Stumble of the Week

The Democrats. The last time there was a major recall election in this country, Gray Davis was sent packing from Sacramento and Arnold Schwartzneggar ended up governor of California. Then the housekeeper surfaced with the love child, and Maria Shriver filed for divorce. So before you push for a recall, you better have your ducks lined up, which the Democrats in Wisconsin did not. As a result, they suffered an embarrassing loss: Scott Walker won more handily than he had the first time and became in the process a Tea Party icon. Outside groups poured millions into the race, with Walker getting the lion’s share of the record-setting $80 million total. Teachers. The backlash against teachers in the wake of the Wisconsin vote is kind of breathtaking, at least on talk radio, where self-styled anti-intellectuals hold kangaroo court. It may seem counterproductive for a country that constantly wrings its hands over the state of its education to treat its teachers so shabbily . . . until you realize that many of the hand-wringers blame teachers for the state of our education. In a nation where both teachers and students go into some urban schools just hoping to survive, where school boards insist that creationism belongs in the science curriculum, and where the exploration of new ideas is considered a subversive activity, teachers have enough on their plates without being made the scapegoats of a problem we need to solve together.

History Lesson

Herb Reed and William Lee Miller have almost nothing in common, other than that their obituaries appeared side by side in yesterday’s newspaper. Reed was the last living member of the original Platters, the 1950s pop group that recorded “The Great Pretender,” “Only You” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” They were one of the first so-called crossover groups, whose songs appealed to both white and black audiences in an era when “race music” was banned in much of the South.  We now call it “rhythm and blues.” Miller was a historian who wrote popular books abut the national debate over slavery. In addition to biographies of Abraham Lincoln, he wrote Arguing About Slavery, the story of the “gag rule,” which forbade any petition about – or even discussion of – slavery on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams spent the last years of his life fighting and finally repealing the rule.

Almost 120 years separated the introduction of the first gag rule in 1836 and the release of “The Great Pretender,” the Platters’ first number-one hit, in 1955. A lot had happened in between: The Civil War; the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South after a brief interlude of Black progress; the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education mandating public school integration. And yet, despite the Platter’s enormous success across racial lines, they still had to play for segregated audiences in the South. “There was still so much prejudice everywhere,” remembered Reed. “How could you enjoy it?”

The Good Drone

Sixty-eight years ago this morning, allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches and began the push through France that would end the war in Europe within a year. World War II, known as “the Good War,” was the deadliest war in history. Over 60 million people were killed, more than 2.5% of the world’s population. Yesterday, a CIA drone strike in Pakistan killed Abu Yahya al-Libi, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader, in what we are told is a major blow against terrorism.

Why does the world not seem safer this morning?

Because the war on terrorism is the current century’s equivalent of “the good war,” we justify the use of unmanned drones to seek out and kill people thousands of miles away. But the program seems at least morally uncertain and, in the long run, strategically counterproductive.

Exactly a week after D-Day, the Germans unleashed a barrage of unmanned V-1 rockets that did far more damage to Britain than had the entire Blitz. Three months later came the V-2, which, according to Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London, “traveled faster than sound and approached their targets in total silence.”

There is a huge distinction between Hitler’s rockets, which were weapons of indiscriminate destruction, and the drones, which are infinitely more precise. And yet, the latter are clearly descendents of the former, which, wrote Evelyn Waugh, were “as impersonal as the plague,” bringing death suddenly from the sky.

Both weapons killed; neither brought victory to those who used them; and in Germany’s case, the rockets led to Nuremburg.

Crude

In 1967, Texaco (now Chevron) discovered huge reserves of oil beneath the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, a roadless place whose indigenous inhabitants had virtually no contact with the outside world. That swiftly changed, as Texaco and its partners built roads and even an airport into the jungle to extract billions of barrels worth trillions of dollars. They left behind 18 billion gallons of toxic sludge. Or so the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Amazonian people claims. That suit has been going on since 1993, and last year, in an unprecedented ruling, an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay $18 billion. It will be a long time – if ever – before the company hands over a dime. In fact, it responded by suing the plaintiffs’ American lawyer, Steven Donziger. But the real motivation is less to save the money (Chevron recorded a record profit of $26.9 billion in 2011) than to send a signal. As a company lobbyist said to Newsweek, “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.”

I teach a documentary about this case, “Crude, The Real Price of Oil,” whose maker told Mother Jones, “I hope that the film sends the message out that you should be very aware of where your products come from and how companies act in your name.”

I hope as well that it makes people look closer to home, where the forces behind gas “fracking” are making the same promises and behaving with the same arrogance as Chevron has in Ecuador.

Gaydar

A recent study by two psychologists concludes that “gaydar” – the ability to gauge sexual orientation simply by looking at someone – is real. Participants, who were shown photographs of men’s and women’s faces for 50 milliseconds, demonstrated “above-chance gaydar accuracy even when the faces were presented upside down. Accuracy increased, however, when the faces were presented right side up.” Skeptical, I did some digging and came across several similar studies, including:

Afrodar. As the antebellum and Jim Crow South discovered, this is much easier to determine in theory than in reality . . . although, interestingly, the darker the skin color, the more likely respondents were to classify the person as Black. Overall, however, a greater percentage of participants correctly identified Norwegians.

Jewdar. Participants demonstrated a complete inability to distinguish Israelis from Arabs, with one exception: if the head had a yarmulke, 100% identified him as a Jew.

Gendar. Fully two-thirds of respondents (67%) correctly identified the gender, a figure that increased to 92% when photographs of full-frontal nudity were shown. The margin of error was +/- 3%.

WASPdar. The study was aborted when the photographers were denied access to the country club.

Catholodar. 72% of participants correctly identified people emerging from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Ash Wednesday as Catholics. 28% thought they were Hindus.

Fidar. The ability to identify dogs turns out to be breed-dependent. While English Toy Terriers were often misidentified as  rodents, all but one respondent recognized the Great Dane as a dog. The lone incorrect answer was “Hamlet.”

Stumble of the Week

Yesterday Buddy Roemer announced, “I am no longer a candidate for President of the United States." Who knew? I was reminded of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who discovered World War II was over when he came out of a Philippines jungle and surrendered his .25-caliber rifle in 1974.

Of the entire collection once touted as major Republican candidates, only Ron Paul is left (oh, and Fred Karger, the gay-rights advocate who has so far received 3,805 votes). Despite my horror at the time, I kind of miss the mind-boggling prattle and those who uttered it in the endless debates:

• Michele Bachmann, who turned out to have her own birther issue, as she had secretly held Swiss citizenship since 1978.

• Herman Cain, who was finally taken seriously on Stephen Colbert’s ticket.

• Newt Gingrich, whose self-righteous bombast could not conceal all those stories about his ex-wives.

• Jon Huntsman, Jr., the self-proclaimed moderate who got clobbered early and often.

• Gary Johnson, whose platform to legalize marijuana got him laughed out of the Republican fold . . . and nominated by the Libertarians.

• Tim Pawlenty, who ran for so long that people forgot who he was. Well, he’s now on Romney’s vice-presidential short list.

• Rick Perry, whose performance in one debate caused a journalist to ask if he had suffered a stroke.

• Rick Santorum, who almost convinced his party to nominate a 21^st-century Torquemada.

• The Donald, who will simply never go away.

All these candidates had one common goal: to prevent Mitt Romney from getting the nomination. They couldn’t even do that.

Doc Watson

Doc Watson died on Tuesday. Yesterday I listened to some of the recordings he made over his long career and, while I have little musical knowledge and less talent, as Justice Stewart famously said of pornography, I know beauty when I see it . . . or in this case, hear it. Years ago I used to ask myself: who has made a greater difference to the world, Mozart or Napoleon? Winston Churchill or Paul Cezanne? This was not an idle question because I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, and one of my aspirations was to leave behind some small legacy. I thought bigger in those days, but the question was really: who has a more lasting influence on the world – those who seek to create something beautiful, often by withdrawing into a private world, or those who are driven to immerse themselves in public affairs?

I was brought up firmly in the latter camp, taught that leadership meant service to others and being fully engaged in public life, not in the self-absorbed worlds of artists and dreamers. My history books told of the lives of “doers” – generals, statesmen, titans of industry, even, in the modern versions, rebels and labor leaders. Artists were relegated to sidebars in catchall chapters on culture.

But art endures, as empires don’t. And artists have borne witness in ways history texts don’t capture. And beauty seems a greater legacy than conquest.

And Doc Watson, blind since infancy, sure could play.

The Other Priest

Michael Doyle came to Camden, New Jersey, in 1968, sentenced to serve in one of America’s poorest parishes because of his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. He was 33 and arrived with all his worldly belongings in the back seat of his Chevrolet. He has been the priest at Sacred Heart ever since, and has watched Camden go from destitute to desolate. After 9/11 a young parishioner told him that he felt safe in the city . . . because anyone flying above it would think the terrorists had hit it already. Father Doyle is a man of deep faith, who has chosen to serve his God by devoting his life to serving Camden’s poor, accepting as a given his own life of poverty. He writes monthly letters to church supporters that are filled with compassion, and also with sadness, with anger, and occasionally with despair, as he bears witness to what he calls a national crime: the urban neighborhoods where America has discarded its poorest people and delivered its most toxic wastes. Among Camden’s abandoned buildings and violent crime, New Jersey has sited a sewage treatment plant, a trash incinerator and a dump.

“The threat to the future of this nation is not in Iraq,” he wrote a few years ago, “but in the inner core of our deadly cities. If only we had a national guard with hammers and saws and marines who did nothing but plumbing.”

Michael Doyle’s letters are the basis of a documentary, “Poet of Poverty.”

The Butler Did It

We were what you might call an Easter Christian family. On the one Sunday of the year when we made it to church, the congregation was overflowing and, because we were late, we were usually ushered to a pew in the front. When the minister announced, “There are a lot of new faces here today, we welcome you, and we hope we will see you before next year,” I felt he was looking directly at me. And I knew enough theology to understand that this was not a good start on the road to the afterlife. Even so, we were brought up to honor clergy as (in those days) men who had given up the pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasures to dedicate their lives to seeking spiritual truths. They had, we were taught, an extra magnitude of goodness. We counted among our family friends a future Episcopal Bishop of New York and a Trappist monk . . . and while few wanted to emulate the monk, all treated his decision with reverence.

So the continuing revelations of “the biggest scandal to rock the Vatican in decades” stun me. And they continue to take their toll. Last week, the president of the Vatican bank was forced out. Yesterday the Pope’s butler was arrested. The pope's butler?

Of all the “Vatileaks” revelations, the one for which I was least prepared is not the allegation of nasty internal power struggles, institutional corruption, money laundering or even mob connections. It is that the pope has a butler.

Memorial Day

There is no easy way to write about Etan Patz. We were living in New York’s east village, just a few blocks from where the six-year-old boy disappeared 33 years ago. Our first child was almost two. So the news reports hit close to home. In those days the abduction of a child seemed a rarity. It was before Megan’s Law. Before Brian David Mitchell took 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart to be his “second wife.” Before 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard spent 18 years in a series of sheds and gave birth to two children.

Etan was the first missing child to have his face on a milk carton, and for many of us he will always be that impish and innocent little boy – the adventurous first grader who begged his parents to let him walk alone to his school bus stop just one block away – until they finally relented on May 25, 1979. Now designated National Missing Children’s Day, it was also the date last Friday that police charged Pedro Hernandez with Etan’s murder.

But while Etan’s smile has remained stopped in time, our lives have not. We have grown older, perhaps had our own tragedies. But I will not forget that face.

The death – or worse, the disappearance – of a child puts unimaginable pressures on a family. At first, it draws them closer, but people cope in different ways, heal at different rates, if at all. For many couples the death of a child ultimately brings the end of their marriage.

Etan’s parents still live in the same loft on the same street in Soho. In 33 years of indescribable pain, they have given us an image of extraordinary grace.

Stumble of the Week

Update. A reader asked whether Harold Simmons (May 24) really was the biggest PAC donor? Bigger than the Koch brothers? Because of the current ability to give both personally and through corporations, it is becoming as hard to trace the money as to pierce the veil of Simmons’ empire. I think Simmons is still the largest individual donor, but Huffington Post reports that the Kochs solicited $100 million to defeat Obama at their recent retreat for rich right-wing donors – and they pledged $60 million themselves. So, in this unsavory contest, Simmons’ lead is clearly in jeopardy – but not nearly as much as the democratic process. Horse Racing. Barely two weeks before he saddles “I’ll Have Another” for the final leg of the Triple Crown, trainer Doug O’Neill received a 45-day suspension for doctoring a horse, a charge he denies. The suspension kicks in after the Belmont Stakes. With its heavy gambling, sorry ethics and abuse of horses, the “sport of kings” has become the “sport of thugs.”

Harvard is apologizing profusely for printing the updated profile submitted by Ted Kaczynski for his 50^th-reunion report. The Unabomber (Harvard 1962) listed his profession as “prisoner” and counted “eight life sentences” among his awards.

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark and Obama insider, is also apologizing for his public criticism of the campaign’s attacks on Bain Capital. Booker’s real mistake was trying to make a complicated argument in an arena that reduces everything to its lowest common denominator. See Steven Rattner’s piece for a good analysis of the issue.

American Dream

Harold Simmons leaves a bad taste in your mouth. One of America’s richest men, Simmons was born in poverty in rural Texas and has subsequently amassed billions through an arcane holding company that shields him from responsibility for the trail of toxic sites he has strewn across America. One of those sites is an abandoned NL Industries property on New Jersey’s Raritan River. Simmons bought the former National Lead in 1986, acquiring both the company’s assets and its considerable liabilities. It would appear that if you exploit the assets and stonewall the liabilities, you can make a lot of money out of toxic metals.

Last evening I gave a program in environmental justice for the New Jersey Council of the Humanities, which opened with the documentary, “Rescuing the River: The Raritan.” New Jersey is trying to clean up the Raritan, whose waters historically sustained some of the nation’s largest industries. Parts of the river now sustain nothing at all, primarily because of the toxic wastes those industries have left behind. It is a crime repeated along countless rivers across America. The Raritan’s biggest culprit is NL industries.

Perhaps coincidentally, Simmons is a huge philanthropist in Dallas and the largest individual contributor to SuperPACs in the country. As of March, he had give $18 million. Although Rick Perry was his first choice, he has subsequently contributed to every Republican candidate.

But there's hope: Simmons’ foundation, which is run by his daughters, supports immigration rights, campaign and prison reform, gun control and reproductive rights.

Is More Better?

After determining that China has been “dumping” its heavily subsidized solar panels on the U.S. market, the Commerce Department recently imposed duties of 31 percent on imported Chinese panels. This set off the predictable debate about free trade and protectionism, trade wars and global capitalism, the economics of alternative energy and Chinese currency manipulations.

It’s way too complicated for me, but a debate on NPR yesterday pitted US panel manufacturers against panel distributors and an environmentalist from the Rocky Mountain Institute. The manufacturers pushed for the tariff because of what they claim is China’s drive to create an international monopoly. By unfairly subsidizing its manufacturers, they argued, China has undermined the U.S. domestic industry – and ensured the transfer of thousands of jobs overseas.

The others raised concerns about the impact of substantially higher panel prices on the still-fledgling efforts to shift America from fossil fuels to alternative energy, and they forecast continue dependence on “foreign oil” and increased contributions to global warming.

Despite the variety of their views, they were united on the need to produce more of what all accepted as an unmitigated good: sustainable energy. In the last depression Americans were promised a chicken in every pot; in this one it is a solar panel on every roof.

But one reason we are in this mess is because of our insistence that more is better, that we can have our cake and eat it too. In a finite world, maybe we can’t – and maybe it’s time to talk, not just about alternative sources of energy, but about alternative ways to live.

Viva Las Vegas

An old friend and I were driving around our childhood neighborhood last weekend, when we passed a decrepit and long-abandoned shack along the road. I recognized it instantly. “Hey,” I said. “Remember Wally’s Ski Shop?”

“Sure do,” he said. “Wally won the lottery . . . The next day he closed up shop and took off.”

The lottery has replaced the American Dream as the way to wealth. In Pennsylvania, where it’s celebrating its 40^th anniversary, billboards urge the public to “play every day.” But the multi-billion-dollar market may be reaching its saturation point, and states are finding it ever harder to sell ever more tickets. So governments must constantly come up with new games and gimmicks to fill their coffers.

The main difference between state lotteries and the TV car salesman who jumps out of the trunk waving a giant cardboard price tag is that the money the states so generously give away comes out of the pockets of their own people – and in particular of those who are least able to afford it and most addicted to trying.

Of all the hidden taxes we pay, the lottery is the most regressive. And in their frantic search for revenues that don’t seem like taxes, the governments have become as addicted as the players.

Maybe it’s time to have an honest conversation about the need to provide essential public services and a fair formula for distributing the cost of doing so. But that would be a tax, which is, of course, unthinkable. The states have a better idea.

Casinos.

Stumble of the Week

The Eponymous Mr. Pitts.  The office of Joseph R. Pitt (R PA) is desperately trying to tamp down the laughter after the veteran Congressman sent a letter to a constituent declaring: “With the global war against terrorism, it is now incumbent on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Yasir Arafat to clamp down on Palestinian extremists that have perpetuated violence and to restart a peace process that has collapsed.”

There was no immediate response from Arafat, who died in 2004, or Sharon, who has been comatose since 2006.

Pitts, a former member of the International Relations Committee, is seeking his 9^th term (despite his public pledge to limit himself to five). One of the House’s most right-wing members, he was tapped as a freshman to chair the Values Action Team, which is the liaison between “traditional values oriented Members and similarly-minded citizen groups.”

Despite his ideology of small government, Joe has dined without interruption at the public trough since 1972, first as a member of the state legislature and then, since 1996, as a Congressman. As a result, he will receive two hefty pensions (including the largest legislative pension in Pennsylvania), numerous perks, and the best health insurance that our money can buy.

I’m not saying “I told you so,” but I did run against Joe Pitts in 1996.

Roger Clemens Trial Update.  Injections also seem needed in the jury box, as Judge Reggie Walton dismissed the second juror in a week for sleeping during the trial.

All Our Trials

America has long been known as a litigious society, its people just itching to haul somebody into court. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as settling matters at trial seems preferable to dueling with pistols or “necktie parties” in the woods. The courts have declared the right to sue inherent in the first amendment, and the fairest judge I ever knew told me never to sign that right away. But we don’t need show trials to publicize repellent behavior, and two current proceedings strike me as complete wastes of taxpayers’ money – because smarminess, however destructive, is not crime. The prosecutions of John Edwards, the politician, and Roger Clemens, the pitcher, have cost millions of dollars, and the testimony at each seems more appropriate to daytime television than a court of law.

Since taking steroids was not a crime when Clemens played baseball, he is being tried for perjury; and Edwards’ verdict will turn on whether the money Bunny Mellon and Fred Baron funneled to him violated the campaign finance law or was simply to cover up his creepy behavior. We’ll never know, since Ms. Mellon is 101 and Mr. Baron is dead. In any event, that seems a distinction without a difference.

Meanwhile, a trial of huge significance began yesterday at The Hague, where Ratko Mladic, the “Butcher of Bosnia,” is charged with war crimes and genocide. The United States led the effort to bring prosecute those crimes after World War II, although the Bush administration subsequently refused to recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

It seems almost criminal that we waste millions on Edwards and Clemons when real and appalling crimes are being prosecuted at The Hague.

Let Them Read Books

This is an observation, not a statistical analysis, but I have noticed a phenomenon lately on which the pundits have yet to remark – and that is the number of homeless people on New York City’s streets who read books. Many are young, some have their dogs with them, and most stare so intently at the page that, other than the pleas written on cardboard with magic markers, you might think they were students on class break. What people make of this probably depends on their politics.

For some, it must be more evidence that English majors can’t even flip hamburgers. Or that the new hippy generation is too lazy to work. Or that the schools really have failed, not because kids can’t read but because that’s all they can do.

Others may think of their own children’s struggles to get work in this economy. Or find the sight of able-bodied, literate young people begging in the streets a social rather than a personal problem.

Maybe these kids go back to their parents’ apartments after their stints on the sidewalk. But maybe they are part of the city’s homeless population, which has reached it highest levels since the Great Depression.

In fact, almost every statistic about the homeless in New York is an “all-time record”: Over 40,000 people are homeless each day, including 10,000 families and 17,000 children. Over 100,000 different people use the city’s shelters each year, and city authorities have no idea how many others sleep in the streets, the subways and the parks.

Play the Game

I am reading Adam Hochschild’s riveting story of World War I, To End All Wars. Born into a family that made a huge fortune in mining in the late 19^th century, Hochschild became a civil rights and anti-war activist early in life and co-founded Mother Jones magazine in the mid-1970s. As such, he is in a prime position to write about the war’s loyalists and dissenters, groups with wonderfully arcane British twists – such as the fact that Sir John French, the first commander of British forces, and Charlotte Despard, anti-war activist, future communist and IRA sympathizer, were brother and sister. Hochschild writes insightfully about the British penchant to see war as a game, to equate fighting with competition, and to honor sportsmanship on both the playing field and the battlefield. In particular, he notes the impact of Sir Henry Newbolt’s “Vitaï Lampada” (“The Torch of Life”) – a poem I still sometimes hear declaimed by grown men in school ties – which compares war to cricket and urges its young heroes on both fields to “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

This was a creed that made the British general staff exceptionally unsuited to the devastation of industrial warfare, the ugly reality of the trenches and the mind-boggling casualties – military and civilian – of World War I.

In an unrelated matter, I lost at squash yesterday, and I’m still pissed.

Unrelated? Well, maybe it’s better to think of a game as war, rather than of war as a game.

Joe, Bob and Me

“We have all these huge issues, and we’re bogged down in whether Joe can marry Bob.” Gay marriage has gone from an abomination to a diversion.

The charge is not new. Democrats have long accused Republicans of exploiting “social issues” to play to their evangelical base – and so giving the party’s real powers the cover to dismantle the welfare state. Indeed, I have done that myself. Republicans, by contrast, now assail Democrats for playing the gay card to deflect attention from the economy.

But gay marriage is not a tangential matter. It is a defining issue of today’s politics. It is part of the ongoing struggle for America’s soul.

As a country we are at our best when we expand the rights of people. Those efforts have never come without fierce opposition – from the mid-19^th century when a tiny group of abolitionists were dismissed as fanatics to the mockery of suffragettes to the murder of civil rights activists. And marriage has long been a focal point. When I was a child, it was a mortal sin for a Catholic to enter a Protestant church, let alone get married in one, and it was not until 1967 that a unanimous Supreme Court declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional.

When I ran for Congress in 1996, my position on gay marriage was “evolving.” I knew the right answer. I was just too chicken to give it. It’s a lot easier to stand up now, but it is not too late.

Stumble of the Week

Buddhism. Perhaps jealous of the recent notoriety gained by Catholic priests and Muslim jihadists, Buddhist monks in South Korea’s largest order were videoed drinking, smoking and gambling huge sums of money at a seaside resort just days before the Buddha’s birthday. J.P. Morgan Chase. How can a company whose founders include J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers be so bad at investing? Fittingly, for an organization that displays Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr’s dueling pistols at its headquarters, the bank lost $2 billion the now old-fashioned way: credit derivatives.

Joe Biden stumbled last week when his public support for gay marriage forced President Obama’s evolving hand. All has been forgiven at the Oval Office, and the expansion of human rights has received a shot in the arm. Here’s hoping that next week Biden stumbles over TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline.

Human Rights fared less well in North Carolina, where an overwhelming majority of voters – in a state that already has a Defense of Marriage Act – passed a constitutional amendment just to be super sure. “We are not anti-gay,” said the movement’s leader, “we are pro-marriage.” Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who have had seven wives between them, are elated.

Switzerland lost one of the most famous citizens it never knew it had when Michelle Bachmann renounced her dual citizenship, saying, “I have always pledged allegiance to our one nation under God, the United States of America.”

Stereotypes. Pam Shaw, whose stage name is “The Sexational Pam,” says she is now ready to give up her virginity to the right man. Ms. Shaw is 70 years old.