And I’ll Raise You a Hail Mary

It’s that silly season of the presidential primary beauty pageant and with Donald Trump in the Republican fray, there is no shortage of material for late night comedy hosts.  But where are Jon Stewart and the “old” Stephen Colbert when you need them?  Their cable comedy shows became the real news while the national newscasts seemed more like the comedy shows.

I’ve purposely avoided writing about politics for some time, mostly because it’s just too disheartening and I write merely one person’s opinion, not with the clout of, say, a Cal Thomas who clutches his bible when expressing his political views.  I have no such source of “truth” to cite.

But speaking of the Good Book, there is the recent amusing exchange between Ben Carson and The Donald, a school-yard square-off to demonstrate who might be more Christian.  Poor Mike Huckabee; he’s been going down yellow brick Evangelical road for so long and no presidential nomination, boo-hoo.  I’m more Christian than you are na-na na-na boo-boo.  Apparently, Carson casteth the first stone, citing Proverb 22:4: “By humility and the fear of the Lord, are riches and honor and life.”  He continued to say, referring to The Donald as “him,” –“And that's a very big part of who I am. Humility, and fear of the Lord. I don't get that impression with him. Maybe I'm wrong."

It must be tough to have lots of humility as a billionaire, particularly one who has monetized his name, not to mention being born to money, and bullied his way to billionaire status with financial tactics that would be the envy of Vito Corleone.  See Andy Kessler’s article in the Sept. 10 Wall Street Journal for the detail: “The Art of The Donald in 10 Easy Steps -- First, be born rich. Then acquire political influence. After that, pile up debt, write books and…. run for office.”

But Trump showed his other cheek to Carson in a relatively benign Christian Tweet: "Wow, I am ahead of the field with Evangelicals (am so proud of this) and virtually every other group, and Ben Carson just took a swipe at me."  According to Politico: “Weeks earlier, he told a crowd of religious conservatives in Iowa that he couldn't recall ever asking God for forgiveness, though he said he has taken Communion. ‘When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed,’ Trump said.”

Now he might have criticized Carson on something more substantive such as Dr. Carson’s belief in creationism and his denial of climate change, but, instead, I suppose he had a little wine and a little cracker to cleanse the matter.

This is what the candidates talk about when running for The Presidency? “God” forbid the pious rhetoric if an atheist ever runs.

And let’s not forget the Democrats in the two ring circus, and the plight of poor Hillary who was considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination not long ago.  The Clintons always get in trouble with denials rather than stepping up to the plate and admitting to a mistake.  I did not have sex with that email server!

Let the games begin!

Post Labor Day Thoughts

My good friend and ex colleague, Ron, emailed to wish me “Happy Labor Day” even though we’re out in the pasture with the herd of the retired.  We proudly earned our branded hides: workers.

As my older son Chris proclaims, life is work.  We’re always trying to find a balance but when your job is enjoyable, and you find it meaningful, life and work negotiate a successful merger.  During my career I was tempted to bring it to the next level in a major publishing organization.  It would have meant leaving the company I was joyfully building and moving overseas to London, a city we love.  But the thought of engaging in corporate politics, vs. the hands-on experience of running a stand-alone publishing company made me hesitate and I’m glad I did.

My favorite section of the Sunday New York Times is their Sunday Review, mostly thoughtful, opinion pieces.  This past week’s had two relating to the above, “Friends at Work? Not So Much” (by Adam Grant) and “Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work” (by Arthur C. Brooks).   The former cites factors such as the disappearance of a job for life, flextime, and the rise of the “virtual office” that has potentially impacted the loss of meaningful relationships for life.  I always considered colleagues friends as well as fellow workers.  There is much to be said about the virtual office but it is a steep price to pay for true collaboration and trust that develops through personal interaction.

The second article also speaks directly to my working years.  As the article asks, “Why don’t people just keep the jobs they like?”  The answer is we are sort of hard-wired to achieve success by climbing the next wrung in the ladder, and then next, etc.  I climbed to the extent that I found a place in the working world that made me happy.  Why go any further, indeed? Simply for more money?  Bad reason I thought.

I always felt that I was responsible not only to my employer, but to my employees, our vendors, authors, as well, everyone who makes up a publishing company.  As the article concludes: “In our interconnected world and global economy, our work transforms the lives of countless others.  Sometimes the impact is obvious: Managers and executives directly inflect their employees’ happiness and career success.  But everyone, in every industry, affects the lives of co-workers, supervisors, customers, suppliers, donors or investors.”  If we all realize this in our working lives, perhaps work would not be a dirty four letter word.

Speaking of the latter, the prior week’s Sunday Review (August 30) carried still another meaningful article on work, “We Need to Rethink How We Work,” accurately reflecting on what motivates people.   As Barry Schwartz, the author of the article points out, it was Adam Smith’s view that people just dislike work, writing in his enormously influential The Wealth of Nations, that “it is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can.”  Schwartz thinks that his notion has clouded the science of management ever since, viewing workers as beasts of burden which a whipping stick, or at least a carrot and a stick might be the best motivators.  Hence, employees are being constantly monitored, as the wickedly funny movie Office Space satires as the “TPS Reports.”

Employees thrive on a measure of independence and fair compensation should be the natural result of people working at jobs they find meaningful.  “When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things….[We] should not lose sight of the aspiration to make work the kind of activity people embrace, rather than the kind they shun…..Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good.  But so is work that is worth doing.  Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.”

I’m currently reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Purity (thus far, brilliant!).  More on that book in a later entry, but early on in the novel there is a techno-utopian view of work expressed by participants in a Wiki-leaks-like cult movement:

Their theory was that the technology driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products. Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

At this point there is a discussion as to why a person changing bedpans in a nursing home for a $40,000 salary wouldn’t want, instead, to be a paid as a consumer at the same remuneration.  One of the participants in the discussion comes to the conclusion: "The way you'd have to do it is make labor compulsory but then keep lowering the retirement age, so you'd always have full employment for everybody under thirty-two, or thirty-five, or whatever, and full unemployment for everybody over that age."

Is that the future of work?  Sounds more dystopian to me. Franzen’s unique social observations have a clarion ring of future verity.  Maybe that’s where we’re heading: let robots do the work, and we’ll lay about consuming streaming video all day.  Thankfully, that is not my future, but we ought to be careful about what we wish for.

Nonetheless, getting back to Labor Day, I’m now many years into retirement and my working life seems more like a dream some stranger went through for those four decades.  I like the way my friend Ron put it:  "I have accepted the fact that we were merely hired ballplayers.  While working we were respected, valued, and even ostensibly loved as long as we could pitch, field, run, and hit.  Once retired, we were just old ex ballplayers.  Now, there is hardly anyone at our companies who remember us or would even recognize our names let alone appreciate what we did.  It is the way of the world, and I have accepted it.”  To that analogy I added, in my response, “I like to think we played it well -- and now don't even get invited to an old timer’s game.  I still think I can reach home plate from the pitcher’s mound though :-)."

OK, no more pitching for me, but we know what we did and we know that our careers led to thousands of publications that might not have seen the light of day, and those went out into an Internet-less world at the time, and affected change and hopefully progress.  And we were part of working communities, dedicated as much to one another as we were to the work itself.  As I said, it was a merger of sorts.  My very first entry in this blog on the subject of work and my first job out of college still resonates.

When She Was Good – and Roth is Great

The time had come to leave our boat and return to Florida.  We wanted to beat the weather for a safe drive.  Ann needed to see her surgeon because of an arthritic flare up in her knee and as much as we love being in Connecticut, seeing friends and family, living on our boat at our Club, there comes a time when the confines of the boat simply get to you and we long for the spaciousness of our home.  It’s the earliest that we’ve ever returned from our 15 years of bifurcated home/boat living, just in time for what we thought might become a Category 1 Hurricane, Erika, which thankfully disintegrated into remnants with only brief heavy rain and an eerie sunrise the day after.

Right before leaving the boat I picked up a novel I had brought (again, avoiding short stories for the time being), this time Philip Roth’s When She Was Good.  I’ve read a lot of Roth, and think his American Pastoral is one of the more important novels of my time.  I wasn’t expecting much from this novel, one often not discussed, but I was curious about it as to my knowledge Roth’s only novel with a woman (Lucy Nelson / Bassart) as the protagonist, particularly given the accusations over the years of Roth being a misogynist.  Furthermore, as Stanley Elkin’s brief blurb on the cover states, When She Was Good could be compared to Theodore Dreiser’s work ( I've read practically all his work in college and can count him among my favorite American writers), particularly in my mind his American Tragedy.

What mesmerized me is Roth’s lapidary characterization of Lucy.  This is a character, like the one in Dreiser’s other great novel, Sister Carrie, who you are unlikely to forget and it is Roth’s characterizations and dialogue which sets this novel apart. .  It reminded me of my own mother’s struggles in a man’s world.  There are two edges to this sword, though, Lucy as standing for and rationalizing what she considers “the truth” and then where her expectations stemming from” the truth” almost borders on mental illness.  Although she is described as a “ball buster” at one point, I think Roth is clearly rooting for Lucy in a world that does not reward her stalwart individualism.  Like Anita Shreve’s Olympia in Fortune’s Rocks, Lucy is a woman before her time. And like Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, this is a multigenerational novel, but with a darker view. 

Willard Carroll is from a dysfunctional family but as a young man he finds the American Dream waiting for him in “Liberty Center:”

     So at the sight of Liberty Center, its quiet beauty, its serene order, its gentle summery calm, all that had been held in check in him, all that tenderness of heart that had been for eighteen years his secret burden, even at times his shame, came streaming forth. If ever there was a place where life could be less bleak and harsh and cruel than the life he had known as a boy, if ever there was a place where a man did not have to live like a brute, where he did not have to be reminded at every turn that something in the world either did not like mankind, or did not even know of its existence, it was here. Liberty Center! Oh, sweet name! At least for him, for he was indeed free at last of that terrible tyranny of cruel men and cruel nature.

     He found a room; then he found a job-he took an examination and scored high enough to become postal clerk; then he found a wife, a strong-minded and respectable girl from a proper family; and then he had a child; and then one day-the fulfillment, he discovered, of a very deep desire-he bought a house of his own, with a front porch and a backyard: downstairs a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen and a bedroom; upstairs two bedrooms more and the bath. A back bathroom was built downstairs in 1915, six years after the birth of his daughter, and following his promotion to assistant postmaster of the town.

That daughter, Myra, becomes the mother to Lucy, Willard’s grandchild.  But Myra married a man with a drinking problem and as a young girl Lucy calls the police as her mother was hit by her drunken husband, Whitey, blackening her eye.  The shame of having the police involved, and their name the subject of gossip, seems worse to Lucy’s grandparents, and even her mother, than the act itself.  It is from this action that the novel finds its themes and its energy, Lucy condemning her father, totally ostracizing him, and men in general, unless they tell the “truth” and abide by her expectations of how a man should behave, taking responsibility, doing the right thing.

These “blue threads” of shame and anger and expectations culminate in her savage condemnation of her malleable husband, Roy, with whom they now have a child, the fourth generation in the novel.  These very words could have been spoken by my own mother during the height of her own unhappy marriage to my father:

     "You worm! Don't you have any guts at all? Can't you stand on your own two feet, ever? You sponge! You leech! You weak, hopeless, spineless, coward! You'll never change- you don't even want to change! You don't even know what I mean by change! You stand there with your dumb mouth open! Because you have no backbone! None!" She grabbed the other cushion from behind her and heaved it toward his head. "Since the day we met!" ….

     She charged off the sofa. "And no courage!" she cried. "And no determination! And no will of your own! If I didn't tell you what to do, if I were to turn my back-if I didn't every single rotten day of this rotten life ... Oh, you're not a man, and you never will be, and you don't even care!" She was trying to hammer at his chest; first he pushed her hands down, then he protected himself with his forearms and elbows; then he just moved back, a step at a time.

This tirade is in front of family and in front of their child.  It is a novel that resonates with me for personal reasons.   I’ll leave it to the reader as to whether Lucy is a “ball buster” or just a person living in a world that has turned on her because “of that terrible tyranny of cruel men and cruel nature” -- as experienced by her own grandfather before he fled to “Liberty Center.”

I’ll miss Roth (who has vowed to write no more) as I’ve missed Updike.  To hear from them no longer is like losing close friends.

Hamilton Hip Hops into Broadway History

Ann and I once again boarded the New Haven train to NYC, this time to see Hamilton.

It’s everything that has been written and said about the show, probably the most talked about Broadway musical prior to its opening in history.  No sense repeating the story here about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius in putting together the most original Broadway musical since, perhaps, Oklahoma.  As with Oklahoma, Hamilton breaks all the rules, but similar to its predecessor, it uses dance, music, acting, and a fine “book” to move the action along.  The action is explosive, a constant pulse measuring the beginning of our nation, the meaning of compromise, and the contributions of immigrants, particularly the Caribbean born Hamilton.

This nation’s historical founders are played by minorities in period customs, singing history through the medium of rap and hip hop, where the copious dialogue springs to life.  There are very few speaking parts, and that factor as well as the staging, the subject of revolution, and some of the love songs hearken back to a previous transforming musical, Les Misérables.  The reminder of the latter in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work is omnipresent.  And like “Master of the House” there is a change of pace humorous song embedded in Hamilton as well, one sung by a foppish King George entitled “You’ll Be Back,” which contrasts with the hip hop in the show.  It was sung with such a recognizable Beatles’ beat that the audience erupted into instant laughter.  Nevertheless, the other music, even for old Rodgers and Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim fans, was memorable. Rap songs such as “My Shot” and “The Room Where it Happens” run like leitmotifs throughout the show and get under your skin (not that I could sing them or even play them on the piano).

If I had to sum up the musical in one word, it’s pure raw energy. Never a dull moment, with many emotional ones, particularly if one has an understanding of the beginnings of this nation, as well as cautionary inferences pertaining to our own times, it is the must see show of this season, and probably many to come.  We were fortunate to be able to get tickets months and months ago when we first heard about it.