The Voice of Treason

Oscar Wilde said it and it can be taken many ways. I apply it today to Michael Jackson. If he’s not a child molester, then he’s just one of the biggest dumbasses on the planet.

In the next few days we may find out if he’s going to the big house — or if he’s going to be heading back to The Neverland Ranch. To continue to sleep with little boys.

Also known as Anna Maria Louise Italiano, also known as Anne Bancroft. When 20th Century Fox thought that her real name was “too ethnic,” she chose Bancroft because she thought it sounded dignified.

What was so special about her is that she was both extraordinarily talented and extraordinarily beautiful. In some roles, like in The Elephant Man, she seemed to be so classy and well-bred; but then you had to figure, being married to Mel Brooks, she had to be much earthier. She was, after all, a girl from the Bronx.

“When Mel told his Jewish mother he was marrying an Italian girl, she said: ‘Bring her over. I’ll be in the kitchen - with my head in the oven’.”

She could be refined or she could be coarse. She was always tough. In Malice, she was a drunk and a con, but there was still that undeniable tenderness. You couldn’t hate her entirely.

A guilty pleasure from high school was The Turning Point. My friends were all in love with ballet and dreamed of going to New York and becoming prima ballerinas. The only problem is that they were all built like Eastern European speed skaters. But they dragged me to see the movie and I didn’t resist because I liked to look at Baryshnikov.

Anne Bancroft was Emma, the one who didn’t give up her dream of dancing and became a star. Shirley MacLaine - Deedee - gave up a budding career to marry and raise a family. Did they make the right choices? Typical soap opera, but Anne was fun to watch. This was the late seventies, and the scene where Emma and Deedee confront their issues at the bar reveals Anne Bancroft in a clingy, long dress — a lean, silky silhouette - and the camera is on her abdomen. Her character is trying to remain cool, her face doesn’t give away her emotions, but her torso is just vibrating.

She won an Oscar, two Tonys, and an Emmy. And again I’m reminded of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Old Italians Dying. For years the old Italians have been dying all over America. They are almost all gone now. Dying out in Little Italys all over America; one by one, year by year they are carried out. The bell never stops tolling.

Lodi, California residents who shop at Albertson’s, Buy For Less, Safeway, and Savemart can breathe a little easier now that the FBI has arrested twenty-two year-old Hamid Hayat and his dad. Hamid admits to training at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan to learn “how to kill Americans.”

There’s evidence that he and the rest of the Lodi cell were planning on targeting hospitals and grocery stores. This is appalling. Americans have had it drilled into them that mosques - no matter how many terrorists are holed up inside - are off limits. Yet American grocery stores are fair game? I’ve had many a religious experience in the produce aisle at my local market (”Bell peppers are affordable this week? Wow - there really is a God!!!”), yet if I’d been shopping in Lodi I could have been blown to pieces picking out Granny Smith apples?

Doesn’t sound too peaceful and loving to me.

Reminds me of the news story a couple weeks ago. A martial arts expert was arrested in New York because he, too, wanted to help al Qaeda. Proud as punch, he showed an undercover FBI agent how he fashioned his prayer beads into a weapon to be used to strangle a human being.

I used to send money to Catholic charities until I became increasingly edgy about the whole pedophile priest thing - I couldn’t see sending my hard-earned dollars (hear that, Dr. Dean?) to lawyers. But when I was writing out those checks, I always got a little gift in return. A rosary. I have quite a collection of rosaries now, and it has never crossed my mind to kill someone with them. Not even a pedophile priest.

It infuriates me that people died on September 11 doing a typically American thing: going to their jobs to support their families. I don’t always relish getting up and going to work or to the grocery store, but it’s something we Americans do. And that’s obviously what our enemies are counting on.

Again, it doesn’t sound all that peaceful and loving to me.

Howard Dean is representing the party that doesn’t believe in stereotypes. A party that’s color blind. An inclusive party. Recently he said that he hated Republicans. Then he accused them of being “not very friendly to different kinds of people.” And that a lot of Republicans “have never made an honest living in their lives.”

Today he said that Republicans are “a pretty monolithic party. They all behave the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.” Is it any wonder why Christians feel they’re under attack? (Excuse me. They all “look alike?” I see.)

When I heard this I was reminded of an incident a couple years ago. In a staff meeting, a coworker turned to my former boss and said: “You’re a Liberal.” When she turned and glared at him in a way that would have turned someone into a sow bug, he said: “Well, yeah, you’re a Jew from New York, so you gotta be a Liberal.”

This coming from a Liberal. As it turns out, my former boss was originally from New York state where she was raised as a Methodist. In college she started taking comparative religion classes. Methodist friends and family members urged her not to do that. That made her study even more. And that led to her eventual conversion to Judaism.

A Liberal, she was not. As it turns out, she was a conservative Republican. How could that be? A college-educated woman from a blue state, successful, independent, Jewish, and…a Republican?

I know gay Republicans. I know atheist Republicans. Some of the most wonderful Republicans were the ones I met in the Bay Area - Silicon Valley, specifically. I worked for a semiconductor company that looked and sounded like the United Nations. So many languages and dialects; interesting names, too. I loved it - it was the melting pot I’d always heard about. Our potlucks were legendary.

The year Bill Clinton was running against George Bush was difficult. A lot of people in the offices - women, mostly - were vocal in their support of the “cute” candidate from Arkansas. (Refresh my memory: Why did women get the right to vote?)

I was in the fab, keeping a low profile about the upcoming election. But my coworkers wanted me to open up about it. They kept asking who I was going to vote for. I was hesitant to tell them at first, but I had to say something to defend my position. I worked with people from Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, China, the Philippines - every one I spoke with was virulently pro-Bush and had an amazing story about why they supported Republicans and loved Ronald Reagan. We transcended borders, languages, and religions, and found a common thread that pulled us together: we all despised Jimmy Carter. Oddly, the only foreign-born coworker who was for Clinton was from Portugal. A Socialist, naturally.

That is the beauty of politics. People make assumptions about how other people vote based on how they look, how they speak, where they work, and what they drive. You’d think Howard Dean, being a doctor and all, would be smarter than that.

The allied invasion of western Europe began on June 6, 1944, with the simultaneous landing of U.S., British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads (Omaha, Utah, Sword, Gold, and Juno) in Normandy, France. By the end of August in that year, all of northern France was liberated, and the invading forces reorganized for the drive into Germany, where they would eventually meet with Soviet forces moving from the east to precipitate an end to the Nazi Reich.

It is mind-boggling to research this. The planning and execution…looking at it on paper had to elicit comments like, “You’re joking, right?” Pointe du Hoc…I mean, I can’t even imagine leaders telling their men that this was going to happen.

But it did happen, and there were terrible losses, but incredible gains. So many young men died doing what seemed impossible, illogical, unachievable. How terrified were they? How did they face what they had to know was coming?

Steven Spielberg tried to capture a part of it in the opening of Saving Private Ryan, but as horrible as those scenes were, reality had to be so much worse. More than one hundred fifty-four thousand troops - some sources say two hundred thousand — put their lives on the line and saved the world.

I can’t begin to comprehend it, but all of us should be grateful. It’s important for Americans to remember what happened…because it appears that many Europeans have forgotten.

Very few people know what day my birthday is because I just don’t advertise it. Last year my coworkers threw me an un-birthday party because one of them realized that I was always running out and picking up birthday cards for everyone and no one ever circulated a card for me. My birthday’s a secret. Not an age thing - I just don’t tell people when it is. Mainly because I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to run out and do something about it. And because my family has a history of bad birthdays. Some day I’ll write about the horrific events that have coincided with my mother’s birthday; I’ve already mentioned that my sister’s favorite president died on her birthday. Well, now it’s time to reveal that another favorite president died on another sister’s birthday. That was Ronald Reagan - one year ago today.

I intend to use this space to put some typical Reagan quotes out there. Here goes:

“In America, our origins matter less than our destination, and that is what democracy is all about.”

“Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘We should never judge a president by his age, only by his works.’ And ever since he told me that, I stopped worrying.”

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

“The government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

“The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.”

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have.”

“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder.”

“All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”

“The ultimate determinant in the struggle now going on for the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas — a trial of spiritual resolve: the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish and the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

“Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”

“Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him.”

“I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency — even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”

“Surround yourself with the best people you can find, delegate authority, and don’t interfere.”

“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”

“The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much.”

“I am not worried about the deficit. It is big enough to take care of itself.”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

“A people free to choose will always choose peace.”

“Republicans believe every day is 4th of July, but Democrats believe every day is April 15.”

“If we love our country, we should also love our countrymen.”

“People do not make wars; governments do.”

“I’ve often said there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”

“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”

“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement.”

“I’ve always believed that a lot of the troubles in the world would disappear if we were talking to each other instead of about each other.”

“Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

“We have long since discovered that nothing lasts longer than a temporary government program.”

“When you start talking about government as ‘we’ instead of ‘they,’ you have been in office too long.”

“They have kind of a layaway plan for your lives which never changes. It’s called, ‘Americans make, government takes.’”

“Government does not produce revenue. It consumes it.”

“Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”

“Trust, but verify.”

“I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.”

“There are worse things to be called than a dreamer.”

“Here, too, one soon learns that so long as books are kept open then minds can never be closed.”

“The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs. Men with vision; with the courage to take risks, and faith enough to brave the unknown.”

“When was the last time you bought a car…even a good cheese or videocassette recorder and the label read, ‘Made in the U.S.S.R.?’”

“Before I took up my current line of work, I got to know a thing or two about negotiating when I represented the Screen Actors Guild in contract talks with the studios. After the studios, Gorbachev was a snap.”

“How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”

“My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.”

“Honey, I forgot to duck.”

“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

This has been bugging me, so I need to address it. I caught a bit of a “Best Of” show with Rush this past week - it might have been Memorial Day - and I heard a woman caller tell Rush how mortified she was to discover her nine year-old had no idea who Adolf Hitler was. What, she asked Rush, were the schools teaching? Well, I think we all know that, and my opinion of government schools is no secret, but in this case I have to do something unusual. I’m going to defend the school and/or teacher. But only a little.

Let me relate a story. A few weeks ago, in the city in which I live, a little girl was found wandering the streets. Someone was interested enough in the little girl to express concern and contact the authorities. When the police officer questioned the little girl (standard questions like “What’s your name? How old are you? Where do you live? What’s your address? Phone number?”), she didn’t really seem to know. She said she was four, no - five. Her name was Annabelle - no, it’s Isabelle. Didn’t know where she lived, didn’t know a phone number, didn’t have a last name or the name of a parent. Was she retarded? No.

If I remember correctly, my mother and siblings treated me like I was a POW. My mother lived in fear that the neighbors or relatives were going to “pump me” for information, so it was my job to play the moron. I could give them basic information, then I was to look blank and say “I don’t know” until they were convinced that I was stupid and they’d never get anywhere with me. I’m not sure what my mother was trying to conceal - I suspect she just wanted to remain mysterious. So I sacrificed and made people think I was slow. (”Doesn’t that girl know a damned thing that’s going on around her?”)

I don’t think that was the case with Annabelle - or Isabelle. I get the feeling here that no one ever sat down with the kid and gave her the name, rank, and serial number speech. She honestly didn’t seem to know her own name or how old she was, and she had no idea where she lived or how to contact anybody. I still know the address and phone number of the place we lived when I was four.

Somehow they figured out where her mother was - she fell asleep for five hours (long nap) and the kid just walked out of the house. It haunts me that this kid couldn’t tell a police officer who she was or where she lived. And it bothers me that when I’m watching TV, public service announcements tell me that it’s a good idea, if I’m a parent, to read to my kid. Imagine that! And hey - I’m supposed to feed him, too! What an informative PSA!

Now when I was a kid, there was a lot of adult conversation in our house and we had shelves full of books. My mother bought us a brand new set of encyclopedias when I was little and I thought they were the most amazing things ever. I’d have a thought - then I’d go to the bookshelf and see if I could find something about it in the encyclopedia. The set came with enormous dictionaries, too - so big that they had to put the words in two volumes so they could be lifted. Heavy books and they smelled good.

I was fortunate enough to miss Sesame Street. I was already old enough to think the show was ridiculous, but my sister’s kids watched it. I guess that was 1969. No, that year I was watching the Cubs and Jack Brickhouse. After that I watched a lot of docudramas like The Strauss Family and supernatural series like Night Gallery. Before that, though, I watched a lot of horror films (Vincent Price! Peter Cushing!), and war movies. It might have been because I liked The Great Escape so much, that I found myself watching Victory At Sea, Combat!, Twelve O’Clock High, The Rat Patrol (ah, back when Eric Braeden was Hans Gudegast), Jericho, Garrison’s Guerillas, and Hogan’s Heroes. So when I watched The Rat Patrol and thought it was odd that there was so much sand, I consulted our encyclopedia to find out why. Oh! They were in Africa! Some guy named Rommel! I see! No wonder they called it a World War! (Truth be told the actors were in Spain, but sand is sand.)

Anyway, I knew about Hitler way before I was nine. And I don’t think living in a Jewish neighborhood made that much difference. Sure, there were a lot of European Jews in Rogers Park - many with German surnames - and many businesses with German names. But I’d read Anne Frank’s diary and saw the movie. And it seemed to me that all the kids my age were watching the same shows and reading the same books. What happened then, thirty plus years later? MTV? Video games? Reality TV? American Idol? Where are kids getting their information about war? Can’t this woman sit her nine year-old down in front of Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers? She too young for Shoah? Memory of the Camps? Hey, how ’bout crackin’ open a book? Or having a conversation about history? What do you talk about at dinner or in the car?

I hate to think that because WWII happened over sixty years ago that it’s somehow not important. Should we stop studying the Civil War? The Revolutionary War? The Black Plague? The Roman Empire? That was then, this is now. What’s really important now is Michael Jackson. I understand he’s a bit under the weather.

Col. David Hackworth died last month. Whether or not you agreed with him on every point, you had to give him credit for being who he was. In going online to find out more about Hack, I found something that I thought made good sense and decided to include it here. This is a blurb I’ve pulled off another site, www.hackworth.com:

“Good training is the foundation of good leadership. The rest can be found in the principles of another man who deeply influenced Hackworth, Col. Glover Johns. Hackworth loved to quote Johns’ basic philosophy of soldiering.

- Strive to do small things well.

- Be a doer and a self-starter. Aggressiveness and initiative are two most admired qualities in a leader - but you must also put your feet up and think.

- Strive through self-improvement through constant self-evaluation.

- Never be satisfied. Ask of any project: ‘How can it be done better?’

- Don’t overinspect and oversupervise. Allow your leaders to make mistakes in training, so they can profit from the errors and not make them in combat.

- Keep the troops informed; telling them ‘what, how, and why’ builds their confidence.

- The harder the training, the more troops will brag.

- Enthusiasm, fairness, and moral and physical courage - four of the most important aspects of leadership.

- Showmanship - a vital technique of leadership.

- The ability to speak and write well - two essential tools of leadership.

- There is a salient difference between profanity and obscenity; while a leader employs profanity (tempered with discretion), he never uses obscenities.

- Have consideration for others.

- Yelling detracts from your dignity; take men aside to counsel them.

- Understand and use judgment; know when to stop fighting for something you believe is right. Discuss and argue your point of view until a decision is made, and then support the decision wholeheartedly.

- Stay ahead of your boss.

These are the traits of good leaders in any field. Sadly, the people who live up to them are few and far between. But when you find a person who has these qualities, you will follow them gladly and with pride.”

These are good tips. Parents and managers should take note.

Every week there are stories about kids who kill. One of my favorite films when I was a youngster (and it still is a favorite - thank you, Eileen Heckart!) was The Bad Seed. I loved watching little Rhoda Penmark off people who got in her way. The kid had absolutely no conscience. She needed to be removed from the gene pool, no doubt about it. But if you remember the end of the movie, it was softened (ruined, some say) to make it more palatable to an audience who was once shocked by a child villain.

Psychologists tell us that serial murderers practice on family pets when they’re young and work their way up to killing human victims. I’m one of those people who wants stiffer penalties for animal abuse. If you can torture a puppy, you need to be separated from the rest of us. Ideally, you need to be removed. Permanently.

I truly believe parents know when a child of theirs is evil. My fear is that if I gave birth to a bad seed, would I have the garbanzos to put a pillow over the little darling’s face? How could I allow this thing to mix and mingle with humanity?

The city I live in is teeming with little gangsters - male and female - who will stab someone at a party over a wine cooler. Kids kill their classmates and teachers; like Scott Moody (I’ll say!), some kill friends and relatives. They do terrible things to defenseless animals - and each other. A nine year-old girl just plunged a steak knife into her eleven year-old playmate’s chest after arguing over a rubber ball. And now a nine year-old boy, jealous of his baby half-sister, beat her with a 2×4, then punched and kicked her to death.

Child labor laws have allowed all that energy to go unchecked. Working fourteen or more hours in a factory will take all murderous urges out of a child. All they want to do is get a crust of bread and go to sleep. Now kids are bored. A couple of them this week were looking for something fun to do. I used to ride my bike to the park and get on a swing. These kids beat a homeless man to death.

I watch our young men in Iraq and wonder how they can make life and death decisions every day. They are responsible for so many, yet cannot walk into a convenience store and buy a six-pack. They’re so young and have seen so much.

Would mandatory service be a solution to the bored kid syndrome? Or should human debris stay out of our military? When I hear mandatory service, I don’t automatically hear military or draft. Can’t we put these young adults into the community to work? Send them to another part of the world where they can put all that energy into doing good work for others?

A college degree, frankly, is just not what it used to be. Perhaps there should be a period of introspection between high school and college for kids to figure out what they really want to do with themselves. Too much academia can be hazardous to your health. Yes…a little break for reality. Whadda concept.

And so it turns out that Deep Throat - the person who leaked to The Washington Post and helped topple the Nixon presidency - was little more than a disgruntled government employee. Nixon was VP the year I was born, and a year later, he should have been President-elect. There’s evidence that he won that race, but that was a very long time ago and many things have happened since.

My early memories of Richard Nixon were during the 1968 campaign. My sister, who was fifteen at the time, took me around Rogers Park to remove posters of Hubert Humphrey. I was eight, and I suspected that this was something we shouldn’t have been doing, but she convinced me that it was okay. So I stood on her hands and she boosted me up high so I could pull Hubert Horatio’s face off telephone poles.

My sister loved Reagan, but Nixon was her president. She was devastated when he chose her birthday, April 22, to give up the fight. My sister maintained she was conservative, and found fault with George Herbert Walker Bush, who wasn’t conservative enough. She loved Bill Buckley, Dick Cheney, and Tom Selleck’s knees. She always suspected our mother of voting for JFK.

She claimed she was an atheist. She was definitely a misanthrope. But she was brilliant, funny, artistic, talented, and had such good taste. She lived simply, and hated yuppies. She allowed herself few luxuries: books, inexpensive objets d’art, cigarettes, Dubble Bubble, and antique clocks. She listened to Rush on a cheap, battery operated radio. I sent her a portable stereo/CD player with Glenn Miller and Vivaldi CDs once, and she never took them out of the box.

She was kind to animals, fed strays, put out seed for birds and squirrels, and loved dogs more than anything in the world. She liked cats. She could name every tropical fish and could identify any plant. There was very little she didn’t know and little she couldn’t do - unless it involved driving, which she hated.

She was one of the most generous human beings I’ve ever met. And she had a great capacity to empathize with those who were less fortunate. Like her president, she was complex and sometimes misunderstood. And, like him, not quite as conservative as she appeared to be. Her heart was enormous, and it failed her two years ago this week.