Love Story

“Old age ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis, famously said. And she had a point. Things just don’t work as well as they used to. The body breaks down. The mind goes with it. And the memory? Don’t ask. “It ain’t what it used to be,” pitcher Dizzy Dean said of his right arm, “but what the hell is?” But if old age isn’t for sissies, neither is adolescence or middle age, early childhood or any other of the ages of man. And growing old has its compensations. We were lucky to get here, however broken down we are. And we have seen enough along the way to know the role luck played in the journey, which is the source of whatever wisdom we have. Knowing our days really are numbered can create a sense of gratitude and excitement for each one of them that perhaps the young don’t yet appreciate.

Last Saturday Ada Bryant and Robert Haire were married. He is 86. She is 97. As beautifully described by Margaux Laskey, their courtship was as filled with romance and fraught with angst as any other. “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me,” said Ada. “But he said, ‘That’s all the more reason.’ I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”

“Those who love deeply never grow old,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “They may die of old age, but they die young.”

"Trustworthy, loyal, helpful . . .

. . . friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent." Full disclosure: I have never liked the Boy Scouts. Many years ago I joined the Cub Scouts, mostly to get the blue-and-gold uniform so I could reenact western cavalry campaigns in the back yard. I was an indifferent scout, forever behind in the pursuit of my next badge or arrowhead. Born during World War II, I found the image of smiling blond adolescents and their adult leaders espousing the strenuous life, dressed in uniforms that featured short pants and chest medals, frightening even then. Anyway, my mother was hardly the den mother type, so I always had to go to meetings in other boys’ basements.

Later, when I published a newspaper in rural Pennsylvania, the Boy Scouts were a constant thorn, demanding coverage but refusing to recruit minority members – even after the United Way defunded them for discrimination. The Girl Scouts, by contrast, reached out to everyone, eagerly seeking Spanish-speaking members among the growing population of migrant workers.

Yesterday’s reports that the Boy Scouts are considering lifting their longtime ban against gays seem suspect. Under intense corporate pressure (UPS threatens to stop its funding; the Family Research Council counter-threatens to boycott UPS), the Scouts appear ready to punt on a national policy change and kick the issue to the local level. It’s time for an organization that suppressed thousands of internal files documenting decades of sexual abuse to clean up its act and open its doors.

Hagel

The nomination of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense illustrates again what so many politicians and pundits keep missing – and that is how fundamentally centrist the Obama administration has been. That may change in the next four years, but I would be surprised. My sense is that Obama has generous instincts on human rights and dignity issues, which drive, for example, his health-care initiative. The communitarian philosophy that his right-wing antagonists denounce as socialism, seems more an effort to build an inclusive consensus than to impose a big-government solution. And his foreign policy seems intent on building a similar consensus internationally by returning to the principles Thomas Jefferson set forth in his first inaugural: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Nowhere is this rethinking more necessary than with Israel, and the time seems propitious: last week’s elections showed that Israelis themselves are tired of the intransigent politics of their leaders. Chuck Hagel is well qualified to lead the effort to reconsider our defense policies there and elsewhere. His experiences under fire in Vietnam gave him a skepticism about war, whose glories are so often touted by those who avoided its carnage. And it’s worth remembering that the department he will lead changed is name from War to Defense in 1947. But that hasn’t penetrated to the people now mounting an unprecedented public and well-financed attack on Hagel’s nomination. Leftovers from last fall’s SuperPACs, they embody big money's continuing and insidious determination to have its way.

Stumble of the Week

The first reminder of how much the world of air travel has changed came with the $25 fee for my checked bag. “I’ll pay cash,” I told the agent, who replied, “A credit card is faster.” How is that possible? I wondered, before realizing that (1) my entire adult life is contained on the magnetic strip of my Visa card and (2) there is no need to hold greenbacks to the light to see if they are counterfeit. Thus began three hours of non-stop marketing. Upgrade your seat for $29. Purchase extra bonus points so we can do this again. Buy snacks. Swipe your card and watch TV ($5.99 for short flights, $7.99 for longer ones). I foresee the day when your ticket will only get you onto the gangway to participate in an auction for the 23 middle seats that weren’t presold. Once on board, you’ll need your credit card to use the toilet, where toilet paper and soap are extra. Ice in your drink? Two-fifty, and of course you’ll want a cup. Swipe your card.

Already, you don’t get a whole seat. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but each row has only four armrests for  six arms, assuming everyone has two, and the knee jockeying often requires an unannounced lowering of your tray table on your neighbor’s thigh. Although the TV screen threatens to go blank if I don’t swipe my card, it keeps rolling out one ad after another for the entire flight. Finally something's free, and I can’t get rid of it.

Shoeless Joe

In the other election, Roger Clemens received 214 votes for baseball’s Hall of Fame; fellow first-ballot candidate Barry Bonds got 206. Both fell far short of the 427 votes needed for induction. Clemens ranks ninth in victories and third in strikeouts in the history of Major League pitching, while Bonds holds the season and career records for home runs. Until confronted with allegations of steroid use, which they vehemently deny but cannot shake, they were shoo-ins for the Hall. But their performances seemed to defy human limitations and, particularly in the case of Bonds, their bodies – at least those parts visible to the public eye – seemed weirdly changed. But they looked into the eyes of the press, the public, prosecutors and the United States Congress and flatly denied they had juiced – as Lance Armstrong had done, and as Pete Rose had denied he bet on baseball. Bonds, Clemens and Rose have joined Shoeless Joe Jackson as the greatest stars kept out of the Hall. Jackson is by far the most sympathetic figure. Born to sharecroppers, working by age six as a "lint head " in a textile mill, and illiterate, Jackson became one of the best players in history. He allegedly admitted – but subsequently denied – being part of the effort to throw the 1919 World Series. Acquitted by a jury, he was banned for life from the game he loved and swore he never betrayed. It was Jackson to whom a tearful young boy supposedly said, “Say it ain’t so, Joe?” What boy would say that now?

The Second Inaugural

I cannot wait to be part of the next four years. President Obama’s speech, so masterfully crafted and so mercifully short, called on all of us to embrace the ideals of our past as we work to transform the future of our world. “With common effort and common purpose, . . . let us answer the call of history and carry into an uncertain future the precious light of freedom.” That is the essence of America at its best, and it is fitting that, 150 years after Gettysburg, a man who is half-black and half-white should stand up and tell us so. Obama built his speech on the bedrock of American exceptionalism, which has of late become a touchstone of conservative politicians. But he hardly expropriated their ground, for the belief that America was founded on ideals that make it a beacon for the world is ingrained in the three defining documents of our history – the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Each specifically harks back to those that came before, and Obama repeatedly references every one of them. Each summons the nation to live up to its stated ideals and to honor its past, not by worshipping at its altar, but by building a new future on its foundation. Each expands the definition of community – “Seneca, Selma, Stonewall;” “the poor, the sick, the marginalized” – and all make clear that “our journey is not complete.” And thank God our government has finally acknowledged global warming.

Courage

I missed the president’s inaugural speech yesterday because I was part of a panel commemorating Martin Luther King’s visit to a small boys’ school in 1963. As I listened to the tape of King’s speech, I thought of the impact his presence had on me then, and I also thought that, despite all the changes of the intervening years, including the events in Washington, King could have given much the same speech today. As I listened to my co-panelists – Bill Forsyth, who spent 1964-5 in Mississippi with the Congress of Racial Equality, and Roger Daly, who registered black voters in Alabama with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – I was reminded of the courage of so many people of all races in those years. Bill was arrested three times. Roger, who was arrested four times, was finally driven from the South after one man held a gun to his head and three others beat him to a pulp. He had been our football captain, and a want of aggression had not marked his character, but nonviolent resistance was the hallmark of the civil rights movement, and for Roger, who had always hated bullying, nonviolence was the cornerstone of his commitment. We should not forget that all the violence of those bloody days was perpetrated by one side, and Roger spoke of living in constant fear, of being a double outsider – hated by whites and mistrusted by fearful blacks – and of being ashamed of leaving. I write to honor both his courage and his honesty.

Fifty Years Ago

Later today I will participate in a panel discussion honoring the 50^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to a small school in rural Massachusetts where I was a high-school senior. I wrote about his visit a year ago, and today’s ceremony takes me back to the 1960s, which was the formative decade of my life. It is a time now often disparaged because, it is said, it ended up glorifying violence and led to the narcissistic backlash of the “me generation.” Popular culture instead reveres what Tom Brokaw branded “the greatest generation,” a phrase that has always stuck in my craw. For that was that generation against whom my own was in rebellion, not because we saw our elders as an undifferentiated collection of other-directed organization men in gray flannel suits (as some books of those days described them), but because we saw a country, entering into unprecedented economic prosperity after a devastating depression and a global war, which was reacting violently to the demands of a people who were, in Dr. King’s words, “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” a country that ignored an environment that featured a dying Lake Erie and a burning Cuyahoga River sending flames five stories in the air, a country that was itself engaged in a devastating conflict in southeast Asia. And while we were sometimes attracted to false prophets, we were struggling to change things we believed needed to be changed. They still do.

Stumble of the Week

A Friday feature (revived) Journalism. Today is the day management has threatened to close The Philadelphia Inquirer and/or sell its assets if the unions don’t deliver $8 million in givebacks. Whatever happens today, it has been quite a tumble for America’s third-oldest daily newspaper and long one of its best – in 15 years under editor Eugene Roberts The Inquirer won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. But how the mighty have fallen: In 1993, The New York Times paid $1.1 billion for the Boston Globe, a paper very similar to the Inquirer, whose current owners bought it for $55 million a year ago.

Lennay Kekua is not dead! It should be good news that Manti Te’o’s 22-year-old girlfriend did not die, as reported, from leukemia last September, following her hospitalization from a serious car accident. In perhaps the most inspirational story of 2012, Notre Dame’s all-American linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up played a monster game after learning that both his long-time girlfriend and his grandmother had died earlier the same day. In the weirdest story of 2013, Lennay turned out to be a hoax. Overall, it was a bad week for big sports: Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds didn’t come close to election to Baseball’s Hall of Fame; Lance Armstrong demonstrated on “Oprah” that he is a pathological liar; and Lennay never existed.

Pornography. The dirty movie industry has launched a stiff protest against Measure B, which requires actors to wear condoms, claiming that Los Angeles County’s new regulation violates filmmakers First-Amendment right to make movies they way the want.

Life of Orion

Before offering even the most minor restriction on guns in America, advocates must genuflect to “the hunter.” Alone in nature, with only his rifle for food, survival and protecting the vulnerable, the hunter has become an icon of America’s mythic past and a guardian of its present values. I have no quarrel with hunters, although I don’t see why the attitudes of those who shoot animals – that are often beautiful and that do not shoot back – should be the sacred touchstone of gun policy. In one of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons, two young bucks look over a woods teeming with men with guns, and one says to the other, “Why don’t they thin their own damned herds?” And so Congress has cast a cold eye on the regulations the president proposed yesterday, addressing an issue that no candidate dared even to touch in the last election. Obama’s “sweeping” package seems a modest list, which includes renewing the 1994 assault-weapons ban; prohibiting the sale of magazines with over 10 rounds; banning the possession of armor-piercing bullets; toughening gun-trafficking laws; and requiring background checks for all gun sales. The NRA responded with a repellant video that called Obama an “elitist hypocrite” because his daughters have secret-service protection in their school.

The proposals do not seem to gut the Second Amendment. Whether they will help thwart future killing sprees, I don’t know; but restricting some people’s access to some weapons seems a more hopeful step than arming everybody in sight.

A Noble Profession

The day Gene Patterson died, Greek anarchists set off bombs in the homes of five journalists. There was no direct connection between the legendary editor’s death in Florida and the explosions in Athens. But it focused my attention on the state of modern journalism and the vulnerability of those who practice it. Patterson was a giant: as editor of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1960s, he became the conscience of the South, demanding justice for Blacks while explaining the complexities of his region to the rest of the country. Later, at The Washington Post, he oversaw the publishing of the Pentagon Papers. He was a man of enormous courage. In Greece, journalists are being attacked from all sides, part of a worldwide assault on the press. Three issues are combining to create the lethal situation. The first, and by far the most serious, are attacks on the press and its practitioners, fomented by sitting governments and marauding thugs. The attacks are political, psychic, physical – and effective: 70 journalists were killed last year and six already in 2013. The second is the profession’s own self-destruction, as bad reporting, crass partisanship and corporate greed have shattered public respect for the institution. People wanted to kill Eugene Patterson, but they never questioned his integrity. Finally, the old economics of journalism no longer work. As the only business specifically protected by the Constitution, journalism is a unique combination of private enterprise and public trust. If we neglect the second part of that equation in pursuit of the first, the dead reporters will have died – and Gene Patterson will have labored – in vain.

Clarence Speaks

Yesterday Associate Justice Clarence Thomas spoke publicly from the bench for the first time since Feb. 22, 2006. According to the Supreme Court’s official transcript, Thomas broke his almost-seven-year silence with the words, “Well – he did not —.” One Court analyst called those four words “perhaps the most important speech in Thomas’ 21-year career on the bench” – although no one in the courtroom seems to have any idea what the enigmatic jurist actually meant. Professor Emily I. Dunno, who teaches linguistics and constitutional law at Southern Indiana Law School, pointed to the dashes for insight into his potential meaning. “Half as many dashes as words,” said Dr. Dunno. “That’s a lot of dashes.”

There are various explanations for Thomas’ taciturnity. He has written that he is self-conscious of his rural southern accent, and at other times has said he comes to listen not to talk, and that his verbose colleagues make it hard to join the discussion. My own thought is that asking questions will only muddy the thoughts in Thomas’ rigidly made-up mind.

It hardly seems more than two decades since the Bush administration cynically pushed through a man, who openly resented the idea of affirmative action, to replace Thurgood Marshall, the civil-rights titan who insisted on the justice of such action to confront three centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Thomas was confirmed 52-48, the smallest margin in over a century, and his subsequent silence has obscured the extremity of his opinions on an increasingly right-wing Court.

Our Trillion-Dollar Baby

I had somehow missed the discussion about the trillion-dollar platinum coin, which the Treasury Department would mint under a creative reading of a 1997 law that authorizes the production of commemorative coins. The coin would be deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank, where it would sit in splendor, like a beneficent monarch, enabling its country to carry on without Congressional action on the debt ceiling. The idea has met with much ridicule. But I love it. It brilliantly combines the hard currency demands of those who support a return to the gold standard with the cheap money of the Populist free silver and greenback traditions. All of American history can be read as a recurrent battle between the advocates of “hard” money (let’s call them Creditors) and “soft” money (let’s call them Debtors). Creditors want money to be as rare as possible so they can squeeze the blood out of those in their debt. That’s why we call them bloodsuckers. Debtors, by contrast, want cheap money so they only have to pay back 47 cents for every dollar they borrowed. That’s why we call them the 47 percent.

The plan is that, when Congress finally raises the debt ceiling and the coin is no longer needed, it will be destroyed. But that seems like a terrible waste of money – and obviously we are going to need that coin soon again. So I think we should give it to the Chinese as a memento of our entangling financial relationship . . . and as full payment on a trillion dollars of debt.

A Samoan Tragedy

I was, to put it mildly, a modest high-school football player on a team of which our coach noted, “We’re small, but we’re slow.” Junior Seau and I had nothing in common football-wise – except that I once had a concussion that knocked me loopy, sent me to the infirmary, and that I wore as a badge of honor until I started reading about chronic traumatic encephalopathy. CTE is a degenerative brain disease – a close relative of boxing’s “dementia pugilistica,” which is just “punch drunk” dressed in a toga – that can only be diagnosed in the brains of the dead. To the living it brings early-onset Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s disease, often in the prime of life. Seau was 43 last May when he went home and put a bullet through his chest, preserving for science the brain that had brought him to suicide. Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health confirmed that it was riddled with CTE.

The CTE story is much like the global-warming story. The scientific evidence is beyond dispute, but the culture refuses to accept it. Boston University researchers have studied 34 brains of former pro football players; 33 had CTE. So players, fans, coaches, owners insist the evidence remains insufficient.

Pro football is no longer a game. It is a “spectator sport” in the way the Roman games were. It involves enormous amounts of money, both legal and illegal, and a class of gladiators who do battle to bloodthirsty cheers. Unless that changes, the brains of the Junior Seaus will remain simply a cost of doing business.

And the Democrats?

What are their ideas for the country’s future? Obama has learned that much of governing requires pragmatic deal making for marginal progress. But that is not all of governing, and I believe the Democrats need to renew the vision of a diverse, just and vibrant America that excited the electorate in 2008 and was noticeably subdued last fall. For me, the big issues we face are:

1. The growing disparities between rich and poor.
2. The devastation of our environment.
3. The militarization of everything – from China’s saber rattling to Iran’s nuclear threat to ivory poaching in Africa.

These are not unrelated. The huge gaps between rich and poor, both within America and around the world, are creating expanding pockets of misery and despair. These mock the idea of a community of all people, and encourage environmental destruction by creating some classes who amass nature’s fruits for their private enjoyment and others who must do whatever they can to survive. Such a world creates opportunities for heavily armed gangs, terrorists groups, and rogue armies to sell themselves to the highest bidders.

A country as divided as we are threatening to become internally – and as isolationist externally – ignores these issues. We rightly make much, for example, of the nation’s 7.8% unemployment rate. But we barely notice that half the people of Detroit are out of work.

Obama’s promise was to build a national community of our diverse parts. We are headed in the other direction. He needs to lead us back.

The Hollow Men

The Republican Main Street Partnership yesterday removed the word “Republican” from its title. But “we have not changed our values or our mission, “ said its president, former Congressman Steven LaTourette (R-OH), “ We will continue to . . . represent the governing wing of the Republican Party." This might be a good place for the GOP to focus its frenzied efforts at self-analysis in the wake of its election losses. Its nominee had spent hundreds of millions polishing the very presidential bona fides (business executive, governor, Olympics guru) with which his primary opponents filleted him (vulture capitalist, Massachusetts moderate). Romney could have stood out from the crowd by standing up for his carefully created image. True, he might have lost, but it’s hard to imagine one of his primary opponents as an actual presidential candidate (Santorum? Herman Cain? Newt?). But Romney caved to the party's know-nothings . . . and then was required to execute another about-face in the summer. No wonder people were incredulous. The Obama team didn’t come up with the term “Etch-A-Sketch;” Romney’s top adviser did.

As the election showed, the “social issues” do matter. Our core beliefs are the heart and soul of our identities as people and as political parties, and while we don’t seem to think much of our politicians right now, we do expect them to stand for something. What stronger signal could a party send of its current hollowness than to have the group that claims to represent its governing wing remove Republican from its name?

History Lesson

In his wonderful book, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan asks us to consider evolution, not just from our own perspective, but from that of the things we grow. He gives four examples of how a plant’s appeal to a particular human desire enables it to gain an advantage in its fight to survive and propagate, which it then ruthlessly exploits. We should suspend, suggests Pollan, our conventional – and certainly Biblical – view of ourselves as gardeners in control of the earth and try to see creation from other creatures’ points of view. Having arisen this morning to day four of the vicious flu, I see his point. And while it’s hard to work up much empathy for the germs, it’s instructive to think of the process as Pollan does. After a sneak attack made more devious by the flu shot I had had two weeks before, the germs are now clearly in control of my body, having come out of nowhere, like Genghis Khan’s hordes, to crush a more advanced civilization. My germs, though, seem more like the Europeans in Africa, who appropriated the land, superimposed their own institutions on a weakened culture, and forced the natives to do their bidding. I wonder if my settlers believe, as the British did, that they are doing me a favor by cleansing me of the evils of my primitive practices. But Pollan – and history – have shown that they are there solely for their self-seeking purposes, and I must quietly marshal my strength to drive the invaders out.

Lance and Me

(If you get this twice, I apologize. Technical problems. JGB) “My name is Lance Armstrong, and I’m a doper.”

Recent news reports indicate that Armstrong may soon admit he used performance-enhancing drugs and illegal blood transfusions during a cycling career that included seven consecutive Tour de France victories after he had recovered from testicular cancer. The admission would come in the face of years of aggressive denial and in the wake of Armstrong having been stripped of his medals and banned for life last October for “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."

Armstrong had an extraordinary career. He was a national triathlon champion before taking up cycling, and his Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised hundreds of millions for cancer research. Not only does that career now appear built on a lie, but he has joined so many other public figures, from Barry Bonds to Bill Clinton, who have looked straight into a camera and unflinchingly denied the truth.

Their insistence is so pathological it’s hard not to believe them, even as the evidence mounts. Caught in a lie, they lie more. They believe themselves outside the rules for ordinary people and are too competitive to admit failure. While all these are undoubtedly true, I also think that all of us have parts of ourselves we want to shield from public scrutiny because they expose our conviction that we don’t live up to our own self-image. It is so human to be imperfect, but in a culture that insists on heroes it is so hard to admit it.

Congress is Back (to be read aloud)

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ooooohhh Ho Hee Ho Hee Haw Haw Oh, my sides hurt. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho  Oh . . .  My . . . God . . . Ooooohhh! Stop! Stop! You’re killing me! Ho Ho Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho . . . Congress is back! Like in session? Ho Ho Ho Ho Ho. That’s so funny. Ooooohhh Ho Ho Ho. Hah. Hah.  Hee. Hah. Ohhhhhhh. Too funny. What for?

Connections

It was dark when I got up this morning, and the ground outside was frozen. Death is much on my mind. The sadness of it. And the wonder of it. As we plan for our mother’s service and burial, I remember our second child, who was born 34 years ago today and lived only three days. My mother, who was not born to grow old, lived for 90 years, almost all of them filled with a zest for living. I have never known life without her. My daughter I barely knew. She lies in a Quaker graveyard overlooking the peaceful hills of Chester County, Pennsylvania, in a plot she shares with her maternal grandmother, who died too young at 62, and grandfather, who lived fully for two more decades; her cousin Dallas, who died suddenly at three months and whose parents I first met at her graveside service; and, in unmarked graves, Leonid Berman, the painter who fled the Russian Revolution and survived the Holocaust in rural France, and his wife, the harpsichordist Sylvia Marlowe.

It’s an eclectic community, so resonant of life’s caprices. For reasons I don’t really understand, I feel connected to all of them, as much now as when they were alive. I wonder where they have gone and why some of their lives were cut so short, while others survived wars and shipwrecks.

The daylight has come, and the ground will thaw. But I still wonder why, with all the sadness death brings, we inflict it so wantonly.