proud of, what we’re fearful of, what is stressing us, what gives us joy.  There have been many profound moments in these years together, but overwhelmingly the feeling is that you are in a circle of people who care for you, who have your back, whose company you love, whose work you admire and learn from.

Though she was a smallish person, there will be a very big Urvashi-sized hole in our circle from now on.  But her love and presence will be felt, always. Here is Masha Gessen's appreciation of her.

Kathy Boudin

I don’t remember who introduced me to Kathy Boudin, but she asked to see me not long after her release from prison, and for some years in philanthropy I supported her work at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, where she was on the social work faculty, to end mass incarceration and criminalization.  In recent years, I’ve been on its advisory board.  Kathy was, like Urvashi, a well-known figure for her time in the underground and her role in the Brinks robbery, but the Times obituary of her focused much too much on that to the exclusion of the amazing work she did both during her long stint in prison and in the few decades she spent after release.  This Guardian piece and this New Yorker remembrance capture that well and also the kind of person she was.  What I will miss most about Kathy is the long breakfasts we had over the fifteen or twenty years that I knew her – talking about the work, of course, but for much of the time talking about the deeper things in life.  She was someone with whom I felt, almost instantly, an effortless intimacy, and while I celebrate her as a fighter, thinker, connector and builder, I will miss her most as a friend.

Rob Stein

I spent eight years running The Democracy Alliance, the progressive organization that Rob Stein built, and stood on his shoulders.  In his 78 years, Rob made significant contributions to philanthropy, as a public interest lawyer in DC, and as a key aide to Ron Brown, the Clinton-era Commerce Secretary.  But he will likely be most remembered for organizing the progressive response to an earlier moment of challenge, when George W. Bush was riding high, and pulling progressive donors and activists together under a big tent to acknowledge their differences but accentuate their common purpose.  That vision, driven by the sunny and optimistic but hardheaded Rob, maintains its strength today and if you saw it in November’s midterm successes, you can thank Rob.  As for me, who met Rob when he was running around like Johnny Appleseed with the germ of the idea that became the Democracy Alliance, he was as kind and supportive a presence as any I’ve had in my life.  My politics were to the left of his, and I’m sure there were steps I took that he disagreed with, or that even disappointed him.  But I always felt he had my back.

Pablo Eisenberg

Pablo, who died at 90 last month, is probably best known as a pungent critic of philanthropy, which almost always deserved the hits it took from him in the column he wrote for many years in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.  But more important to understand is that it was all in the service of a deeply rooted commitment to justice for the poor and marginalized.  Pablo was a key leader of Community Change, the center for organizing on behalf of those communities. I first met him there when I had only been in philanthropy a matter of weeks and he was a key organizer of a fund to respond to the Clinton Administration’s devil’s bargain with the Gingrich Congress to cut welfare benefits and shift power to the states.  (I think he may have been shocked when Open Society offered a grant that was more than he had asked for.). Pablo also created another group, the Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, to organize non-profits and donor allies to push philanthropy to be more transparent, less bureaucratic and spend more money on poverty and racial justice.  (I served as its Vice-Chair for a while.).  The strength of both organizations is a huge part of his legacy, but as with any good leader, it is also felt in those he influenced, and one of them was surely me.  I tried to practice the kind of philanthropy Pablo advocated – and surely heard from him when I fell short – and the strange role I have played for 25 years or more, as a kind of practitioner-critic of philanthropy, owes much to what I learned from him.

Susan Sandler

Susan was among many other important roles in her life for some years the chair of Community Change, which embodied her own deep social justice values.  She died this month after along battle with glioblastoma, and one of her late-life contributions was this beautiful short book on what she learned on her “cancer journey.”  I met Susan a few decades ago through her late parents, the formidable Marion and Herb Sandler.  She was devoted to them and they relied on her heavily, and over time she became a formidable – and visionary – philanthropist in her own right, among other things establishing a $200 million fund for racial justice.  Susan did a great deal to shape my own views about racial justice, and her deeply-held belief that poor and marginalized people should lead the way toward systemic change of the structures that oppress them – with the rest of us taking our cue from them – made a strong impression on me as I was becoming active in philanthropy. When I took over the Democracy Alliance in 2013, I worked hard – and to my surprise, successfully – to get her to join our board, and there was no one whose counsel and wisdom meant more to me, until her illness caused her to reduce her commitments.  Her powerhouse husband, Steve Phillips, was the model of a devoted and supportive partner throughout their marriage, but never more than in the last challenging years.

Doing errands on this last day of the year, without meaning to, I found myself driving by my mother’s grave, my Aunt Jackie’s nursing home, and the George C. Moore Company, where my Dad worked for forty years.  I blew a kiss to each as I passed, and when I went by Dad’s office – where he’d wave down to me many times over the years as I passed by on my way home – I kissed the ring he wore, which became mine upon his death 25 years ago tomorrow.  As I get older -- as we all get older -- we are accompanied each day not only by the people we live and work with, but by a growing number of those who once lived, yet remain essential parts of us still.

Fifty years later

When I was eight years old, my grandparents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.  I remember this not because I was
there, which I was, but because the occasion was commemorated with a large group photo of their children, nieces and nephews and grandchildren, and I’m in the front row of the picture with my brother and cousins.  What I believe I thought at the time, and again from time to time over the years when I came across the photo, was how amazing it was that they were still alive.  (At the time, my grandfather was 71, three years older that I am now.). They were Methusaleh-like figures to me.  Fifty years seemed a staggeringly long time.

Now that I am sixty-eight, a half century into adulthood, it still does, though I am edging into the Methusaleh role myself.  Fifty-year anniversaries are all around me.  First of my high school graduation, which took place in June of 1972 and was marked with a reunion this August.  The graduation itself was not particularly memorable to me, with a commencement speech by the local Republican Member of Congress, but the previous four years -- which we’re now as far away from as the launch of Prohibition or Warren Harding’s introduction of the radio, then a newish technology, into the White House was at the time – still seem like a golden period to me.  It’s hard to imagine given the direction of the U.S. Catholic Church since, but I went to a religious high school that was as progressive and innovative as any public or private school of the time and even now.  I was moved to write about it here and here some years ago when I was trying to figure out how my political and social consciousness developed.

I started college at Columbia on September 1, 1972, the day I first set foot on the campus when my parents dropped me off with a modest trunkload of clothing, toiletries and the Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter I got for a high school graduation present (this was long before parents had to rent trailers to accommodate refrigerators, microwaves and the like).  That was the day I met my dear friend to this day Dan Baker, though we got off to an inauspicious start.  After my parents drove back to Rhode Island and I had settled into my dorm room on the 9^th floor of Carman Hall, I sauntered down to the TV lounge on the floor to find a group of first-day freshmen like me watching a football game.  Apparently I had my shirt unbuttoned, exposing much of my chest, because Dan, who I had never laid eyes on before, looked away from the game, took the sight of me in, and announced loudly to the group, “You don’t have any hair on your chest!”  Which was, and remains, true, but made me pretty conspicuous at a moment when I was eager to fit in.  Somehow, despite that icebreaker, we became friends and eventually roommates, and we’ve spent a few thousand hours together, often with spouses and children, in the years since.  Every five years or so we commemorate the day of our meeting, as we did at the half-century mark last month, with a trip back to campus and dinner.

The same week I entered Columbia I began another lifelong association, with the American Civil Liberties Union, as a member of its now-defunct but then prestigious and historic Academic Freedom Committee.   I’ve spent half of the fifty years since as a staff member in two ACLU state affiliates and at the national headquarters, and as a national Board and Executive Committee member (I even eventually co-chaired the committee that abolished the Academic Freedom and other committees, a very ACLU-meta thing), but it all started with an unlikely 18-year old, long-haired, pimply and bell-bottomed, taking his seat around a conference table in a wood-panelled conference room to debate the likes of tenure policy with about twenty men (and one woman, at the time I joined) in their fifties and sixties who were mostly professors and deans.  It was a bit intimidating, and I had no idea what I was doing at first.  In two years I was the committee’s vice-chair, and as I came to the attention of the ACLU powers-that-be, they asked me to take on more and more things, including this. 

How I got there is a long story, but at its root is the serendipity that my high school debate coach, who had left teaching and the Christian Brothers and moved to New York to go to graduate school, ended up with a part-time job at the ACLU staffing this committee when they in early 1972, these older academics, reeling from the student protests of the previous few years, were desperate to add a token student to their ranks, he told them he had just the person in mind.  I tell the story of my early ACLU days in this first installment of the interviews I did with the Rutgers ACLU Oral History Project.

That autumn of 1972 was notable in launching two deep engagements of mine that have endured for the last fifty years.  One is with politics.  I cast my first Presidential vote in November 1972, for George McGovern.  I canvassed for him on the Upper West Side of New York (the political equivalent, in a neighborhood where Democratic nominees garner 90% of the vote, of carrying coals to Newcastle), and took the subway to Herald Square to hear him speak at a labor rally.  (McGovern, a decent and honorable man who would have made a fine President, was steamrollered by Nixon, two years before his ignominious resignation, and deserves much better than history’s loser designation.  I was honored to meet him late in his life a few years ago.). A few years later I organized with other Columbia students to press for Nixon’s impeachment, and was a political junkie long before MSNBC, Politico and FiveThirtyEight made it possible for everyone to be an armchair statistician, and when our dread about biennial elections was about taxes and foreign policy, not whether we will have a democracy at all.

The other deep engagement, if not to say love affair, is with New York City itself.  I’d spent some weekends here in high school, and since my early teens had been addicted to WNBC talk radio, whose great hosts – Long John Nebel, Brad Crandall and Lee Leonard -- I listened to at bedtime, so I knew a lot from top-of-the-hour New York news and was probably the only 12-year old in Westerly, Rhode Island who could discourse on transit union leader Mike Quill’s strategy in the subway strike.  But living in New York was a dream.  I was largely indifferent to what was going on in my classes at Columbia (something my transcript would surely certify, so it's fortunate I never had to use it to get into graduate school), so I made the city my campus.  On Saturday nights I walked down Broadway to H and H Bagels and bought an onion bagel and some cream cheese for my breakfast the next morning, picking up a fat Sunday Times on the way back and carefully leaving it unread on my desk until the next morning. I was very interested in old movies, but indulging that interest in small-town Rhode Island in the pre-cable, pre-video store, pre-streaming days was virtually impossible – you had to look out for when Casablanca or Rear Window might suddenly appear on the late-night schedule of one of the four TV stations we could get with our rooftop antenna. 

But New York was a different story.  In those days, there were at dozen revival house theaters changing their bill almost every night, including the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Elgin, Theater 80 St. Marks and many others. In my first year I saw practically every Hitchcock, Marx Brothers and Bogart film there was to see.  People remember the early 1970s as a New York low point, and there was plenty of crime, to be sure.  In my first week at Columbia, a professor was stabbed to death in broad daylight on Amsterdam Avenue near campus, and it was all I could do to stop my parents from driving back to New York to take me home.  We had police locks on our doors, and if I’d had a car it would have had a “no radio” sign in the window, as was common at the time as a way of warding off thieves.  But it was something you (hopefully) lived with, and crime and graffiti are not the dominant memories I have of my early New York years.  Those were, and remain, the excitement of racial and ethnic diversity, new (to me) tastes like Hunan cuisine, deli, hummus and pierogi, culture, argument, architecture, and energy.  And while there are plenty of people who are born and die here, spending all their lives here in between, more than any other place I know it is a city people choose to live in, because what they can get here – all the things I listed, but much else as well, like career paths impossible in small towns and rural areas, and the combination of privacy and respect for difference that for most of history has been impossible to achieve in other places. 

For the past year and a half, I have lived mostly in a small coastal town in Connecticut just five miles from where I grew up, and I’m in New York only a few days most weeks.  It bothers me a bit to see the city now, sometimes, with the eyes of a visitor, overwhelmed at times by the crowds, noise and light, which often drain my energy, not feed it.  I’m recalibrating my identity as a New Yorker.  But it is a central part of who I am, and has been from the day I waved goodbye to my parents’ car as it headed down Broadway without me.

Come to think of it, my grandparents started their 1912 marriage with a honeymoon in New York – the New York of Ragtime.  They could hardly have imagined the time would come when an eight-year old boy would see them as ancient.

Sister Jackie, 1928-2022

My first memories of our Aunt Jackie – then Sister Mary Paulita -- are from the visits we made to whatever convent she was living in when I was little. She taught in a few Providence parochial schools in the 1950s and 60s, and in those days Sisters of Mercy couldn’t travel without a chaperone, so a few times a year we drove up to the city – a bigger deal in those days, pre-Route 95 – and she met us in the parlor, usually with other nuns dropping in so she could show off her niece and nephews.In those pre-Vatican II days, all that was visible of her was her chin to her forehead, since her face was surrounded by what I think was called a wimple, and habits of that period flowed down to the floor. 

The whole effect of those visits, with all their rules and restrictions, was a bit like seeing an inmate in prison.  Even then, though, Aunt Jackie could never suppress her amazing laugh, which has echoed across classrooms, seashores, Indian reservations, social service organizations, and, in the last few years, the nursing home that was her final stopping place.

Like my father, Uncle Jerry and Aunt Martha, she had a rough start in life, with a mentally ill mother taken away to an institution when Aunt Jackie was three, and a father who abandoned her and her siblings a few years later, never to be heard from again.  After a brief stint of dividing up these traumatized children among relatives, they all ended up being raised by their Aunt Bina and Uncle Paul.  Neither the baby like Martha or the instant eldest son like my Dad, Jackie got less attention and learned to be pretty independent, a quality that lasted all her long life.

Aunt Jackie was a person who all her life was a searcher, questing for meaning in the world and trying to understand her place and 
those of others in the great scheme of things.  In high school, walking on the beach – her favorite place, and one of the great pleasures of her later years was helping her fellow Sisters of Mercy tend their summer residence in Watch Hill – she had a moment of clarity about her religious calling, finding her life’s vocation as a nun, as a member of a community to which she was deeply devoted, and which has surrounded her today at this time of passage.  She went into novitiate at nineteen, in 1947, and after about seven years in a fairly cloistered situation – she had a Rip Van Winkle gap of cultural knowledge, puzzled by references to I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners --- when she came out she got busy making up for the seclusion.

Aunt Jackie taught for many years, not only in Catholic elementary schools but at Bayview, a girls’ high school.  But that never really seemed to be her ultimate calling.  In the 1970s she got herself a counseling degree – becoming one of the most highly educated of the LaMarches, and the first woman to get a higher education – and did a remarkable thing.  Aunt Jackie moved west, living for several years in Oklahoma and Arizona, working with Native Americans, and prisoners.  While there, for whatever it’s worth, she took up smoking in her forties.

I have a Navajo weaving that has hung on the wall of every office I’ve had, that she gave me from that period.  It is there to remind me of her example, that the highest calling is to live a life of service to those marginalized by society.  It is not always something that I, or any of us, have lived up to.  But it is an aspiration, and Aunt Jackie was the leading model in our family for such a life.

When Aunt Jackie moved back east she became the counseling director of Amos House in Cranston, a social service agency for homeless people, most of them people of color, many with substance abuse issues.  She loved the work and was good at it.  She told me in later years that the time she spent out west, and Amos House, were important to her because she wanted to go where the challenge was – where the pain was.  Jesus would understand.

Much as she gave to others – including a few close female friends from among the order and elsewhere – Aunt Jackie could be a quirky presence in our family. She moved back to Westerly upon retirement so she could be closer to her nieces and nephews and her siblings, who were getting older and needed some help.  She was at all family gatherings but you might turn around at a cookout and see her walking across the lawn to her car, not having said goodbye.  Not leaving in a huff, but suddenly tired of company.  She did well by herself and I sometimes thought it strange she chose a life in a religious order with such communal activity.  But in fact living in a convent, apart from your family for the most part and spending much time in contemplation, suited her very well, and she managed to recreate some version of that once living on her own.

Some in the family found her penchant for searching, often in the form of psychoanalyzing, a bit much, because LaMarches as a group are not particularly introspective or prone to sharing.  She went into therapy herself midlife, and got so much out of it she was eager to penetrate the defenses of others. My brother David recalls, as many of us nieces and nephews do, going to her small apartment near Wilcox Park in Westerly after she retired, having her serve up a grinder, soup and copious amounts of coffee as she engaged in an armchair analysis of every member of our family. As Aunt Jackie got older, particularly in her later years as she outlived some aspects of her mind, she had very few filters, and visiting her, you had to be prepared to be told how old, or fat, or gray you had become.  She forgot a lot of facts about her own life and the lives of her nieces and nephews, but she never forgot who we were, and never lost her emotional intelligence. I know she had my number practically right up to the end.

Our family is grateful to the Sisters of Mercy for their care for our beloved aunt.  When your aunt is a nun, nieces and nephews have the privilege of care when they are old, and I’m particularly grateful to my cousin Suzanne and my cousin Jackie for their devoted attention to her.

Like most of her brothers and sisters, she insisted she not end up in a nursing home, and again like most of them, that is where she spent her final years.  But whatever toll the dementia took on her, it did not rob her of her spirit. She lived in a constant present, and was happy with it. Until her last few weeks, she never lost her sense of humor or her infectious laugh.  One of my fondest memories of Aunt Jackie in this period is when Lisa and I asked her one day what kind of food she missed.  A lobster roll, it turned out.  So we went to Sandy’s one morning and bought one, along with a bag of potato chips.  We took them to her room and laid out a spread for her, and I will never forget not only her look of joy at this rare treat, with all the memories it summoned, but the enormous gusto with which my tiny then 90-year old aunt tore into it, devouring and savoring every bite.

I would like to tell a few other stories about Aunt Jackie, like the way she manifested her frustration over how difficult it was to find a priest in Westerly to say a few prayers at an unorthodox memorial service for my Aunt Marcelle and Uncle Bill in a local tavern, but from time to time she warned me – since she assumed I would be among those to eulogize her – against making any public reminiscences of her occasional infractions of the Ten Commandments.  So this eulogy is the G-rated version.

As I come to a close, I want to widen the lens a bit, because Aunt Jackie’s passing, and the personal loss we feel of what she meant to each of us, is also the end of something else.  She lived to be older than anyone in the recorded history of the LaMarche and Brassard families, going back to France in the 17^th century.  But she was also the last of the siblings of the family my cousins and I all spring from.  My Aunt Millie is still with us as the remaining link to that generation, but all the rest -- Uncle Jerry and my Dad Phil, along with Martha, Gert, Pauline, Marcelle, and now, Jackie, are gone.  The hand they were dealt in the 1930’s was as traumatic a start to childhood as could be imagined. Not just for the four who were abandoned, but for Pauline, Gert and Marcelle, whose parents – Bina and Paul, were sister and brother to Alice and Philip, respectively – more than doubled the size of their family on a small-town pharmacist’s salary at the height of the great Depression, the disruption must have been sharply felt.

And yet this blended family grew close, enjoyed one another’s company and looked out for one another for the rest of their lives.  My cousins and I followed their example, and that of Bina and Paul, who were a center of gravity for all of us, and remain close to one another, even though we are a little more scattered than the preceding generation.  Now most of us are grandparents ourselves and hardly a day goes by when I do not think of Bina and Paul, my aunts, uncle and Dad for this beautiful legacy, and with Aunt Jackie’s passing we will redouble our efforts to keep it strong for generations to come.

Aunt Jackie said to me more than once that as she grew older that she felt a great affinity for Buddhism, so I want to close with a Buddhist saying which can stand as a kind of epitaph for our remarkable aunt:  “Set your heart on doing good.  Do it over and over again and you will be filled with joy.

Barbara LaMarche 1930-2022

We celebrated the life of my Mom, who died at 91 on March 13, on March 18. Here are the reflections and remembrances I shared then.   

 I guess the first thing I should say, on behalf of our mother, is that she is very sorry she can’t be here today – I mean sitting out there with the rest of you. The sash across the back of her casket, reading “I’d rather not be here,” is not some little gag that my siblings and I dreamed up – it was one of her two oft-expressed wishes for after her death, the other that we inscribe her tombstone with the words* on the little laminated card you were given, from the 1958 song “This is All I Ask,” made popular by Tony Bennett. Of course she would like to have been present at this occasion to hear all the things being said about her. And who knows?  Maybe she can.

Actually, in going through Mom’s apartment these past few days, we found more notes about her post-life wishes than we had been aware of when we met with Eddie Dolan on Monday to plan today’s service and burial.  Thank God we got most of them right, but on one point – “would like to have my wake while I’m still alive” – well, I’m sorry we couldn’t deliver on that one, Mom.

It’s a little strange to be doing this with Mom over there, because as you all know, she didn’t miss a trick, and you would certainly hear about it if you were eating a potato chip too loudly or God forbid she was your passenger in a car and you didn’t pull out quickly enough into traffic or drove too close to the center of the road.  It’s hard to shake the expectation of her running critique.  But I’ll try.

There are many things to be said about my Mom, of course, and David, Zoe and Zack have said some of them beautifully, but the first and foremost is that she mattered.  All human beings matter, of course, but my Mom conquered every room she entered.  Frequently funny, often profane and  opinionated, armed for most of her life with Scotch or a glass of red wine and always a cigarette, teasing and flirting, belting out “It Had to Be You” -- it will be a long time before her memory fades, before those of us who loved her will come to terms with the fact that she’s not here.

From the time I was little, friends would meet and be captivated by my Mom – I swear Tom Kendzia and my school friends and cousins hung around the house so much not to see us kids, but so as not to miss any of her bracingly funny and outrageous utterances, to eat her great cooking, to hang out with a mother not quite in the Leave It To Beaver/Donna Reed Show mold.  A little more like Lucille Ball crossed with Mae West and a bit of Elaine Stritch. 

She grew old, but never quite became old. My Mom kept a pool cue in the trunk of her car at all times, and in her mid-eighties, I saw her triumph over four men half her age in a row – I was one of them. The only accidents she had in her late 80s and early 90s were far from typical for her age cohort – being flung from a rowing machine at the Y and falling out of a chaise lounge in front of her apartment during one of her daily tanning sessions. This is a woman asked a year or two ago by my sister what supplies she would need during the COVID quarantine who submitted this terse list:  Pinot Noir, Marlboro Light 100s and bacon.

We can tell these wonderful stories about my Mom forever – and we will --but before we lay her to rest today I want you all to reflect that one of the most important things to know about my Mom -- and some of you do know it -- is that her start in life was pretty hard.  She didn’t grow up in material poverty, though she shared a bed with a sibling until she was practically grown, and could take only one bath a week, as was not uncommon in the Depression era she was raised in.  But she did grow up in emotional poverty.  The last of her parents’ six children, she was largely neglected as their marriage deteriorated.  In the last few days, going through her things, we came across this note she wrote, to no one in particular:

    “When I was about six or seven years of age, I lived next door to Mrs. Mary Buchanan who had a child my own age.  Apparently my own mother had left home and my siblings couldn’t handle the responsibility of taking care of me. My father worked third shift at the Post Office and therefore was not able to oversee my needs.  I remember getting out of bed each morning and going next door to sit in Mrs. Buchanan’s kitchen to wait for her to get out of bed.  She then gave me breakfast, saw to it that I was clean and braided my hair for school.  Sometimes I would find myself at her doorstep in the evening and she would soothe my fears and send me back to bed.  She fed me and made identical sweaters for her daughter [who great up to be her best friend Janet] and me.  I’ll never forget her kindness to me when I needed it most.”

Is it any wonder that my mother became an ardent fan of Shirley Temple, her famous contemporary, who so often played an orphan girl who found a loving home?  (Not to mention being a pretty good singer and tap dancer as well.) Is it any wonder that she was such an active volunteer, the favorite aunt -- if truth be told -- of ALL her nieces and nephews, that in time she made her own home a sanctuary for those who needed an ear or a hug?

My Mom’s life did not always follow the course of a storybook fantasy.  She struggled all her life with insecurity, and often found it hard to trust the love of others. No relationship with Barbara LaMarche was always easy.  But her intensity was worth every minute of the occasional drama, and it was the lodestar of our lives.  She loved and protected David and Barbara and me ferociously when we were young.  How many times did I have to plead with her not to march down to Immaculate Conception to grab the nuns by their wimples and give them a piece of her mind about some real or perceived injustice?  By the way, that passion extended to dozens of letters to the Westerly Sun, a robust sampling of which we’ll have on display at the Haversham this afternoon, but here are a few lines from one about one of her favorite topics, discrimination against smokers:  “You mentioned that children growing up with smoking parents have more diseases than most children.  I have three grown children who are exceptionally intelligent and free from any debilitating illnesses!”

Mom had a little difficulty letting us go as we grew independent and formed our own households and families, no doubt because abandonment was a constant theme of her early life.  But in her last years, even taking into account the significant memory loss of the final few, she came to see and accept the love of her family, to see herself in us and to know that we see so much of our best selves in her.

Her wit, her hospitality, her intelligence, her caring in Barbara.  Her naturally blonde hair – no, wait a minute – her love of music, her loyalty, her independence in David.  As for me, I cannot imagine who I would be without her. I can be judgmental, profane and impatient myself – thanks, Mom! But she also made me feel that I was the most special child on earth, that there was nothing that I could not do, and that confidence has helped me to achieve more than I could ever have dreamed.  She showed me a love of words and reading and writing which are central to my life.  She was the most resilient person I have ever met, when she took a knock she got up stronger the next day.  I learned to look forward, rarely back.  She made our home a welcoming place, and I love to play host.  She had all the time in the world to spend with
the old and reach out to the young, and I try to carry that on in my work and life. She could not keep her mouth shut about what she thought was wrong, and well, look what I’ve done for a living as a kind of professional crusader.  I know she found it hard to believe sometimes, but it is true:  whatever is good about me bears her indelible stamp.

 

The last years of her life were in many ways the best, and how many people who have walked this earth can say that when their time is done?  She saw her
children successful and secure, loved Lisa’s entry into her life, and watched her four grandchildren grow into fine adults.  She delighted in the bonus of four great-grandchildren, and forged a beautiful relationship with them as their beloved GG that assures she will be remembered with love and joy into the next century.  And she had the sweet good fortune, when she was long past looking for it, but when she was finally ready for it, of finding love with the wonderful Phil Newbury – and on behalf of our family, we love you too, Phil, we delighted in the happiness you brought to our mother and your exquisite caring and attention to her, and you’re a part of our family forever.

With her memory failing and multiple mortal illnesses, those of us who cared about and cared for my Mom feared the time would come when we would not be able to keep her at home.  But home is where she died early Sunday morning, very peacefully in her sleep.  The manner of her passing is a great blessing, but still her loss has hit very hard.  She was a vital and vibrant presence, my most pungent critic and my fiercest advocate, and I will miss her as long as I live.

And so, as Mom would croon so many Sunday afternoons at the Harborview, or wherever the band was playing:  we’ll have to be glad, just to be sad thinking of you.  “Some others I’ve seen, might never be mean, might never be cross, or try to be boss, but they wouldn’t do, for nobody else, gave us a thrill, with all of our faults, we love you still, it had to be you, wonderful you, it had to be you.”

And let the music play, as long as there's a song to sing, and I will stay younger than spring

 

On the day of my Mom's funeral, the wonderful staff at StoryCorps sent me this beautiful piece drawn from the conversations I had with her in the StoryCorps booth at Grand Central Terminal in 2006.

"History will not forgive us if we fail"

Over the weekend, we finished listening to the first season of the excellent Slate "Slow Burn" podcast, a look back at the Watergate scandals and the Nixon impeachment.  I also started "Our Man," George Packer's new biography of Richard Holbrooke. Parts of each made me ache for an earlier time when we had some leaders who confronted moral and constitutional horrors with the clarity and gravity they demanded. As we deal with a corrupt and lawless President and the atrocities of border camps and family separations, what both the podcast and the book cover are chillingly relevant to the current moment.

I lived through Watergate, of course, but there was a lot I had forgotten about before Slow Burn, like Martha Mitchell -- how she saw what Nixon was up to before anyone else, and how the people around the President tried to silence her, to the point of holding her in isolation.  But what really hit me hardest, and moved me, was the final episode on the House Judiciary Committee Vote on impeachment.

I'd forgotten how several conservative Democrats whose "base" had been staunchly supportive of Nixon, not to mention a number of Republicans -- shamefully almost impossible to imagine today -- stood up to do the right thing.  In announcing his surprise vote on the Judiciary Committee, Alabama Democrat Walt Flowers asked:  "What if we fail to impeach? Do we ingrain forever, in the very fabric of our Constitution, a standard of conduct in our highest office that in the least is deplorable, and in the worst, is impeachable?"

And who in our politics today, save John Lewis, has the moral weight of Barbara Jordan, who after talking about how she had reluctantly concluded that the founders "left her out" of the Constitution, declared that nevertheless:  "My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the demolition, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."

Holbrooke, whose manifest faults the Packer book does not shy away from, was right, and forcefully so, about some of the key human rights crises of his time. Few today remember the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that created hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees with most nations of the world looking the other way. Holbrooke prepped then-Vice-President Mondale for a conference on the refugee crisis in Geneva where he spoke for a United States that was, at its best -- a far cry from the moral depravity of the Trump Administration -- a beacon:  "Let us renounce the legacy of shame.  Let us honor the principles we inherit.  Let us do something meaningful -- something profound -- to stem this misery.  We face a world problem.  Let us fashion a world solution.  History will not forgive us if we fail.  History will not forget us if we succeed."

 

Do I love America?

Looking out over Puget Sound every day on my writing leave this summer, trying to focus on a few personal writing projects removed from the day to day fray of politics, I have tried to revert to mid-20th century news habits, just reading the physical New York Times each day (sometimes not even on the day it comes out) and avoiding websites and social media.  But Donald Trump's attacks on "the Squad" have managed to penetrate my consciousness -- and, of course, sicken and enrage me.

A lot of the writing I am doing is grounded in the past, and what Trump is doing has strong echoes of George Wallace, the last out and out racist to run for President, carrying five states and 13% of the popular vote.  Many have made that comparison in recent days, but I also thought of an almost-forgotten figure, Spiro Agnew, who before he was famous for resigning the Vice-Presidency over taking bribes, was Nixon's hatchet man.  A hatchet man for a President who was a legendary hatchet man himself is a pretty despicable figure, and Agnew did not disappoint.  I associate the call to "Love it or Leave it!", which you used to see on bumperstickers in the late sixties and early seventies, with him.  But then it did not quite have the putrid racial tinge that Trump and his supporters -- both the chanting MAGA-cap clad rallygoers and the enablers in Congress -- have given it.

Of course what Trump said has brought about broad condemnation, but what's truly depressing is that we are having a national discussion about it where two sides are represented -- echoes of Charlottesville -- and people like me feel compelled to step up and explain why Trump's call is so reprehensible.  Attack by attack, what was once beyond the pale -- something that would get you fired in any workplace -- becomes discussable, and if in a second Trump administration we were debating preventive detention for those who "hate America" or denaturalizing U.S. citizens for their views, or worse, who could any longer be shocked?

I haven't agreed with every utterance of every member of "the Squad," though I admire them and share most of their views and politics.  They are important and exciting new leaders, though it's important to remember that we didn't take back the U.S. House, and most likely will not take back the country, solely or primarily on the victories of those in safe, progressive Democratic districts. But in this awful, gratuitous fight, I stand with them completely, and if I could join the Squad, I would, since for every day of my career over the last forty years I have criticized my own country for its failures to live up to its ideals -- the ideals that it has often fallen short of, sometimes (as today) miserably and murderously, but which are all that truly set it apart from most countries of the world and why I continue to feel any glimmer of patriotism and love of America even as I weep and rage over what Trump, the only President not to make even a scintilla of effort to ground his "leadership" in anything beyond self-interest and raw power and force, is doing to destroy it.

 

 

 

Cultural notes

At right and left, I'm sharing some recent enthusiasms, which I haven't done for a while here -- a new biography of Alfred Stieglitz, the new Lizzo album, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez on The New Yorker Radio Hour, and David Letterman's surprisingly raw at times Netflix talk show.

Trump and Grant

It’s taken me a while to get through my friend Ron Chernow’s giant biography of Ulysses S. Grant, but I’m finally done, and managed not to crack any ribs when I dropped it on my chest a few times while reading in bed.  Though Ron wrote it before Trump’s election, it’s hard not to think of Trump – and the contrast with Grant, or any reasonably decent President, while reading it.

Turns out that Grant, the great military hero, abhorred military parades, unlike the chicken-hawk Commander-in-Chief of the moment.  Of the Great Wall of China, he wrote:  “It is hard to see any practical use these walls can serve in the present age unless they should be converted into drives.”

But this paragraph from the book really got to me, because it reminded me that it is possible to have a chief executive who is alert to the moral perils of racism, not working overtime to stoke the flames of hatred:

The Squirrel Chronicles

If you know me, you know I’m not a big animal person.  At least not beyond dogs and cats.  I even managed to work no fewer than three references into my wedding vows to my mystification at my bride’s comfort level with plowing ahead on hikes in California past warning signs about mountain lions, coyotes and rattlesnakes. 

I prefer walks on the beach, where there is no way for predators to hide and no known reports of jellyfish or sharks jumping out of the ocean.

My now-wife Lisa and I have regular debates about safaris.  I know many people who’ve been on one or more, and find them to have been transformational experiences.  She’d like to do it sometime.  I want her to be able to check this bucket list item, and I know the reports of death and injuries of tourists on safari are exceedingly rare, but why tempt fate?  David Attenborough nature specials get you even closer, from the safety of your couch.

I’ve never been particularly bothered by squirrels, though from time to time, sitting on a park bench and watching one scurry past, I’ve wondered why.  After all, they’re basically rats with bushy tails, and like most people, I’m revolted by rats.  But while I’m perfectly comfortable with squirrels in the outdoors, I would not be happy about having them in my house.

Which brings us to the squirrel nest on the window ledge outside our bedroom.  Last year, our landlady, citing some New York real estate code requirement, informed us that she was having elaborate wrought iron window guards installed in the windows where we put our air-conditioners in the summer.  That was perfectly fine with me, since I once offered to help a friend remove an air-conditioner from her window, lost my grip, and watched it smash to pieces on the (thankfully unoccupied) patch of sidewalk below.

So the window guard went in, we installed the air conditioner, and a few days later I was awakened soon after dawn by some scratching sounds on the window ledge.  I got up to look, and a squirrel was in the space between the right side of the air conditioner and the wall, carrying in its mouth (I’ll avoid gender-specific pronouns here, as I’m not that good at spotting squirrel genitalia) small branches from the nearby tree.

It seemed to be building a nest, and was pretty far along – we’d been away for a few days, and a lot of progress had been made.  I wasn’t wild about this, because the only thing between the squirrel nest and the inside of our bedroom was a fairly thin accordion-like barrier.  It wouldn’t be hard, I figured, for a squirrel to claw its way through, maybe even accidentally, burrowed into the nest with a slew of squirrel babies.

Yet I didn’t want to disrupt the nest, because for all I knew there were already squirrel babies in it, and if there weren’t, I felt bad about the idea of forcing the industrious squirrel to find an alternative site with delivery imminent.  So I set about building a little fortress to make sure the squirrels couldn’t break through.  We have a lot of books, so I made a big stack of them on the other side of the thin plastic barrier and weighted them down further with stones.

Some weeks went by, there was a fair amount of squirrel activity, including cheeping sounds (at least I think they were cheeping – in all the children’s books I’ve read to my kids and grandkids, I’ve never come across any representation of a squirrel sound) and eventually the activity died down and the nest was dismantled, either by highly responsible squirrels or by time, wind and rain.

A year passed.  Spring came again and we installed the air conditioner.  Once again a squirrel appeared with a few small branches, and began the nest, as if guided by a foreman. I resolved to nip this in the bud, and went to the internet to see what might deter squirrels.  The internet told me they were repelled by vinegar, and by owls – and since I don’t have an owl around, I figured one of those plastic owls you find in garden stores would do.

I made a trip to the hardware store and bought one of the owls, along with a plastic spray bottle, which I filled with a vinegar solution.  My grandson came over and I enlisted him in the squirrel deterrent operation.  We opened the window and swept out the beginnings of the nest, and sprayed the area with vinegar.  For good measure, we put the owl on top of the air conditioner, closed the window, and congratulated ourselves.

For a day or two, no sign of squirrels.  Then early one morning, while at the gym between sets, I looked at my iPhone and Lisa had texted me:  “I hate to say it but the squirrels are back – one just put out its front paws on the owl and was trying to bite its nose!”

I texted back urging her to spray more vinegar, but I had a sense our goose was cooked.  So much for the owl deterrent.  I’m guessing there was a conversation among our backyard squirrels that went something like this: 

“Hey, Frank (I’m assuming for dramatic purposes here that they give each other human names), have you noticed that that owl on the ledge hasn’t moved in three days.  Do you think it’s dead?”

“I was wondering myself, Muriel, let’s go check it out.”

“Jesus, this thing is made of plastic!  Do they think we’re idiots?  Let’s get back to building the nest.”

And so they did, now unmolested by me.  Once again, the squirrels have won.  The books are back.  The owl remains on the sill as a reminder of our fecklessness. And now our salads come with a light mist of vinegar.

 

Am I a patriot?

I've been planning to write something for today, the Fourth of July, about my complicated relationship with patriotism.  I looked up the various dictionary definitions, and all emphasize national pride, love of and devotion to country, even "vigorous support" for it.  That's much too close for me to nationalism, defined as a feeling of superiority over other countries, and all my life those who invoke patriotism -- especially today, with a flag-waving, military-exalting white nationalist as President -- seem to mean it as a kind of blind faith in the goodness and rightness of America. I've never been able to identify with that.  What I love about my country -- much as I love the Gospels of my Christian faith tradition, despite the way many Bible-thumping "Christians" have perverted them -- is that its founding principles give us something to aspire to, however much we have fallen short of their aspirations from the very birth of the United States to this day.

I have never felt comfortable with the traditional trappings of patriotism, because they usually celebrate conformity and gloss over our moral and political failures, and because in all such matters of identity -- politics, religion, gender, race -- I am personally lacking in conventional tribal instincts. But I have devoted my career to fighting to make my country live up to its ideals, and so I'm damned if I'm going to cede patriotism to the likes of Trump -- or his ancestors like Spiro Agnew, Nixon's Vice-President, and a loathsome figure of my formative years, whose version of "Make America Great Again" was "America: Love it or Leave It."

I had been planning to write more, and may at some point, in a book I am thinking of doing expanding on this piece from 2016.  But a few things I read this morning capture a number of my thoughts really well, and I'm going to share them here as my patriotic exercise for America's 242nd birthday:

•  The starting place for all reflections on the Fourth of July, Frederick Douglasses" What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?
• Christine Emba's op-ed in today's Washington Post, "Of Course this is Who we Are.  But who do we want to be?
• My friend Darren Walker's Medium post today reminding us why protest is patriotic.

Long-playing

Last Christmas my daughters gave me a present I had not asked for and hadn’t imagined wanting: a turntable on which I could play vinyl records. Since I had no vinyl at the time – with a few exceptions I’ll get to – they also gave me a few records from our shared past, Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon by James Taylor and Madman Across the Water by Elton John. A little later we went to Christmas dinner at the home I used to share with them and their mother, where Ellen still lives, and I went into her basement and emerged with a few dozen albums that had been stored there since, like most people of my generation, I finally gave up vinyl and moved first to cassette tapes and then CDs.

My younger daughter’s partner, just 30, is a big vinyl fan, and the main source of music in their apartment is a turntable fed by a few shelves of record albums, including a number raided from my old basement, some of which I’ve “borrowed” back since I acquired a turntable myself. For many people like him, who have a better feel than I have for audio quality, apparently you can’t beat vinyl.

I’ve been playing all my old records for a few months now and while I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have a highly sophisticated ear, it’s not the sound quality that is attracting me. Indeed, most of my old records have scratches and skips, and it’s those flaws I most love – and, though it’s been thirty or so years – remember fondly. It’s odd to think of these 33 rpm records as “long-playing” – though they were, of course, compared to their predecessors, 78’s – since after twenty minutes you have to get up from wherever you are sitting and turn the record from Side A to Side B, having gotten used in the age of digital music to playlists that can go on for hours. (This turntable still has three speeds, so I’ve been able to play the only boxed 78 set I have from my parents’ collection, the original Broadway cast recording of South Pacific.)

Most of what it is about for me is a nostalgia trip, since, perhaps along with scent, sound, and particularly music, is a time machine for me. Many songs take me back to the stormier parts of my adolescence, riding around in my car alone and feeling sorry for myself, in the wake of some unrequited or doomed love, as James Taylor sang (in this case, on the car radio) Fire and Rain. I remember reading the Sunday Times in my Columbia fraternity house while eating an onion bagel from H and H or a croissant from the Hungarian Pastry Shop while listening to E. Power Biggs’ baroque organ playing on Music of Jubilee, the first classical album I ever owned. Looking through my old albums reminds me of what weirdly eclectic tastes I have, from an album of Holly Near/Ronnie Gilbert duets (one of the reasons my daughters always claimed I am a lesbian trapped in a straight man’s body) to a middle period Isley Brothers album, one of the reasons Spotify’s algorithm seems to think I am Black.)

Of course, it’s not as if all these songs have been locked in a vault and unheard for decades – like many people, I replaced most of my LPs with CDs and then, when iTunes and MP3 players came along, I burned them or downloaded them. But there are big differences. In many cases (a few perfect albums like Joni Mitchell’s Blue as the exceptions) I copied my favorite songs and skipped over those I didn’t like as much. Those in-between songs have been missing for years, and it’s actually nice to have them back, as well as to restore the sequence of songs that a well-constructed album has. If you grew up listening to something over and over, your ear, decades later, is still trained to hear the next song, not what comes up in your music shuffle.

And I love being reacquainted with labels that meant something to me, splurging on records at Korvettes or J and R, like Angel and Nonesuch. The greatest gems in the records I’m getting reacquainted with are some from the 1950s that Ellen and I inherited from her parents, since I did not grow up with much exposure to classical music and my self-education began with Dvorak Cello Concertos, Handel Trio Sonatas, Joaquin DesPres motets and, most exquisitely, Pablo Casal’s recording of the Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, on which you can hear him grunting as he works the bow.

The cello is a particular favorite of mine, and in 1979 I remember reading in the New York Times about a debut album by a young Black cellist, about my age, named Eugene Moye, and I went out and bought it. It’s a beautiful album, and the best thing on it is Brahms’ Sonata in D, Op. 78, written for the violin but adapted for the cello. I’ve never been as transported, before or since, by a piece of music. Moye never made another album – I see him listed today in programs for the American Symphony Orchestra or the American Ballet Theatre, where my brother David is a conductor – and despite my efforts to locate it, his debut album does not seem to be available in any other format. So for the last 25 years or so, it’s been one album I’ve kept, but was never able to play it until Christmas. I’m delighted to be reunited with it, and all my long-lost platters.

Fathers and sons

Reading this excerpt from Daniel Mendelsohn’s recent book, An Odyssey, and hearing him on Fresh Air and other places, I’ve been struck by how often it’s the case that a parent – often a father – knows and cares more about an adult child’s life and achievements than they are willing to let on, at least directly to the child.  In An Odyssey, the author’s retired father takes the Bard College class he teaches that is devoted to the epic poem, then travels with him to Greece.  There’s a point at which Daniel Mendelsohn realizes that his father, who never gave him much in the way of positive reinforcement when he was growing up, has kept clippings of almost every article he has written or been featured in.

My late father-in-law from my first marriage was, like Mendelsohn’s father, pretty withholding when it came to praise for his daughters.  When he died, they gathered in La Jolla, California, where he had retired, with his local friends, including various young women to whom, apparently, he had been a cherished father figure and much more open with. His family was struck to learn how often, how warmly, and how knowledgably he’d spoken about their lives, families and careers to his local friends when to them he didn’t seem to be paying much attention at all.

My father died twenty years ago in a nursing home with few possessions left.  One of them was a file box in which I found not only every article by and about me, but every note and birthday and Father’s Day card I ever sent. He also left behind his wallet, which I’d never had occasion to handle before.  Going through it, along with photographs and some money and cards, I found something tucked into one of the compartments – a piece of paper folded many times over, in order to fit, and very fragile at the folds from having been opened closed many times.  The paper was at that point like parchment and almost fell apart in my hands when I unfolded it.  Indeed, it had been in his wallet for over twenty years.  It was a note I had written to my parents on the day of my college graduation.  I had forgotten completely about it.

I don’t have the letter any more – I gave it to my mother after reading it – but somehow I’d had the presence of mind and the grace at 22 to write to thank them for the kind of parents they were.  They’d sacrificed for me to be the first in the family to go to college, and had somehow managed the balance of making me feel there were no limits on what I could accomplish while not crushing me with the weight of their expectations for me.  That kind of love and support is a huge part of what has made it possible for me to have the life I’ve had and loved, both professionally and personally, and I’ve tried to be that kind of parent and grandparent.

What prompts these remembrances is being reminded that it is sometimes difficult, particularly for men of a certain generation like Mendelsohn’s father and my own, to express their pride and love as directly as we might want or need.  But they often find other ways of doing it -- which if we are lucky trickles back to us from what they say to others and in the hidden archives that they keep, sometimes close to their very skin.

Restaurant Heaven

There was a New Yorker cover some years back, which I’ve been unable to find, of a vision of heaven populated by bygone New York City department stores – B. Altman, Gimbel’s, Bonwit Teller and the like.  It wouldn’t mean much to someone who hadn’t been here forty years ago, but it was a nice vision for me, who still misses some of those places and knows the day is coming when Lord and Taylor and even Macy’s will join them in the great beyond.

I have that feeling about restaurants that have figured in my life.  I am not much of a foodie, but some of my most powerful connections are with restaurants -- both the food and the conversation that takes place over dinners -- and I tend to eat the same things over and over if I like them.

We didn’t eat out much as kids, but when we did it was at one of a few local red-sauce Italian restaurants, the most memorable being Capizzano’s, at the top of Granite Street in Westerly, where we’d sometimes have fish and chips on Friday nights.  On the way back from the beach we’d sometimes stop at The Crossroads, whose food I no longer remember but whose knotty-pine booths live on in memory.  In high school I worked in Watch Hill during the summers, for a few years operating the famous flying-horse carousel there, and in the slow period between five and six p.m. when the local kids would go home for supper, I’d steal $3.75 from the muffin tin where we kept the coins from fares and run across the street to Snuffy’s Diner to get a take-out box of veal scallopini with spaghetti on the side. (In my defense as a thief, all of us who worked there pillaged the till, and when he was on his deathbed I confessed to my boss that I had routinely stolen change for my dinners.  He said that of course he knew we all did that, and factored it into the business model.)

None of these establishments are in business anymore, but I did find an old postcard of Snuffy's dining room.

As a college student, I quickly abandoned the Columbia meal plan and ate dinner most nights at Tom’s Restaurant – later made famous as the place Jerry and friends gathered on Seinfeld – where they had a 35-cent hamburger. (This in the days when I lived on $20 a week, which I got from a teller at First National City Bank every Monday morning.) 

On special occasions, we’d go to V and T on Amsterdam, where they still have a fabulous eggplant and garlic pizza. 

 

Speaking of garlic, I had my first bagel in college (before you could get them everywhere from Walla Walla to Bangor) at the now-departed H and H on Broadway ...

where I'd go on Saturday nights, also getting a small tub of scallion cream cheese and the fat Sunday Times, and many Sunday mornings I’d walk the few blocks from my fraternity on 114^th Street to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, still operating 40-plus years later on Amsterdam and 111^th, to get for our Sunday brunches a dozen of the light, buttery croissants still offered there.

When we lived in the East Village in the early 80’s, I became a devotee of the fried potato pierogies with sour cream and onions at Veselka ...

now practically world-famous, and I loved the whole wheat waffles at Bini-Bon on 2^nd and 5^th – long gone, but briefly notorious as the site of a murder committed by an ex-prisoner whose cause was championed by Norman Mailer.

Thirty years after leaving Austin, Texas, where I lived from 1984-88, I still miss the enchiladas rojas, flan, salsa and endless iced tea refills  from Las Manitas, forced out of business by downtown development...

but Threadgill’s is still thriving, and I just had my go-to chicken fried steak with cream gravy, mashed potatoes and butter beans a few weeks ago, a few days after making it out to Driftwood for BBQ at the legendary Salt Lick, which now has a branch of at the Austin airport.

As a creature of habit, during the eleven years I worked for the Open Society Foundations near Columbus Circle, I had lunch at least once a week at two Italian places -- the upscale Gabriel’s on 60^th Street, where you would likely be dining not far from the late New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers in his customary booth. I could usually be found inhaling the penne arrabbiata after an arugula and shaved parmesan salad, and at my other haunt, the neighborhood favorite Bricco on West 56^th,  I inclined toward penne in some kind of artichoke cream sauce and a Tiberio salad with pears and fennel.  Both places are still thriving, and I go there when I can, greeted in Cheers-like fashion by Gabriel and Nino, the respective owners, but those dishes seem to have been rotated out.

Which brings me to Noho Star, which closed last night after thirty years, during most of which I have been eating there every month or two.  I’ll miss the ambience – somehow without reservations you could always show up and get a table, and not because it wasn’t busy – but most of all my signature dish there.

A few years ago my daughter Una had a book event at McNally Jackson, a few blocks away, and afterward we went with about a dozen friends and family to Noho Star to celebrate.  My ex-wife, Ellen, and my wife Lisa were sitting next to one another across from me, and as they were examining the menus I heard Ellen turn to Lisa and say, “Does he still order the stir-fried shrimp with eggplant and coriander?”  To which Lisa laughed, “yes, – every time.”  I’m THAT predictable. Now I’ll have to learn to make it myself.

 

My best of 2017

I’m inspired by a recent set of lists from my friend Deepak Bhargava to list some of the movies, books, TV shows and podcasts that made the biggest impression on me in the year now ending.  (Sadly, though omnivorous in my media tastes, I don’t hear enough live music, go to enough theater or see enough art to populate a ten best list in those areas).  Though an inveterate list-maker, I am not big on ranking, so in each category these are in alphabetical order, with some brief comments about why I chose them.  The movies, as far as I know, all came out this year. The books are drawn from those I read this year, no matter when they were published.  The podcasts and TV shows are, except where noted, ongoing.

Movies

1. 
   Coco. Latest from Pixar -- a child's introduction to death, lushly animated and moving. 
2. Get Out.  Who knew the most effective piece on liberal racism would come in a mock-horror flick?
3. Hidden Figures. I was shamed that I had not been aware of the compelling story of the historic role three Black women played at NASA.
4. Lady Bird. First film directed by Greta Gerwig, I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.  And Saoirse Ronan (Irish, yes, but born in the Bronx) is fantastic.
5. Lion. Wonderful saga of a young man on a search to find his family.  Margie Fine and I were openly sobbing when it was over.
6. Their Finest Hour. Dunkirk was great, but this dramedy about the making of a propaganda film about it was great fun.
7. The Big Sick. I particularly loved Kumail's scenes with Emily's parents when she was in a coma.
8. The Post. Katherine Graham finding her leadership in a male-dominated business, the First Amendment as a bulwark against lying leaders -- really timely.
9. The Shape of Water. A beautiful fantasy, though obviously rolled-up towels at the door are not going to convert a bathroom into a swimming tank.
10. Wonder Woman. Move over, Batman and Superman -- an action hero for our times.

Television

1. Blackish (ABC). Always funny, but this season building in a bunch of civics lessons about racial history in innovative ways.
2. Call the Midwife (PBS). Fifth season or so about midwives -- Protestant sisters and lay nurses -- in the East End of London in the early 60'.  Never fails to exercise my tear ducts.
3. Catastrophe (Amazon).  Accidental couple raising a family together.  Vulgar, funny, real.
4. Fouda (Netflix).  Gripping Israeli show much better at showing daily cruelties of Palestinian oppression than anything here.
5. The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu). Hard to binge-watch, since each episode leaves you reeling.  Like Man in the High Castle and House of Cards, its dystopian tale is too close to current reality for comfort.
6. Master of None (Netflix) I think Aziz Ansari is our next great auteur director, if he isn't already there.  Particularly loved Thankgsgiving, for which Lena Waithe, who wrote it and starred, won a well-deserved Emmy.
7. One Mississippi.  Tig Notaro has created an ensemble of offbeat characters but never patronizes them.
8. Stranger Things (Netflix). Seems to have a lot of fans, and I am late to the party, but I love Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven -- a great heroine in the mold of Lisbeth Salander and Katniss Everdeen.
   

   Eleven
9. The Crown (Netflix). Another crowd-pleaser on everyone's list. I never thought I would have a crush on Queen Elizabeth.
10. Top of the Lake (Sundance Channel). Elisabeth Moss also stars in this Australian crime series, directed by Jane Campion.  

There’s so much good TV, I want to give shout-outs also to Veep (which everyone I’ve known who’s worked in a White House says is closer to reality than The West Wing), Big Little Lies. The Good Place, Glow, Better Things, The Americans, Homeland, Modern Family, and This is Us.  Just started MIndhunter, which I am also loving, and checking out Peaky Blinders.  When is Luther coming back?

Books

1. Bad Feminist. From what I had previously read of her writing, I knew Roxane Gay could be a fierce and strong voice, but I also loved her pop culture voraciousness and wit.
2. Brat Farrar.  Old Josephine Tey classic of mistaken identity -- or was it?
3. Coming to My Senses. Alice Waters memoir, nicely evokes life in and around Berkeley in the '60s and the roots of her enormous influence on food.
4. Commonwealth.  I love anything Ann Patchett writes, and most sprawling multi-generation sagas.
5. Going into the City.  Ditto Roz Chast -- this is her love letter to the city she grew up in and left, evoking my memories (as we are exact contemporaries) of cockroaches and police locks and everything else charming about my adopted home.
6. Hitler.  This year seemed a good time to read a 1000-page book about how everyone thought Adolf Hitler was a buffoon who couldn't possibly take power and do the things he was ranting about.
7. Hope in the Dark. This year also seemed a good time to read Rebecca Solnit's book from the Iraq war period about the power of hope, people and activism.
8. Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson's first novel, about the challenging childhood of two sisters.  If you haven't read the three books in her later Gilead series, they are among the finest I've ever spent time with.
9. News of the World.  Small book about a retired captain who accompanies a young girl back to her family after time in captivity, across many miles and dangers.  Kind of what Larry McMurtry might write if he wrote shorter books.
10. Strangers in their Own Land.  Since I chair the board of Arlie Russell Hochschild's publisher, this might seem a shameless plug, but it is indeed one of the better books of the year. Essential to understanding Trump country -- Hochschild, a Berkeley sociologist, burrowed in with families in the Louisiana Bayou for years, gained their trust, and writes with compassion and sensitivity.

Podcasts

1. The Ezra Klein Show. One of his several wonky podcasts, always featuring long-form discussions with policymakers and thinkers - this year, I particularly enjoyed Ta-Nehisi Coates, Cecile Richards and Senator Michael Bennet.
2. Fresh Air.  I hope Terry Gross gives at least ten years' notice of her retirement so I can prepare myself.  Particularly love the stuff she pulls out of her archives, like the recent rebroadcasts of talks with Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee.
3. Love and Courage. Nice podcast of deep conversations with activists in Ireland and elsewhere, hosted by Ruairi McKiernan.  In the shameless plug department, check out the one with me, which captured a lot of the themes of my life and work better than most.
4. New Yorker Radio Hour. I don't know how David Remnick manages to edit a magazine, write long-form stuff, and host penetrating conversations, but there's always good stuff here.
5. S-Town.  Over now, but really worth checking out.  You won't forget John B. McLemore soon.
6. StoryCorps.  As I am board chair, you may discount my enthusiasm, but host Mike Garafolo puts together great themed podcasts from the growing StoryCorps archives.
7. Working. Slate's deep dive into what people actually do at their jobs. In recent seasons, there have been place-based themes, like Baltimore, LGBTQ and The White House.
8. The Writer’s Voice. Just came across this, which is New Yorker fiction contributors reading their work.  Check out Kristen Roupenian reading her viral story, Cat Person.
9. WTF with Marc Maron. I don't listen to all the obscure comics he has on, but Maron, who is always compelling and honest, gets to the essence of many of his guests, and has a remarkable knowledge of film and music to boot.
10. You Must Remember This. Old Hollywood. I got hooked on the "Dead Blondes" season, featuring much exploited and abused female stars like Marilyn Monroe and Veronica Lake and others whose lives spiralled downward. This season featured two paired series -- Jane and Jean, about Fonda and Seberg and their entwined activism and acting, and Bela and Boris, about Lugosi and Karloff.

    I won't list my top ten favorite articles written by me in 2017, but in case you missed these, a few hold up well.  I vow to write less about Trump and more about other things in the year ahead.

In Free Speech Territory

Progressives Must Mobilize and Persuade -- and Get Better at Both

Seven reasons for optimism on a terrible day for America

The story of America is a fight about power

Democracy in the balance:  a time to resist and restore

and remembrances of two dear friends lost this year, Jack Rosenthal and Norman Dorsen.

Happy new year, everyone!

http://www.democracyjournal.org/3/6504.php?page=all

Timely again -- my review of Uncivil Liberties: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism

JFK: A nine-year-old's view

I haven't watched any of the JFK TV specials, or even read much of the coverage in recent days.  It's not
that I have no interest in Kennedy as an historic figure, but like many people who are old enough to remember him and the assassination, it's very personal.

The oddest thing, I have to admit, about this much-hyped anniversary -- and strangely, the day he was killed was also a Friday -- is to be old enough to have a vivid memory of something that happened fifty years ago. For someone of my age in 1963 to have such a memory, they might be recalling the first Wilson inauguration, and for someone in 1913 it would be the Emancipation Proclamation.  So as a benchmark of age, it's pretty powerful.  Put another way, virtually no one I come in contact with all day was born when JFK walked the earth.  He might as well be Coolidge to them.

So I was 9 when JFK was killed, and a student in Sister Mary Clare's fourth grade class at Immaculate Conception School in Westerly.  A little while after lunch, the principal, Sister Mary Robert, came into the classroom -- itself a rare and somewhat scary event -- and announced that the President had been shot, and that we should pray for him.  Maybe an hour later she came back to say he was dead.  Jayme Sacco burst into tears.  We all were stunned.  I am not sure we were released early, but it was close to the end of the school day anyway, and soon after, as I was trudging up the hill home -- we lived about a quarter of a mile from school, and I walked every day -- I have a distinct memory of the church bells tolling 46 times.

Sister Clare gave us an assignment to do a scrapbook about Kennedy.  It seems odd that she would have done this on the spot, in such a traumatic and unanticipated moment, but maybe she was alert to the pedagogic possibilities.  Or maybe, as a likely veteran of the McKinley assassination, she knew we would all remember, always, where we were, and that this would be a valuable keepsake for us.  Indeed it has been.  That weekend I went to McCrory's, or whatever five and dime was on High Street at the Time, and bought a cheap construction paper book.  I begged my parents for money to buy all the newspapers I could, and put together this:

The scrapbook was heavy on coverage of the assassination itself, to an almost creepy degree, with a stop-action photo sequence of Oswald's own shooting (which my mother and I saw on live TV, as we were glued to the set the whole weekend), and even a section on previous assassinations. (A very old woman we knew remembered the Garfield assassination from her early childhood, and that seemed, and still does, almost unbelievable.)  Like my own little Warren Commission, I introduced one section as follows:

We "THINK."  I like the little detail that Ruby was a nightclub owner.  That seemed particularly tawdry to me.

At nine, I had already developed my geeky interest in the Presidents, though I am not sure I had yet ordered, from the back of a DC comic, my Marx Toy set of miniature statues.  The summer before, my brother and I had been packed into the back of our Plymouth station wagon one summer Sunday night after the Ed Sullivan Show and driven sleeping to Washington by my father and grandfather, alternating at the wheel, for a week with my Aunt Marcelle and Uncle Bill, a naval officer, as they were living in Virginia at the time.  We spent the week seeing the sights -- the US Mint, the FBI, Mount Vernon, the Washington Monument -- and even took in a Senators game.  It made a huge impression on me, possibly because it was literally the only vacation we ever took.  I was 24 before I ever went further than DC, or for that matter, got on an airplane.  I came back with all sorts of memorability, including the famous postcard of JFK in a rocking chair, which I stuck on my wall.

So what did John F. Kennedy mean to me then?  I was largely unaware of actual politics, though occasionally, as with the Cuban Missile Crisis, they intruded on my childhood world.  Kennedy to me was like a handsome, charming prince, and coming to wider-world consciousness around the time of his election, he came to form the template for what I thought of as a President, and the kind of standard against which all others are measured.  Someone growing up with Eisenhower might have seen the President as a kindly old man prone to heart attacks and inclined when not recovering from them to spend a lot of time on the golf course; someone growing up with Kennedy saw vigor and activism and wit. That Kennedy was the first Catholic elected President, and the first from my part of the country since Coolidge, certainly increased the sense of "ownership" -- that he was MY President.

So his violent, sudden loss was almost unbearably wrenching, even to a nine-year old.  As the years have gone by, my view of Kennedy has changed in many ways.  His womanizing, not a matter of public knowledge then, was appalling even by the entrenched sexist standards of the time.  On domestic matters at least, LBJ, who seemed to the nine-year-old me a wretched substitute for the fallen prince, was more progressive and effective -- and indeed, more passionate than JFK.  I wouldn't rate him as a great President, and had he lived, he might have disappointed more, as Presidents tend to do.  But he gave me an image of a leader that is still my default setting, and inspired me to care about politics and public affairs, a thread that has run through my entire life and career.  

I still have the issues of Life and the Saturday Evening Post that came out in the week after he died.  I'm told the Post one, at the left, has been reissued as a commemorative.  Mine, though, is still intact,carefully tended for fifty years.

Who would have thought that the Bishop of Rome could actually be a moral leader?

A few years ago I posted a talk I gave, "The Christian in Me," that captures the way I feel about the Catholic Church -- the faith in which I was raised, including twelve years of parochial school and thousands of hours logged in pews and confessionals.  Though I have taken an interest in papal elections the way an inveterate political junkie follows the Iowa Caucuses, I have long since given up on the hope that the Catholic Church, at its senior leadership levels (as opposed to the many nuns, priests and lay people who live the social gospel each day), would actually be truly Christian.

Like many people, though, I have been astonished and thrilled at the words and actions of Pope Francis, particularly in the few days since his lengthy interview was published in a number of Jesuit publications, including here, in America.  I really encourage everyone to read the whole thing, and not just the parts that have been widely quoted.  At many points, it is profound.

On why he chose not to live in the papal apartment:

This room where we are now was a guest room. I chose to live here, in Room 201, because when I took possession of the papal apartment, inside myself I distinctly heard a ‘no.’ The papal apartment in the Apostolic Palace is not luxurious. It is old, tastefully decorated and large, but not luxurious. But in the end it is like an inverted funnel. It is big and spacious, but the entrance is really tight. People can come only in dribs and drabs, and I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.

On the Jesuit concept of "discernment":

Discernment is one of the things that worked inside St. Ignatius. For him it is an instrument of struggle in order to know the Lord and follow him more closely. I was always struck by a saying that describes the vision of Ignatius: non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est (“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”). I thought a lot about this phrase in connection with the issue of different roles in the government of the church, about becoming the superior of somebody else: it is important not to be restricted by a larger space, and it is important to be able to stay in restricted spaces. This virtue of the large and small is magnanimity. Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

“This motto,” the pope continues, “offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ According to St. Ignatius, great principles must be embodied in the circumstances of place, time and people. In his own way, John XXIII adopted this attitude with regard to the government of the church, when he repeated the motto, ‘See everything; turn a blind eye to much; correct a little.’ John XXIII saw all things, the maximum dimension, but he chose to correct a few, the minimum dimension. You can have large projects and implement them by means of a few of the smallest things. Or you can use weak means that are more effective than strong ones, as Paul also said in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

This discernment takes time. For example, many think that changes and reforms can take place in a short time. I believe that we always need time to lay the foundations for real, effective change. And this is the time of discernment. Sometimes discernment instead urges us to do precisely what you had at first thought you would do later. And that is what has happened to me in recent months. Discernment is always done in the presence of the Lord, looking at the signs, listening to the things that happen, the feeling of the people, especially the poor. My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people and from reading the signs of the times. Discernment in the Lord guides me in my way of governing.

But I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time. The wisdom of discernment redeems the necessary ambiguity of life and helps us find the most appropriate means, which do not always coincide with what looks great and strong.

A lot of what anyone needs to know about leadership or management -- in diverse settings -- could be gleaned from reading what the Pope has to say.  And while his predecessor, Benedict, was widely touted as an intellectual, Francis seems to be an amazing combination of someone who is truly Franciscan, walking with the poor, and also a deep and complex thinker with a gift for communicating those things in accessible language and images like the funnel, the opera libretto, the collapsing house.

Here, finally, is an extended excerpt from the most widely quoted part of the interview, about the church's obsession over many years with abortion and homosexuality, about the folly of doctrinal fundamentalism and the need to embrace uncertainty:

The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?

We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

Yes, in this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions—that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble. Uncertainty is in every true discernment that is open to finding confirmation in spiritual consolation.

The risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever. Often we seek as if we were blind, as one often reads in the Bible. And this is the experience of the great fathers of the faith, who are our models. We have to re-read the Letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 11. Abraham leaves his home without knowing where he was going, by faith. All of our ancestors in the faith died seeing the good that was promised, but from a distance.... Our life is not given to us like an opera libretto, in which all is written down; but it means going, walking, doing, searching, seeing.... We must enter into the adventure of the quest for meeting God; we must let God search and encounter us. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists­—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.

Justice Scalia, take note.  Seriously, whatever you think about the institutional church, and whether or not you have (as I don't) a strong belief in God or a particular need for the kind of community a church can provide, there is much to learn from this man.  I'm amazed to be writing this, but he could very well come to have the earned moral authority of a Mandela, a Tutu, a Dalai Lama.  How did the College of Cardinals stumble into this?  Maybe there really is a Holy Spirit!

 

 

 

 

 

A few thoughts on the New York City Mayoral primary

People who follow me know I was a supporter of Christine Quinn in yesterday's Democratic primary.  I have known her since she led the Anti-Violence Project, I think she's a fine public servant, and I believe she would have made -- may yet make, down the line -- a great mayor.  At this writing, it's not clear whether Bill de Blasio has won outright or will be forced into a runoff with Bill Thompson, but in either case I plan to vote for him, and will do so with moderate enthusiasm - the enthusiasm mainly generated by the themes on which he ran.

Among the least important things the primary made clear is that my endorsement of a candidate has either no or negative value.  Almost instantly after Urvashi Vaid and I wrote this progressive argument for Chris Quinn, she began a slide in the polls.  That insight aside -- that I should stick to punditry over partisanship -- I have a few other thoughts on the election.

De Blasio won, the very appealing Dante ad aside, because he made his campaign a cause, and tapped into a strong vein of discomfort with the underside of the Bloomberg years, both with policing and economic equity.  This vein runs strong among national Democrats and in many states and cities as well, and while New York City is not always a harbinger for other places and races, I think other Democrats (like Hillary Clinton) should take note.  As a progressive, though I supported Quinn, I can't help but feel gratified, and hopeful, that these themes had such electoral resonance.

Whatever his actual politics -- and I think there's much less room between Quinn and de Blasio than the conventional wisdom holds -- de Blasio was able to run on these themes because he had the room to.  He's had no governing responsibility or authority, and was free to read the political moment and opening and move into it.  Hats off to him for that.  Quinn had no such freedom, having for better or for worse shared responsibility for leading the city in recent years, and it would have been inauthentic of her to suddenly cut loose from Bloomberg.  Had their positions been reversed -- had de Blasio been the Speaker -- he might have had a similar problem.  But he had some luck, and used it shrewdly.

Though the Democratic advantage is such that I am not too concerned about the general election, I expect de Blasio's victory last night to pump life into the Lhota campaign.  Inevitably, de Blasio, a relatively unknown citywide quantity, will attract the kind of scrutiny he didn't for much of the primary, he'll fall a bit from the heights, and the various powers-that-be among the one percent -- the Mayor and his crowd included -- will find Lhota, with his social-issue liberalism and fiscal/crime conservatism, an appealing alternative.  De Blasio's lack of executive experience can also be made to look risky compared to Lhota, who was at Giuliani's right hand during 9/11, etc.  But I think de Blasio will win, and a victory won in a more genuine race, against a more stark alternative, will be more valuable for the progressive themes he campaigned on.

Much has been made of the strong black support -- the strong support from almost all quarters -- that de Blasio garnered, and I think that bodes well for his ability to govern.  During the campaign, given the anger at Quinn over her Bloomberg ties, and the marginalization of Liu, de Blasio over the summer became a hot progressive cause -- the Elizabeth Warren/Wendy Davis of the moment -- and those of us for the reasonably progressive (and barrier-breaking) Quinn became distinctly uncool.  To counter this tendency among our fellow lefties, Urvashi Vaid and I wrote our piece, but the de Blasio phenomenon was too much to overcome at that point.  I wish him well, and see no reason to disparage him at this point (I am not a likely transition committee candidate in any case:), but I'm slightly amused and annoyed by the attachment to de Blasio among people who are otherwise quick to fill their FaceBook posts with rants about how films or TV shows about the struggles of people of color (The Help, Orange is the New Black) always seem to need a white hero.

There were many factors at play in this election, and when your candidate loses by 25 points (or fifteen, in Thompson's case), there are plenty of other variables besides race and gender, which were far from determinative.  But I wonder when my fellow progressives are going to start putting some real energy into diversifying the top line-up of power in this city.  Most of the Park Slope/Upper West Side progressives I know voted a straight white male ticket, and assuming there is no Mayoral runoff, the only way to assure that our government for the next four years does not look the same way is to vote for Letitia James in the Public Advocate runoff.  I'm sure there are  compelling arguments not to do that -- I voted for Squadron yesterday myself.  But if there is no serious pipeline for women and leaders of color in this city than we are likely to be led for a number of years by those who could just have easily been on the ticket in 1950, increasingly out of step with the rising electorate we keep hearing about.

My path to the progressive infrastructure

I gave my final Berkeley lecture yesterday, 'What Do Progressives Stand For?"  I'll post the whole thing soon, but I had a more personal reflection at the end that I dropped when I realized I was going too long.  Here, as I promised those who were there, is what I cut:

    I promised to close with some more personal reflections and recollections on my own ideological leanings.  I did not grow up in a family that was particularly political.  My grandfather, a small-town pharmacist, was apparently a Main Street Republican, though I don’t recall ever hearing him express a political view.  My father, still living at home at twenty-four, sat down at the dinner table on the night of the 1948 Presidential election and announced to his family that he had voted for Harry Truman, incurring my grandfather’s anger but establishing a streak of stubborn political independence that led him to vote over the years for both Eisenhower and Clinton.  I don’t recall my father reading much history, but he was an avid consumer of newspapers, and we were given plenty of history books as children and adorned the walls of the bedroom my brother and I shared with a barbershop calendar of the Presidents and a four-color map of the United States.  Under my father’s nightly tutelage, we memorized the order of the Presidents and knew every state capitol as well, knowledge that has served me well not only in crossword puzzles and Trivial Pursuit but in instilling a sense of the story of the country – albeit one without too much room for popular movement, though I picked that up later.  My mother is a very smart woman who has never followed politics very closely, and her enthusiasms have ranged from Ross Perot to Barack Obama.

    I revered John F. Kennedy, elected when I was six, who provided my first image of what a President might look like, and resented the dull Lyndon Johnson who replaced him.  I had no idea at the time what a colorful figure Johnson actually was, and my esteem for him has risen over the years, but I formed a view as a boy that the Vietnam War was wrong, and as I neared high school I was mightily drawn to the protest candidacy of Eugene McCarthy.  I saw Bobby Kennedy as an interloper coming in after McCarthy had done the hard work of toppling LBJ, and when in the end it was Hubert Humphrey – I had no idea of his proud liberal career, I just saw him as a lackey for Johnson – I shifted my allegiance to Richard Nixon, who said he’d end the war, even attending a rally for him in Hartford, CT and winning my high school’s freshman public speaking contest with a call for the country to unite behind Nixon once he’d been elected.  Barely five years later, I was a leader of a Columbia student group working for his impeachment.

    You might judge from this short trip down Memory Lane that my political impulses are as erratic as my parents’, but in fact from mid-high school to the current moment I have been very predictably liberal … er, progressive.  Though my race and gender, not to mention my nationality, has placed me at the pinnacle of the pyramid of privilege, despite a more modest class background (as, for instance, the first in my family to attend college), I have been drawn all my life to causes and movements of the discriminated-against, persecuted and marginalized. 

    I am by conviction a person of the left, but by temperament a moderate.  I have in recent years run big institutions, and tend to identify, though usually quietly, with Presidents and other chief executives – the forces they have to contend with, the competing and often irreconcilable demands they face.  But I also believe that the first question to ask in any contested political or public matter is what the people most affected, folks at the bottom, want and believe – low-income families in a school district, undocumented workers, single mothers on public assistance, inmates in a prison – and take my cue from them.  Yet I am uncomfortable at a rally or a parade, and cringe at the hyper-partisanship of the posts of many of my FaceBook friends, even as I often hit the like button.  It’s complicated.

    Most of all, as I have gotten older, I find myself returning to the second faith in which I was raised – not the Catholic Church, though it still guides much of my worldview forty-five years after my last communion and confession, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which I became involved with at eighteen, just as I was starting at Columbia University.  I have liked much about the progressive movement of which I have been a part, and hope to continue to play a role in shaping and leading it.  But what I like least about my own side – and this is of course true of the other side as well – is its tribalism.  If all you need to know about what you think about an action or policy is who is for it and who is against it, so that the conduct of the war on terror – and yes, I realize there are some differences, not insignificant but not nearly enough – is enough to get you into the streets when George Bush is President and to quickly turn the page of the newspaper when it’s Barack Obama, something feels very wrong to me. 

    I prefer what Woodrow Wilson called the “growlers and the kickers.”  I’m drawn to those who hold their friends and allies to account, even when it’s uncomfortable to do so, those who hew to a clear set of principles, of rules that do not depending on which team is at bat.  These are not just about civil liberties, though they are most often at risk; they’re also about the deployment of money in politics, the conduct of foreign policy, and how this society treats poor people.  There is a progressive creed that knits together these things, and it often finds voice, for most of the last century, in the Democratic party, but it is not inherently a partisan one. 

    By the time of the 2012 elections, the unions, economic justice groups, organizing networks, civil rights, women’s and immigrant groups and others who had been pressing for more robust rhetoric and policies on economic inequality finally saw the President embrace their approach, most of the time, on the campaign trail.  He was a champion, they mobilized for a ground game across the country and particularly in key states, and it worked.  Chicago wonkery aside, the power of social movement determined the 2012 Presidential election.  Whether it will determine the course of the next four years remains to be seen, but is largely up to us.  We may have convinced the President, as our forebears did nearly eighty years ago.  Now we have to go out and make him do it.

 

 

Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man, or, The Audacity of Hope

A few things in the past week -- Daniel Mendelsohn's lovely piece about his youthful correspondence with Mary Renault, Una's posting of the letter she got from Judy Blume, my continuing excavation, in re-organizing some files, of some artifacts of my youth -- prompt me to share a few things about my first attempts to be published as a writer.

I don't remember writing much, outside of what was required for school and the occasional essay contest, until I was in mid-high school.  But I think if you had asked me what my dream job would be, it would have been journalism.  I read a lot of magazines, from the Times and Reader's Digests that came into our home to things I found on my own and subscribed to, like New York Magazine in the heady days of the New Journalism, the Village Voice in its heyday, Psychology Today, and the briefly-revived Saturday Review.  I'm quite sure I was the only sixteen-year old subscriber to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books in Westerly, Rhode Island. To this day I am a magazine junkie, and am trying to get used to reading them on my iPad -- particularly since I'm away from home for three months -- but it's just not the same for me.

The letters of encouragement that the young Daniel Mendelsohn got from Mary Renault resonated strongly with me, since I got a few myself.  It seems the first time I acted on my desire to become a writer was this letter to the editor of The Westerly Sun, my hometown paper*:

 I'm sure I didn't mean to be snarky, but I wince at my line that the Westerly Sun is the "only, and therefore the best example of journalism in the area."  I am not sure I made note of it at the time, but the reply of the editor, Charlie Utter, contained four typos.

I never did work for The Westerly Sun.  A few years later, right about the time I got to Columbia as a freshman in 1972, I sent a piece to the fairly new op-ed page.  I no longer have it, but as I recall it was a Robert Benchley-esque piece (or so I hoped) about the travails of a mild-mannered small-town boy among the aggressive elbowers on the New York City subway.  It was rejected, but the manner in which it was rejected, by an editor named John Van Doorn, made more of an impression on my than virtually all of the acceptances I have had in the many years since:

I kept trying, and over the winter break from Columbia that year, I got an article idea while watching the return of Jack Paar to late-night television.  I wrote a critical piece -- "What Did My Parents Ever See in Jack Paar?" (a great title, I can't remember whether it was mine or the TImes'), and sent it in, unsolicited, to the Arts and Leisure page.  A few weeks later, in late January, the phone rang in my dorm room one day and it was Seymour Peck, then the Arts and Leisure editor, telling me that my article had been accepted for publication.  Incredibly, next week is the 40th anniversary of that thrilling event, and I had forgotten that I noted it on this blog some years ago, so a fuller account of it is here.

And here is the receipt for the first money I ever made from writing anything. It still gives me a little charge to look at it.

 

*I love telling the story that, with its Seventh Day Adventist roots, the Sun was then the only Sunday evening newspaper in the United States, and therefore scooped the nation -- in print, anyway -- on the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

Two election takeaways

In all the reading I've done about the election last week, two things strike me most forcefully -- one about the Republicans and one about the Democrats.

The Republican observation was best captured in this John Dickerson Slate column:

In the final 10 days of the race, a split started to emerge in the two campaigns. The Obama team would shower you with a flurry of data—specific, measurable, and they’d show you the way they did the math. Any request for written proof was immediately filled. They knew their brief so well you could imagine Romney hiring them to work at Bain. The Romney team, by contrast, was much more gauzy, reluctant to share numbers, and relying on talking points rather than data. This could have been a difference in approach, but it suggested a lack of rigor in the Romney camp.

In other words, the campaign run by the business guy -- who by all accounts in her earlier life, even to some extent his gubernatorial as well as private sector life, was the essence of a data-driven, strategic leader -- went fantasy-based, abandoning facts for ideology as surely as most other elements of the GOP have done in recent years on stem cells, climate change, weapons of mass destruction and a host of other issues.  That Republicans are in thrall to a narrow, reality-denying ideology when they govern is very bad for the country.  That they are in thrall to it when they campaign is good for us, and long may it continue.

On the Democratic side, what is crystal clear is that the advice that progressives pushed on the President during his first term, that he finally heeded and thrived at once he started to run for re-election, was right on the money.  A more populist economic agenda, coupled with bold, pro-equality moves like the Dream Act executive order and his endorsement of same-sex marriage, both made a real difference in real people's lives and safety AND energized his base voters.  This and a first-rate technical campaign, as noted by Dickerson above, made the crucial difference in his re-election victory.  Doing the right thing was also the most electorally beneficial thing.

Of all people, Maureen Dowd, not ordinarily my favorite New York Times columnist, hit this point, albeit in her typically condescending style, in her column last Sunday:

If 2008 was about exalting the One, 2012 was about the disenchanted Democratic base deciding: “We are the Ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama.

When the first African-American president was elected, his supporters expected dramatic changes. But Obama feared that he was such a huge change for the country to digest, it was better if other things remained status quo. Michelle played Laura Petrie, and the president was dawdling on promises. Having Joe Biden blurt out his support for gay marriage forced Obama’s hand.

The president’s record-high rate of deporting illegal immigrants infuriated Latinos. Now, on issues from loosening immigration laws to taxing the rich to gay rights to climate change to legalizing pot, the country has leapt ahead, pulling the sometimes listless and ruminating president by the hand, urging him to hurry up.

The President, in the end, led as all great leaders do -- go back and look at Lincoln and Roosevelt, among others -- by recognizing movement and reacting to it.  The job for those of us who want him and the country to achieve is to keep building that movement.

 

 

Alan Reitman

I delivered a eulogy today at the funeral of Alan Reitman, a longtime ACLU leader and my first boss:

I first met Alan a little over forty years ago. I was a high school senior, and had made the three-hour trip from Rhode Island, where I lived, to the ACLU’s offices, then on lower Fifth Avenue. How I ended up there is a strange story more appropriate for another occasion, but I had managed to be nominated for a slot on the ACLU’s oldest and most prestigious committee, the Academic Freedom Committee. My nomination had to be approved by the ACLU National Board, and Alan, the czar of all things pertaining to the committees and the board, needed to vet me first.

I don’t remember anything of that conversation except that when Alan came out to meet me in the lobby, he was accompanied by the ACLU’s founder, Roger Baldwin, then in his late 80’s, with whom he had been meeting. Alan was one of the last hires Roger made, in 1949, and they remained close throughout the rest of Roger’s life. In any case, I made it through the vetting, and joined the committee that September a week or so after I arrived as a freshman at Columbia. In those days, Alan came to every committee meeting, and there were seven of them that met once a month, so that was a lot of meetings. Apparently he saw something in me, because he invited me to write the committee’s history on its 50th anniversary in 1976, and he also hired me to take the minutes for the ACLU National Board, which gave me a ringside seat on the intense deliberations of a body – 83 people, the size of a legislature – ferociously devoted to intellectual rigor and debate. A few years later Alan hired me to staff one of the other committees, and when a financial crisis hit the ACLU in 1977 -- brought on, in fact, by its devotion to principle, when it defended the First Amendment rights of neo-Nazi marchers in Skokie, Illinois – all seven of us part-time staffers were fired and a single job, staffing all the policy committees, was created, at a salary, I will never forget, of $11,000. I got that job, and worked for Alan for the next few years. He was my first boss.

And it was my great good fortune that he was. I’ve spent the last forty years in executive positions in non-profit institutions – the ACLU for twelve years, then Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Foundations, and the Atlantic Philanthropies, and now I teach management and policy to students in a public affairs school. The template for all I do and have done was set by watching Alan. I want to say three things about what I saw over the years that will sketch a portrait of Alan, the institutional man, to fill out the picture of the remarkable life being celebrated here today.

First, he had a true genius for administration. That is a consistently undervalued talent, and many organizations pay a steep price for ignoring it. But Alan balanced a wide range of organizational responsibilities, making it possible for a series of ACLU executive directors, as Aryeh Neier reminded me in an e-mail this week, to focus on the bigger picture. What that means is that over forty years – a period encompassing the ACLU’s work in the McCarthy era, the civil rights and anti-war movements, the rights of women and gay people, the civil liberties incursions of Watergate and COINTELPRO, and a host of other historic engagements with historic issues, Alan was at the center of the ACLU, playing a critical role in the maintenance and strengthening of a vital American institution.

I’ve since played myself, in a few institutions, the kind of role that Alan played – as well as the top role, in more recent years – and I have a keen appreciation of its importance. But in truth all I did was channel Alan, who was both the busiest and most responsive person in one of the most important organizations in America for several decades. Alan truly appreciated the role of the board in governing the ACLU, and a big part of his job – and it was a big board – was to manage the board’s processes in a way that kept them focused on their job, so the staff could do its job. In a contentious organization that thrives on disagreement, Alan retained the respect of members across the ideological spectrum. He was an honest broker.

A further word here. As I can personally attest, Alan nurtured young talent and had a good eye for it – something I have also tried to channel in my own professional life. But I have also been struck, in exchanges this week with ACLU leaders, by his particular advocacy for, and mentoring of, emerging women leaders. The ACLU Alan went to work for in 1949 had very few women on the staff or the board, and it remained that way for many years. But both the first female President of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen, and the second and current one, Susan Herman, made a point of telling me this week what a special interest Alan took in them from their earliest appearance on the scene, as committee members in their mid-twenties. And they rattled off a list of other women Alan supported and advanced, from Philippa Strum to Vivian Berger, all of whom went on to play key leadership roles in the ACLU and beyond. That is one sterling and indeed visionary aspect of Alan’s proud legacy.

The second thing I want to say about Alan is that he had a passion for substance, something you don’t often find in a person whose principal responsibilities are management and administration. He was good at what he did because he cared deeply about the issues. And most importantly, in an organization whose principal asset is principle – that will make more sense in the written version of these remarks! – he was the chief custodian of the ACLU’s conscience. Alan’s formative years saw great struggles over free speech and labor rights, the incursions on civil liberties in the Second World War, the post-war red scare in which many were persecuted for political beliefs and associations. It was principle to him, but it was also personal. And his compass on such matters was unwavering.

Finally, and most remarkably, with everything else Alan did, he managed to maintain a life as a public intellectual, almost always teaching, and regularly writing. That is extremely hard to balance, and something I have also tried to model. His authority derived not only from the high position he held, but from his intellectual integrity and vitality. Whatever his other capacities, and they were significant, he led with his mind.

After I got the sad news of his passing last weekend, I went downstairs to our library and pulled off the shelf “The Pulse of Freedom,” one of the several books he edited and introduced dealing with civil liberties history and debates. I was taken, in re-reading it, by how good it was and how good it remains, and I think it would make Alan happy if I closed with these words, written by him almost 40 years ago, which may also be taken as a commentary on his remarkable 90 years:

“We are living through a period in which respect for accumulated knowledge does not occupy the high station it once did. The existentialist emphasis on the current ‘happening,’ in the lives of people and of nations, all too frequently downgrades the importance of history, and elevates today’s events to the pinnacle of the ‘real truth.’ Yet as knowledge and information are prime requisites in the struggle to achieve and exercise freedom, the past record of personal experience and historical incident is essential. Only if we know the ingredients of the struggle, its depth and breadth, its glories and failures, its human and inhuman elements, can we understand the full meaning of freedom, how it can be won, preserved and extended.”

Some thoughts on men, women, children and work

    So far as I can see, men have mostly stayed out of the debate over Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic article, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All."  But it seems to me one of the reasons women have this debate -- and too often, in my view, judge one another's choices harshly -- is that men don't see it as too relevant to them, or, if they do, they think it more prudent to keep their mouths shut.  Maybe.  But I don't know how things will change unless men join in.  So I have a few comments.

            I can see why it resonated so strongly with so many women.  So many younger women, anyway.  I first became aware of the piece at a dinner party a few days before its publication.  A few of the other guests were prominent feminists in their late sixties.  One had been asked to comment or blog on the Slaughter piece, and went on a tear about how it would undermine the hard-won gains of women in the workplace.  Nobody else at the table had read the piece yet, but the three other women of her generation seemed to agree with her take.  I know Anne-Marie Slaughter a little bit from professional encounters -- I guest-taught her class at Harvard once some years back, and was among the respondents a few months ago when she gave a major lecture at NYU -- and said I would be surprised if the piece was as retrograde as my dining companion had characterized it.  Indeed, when the Atlantic came in the mail a few days later and I read it, my instincts had been right.  It is thoughtful and measured, and captures the real struggles that many women I know deal with. (Women of a certain income and professional level, to be sure – but Slaughter doesn’t claim to be speaking for anyone else.)

            In our age of viral media, the piece raced across the internet, and in the next few days it was posted on Facebook by dozens of female friends and colleagues -- with few exceptions under 50, and usually under 40, sometimes with a noncommittal query ("What do you think of this?), but more often with a shout-out ("What she said!" or "this captures much better than I could what I have been experiencing"). I sometimes think that those who fought the great fights for civil and human rights in the 1960s and 70s (I am just young enough to have missed the peak years of those, but I know a great many of the people who led the way) feel they can give no quarter, acknowledge no nuance or ambivalence, that to do so would give aid and comfort to the oppressor or turn back the clock.  I think I can understand and appreciate this impulse to represent, a prominent tendency in revolutionary generations.  But young people, though they may often be too blithely unappreciative of the fights that paved the way for them, usually don't see things in such binary terms.

            When my daughters were growing up, their mother (to whom I am no longer married) was a strong feminist of the baby boom generation who also believed in a very engaged kind of parenting, in particular that children needed their mothers nearby during their nursing years.  So she organized her life -- we organized our lives -- around those beliefs.  She worked at home (as a bookkeeper and artist) when the children were young or took them into the office or studio with her.  When she became a childbirth educator, her classes were usually in the evenings, and I came home from work in time to be with the girls, or pick them up from dance class or playdates), make or buy them dinner, and put them to bed. The deal, 1950's style, was that I would make most of the money (augmenting my non-profit salary with freelance writing jobs that kept me up at the kitchen table late many evenings), and she would provide most of the child care.  I was engaged, but not the primary or nearly equal caregiver.  As the girls got older, things equalized, though the division of labor was not always predictable along gender lines (she rewired lamps and dealt with the boiler, I was active in the PTA). 

            At the moment I find myself at 57 -- in a kind of sabbatical in between full-time jobs, with flexible hours -- an extremely engaged grandfather, spending a few mornings a week pushing a stroller in brownstone Brooklyn.  I see a few fathers in the playground, and even some other grandparents (though it's dangerous to make assumptions).  I see lots of mothers, most carting around children who seem to be too old for them to be on maternity leave.  And I see mostly paid caregivers – with few exceptions, brown-skinned women tending to tow-headed boys and girls.  I spend so much time with my grandson Sam because I can -- because I have the economic flexibility to do it -- and because I want to.  I've had a rich and celebrated career, and I expect to continue it, but for now, among all my activities, this seems like the most important thing I can do.

            I also do it because I don't know how my daughter would cope otherwise.  She left her job as a newspaper editor after four months of unpaid maternity leave (and self-paid health insurance premiums, all of which her mother and I helped to cover) and now works as a freelance writer.  She has a column to write, several blogs to feed and edit, two young-adult novels to finish on deadline, and a husband who is working hard to start his own photography business.  In our entirely privatized non-system of child care, if she could find someone to mind Sam who she was comfortable with, the cost of paying that person a living wage would eat up any money she would make.  Fortunately for her she has close family nearby, and her mother and sister and I provide about half a week of free childcare.  If she lived in Scandinavia, the state would pay her to stay at home, or provide safe and decent childcare as a matter of right, like public schools or fire departments.  But she lives in America, and you have to figure it out, and pay for it, on your own. 

            One of the great public policy mysteries to me is why we don't have a movement for, and a raging public debate about, the lack of good, accessible and affordable child care in this country.  Maybe it's because the right keeps tying us up in knots trying to keep the rights to contraception and abortion without which there can be no equality.  Channeling our energies into such a movement in which women and men could join across generations seems to me a much more productive course than the one we're on, where mothers are made to feel guilty about working, or not working, outside the home.

            Besides as a father and grandfather, I relate to this debate as a manager.  I've run several large enterprises, and supervised hundreds of employees, and while the organizations' personnel policies were usually relatively generous by American standards, they rarely suited the real lives of employees with children.  I've mostly had women work for me as senior staff and program directors, so my view of this may be skewed, but in twenty or more years of management I don’t recall ever having a man ask for more than perfunctory parental leave, ask to work at home so he could manage childcare, either on a regular basis or because his child was sick one morning, or say he had to miss a meeting for a child's doctor's appointment or parent-teacher conference -- all matters raised regularly by working mothers, and supported by me as their boss, as any such request by a working father would have been.  Reading Anne-Marie Slaughter, I see there are such men, at least at the State Department.  And if their ranks are growing, that's welcome.  But until more men take responsibility for these parenting needs, and are open about it with their employers, I don't see how things will change. 

            When I read Sheryl Sandberg's article a few months ago, coming out of the closet about leaving work at 5:30 each night to be home for dinner with her children, I thought of the two most efficient colleagues I have ever had.  Both were mothers of school-age children who were out the door like clockwork each day at 5.  I've never worked with anyone, male or female, more reliable, able or productive.  In fact, I've over the years observed most of the time an inverse relationship between productivity and late hours. Sure, some people work at a slower or more deliberate pace.  But usually, the person who is hunched over the computer in the office at 9 pm when the cleaners are coming around, or on weekends is either there to be seen or because they aren't very organized or disciplined.

 

Crying out loud

    I sat down for a StoryCorps conversation with my daughter Una last week and found myself in tears about thirty seconds into my answer to her first question.  And it wasn't even one that seemed to pack a particularly strong emotional charge (like the other two times I cried during our conversation, talking about my grandson and my own father).  She asked what my first memory was, and I started to say it was walking down the street to a small grocery store with the upstairs neighbors, and all of a sudden I couldn't get the words out.

     I am, I have to admit, a big crier.  I used to take my daughters to the movies a lot when they (and I) were younger, and in every Disney cartoon, comedy romance, Die Hard-type action thriller -- no matter what the genre -- there would always be some heartstring-tugging scene that would get me going, mortifying the girls.  Graduations, weddings, AT and T commercials -- get me a handkerchief.  

      Funerals -- forget about it.  As the oldest child, I tried to be a rock of support for my family when my father died, about fifteen years ago, and I was -- until the actual funeral, where all of a sudden death acquired a soundtrack.  (You try to stay dry-eyed during "On Eagle's Wings.")  In my movie and tv crying, I always managed to stifle and choke my sobs -- the cumulative effect of all that damming up is probably a big risk factor for brain tumors -- but as I sat in the pew beside my Dad's coffin I let them flow, greatly alarming my extended family.  There are few things more uncomfortable to sit through than a grieving relative sputtering through a eulogy, and I had pre-arranged with the priest officiating at my Dad's service that if I didn't think I could manage my eulogy, I would give him a sign.  But somehow, when the moment came for me to speak, the sobbing stopped and I was in command of the occasion.  I cried a great deal more for my father in the months to come, mostly in private (solo car drives are good for that, though probably more of a safety hazard than texting) but always, remembering the months my father spent comatose in intensive care, whenever a tv show featured a hospital visit.  To this day, in fact.

      Apparently I wasn't always this way.  My mother likes to tell people that I never cried as a child -- not once.  I find that hard to believe, but she may be right -- I have no recollection of crying.  Her favorite illustration of this is of the time when I was a baby, and they were living in a third floor walk-up when the doorbell rang for a package delivery.  I was lying on my parents' bed -- or rather, beds, as they always slept in twin beds, I Love Lucy style, and at this point they were pushed together with a narrow crack in between. My mother must have figured I would stay put, lying on my back on one of the beds, while she ran downstairs to answer the bell.  But when she came back up a few minutes later, I was nowhere to be found.  She searched frantically -- no doubt the Lindbergh baby came to mind -- and eventually she found me on the floor under the beds -- I had fallen through the crack.  I never made a sound.

            When and why did this change?  I can't remember.  But I'm glad it did. Over the years I've learned some coping mechanisms for the minor disability of my lachrymosity.  I had two great sources of anxiety about Una's wedding (three, I guess, if you count paying for it).  One was that I would flub the father-daughter dance.  Three months of lessons at the Fred Astaire School took care of that, and I acquitted myself ably on the dance floor that night (though to my constant regret, I haven't kept it up).  The other was that I would be convulsed in sobs while walking her down the aisle.  To avoid marring her big day that way, I had the great idea that I should insulate myself by playing the music we would march to ("Dance of the Blessed Spirits" from Orfeo ed Euridice, one of my favorite operas) over and over again to myself in the hours before dressing and leaving for the wedding. 

      It worked. I cried my eyes out all afternoon before the ceremony, and when I walked down the aisle with Una I was completely dry-eyed.  Probably too much, actually -- there were probably guests who asked one another whether I’d had Botox injections.  Otherwise, how I could be so placid, indeed stoic, when my first-born was leaving the nest?

 

A few holy days in India

Last month I spent eight days in India on a study tour sponsored by the NoVo Foundation -- created and led by Jennifer and Peter Buffett -- focusing on sex trafficking and work that is being done with women and girls who are survivors or who are at risk for being forced into the trade.  As I always do when I travel, I kept a journal, and here are some excerpts from it. Since some of the details are sensitive, I erred on the side of caution and changed the name of the lovely girl we spent an afternoon with in Forbesganj.

Holy Thursday, April 5

Been here about three days now.  A little hard to reconcile the lavishness of the Imperial Hotel with the streets outside its gates in Delhi.  Indeed, with pictures of the colonial period everywhere, and almost exclusively white patrons being served by Indians in turbans, etc., you could be forgiven for thinking the Raj was still in place. 

Started on Tuesday morning with an overview and introductions.  Jennifer Buffett mentioned, in her own introduction, how her father left her mother just before she would have gone to college and told her he was leaving money for the boys to go to college, but not her, since she would just end up getting married.  That couldn't have been more than 20 or so years ago. She managed to put herself through, though, with pluck and determination.  It helps explain a bit her passion on issues pertaining to women and girls.

We visited the Gandhi museum -- on the site of the compound where he periodically stayed and spent his last months -- and got to wander around on our own for an hour. You could actually retrace the steps he took in his final moments.  I was most struck by the simplicity of the room in which Gandhi lived, and a display case on the wall with the half-dozen worldly possessions he left behind -- some cutlery, his walking stick, eyeglasses, a small scythe.  Actually, he had two spoons and two forks, so I guess he had more than he needed!  Also, a strong theme of the displays, which recount his last 24 hours, is how often he talked of a foreboding of death just before he was actually murdered.  In this respect similar to Martin Luther King ("I may not get there with you...") and, for that matter, Jesus.

There was a panel discussion, led by Gloria Steinem, right after, with four women in the Gandhian tradition.  One big takeaway is that there is a kind of Gandhian economics, having to do with local production, etc., that seems to have fallen away in his legacy, which is mainly identified with nonviolence.  Again, quite similar to the homogenization of King (who died supporting the Memphis janitors, and was increasingly an outspoken opponent of the VietNam war) and, for that matter, Jesus.

Next day starts with a presentation on the legal aspects of trafficking, which under the UN definition of a few years back does not require actual movement for trafficking and defines coercion as involving vulnerabity and abuse of power, not just force as traditionally regarded.  So it in effect bars most of what we think of as prostitution, hence the slippery slope issue.  The US doesn't accept this part of the definition, though.

There is a view that trafficking is the process and prostitution is the outcome, inseparable, as Catherine McKinnon has written.  Some dispute over the Swedish model, which goes after customers but not "victims." But Pamela says Sweden has gone from one in 8 men using, to one in 40, in 15 years or so, with a 50% reduction in prostitution.   Criticism of Netherlands model, which is legalization, for sanctioning abuse of women, not curbing trafficking, etc.  

Presentation in late afternoon by Apne Aap, the anti-trafficking group which has arranged most of our week here, about Sonagachi, the red light district we visited in the evening.  Much discussion of public health groups here, funded by some large Western foundations, employing pimps as “peer leaders.”  Seems unbelievably reckless in legitimizing a sordid state of affairs. 

The red light district itself was quite a trip.  I had been wondering if poverty here would be different than in, say, Haiti or the Roma slums of Bulgaria or the townships of South Africa.  So far, not so much.  There was a squalor about Sonagachi, but also a liveliness -- poor people going about their lives and businesses. (Skinny, torpid dogs lying all about.)

And all around, women and girls -- some as young as 13, say? -- made up and dressed nicely, not beckoning, but waiting to be bought.  I wish I could say I found it as shocking -- both the poverty and the girls -- as the others, but I did not.  There was a strange normalization -- life going on amidst crime -- that is probably similar to an open air drug market in Baltimore. The girls seemed neither happy or particular desperate, or even deadened.  Which is not to say what is happening to them is not a crime and a tragedy.   Oddly, or maybe not, I was most affected by a probably three-year old boy sitting on a crate surrounded by working women, one of whom may have been his mother.  He didn't seem particularly distressed, he seemed like any other kid, but I couldn't help but think of Sam.  Indeed, the most troubling aspect of all this, going back to the disconnect in my opening lines, is, as I think Sarah Jones put it, the ovarian lottery.  These girls were in a sense born to this -- born into brothels, in Zana Briski's phrase -- just as, say, my daughters Una and Zoe were born into a certain kind of life.  The randomness of that -- that I should spend the early morning doing the backstroke in a pool under palm trees in a luxury hotel while a few blocks away someone scrounges in the garbage for food -- that is what is most hard to live with. Or, maybe not.  We all have ways of suppressing that harsh reality, or otherwise we would find it hard to live at all.

The charge for what the girls do is 150-250 rupees (specifics not offered).  That's three to five dollars.

Good Friday/First night of Passover, April 6

Yesterday started with a panel featuring two women who are survivors, in the favored term, of the sex trade.  Mumtaj, a dark-skinned ragpicker who lives under a bridge in Kolkata, was married to an abusive rickshaw puller.  She lives on less than a dollar a day.  Fatima, from a nomadic community called Nat, was forcibly married at nine into a home-based brothel far from her childhood home.  She has a maybe three-year old boy on her lap and is accompanied by her mother who we later learn, is a snake-charmer.

We then introduce ourselves, always somewhat revealing (about how people characterize themselves in
different settings; I tend to describe myself as a teacher these days, which is a lot more understandable to most people than “foundation executive”).  Sarah Jones tells the women, "you're not so different from me" -- which, I think, is a solidarity of brown skin, much like Obama's declaration that "Trayvon could be my son."  Gloria Steinem, always a font of memorable pithy wisdom, says that "stories are our very best textbooks."

Mumtaj's path of activism and self-empowerment started with access to schooling for her kids, went on to resisting her husband's beatings, enlisting the help of other women, and apparently changing his behavior --they're still together, and he supports her work organizing in the red-light district -- and now is focused on fighting the city's plan to raze her informal settlement to put up apartments, or office buildings, or whatever.  Lately, she and others in her settlement stood -- successfully, at least for now -- in front of a bulldozer.

There's also some issue with the connection between identity cards -- most of the women don't have them -- and access to alternative housing.  They've taken the position of access for all or none.

Fatima, a pretty 26-year old -- she's had five or six children since her marriage at 9 -- started out by talking about having been married when she should have been "out playing."  Somehow she escaped from the brothel and helped five other women run away.

She equates acceptance for a brother or husband who has visited the red light district with treating your daughter's rapist with respect -- something you shouldn't do or countenance.

We asked if they had questions for us.  Mumtaj wanted help with the eviction issue.  Fatima, simply:  "stand by me."

Fatima and Mumtaj followed by panel of various kinds of "experts" with differing views on trafficking, though these don't really emerge until late in the panel.  Anchita Ghatak, who represents domestic workers, says there are not needs particular to "sex workers" -- like domestic workers, they need recognition, education, health care.

Someone mentions drug and ganja addiction problems of both abusive men and of women in sex work -- first time anyone has mentioned what would seem to be an obvious issue.

When Pamela Shifman, moderating, finally gets people to focus on their differences, it turns out that it is Anchita, quite eloquently and respectively, articulates the arguments for treating sex work as work.  It is always unorganized, she says, and unorganized work by women is never a haven of fairness, and more heterogeneous than the debate would indicate.  For instance, some women are only part time, and have other jobs and priorities.  She talks about it in the context of society's attitudes toward sex,and to what extent sex is different.  There is always violence and injustice in women's work, and women should organize and speak for themselves.  A right to leave some kinds of work implies a right also to stay.  

A few other comments from panelists, and then Fatima speaks, setting off a gripping exchange with Anchita.  If buyers get arrested, she says, then women become more strengthened, because we see the law is on our side.

Anchita:  There are no quick solutions.  Some sex workers may overemphasize their reluctance to be in the profession when speaking to privileged people like us.  Why are we comfortable with the selling of all services except sex -- is it automatically exploitative?  It is not just about the law, but about what we do after it.  What have we gained by legal advances alone on dowry, rape, domestic violence?

Fatima:  To sell your dreams, to suffocate your life, how can this be called a business?  If a woman is saying it is work, I will accept that, but we have to understand the context in which she is saying that -- she has no house, food or work.  She is doing it for survival, with no other options in front of her.

Gloria at some point repeats a point she'd made the night before.  She stopped using the term "sex work"  -- she makes the point about contested language, and coming up with more appropriate terms -- when she learned that places like Nevada and Germany, accepting it as work, then expected women to apply for available sex work jobs before granting public assistance.  Sex work, she says is "survival sex.  But she is not necessarily for overcriminalizing purchase -- a penalty of some kind, but not prison.

Srabani says sex work is not like a job in an office  -- is it something you can tell your son or daughter about?

Archita:  this is not a binary issue.  The point of the panel is to listen to one another. No knee-jerk response on any issue is the right response.

After lunch we repair to Victoria Park and are divided into small groups to sit with circles of ten women, representing the heart of Apne Aap's organizing and support strategy.  An Apne Aap staff person, Sahana, leads the discussion.  The women have all been in the sex trade, and all still live in Sonagachi.  A few are youngish, maybe in their thirties, it seems, but most seem older, in late fifties or sixties. (Gloria Steinem, who is my only partner in this exercise since Peter Buffett stayed back, not feeling well, jokes that she and I have been age-segregated.)  But eventually it dawns on us that the women are not older, they just look older -- poor teeth and skin, gray hair. One woman who I took to be sixty has an 11-year old daughter.

The evening event, at the home of one of Ruchira's board members, has been billed as a dinner with "stakeholders."  I didn't look forward to something as dreary-sounding as that, but it turns out to be in a gorgeous modern house filled with art and amazing foor (we later learn it is their recently-built "party house,"just for entertaining -- they live across the garden in one of the other three buildings in the compound.)  The guests are political people, artists, corporate types -- a glittery evening such as you might have in a Tribeca loft.  We all had fun. 

Holy Saturday, April 7

Up very early for flight to Bihar, the state where Ruchi's family lives and there is a big Apne Aap operation in Forbesganj.   But there is a lot of rain this morning, and we are told that our planes -- the same private jets we took from Delhi to Kolkata -- are going to be delayed at least 45 minutes.  When it clears, we take a short jet ride, landing in some kind of military airfield about 90 minutes from Forbesganj -- at least that's how long it takes, allowing for rickshaws, buses and various livestock on the road.  Apne Aap's office is on a compound in the center of town, across from the railroad station -- at one time, since some in our group are not fond of flying, apparently we considered coming here by rail, a twelve-hour trip -- that also contains, or rather, primarily contains, Ruchi's family's ancestral home, where many of us are staying.  By local standards, they are wealthy, and while simply furnished, the house is spacious.

When a bit later we spend much of the afternoon at the primary school/community center -- also Apne Aap branded -- I begin to wonder about its visibility, and perhaps vulnerability.  On the one hand, they are a local employer and, likely, economic force of some significance in a place where not much else is going on economically.  Kind of like Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.  On the other, they are a threat to the established order, taking away girls with high economic value to their impoverished families --or so it is seen -- and while I haven't yet heard of this, it seems evident that the girls and the organizations would be the target of violence and intimidation. 

After a nice hot lunch -- all vegetarian here -- we spend the rest of the afternoon, in pairs, assigned to one girl who is thought to be at risk for prostitution and who is attending the Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidaley, a government-funded girls hostel.  Pamela Shifman and I are with Kavita, a thirteen-year old girl who, like the others, is a member of the Nat community, an extremely low caste whose apparent line of work, for the most part, is pimping and prostitution.

It's worth a minute on how that came to be.  Under the British, the sex trade is all the Nat were allowed to do.  So it's hardly a matter of destiny or preference.  Rather a matter of politics, of structural disadvantage.

Our Apne Aap facilitator walked us through Kavita's bio (which was also in a little booklet we got on the plane here).  Her father was an alcoholic who beat her mother, and her mother poisoned him and went to prison for two years.  (In the written materials, it says she went to prison for a petty crime, but perhaps they thought it better not to put the poisoning part in writing.)  Kavita, who has two older brothers and two younger ones, then goes to live with her uncle and aunt.  Who she apparently likes.  Though then it emerges, in the facilitator's telling, that the uncle is also a pimp, the aunt has been pimped out by him, and Kavita, who is a beautiful girl, is at risk of being forced into the sex trade by him.  Which is why she is at Kasturba, though she has dropped out, for various family reasons, half a dozen times.

We go to the community center to meet her through some kind of game where the girls follow a ribbon to our name tags.  Then we sit on a straw mat and talk with her for an hour or so.  We've been given some suggested questions (and so has she, since the Apne Aap staff has prepped them), and we use some of them, not others:  what makes her happiest, what makes her saddest, what is her favorite school subject, etc. 

She wants to be a singer when she grows up.  Loves Bollywood.  Or a lawyer -- she is excited to hear Pamela is one. Why?  "Lawyers suck the blood out of poor people."  This comes from her family's experience in trying to find a lawyer to represent her mother, and all demanded fees well beyond their reach.  So she wants to be a different kind of lawyer, who helps the poor.  

The girls have done an exercise -- we have some photos of the charts they did -- about what they most like and dislike about their community.  For Kavita, the list of dislikes is all about men abusing women, calling them names, being separated from her mother (who, now out of prison, is married to another abusive man in another town), and so on.  It's heartbreaking.  Here is a child -- and despite her wisdom and determination, and how much she has seen and had to deal with (unlike some of the other girls, she has not yet been sexually exploited), she is in many ways a very girlish, giggly 13, as well she should be --whose list of dislikes ought to be filled with things like broccoli and gym class, but instead is a list of harms and dangers that no child should have to face.

Who does she admire most, in her life or who she has heard about, who she would like to be like when she grows up?  Nehru.

She bonds with Pamela, and in time begins to stroke her hand, and clasps it when we walk around the village.  Pamela is also moved, and attributes this to transference -- longing for a mother figure -- but I think it's also a bit more than that.  She is sweet to me, though I think she thinks I am quite old -- which, in this community, I am; her mother is probably in her early 30s.  But also, why would she warm up to me in the course of an hour?  Every model she has of men in her life is wretched -- either violent or idle.  (That makes me think, not for the first time, that while I am fully for a strong focus on the empowerment of girls and women, there has got to be some concomitant strategy for boys, because it is hard to envision a just world in which the girls are taken care of and the boys have no future. It's the powerlessness of these men and boys, in the larger world outside the home, that turns their anger and rage toward the women around them.) 

The village is a mix of homes and businesses.  All rudimentary.  Pigs and goats roaming everywhere.  Dirty, barefoot, feral children -- one boy making a kind of kite from two plastic grocery sacks knotted together.  She takes us to her house, or rather where she lived with her father and mother when they were all together.  I have seen many poor homes, but this is as wretched as any.  Her aunt is squatting by an open fire frying naan made from a mound of dough covered by flies.  Every bit of clothing and cloth in the house is filthy.  (When, earlier, we asked her to describe her typical day at home, Kavita mentioned, twice, "dusting," but I can't begin to imagine what that means in this context.)  Inside, her brothers and some other boys are standing around a table on which there is a small television set showing a Tom and Jerry cartoon, which transfixes them.

I forgot to mention that Kavita, like all the other girls, is beautifully turned out  in a sari, which various jewelry -- earrings, bracelets and the like.  She's immaculately clean, with sparkling teeth.  And yet she lived in a place like this -- and when she goes home, that's what she finds?  It's hard to compute.  And when I ask Ruchi later, she says the girls were particularly well turned out for this important visit, and if she lived at home she would be more like that.  It reminds me, though, of how struck I have been in desperately poor places, from the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago to Port au Prince, by how starched and pressed and clean is the dress of school children -- how someone, against all odds, cares for them.

The village, which is obviously important to her, even a barren patch of land she calls a park, is a depressing experience.  Piles of garbage everywhere, men looking suspicious of the white Western visitors, a tea stall that is the hangout of pimps who would be harassing Kavita if she walked by alone, not with us.  All the while, while outwardly her cheerful, hopeful, sweet self, Kavita clasps Pamela's hand more tightly, and says to her, Pamela tells me later, a few things in her limited but good English -- I am sorry to be so poor, I am sorry the men in my village are so terrible.

Later, at Ruchi's house, after much confusion about who is staying where and where the bags are, I talk with her a bit.   Despite my being moved by this day, and the reality of the options -- or lack of them -- for these desperately poor girls, I still have some concerns about the balance between rescue and empowerment.  I think they would like stronger powers to take girls from their families, and while my usual strong feelings are that generally bad things happen for black and brown people when the state intervenes in families, this poses the hardest case. A father's "rights" to his adolescent daughter can destroy her life.

Some guests at the house invited last night by Ruchi's father. One, a self-described leftist politician in a white tunic (have to get the name of the word for that garment), asks what's up with Obama.  We were happy to get rid of Bush, he says, but US policies are the same.  And from his point of view, looking at, say, Afghanistan, why wouldn't he think that? We made no particular defense of Obama, and noted the permanent government, particularly the national security state, we talked about how crazy and awful the Republicans would be (if you thought Bush was bad...), and he gets that.   But he seemed bemused by how little has changed.

Later on Saturday 

On the plane returning from Bihar to Delhi.  Woke up early, around 5:30, to the sound of chanting -- Muslim prayers -- which apparently never let up during the night.   Took a cold shower (the only option), got dressed, and left the room about 6:30 to pass by Ai-Jen Poo sitting in her room working, which is just what I intended to do, before others in the house were up. She suggested we find a place to work together, so we went downstairs on the patio.  In a little while Ruchi's mother and father appeared, and we were served tea.  Ruchi's mother offered to give us a tour of the garden, as the sun was coming out (it had stormed during the night), and we took a lovely walk as she pointed out the 30 different varieties of fruit tree.  In a while others came down from their rooms, or arrived from the local hotel where they were staying, and all kinds of enticing fruit came out on platters -- tiny pungent mulberries and small bananas (all from the garden) that actually tasted like bananas. 

Our first stop of the day was a women's rally, at Jain Hall.  Apne Aap-organized, we were told it was happening anyway, and we would drop in, though Gloria, as an international feminist celebrity (I had not fully appreciated until this trip just how global her reputation is) would say a few words.  I think the rally, which was attended by a few hundred women and girls, was called to demand education, jobs and the like.  When we got there, all of us in the Novo group were ushered up to a table at the front, seated and given pink fezzes that looked, on the women anyway, like the hat that might be worn by a Pan Am flight attendant.  I was not happy to be so conspicuous, as if the rally were being put on for our benefit -- maybe it was -- but it seems our presence was seen as an honor by them, and it was important to act the part.  Sarah, either by accident or conviction, sat in the audience, but she was fairly conspicous, particularly with the pink fez, a head taller than anyone around her.

Drove from there to the hostel where the Kasturba girls live, where a stage had been set up and the girls were going to perform for us -- singing, dancing, and karate.  We found Kavita, very happy to see us, when we arrived, but she disappeared during the performances.  We later learned she was in a group of girls interviewing Jennifer Buffett and Gloria, and Pamela and I saw her again when we were leaving.  She led us by the hand around the place and showed us her room.  It's pretty basic, but light years nicer than her family home.   

Sarah also performed one of her characters for the girls.  They appreciated it, but probably much was lost in the translation.  The shows were charming, and I was struck by the presence on the fringes of the gathering by groups of boys -- from the neighborhood, I'd think, though we were out in the country by then -- gravely but quite attentively watching the festivities.

Had a talk with Puja in the garden, sitting in the sun this morning, about the tensions among feminists on this issue.  She asked me which of the feminists I respected felt differently from, say, the Novo view, and I rattled off three or four.  The missing piece for me in all of this is the voices of those “sex workers” -- I keep hearing about them, but haven't met any -- who view decriminalization as their empowerment.

Before we flew just now -- from an airforce base that is the only place within three hours of Forbesganj that could land a jet like the ones we are in, and which apparently took some wrangling -- we were told the commandant wanted to serve us tea, and were all ushered into his office, and then outside for a group photograph.  It turns out he got wind that Warren Buffett's son was passing through his airport, and it may have made his day, or month or year.

This is a funny way to see India.  I've missed Mumbai and the south, and even in Delhi and Kolkata, seen virtually no monuments, markets, temples, museums, historical sites.  What I have seen are red-light districts and, in the space of 24 hours, the most medieval hovel and a "party house" that is a lavish as anything in Beverly Hills or Soho.

 

                                    

 

About being human

Yesterday's watershed declaration by the President on same-sex marriage made me think about an experience I had with the class I taught this semester to prisoners at Eastern Correctional Facility. It's a course on social movements, and when I was putting the syllabus together, I included classes on abolition prohibition, civil rights, and labor, but also wanted to deal with a few contemporary issues and movements.  New York State had just passed marriage equality, and I thought that would be a good, fresh issue to focus on.

I invited as a guest for the class my friend Evan Wolfson, director of the Freedom-to-Marry Campaign, who is the leading legal architect of the same-sex marriage movement. (Who will be sharing the stage with President Obama soon when both get honorary degrees from Barnard, now to become an even more celebratory occasion.) Evan was terrific, the students were -- as always -- fully engaged, and on the two-hour drive back to New York City, Evan said he was not only bowled over by the sharpness and intense participation of the students, but that he had not detected an ounce of homophobia, even in body language, in the room of 22 men, mostly in their '30s, mostly Black and Latino. I agreed.

My practice was to give the students a weekly short paper to write, and at the end of this class, I asked them to reflect on what they would advise Evan Wolfson on the next strategy to advance marriage equality. When I read the papers a week later, I was struck by how many of them focused on media and public education campaigns to help the larger public understand and appreciate the basic humanity of their gay friends, families and neighbors.  Many talked about their own personal journeys in coming to see gay rights, and same-sex marriage, as a human rights issue.

Last week I met the class as a group for the last time, and I asked them at one point if there was anything they wish we had focused on more during the semester.  One after another spoke about the movement against mass incarceration -- captured in Michelle Alexander's terrific book, The New Jim Crow -- an issue of strong personal interest to them.  Indeed, the students have such a deep consciousness about the toxic brew of race and crime that has resulted in a U.S. prison population of two million people, disproportionately people of color, that without any prompting, they related practically every issue we talked about during the semester back to their own reality.

But I was struck in comment after comment, in the very candid exchange we had in the final class, how much each person spoke about his pain about the dehumanization of prisoners -- about their own dehumanization, seen as "animals," written off as dangerous, useless, a set-apart "other." 

And then I realized that in writing about the need for gay people to be seen and understood as fully human -- as just like everyone else -- my students were also, or maybe even mainly, talking about themselves.  They made the connection, and they felt a personal sense of solidarity with a group they felt that many in society were eager to marginalize, make "other."

There are various differences, of course, between the gay rights movement, the Black civil rights movement, and the emerging movement against mass incarceration.  My point is not to equate them.  But what I learned about solidarity in that prison classroom was a poignant and profound moment for me, and it has been been very much on my mind since the President's words yesterday.

Marjorie Fine: Our Own North Star

I had the honor of presenting an award last night from the North Star Fund to my very good friend Marjorie Fine. Since many of you know her so well and love her so much -- and if you don't, you ought to! -- here is the text of what I said:

I first met Marjorie Fine over fifteen years ago when I was the very new Director of the very new U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute.  Margie was the Executive Director of the Veatch Foundation – or, as they prefer to call it, the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, or some acronym-defying mouthful like that – and she was chairing or facilitating some meeting of funders.  Neither she or I can any longer recall exactly what the meeting was about.

 

Though the topic has faded from memory, I do remember that I was dazzled by Margie that day, by how she handled the meeting with savvy, sensitivity, warmth and humor.  I got back to the office and sent her what I called a fan letter.  She was touched that I had taken the time to write – she had the letter on her wall for many years, but it’s still packed with things from her recent office move – and we made a lunch date and talked for hours.  We’ve been eating and talking and conspiring about social justice ever since, also playing board games, going to the beach, and seeing movies, joined in the last six years by Lisa, who adores her as much as I do.

 

I sometimes think that everyone knows Margie, certainly a great many people in this room, so my task in presenting this award to her is easier than it might be. I don’t have to make the case, as it were. But it’s worth a short trip through her path here tonight.

 

Margie was born in Dayton, Ohio into a family who took the Jewish social justice tradition seriously and produced a daughter who never strayed from it. After graduating from SUNY Buffalo, Margie got her master’s in social work from Hunter College with a focus on community organizing, a central theme of her work in all the years since.  After stints with the National Council of Jewish Women and the Reproductive Rights National Network, she found a home in progressive philanthropy, first with the North Star Fund – so tonight is a homecoming for her in many ways – and then, for many years, as Executive Director at Veatch.

 

Years ago I was a grantee of Veatch, before Margie’s time there, and I admired both the way it went about its work – making democratic decisions with participation by those most affected, practices she honed here at North Star – and the places the money went:  to communities taking the reins of their own struggles for social justice.

 

In Margie’s tenure, Veatch was among the leaders in the environmental justice movement, in fighting right-wing assaults on access to the courts through SLAPP suits and other tricks designed to block justice, and in exposing and combatting sterilization abuse and other assaults on the rights of the poor.

 

Since leaving Veatch, in her work on the Linchpin Campaign of the Center for Community Change and in every other thing she does, Margie has returned to her core professional talent, one that has threaded through all her jobs – she is a born teacher.  She knows that the vital work of social justice cannot be fuelled by the occasional largesse of an enlightened remnant of the one percent – fundraising must be democratic, with a wide net cast so that everyone can ask, and everyone can give.  To all who are trained by her, she makes it possible, she makes it irresistible, she makes it fun.

 

            And on that note, I cannot close this tribute, cannot call Margie up here to accept a token of our regard, respect and love for her, without saying a few final words just about Margie the person.  C.S. Lewis – a Christian author, I know, and forgive me the chutzpah, Margie, for not coming up with a Jew – has written that “joy is the serious business of heaven.”  And joy, in the serious work of justice here on earth, is what infuses every molecule of Margie’s being.  She is the happiest of warriors.

 

            In the end we love Margie, and we lift her above so many others who we also love and respect, not just because of the fine quality of her social conscience, not just because she is a peerless teacher, but because she also has the rarest and most precious of human gifts:  the capacity, by her very presence in the world and as our colleague, ally and friend, to make us feel better about ourselves, about the possibilities of being human, about the attainability of justice.

 

            The North Star in the heavens shines so brightly it has helped us for centuries to find our way.  In calling us to our highest values, Frederick Douglass knew what he was doing when he made that the name of his anti-slavery newspaper.  I can think of no better name for an award that I am proud to present, on behalf of the North Star community and all whose lives have been enriched by this wonderful woman, our own North Star, my dear friend Marjorie Fine.

 

 

 

My Life in Institutions

Yesterday I was the speaker in a lecture series at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy.  Since
for the first time in several decades I am not running or helping to run a large institution, I took the opportunity to reflect on what I have learned in my institutional life to date.  I came to realize that high school set the template for the career that followed. The talk is here:  Download MY LIFE IN INSTITUTIONS Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Signs of intellectual life

The current (March 22) issue of the New York Review of Books has a lot of good stuff in it, including Nicholas Lemann on Howard Cosell and an excerpt from Tony Judt's last work accompanied by a piece by his wife, Jennifer Homans, about it.  But of greatest interest to me were three items -- two reviews and a letters exchange -- featuring sharp differences about significant public issues between and among essentially like-minded people.  It's easy enough, and fun -- and the New York Review has plenty of this -- to take shots at big corporations, the Tea Party and the Republican presidential field.  But pressing your friends on points of principle or strategy is much more rare -- too rare, in my view, for our intellectual and political health.

So in this issue you have Diane Ravitch's critique of Teach for America, Ezra Klein's critical take on Lawrence Lessig's new book on money and politics, and a critique by various global feminists on Ken Roth's introduction to the 2010 Human RIghts Watch World Report.  What I most like about these, as a generally opinionated person, is that I am not entirely sure what I think about any of them.  Since Ravitch's conversion, a few years back, from enthusiast to critic of the contemporary wave of education reform, I have almost always agreed with her, though I also find much to inquire in Wendy Kopp and Teach for America.  I worked for many years to get money out of politics, but I think Klein makes some very good points about the limits of a money focus (and, as a lobbyist myself many years ago, albeit for the ACLU in the Texas Legislature, a tough assignment if ever there was one, I think he is -- pun intended -- on the money about the real culture of lobbying).  And I worked for, and retain a strong connection to, Human Rights Watch, though I think (as I write in the chapter I contributed for the new Human RIghts Watch book on women's rights) that the human rights movement, to its great detriment, has too long failed to recognize the centrality of women's rights to all human rights.

So, since I am not entirely sure what I think after reading these provocative critiques and exchanges, I am interested in knowing what you think.

Why I am not a Forest Ranger or Cop

I was going through some old files and came across an old report on "Strong Vocational Interest," the result of a test I took as a senior in high school -- in fact, it is dated exactly forty years ago, January 10, 1972.  On the "basic interest scales," my highest ratings were for public speaking, law and politics, and social service, also very strong in music, art and writing.  Lowest?  Nature, agriculture, math and science.

As for the "occupational scales," my highest was music teacher -- kind of odd, coupled with the high interest score for music, as I've never really played an instrument or engaged in any organized musical activities, despite intermittent piano lessons -- followed by librarian and social worker.  My lowest -- we're talking negative numbers here -- were carpenter at -03, policeman at -04, and forest service man at -09.

I'm struck by how, well, accurate the test was.  Though there were no categories for, say, human rights activist or foundation executive on the test, my career in the intervening 40 years has aligned pretty well with what I was said to have interest in and aptitude for. All of the things I was said to be best suited for had to do with expression and human and social service; all of the things I was said to be most unsuited for had to do with authority and order.

 

 

Bernie Bellush

I was very sad to learn, over New Year's Day breakfast in California, that Bernie Bellush, my friend of forty years, died at the age of 94 on Friday.  The Jewish Daily Forward, with which he had a long association, had an obituary which appears here.

I met Bernie in the summer I turned eighteen, on a visit to New York, when the friend I was visiting took me to the campaign headquarters -- on Montague Street in Brookylyn Heights, just around the corner from where I now live -- for Allard Lowenstein, the great liberal antiwar activist and Congressman, attempting a return to office from Brooklyn after losing his seat in some redistricting maneuver.  Bernie, a towering man with a booming voice and almost everything else on his lean frame -- nose, ears, feet, hands -- also oversized, was in my memory wearing a beret which capped longish hair that even then (he was a few years younger in 1972 than I am now) was snowy white.  I was introduced as an incoming member of his beloved ACLU Academic Freedom Committee (THAT story, too long to tell here, appears in one of my "Gaining My Mind" installments on this blog), and from that moment he took a teacherly, fatherly interest in me that never flagged, despite our shifting roles, until the end of his life last week.

We served together on the Academic Freedom Committee for six years or so, by which time -- 34 years ago tomorrow, in fact -- I joined the ACLU staff full-time and resigned from my volunteer responsibilities.  I came to know his wife Jewel -- a Hunter College political science professor and member of the ACLU National Board -- as well, and they began to invite us to dinner parties a few Saturday nights a year at their Great Neck home.  These were a huge part of my social and political education.  The evening would start with hors d'oeuvres in the living room, brought in from time to time by Michele, a young French woman who lived with them, cooked their meals and did other household things, but who was really like a third daughter.  The other guests on any given evening might be accomplished friends like Jack Weinstein, the federal judge, or VIctor Gotbaum, the labor leader, but there would always be younger people, mostly former students.  When we were called to the table for dinner, the seating always very strategic, after a brief period for service Bernie would direct a group conversation and announce the topic -- invariably some version of "Whither the Democrats" or "Whither Israel."  

I'd never experienced anything like that before, and it made a deep impression, particularly having to hold my own on topics I barely knew anything about with the likes of Weinstein and Gotbaum.  What I also observed around that dinner table, and over the many years I have been close to Bernie and Jewel, is a rare equality of partnership.  Jewel was an early feminist, and the two of them were professional peers who were completely secure with one another, raising two strong and independent daughters along the way. Through this remarkable couple a Catholic boy from Rhode Island learned to tell the difference between the Trotskyite and Schachtmanite lunch tables at City College (where Bernie went as a student, returning for many years as a history professor) and to sprinkle my conversation with liberal doses of Yiddish, which never failed to amuse Bernie.

Bernie (sometimes with Jewel) wrote a number of books -- on the NRA, on FDR as Governor of New York, on District Council 37 -- and had a dazzling array of civic activitis, from the American Veterans Committee upon his return from the Second World War (the Forward obit has a great link to Bernie's account of his participation in D-Day) to Americans for Democratic Action to the Forward itself.

I last talked with Bernie on his last birthday in mid-November.  For someone with a great many friends and acolytes, he never failed to give you the impression that his conversation with you was the most important thing he had to do.  From him I learned much of what I know about how to have a socially engaged intellectual life.  Bernie was not without flaws -- he could be thin-skinned, and unduly contentious and prickly in some organizational and bureaucratic matters -- but he was, to me and countless others, the quintessial teacher.  He was kind and warm and caring, and the dimming of that glow leaves me very sad today.  

 

David Isbell and Margaret Mahoney

The past week has brought news of the deaths of two longtime friends and colleagues, both in their eighties.  This Washington Post obituary of David B.Isbell, a prominent D.C. lawyer who I worked closely with over many years in the ACLU, captures him beautifully; so far all that has appeared in the New York Times about Margaret E. Mahoney is a paid notice, but I hope in the days to come she gets the full news obituary she deserves, as she was a hugely significant figure in American philanthropy.

I met David nearly forty years ago when I started to take minutes for ACLU board meetings while still in college.  He was married to another ACLU stalwart, Florence Isbell, who was among the first female directors of an ACLU affiliate -- indeed, she was over time the director of three, and eventually the national membership director, having started in the 1940s as Roger Baldwin's secretary. Florence was -- and still is -- blunt, sardonic, funny and whipsmart.  David's was a drier wit, but he and I spent many hours sharing parodies and other bemused accounts of the doings of our fellow ACLU Board members, since I eventually grew up and joined him on the ACLU board and executive committee.  There is no one whose advice I took more seriously than David, who lived the role of "counselor" not just to me and countless friends and colleagues, but to his family, clients and a host of civic organizations.  He was the quintessial civically engaged lawyer, devoting much time to teaching and board and committee work, and both for that and for his rock-firm ethical standards he represents a dwindling breed.  The last few times I saw David, sometimes with Florence, sometimes without, were challenging, as he (and she) had significant hearing impairments that made casual conversation very difficult.  I gather he had recently had cochlear implants that were making a huge difference in that, making even more cruel and heartbreaking his premature death from the West Nile virus.

Maggie Mahoney had faded in the last few years of a degenerative illness that took away much of the sharpness and insight that made her such a valuable friend -- and yes, counselor as well -- to me and to so many others.  She was a protege of the fabled Carnegie Corporation President and H.E.W. Secretary John Gardner -- a man with a great eye for talent and a gift for nurturing it -- and was a prominent figure at Carnegie and then the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation before assuming the Presidency of the Commonwealth Fund, becoming the first woman to head a large American philanthropy.  I met her during that period when a mutual friend suggested we meet over lunch in 1996 when I had just gone to work for the Open Society Foundations (then Institute) as Director of U.S. Programs.  She seemed to me a deeply wise, almost Yoda-like figure, and everything she said to me that day and over the years seemed etched in stone, as if delivered on tablets. If that sounds off-putting, it wasn't.  She was one of the most focused and thoughtful people I have ever known

When she left Commonwealth, she set up a consulting firm with two other women who, like her, had been pioneers in philanthropy, Barbara Finberg and Alberta Arthurs.  At one point for a few years I hired her as a consultant to OSI.  I don't remember the ostensible scope of work, but in fact was I wanted was to be able to call on Maggie once a month or so as a kind of organizational therapist without feeling I was intruding on her time.  And so I did.  I would come down to her office for an hour or so to share challenges and problems I was trying to work out -- sometimes I would share drafts of things I was working on -- and she always gave me comments that lifted whatever I was concerned about out of whatever too-narrow context I had framed it in.  She thought big, deep and long.  And she was unfailingly courtly and kind.  I have saved all of her Christmas cards, which always had a personal line or two meant to buck up and inspire me.

I've been very fortunate in my life to find mentors, among whom David and Maggie were two of the most special, to help me figure things or, stay on course where needed, and change course where warranted.  Their passing fills me with sadness, but also with deep gratitude and love.

O Jackie!

It happens that as I was listening to the final minutes of the audiobook of "Jacqueline Kennedy:  Historic Conversations on Her Life with John F. Kennedy" -- eight hours of unedited tapes of conversations she had, about six months after her husband's assassination, with the historian and White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- I flipped open a recent Vanity Fair to find this essay, "Widow of Opportunity," which turns out to have been one of the last written by the staggeringly prolific and wide-ranging Christopher Hitchens.  A man who had no use for God or Mother Teresa turns out, unsurprisingly, not to have a soft spot for the sainted Jackie Kennedy either, viewing her as an apologist for a serial plagiarist and wiretapper. (That willingness, indeed it seems eagerness, to slaughter sacred cows is what I will miss most about Hitchens.)

My reaction to the tapes was more mixed.  On the one hand, they provide quite a glimpse into a woman who was famous but mysterious, a kind of Greta Garbo of the political/social world.  Until the tapes, I had barely heard her breathy, Marilyn Monroe-like voice with its periodic and slightly jarring Rhode Island inflections.  On the other hand, at least in the unexpurgated version, they can be mind-numbingly boring, particularly as Schlesinger's questions seemed to be working off a chronological checklist of people and events in the short life of the President and his administration ("Did he ever say anything to you about Skybolt?" -- something that must have been important at the time, but does not seem to have survived the sift of history like the Berlin or Cuban Missile crises -- or "What did the President think of Walter Heller?")  

Although it was only months since the limo ride in Dallas, Jackie Kennedy is remarkably composed and effortlessly articulate, with an amazing memory for detail, rendered in novelistic touches:

And anytime Lyndon would talk that night, Lady Bird would get out a little notebook -- I've never seen a husband and wife so -- she was sort of like a trained hunting dog.  He'd say something as innocent as -- I don't know -- "Does your sister live in London?" -- and Lady Bird would write down Lee's name and "London."  Just everything.  I mean, she had every name, phone number -- it was a -- ewww -- sort of funny kind of way of operating.

Despite his beastly historic reputation, she was very impressed by the attentiveness of her father-in-law, Joe Kennedy, to his childen, and somewhat less with his wife:  "I always thought he was the tiger mother.  And Mrs. Kennedy, poor little thing, was running around, trying to keep up with this demon of energy, seeing if she had enough placemats in Palm Beach, or should she send the ones from Bronxville, or had she put the London ones in storage."  That alone gives a good flavor of the quite privileged life she and her husband grew up in and maintained, the action taking place at one family compound or another.

All this, as the Lady Bird and Rose Kennedy anecdotes suggest, with surprising wit (cataloguing all that JFK was reading in the White House while "I was growing illiterate there") and considerable acidity about those around her husband that she felt were too self-seeking (Theodore Sorensen) or unworthy (Lyndon Johnson, though if you listen, as I have, to the much more entertaining LBJ tapes, you'll hear her fawning over him on the phone).

Much has been written, in the reactions to these tapes -- which she knew, in recording them, would not see the light of day for many years after her death -- about Jacqueline Kennedy's retrograde attitudes about women and men. She speculates, for example, that Clare Booth Luce, so interested in the men's world of politics and policy, might be a lesbian, and for herself wonders why anyone would think she'd need to have opinions of her own when she can get perfectly good ones from her husband.  But there's no question from the evidence here that she had a first-rate mind and JFK must have respected it a good deal (while disrespecting her regularly in his prodigious extramarital activities -- how they were managed with his back and other medical issues is a great mystery to me.)  Indeed, it's hard to think of a woman, from "prunefaced" Indira Gandhi to Mamie Eisenhower to Letitia Baldridge, her own social secretary, who comes off very well.  I assume over time she grew out of her pre-"Feminine Mystique" views.

What I was most struck by was the lack of generosity she showed toward almost every other figure, dead or alive, who dared to threaten the glow of her late husband.  Asked by Schlesinger to comment on other 20th century Presidents -- or rather, what JFK thought of them -- she is a bit guarded about what he thought but makes it clear that couldn't hold a candle, not even FDR, to her husband. I always admired Jacqueline Kennedy from afar, mainly for the way she seemed to guard her children from the press, trying to raise them as normally as possible.  And my views of JFK, who formed my young view of what a President was and could be -- I was nine when he was killed -- have grown much less admiring over the years.  But in his adoring wife's effort to capture him, he becomes more human and appealing -- in his intellectual curiosity, his forgiving nature, his many small acts of consideration -- and she becomes diminished.

What's wrong with our politics: views from the right and left, oddly converging

I just got around to reading Bill Moyers' essay in the November 21 Nation, adapted from his speech to the 40th Anniversary of Public Citizen, "How Wall Street Occupied America."  Moyers is one of the leading moral voices on the progressive side, and this is a bracing critique of the new Gilded Age -- tough on the Democrats and the Republicans alike for their capitulation to corporate interests.  I especially like his recollections of how important government was in providing a solid floor for the success of his family:

I was one of the poorest white kids in town, but in many respects I was the equal of my friend who was the daughter of the richest man in town. I went to good public schools, had the use of a good public library, played sandlot baseball in a good public park and traveled far on good public roads with good public facilities to a good public university. Because these public goods were there for us, I never thought of myself as poor. When I began to piece the story together years later, I came to realize that people like the Moyerses had been included in the American deal. “We, the People” included us.

Compelling for different reasons is David Frum's recent New York Magazine piece, "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?"  If I wrote a piece like that -- and I have certainly done variations on it, in this blog and elsewhere -- it would be dismissed, probably, as a predictable rant from a left-leaning (why is it always "leaning?" At what point do you lean so far you fall over?) liberal (to be both alliterative and redundant at once).  But Frum poses problems for conservatives because he's truly one of them -- worked for George W. Bush, the Wall Street Journal, the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes --  and for that reason he's been drummed out of the establishment right for his heresies, most recently encouraging Republicans to compromise on the Obama health care bill, laden as it was with ideas that were once put forth by conservatives.  Here he is on the alternative universe of Fox News and talk radio:

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy ­errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action ­phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”

Note the consistency of the penultimate sentence with the arguments made by Moyers and others on the left (and, increasingly, center). Indeed, the consistency with Occupy Wall Street.  Frum remains a conservative Republican -- he hasn't done an Arianna Huffington/David Brock-style conversion -- yet there seems to be no home for him in his own party.  Is there any chance of this changing?  I devoutly hope so.

Because, strangely, I think the best thing for our politics would be for genuine conservatives -- fiscally responsible and concerned about national security, for instance, but reality-based (not opposed to all taxes at all times) and socially tolerant -- to reclaim the Republican Party or break away from it.  Not because I want to see them govern, though from time to time they probably would, but because it's terrible for our politics for a once-great party (Lincoln's and Teddy Roosevelt's, let's remember) to be in the tightening grip of ideologues who have no stake in governing, just in inflaming their "base."  

 

 

 

Occupy this!

I got an award last night from one of my favorite organizations, Make the Road New York, along with several other New Yorkers, including George Gresham of 1199 and Michael Mulgrew of the UFT.  In my experience going to MTRNY's annual events over the years -- held on the top floor of the Fire Department Museum on Spring Street -- it's hard to keep the attention of the boisterous crowd, so I decided to opt for something a little more rowdy myself, and it seemed to go over well, so here is what I said:

    Thank you so much for this.  I noticed when I looked at the program that the awards are divided into different categories:  honor, dignity, power.  Mine, I see, is for dignity.  So maybe I'm being honored for the dignity with which I gave up power!

    I've been to enough Make the Road events over the years to know that it is a challenge to hold the attention of the room, so if at any point in my short remarks I seem to be losing the crowd, I am just going to shout "Si Se Puede!" three times and sit down.

    I’ve been thinking lately about the meaning of the word “occupy,” which has been on so many lips in recent weeks.  So I went to the American Heritage Dictionary.  What did I find?  Well, there are at least five documented definitions.

    To “occupy” is to “fill up time or space,” to “dwell or reside in.” That’s is one important meaning, someone needs to tell the Mayor and the NYPD, of what is happening in Zuccotti Park and in so many other cities in this country and around the world.  It’s about presence, and a groundedness in space.

    A third meaning is to “hold or fill an office or position.”  One early achievement of Occupy Wall Street is to put those holders and fillers on notice that they are there to do more than to hold or fill seats in the service of a small plutocratic minority.  They need to be accountable to working people, the unemployed, the targets of corporate malfeasance, communities of color, and all of us.  In that Occupy and all of us can take a lesson from the work of Make the Road, of which I have been proud to be an ally and supporter, for over a dozen years. 

    To occupy is also “to engage or employ the attention or concentration of (as in to ‘occupy the children with coloring books’).”  That’s American Heritage’s example, not mine. What is going on a mile or so south of here certainly has attracted the attention and concentration of millions, and strikingly altered the national conversation from one about deficits to one about jobs and inequality.

    Finally, to occupy is “to seize possession of and maintain control over by or as if by conquest.”  Now we are getting somewhere.

    But why stop with Wall Street?  The brilliant fusion of Make the Road by Walking and the Latin American Integration Center has occupied Bushwick, Jackson Heights, and Port Richmond, and in doing so, led primarily by strong women, has made the lives of thousands of low-income people of color, much better by demanding accountability from power and staying on the case.

    So what else do we need to occupy?

    First, we need to occupy Occupy, to make sure that the faces and voices of black and brown and Asian people have a central place in it…

    We need to occupy the Department of Education to restore accountability to communities …

    We need to occupy the NYPD to assure that young black and brown people are respected as assets and allies, not stopped and frisked as targets …

    We need to occupy the courts so they truly render justice to those whose rights have been trampled upon …

    We need to occupy City Hall and all five boroughs of this fabulous city…

    We need to occupy the New York Post and Fox News…

    We need to occupy the brains and hearts, which seem to be quite vacant, of the Republicans running for President and their allies in Congress...

    And we need to occupy the spines and tenacity of the President and the Democrats in Congress.

    SI SE PUEDE!

 

Government and philanthropy

The lead piece in the Giving section of today's New York Times -- a supplement published a few times a year, focused on philanthropy -- seems aimed at the tensions between philanthropic impulses that are charitable (designed to alleviate suffering and help individuals) and more systemically focused (housing policy vs. homeless shelters).  It's a well-worn topic, one that I have weighed in on often in my fifteen years in philanthropy.  

It's not an either-or situation, of course -- for instance, when I was at the Open Society Foundations, our Emma Lazarus Fund both provided naturalization assistance to individuals and funded advocates seeking to overturn Congress's cutoff of safety net benefits to legal immigrants -- but I incline strongly toward the systemic change approach, because that's the way both to get at the root causes of any social ailment and to increase the likelihood that if you fix it, it will stay fixed, and help many more people in the process.  Since in most public policy matters, what the government can do to improve lives (public education, health care, Social Security) dwarfs what even the combined assets of philanthropy can do, it's not a close question for me that the aim should be to affect government policy, particularly the flow of government dollars.  They should be more smartly spent than they often are, but there's really no alternative for meaningful impact and social change.

I always thought of Emmett Carson, the thoughtful and energetic President of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as a kindred spirit in these matters, but I have to take issue with the quote he provided to the Times, which seems to want to have it both ways.  Carson starts out by criticizing his colleagues, with good reason: “At a time when America is having a debate about the social contract, philanthropy is silent.We are silent about the depths of the problems of homelessness, joblessness, foreclosure, hunger, and people are starting to believe that philanthropy is irrelevant to the core needs of their communities.”

But then he goes on to criticize proposals by the Obama administration to reduce the tax deductions for charitable giving, which are mainly used by the very wealthy. “Because of our silence, we now have a president, a former community organizer, who does not value the charitable deduction,” Carson told the Times. “What he’s saying is that, left to its own devices, government can spend those dollars better than philanthropists.”

Well, yes.  Government has plenty of faults -- democracy is not perfect.  But is letting the very rich keep more of their money protected from taxes -- and as the article notes, much of it goes to elite causes like alumni giving -- preferable, as a matter of public policy, to more accountable democratic decisions like whether to expand health care coverage or keep public college tuition affordable?

To the list of important matters about which philanthropy was silent we could add the massive redistribution of wealth -- upwards -- that took place in the Bush years, as the Treasury was starved so that already-rich people could get richer.  Philanthropy has a lot to contribute to the urgent questions facing the country -- money, surely, but also ideas and the power of knowledge and convening.  The independence of philanthropy ought to position it well to take unpopular stances, like arguing, as Warren Buffett does, for a more equitable tax system.  Using that independence to defend the status quo, and play into the right-wing attacks on government is not a good start.

 

Prohibition

Just finished watching the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick three-part series, Prohibition: http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/.
I'm grateful to Shira Saperstein for pointing out to me that it has a lot to tell us about social movements. The movement that brought about the prohibition amendment was not, I learned, as it has come to be caricatured, some kind of early 20th century version of the Christian Coalition. Among its leaders were many feminists of the day who had cut their teeth in the suffrage movement (as indeed, many women's and gay rights leaders some decades later cut their teeth in the civil rights movement.) They saw alcohol, and the big economic interests behind it, as huge contributing factors to many social ills, including domestic violence. Yet it's more complicated than that, as there were serious nativist and anti-immigrant strands in the movement.

The story of how prohibition came to be repealed a dozen years later is the story of unintended consequences, of overreach and absolutism on the part of the drys. (Echoes of today's right-wing Republicans.) At the same time, the Depression caused many to question why government resources were being devoted to enforcement of a widely-violated law, and the movement for repeal gained momentum from arguments that it would stimulate the economy and add jobs and revenue.

Most fascinating to me, beyond these obvious parallels with the present day -- reminding me of why we study history -- the film is filled with interesting characters who were household words in their day, like Mabel Walker Willebrand, Wayne Wheeler, Lois Long and Pauline Sabin. Of the "stars" of the film, only Al Capone seems to have survived to any significant degree in modern memory.

Philanthropy's Role in a Fractured America

That's the title of a keynote address I gave this morning at the annual meeting of the Ohio Grantmakers Forum in Columbus.  I've included a link to the PDF of the full talk below, but here's an excerpt:

Much of the world, and certainly much of this country, enjoyed a long-running economic boom which came to a crash in 2008, ushering in widespread misery and insecurity, from high and unyielding unemployment rates to the loss of homes and pensions for many and the loss of value in those assets for almost all.  Making things worse, draconian budget cuts are straining, and at times, shredding, the social safety net, threatening environmental and worker protection, public safety and public education, and further eroding a decaying national infrastructure.

The great shame of the nation, and of most industrial democracies -- in my years at the Atlantic Philanthropies I had a ringside seat on politics, the economy and culture in Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere, and I saw the same thing there -- is the failure to use the boom years to improve the lot of those worst off, indeed, to improve the lot of the vast majority, whether that is the 99% touted by the Occupy Wall Street movement or some lower figure.  Instead, inequality widened greatly, and now the gap between rich and poor tears at the social fabric.

This cataclysm has also shaken up our politics, which are now more volatile than ever – with President Obama, for instance, first the beneficiary of a frightened but hopeful electorate and then its target.  We lurch toward another national election with vast numbers in each party unsatisfied with their choices:  the President, the great hope of millions in 2008, whatever his achievements – and they are not trivial -- is attacked by many of his former supporters as too centrist and too quick to compromise, by self-styled independents as too partisan and purist, and by Republicans as a dangerous radical bent on destroying the very essence of America.  His Republican rivals take turns each week as the great hope of the G.O.P., but none can command support so far from more than a quarter of an increasingly polarized party.  The nomination race already has a Survivor-like quality, and when the best that can be said of the field is that its most likely victors probably don’t believe half of what they say, that is not a shining moment for democracy.

In the states -- and I don’t need to tell you this in Ohio --the economic decline and the winding-down of stimulus funds that disguised for a while its truly calamitous nature is written in the faces of children in overcrowded classrooms, men and women standing in lines at soup kitchens and the unemployment office, and drivers stuck in traffic on crumbling highways.  In this state, as in many others, a newly hegemonous political leadership sees no reason not to go for broke, as politics everywhere now seems to have become a winner-take-all game.  

I make a case for a stronger, coordinated effort to protect independent science and economic analysis, key civil society institutions like universities and the media, and rules of the game fora like fair elections and courts.

I'd welcome feedback, as always:   Download Philanthropy’s Role in a Fractured America

Bork again?

Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist -- whose specialty, I thought, was business and finance -- has a bizarre and ignorant column today arguing that all the "ugliness" in Washington started with the Democrats' campaign against the nomination of of Judge Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987.  I'm not sure what Nocera was doing or covering in 1987, almost a quarter-century ago, and it may be that many Americans have short memories, but I was around, and quite active in the anti-Bork campaign in Texas (where I was then living) and speaking against the nomination in several Western states, and what Nocera writes is a bunch of nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, because the anti-Bork campaign has little in common with the dysfunction in Washington today.  The right-wing has been trying to peddle that notion for years, since it serves their interests, but it's false.

I wrote a lot about this at the time, and if I can manage the technological feat of posting or linking to the PDFs of my old articles, I'll do it in this post.  No one opposed Bork on personal grounds, or tried to assault his character.  Indeed, Bork enjoyed good relations with ideological opposite numbers on the Yale faculty and on the D.C. Court of Appeals, where he was sitting when Reagan nominated him.  It's often brought up that some DC newspaper got hold of Bork's video rental records and published them, but that had nothing to do at all with the formal campaign against his nomination, and in any case revealed his tastes to be quite conventional, running as I recall to Hitchcock films. It played no role in the campaign or the vote.

A broad array of civil rights, religious, labor and other groups opposed the Bork nomination -- including the ACLU, where I was employed at the time, which departed from its traditional position of neutrality in Supreme Court nominations for only the second time in its history -- because his entire approach to judging rejected the settled approach to constitutional law that had been embraced by the Supreme Court at that point for over thirty years.  Yes, he was conservative, and it is be be expected that a conservative Republican President would nominate a justice from his side of the ideological spectrum, and some deference is ordinarily paid to that.  But Bork was beyond the pale, and what was thrilling about the success of the campaign against him is that it was waged on the issues and on the merits, with none of the personal character issues that dominated some later nomination battles.  To use Bork's own words (said in response to a question about why he wanted to serve on the Court), it was an "intellectual feast."  And an important teachable moment about why the Constitution and the Court matter.

The soundness of the campaign against Bork has been vindicated by his post-nomination career.  In recent years his writings have taken on an increasingly theocratic tone, and when asked by Newsweek this week (in an interview sparked by his role as an adviser to the Romney campaign) if he still disagrees with the high court’s Griswold v. Connecticut ruling that married couples have a constitutional right to the use of contraception, his answer was: “Oh, my God, yes!”

Finally, it's worth noting that the lopsided majority rejecting Bork's nomination included six Republicans.  It was a different time, when the party was not entirely in the grip of the Tea Party and the Christian right. What the Bork nomination battle shows is that there was a time in our politics, not too long ago, when you could have a high-level debate on matters of basic principle, and members of each party could come to a judgment based on their sense of what is best for the country and its traditions, not on the basis of what team's uniform they wore.  If we could learn THAT from looking back at the Bork debate, we'd be fortunate.  Joe Nocera has it completely backwards, and shame on him for lending his column to perpetuating the long-cherished myths of the paleolithic right.

***

If I managed to do this right, here are the links to my 1987 articles:

Download CorpusChristiCallerTimes_WhatTheBorkFightIsReallyAbout_GLM_092687

Download TexasObserver_ThePostBorkChallenge_GLM_102387

All Will Be Well

That's the name of the memoir by the great Irish writer John McGahern, which I was finishing as our plane set down in Dublin.  Its central themes are the strength he was given by his mother, who died of cancer when he was nine, particularly to endure over the coming years the brutalities and insecurities of his self-centered, domineering father.  There are many beautiful passages in the book, apart from the sharp and evocative character and landscape descriptions and the story itself, that capture in a very deep way aspects of the human experience -- religion and faith, for example.  This one, on childhood, life and death, seems to me to express in a few paragraphs what I think Terence Malick was trying to get at in his recent film, The Tree of Life:

We come from darkness into light and grow in the light until at death we return to that original darkness.  Those early years of the light are also a partial darkness because we have no power or understanding and are helpless in the face of the world.  This is one of the great miseries of childhood.  Mercifully, it is quickly absorbed by the boundless faith and energy and the length of the endlessly changing day of the child.  Not even the greatest catastrophe can last the length of that long day.

We grow into an understanding of the world gradually.  Much of what we come to know is far from comforting, that each day brings us closer to the inevitable hour when all will be darkness again, but even that knowledge is power and all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is.  We grow into a love of the world, a love that is all the more precious and poignant because the great glory of which we are but a particle is lost almost as soon as it is gathered.

 

A non-Hallmark birthday greeting for the President

I'd like to wish the President well on his 50th birthday, which must be a strange time for him, as he undoubtedly knows how disappointed, surely, and angry, often, so many of his supporters are, particularly over actions and events of the last year.  He may not have believed his own hype, but he knows how many others did, particularly among the young who had never had any reason to think politics and government might be relevant to them, might be vehicles to advance the kind of world they want.  

Obama is a fine man with many attributes of leadership, and he has stayed pretty much in character all along, which is why I don't have quite the anger, or even the sharp sense of disappointment so many feel who projected all their hopes and dreams onto him.  The sobering state of our dysfunctional politics -- well, dysfunctional for those who do not believe government should revert to some Hobbesian state in which the rich take all they can and the rest of us scrap for crumbs -- is such that no one can claim with a straight face that Washington and its way of doing business has been transformed.  It's worse than ever.  It is the height of irony that the debt "crisis" was dealt with in a way that avoided financial default and exemplified political default.

This is the fault of an extreme rightwing party, fueled by a virulent media arm that, in contrast to any former time in this country, feels no stake in the social contract.  It is the fault of those on the left who simply do not have the power to hold even their own side accountable, and of course to the same right-wingers who have systematically tried to weaken and delegitimize all key institutions of the left and center, from ACORN to NPR to progressive foundations.  And it is the fault of the President, who for all his many talents and strengths fails an essential test of character, which is to draw the line somewhere and stand up for poor and working people.  

It is a cruel coincidence that the President's birthday is marked by front-page articles in the New York TImes telling us that while unemployment and foreclosures mount, luxury goods are flying off the shelves faster than ever -- no recession for the customers of Neiman Marcus and Mercedes-Benz -- and that private philanthropy is increasingly called on to meet the gaps in essential government services and support.  Most of us will support Barack Obama for re-election, perhaps even desperately, given the nature of the opposition and the specter of its possible hegemony over government.  But we now know,  with sadness if not the other more more active emotions, that he is mismatched to the times, which call for so much more than reasoning with the unreasonable and compromising with yourself.  

In other words

I chose in my brief remarks at my Atlantic going-away party last week to speak mainly in the words of others.  Some found it interesting that I did that; I wasn't trying to be elliptical, it was just an impulse I decided to go with.  It's not as if I am incapable of speaking for myself, which I do often and at (usually too-great) length.  Also, I liked the idea of quoting leaders and writers from the countries in which Atlantic works, including South Africa, Ireland and the U.S.

Afterwards, a lot of people asked me for the text of the three things I read, so I reproduce them here.  One was from Nelson Mandela, about pausing for reflection:

   I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. 

Another, about the fight for social justice, was from the Cure at Troy, a Seamus Heaney poem:

 

 

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

  

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

  

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

Finally, I closed with these words from the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

 

 

More on the moral dimension of philanthropy and social change

Some months ago I gave a talk at M.I.T., pulling together my thoughts on a theme that had been building a while in my mind, called "Reclaiming the Moral Life of Philanthropy."  One of my chief arguments is that in recent years, progressives, in their zeal to rehabilitate their 1960s image as starry-eyed idealists, have gone so far toward embracing a "what-works" ethos that they risk losing sight of the moral impulse that propels us to action in the first place -- protecting human rights and civil liberties, improving schools for poor kids, providing health care, and so on.

The New York Times recently ran two op-eds that buttress my case, both very much worth reading.  The first, by Michelle Alexander, an Ohio State law professor and former Soros Justice Fellow 'In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights,"  echoes a section of my talk in arguing that the "interest convergence" of prison reformers and budget cutters that has led to some recent state moves toward reducing incarceration is not enough to do the job of ending mass, racially disparate imprisonment in the U.S.:

Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.

And in Jaye Cee Whitehead's "The Wrong Reasons for Same-Sex Marriage," she challenges the increasing reliance on economic arguments for ending the exclusion of gays and lesbians from marriage:

... supporting marriage on economic grounds dehumanizes same-sex couples by conflating civil rights with economic perks. Americans should be offended when the value of gays and lesbians is reduced to their buying power as consumers or their human and creative capital as workers.

Economic arguments for prison reduction and gay marriage, like similar ones for universal health care, or utilitarian arguments against torture ("it doesn't work,") need not be discarded entirely.  They often buttress the core moral case and help to persuade those for whom the moral assertion is not enough.   But over-reliance on them is perilous, for if we cannot lead with and stand behind the moral imperative that moves us, in the end any victories will be short-lived, and we will have failed to provide a compelling reason to sustain them.

Time to end the distractions!

Despite the release some months ago of not only my birth certificate, but the itemized bill from the Westerly Hospital --

 

I continue to be dogged by sideshows and carnival barkers demanding proof of other key elements of my life in the Rhode Island years. I know there are some people who will never be satisfied, no matter how much detail I provide, that a small-town Catholic boy of French-Canadian ancestry can ascend to the Presidency of a major global foundation.  But for most people of goodwill, I think the following true copies will put the rumors to rest.

I was indeed promoted to Second Grade, attested to by no less a paragon of rectitude and integrity than Sister Clarella:

 
I have been claiming for years that I placed third in the Daughters of the American Revolution essay contest in eighth grade.  Upon review of the documentary evidence, I now see that I received a Certificate of Appreciation -- clearly, the next highest honor. After consultation with my family, I believe I conflated this with my third-place showing in the annual piano recital of Miss Soloveitzik's students that year -- for which, regrettably, there is no surviving documentary proof.

 
I hope my critics will be silenced by the proof that I did indeed graduate from the Immaculate Conception School:

 
And made the honor roll in my first year of high school:

 
By that time, so as not to have to explain the derivation of "Gara" to hundreds of new classmates and seven new teachers, I was going by "Philip," my first name, and undoubtedly this has fuelled the conspiracy theorists.

I never claimed to have played football or been recognized for it, despite the false allegations of "pigskinner" movement.  I believe the confusion arises from my accomplishments in debate, for which I received a certificate from the National Forensic League:

 
Finally, and most hurtfully, I have been dogged by attacks on my magical powers.  I have, sadly, been unable to locate the lacquered table on which "LaMarche and Brother" performed our magic shows for delighted family and friends in the mid-1960s, but I have recently come across, in my own childish (though more legible than I can currently manage) hand, the cards listing both the tricks I was competent to perform and the several shows in which I arranged these tricks:

 
 
I hope this will finally prove that any sleight-of-hand in my early career was confined to my living room performances.

The cane

My Uncle Jerry died last night.  He'd been terribly ill in the last few years, but something at his core was very strong, since he managed to "graduate" from his first stint in hospice over a year ago and come back home.  Not this time, though.  We saw him on Sunday and while he still had lots of ferocious will -- tried to climb out of bed when we were saying goodbye -- it was clear the end was near.

I could say a lot about my uncle -- my father's only brother, and his constant companion growing up.  I didn't become close to him until the last fifteen years or so, when my own father was ill and Uncle Jerry -- by then retired and transformed into a healthy eating nut -- attended to him, or tried to, with all manner of fruit and veggie shakes that my father pretended to tolerate out of love for his sibling.  He was, among other things, one of the funniest people I have ever met, a born monologist who was amazingly well-read and informed.  Though like many people unfortunate enough to be plagued by illness in their final years, he was by the end a shadow of the person we knew and loved, I'll miss him very much.

His death prompts for me a family story, the earliest threads of which go back to the 1860s.  One of the last times I saw my Uncle Jerry was around Thanksgiving, when he was still at home and ambulatory, and though tethered to an oxygen tank, he make the short trip downstairs to the kitchen to see us.  I noticed that he was leaning on a cane, and was astounded to find it was one that was familiar to me.  Here is a picture of its ivory handle.

 

I last saw that cane in 1992, when my father was recovering at home from a long stint in the hospital, some of it in a coma, after he survived a burst aneurysm.  I was staying with him for a week to help take care of him, and one afternoon my Aunt Gert came by his apartment with a bunch of things, among them the same ivory-handled cane, which she said had been in the family for years, though she didn't know much about its origins.  My father tossed aside the hospital-issued walker and began using it to steady himself.  Here he is, still thin from the hospital stay, clasping it in his left hand during a visit to my sister's house:

 

Later that evening he went to bed and I stayed awake on guestroom sofa listening to cassette tapes.  I had brought one from my high school days that I had just come across.  I remember the family had just bought a tape recorder and I went around interviewing friends and family like a junior Anderson Cooper (then I might have said a junior Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite).  On this particular tape, we were visiting my grandmother, my father's beloved Aunt Bina (why he called her Aunt is a story for another time) some time after my grandfather had died, and she was living in an apartment in my Uncle Jerry's family home.  I probably taped her surreptitiously.

I hear my mother ask:  "Grandma, where did you get that cane?"  Apparently she was using it to get around.  And then I hear my grandmother, thirty years in the grave, telling the story:  it belonged originally to my great-great-grandfather, Georges Bricault LaMarche, and he bandied it about town -- Laval, then called Ile de Jesus, outside Montreal, where my family comes from -- as a sign of social status.  Hence the initials on the handle, GBL.

I took off the headphones and shut off the tape player, very pleased with this discovery and touched to hear my grandmother's voice again.  I got up to go to the bathroom, and noticed that a light was on in the living room, so I went down the hallway to check it out.

My father had gotten up to read, and he had fallen asleep in the chair with a book on his lap, his hand curled around the head of the cane that his beloved Bina had used many years before.  When I saw my Uncle Jerry using it, I was happy that he was drawing support from this object, some 150 years old, as his brother and aunt and who knows else had done.  I hope it is still providing support for us 150 years from now. 

 

It's all connected

It's very heartening to see the labor movement fighting back so hard against Wisconsin Governor Scott  Walker's shameless move to use his state's financial crisis to gut collective bargaining rights for public employees.  Paul Krugman has it exactly right this morning about what's really at stake in the fight.  I want to enlarge the argument and connect it to other struggles of the moment and the past, because it seems very clear that the Wisconsin battle is just one important front in a war that has been raging for at least thirty years, in which an emboldened right is going right for the jugular of the most powerful independent voices, some of which are the leading sources of opposition to its policies.

In the early 1980s, around the time of Reagan's election,  a rallying cry took hold on the political right:  defund the left!  They went after federally-funded legal services programs, decimated their funding and hobbled them with restrictions on who they could represent --affecting most severely, of course, the most marginalized and vulnerable groups like prisoners, welfare recipients and immigrants.  They went after the National Endowment for the Arts, effectively bringing to an end the individual grants for artists that were one of the few sources of public support for creative people in this rich country in which we spend more on military bands than on all other sources of federal support for arts combined.

"The left" as a tag for legal services lawyers and artists is a misnomer, to be sure, but so too is it for the two key targets of the moment, Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio.  Until the Republican Party fell under the sway of the religious right a few decades ago, family planning, not to mention the right to abortion itself, was a bipartisan cause.  NPR's news programs have more listeners than Rush Limbaugh, not because they are as partisan or as cruelly entertaining, but because across the country people who want to be better-informed see it as an oasis on a radio dial almost completely captured by shock jocks and top forty stations.

The modus operandi of the left-defunders, as with ACORN -- and going back to the manufactured controversies of the 1980s over Robert Mapplethorpe's photos and the works of Andres Serrano and Marlon Riggs -- is to start by whipping up outrage over some action taken by the offending agency.  If there is not one at hand, as with the dismissal of NPR commentator Juan Williams over his offensive remarks about Muslims, then one will be created -- enter the "pimps" with hidden cameras who paid a call on the offices of ACORN and Planned Parenthood. (Note to George Soros, SEIU, ACLU, etc.:  be on the lookout for walk-in pimps!)  Feed the distorted tapes to Fox and other key players in the right-wing media machine, and make sure some reliable agent in Congress introduces a bill to cut off all federal support for the allegedly scandal-plagued agency.

This worked with ACORN, partly because progressives were too spooked by the tactic to respond effectively, partly because ACORN had suffered plenty of self-inflicted wounds that made it especially vulnerable and sometimes hard to defend.  The Tea Party House of Representatives has managed to strike a blow at Planned Parenthood, but at this point neither progressives or the larger public seems to be playing along, and the agency has been flooded with support as it girds up for the biggest fight in nearly 100 years.

Undoubtedly there are other examples, past and present.  In the time of reaction we are living in, when following a modest but significant period of reform the empire has struck back with a vengeance, this is what life is like now.  We have no choice but to fight to protect bulwarks of independence, justice and equality as they come under attack.  We do have a choice to wage these fights one at a time, remaining in the silos that have impaired our strength and effectiveness, or to see them and to deal with them as connected events requiring a collective and connected response.  That is a choice I hope we will see clearly and make well.

Gaining my mind, Part VI

    When I last posted an installment of these remembrances of experiences that have been formative in my thinking, I was about to start as a freshman at Columbia College.  I'll get back to that, though in truth Columbia had much less impact on my intellectual development than my high school or my extracurricular experiences.  But first I want to think back to my early experiences in the American Civil Liberties Union, and why it was so important to me.  What follows is a slightly revised version of the remarks I made earlier this evening at a celebration of the ACLU's 90th Anniversary.

    I went to a Christian Brothers high school in eastern Connecticut, and serendipitously one day in 1970 or so my debate coach left the religious order, moved to New York, came out as a gay man, went to graduate school, and got a part-time job as staff associate for the Academic Freedom Committee, then one of seven standing ACLU policy committees and the oldest of them, founded by Roger Baldwin in 1926.  The committee, then composed almost entirely of old white men – or at least they seemed, in their fifties and sixties, quite old to me at the time – came to feel, or was under some pressure, following the campus uprisings of the 1960s, to be more relevant, and so it was they went looking to add a student member to their ranks.

          You’d think a bunch of academics would have plenty of access to students, but somehow my former teacher, Phil Ryan, managed to convince them that I, not yet eighteen and not yet matriculated at Columbia College, where I had never set foot, would be an appropriate nominee.  In those days, appointments to committees had to be ratified by the ACLU board, and on a spring visit to New York City from my small town Rhode Island home I found myself in the ACLU’s offices, then on lower Fifth Avenue, waiting to be vetted by the ACLU’s Associate Director and czar of all things Board and policy-related, Alan Reitman.

          When I arrived in the office I noticed a fedora sitting on the couch in the waiting area.  In a few minutes I found out whose it was, when Reitman came out accompanied by his visitor:   Roger Baldwin, the ACLU’s founder.  I don’t remember what exchange Roger and I had that day, or that I was even very aware at the time of what a significant person he was.  But I got to know him in the last ten years of his life – he died on my 27^th birthday in 1981, and I was in the room when he was presented with the Medal of Freedom which returns home to the ACLU today – and remember most of all his keen interest, to the end, in what I was doing, in what all younger people were doing.  He was the first great example in my life of successful aging – a topic I am focused on in my work at Atlantic Philanthropies, among many other things.  I think in his mid-90s Roger began to have more trouble with stairs after he fell from a horse in the German Black Forest.  As Bill van den Heuvel likes to remind me of what I said on his passing, he was the only 97-year old man of whom one could lament, “why was he taken so young?”

          Alan Reitman, who turns 90 next week, became a mentor and friend, now semi-retired in Palm Desert, California, and when I told him I was coming here tonight, he asked me to send his regards to those he worked with and those who have come after. 

          I managed, after my interview with Alan, to be elected to the Academic Freedom Committee, where a week after my 18^th birthday and a few days into my freshman year at Columbia, I took up my seat at the first meeting of the fall season.  We met in those days in the posh conference room of the ACLU’s new offices, the former corporate headquarters of the Johns-Manville Corporation on Madison Avenue, with a hot meal served and a full bar running.  I had no idea what I was doing, of course, and don’t think I opened my mouth for six months – among other luminaries, my college dean was a member of the committee—but in time I got comfortable, was elected vice-chair, and I have rarely stopped talking since.

          I went on to do a variety of odd jobs at the ACLU while at college and for a year or two after, from taking minutes at national board meetings, to counting the votes in the disputed 1976 board election in which the seat of Frances Fox Piven, today the target of Glenn Beck, hung in the balance, to spending a summer holed up in a back office, at Aryeh Neier’s assignment, to pore through thousands of pages of the ACLU’s freshly-received FBI files, in which we discovered the betrayal of several former ACLU officials.

          I mention all this because the ACLU was the most fantastic education I have ever received, far more than anything that ever took place in a classroom To sit for hours at board meetings listening to the likes of Aryeh Neier, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Norman Dorsen, Osmond Fraenkel, Harriet Pilpel, Monroe Freedman, Frank Askin, Pauli Murray and so many others; to hear them grapple with tough ethical issues like the ex parte contacts in the Rosenberg case, or conflicts between rights like fair trial and free press; to have a ringside seat at the time of the Skokie case and debates over a provocative Klan rally at a newly-integrated school in Mississippi – to take all this in was the most rich and formative experience in my intellectual and moral development.  In the ACLU I had entered a country in which principle was sovereign, in which for any matter the most important consideration was not “how will it affect me,” or “how does it advance my ideology, or party, or identity group,” but what outcome is dictated by neutral principles, regardless of whose interests are advanced.

          This above all is what sets the ACLU apart from almost any other group of the many I have been affiliated with since.  It is this commitment to principle, more than any other factor – more than the good fortune of visionary leadership, from Roger Baldwin to Ira Glasser to Anthony Romero;  from Harry Ward to Nadine Strossen to Susan Herman;  more than the strong base of small donors that gives the ACLU a bulwark, a base and a reach that is the envy of every other cause organization;  more than its sometimes maddening but vitally central commitment to its own internal democracy, an endangered species among today’s non-profits – more than any of this, it is adherence to principle that has provided the ACLU with its never-flagging strength and endurance.

          As will be apparent, I am no longer eighteen, but I’m not that old, and I was blessed to touch, in  my early years, the ACLU’s founding generation.  I don’t know if the Brahmin Roger Baldwin could have envisioned a street-tough Puerto Rican gay man sitting in his chair, but I feel confident he would have admired Anthony Romero’s stewardship of the national treasure that he, Crystal Eastman and others bequeathed to us. 

          No one in the founding generation is alive today, and those of us who knew them are increasingly few in number.  The room I look out at, mostly full of board members, is almost a completely different room than the one I left when I stepped down from the board and executive committee barely a dozen years ago, and a room that would be almost unrecognizable to the small band of true patriots who came together to start a permanent civil liberties organization in 1920.  But the extraordinary thing is that the DNA of the ACLU in the last decade of its first century is so strong that with all the changes in those many years, in the gender and skin color and geographic and life diversity of those whose energy and commitment pulse through its work today, with technology and globalization  and challenges undreamed of in 1920, one thing has not changed.  It is that the women and men who form this community of values still place principle at its core and judge everything they do, from their own institutional policies and practices to those of a President most of them voted for but who they do not hesitate to hold to the fire, by fidelity to the rights expressed in -- but not bound by --the U.S. Constitution, no matter where the chips fall.

          In the world we live in – in almost any world – that is as rare as the lunar eclipse but as welcome as the sunrise, and I am proud to have served in a small way but been shaped in a big way by my association with the ACLU.

What eighty looks like

Today, the last day of 2010, is the 80th birthday of my friend Herb Sturz, one of the most useful citizens this city, or any city, has ever seen.  In paying tribute to Herb on this occasion, it occurred to me that he is one of at least five people who are very important in my life who turned 80 this year, and I've given toasts at parties for four of them.   So let me shout out to all, starting -- and at greater length, since it is his actual birthday today -- with Herb.

A few weeks ago (since it's hard to hold a proper birthday party for someone born on New Year's Eve),  Jack Rosenthal, Fritz Schwarz and I, along with six other friends of Herb's, threw him a cocktail party at the Century Association.  Ed Koch, freshly turned 86 himself, who Herb served as Deputy Mayor and City Planning Commission head, gave the main toast (a funny and rambling review of the Koch administration with periodic appearances by Herb), followed by the ever-dazzling Amanda Burden, Jack and me.  Here is a bit of what I had to say:

When Jack and I talked last week about who would cover what in our toasts for Herb’s 80^th birthday, I think he suggested something along the lines of:  I’ll take education and housing, and you cover justice.  It IS tempting to use this occasion to catalog Herb’s public achievements, but fortunately, in the five years since some of his gathered to surprise him on his 75^th birthday, those have been well chronicled by Sam Roberts in the biography, A Kind of Genius.  So I want to take a few minutes to talk about Herb the writer, reader and friend.

Herb the writer.  Before he did any of the things we most associate him with, Herb and Elizabeth (Herb's wonderful wife, who left us earlier this year at 93), while living in Paris, wrote their novel Reapers of the Storm.  We can only hope this pioneer of encore careers, who has had more encores than Enrico Caruso in his heyday, may have another novel or two in him.

Is there anyone who uses language more carefully than Herb?  OK, maybe Jack.  But not many.  In the few years he contributed carefully-crafted editorials and essays to the Times as a member of its editorial board, Herb waxed eloquently not only on burning justice issues like the shackling of pregnant prisoners, but found time, Sam Roberts reminds us, to get around the city and write about … well, about people like himself, who see a problem and then get to work on it, like a street musician who set up a Lower East Side soup kitchen – “street people, taking care of themselves, and extending that care to others,” Herb wrote.

Herb the reader.  His famous letter to John Steinbeck, written while a graduate student in American literature at Teachers College, in which Herb told the famous novelist he was moved most by “the poetry, the toughness and the integrating beauty” of key chapters in The Grapes of Wrath, is an insight we could well apply to Herb himself.  “You are the first critical person,” Steinbeck replied to the young Herb in a handwritten letter, “who seems to have suspected that they had a purpose.”

Herb is often the first person to see the purpose, and there are legions of the young and now no-longer-young whose sense of possibility for themselves was first sparked by Herb’s vision of their future, and whose shaky confidence that they might make a mark in the world and do some good was bolstered, as Steinbeck did for Herb, by his critical attention and kindness.

If I had to use one word to describe Herb, it would be “kind.”  In fact I wish I had thought to say to Sam that he could have saved a word in the title of the biography, calling it instead, “A Kind Genius.”  I had the fortune to have Herb as a member of the board at OSI for over ten years, and while we became good friends over that time, and his judicious interventions in meetings were always laced with good and cogent – though never intrusive or directive – advice, what meant the most to me was the warmth of Herb’s support and the generosity of his compliments.  I am sure hundreds of others could say the same, but it detracts not a bit from the fact that each one of us feels that in Herb’s world we are special.  Because we are, such is the quality of his loving attention.

To bring things around full circle, there are few policy wonks among us – and Herb, if anything, is a certified policy wonk – whose eyes light up most when talking about the novel he’s just read, or the play or movie he’s just seen, and in the many meals of our friendship Oscar Wilde is much more likely to make an appearance than William Julius Wilson.

“Most good writers I know,” Steinbeck wrote to Herb, “have no time for immortality.”  And that, again, is the essence of Herb – too busy, too outward-directed, to think about immortality. Which is why he is well on his way, eighty years in, to achieving it.

I think it was Gloria Steinem, still looking fabulous at 76, who said, on her 50th birthday, when told how fabulous she looked,"this is what 50 looks like!"  So I'll go next to my Mom, Barbara LaMarche, who turned eighty on June 24, who could very well say the same, to incredulous admirers, about her own eight decades.  We threw her a big party in our hometown, Westerly, full of friends, family, an open bar, toasts, songs and a slide show panorama of her life.  The high point, of course, was Mom's own rendition, to the accompaniment of my brother the pianist, of her signature song, "It Had to Be You."  She can be seen above belting it out.

To say I would not be the person I am today without my mother is to state the obvious, though since it is not always obvious to her, I will elaborate a bit.

Along with my Dad -- dead thirteen years ago tomorrow -- she made me feel that I was the most special child on earth, that there was nothing that I could not do, and that confidence has helped me to achieve more than I ever thought possible.  She showed me a love of words and reading which are central to my life.  She is the most resilient person I have ever met, and when she takes a knock she gets up stronger the next day.  I learned to look forward, rarely back.  She made our home a welcoming place, and I love to play host.  She had and has all the time in the world to spend with the old and reach out to the young, and I carry that on in my work and life. She can not keep your mouth shut about what she thinks is wrong, as so many passionately intemperate letters to the Westerly Sun attest, and well, look what I do for a living.  Whatever is good about me bears her indelible stamp.

Lisa's Dad, Gerhard Mueller, is another 1930 baby -- what a remarkable year -- and we feted his  birthday, December 4, with a global assembly of family and friends in Corpus Christi, Texas earlier this month.  To appear, as I did, in a beloved daughter's life a few decades into adulthood, in a close and loving family, is to pose a bit of a challenge, and the shelves of libraries and the couches of therapists attest to how challenging that can be, and how often it doesn't go well.  From the minute I met him almost five years ago, Gerry (and Coralie, too, Lisa's terrific Mom, but she turns eighty in 2012) embraced me lovingly and fully, and my midlife entry into the Mueller world has been one of the great joys of recent years.  A big family guy myself, I find myself in awe of the way this accomplished man is at the center of communication and caring for dozens of relatives and near-relatives from California and Washington to the tiny hamlets of eastern Germany from which he came to the U.S. in his late teens (to live with an American family, the Shryers, who had an orange farm, and to whom he remained close all their lives; as the photo above indicates, the orange thing took, too).

Gerry's public life has been one of great impact in his chosen field of accounting education -- as a pillar of the University of Washington business school faculty, as a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, past president of the American Accounting Association, and much more, all chronicled in a professional biography released earlier this year, which aptly gives him credit for virtually inventing the field of international accounting standards.  But despite a legion of academics and practitioners for whom he has been a mentor and inspiration, I am pretty sure Gerry views his highest accolade as the Opa of his loving family, and with a close vantage point on that, I can say that fewer of life's honors are more deserved.

Norman Dorsen, for almost fifty years a professor of law at New York University, is another person whose influence is seen in hundreds of former students who have taken their places in the leadership of public interest law in the academy, on the bench, and in the nation's leading civil rights organizations, and when a few dozen of us (I'm not a lawyer, nor was I his student, but more on that in a moment) rose to toast him in September at his 80th birthday dinner at the law school on Washington Square, the foundation he had built (to use Burt Neuborne's image) seemed more secure than ever.  I first met Norman when I was a 22-year old peon -- a minute-taker for the ACLU board meetings -- in 1976, on the Saturday in December when he was elected chair of the board, a position he held for fifteen years.  The ACLU board meetings, then as now, run over two weekend days, and were then held at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel near Central Park.  Norman pulled me aside at the end of the Saturday session and asked me to meet him the next morning a half-hour before the other board members showed up.  The board -- then, as now, an unwieldy and contentious group of over 80 (what a coincidence!) people -- had hardened into factions and social groups, and Norman was eager to shake it up, so he had me work with him to move the tables into different configurations so that when the members arrived they wouldn't know where to sit.  That bit of creative instability was the beginning of Norman's considerable influence on me, to be sure, but more importantly on a great American institution, whose leadership he assumed at a moment of financial and organizational challenge.  In the annals of organizations, board chairs rarely get the credit they deserve, for if they do their jobs well, others shine.  Norman has long since become a dear friend, and his influence on me is hardly limited to the board room, but I went on to serve with him in later years as a member of the ACLU's board and executive committee, and there is no one from whom I have learned more about organizational leadership, or from whose wisdom I continue to benefit.

George Soros, the most famous, and controversial, of the group here,  turned eighty in August, and I  missed his giant party in Southampton, as I was on our annual vacation with the Mueller family on Whidbey Island, here off the coast of Seattle, where I am writing this now.  His life and deeds have been well-chronicled, and maybe someday I will write a bit about what it was like to work for and with this remarkable man for 11 years in which I had the privilege of founding and leading his U.S. philanthropy, spending about a billion dollars of his wealth (in other words, what he made in a day breaking the Bank of England).  A true public intellectual, a global statesman, a canny philanthropist, a guy with a knack for making money -- George is all these things.  What impressed me most, though, in years of close association, and what impresses me more each day from a distance, is that he truly believes in open society, in the play of ideas as the central operating principle of democracy.  Truly un-orthodox and un-ideological, he could not be further from his public caricature, and may I say while I am at it that he does more for freedom in an afternoon than Glenn Beck and his acolytes will do in a lifetime.  I was and am proud to play my small role in his accomplishments.

To all of these magnificent octogenarians, I offer in closing this poem from May Sarton, from her collection, "Coming Into Eighty."  Happy birthday, and many many more.

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken 
Time, many years and places; 
I have been dissolved and shaken, 
Worn other people's faces, 
Run madly, as if Time were there, 
Terribly old, crying a warning, 
'Hurry, you will be dead before-' 
(What? Before you reach the morning? 
Or the end of the poem is clear? 
Or love safe in the walled city?) 
Now to stand still, to be here, 
Feel my own weight and density! 
The black shadow on the paper 
Is my hand; the shadow of a word 
As thought shapes the shaper 
Falls heavy on the page, is heard. 
All fuses now, falls into place 
From wish to action, word to silence, 
My work, my love, my time, my face 
Gathered into one intense 
Gesture of growing like a plant. 
As slowly as the ripening fruit 
Fertile, detached, and always spent, 
Falls but does not exhaust the root, 
So all the poem is, can give, 
Grows in me to become the song, 
Made so and rooted by love. 
Now there is time and Time is young. 
O, in this single hour I live 
All of myself and do not move. 
I, the pursued, who madly ran, 
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

Son of Grinch Christmas remembrances

Mostly at home this Christmas Eve, nursing a cold, wrapping presents, listening to our vast collection of holiday (sorry, according to Avery on the Christmas 30 Rock episode, that's what terrorists say, so Christmas CDs), I took a break at the kitchen table with my favorite comfort food, Lipton's Chicken Noodle Soup with a side dish of King Oscar sardines on crackers.  I smiled when I realized I am channeling my late father in this respect, as sardines were (along with Cracker Barrel cheddar and slices of apple) among his main cuisinic pleasures.

In being one of the world's great Christmas enthusiasts, I am definitely not channelling my father.  Not that he didn't deliver nicely on the occasion when we were children, a model father in that as well as every other way, but as he got older he liberated himself as much as he could from the conventions of Christmas, and loved to tell us, a bit provocatively, "it's a day like any other."  After many years of fighting with my mother about which tree to select, where to put it in the house, whether it was straight and sturdy (not exactly a handyman, my father secured the tree over the years by nailing it to the floor, tying it to hooks in the wall, and a variety of other non-Martha Stewartish measures), after my parents divorced, my father took a ruthlessly efficient approach to the tree in his own apartment.  He bought a fake one, decorated it the first year, then pulled a giant plastic bag over the whole thing, tinsel and all, and hauled it into the closet on December 26.  The next year he would take it out, pull off the bag, plug in the lights, and he was all set.

Family, friends, and the few close readers of this blog may remember that about half of the Christmas weeks of the 1990s were the opposite of festive.  My Dad had each of his two aneurysms on December 26, three years apart;  my aunt died on December 27, and Dad himself died just minutes into the new year of 1998.  That would be enough to make me dread the holidays, I suppose, but just as I have blocked out the fact that my parents' Christmas tree fights and others over long-forgotten slights and oversights made the holidays a time of tension and stress as much as anticipation and joy, my consciousness has a very convenient filter that pulls to the top an array of other, more cherished moments.  These include coming downstairs at dawn to find, it seemed, everything we had asked for from the Montgomery Ward catalog arrayed under the tree (Santa, perhaps an early environmentalist,  did not wrap presents in our household);  a trip to the Outlet Department store in Providence one snowy Christmas Eve when my father went on a mission to get a strange spinning-wheel lamp my mother desired, on the way back listening to a fake weather report on the radio announcing the sighting of a sled pulled by eight reindeer; years later, after being let in on the conspiracy, allowed as teenagers to open our presents after coming home from midnight mass, with a shot of Drambuie warming its way into my chest. 

Add to this the years of putting my own girls to bed on Christmas Eve with an alphabetical listing of every stop on Santa's journey (Alabama, Belize, Chile, Dakar...), then staying up well past midnight, cursing vigorously while trying to put together whatever Barbie Hut or Playmobil Doll House Una and Zoe had asked for, eating a few bites of the cookie left for Santa (half-consumed glasses of milk eventually replaced by completely-downed glasses of Scotch); even my honorary Jew Chinese-dinner-and-movie Christmas Eves with my friend Janlori the few brief years of my midlife singlehood; and now life in the Christmas House of Joralemon Street with a woman who has so completely embraced my holiday fervor that I find a small present somewhere in the house every day of the Advent season.  Not to mention buying tiny Santa hats for each of my little Presidential statues.

I guess what I like best about Christmas (my children and other close loved ones would say it is presents, but of course they would be wrong:) is that, in memory or in life, it calls us to our best selves, and for that reason, I've always loved best this line from A Christmas Carol, where Fred says to his curmudgeonly Uncle Scrooge:

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say. Christmas among the rest.  But I have always thought of Christmas time as a time for forgiving. A charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know when men and women seem to freely open their shut-up hearts. Therefore, Uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, "God bless it"!"

I'm sure my Dad, wherever he is, would somewhat grudgingly agree that in the end, it is not a day like any other.

 

What I've been reading lately

I've been very lazy about updating this section of the blog, but ran into an acquaintance a few weeks ago who flattered me by saying she missed the recommendations for books, DVDs, music, etc.  So I've added half a dozen or so in the column at right, including Sarah Silverman's kind-of-memoir and novels by Anne Tyler, Charles McCarry and Helen Simonson.