#979 Paul Alexander: Inspiration and Determination; Validation and Immunization

Throughout childhood, our maternal grandmother, Anne Kagan, would frequently read aloud to us her favorite poems from a dog-eared volume entitled One Hundred and One Famous Poems. Unbeknownst to us, she was providing the two of us with a glorious, absolutely pain-free introduction to some of the English language’s greatest (and occasionally, long-forgotten) wordsmiths. Time and again we would listen to her read (and quite dramatically, I must say), from Keats (Ode On a Grecian Urn), and Byron She Walks in Beauty); to Kipling (If) and Wordsworth (She Was a Phantom of Delight); and from Whittier (The Barefoot Boy) to Kilmer (Trees). 

         Paul Alexander, Esq. (1946-2024))

A couple of days ago, I read the obituary of a man named Paul Alexander . . . a man who, due to polio, was forced to live from ages 6 to 78 in an iron lung.  The opening  paragraph of the New York Times  obit told the entire story: Alexander relied on the machine to breathe. Still, he was able to earn a law degree, write a book and, late in life, buil[t] a following on TikTok.

The poem his utterly remarkable life brought  to mind was Frank Lebby Stanton’s Keep A-Going!, whose opening stanza I can still hear Grandma Anne reciting from memory:

                                                                          Ef you strike a thorn or rose,
                                                                               Keep a-goin'!
                                                                          Ef it hails, or ef it snows,
                                                                                Keep a-goin!
                                                                          'Taint no use to sit an' whine,
                                                                           When the fish ain't on yer line;
                                                                            Bait yer hook an' keep a-tryin'—
                                                                                Keep a-goin'!

I really, really urge you to read Mr. Alexander’s obituary. The story of his life is truly remarkable; in its own way, it rivals that of Helen Keller, who despite being blind and deaf, somehow managed through determination and pluck, a remarkable caretaker and a “never say die” attitude, managed to become the first deafblind individual to graduate from college (Radcliffe College, class of 1904), become a prominent lecturer and author (12 books) and learned to “hear” people’s speech via the Tadoma Method, in which she used her fingers to feel the lips and throat of the speaker. Keller even wrote her first autobiography while studying at Radcliffe. Without question, she, like Paul Alexander, are among history’s greatest inspirations.

     Paul Alexander, Attorney-at-Law

In 1952, the then 6-year old Paul was stricken with Polio.  It came on seemingly in a day, quickly paralyzed limbs and and left him incapable of breathing on his own - the muscles which control respiration had become incapable of movement.  He was quickly placed in an “iron lung,” became worse and worse, and was eventually sent home from hospital to die at home.  But he did not.  When he was 8, Paul learned to breathe on his own for up to three minutes by gulping in air “like a fish” and swallowing it into his lungs, he told The Dallas Morning News years later. He told the newspaper that he was motivated to learn to breathe by a caregiver who offered him a puppy if he tried to learn to breathe on his own. He got his puppy, and it later became the inspiration for the title of his book, Three Minutes for a Dog: My Life in an Iron Lung.  He learned to write by gripping a long, narrow tube with his teeth; at the end of the tube  was a  pen or pencil.  By painstakingly moving his head, he could put words to paper.  He managed  to graduate from law school, and was a practicing attorney for  more than 30 years . . . all the while being trapped (except for upwards of 3 hours a day) in his iron lung.  At his death this week, there is now but one person still living in such a device.  

Those of us who were children in the 1950s well remember the panic and fear that Poliomyelitis caused.  As children, we had no idea of what caused it and had nightmares about catching it.  During the early 1950s, 25,000 to 50,000 new cases of polio occurred each year. Jonas Salk (1914–1995) became a national hero when he allayed the fear of the dreaded disease with his polio vaccine, approved in 1955. Although it was the first polio vaccine, it was not to be the last; Albert Bruce Sabin (1906–1993) introduced an oral vaccine in the United States in the 1960s that replaced Salk’s. (The main difference between the two vaccines was that Salk’s - the first - was made with a “killed” virus and administered by tiny needle pricks on  the upper arm, while Sabin’s  was made with a live though weakened [attenuated] virus and was administered orally via a sugar cube).  By the  1970s, Poliomyelitis was essentially eradicated . . . along with the post-war era’s other monster pediatric stay-home-from-school issues: mumps, measles and chickenpox.  Today, those 70 years and older have memories of staying home from school; of spots; of having to stay in darkened rooms and calamine lotion; of “chipmunk cheeks” and the possibility of lethal sequelae (side effects) such as a brain infection called encephalitis, which causes it to swell.  And then there was chicken-pox, which caused unbelievable pruritus  (eternal itching) and necessitated keeping one’s nails very, very short.  Some of us still bear its tiny scars . . . especially on the arms, legs and cheeks.

Although these mostly childhood diseases were finally brought under control because of vaccines - Salk, Sabin and  “MMR” (mumps-measles-rubella) -  the science behind them fired up debates that continue to this day.  Why?  Partly because many post “Baby Boom  Generation” folks (and their children and grandchildren) don’t  know drek from shinola about history;  they simply have little or no knowledge of these childhood diseases, and claim to have “knowledge”  (gained largely through mis- and disinformation spread by social media) that vaccines are a hoax, science itself is a hoax; that when a governmental body or agency mandates children  to be immunized before attending school this is a breach of parental authority . . . or part of  a Zionist conspiracy (remember: both Salk  and Sabin  were Jewish) or the CDC is a mere lapdog of the liberals . . . or a thousand other things.  Here in Florida, our Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo, M.D. recently said in a letter that parents at an elementary school with confirmed measles cases can decide whether their children should attend school.  This simply contradicts widespread medical guidance about how to keep the disease from spreading.  And spreading it is. However, in all fairness to “The Doctor from Perdition” he’s merely serving the man who hired him, Governor Ron DeSantis, with every ounce of his being.  I’m sure he must have learned in his Infectious Diseases course at Harvard Med. that Measles is one of the world’s most infectious diseases. Cases and deaths have been rising across the globe, in part because health officials have struggled to vaccinate people in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and growing vaccine hesitancy.

The same goes for Polio - the disease which kept Paul Alexander imprisoned in an iron lung for more than 90% of his life.  It has resurfaced . . . in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and the United States.  Answering the  question “why now?” isn’t totally clear.  However, at base, it seems to stem from a growing percentage of the child population not being vaccinated at an early age. Then too, there is the whole “anti-vaxxer” craze in which “knowledgeable” parents refuse to have their children immunized with the aforementioned “MMR” vaccine because they have “read” that it can lead to autism. And even if you were to ask most anti-vaxxers “which studies state this?” they will be mute.  Professional anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who is now running as an independent for POTUS) will site 2 studies - both of which were determined to be fatally flawed.  The 2 studies, which were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (Published since 1823, it’s on a par with the Journal of the American Medical Association) were so egregiously, so dangerously flawed, that Wakefield (1956- ) was struck off the medical register in the United Kingdom - tantamount to losing his license to practice. And yet, even if anti-vaxxers don’t know his name and cannot identify The Lancet, they continue spouting their bilge.    

I think I understand why an ever- growing number of people believe in anti-vaxx myths; they are afraid, frustrated and taught to distrust science and the so-called “intellectual elite.”  What I cannot fathom are the creators and perpetrators of all these dangerous myths; what’s behind their willful perfidy?  Is it for political gain?  Is it for profit or ego enhancement? Or is it for picking off “low-hanging fruit” on the tree of society, in order to eventually fell the tree itself?   

 It is a pity that a significant percentage of the so-called “enlightened” populace are  anti-science . . . in  the name of personal liberty or religious freedom.  I think of Paul Alexander who, if he’d only been born a few years later, would likely have received a Salk vaccine and would never have had to live out his life in an iron lung.  What he was able to accomplish despite this multi-ton millstone that kept him alive is a story for  the ages . . . and hopefully a source of inspiration for us all. 

                                                              When it looks like all is up,
                                                                   Keep a-going’!
                                                               Drain the sweetness from the cup,
                                                                   Keep a-agoin’!
                                                               See the wild birds on the wing,
                                                              Hear the bells that sweetly ring,
                                                              When you feel like singin’ - SING —
                                                                    Keep a-going’!

Copyright©2024 Kurt Franklin Stone               

#969: Hallelujah!

                     Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

Welcome to the year 2024. Generally speaking, the new year brings resolutions aplenty . . . many of which will be broken within the wink of an eye. It’s not that we are being dishonest with ourselves; for many, it’s a lack of resolve. And who can blame the resolution transgressors? We live in extremely frustrating, fearfully uncomfortable and trying times. The fences, hedges and walls which divide people around the world cause many of us to quit watching the evening news and, in its place, crack open a bottle of whatever suits our taste. Peace and understanding, unity and serenity are oh so evasive. HOWEVER, from time to time we find moments of hopefulness and words of love and cheer which can - if we pay attention - act as restoratives.

Yesterday, while attending services for Shabbat (Sabbath), a restorative discovered me . . . rather than the opposite.  (To be honest, I am paraphrasing one of the three women who became b’not mitzvah; she said that they [the three women] did not choose the particular Torah portion [Exodus 1:1-6:1] upon which they would be observing this marvelous rite of passage  but rather, the Torah portion chose them.) How so?  Simply stated this first portion in the book of Exodus (in Hebrew, Sh’mot [שְּׁמוֹת] meaning “names,” deals with 5 profoundly heroic women: the baby Moses’ mother (Yocheved), and sister (Miriam), the Pharaoh’s daughter (Bat’ya) and two midwives, (Shifra and Pua); without these women, there would be no Jews in the world today . . . Quite a portion to be shared by three b’not mitzvah!

At one point in the service, we sang together the 150th - the last - Psalm.  It has no known author (To King David 73 of the 150 Psalms (תְהִילִים - pronounced t’hilim) are ascribed; it is easily the most universal, most unifying of all those poetic praises to G-d.  In this psalm of 6 verses, 13 times we find the words created from the Hebrew root ה-ל-ל (the root means “praise”), from which we get the word “Halleluyah,” literally meaning “G-d be praised.”  (Now mind you, there is a perhaps unintended coincidence here; according to Jewish law, there are precisely 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah. Put 6 verses together with the 13 times the root ה-ל-ל is used and voila!  You get 613.  Brrrr.) During the more than six decades of chanting this psalm in shul, I have been accustomed to a single melody . . . likely the same one my grandfathers (Yussel and Issac) and their grandfathers sang more than 150 years ago. 

But not this time.  For this service, the Cantor (חזנית), Debbie Hafetz, a woman with a voice of gold and a soul of rhodium (the most valuable metal on earth), said we would be singing it to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s song entitled, simply, Hallelujah.  It both knocked my socks off and brought copious tears to my eyes.  Putting these Hebrew words together with Cohen’s emotional musical score was about as restorative a moment as one might hope for in these deeply troubling times.  Let’s explore several versions of this song, using both the original Hebrew words from the Bible,  and Leonard Cohen’s English creation. 

First, Central Synagogue’s Cantor Azi Schwartz singing the original Hebrew text of the 150th Psalm to Leonard Cohen’s melody.  Even if you do not know the words in Hebrew - let alone another language - I think it just might move you.  And, as the French say, n'ayez pas peur de sortir vos mouchoirs: “Don’t be afraid to take out your handkerchiefs.”  

To the best of my knowledge, there are only 2 words in the more than 7,000 tongues spoken on this planet which are the same . . . and both are Hebrew:  AMEN and HALLELUJAH.  The first means something akin to “I AGREE,” the second, as mentioned above “Praised be G-d.”  (According to Jewish oral tradition, AMEN is actually an acronym for the three Hebrew letter aleph (א), mem (מ) and final nun (ן) which stand for ayl melekh ne-ehmahn, meaning “G-d is a faithful King.”  Yes, both are a tad too theistic for some, regardless of their tongue or religious (or lack of)  belief.  But nonetheless, they are the two unifying words which bind us together. 

Leonard Cohen originally wrote lyrics to his Hallelujah (1984).  It easily became his most famous song.  What follows is the legendary guitarist Jeff Buckley singing Cohn’s English lyrics, while accompanying himself on his instrument.

Next, a Hebrew/English version of Cohen’s lyrics as performed by Yechiel Erps, a Chasid with an MS in speech pathology and a great deal of musical talent:

Indeed, this is a universal song with universal meaning.  I would be remiss if I were not to include Cohen’s universal son sung in, amazingly, English, Hebrew and Arabic.  Could there eventually be a hope for peace?

And last, but not least, Cohen's “Halleuljah” in one of his native  languages: Yiddish.  Cohen was born and raised in a family of Orthodox Jews in the wealthy enclave of Westmont, Quebec.  His native languages were French and Yiddish.  Until the  end of his life, despite exploring almost every religion on earth, he remained a practicing Jew, who would forego concerts on Friday nights.  His ideal was what is known in Hebrew as ‘‘pekuakh nefesh,”  repairing the world.  May his epitaph be this song, and may this song, some 3,500 years in the making, be a restorative for a world badly fractured and in need of repair.  For when all is said and done, isn’t this what all Abrahamic religions seek  most?

Can you say - or sing - Hallelujah with meaning?

Copyright©2024, Kurt Franklin Stone

#956: There Will Never Be Another Dianne Goldman Feinstein Blum

Woke up quite early yesterday, only to find out that the dean of the United States Senate, California’s Dianne Feinstein, had passed away at age 90. “It’s the end of an era,” many commentators lamented throughout the day.  That term ‘end of an era’ - doesn’t even come close. The senator was a throwback to a time when civility, bipartisanship and a touch of both elegance and eloquence pervaded its halls.  Senator Feinstein was, from a strictly political point of view, both a dynamo and a doyenne.  Just mere hours before her passing, she cast the final vote of her long, long career - an ‘aye’ vote on a procedural short-term government funding plan.  She was then helped back to her office, completed the days work, went home, and died in her sleep.

Already, there are some ancillary issues surrounding and clouding her passing: precisely whom California Governor Newsome will select to replace her, and the question of why she did not retire sooner, seeing that in the past year she was either absent at home, or hospitalized (due to a nasty case of Shingles that led to encephalitis, a rare complication that causes inflammation and swelling in the brain).  I for one hope that discussions based on that last year of her long, productive life won’t erase all that she accomplished.  For make no mistake about it: this elegantly-dressed, perfectly coiffed lady was a political superheavyweight.

Over more than a 30-year period (which encompasses 2 mammoth books published in 2000 and 2010), I interviewed her on numerous occasions; I will long remember her graciousness, her pluck and sheer class.  She was, in a infrequently-used phrase, the living embodiment of an “iron fist inside a velvet glove.”

What follows is based on the two biographic entries in my books, “The Congressional Minyan” and “The Jews of Capitol Hill.”  As much as I have written about her (and you will now hopefully read), my words don’t come within 50 furlongs of presenting Senator Dianne Goldman, Feinstein Bloom in toto.  She was and shall always be sui generis . . . one of a kind.

As the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Dianne Emiel Goldman was raised in two religious traditions. As a teenager, she attended the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she was the only Jewish student, and went to synagogue on Friday nights. It was the Goldmans’ hope and expectation that once grown, Dianne and her two younger sisters would make their own choices as to religious affiliation. Speaking about her dual upbringing from the distance of more than forty years, Dianne Feinstein said, “I was brought up supposedly with some Catholic religion and some Jewish, and I was to choose . . . but I don’t think that works very well. You are what you are.” When she was twenty, Dianne Goldman decided what she was; she officially converted to Judaism. Born in San Francisco on June 22, 1933, the future Dianne (the unusual spelling is said to be in tribute to her late maternal aunt Anne) Feinstein was the eldest child of Dr. Leon and Betty (Rosenburg) Goldman. Her father, a prominent surgeon and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, was the son of Orthodox Jews. Leon’s father, born Samuel Gelleorivich, is said to have stowed away at the age of fourteen on a ship bound for Boston in order to flee a pogrom in his hometown of Griva, “in a region of Russian-ruled Poland.” His mother, Lily Kaflin, came from Vilna. In America, Samuel Gelleorivich became Sam Goldman. “A shoemaker by trade, he made his way west to Sacramento and, in 1895, moved south to San Francisco, where he opened a dry goods store on Market Street. He would eventually have 11 children.” Following the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Sam moved across the bay to Berkeley and eventually wound up in Southern California, where he “speculated in wildcat oil wells and worked as a retail merchant before finally returning to the San Francisco Bay. Sam Goldman helped found several synagogues in California; his son Leon would become a prominent donor to San Francisco’s Mount Zion Synagogue. Leon, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and earned his medical degree at the university’s campus in San Francisco, would be greatly assisted by one of his elder siblings, Morris, “a successful businessman and streetwise gambler.” Dianne’s mother, Betty, told her daughters that she had been born Pasha Pariskovia in St. Petersburg, Russia, and had fled the revolution with her family as a child. This was simply not true. The Rosenburgs—who had both Jewish and Eastern Orthodox sides to the family—came first to Eureka in Northern California, where there was a large Russian settlement. Betty, who in her younger years called herself “Bessie,” was a sickly child. By all accounts, she spent several years in a sanitarium, likely suffering from encephalitis (ironically, the same malady that was partially to blame for Dianne’s death many, many years later).

By the 1920s, the Rosenburgs had come to San Francisco, where Betty found a job modeling clothes at Maison Mendesolle, a boutique in the upscale Saint Francis Hotel. (n.b. Maison Mendesolle still exists in 2023 and specializes in vintage clothing and jewelry. It is no long housed in the St. Francis.) Leon and Betty’s marriage announcement did not sit well with her family. As a result, the couple eloped to Reno, Nevada, where they were married by a Conservative Rabbi on January 19, 1931. Dianne and her sisters did not know that their parents had been married by a rabbi; Betty always told her children she was Russian Orthodox. As Dianne would recount many years later, “My father thought my mother was Jewish. But she wasn’t.” Mrs. Goldman suffered from an undiagnosed brain disorder (likely encephalitis) . As her daughter, the senator, would reveal many years later, “She was prone to great bouts of hostility and irrationality that sometimes manifested themselves in really undeserved punishments for us.”

As a result of their mother’s unpredictability, Dianne and her younger sisters, Yvonne and Lynn, “lived in a great deal of fear.” Late in life, with the invention and perfection of the CAT scanner, the source of Mrs. Goldman’s problem was finally diagnosed as “Chronic Brain Syndrome.” (Generally speaking, C.B.S. is defined as a “Global deterioration in intellectual function, behavior and personality in the presence of normal consciousness and perception.”) Speaking of her childhood in a 1990 interview, Dianne Feinstein recounted, “It was not always easy with my mother, but she was still a good mother. She took good care of me and my sisters. I think I can say I was happy growing up.” (Dianne’s sister Yvonne was born in 1936, her sister Lynne in 1941.) Writing about Dianne and her sisters in a 1994 biography, Jerry Roberts described their lives: “They attended private schools, wore expensive clothes, were indulged with riding, tennis, and piano lessons, and were treated to white-gloved teas and luncheons at fine hotels and restaurants in fashionable Union Square.”

It is apparent that the two stabilizing influences in her young life were her father, a kindly man, and her father’s brother Morris, a clothing manufacturer with a passion for politics. Uncle Morrie was “a colorful San Francisco character in the style of Guys and Dolls.” Morrie lived at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, and held “informal membership in the ‘Third Base Gang,’ a fraternity of bookies, bettors and bagmen.” Where Dianne’s father was a Republican, Uncle Morris was often identified as a “frequent finance chairman” for local Democratic politicians. Morrie was connected to Arthur “Artie” Samish (1897–1974), who in his day was easily “the most influential and powerful individual lobbyist in California.” Morris Goldman introduced his favorite niece to politics by taking her to Monday-afternoon sessions of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which he derisively referred to as the Board of “Stupidvisors.” It was Uncle Morris who planted the seeds of Dianne’s political ambitions. “Dianne, you get an education and you can do this job,” he would tell her. One of her classmates at Convent of the Sacred Heart, Cynthia Arden Brown, was the daughter of then–California attorney general (and future governor) Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. (Fortuitously, her father also happened to be Brown’s personal physician.) Upon meeting Brown (1905–1996), Dianne Goldman “impressed him with her interest in political life.” He decided to keep an eye on the teenager.

In 1951, following her graduation from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Dianne entered Stanford University. After a brief fling at premed—and after nearly failing a course in genetics—she changed majors to political science and history. While at Stanford, she modeled clothes on her uncle’s television show, played golf, taught horseback riding, and joined the Young Democrats. As a senior, she ran successfully for student body vice president. While campaigning at a fraternity house, she was severely heckled, picked up, and carried into a shower stall, where she was drenched. Rather than lash out, Feinstein took things in stride; she turned up the heat in her campaigning, and once in office used her newfound influence to deny the culprit fraternity a much-sought-after permit for an overnight party.

Upon graduating in 1955, Dianne became an intern at the San Francisco–based CORO Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing promising young adults with concrete experience in the realm of politics and public service. While on assignment to the San Francisco district attorney’s office, Dianne met and began working for a thirty-three-year-old prosecutor named Jack Berman. They eloped and were married on December 2, 1956. Just a few days shy of eight months later, July 31, 1957, Dianne gave birth to her only child, a daughter named “Katherine Anne.” The Bermans had “fundamental disagreements” over the role that a woman should play. “Berman wanted his wife to be a wife and a mother to their daughter. . . . She saw herself in this role but also wanted a career in the public sector.” The Bermans were divorced in 1959, leaving Dianne to raise a two-year-old child by herself. Jack Berman (1922–2002) would be appointed judge of the San Francisco Superior Court in 1982 by then–California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, the son of his old boss.

For the next several years, Dianne Goldman Berman took care of her daughter, explored various career paths, and worked as a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. She also studied the Stanislavsky method of acting. After a few less-than-stellar acting appearances and a trip to New York—where she had gone to “browse the want ads and check out jobs and apartment prices [while] attending eight Broadway plays in five days”—she put her acting ambitions out to pasture. In 1961, she approached Governor Brown about the possibility of working for the state. Soon thereafter, Brown appointed the twenty-eight-year-old to the California Women’s Board of Terms and Parole, the body that set prison terms and parole conditions for female inmates in the California penal system. Feinstein (known at the time as Berman, of course) served on the board for the next five years, reviewing more than five thousand parole applications and formulating her positions on such issues as abortion and capital punishment. While serving on the Board of Terms, Feinstein became vehemently anti–death penalty: “Though you may owe it to your fellow-man to put a criminal out of commission, there is no moral or religious ground that gives you the right to terminate the life of another human being.”

Years later, she would change her point of view and come to support capital punishment as a means of deterring certain types of heinous crime: “In those days I saw the criminal justice arena very differently than I do now [1990]. The nature of the problem has changed. . . . I began to see that there are people who have no regard for other people’s lives—and over time came to forge the view that by your acts you can abrogate your own right to life.” This change of heart, derided by her political opponents as waffling or mere opportunism, would be used against her in future campaigns.

On November 11, 1962, twenty-nine-year-year-old Dianne Berman married a forty-eight-year-old neurosurgeon named Bertram Feinstein. Feinstein (1914–1978), a native of Winnipeg, swept the young divorcee off her feet. He was “charming, warm and witty . . . every inch a distinguished gentleman.” Within a few years of marrying they moved into a thirteen-room house on Lyon Street in Pacific Heights, home of some of San Francisco’s wealthiest residents. In 1968, San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed Dianne Feinstein to a blue-ribbon committee on crime. With her increased visibility, she decided to chance a run for the eleven-member San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Bucking the odds—no woman had been elected to the board in nearly half a century—Feinstein, spending an unheard of $100,000, put together a coalition of liberals, gays, environmentalists, and minorities. Bert aided his wife’s campaign by putting up hundreds upon hundreds of signs with “DIANNE” in large red letters. (As a result, to this day most San Franciscans refer to her simply by her first name.) Feinstein overwhelmed the eighteen other candidates, capturing more votes than any of them. In one fell swoop, she became both a member and president of the board of supervisors.

Dianne Feinstein went on to serve nearly nine years on the board of supervisors. Additionally, she served as its president from 1970 to 1972, 1973 to 1976, and again in 1978. Not having to work for a living, she became the board’s first full-time supervisor. Early in her career she evinced what can only be called “tone deafness” when it came to women not so well off as herself. Shortly after her first campaign, for example, she argued that women made superior public servants because they were untainted by the need to make a living: “A woman does not have to make decisions based on the need to survive. She can cut through issues, call shots as she sees them. Many bad decisions are made by men in government because it is good for them personally to make bad public decision.”

During her eight years on the Board of Supervisors, she gained a reputation for being its most knowledgeable authority on criminal justice issues. She pushed for an increase in the number of police officers patrolling the city’s streets and sought much-needed revamping of the entire criminal justice system. Rather than announcing what her solutions would be to the problems and challenges facing “The City,” she brought in experts who would investigate, summarize and then make suggestions. This was indeed something new. San Francisco has long been known as a wide-open city—one eminently tolerant of the aberrant, the wild, and the woolly. Over the years it has been the home of such “dens of iniquity” as the Barbary Coast, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro District, and North Beach. San Francisco is often called the City by the Golden Gate; locals refer to it either as “Baghdad by the Bay” or, as the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, would have it, “Fagdad by the Bay.”

In 1970, Supervisor Feinstein made the politically unpopular move of tightening zoning restrictions “in order to limit or abolish adult nightclubs and movie theatres.” Going against the prevailing political wisdom, which would have had her simply look the other way and maintain the status quo, she instead did what she thought was right. After visiting a local pornographic movie house with members of her staff, the supervisor reported, “We have become a kind of smut capital of the United States. . . . As a woman I feel very strongly about it, because part of what is happening, what is shown on the screens, works to the basic denigration and humiliation of the female.”

At the same time, Dianne Feinstein was developing quite a following in San Francisco’s gay community. “She conferred legitimacy on many gay activist groups by attending rallies during her campaign, authored and obtained passage of a measure to ban job and hiring discrimination against gays, and favored a state law that would legalize all private sexual conduct between or among consenting adults.” Soon, Dianne Feinstein was the most visible member of the board of supervisors. In 1971 and again in 1975, she ran unsuccessfully for mayor, placing third in both races. In the 1975 campaign, State Senator George Moscone (1929–1978) was elected mayor. By that time, San Francisco was going through a trying time of political upheaval. Those were the days of the Reverend Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, the Symbionese Liberation Army (which kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst), and the New World Liberation Front. Feinstein herself was the target of two separate bomb attacks in 1976 and 1977. After the second failed attempt—this at her vacation home in Monterey— she took to carrying a .38-caliber pistol for protection.

            Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone

Feinstein’s personal life was particularly difficult as well. In 1975, her father—whose surgical students called the “Coach”—succumbed to cancer at age sixty-nine. In April 1978, her husband Bertram, who was director of the Neurological Institute at Mount Zion Hospital, succumbed to the same disease at age sixty-four. The violence of the era began cresting on November 18, 1978, when nine hundred members of the Reverend Jim Jones’ People’s Temple committed mass suicide in the wilds of Guyana. Nine days later, November 27, both Mayor Moscone and the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk (1930–1978) were gunned down in their city hall offices by deranged former supervisor Dan White. Just hours before the double assassination, Feinstein had told a reporter that she would be retiring at the end of her term. By the end of the day, Feinstein was the acting mayor of the City of San Francisco. She garnered high marks for the manner in which she led the city during its days of shock, anguish, and disbelief. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle stated, simply: “She was poised. She was eloquent. She was restrained. And she was reassuring and strong.” Dianne Feinstein served as mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988. Early in her first term, she married Richard C. Blum, a “lean and 6’4 self-made millionaire,” who was founder and co-chair of Mayor Moscone’s Fiscal Advisory Commission. Blum’s wealth (reported at somewhere between $40 million and $50 million) would become a source of difficulty a decade later. During her mayoralty, Dianne Feinstein (she maintained the name under which she had entered elective politics) was twice reelected and once subjected to a vicious recall drive. The latter occurred in early 1983, after she had angered the far left by not supporting tighter restrictions on handguns and vetoing a domestic-partners law “which would have granted some benefits such as insurance, to unmarried couples (straight and gay) who registered at city hall.” Feinstein easily survived the recall drive, receiving more than 80 percent of the vote. This victory all but guaranteed her winning her next election as mayor.

During her second term, Feinstein, although popular, angered gays and women by closing gay bathhouses and refusing to close off a street for an abortion rights rally. When questioned about some of her supposedly anti-feminist positions, she stated flatly: “I’ve lived a feminist life. I had to quit a job because there was no maternity leave. I raised a child as a single mother. I put together legislation. I haven’t been a marcher, but I’ve lived it.” By 1984, Feinstein’s popularity and respect among her colleagues had risen to the point where Walter Mondale seriously considered asking her to run for vice president with him on the Democratic ticket. Feinstein was eventually passed over for another woman, New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferarro. It is likely that what ultimately kept Feinstein off the ticket was concern about her husband’s finances. Ironically, Ferarro (1935–2011 ) came under repeated attack during the 1984 campaign about her husband’s financial dealings. Dianne Feinstein left the office of mayor after 1988; San Francisco city law permitted only two consecutive terms. In 1990, she became the first woman to run for governor of California. She drew as her opponent Republican U.S. Senator Pete Wilson. Running on a “pro-environment, abortion rights platform that also [included] a plank in favor of the death penalty,” Feinstein was hard-pressed to say precisely where and how she differed from Senator Wilson. He attacked her for leaving San Francisco with a $172 million deficit. Feinstein countered that the shortfall was nothing out of the ordinary—a fact that Wilson, a former mayor of San Diego, would certainly understand. Republicans also questioned Richard Blum’s finances; he was underwriting a goodly proportion of his wife’s campaign. Feinstein angrily replied, “This is all his business. I have nothing to do with it. It’s his—and it was before we were married. . . . Clearly there’s a strategy here that’s really basically pretty sexist. It’s sort of implicit that somehow the woman can’t be doing all this by herself.”

With few issues dividing or distinguishing them, the campaign devolved into a series of personal charges and countercharges. In the end, Feinstein held Wilson to less than an absolute majority: 49 percent to 46 percent. 1992 will go down in American political history as the “Year of the Woman.” On November 10 of that year, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer were both elected to the U.S. Senate, thereby becoming the first and second Jewish women to serve in the upper chamber. Feinstein handily defeated (54 percent to 38 percent) Senator John Seymour, a wealthy political consultant and former state senator from Orange County, whom Governor Wilson had appointed to fulfill the final two years of his six-year term. In winning the election, Feinstein garnered more votes—5,853,621—than any senatorial candidate in U.S. history. By prior agreement, Feinstein was sworn in ahead of Boxer, thereby becoming both California’s senior senator and the first Jewish woman elected to that body. Feinstein got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, where she could watch out for California’s multifaceted economic interests, and Judiciary, where, after the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle, it seemed prudent for Committee Chair Joseph Biden of Delaware to appoint a woman. (Feinstein thereby was able to add yet another “first” to her resume: first woman ever appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

Although Feinstein did not support the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and quietly opposed President Clinton’s health-care plan (which she had originally supported), she carved out a generally liberal position on most issues. In her first term she managed to append an assault weapons ban onto the Clinton crime bill. When Idaho Republican Larry Craig, who was against the ban, challenged Senator Feinstein’s knowledge of firearms, she froze him in his tracks by responding: “I know something about what firearms can do; I came to be Mayor of San Francisco as a product of assassination.” The assault weapons ban was enacted into law. In 1994, Senator Feinstein easily won the Democratic primary for the Senate, leading the field with 74 percent of the vote. In the general election, she squared off against multimillionaire Representative Michael Huffington of Santa Barbara. The Republican Huffington, who had spent more than $5 million of his own money to capture his House seat in 1992, spent nearly $30 million of his own funds in 1994, making their Senate race the most expensive in U.S. history. Huffington began the Senate race with an advertising barrage extolling former secretary of Education William Bennett’s Book of Virtues. In his commercials, he sought to take the moral high ground, arguing that California suffered from a moral malaise. Feinstein came under attack for casting the deciding vote for the 1993 tax increase, and for being a “career politician.”

The press had a field day with the Huffingtons, deriding Arianna for being the “Edmund Hillary of social climbing,” and publishing stories about her involvement in the Movement for Spiritual Awareness. Amidst the charges and countercharges, Huffington made a fatal mistake: he endorsed Proposition 187—a measure that would have banned all state spending on illegal immigrants. Feinstein opposed it. Less than a month before the election, it was revealed that the Huffingtons had employed an illegal alien as a nanny—a charge hurled against many people seeking office that year. Huffington offered proof that Feinstein had likewise employed an illegal alien; the charges failed to stick. Feinstein eked out a 47 percent to 45 percent percent victory. (In 1997 Huffington and his wife, Ariana, divorced. The next year he announced that he was bisexual. His wife became a noted liberal, and to this day runs the eponymous and widely-read Huffington Post. Her ex-husband became a film producer and chair of the Log Cabin Republicans.) This would turn out to be Feinstein’s last close reelection. In 2000, she defeated San Jose–area Congressman Tom Campbell 56 percent to 37 percent. Campbell (1952– ), a libertarian Stanford law professor, had nearly won the Republican nomination to run against Barbara Boxer in 1992.

In 2006, Feinstein overwhelmed former state senator—and author of the above-referenced Proposition 187—Dick Mountjoy 59 percent to 35 percent. In the latter race, it was shown that Mountjoy’s (1932–2015 ) Web site had erroneously reported that the conservative Republican had served in the Korean War aboard the USS Missouri. When ship records later confirmed that he had actually served aboard the USS Bremerton, Feinstein questioned her opponent’s credibility. It also helped that Feinstein outspent Montjoy by a better than forty-to-one margin: $8,030,489 as compared to $195, 265. Throughout her many years in the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein maintained a moderate-to-liberal voting record. She supported repealing both the marriage penalty and estate tax, and voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002 and President George W. Bush’s $87 billion supplemental appropriation in November 2003. Once she cast these votes she began having regrets.

In April 2004, she said that she was “misled into voting for the war by an exaggeration of the threat.” As a member (and eventual chair) of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she sponsored legislation that would have “required the CIA to use only non-coercive interrogation methods found in the Army Field Manual,” thus ruling out waterboarding and other measures. President George W. Bush vetoed the bill in 2008. Understandably, she has been an unrelenting supporter of gun control measures and, along with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, got fifty-four senators to sign a letter calling for more embryonic stem-cell research. She was also the only Democrat on the Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of an amendment authorizing prosecutions for flag desecration. Overall, Feinstein voted with her Democratic colleagues nearly 95 percent of the time. The senator and her husband (who died from cancer in 2022, lived in a Tudor house directly across the street from where Dianne Goldman grew up. Feinstein’s daughter, Katherine (born 1957), a former assistant district attorney and San Francisco police commissioner, was, until recently, the assistant presiding judge of the San Francisco  Superior Court. She is married to real estate developer Rick Mariano. On September 18, 1992, Dianne Feinstein became a grandmother when Katherine gave birth to Eileen Feinstein Mariano. The senator also had three stepchildren: Heidi, Annette, and Eileen. In early 1996, Roll Call magazine estimated Feinstein and Blum’s net worth to be $50 million—the fifth-highest in Congress. Twenty years later Blum’s net worth had grown to an estimated $80 million.

Over the years, there has been much speculation that Feinstein would one day run for the job she “really, truly wanted”—California governor. Up until 2009, Feinstein still had not made up her mind if she was going to enter the 2010 race. “I’m not ruling it in,” Feinstein remarked on the eve of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. But she didn’t rule it out, either. “People will know within time,” she said. “I mean, this election is two years away.” As of mid-2009, the only announced Democratic candidate was—ironically—former California governor Jerry Brown, the son of her political mentor. Brown won - and wound up servimg 2 more terms.

Dianne Feinstein wound up running and winning her seat in 2012 and 2018 by wide margins.  In late 2022 she announced that she would  retire after her current term expired in 2024, thus setting off a race to replace her with 3 strong Democratic moderates, Representatives Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee. 

Senator Dianne Goldman Feinstein Blum has led an extraordinary life.  She began breaking through glass ceilings long, long before writer Marilyn Loden (1946-2022) coined the term way back in 1978.  She has led a life that was at once charmed and privileged, honorable and haunting.  Throughout it all, she has given back to the people she served every ounce of strength, energy, grace, brains and courage she could muster.  

Sad to say, we may never see her kind again . . . 

Copyright©2023, 2010, 2000 Kurt F. Stone

Guinevere Had Green Eyes

Note: There are numerous live links in the following blog; many lead to performances [some with written-out lyrics] of songs made famous by the Byrds and CSNY.   Enjoy!

Just 24 hours before he died (Jan. 18, 2023), 81-year old singer/songwriter/icon David Crosby, in his first Twitter of the day, wrote about heaven. The musician, who was a founding member of 2 Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame bands (Crosby, Stills & Nash and The Byrds), responding to various posts about heaven and loneliness, joked "I heard the place is overrated….cloudy." The statement was so typical of the multifaceted Crosby. At once a stellar writer of songs that provided the lyrics of a generation who themselves are now in their late 60s through 80s (I  Almost Cut my Hair, Teach Your Children Well, Carry On) and one of the best, most romantic ballads of all time (Guinevere), he was both a blueblood (related to both the Van Cortland and Van Rensselaer families; the son of, Floyd Crosby, the acclaimed cinematographer of such classic films as High Noon, From Here to Eternity and Tabu: A Tale of the South Seas, (for which he won an Oscar); a recovering drug addict, a twice-imprisoned felon, and a financial supporter of many progressive candidates for public office.

Despite all this, he somehow managed to live 81 years and continue recording albums until his late 70s.  Even at the end, his singing voice was crystal clear, his ability to make great harmonies with his longtime friend and compatriot Graham Nash a miracle.  In many ways, he was a freak of nature.   I remember first seeing him at Doug Weston’s Troubadour in West Hollywood; then, he was in his early 20s, a thorough-going folkie sans the lion-like mane and fu manchu moustache.  He was even wearing a coat and tie!  Within a few years he became a seminal member of the Folk Rock group The Byrds, and catapulted to fame and fortune with such timeless classics as Mr. Tambourine Man (written by Bob Dylan), Turn, Turn, Turn (lyrics by Pete Seeger, originally from the  Biblical book of Ecclesiastes) and The Bells of Rhymney (first recorded by Pete Seeger with lyrics by the Welsh poet Idris Davies) and Eight Miles High.   

By this time, he had the iconic moustache he would wear for the rest of his life.  As time went by, his long brown hair thinned and became white, until what was left made him look a lot like Bert Lahr’s Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.  Almost from the day he received his first royalty check, Crosby began contributing to political campaigns and causes.  Although I’m not 100% sure, I seem to remember that in the summer of 1969 he hosted a fundraiser for the California Assembly Speaker Jess “Big Daddy” Unruh, who was running against Governor Ronald Reagan.  (I did check this out with my former boss in that campaign, Fred Taugher, who, despite making several calls, was not able to guarantee that my memory was correct . . .however, Fred could verify that Crosby had purchased a 59-foot yacht [the “Mayan”] just 2 years earlier).  Crosby continued his political ways up until the 2020 presidential campaiign.

In addition to at one time being addicted to both cocaine and heroin, Crosby suffered from Hepatitis C (which led to undergoing a liver transplant (paid for by rocker Phil Collins) in 1994, and Type 2 Diabetes, which caused him to put on a great deal of weight.  In January 2000, Melissa Etheridge announced that Crosby was the sperm donor of two children with her partner Julie Cypher by means of artificial insemination. On May 13, 2020, Etheridge announced on her Twitter that her and Cypher's son Beckett had died of causes related to opioid addiction at the age of 21. In February 2014, at the urging of his doctor, Crosby postponed the final dates of his solo tour to undergo a cardiac catheterization and angiogram, based on the results of a routine cardiac stress test. And yet, he continued living up to the words of one of his earliest songs: “Carry on.”

More than most singer/songwriter/performers David Crosby, whose professional career lasted nearly 55 years,  was both a symbol and vivid remembrance of an era of peace, love, long hair, beads and pot.  His image as the twinkle-eyed stoner and sardonic hedonist of the cosmic age was said to have been a model for the obstinate free spirit played by Dennis Hopper in the 1969 movie “Easy Rider.” (Hopper died from prostate cancer in 2010).  In one of his last interviews, the notoriously cantankerous Crosby spoke about how he had alienated nearly all of his old musical associates: “All the guys I made music with won’t even talk to me,” he said. “I don’t know quite how to undo it.”  In the second of his two autobiographies he mellowed, writing: “I was tremendously lucky, surviving injury, illness and stupidity,” he wrote. “As for the music, I was blessed early and often, from the Byrds to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and singing with Graham”  

The last time I saw David Crosby live was in 2015 nearly 55 years after I had first seen him performing with Les Baxter's Balladeers at the Troubadour; in 2015, he was playing with Stills and Nash.  The 3 (now minus Neil Young)  were note perfect . . . both on guitar and with vocals.  Their complex harmonies brought tears to the eyes. Watching and hearing them was a truly emotional experience.  It brought me back to my college days where protesting (the war in Viet Nam, the draft, Richard Nixon) took up far more time than attending class. The score for those memories was written largely by Crosby, Phil Ochs, and Tom Paxton.  But without question, the most noteworthy of them vis-a-vis musicality were CSNY.  To this day, whenever I hear them - or watch them through the magic of You-Tube - I feel a catch in my throat, youth in my veins and great purpose in my steps.  

Those of us from the Berkeley, Kent State, Columbia, March on Washington days who still are privileged to walk this earth, have yet to give up the fight and the dream.  David Crosby’s lyrics still suffuse our memory and motivation.  To wit:

Carry on
Love is coming
Love is coming to us all.

As idealistic and saccharine as the refrain may sound in 2023, so long as we remember that Guinevere did have Green Eyes and we must continue to Teach Our Children Well, there is still a hope of succeeding.

Rest in peace David; you made a great contribution to a generation of (hopefully) gracefully aging peaceniks, some of whom have yet to cut their hair . . .

Copyright©2023 Kurt F. Stone

Vin Scully: Shakespeare With a Mic

Long, longtime Dodger play-by-play announced Vin Scully passed away yesterday at age 94. He was, hands down, the best at what he did. I mean, have you ever attended a baseball game in which the vast majority of the fans in the stands were listening to the game on radio? Vin could do that.

Nearly 9 years ago, at the time of his retirement, I wrote a blog essay entitled "Vin Scully: Shakespeare With a Mic." In observing his passing . . . and with tears in my eyes, what follows is a reprint of that post .from August, 25, 2013 . . .

 Benjamin Franklin famously opined that "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."  Well, I'm here to tell you that his list wasn't complete.  For indeed, if you are a Southern Californian there is a third eternal verity: that Vin Scully, the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is the greatest announcer in the history of sports.  Period.  And, mirabile dictu, this past Friday, the Dodgers announced that the 85 year old Scully will be returning to the broadcast booth for a record 65th season in 2014. For Dodger fans -- indeed for all Angelenos -- Scully is much, much more than the voice of the Dodgers; he is, without question, the most beloved citizen of that place Dorothy Parker once called "72 suburbs in search of a city." When, several years ago, team owners asked fans to vote for their all-time favorite Dodger, guess who won?  Hint: it was neither Sandy Koufax nor Don Drysdale.  It was L.A's favorite redhead. 

Vin Scully has been with the Dodgers longer than Connie Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics, and longer than Joe Paterno coached the Nittany Lions.  In fact, the only person ever to serve a single sports team longer is another Dodger: Tommy Lasorda, who signed his first contract in 1948 -- one year before Vin came on board. 

I first heard the voice of Vin Scully on April 18, 1958 -- the first game the Dodgers ever played in Los Angeles.  They beat the San Francisco (formerly New York) Giants 6-5.  Carl Erskine defeated Al Worthington; Clem Labine got the save and third baseman Dick Gray was the first Dodger to homer at the cavernous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.  I remember being absolutely mesmerized by the dulcet tones of the Dodger announcer.  It was as if he was talking to me and me alone.  By the end of that first season -- in which they finished a miserable 7th, 23 games behind the Milwaukee Braves -- I had my own radio.  Since then, I would estimate that I have heard Vin Scully call nearly 8,500 games, which means that next to my late father, his is the male voice I've heard most often in my life.

As any Dodger fan knows, Vin Scully does far more than merely announce a game.  He is a walking, talking and breathing baseball encyclopedia.  His memories are priceless; his stories are sensational.  He not only tells mostly first-hand stories of the past 70-plus years of baseball, but also, when appropriate, tidbits about world and Broadway history, literature and music.  At the same time, this 85-year old might also remind listeners that AC/DC does "Hell's Bells" and that "Enter Sandman" is by Metallica. He does all this while calling a baseball game.  And best of all, unlike just about any other announcer, he knows when to be silent.  I guess the greatest proof of the Scully's genius is that almost everyone attending games at Chavez Ravine (Dodger Stadium) is listening to him on the radio . . . even though the game is going on right in front of them.

Over the course of his career, Vin has called three perfect games, 25 no-hitters, 25 World Series and 12 All-Star Games.  Among the iconic moments he has called:

• Don Larson's perfect game in the 1956 World Series: Got him! The greatest game ever pitched in baseball history, by Don Larson! A no hitter, a perfect game in a World Series ... Never in the history of the game has it ever happened in a World Series ... And so our hats off to Don Larson—no runs, no hits, no errors, no walks, no base runners. The final score: The Yankees, two runs, five hits and no errors. The Dodgers: No runs, no hits, no errors ... in fact, nothing at all. This was a day to remember, this was a ballgame to remember and above all, the greatest day in the life of Don Larsen. And the most dramatic and well-pitched ballgame in the history of baseball. ... Mel (Allen) you can put this in your ring and wear it a long time.

• Sandy Koufax's perfect game, September 9, 1965: And Sandy Koufax, whose name will always remind you of strikeouts, did it with a flourish. He struck out the last six consecutive batters. So when he wrote his name in capital letters in the record books, that "K" stands out even more than the O-U-F-A-X.

• Hank Aaron's 715th home run on April 8, 1974: What a marvelous moment for baseball; what a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia; what a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron. … And for the first time in a long time, that poker face in Aaron shows the tremendous strain and relief of what it must have been like to live with for the past several months.

Vin Scully is more than an icon; more than a living legend.  He is, simply stated, the best there ever has been.  Scully is to baseball announcing what Shakespeare was to English literature, what Bach was to music, Einstein to theoretical physics or Sir Charles Chaplin to cinema -- both sui generis and nonpareil.  Scully has taught baseball -- both the game and the "game within the game" to countless millions over the past 65 years.  He has been both a brilliant constant and a thorough-going gentleman in an ever-changing world where far too many idols have feet of clay.  To my ear, he sounds just as young, vital and resonant in August 2013 as he did that first time I heard him back in April 1958.

When Sir Charles Chaplin died on December 25, 1977, I felt a tremendous sense of loss. Although I never met him, I had seen just about every film he'd ever made, and read every book ever written by or about him.  He was -- and still is -- to my way of thinking, the greatest genius in the history of cinema.  I remember reading dozens upon dozens of eulogies delivered by the great men and women of his profession; heartfelt and wonderfully literate sentiments by the likes of René Clair, Lord Olivier, Jacques Tati and Federico Fellini.  The simplest -- and yet the most touching -- was spoken by Bob Hope, whose words best sum up not only the life, times and achievements of "the little fellow," but Vin Scully as well:

"We were fortunate to have lived in his time."

Thank you Vin for being the third eternal verity.  We are so very fortunate to be living in your time.

©2013 Kurt F. Stone

Patrick Michaels Meets His Maker

Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., who spoke out often and brashly against the prevailing view that climate change needs urgent attention, thus becoming a favorite of climate change skeptics and a target of criticism by those advocating action on greenhouse gases and in other areas, died on July 15 at his home in Washington. He was 72. Unlike many climate change deniers, Dr. Michaels had sterling academic credentials; he held a doctorate in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was for decades a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and Virginia’s state climatologist, and had published in scientific journals. At the same time, he was a staunch libertarian who worked hand-in-glove with both the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to spread the word that “The world is not coming to an end because of global warming. Further, we don’t really have the means to significantly alter the temperature trajectory of the planet.”

Michaels was the co-author of several books, including “Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media” (2004) Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know (2009) and “Lukewarming: The New Climate Science That Changes Everything” (2016).  Snippets from these books are frequently recited by climate-change deniers as “proof” that not everyone believes the earth is going to hell in a handbasket or that human beings are the proximate cause.

In short, Dr. Michael’s was to politically-charged climate change denial what such scientists as Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich and Rachael Carson were to such seminal climate change awareness works as The Population Bomb (1968) and Silent Spring (1962).  One huge difference, of course, is that Ehrlich and Carson are still read and quoted by the masses [Dr. Ehrlich, BTW, just turned 90 this past May] while Dr. Michaels is read and quoted almost exclusively by movement conservatives. Ehrlich and Carson are recognized as experts in their field; Dr. Michaels is largely considered an outlier.

What follows, briefly, is an imagined conversation between the recently deceased Dr. Michaels and his maker . . . the Master of the Universe.  In place of the term “G-d,” I have chosen to use the Divine Pronoun “CO,” which as longtime readers know is  to be understood as “He/She” ).

CO: Well, well, as I eternally live and breath; it is you, Dear Dr. Michaels. So sorry to meet you under these circumstances. Please accept my deepest sympathies to your dear wife Rachael and your children, Erika and Robert. It’s been a most impactful and melodramatic three score and twelve.

PM: And whatever do you mean by that?

CO: Well, in a nutshell, that I fully expected far more from you. I mean, you started out your career in Climate science with so much promise, and then, as time went by, you kind of . . . sold out to the highest bidder and turned the pursuit of scientific truth into the divertissement of politics. I well remember that piece you published back in the late 1990s when you predicted that hybrid vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius, “. . . were in the process of finding out that gas is so inexpensive in this country (despite its 40 cents per gallon tax) that no one except die-hard technophiles and hyper-greens are willing to shell out several thousand dollars extra for a hybrid.” I hope you will admit, Patrick, that you were wrong, wrong, wrong.

PM:  With all due respect, I certainly will not!  I was, am and will always be ahead of the scientific curve!

CO:  Oh really? Then how do you account for the fact that the vast majority of your scientific colleagues find your conclusions on global warming to be sorely wanting, and  accuse you of having sold out to petroleum-backed and financed interests like CATO and the Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI)?  I well remember when you accepted a whopping $100,000 donation from a fossil-fuel interest, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, back in  the days when you first joined up with CTI.  I will admit that science can and does include advocacy, but you somehow found a way to profit by it all, for which I find you guity.

PM: With all due respect, dear CO, there have long been scientists who have stood firmly in place against the majority of their so-called colleagues, and were eventually proven to be correct.  Is that not so?”

CO:  Are you really trying to compare yourself to Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler or Semmelweis? To misquote the late Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, “Professor Michaels, I knew Aristarchus, Copernicus, Kepler and Semmelweis, and you, sir, are not they!”  Being eternal, omniscient and omnipotent, I can tell you I really, truly had a Divine Plan in creating the universe.  If you pay attention to the opening chapters of the Hebrew Bible (you called it the “Old Testament”), you will note, I hope, a certain unity of purpose spelled out in the creation the universe.  To wit, the order in which I created it.  I created the oceans before the seas, and the trees before the birds, and virtually everything else before humanity,  Which is to make obvious that neither the seas need the fish nor the trees need the birds.  Nothing which precedes depends on that which antecedes.  And since humanity comes last - the so-called “Crown of Creation” -  this obviously means that nothing depends upon  humanity, but rather that humanity depends on virtually everything.  In other words, dear Professor Michaels, you are wrong, wrong wrong . . . theologically, historically and scientifically.

PM: So what is it you’re trying to say?

CO: That you have placed a major - and G-d forbid fatal - stumbling block in the path toward saving the planet I created; that you have caused so many to ignore - or forget or misinterpret - my very First Commandment to “. . . be fruitful, multiply and act as responsible stewards of the good earth.” In the original, Dr. Michaels, this reads:

                                           פְּר֥וּ וּרְב֛וּ וּמִלְא֥וּ אֶת־הָאָ֖רֶץ וְכִבְשֻׁ֑הָ  (p’ru, u’revu, u’m’l’ooh et ha-aretz v’kheeb-shuah)

PM: I get the feeling that you aren’t terrible happy with me. Where do we go from here?

CO: See that elevator over there?

PM: Yes, what am I to do?

CO: Enter and wait for the doors to close . . . then press the button that takes you to the basement, where most regrettably, you will experience maximal universal warming . . .

Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

Betwixt Optimism and Pessimism There Lies . . .

(Permit me to begin with a word of thanks to Rodger and Madeline Gobel, my friends and congregants who, without knowing it at the time, put a big smile on my face by providing me with an actuality which provided me with the germ from whence this essay evolved.)

Question: when was the last time reading page-one headlines or watching a cable TV news crawler was anything less than a task filled with angst or dread?  (Yes, I know, “angst or dread” is an overly-repetitive redundancy . . . so sue me!)  For those whose answer is something like “I honestly can’t remember” or “Seems like forever-and-a-day,” you are undoubtedly correct.  It’s all too understandable. I mean, consider the menu of malevolence which confronts us on a daily basis: Putin’s maniacal war against Ukraine; teenagers mowing down shoppers and students with AK-47s in Buffalo and Uvalde (which, by the way, has already  passed muster with “spell-check”); the damage done to American politics as a result of the “Big Lie”; our quondam POTUS and retrogressive SCOTUS; the dilatory nature of Congress; the daily gaffs and linguistic lunacies of such Luddites as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis; conspiracy theorists whose every off-the-wall inanity is as acceptable as Sinaitic truth by a growing minority of “true believers”;  higher and higher gas prices coupled with growing inflation;  and on and on and on . . .

 As one who has posted more than 900 mostly political essays over the past 17+ years, there are weeks when it is neigh on impossible to put another 1,000-1,500 words up on the screen.  Complaining, criticizing – even satirizing – becomes sheer drudgery.  And yet, going back to the very first essay (February 4, 2005 - when the blog was called “Beating the  Bushes”), I wrote that its overarching purpose would be “to hold up an honest mirror of the times in which we live, regardless of how complex, maddening or incomprehensible those times might be.”  The past several weeks have been far more complex, maddening, and incomprehensible than many, many others.

And so, this week I will resort to reportage of a more  hopeful sort.  Remember, the subtitle of this blog is “. . . & a Whole Lot More.”   

                      Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia: self-made billionaire and philanthropist

This past Wednesday, May 25, 2022, the senior class at Brookwood High School in Snellville, Georgia, held their graduation ceremony.  Rodger and Madeline were in attendance, kvelling their hearts out; their grandson was one of the graduates.  The commencement address was given by Joe Gebbia, one of the three cofounders of Airbnb,  and a 2000 graduate of Brookwood.  (Gebbia is now chief product officer of Airbnb, the company’s in-house design studio, Samara, and is chairman of Airbnb.org, the company’s nonprofit arm.) His address contained the expected flourishes about following their dreams and never giving up.  The now 40-year old self-made multi-billionaire confided to the graduates that he wasn’t the  most serious of students while attending Brookwood, and admitted “I definitely don’t remember the advice I was given at my graduation. And I don’t expect you to, either.” 

And while few of the 890 graduates are likely to remember what Gebbia said, they will long remember what he did.  Towards the end of his address he said:  “I would like to give you a piece of my dream to help inspire yours and let you know that it is possible.”  He then went on  to inform them that each and every one of the graduates would be getting 22 (for 2022) shares of Airbnb, which works out  to about $2,400 worth of stock per graduate, based on that day’s closing price of $110.40 a share. Altogether it was a gift worth nearly $2.2 million.   

Turns out this gift was by no means Joe Gebbia’s first.  Last year he pledged $700,000 to help boost his school’s arts department and cross country team, both activities he participated in when he was a student. In 2020, he donated $25 million to two organizations in San Francisco (where he and his family live) combating homelessness. Gebbia and his two Airbnb cofounders, Brian Chesky and Nathan Blecharczyk, joined the Giving Pledge in 2016—long before Airbnb went public—promising to donate at least half their wealth to charitable causes.  

Though billionaires often donate to educational institutions, it’s becoming increasingly common for the wealthy to help students directly, especially if a billionaire is chosen as a school’s commencement speaker. Earlier this year, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel paid off the student loans for graduates of the Los Angeles-based Otis College of Art and Design, a gift of more than $10 million. Telecom billionaire Robert Hale Jr. gifted each graduating student at Quincy College in Massachusetts $1,000 each last year. The largest donation to graduating college students, though, comes from private equity tycoon Robert Smith, the richest Black person in America. He spent $34 million in 2019 to pay off the student debt for the entire graduating class of Morehouse College. Smith also gave 15,000 shares of stock from Vista Equity Partners’ portfolio companies to nearly 2,900 students, teachers and staff at Eagle Academies for Young Men, an all-boys school in New York City.

There are now more than 231 billionaires from 28 countries ranging in age from 31 to 98 who have pledged to give away more than 50% of their vast fortunes to charitable causes. Most of this pledging and giving has been done with far, far less fanfare or publicity than those who step on their tongues on an almost daily basis or shoot up schools, synagogues, supermarkets or gay bars. (Just the other day, as an example, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene garnered worldwide attention when she went off the rails, telling her supporters to beware of Bill Gates, who is planning to monitor their eating habits and “zap” them until they eat fake meat grown in a “peach tree dish.” (This is the same woman who, in accusing the Biden Administration of adopting Nazi tactics, accused him of employing “Gazpacho police-to monitor American’s bowel-going habits.

Is it any wonder that a pall of pessimism has enveloped so many otherwise hopeful people? The fact that the utter lunacy of a Marjorie Taylor Greene can garner or an ūber, over-the-top gun supporter like Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks so much more publicity than the generosity of a Joe Gebbia speaks volumes for where we’ve come as a society which is far more often glued to the lunacy of the brainless than the generosity of the accomplished.

Most are familiar with the expression “The pessimist sees the glass as being half empty, the optimist as being half full.” I have long believed that there’s got to be a third option: of being content with the fact that so long as there’s something in the glass that’s a good start. But what do we call these sorts of people (of whom I am proudly one)? I have long believed that laying somewhere betwixt the rosy-hued optimist and the dire, head-for-the-hills pessimist is the possibilist, a term first coined by the late writer/political philosopher/neo-liberal; Max Lerner. For possibilism is far, far better for the stomach than dire pessimism, and far less frustrating to the soul than rosy-hued optimism. And while both optimism and pessimism exist largely in the realm of  weltanschauung - “world view” - which is largely reactive It is the balance of which we speak - possibilism is energizing -  requiring action.  My slightly-older-sister Erica (Riki) just posted a marvelous photo of a heroic looking American Eagle stating what for me is the  possibilist’s creed:

  We are no longer accepting things we cannot change.  It is now time to change the things we cannot accept. 

Three  . . . or four or five . . . cheers for the Joe Gebbias, Brian Cheskys and Nathan Blecharczyks of the world . . . as well as the largely unknown, unsung possibilists of the planet.

Do remember that betwixt pessimism - which always sees the glass as being half empty - and optimism - which sees the glass as being half full - is possibilism - which avers that so long as there’s something in the glass we can throw a party . . . 

 Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone

"There's a Spectre Haunting the World"

We begin by paraphrasing one of the most famous opening lines in all 19th century literature: “There’s a spectre haunting much of the world . . . the spectre of fascistic victimhood.” The literate amongst us will no doubt recognize from whence this paraphraseology comes: the opening paragraph of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), which reads “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre; Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies.”

Leapfrogging ahead 170 years, we find a no less brilliant, prescient and disturbing analysis of contemporary times, which should be read by anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world: Professor Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, which begins with the words “The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas. Those in its thrall deny that ideas matter, proving only that they are in the grip of a powerful one. The cliché of the politics of inevitability is that ‘there are no alternatives.’ To accept this is to deny individual responsibility for seeing history and making change. Life becomes a sleepwalk to a pre-marked grave in a pre-purchased plot.”

Whether it be Marx or Snyder, both are (or in the case of the former, “was”) writing about tremendously dynamic, potentially earth-shattering changes in the political world. Marx wrote about an ancien regime made up of the churchmen, nobles and the ever-growing banking houses of Europe. He (along with his co-author, the German political philosopher Friedrich Engels, was concerned with a new order; one which would lift up the very victims of the ancien regime. In the case of Professor Snyder (he’s the Richard C. Levin Professor of history at Yale University), his focus is also on victims . . . but in a very different way. For his victims are not society’s dispossessed; rather they are the modern era’s version of the ancien regime, being convinced by their leaders that unless they man the barricades against immigrants, Jews, and a vicious “new world order,” they will be taken over by, and become enslaved to, a growing hoard of anti-Christian, “woke,” ultra-liberal Communist immoralists (the American version) or anti-Christian pro-Nazi fascists (the European/South American version). 

Writing in this past Saturday’s The Guardian, Jason Stanley noted that “Vladimir Putin’s pretext for invasion recasts Ukraine’s Jewish president as a Nazi and Russian Christians as true victims of the Holocaust.” To accuse Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, of being a Nazi ranks right up there with the worst lies in all recorded history. President Zelensky is, of course, himself Jewish, and comes from a family partially wiped out in the Nazi Holocaust. For the atheistic, autocratic Putin to recast himself as the ultimate defender of Christian nationalism puts him in league with America’s 45th POTUS, who somehow convinced most Evangelicals that he is the ultimate bulwark against Socialism and immorality. . . and that White Christian males – not Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Jewish or Muslim folk – are modern American society’s true victims. Just as Putin asserts that Nazified Ukrainians represent a lethal threat to the Russian people, so too do Trump and his ilk warn that “ultra-left-wing Socialists and Communists” represent the gravest threat to “real” Americans.  Both believe the enemy must be defeated at all costs.  Between Putin and Trump (and their most avid acolytes) there is barely a millimicron’s worth of distance in their political weltanschauung..

Historically, it was hard-right conservative Republicans who feared and warned of “Reds under the beds” . . . those lurking writers and academics, screenwriters and actors (a huge percentage of whom happened to be Jewish) who were the true enemies of America. Today, the shoe is on the other foot; former President Donald Trump describes Putin as “smart” and “savvy, and, Fox “News’” host Tucker Carlson insists that “Hating Putin, has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious: What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” As far as the Republican right is concerned, Putin is the one standing up to the “Nazified” Ukrainian President Zelensky (who was democratically elected), while President Biden kneels before those who are doing their best to demean and destroy White Christian America. Oh what an unfathomable change of footwear!

How is it possible that the American chapter of the “Friends of Putin” can ignore that this mass murderer has ordered his troops to bomb the largest cities in a Democratic nation which is our ally, as well as deploy TOS-1 heavy flamethrowers (which are capable of vaporizing human bodies) against innocent civilians? How can they aver in poll after poll that Vladimir Putin is a more capable leader than Joe Biden? I guess they just prefer Tom Doniphon (the character played by John Wayne in the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) to Thomas Jefferson ‘Tom’ Destry, Jr.) the character played by James Stewart in the 1939 film Destry Rides Again). As Emily Tamkin, senior editor of The New Statesman wrote in a recent New York Times guest editorial, “The American political right was long associated with Cold War hawkishness. But in recent years the trend has shifted toward fawning praise for autocrats, even those leading America’s traditional adversaries, as well as projecting our own culture wars overseas. Where once Russia and other autocracies were seen as anti-democratic, they have now become symbols of U.S. conservatism — a mirror for the right-wing worldview.“

This “victimization” battle-cry has become both the raison d'être and basis for the platform of one of America’s two major political parties. It tells voters that they - and they alone - can put an end to all the malevolent, progressive (which they spelled either S-O-C-I-A-L-S-T, W-O-K-E or U-L-T-R-A- L-E-F-T- W-I-N-G) conspiracies designed by the “enemies of America” to continually victimize and thus destroy the “real America.”

A frightening proof of this is Florida Senator and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott’s 31-page GOP agenda that he’s dubbed “My Plan to Rescue America.” Scott’s 11-point proposal for what Republicans promise to do should they take back the Senate in 2022 can be summed up in a few chilling sentences:

• Finish construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border -- and name it after Donald Trump;

• Ban all racial disclosures and references to ethnicity on government forms;

• Legally recognize that there are only "two genders," and that "unborn babies are babies."

• Limit absentee ballots and demand that "no ballots that show up after election day will be counted, ever,"

• Mandate that school children say the pledge of allegiance, salute the Flag, and learn that America is a great country;

• Starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism;

• Eliminate all federal programs that can be done locally, and enact term limits for federal bureaucrats and Congress;

• Guarantee that Americans will be free to welcome God into all aspects of their lives;

• Guarantee that every American pay income taxes, so as to assure they have “skin in the game.”

Having lived through eight years of Rick Scott’s governorship here in the Sunshine State, many of us have discovered that as a political leader, he is both hapless and hair-brained. This proposal of his will no doubt - if used correctly by Democrats - become an albatross for Republicans in the 2022 election. For Scott’s lame rescue plan is attempting to solve problems which do not exist . . . such as stolen elections, the teaching of “Critical Race Theory" in public schools, millions upon millions of Americans not paying income taxes (ever hear of payroll taxes?”) illegal immigrants stealing jobs from hard-working Americans. In other words, Scott’s plan, like Vladimir Putin’s, is using the spectre of victimization to keep the legions in line.

But there is some hopeful news on the horizon - both in Europe and America. In Europe, we are daily witnessing both the adroit leadership skills and breathtaking heroism of President Zelensky and the Ukranian people, and the growing unity of our allies in the E.U. and NATO (even Sweden has dropped its centuries-long position of political neutrality). And here in America, it’s not so much what we see as what we‘re beginning to sense: the muteness of the institutional wing of the Republican Party towards the purveyors of victimization - folks like Trump, Scott, Cruz, Hawley, Greene, Carlson and Bannon.

Yes, there is unquestionably a spectre haunting the world . . . but precisely what spectre, only time, tolerance and the truth shall tell.

Copyright©2020 Kurt F. Stone

Coach

Yesterday I received a two-sentence message from an elementary school chum that my oldest friend, Larry Chase, had passed away. As of the moment, there is no further information as to what took his life. The shock and sadness is more than palpable; I cannot imagine a world without him.

                                         Chief Rocky and Pep Duffy

Larry and I met on our first day of kindergarten in September 1954. We were what used to be called “playmates,” played Little League baseball together - although on opposing teams - and were members of the “Sundown” tribe of the Woodcraft Rangers . . . sort of like the Cub Scouts, although only to be found in California. I long remember the four “paths” or “flames” we were taught by our tribal leader Harold “Pep” Duffy: “truth,” “beauty, “fortitude” and “service.”  Back in the 1950s we had a well-known Indian Dance troupe which would travel from place to place arrayed in feathers, bonnets and breastplates - all made and supplied by Wynn Fairchild, who was the major supplier of Indian costumes and regalia for Hollywood westerns.  (That’s me when I was the tribal chief back in 1958, standing next to Pep. So far as I can recall, every “Sundown” mother had a crush on Pep, my mom and Ace’s mom Sally included).

Larry was one of shortest and smallest of the gang. At one point Pep taught us all the art of boxing. When we had our first public bout, he gave Larry the privilege - due to his relative tiny stature - to select who he wanted to go up against. He surprised us all when he chose yours truly - the tallest of the tribe - to be his opponent. He flattened me in the first round . . . and then apologized.

Besides my slightly older sister Erica (Riki), Larry was one of the last people who knew me before the family “got Stoned” back in October 1956. How’s that? As per a ditty our mother wrote and sent out at the time:

“We take this means to verify, the Schimberg’s decision to simplify;
We’ll henceforth be known by the surname of “Stone,”
It’s easy, it’s short, we changed it in court.”

When Larry found out what my new last name was, he immediately dubbed me “Rocky.” Up until yesterday, there were only two people who called me that name: Larry and Erica. Today, I’m sad to say, that number has been cut in half. Ironically, the only one who ever calls me “Schimberg” is my wife Annie.

Larry and I were over the moon when we learned that we were getting a Major League baseball team in Los Angeles; the Dodgers were moving from Brooklyn to L.A! Baseball was a huge part of our lives. As I mentioned above, we played on opposing teams in Little League. I was a member of the “Seven-Up Dodgers,” he the Union-Made Bakery Braves.” Everyone wanted to be on the Braves for the simple reason that their sponsor provided free cake and cookies every time they won a game. It was a great inducement; Ace’s Braves were the best team in the league by a long-shot. Our Dodgers, on the other hand, were at the bottom of the pile; seems that none of us were all that motivated by the offer of a free Seven-Up for every victory. I well remember a game we played against one another; with two outs in the bottom of the seventh inning (the limit in little league), the bases were loaded and it was my turn to bat. Just as I began pawing at the dirt (like my favorite player, Duke Snider), Larry sat down right next to second base proclaiming: “It’s only Rocky; he won’t get a hit. We win!” And of course, I wound up striking out. I actually found Larry’s gesture to me wonderfully funny . . . it did nothing to harm our love for one another.

Ace, by the way, was the one who made me into a right-handed thrower. Being born a lefty (which is great for writing Hebrew and miserable for English), my father naturally bought me a southpaw’s glove. Larry found that to be bizarre, and seeing that I really could throw with little agility, lent me his right-hander’s glove . . . and voila! I became a right-hander. To this day, I can throw much further with my right arm, but far more accurately with my left. Once I started throwing righty, my manager moved me from first base to center field where I would cap off my so-so little league career by throwing out a runner at the plate. Thanks Ace!

                                         Coach and daughter Mere

The Chase family eventually moved from Debby Street to Costello where at the end of the street, mirabile dictu, sat an establishment called “Don Drysdale’s Dugout.”  We naturally assumed it to be a restaurant owned by our favorite Dodger pitcher. Of course we didn’t know it was really a saloon, and just thought it was a place where anyone could go in and see Dodger great Don at table and eating.  And so, we  decided that one day we would go in and get his autograph.  Little did we know that not only was it a bar, but that Don probably never showed up . . . that he had merely leant it his name for purposes of publicity.  Well, going against our parents’ wishes, we did go in . . . only to find out that it contained nothing but a couple of mid-afternoon drunks . . . and no 6’6” Dodger right-hander. To say the least, we were depressed as all get-out. We quickly changed our allegiance from the right-handed Drysdale (who, it turned out, was an alcoholic) to the Jewish leftie Sandy Koufax . . .

Larry was by far the smartest brave in the tribe, and would go on to become a full professor of communications theory at Sacramento State University . . . where he picked up the nickname “Coach.” He was much beloved by his students who found him to be profoundly wise and preternaturally youthful . . . until yesterday.  According to his older brother Richard (“Dickie”) who is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, Coach had been suffering from some heart problems of late, and passed away without notice. . . leaving all of us without a chance for uttering final words of love and admiration.  He is survived by his daughter Mere . . . his beloved wife Terry Jean having passed away several years ago.  

What we have left, of course, are our memories of a shortish Brainiac with a twinkle in his eye and a perpetual smile on his face. I myself will long remember our days as members of the Sundown tribe, that single punch which sent me to the canvas, the many Dodger games we attended together - both at the Los Angeles War Memorial Coliseum and then at Chavez Ravine, hearing the name “Rocky” and having a dear, dear friend who knew us before we all got “Stoned” more than 65 years ago.

Rest in peace Ace, say high to your mom and dad, Pep. Don Drysdale, Gil Hodges, Junior Gilliam and of course, Duke Snider

And please know, you made the world a much much better place . . .

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. “Rocky” Stone

Fwed Astaire Stone Has Now Crossed the Rainbow Bridge

Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a beloved pet has heard of - if not able to recite - the anonymously-written poem The Rainbow Bridge. A simple yet moving poem, it begins with the words:

Just this side of heaven is a place called Rainbow Bridge.

When an animal dies that has been especially close to someone here, that pet goes to Rainbow Bridge. There are meadows and hills for all of our special friends so they can run and play together. There is plenty of food, water and sunshine, and our friends are warm and comfortable.

All the animals who had been ill and old are restored to health and vigor. Those who were hurt or maimed are made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by. The animals are happy and content, except for one small thing; they each miss someone very special to them, who had to be left behind.

They all run and play together, but the day comes when one suddenly stops and looks into the distance. His bright eyes are intent. His eager body quivers. Suddenly he begins to run from the group, flying over the green grass, his legs carrying him faster and faster. . . .

It is with profound sadness that Anna and I must report the death of our treasured Greyhound-mix “Fwed Astaire Stone.” He passed on today, Mother’s Day 2021. Not only has he been as dear to us as any of our children, grandchildren or siblings; he was also Annie’s service dog . . . , her assistant, her legs, her protector. He was everything a dog should be: smart as a whip (he understood commands in English Spanish and Hebrew and loved singing ‘Happy Birthday’ over the phone.  He was also a regular attendant at the closing service (neilah) for Yom Kippur where he would stake out a spot just in front of a large table laden with tons of cans, bags and boxes of pet food contributed by our congregants (and yes, we also collected lots and lots of food for hungry and homeless humans as well). 

Fwed, who would have been 13 this coming August, lived a miraculous life.  He was saved from a parking lot down in South Beach by our kids, Ilan and Nurit.  He was only a couple of weeks old and in terrible shape.  Ilan wanted him, and thought Fonzi would be an ideal name.  Unfortunately, he was in no shape to keep a struggling pup in his apartment, so we quickly agreed to take him in.  However, we told him, since we already had a Chocolate Lab named “Ginger Rogers Stone” (many will remember her; she used to wear a pearl necklace to Friday night services); obviously, he would have to be named after Ginger’s dance partner.  Well, it  turned that the “Star of the Month” on TCM that long-ago August was Kay Francis, a long-forgotten Warner Brothers superstar of the mid-1930s.  Warners paid her a bundle (upwards of $10,000 a week) to wear fabulous gowns and star in what used to be known as “weepies.”  Beautiful, elegant and extraordinarily flat-chested, there was only one problem with Kay: she could not pronounce the letter “r”.  Consequently, the folks in Hollywood generally referred to her behind her back as The wavishing Kay Fwancis.  And so, in her  honor, we naturally started calling the newest member of the family “Fwed Astaire Stone.”

Ginger, who was already at least 12 at the time, took Fwed under her wing and taught him everything he would need to know in order to become a top-flight canis familiarus.  Ginger lived past 15 . . . highly unusual for a dog her size.  The vet who cared for them said that so far as he could surmise, the reason why she lived so long is that she had to complete her task with her baby.  As things turned out, she did an even better job than anyone could have imagined; Fwed, a mostly Greyhound/? mix, wound up having the lithe physicality of her genetic hodgepodge but the personality of a Chocolate Lab.

In addition to Ginger, Fwed’s other instructor was the man who trained the Canine Corps for both the Broward and Palm Beach County sheriff’s department.  To say that he was obedient is to put it mildly.   As mentioned above, Fwed was Annie’s service pooch for years and years, proudly wearing his “uniform” and a perfect gentleman for trips to Publix, the hair cutter and just about everywhere in-between.  Wherever he traveled, people would stop, marvel at how handsome and well-behaved he was, and ask if it was alright if they petted him.  “That’s up to him,” we  would always say . . . ask him.”  At a restaurant, he would lay on the ground on his travel blanket right by Annie’s seat; an “I’m on duty” look on his face.  

Fwed could never thank Ilan and Nurit for saving his life and then providing him with your spouses, Amanda and Scott as two more people to love.  He was the best Tio (Spanish for “Uncle”) to Claire, Mia and Lucas, and would cry with tears of joy whenever he saw  and played with them.  

What a gentleman!  Ironically, my late mother had, for the last 12 or more years of her life a special friend named Fred.  We always had to be careful to make it known which Fred we were referring to in conversation.  Eventually, they became either “Florida Fwed” and “California Fred,” or else “Four-legged Fwed” and Two-legged Fred.”  The one time they met, it was love at first sight.

And so now, Fwed Astaire Stone has crossed the Rainbow Bridge and been reunited with Ginger Rogers.  They are both free and can continue that special love they shared for nearly three years.  But what is that Bridge?  To me, The bridge is a mythical overpass said to connect heaven and Earth—and, more to the point, a spot where grieving pet parents (otherwise coarsely called “owners”) reunite for good with their departed furry friends.  It will be a long time before we remove the three beds belonging to him or his many stuffed animals (which after all these years are still in perfect condition) or beloved uniform from the hat track near the front door.  Whether we continue putting water in his bowl and biscuits in his jar  . . . it is far too early to tell.  What we do know is that he was a world-class dog; one who loved being a dog had a loving fascination for cats and a great singing voice. 

The poem ends with the words:

You have been spotted, and when you and your special friend finally meet, you cling together in joyous reunion, never to be parted again. The happy kisses rain upon your face; your hands again caress the beloved head, and you look once more into the trusting eyes of your pet, so long gone from your life but never absent from your heart.

Then you cross Rainbow Bridge together….”

Fwed: please give hugs and kisses from all of us to Panchito, Ginger Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt and Buster Keaton, and your/our beloved cats Rocky, Malka, Toby, Shlomo and Figaro and let them all know that we speak of them daily and still love them with every fiber of our being.

Copyright©2021 Kurt F. Stone

One Generation Got Old, One Generation Got Soul

Surrealistic Pillow (1967) - Marty Holding Flute at Top Left

Spent several hours yesterday - and most of the night - watching and listening to old Jefferson Airplane songs and online videos. These songs, many of which were anthems for a generation, brought tears to my eyes . . . especially Marty Balin’s pulsating Volunteers. As many of you know by now, Marty (born Martyn Jerel Buchwald in Cincinnati, Ohio on January 30, 1942) died on Friday; he was 76. Balin had an amazing voice - one of the greatest in the history of Rock ‘n Roll. With that voice he could, in the words of New York Times writer John Parles, “. . .offer the intimate solace of ballads like Jefferson Airplane’s “Today,” the siren wails of a frantic acid-rocker like the group’s “Plastic Fantastic Lover,” or the soul-pop entreaties of Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles.” Although Balin always scored high with the public and rock connoisseurs for his pliable, powerful voice, few ever recognized the depth and quality of his lyrics; at base, Marty Balin was a poet.

And now he is dead at age 76 . . . which is sounding younger and younger all the time.

Marty was by no means the first member of the Airplane to pass away. In 2005, their drummer, Spencer Dryden (the son of Charlie Chaplin’s half-brother Wheeler) passed away at age 66 from cancer. On January 28, 2016 both Airplane co-founder Paul Kantner and the band’s original (e.g. pre-Grace Slick) singer Signe Toly Anderson passed away at age 74. Unbelievably, Grace Slick, the one member of the band everyone assumed would be first to go due to her excessive lifestyle, is still alive, flourishing and will turn 79 four weeks from today. Think about it: Grace Slick (that’s her standing next to Marty on the album cover above) is nearly EIGHTY YEARS OLD!! But then again, it is an absolute mind blow to consider the current ages of the rock musicians who played the musical score of our formative years:

• The Nobel Prize-winning Bob Dylan is 78;

• Eric Clapton is 72, as are The Who’s Pete Townsend and CCR’s John Fogerty;

• David Crosby (Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) recently turned 78;

• The Rolling Stone’s Sir Mick Jagger is 75;

• The Kink’s Sir Ray Davies is 74;

• The Animals Eric Burdon is 77;

• The Hollies Graham Nash is 76;

• Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are both 77;

• Former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr is 78 and still touring, as is his band mate

• Sir Paul McCartney, who is 76.

As I was completing this terribly brief list, a faint memory began to wend its way from the old neocortex to my frontal lobe: a brief piece of fiction I wrote in 1969, shortly after Rolling Stones’ drummer Brian Jones accidentally drowned in a swimming pool; he was all of 27. (Ironically, both Jimi Hendrix and the Doors’ Jim Morrison, who dedicated, respectively a song and a poem to Jones, would die within the next two years . . . at age 27.) Anyway, while contemplating Jones’ death, I began imagining how his eulogy would have read had he died at, say 75, or 80 or even 90? From there, it was but a short hop to writing a fictional news-story about the death of the last surviving Beatle - “Lord McCartney” - at age 93. The year in the story was 2035. Regrettably, the story, which was published in the long defunct City on a Hill Press, was long ago lost to the ravages of time. What I do remember is that it carried the screaming headline “I’M ONLY SLEEPING” - LORD MCCARTNEY, LAST SURVIVING BEATLE PASSES AWAY AT AGE 93. The “I’m Only Sleeping” part of the title came from a Lennon-McCartney song included in their 1966 album “Revolver.” It included the lyric:

Please, don't wake me, no, don't shake me
Leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping

It just seemed to fit. As I recall, my purpose in writing the piece was to engage in a bit of prophecy; what the world would be like more than 65 years later . . . what kind of an effect the generation of peace, pot and beads would have had on the world. As I recall, McCartney was made a Life Peer not only for his stellar contributions to music, but also for the important role he had played in bringing peace and harmony to the world. He had spent the last decades of his life traveling the globe, playing his music and contributing virtually ever cent he earned from these concerts to organizations working to feed, clothe and offer free healthcare to people all over the world.

A bit idealistic, no?

I also recall the story containing a bit of levity: interviews with the extremely aged fans who used to shriek and shout when, as teenagers, they went to Beatle concerts in England, America and throughout Europe. Although they frequently suffered from a bit of memory loss, when came it to John, Paul, George and Ringo, everything was crystal clear . . . as if the concert they had attended were only yesterday.

With the real-life passing of Marty Balin, I know I’m feeling a bit less immortal than last week. When I recall attending smallish rock gatherings headlined by The Great Society and The Warlocks (as The Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead were known back in 1965/66) my memory informs me “Hey bro, like that was more than a half-century ago . . . ya ain’t a hippy anymore!” Funny though, I don’t feel all that much older . . . regardless of what I see in the mirror. Like a lot of aging boomers, I still - despite the current shape of politics and the world - continue to be fueled by a mixture of idealism and anger and refuse to retire from activism; refuse to sit back and do nothing but complain while others turn the world into a capacious cesspool. We are still, in the words of Marty Balin, Volunteers of America, the lyrics of which go:

Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Hey, I'm dancing down the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Oh, ain't it amazing all the people I meet?
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
One generation got old
One generation got soul
This generation got no destination to hold
Pick up the cry
Hey, now it's time for you and me
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Hey, come on now we're marching to the sea
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Who will take it from you, we will and who are we?
Well, we are volunteers of America (volunteers of America)
Volunteers of America (volunteers of America)
I've got a revolution
Got a revolution

Look what's happening out in the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Hey, I'm dancing down the streets
Got a revolution (got to revolution)
Oh, ain't it amazing all the people I meet?
Got a revolution, oh-oh
We are volunteers of America
Yeah, we are volunteers of America
We are volunteers of America (volunteers of America)
Volunteers of America (volunteers of America)

Back in the day - when Balin, McCartney, Dylan, Clapton, Townsend et al were in their twenties and an oft-repeated battle cry was “Don’t trust anyone over the age of 30!” we marched, protested and campaigned, seeking, as volunteers, to change the world. We were pegged as a generation of long-haired, stoned-out Communistic irreligious immoralists who were all desperately in need of a bath . . . if not a mass delousing. Collectively, we played a pivotal role in ending the Vietnam War, passing Amendment XXVI of the U.S. Constitution (which lowered the voting age to 18), getting people to recycle, and fighting for the rights of women, the LGBTQ community and the impoverished of the planet . . . plus the legalization of marijuana. Although we grew older, many of us, I am proud to say, never truly grew up.

And we still have all that great music.
Rest in Peace, Marty

“Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting, my friend.”

(We Can Work It Out, Paul McCartney, 1965)

Midterm elections are 5 weeks from today . . . VOTE!!!

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone

Distraction, Diversion and Political Optics

     (Kudos to Sandy Gotttstein, Alaska's gift to the world, for contributing to this piece in more ways than she will ever know . . . )

            John Carlos and Tommy Smith at the 1968 Olympics

By now, , after more than 16 months of  off-the-wall Trumpian weltanschauung, it is clear that whenever the President begins flying too close to the flame of political immolation, he unveils a diversionary issue bound to keep his base both delighted and in thrall.  Most recently, as the Mueller investigation continues picking up Republican support;  the administration continues forcibly taking migrant children from their parents and placing them in separate detention centers, to “deter” illegal immigration; and the world waits and watches as '45 keeps flip-flopping on tariffs and that summit with Kim Jong-un,  what does he do?  He turns up the heat on the various  National Football League (NFL) players who have been refusing to stand for the National Anthem prior to kick-off.  Now mind you, this isn't an issue that just began; it's been around the sports world for more than half-a-century.  Many will remember the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico when African-American 200 meter medalists Tommy Smith and John Carlos both raised a black-gloved "human rights salute" during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner.  The two received their medals from David Cecil (the 6th Marquess of Exeter) shoeless but wearing black socks to represent black poverty. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to represent black pride, while Carlos had his tracksuit unzipped to show solidarity with blue-collar workers. (n.b. Smith went on to a brief three-year career in the NFL before becoming a longtime professor of sociology at Santa Monica College; Carlos, who was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles but never played due to a severe knee injury, became a track and field coach at Palm Springs High School. In 2008, the two were honored with the Arthur Ashe Award for Courage at the 2008 ESPY Awards.)

Fast forward nearly a half-century, and we find San Francisco Forty-Niner quarterback Colin Kaepernik first sitting on the ground (3rd pre-season game) then from the 4th pre-season game onward, taking a knee during the playing of the National Anthem.  When queried by the national media, he explained "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder", he said, referencing a series of events that led to the Black Lives Matter movement and adding that he would continue to protest until he felt like "[the American flag] represents what it's supposed to represent."  As in the case of Smith and Carlos in 1968, few people paid attention to what Kaepernik's underlying motives were in carrying out his protest; of what he was truly saying. Most simply attacked him for being unpatriotic, for desecrating the memory of all those who fought and died for our freedoms, and for showing utter disregard for the flag and all that it has long stood for.  And, as with Smith and Carlos, Kaepernik's professional sports career has all but ended because of his protest.  

By continually attacking those NFL players who have been kneeling during the National Anthem, '45 has accomplished several things:

1. Getting the NFL to set a policy which mandates that those players who do not stand during the singing of the National Anthem will remain in their respective locker rooms until the anthem has been completed . . . and that any player who does not obey this mandate will be fined;
2. Shifted the political optics away from such issues as Mueller, children of immigrants, tariffs and North Korea towards a group of largely minority millionaire gladiators;
3. Set up a potential issue for the 2018 midterm elections (e,g., "Yes or no: are you for or against the flag and all it stands for?" a question whose complexity demands far more than a monosyllabic response.)
4. Shown that the POTUS - like an awful lot of Americans - haven't got the slightest idea about the background, history or meaning of the Star Spangled Banner, nor what the law has to say about it or the flag it represents.

While most Americans know that the words of the Star Spangled Banner were written by Francis Scott Key (1779-1843), few know that he served as the decidedly pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist United States Attorney for the District of Columbia for nearly a decade. Nor do many know that his poem,  written in 1814 and set to the tune of a popular British song called To Anacreon in Heaven, consists of four stanzas and did not officially become our National Anthem until 1931.  It contains some decidedly racist lyrics: in the 3rd stanza, as but one example, we read No refuge could save the hirling and slave/from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave /And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.  When Key wrote these words on the back of a letter 204 years ago, the "land of the free" definitely did not include African Americans or non-citizens.  When I was in grade school (during the height of McCarthyism) our teacher, Miss Collette, had us sing all four stanzas every day at the beginning of class:

For those who do not have access to audio or video, here are the four stanzas:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
’Tis the star-spangled banner—O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I personally challenge the president and any member of his Cabinet (or Congress) to sing any (if not all) of these stanzas correctly.  And as for the president's suggestion that those football players who do not stay out on the field of play and sing our National Anthem should be be deported, this flies in the face of a 75-year old decision by the United States Supreme Court: West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette.  While this decision specifically dealt with the illegality of forcing school children to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Justice Robert Jackson noted for all time that ". . . we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds. We can have intellectual individualism and the rich cultural diversities that we owe to exceptional minds only at the price of occasional eccentricity and abnormal attitudes. When they are so harmless to others or to the State as those we deal with here, the price is not too great. But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order."  Some will argue that the court's decision only applies to public places like class rooms, court rooms and city hall chambers - not to privately-owned spaces.  Maybe yes, maybe no.  But do keep in mind that a large percentage of professional sports' stadia (and the land upon which they have been erected) have been underwritten with public tax dollars which, by definition, makes the West Virginia State ruling apply to them as well.  What legal strategy is '45 and his Justice Department going to use to deport American citizens?  Where is he going to send them?  Guantanamo?  Back to Africa?  To Neptune or Mars?

At least one NFL team co-owner - the Jets' Christopher Johnson - has gone on record as saying that while his personal preference was for his players to stand on the field during the singing of the National Anthem, that fines related to national anthem protests “will be borne by the organization, by me, not the players. . . .I never want to put restrictions on the speech of our players,” he said. “There are some big, complicated issues that we’re all struggling with, and our players are on the front lines. I don’t want to come down on them like a ton of bricks, and I won’t. There will be no club fines or suspensions or any sort of repercussions. If the team gets fined, that’s just something I’ll have to bear.”  One wonders how long it will take for the next NFL owner to break with both the POTUS and league commissioner Roger Goodell, who is paid in excess of $35 million a year plus the lifetime use of a jet.  After all, this is a world in which billionaires abound, making unfathomable sums through the gladiatorial efforts of the multimillionaires they employ.  That even one should show independence is a good sign . . .

So let the POTUS try to divert our attention from issues that truly matter with political optics that are as disturbing as anything ever created by Edvard Munch.  We shall neither be deceived, diverted nor distracted, for we are, when all is said and done, "The land of the free and the home of the brave."

494 days down, 978 days to go.

Copyright2018 Kurt F. Stone

Death of a Beloved Blue Blood

                                             Senator John V. Tunney (1934-2018)

Coming from the Spanish term sangre azul, "blue blood" derives from the medieval European belief that the blood of royalty and nobility was blue. In more common usage "Blue Blood" also refers to old money families that have been aristocrats for many, many generations. In America, these "blue blood" families include the Rhode Island Pells Chaffees and Whitehouses, the Cabots, Lodges and Saltonstalls  of Massachusetts, as well as the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the du Ponts and the Carnegies. 

The last of these, Andrew Carnegie was a 19th century steel baron who, upon his death in 1919, gave away an estimated $370 billion (in 2017 dollars) to charity. One of his partners, George Lauder - who was also Carnegie's cousin -  held on to his money and bequeathed it to his children. One of these children, daughter Mary Josephine "Polly" Lauder, inherited an unfathomable amount of money. She would become a doyenne of high society,  marry the World's Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Gene Tunney (the "Fighting Marine") and bear several children. One of their sons, John Varick Tunney (born in 1934), who would become both a three-term member of the House of Representatives and a one-term United States Senator from California, died a week ago at age 83. Not only was he the living, breathing definition of a  Blue Blood; he was also a progressive, an important environmentalist, and both a friend and political mentor of mine . . .

When I first met John Tunney, he had just been elected senator after having served three terms as a Representative from a California district which included Riverside and Imperial County - about as far away from Blue Blood land as one could get. John Tunney was raised on a 200-acre estate - "Star Meadow Farm" - near Stamford, Connecticut, and was the product of prep schools (New Canaan Country School and Westminster Prep), Yale, and law school at both the Hague and the University of Virginia (where his roommate was childhood friend and future Senator Edward Moore (Ted) Kennedy. Despite this highly privileged background, John would become one of the most progressive senators of his era. In his first term ( 1970-72), Senator Tunney wrote and passed an unbelievable 38 bills - next to impossible for a freshman. And these bills weren't the normal kind of 1st year bills like the naming of post offices or a private bill guaranteeing benefits for a veteran.  These were bills dealing with environmental protection (he played a pivotal role in passing the original Endangered Species Act), civil and voting rights and noise pollution. He also took a leading role in keeping the United States from becoming entrapped in the Angolan Civil War.  Because he spent so much time working on - and passing - seminal legislation, voters in California concluded that he didn't really care all that much about them; as a result, Senator Tunney was defeated for reelection in 1976 by S.I. Hayakawa, a former president of the University of San Francisco and a political novice.  (It has long been presumed that Tunney was model for the Robert Redford roll in the 1972 film The Candidate).

Saying "There is nothing sadder than a 42-year old former senator hanging around Washington," Tunney returned to California where he joined the most politically prominent law firm in the state (despite the fact that he really did not need the money) and became involved in environmental causes such as Living with Wolves, an organization dedicated to raising consciousness of the animals' importance. For many years he headed the board of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. And spent time traveling the world and living variously at homes in Brentwood (CA), Manhattan and Sun Valley, Idaho.

At the time I first met John Tunney and his family (including his son Edward Marion "Teddy" Tunney, named after Senator Kennedy), I was helping a group of anti-war members of Congress prepare for the upcoming "March on Washington." A mutual acquaintance got me lodging at the senator's home on Tracy Place in Georgetown.  During my time with him, we spoke quite a bit about war and peace, books (his father the fighter was notorious for reciting Shakespeare in between sparring rounds) the nature of politics and the importance of forging alliances with "the people on the other side of the aisle."  He also strongly urged that if I eventually decided to make a career in politics, it would be best to remain "in the shadows" rather than run for office.  "In that way," he told me more than once, "you can at least go home at night, get more things done, and step into a restaurant without being besieged."  Of the many political folks I've  had the fortune to be associated with over the past 5 decades, Senator Tunney - despite his background - was one of the most down-to-earth. There was scarcely a hand-breadth between his public and his private personae. 

Despite being a political powerhouse, John Varick Tunney was truly humble.  He had it all . . .and gave the world his all.

Rest in peace Senator.

373 days down, 1,184 days to go.

Copyright©2018 Kurt F. Stone

Are We Living In a Dystopian Novel?

Literary scholars (of which I am definitely not one) have long debated what the first dystopian novel was.  Some claim it was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); others say the honor belongs to either French writer Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863) or British author H.G. Welles' The Time Machine (1895); then there are those who swear the honor belongs to one of two American novel: either Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890) or Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908).  It is likely that some readers of The K.F. Stone Weekly have not yet read - nor heard of - several of these classic works,  and as such, are likely unable to define the term "dystopian." However a brief rendering of some of the most famous novels in the genre - Kafka's The Trial, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games - should give at least a hint as to the definition of dystopia.  Simply stated, dystopian novels, stories or movie adaptations deal with an imagined future time, place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad - typically a totalitarian or environmentally degraded one. In other words, "dystopia" is the bipolar opposite of "utopia."  

In light of the many changes that have radically altered civil society over the past generation or two - and especially since the advent of the Internet - and a populace conditioned to view reality through the lens of "optics" -many of the most dire and frightening predictions of great dystopian novels have come chillingly true.  Consider, if you will, brief summaries of a handful of dystopian novels; the pictures they paint are haunting:

• The Iron Heel (1908): Focusing on the breakdown of politics in a future American society, Jack London imagines the rise of an oligarchic tyranny which bankrupts the middle classes and rules over its poor subjects with a crass, uncaring iron heel;
• 1984 (1949): George Orwell creates a highly disturbing future world of "Newspeak," and "Big Brother," in which 2+2=5;  hot is cold, up is down, constant surveillance and a government-controlled media;
• Fahrenheit 451 (1953): America has become a society in which books are burned and intellectual thought is illegal. Ironically, when first published, Bradbury's book was itself banned for containing "questionable themes";
• The Drowned World (1962):  A vivid picture of a world irreversibly changed by global warming; the cities of Europe and America lie submerged in tropical lagoons, while a biologist cataloging flora and fauna is beset with strange dreams.
• The Handmaid's Tale (1998): Set in a totalitarian, post-nuclear world, Christian theocracy has overthrown the US government. Women are forbidden to read, and the few capable of having children are subjugated and forced to serve the wider needs of society by becoming breeding machines.

What makes these - and many, many other - dystopian novels so chillingly, mind-numbing is how closely they approximate the direction American society has been taking over the past several decades.  The rise of cyber reality, untrammeled, self-centered consumerism, instantaneous hand-held communications, creeping authoritarianism, a rising tide of religious and ethnic intolerance, a growing distrust of science, and a penchant for accepting the most outlandish conspiracy theories as reality, has changed society a thousand times over. Today, as in dystopian novels, there exists a sizable plurality which disdains those they view as effete intellectuals, derides those who hold different opinions on matters of race, politics or sexual orientation, and despises those who will not walk in lockstep with their anointed leaders.  These are people who have been conditioned to turning a blind eye toward provable facts, all the while claiming that these facts are nothing more than lies promulgated by elitist elements for their own purposes. 

Of all the many disabilities and outright lies '45, Bannon, Limbaugh, Fox News, conspiracists like Alex Jones and white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke have foisted upon American society, perhaps none is quite so diabolic - or brilliant - as that of "Fake News."  For over the past several years, they have trained and conditioned their Pavlovian followers into believing that anything in print, on the Internet or broadcast over the airwaves which does not jibe with their preconceived notions of reality is a big fat lie; a lie spread by the Fake Media.  This is utterly brilliant.  All '45 or his lieutenants have to do to negate something in the news which questions their facts or veracity is to proclaim that they are part and parcel of the "Fake News" conspiracy. 

Sometimes the Fake News angle goes beyond belief. Take General Jon Kelly's press conference the other day in which he denounced Florida Congressional Representative Fredrecka Wilson  for having given herself credit for the construction of a new FBI building in Miami.  Turns out that a video taken of that event by the Ft. Lauderdale News Sun Sentinel proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Rep. Wilson never said any thing of the sort. Turns out, that according to General Kelly and presidential press secretary Sarah Sanders, the Sun Sentinel video was a hoax; just another example of Fake News being perpetrated by the liberal mainstream media.  

Other examples abound - going back to that which got the future '45 his first political notice: "birtherism."  Polling done during the 2016 election showed that two-thirds of the Trump supporters knew for a fact that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, is to this day a practicing Muslim, and was sent here as a child for the purpose of eventually turning America into an Islamic nation.  Then too, '45's rabid base still "knows" that he scored the "biggest victory" in the history of presidential elections, and had more people attend his inauguration than any president in the modern era.  And how do they know these things when facts, photos and statistics prove them wrong?  Why their fearless leader told them so!

Oy!

And while one can easily respond with "Don't lose too much sleep over it; these crazy people represent far less than a majority," I say this: members of this "crazy plurality" represent some of the most heavily armed people in America.  Whether '45 knows it or not, the people who consciously created this Republican base (the very base which '45 and most of the cowards in Congress spoon feed) have their own frightening, dystopian agenda: to create a Civil War; a conflict which will pit the followers and descendants of the Old South, Joe McCarthy, Charles "America First!" Lindburgh and the Koch Brothers against the descendants of FDR, Kennedy, King and Obama . . . not to mention Richard Hofstadter who, while not a dystopian novelist, did, back in November, 1964, write one of the most important dystopian essays of all time: The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

I for one do not wish to live within the pages of 1984. The Chrysalids or The Running Man. My choices tend towards George Eliot's Middlemarch and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward  where at least idealism still has a chance.

264 days down, 1082 to go.

Copyright©2017 Kurt F. Stone

This Is Serious . . . Very, Very Serious

                                     Indy and Short Round

Up until late yesterday, I was fully prepared to devote this week's essay to '45, North Korea and the insane rhetorical brinkmanship going back-and-forth between the two nuclear nations.  Of how the POTUS has, whether consciously or not, taken a page from Richard Nixon's "I'm madder and badder than thou" playbook in order to scare the pants off of Kim Jong-un, and how '45's North Korean counterpart has ratcheted up his rhetoric to proclaim that his ICBM is " a gift for the American bastards" even as he promised a missile launch in the direction of Guam. I was looking forward to comparing '45's oratorical flourishes ("fire and fury like the world has never seen," as well as "locked and loaded,") to those of his North Korean counterpart, and quoting Asian sources who are now wondering aloud just who is more dangerous - Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un?  I was even thinking about putting in a word or two about '45's wild and woolly threat to take military action against Venezuela. 

I even had what I thought was a pretty good title containing just a soupçon of satire: This Is Serious . . . Very, Very Serious," which as any Indiana Jones aficionado knows, was said  (in slightly abbreviated form) by cinema's favorite archaeologist/adventurer when he and "Short Round" (a.k.a. "Shorty") were trapped in a death room as long-bladed swords began slowly and ominously descending from the ceiling. This scene and quote was of course in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

And then along came the horrifying events of the past 24 hours in Charlottesville, Virginia, which shoved my original essay into the "maybe next week" column. The one thing I have salvaged from the North Korea/mutually assured insanity/utter chaos at the White House piece is the title, which works just as well . . . if not better.

This Is Serious . . . Very, Very Serious. 

At this juncture, there is little need to go into much detail about the "Unite the Right" atrocity which took place in the town along the Rivanna River; constant cable coverage has pretty much made any such recap unnecessarily redundant.   For certain, this is a story that will continue receiving coverage for many days, if not weeks to come.  And among the media sidebars we should expect will be pieces putting faces on the leaders and major perpetrators, as well as informative (and no doubt chilling) sketches about the roughly one-dozen jack-booted, tiki-torch and Confederate flag-bearing, armed White Power, pro-Nazi, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic groups that gathered in the shadow of the University of Virginia and Jefferson's Monticello.  Their goal? According to their leaders, to protest the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a nearby park. Their not so hidden agenda? To come to physical blows with any and all counter-protesters, thus sending a visual message to those who support their twisted, hate/fear-inspired Weltanschauung.  We know what they are and who they hate: Jews, African Americans, the LGBTQ community, Muslims, environmentalists, Democrats . . . indeed, anyone who doesn't look or think like them.  What they fear is that America is no longer "theirs."  In their rheumy eyes, America has been taken over by the dregs of society and must be stopped.  

What took place on the streets of Charlottesville was obviously not spontaneous.  Rather, it was the product of months of not-so-hidden prodding and planning and a couple of generations of growing, twisted psychopathology.  Seeing the torch-bearing hundreds wearing their various uniforms, brandishing guns, rifles and automatic weapons while chanting the old Nazi refrain Blut und Boden ("blood and soil") was - and is - a stark reminder that something serious . . . very, very serious . . . is taking place in the United States.  To wit, a growing and technologically savvy minority of miscreants who want to return to a time when America was controlled by White Men; when Jews, African Americans, women and immigrants knew their place and all heroes looked and sounded like John Wayne.   

Rhetorical responses to the Charlottesville massacre - in which, as of this writing, 3 have died and more than 2 been dozen injured - have ranged from the predictably outraged to the shockingly hateful to the toxically tepid.  A smattering of statements and Tweets:

• David Duke, former head of the KKK (who attended the "United the Right" rally) called is "a turning point" in the effort to help people like him "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump."
• Richard Spencer, co-editor of AltRight.com Tweeted "We came in peace. It was the police and antifa(cists) that used force against peaceful, lawful demonstrators. 
• The POTUS's brief comment to the press was, to say the most, less than room temperature: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides. What is vital now is a swift restoration of law and order and the protection of innocent lives."  Among the questions he ignored at the end of his statement were  "Do you want the support of these white nationalists?" and "Do you think the violence in Charlottesville should be considered terrorism?"

Responses to 45's comments varied greatly:

• Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT): "We should call evil by its name. My brother didn't give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home."
• Senator Cory Gardner (R-CO): "Mr. President - we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism."
• Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL): "Very important for the nation to hear @POTUS describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists."
• Andrew Aglin, Founder of the Daily Stormer (a neo-Nazi, white supremacist, alt-right website): "['45] refused to even mention anything to do with us. When reporters were screaming at him about White Nationalism he just walked out of the room."
• Barack Obama quoted Nelson Mandela: " . . . for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite."
• Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT): "No Mr. President. This is a provocative effort by Neo-Nazis to foment racism and hatred and violence.  Call it out for what it is."
• Even Anthony Scaramucci '45's former Communications Director (he lasted less than 2 weeks) insisted “I think he needed to be much harsher as it relates to the white supremacists, you have to call that stuff out.”

Hours after these responses to his public comments - both negative and positive, the Tweeter-in-Chief took to the internet and wrote "We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!"

Again, he did not specifically condemn the alt-Right, white supremacist or Neo-Nazi perpetrators. This is serious . . . very, very serious.

If '45 really, truly wants to "condemn all that hate stands for" he could start by immediately - and very publicly - firing:

• Stephen Bannon, his White House Chief Strategist  and former Executive Chair of the far-right Breitbart News and
• Sebastian Gorka, his far-right, anti-Semitic Deputy Assistant, who came to his boss's inauguration wearing a badge, tunic, and ring of the Order of Vitéz,  a far-right group listed by the State Department as having been " . . . under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany' during World War II." (It should also  be noted that Gorka's mother Susan worked closely as a translator with David Irving, the discredited historian described by a judge as a "Holocaust denier … anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."

Alas, there is every reason to believe that '45 would gladly fire Bob Mueller and/or A.G. Sessions before he'd ever let go of Bannon and/or Gorka . . . and for the same reason: he doesn't want to do anything that would possibly alienate his beloved "base."  For it's his base - which apparently includes white supremacists, neo-Nazis, racists and anti-Semites - that ultimately gives him the adulation and ego strokes which keeps his emotional/psychic furnace ablaze.  It's this base that that makes him feel real, feel alive . . . feel presidential.

And this is serious . . . very, very serious.

Copyright©2017 Kurt F. Stone