Running the ball out of bounds
March 30, 2009
I came across a web site today in which George W. Bush was referred to as a modern-day Pontius Pilate. It was not intended as a compliment. The site was an elaborate comparison of Pilate’s administration in first-century Judaea and Bush’s administration in 20th century Texas, with the emphasis on the 152 persons who were executed while Bush was governor. The Catholic Church is opposed to the death penalty – as it was opposed to the war in Iraq – but George Bush was invited nonetheless to address the students at Notre Dame University.
Although I voted for Barack Obama, I disagree with his policies on abortion. I have to wonder, however, if those who don’t think Obama should speak at the university also expect Notre Dame to exclude from the discussions going on in its classes and seminars – exclude from the content of any essay, term paper, dissertation – references to the work of any person – scientist, author, dramatist, theologian, philosopher, political figure – whose views differed with those of the church.
Does anyone seriously believe that because Notre Dame invited Obama to speak, the university doesn’t subscribe to the church’s teaching on abortion, or that a single one of those graduates will change his moral views because he hears a speech by the president of the United States?
As for the honorary degree to be conferred on Obama, if the whole man is to be recognized anywhere in our society, one would hope it would be recognized at an institution of higher learning. It’s true, as some have said, that Notre Dame must remain constantly aware of what it is to be a Catholic university, but it also must remain aware of what it is to be a university.
Sic transit whatyacallit.
March 27, 2009
WILLIE AAMES
I got to wondering the other day about whatever happened to Dick Van Patten. The occasion for me to wonder was a TCM broadcast of the 1948 movie “I Remember Mama,” which was inspired by a novel and in turn inspired a Broadway play and a television series. Which brings us to Dick Van Patten, who played Nels Hansen in the TV show. The “Mama” properties have to do with a Norwegian family living in San Francisco in the early 20th century. It’s wholesome stuff. Van Patten became a more prominent figure when he starred as the patriarch in the later TV series “Eight is Enough,” another wholesome show.
I didn’t finish watching “I Remember Mama,” because it would have kept me up until 2 a.m., so I put it in my Netflix queue. Before I got around to checking up on Van Patten, I read today that Willie Aames, who played one of Van Patten’s kids on “Eight is Enough” was selling his personal belongings in Kansas this week in order to pay off his debts. Aames also appeared in the series “Charles in Charge,” but apparently couldn’t hang onto the money he made. His drug habit probably didn’t help.
WILLIE AAMES
Life didn’t imitate art for the Bradfords – Van Patten’s TV family. Adam Rich, who played the youngest kid, has a string of arrests to his credit, including multiple substance abuse charges and break-and-entry. And Lani O’Grady, who played the eldest daughter on “Eight” died of a drug overdose, according to the Los Angeles County coroner. At one point in his life, Aames was ordained to ministry, a fact that prompted readers of the Dallas Morning News web site to quarrel on line today about why God hadn’t stepped in to lift Aames out of insolvency. Apparently these readers are unacquainted with concepts such as free will and personal responsibility.
DICK VAN PATTEN
Oh, I did check on Dick Van Patten. He’s doing fine, thank you, and still has that wholesome aura. He’s 80 years old now and has been happily married to Josephine Acerno since 1954. They have three sons, all of them actors, none of whom have been busted for drugs. Most of the Van Pattens are very good tennis players. Not pool, tennis. Dick Van Patten completely recovered from a diabetic stroke he suffered in 2006, and, as though to reinforce his wholesome image, founded a company that makes “Natural Balance Pet Foods.’
As George Ade said, “It all depends.”
“Smoke, if ya’ got ’em.”
March 24, 2009
BARBARA EDEN
The Daily Star in Beirut is running an ad on its web site for hookahs and tobacco. If I’m not mistaken, that’s Barbara Eden in the ad. It certainly doesn’t look like any Lebanese women I know. I guess the agency figured that since “I Dream of Jeannie” is still in vogue in the United States – well, it’s one of the series that gets re-run ad nauseam while better ones stay on the shelf – then Barbara would be a good image for this campaign. I’ve been told that my grandmother, Selma Aoun, whom I never met, smoked a hookah, which the Lebanese and Syrians call something like arghille. (I have pictures of my grandmother; she looked more like Salma Hayek than like Barbara Eden.) Another common Arabic term for the water pipe is shisha, which evokes one of the materials a person might smoke in such a device. I have never smoked more than a few cigars, but I have always envied the image of the smoker. Not the crowd I recently saw huddled outside the back door of a restaurant in Morristown, but the thoughtful pose of the Edward R. Murrow. I have always wanted to place a Meerschaum between my teeth during a conversation and nod from behind the blue haze as though to say, “Hmmmmm. I’ll have to see what Spinoza had to say about that.” According to family lore, my grandmother’s arghille had several pipes, so that she could share it with her visitors. I fantasize about getting out that fez I bought at the Moroccan restaurant at Epcot, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and squinting through the smoke at two or three men in dark glasses as we plan the raid on Aqaba. Of course, even if I could sit cross-legged on the floor at my age, I couldn’t get up without assistance.
“Hello, I must be going.”
March 20, 2009
BARACK OBAMA
The television networks are getting impatient with President Obama’s requests for prime time. He’s holding a press conference on Tuesday, and that will mean – among other things – that “American Idol” will have to shift to a Wednesday-Thursday schedule. More than that, the networks will again lose top-dollar revenue that they can never recoup. Doesn’t the economic recovery program apply to them, they ask. I had a fleeting thought that the problem could be solved simply by moving Obama’s prime-time appearances off the major networks; that would separate the men from the boys, as it were, when Neilsen reported how the president did when he was up against Adam Lambert. I’d like to cast the networks as villains in this, but I can see their point even if I don’t think their revenues are more important than a public well informed on what the president is thinking in the present circumstances. I don’t have to balance their books. What concerns me more is that Obama is already overexposed, and the public may get weary of him and stop listening in the same way that it stopped paying attention to the color-coded terrorism alerts from the previous administration. As it is, expectations were unreasonably high when he took office, and the weeks since then have disabused most people from thinking they’ll see postive results overnight or in a week or a month or a year. His live TV appearances – especially following on an administration that avoided such exposure – may still be raising expectations, but that is likely to wear off. I read somewhere today that Obama is considering a series of much shorter appearances – something along the lines of Franklin Roosevelt’s radio addresses.
That reminds me of the movie “Room Service” and a scene in which Groucho Marx is trying to convince a playwright to go home to Oswego, appealing to the young man to picture his mother waiting by the fireside. “We don’t have a fireside,” the playwright says. “No fireside?” says Groucho. “How do you listen to the president’s speeches?”
“Cash or charge?”
March 13, 2009
It’s a good thing we don’t always have to explain our behavior. If we did, I’d have to invoke temporary insanity or on-set senility to account for myself last night. When I left home to drive to Passaic, I thought there was barely enough gas in the Beetle to make the round trip. I pass two gas stations within the first mile and a tenth from home, but I didn’t stop. Before I got to the college – actually, it was during that stop-and-go traffic jam at the junction of Routes 46 and 3 – I already knew there wasn’t enough gas left to make it back to Whitehouse Station. I don’t know how many gas stations I pass on Routes 3 and 46 on the return leg, but I passed by that number, whatever it is. Once I got on Interstate 80 in Wayne, I knew my options would be limited. But I got on. As I headed south on I-287, I passed by chances to buy gas on Route 10 and again in Morristown. Somewhere south of Morristown, the warning light went on on the gas gauge. The needle was nudging the “E” when I saw what I knew was the sign for the Last Resort, an all-night Exxon station that is three miles from the highway. I did a lot of coasting, and gratefully paid $1.99 a gallon – cheap under the circumstances. Did I enjoy myself? Sure – I love white knuckles. Still, I realize that I didn’t measure up to the standard set by Kramer and Rick, the car salesman. Unlike them, I’ll never know how far I could have gone if I hadn’t done the sensible thing, the boring, ordinary thing. Even when Cosmo and Rick had safely reached the dealership – and had not yet plunged on toward The Ultimate – Rick said, “I learned a lot. Things are gonna be different for me now.” For me, I guess, they’ll always be the same.
The final frontier
February 20, 2009
Those of us who are trying to keep track of how the federal government is spending money might want to jot down the $591 million NASA is launching into space early next month in a search for planets that are like our own. “Like our own,” in this case, means planets that orbit a sun at a distance that would allow life-sustaining conditions. The space craft, with its powerful telescope and cameras, won’t be looking for life in space, but only for planets that might sustain life if there were any, given factors like density and gravity. This project is going to take 3 1/2 years. Presumably, NASA will find the money to actually look for life sometime after that – unless, of course, the mission doesn’t find any “planets like our own.” NASA, one presumes, regards as a temporary setback the fact that we’re having trouble sustaining life on this planet
Those of us who were living when the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite might appreciate the fact that there is no conversation about this latest mission, which is to get off the ground, as it were, on March 5. Back then, we were so embarrassed by the Soviet achievement that any progress in the American space program was news. When the first manned moon mission was launched it got more attention than the final episode of “Dallas.” Now we don’t care, which in the present economic climate is probably good for NASA.
“Dallas”? It was a TV series.
Never mind.
“… three, four, open the door”
February 19, 2009
For reasons I’d rather not go into, I have been studying math. As in algebra and geometry. I know, I know. There was a time and place for this process, but my mind was otherwise occupied – or altogether unoccupied – back then. Besides specific things such as figuring ratios and solving for x, I have learned two things. I have learned that math isn’t difficult. I’m not sure that the prospect of its difficulty was what kept me from learning it when I should have, but if I had been asked back then, I would have made that my excuse. This wouldn’t have carried too much weight with my Dad, who could calculate in his head faster than I could figure on a mechanical calculator. (Hey, I was born in 1942!) But then, he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t remember that James A. Garfield was the 20th president. Anyway, I have learned in this, my new incarnation, that I can learn pretty much any math function if I simply concentrate. Who knew?
I have also learned that those who talk about the beauty to be found in math ain’t just whistlin’ “Dixie.” I’m having this whole epiphany in which I’m synthesizing the verities of mathematics with the “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas – but maybe I shouldn’t bring that up in mixed company. For now, it’s enough to know that it all adds up.
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“Stay, little Valentine. Stay.” – Lorenz Hart
February 15, 2009
I probably should have known this already, but when I opened the Daily Office this morning I learned that today is dedicated on the church calendar to Saints Cyril and Methodius, brothers who spread Christianity in the Slavic countries in the ninth century. No chocolate hearts involved, as far as I can tell. St. Valentine, it seems, was dropped from the calendar in an update that occurred in 1969. He was removed because his history is vague. In fact, there was more than one Valentine – or Valens – in the early history of the church, and the whole affair was too indistinct to justify the observance. Those Valentines, apparently were all real, but there was nothing romantic in what little is known of their histories. Some writers have claimed that Geoffrey Chaucer, in his “Parlement of Foules” made the first reference to “Valentine’s Day,” but I gather that has been pretty much debunked. Too bad. It might have compensated a little for Chaucer’s role in torturing generations of English students. I gather from what I saw at the mall yesterday that the rededication of this day has had no impact on Hallmark or Russell Stover.
Uber alles
February 14, 2009
As though the economy weren’t enough to worry about, Germany is involved in a controversy over re-publication of news stories from the period of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. If I understand this correctly, the Allied Powers gave the copyright of much of this material to the State of Bavaria, and Bavaria does not grant permission to republish it. But a British publisher decided to ignore the copyright issue and distribute a collection of articles, including an account of the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the incident that gave Hitler the excuse he needed to assume dictatorial powers. We all know how that worked out.
Agents of the German government is going around seizing copies of the second weekly edition of the reprints, but 250,000 copies of the first issue have been sold already. One complaint the government has is that the first issue included a Nazi poster in which a large swastika was visible. Images of the swastika have been prohibited in Germany since the end of World War II. Another complaint is that the articles are not accompanied by any commentary that might be helpful for those who do not know the legacy of National Socialism.
The broader rationale for stifling these reproductions is that neo-Nazis could use them to further their goals.
Poor people. Poor, poor people who carry such a burden and try to make it lighter by surrendering their fundamental rights. Poor people who forget or never knew the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” and its blazing festival in May 1933 – 25,000 books burned in one day, more than a quarter of a million burned before the Thousand Year Reich came to a premature end, all to “purify” the Fatherland and rid it of “Jewish intellectualism.”
“The future German man will not be a man just of books,” Joseph Goebbels told a mob of students at the May bonfire, “but a man of character.”
Or perhaps, Germany would rather forget that too.
He’ll see you now, damn it!
February 12, 2009
The other day I was railing to one of my daughters about doctors who make appointments that they can’t meet. Why schedule a patient for 8:30 a.m. if you can’t see him until 9 a.m.? Like that. My primary doc and my dentist see patients on schedule. Be careful what you wish for. This morning, in the outer waiting room, I was engrossed in a magazine story about an international movement to grant rights similar to human rights to your great apes, your orangutans and your gibbons. I had at least eight or ten paragraphs to go when I heard the voice: “Charles?” You never get back to a magazine you were reading in a waiting room. That’s a law of nature. I think Darwin first described that phenomenon and, by the way, Happy Birthday! Then there is the wait between the nurse’s initial rituals and the arrival of the doctor himself. Jerry Seinfeld talks about that, and Morty Seinfeld probably has a few things to say about it too. Except that he’s dead. Today I was engrossed in a magazine article about the disappearance of the Pygmy culture in equatorial Africa when in came the doctor, right on time. So I was left mid-gibbon and mid-Pygmy, but – the doctor tells me – everything else was normal.
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