Southern Bookman

Gunfight at the Op-Ed Corral: Krugman blasts GOP falsehoods, while Brooks moons over Rubio

Dueling columnists entertained New York Times readers Friday when conservative David Brooks gushed over Marco Rubio while liberal Paul Krugman blasted Rubio's economic plan as he castigated the entire GOP field as "grifters."

Brooks, frequently ridiculed by left-leaning pundits, claimed that Rubio is the only GOP candidate who wants to help the middle-class. Krugman supported CNBC reporter John Harwood's assertion in  this week's debate that Rubio's program will help the wealthy much more than average workers.

The Brooks column shows that whatever remains of the Republican establishment is rallying around Rubio now that Jeb Bush's campaign has imploded. Like a school boy with a crush, Brooks raved about Rubio's youth and good looks. He also claimed that Rubio will help the middle class with a tax break.

Krugman exposed Rubio's plan as another GOP scheme to give the rich tax cuts while slicing social programs. Harwood in the debate confronted Rubio with a conservative tax group's analysis that showed that Rubio's plan will help the wealthy much more than average workers. Rubio vehemently denied the fact-based study Harwood cited. Krugman found that Harwood was correct and that Rubio's plan is just more of the GOP's "supply side" chicanery. 

The Noble Prize-winning economist took aim at other Republican falsehoods during the debate, including Sleepy Ben Carson's outright lies that he has no connection to a company that claims its dietary products cure cancer. While Republican candidates express alarm at the federal deficit, their programs would bring a severe budget shortages, as Krugman frequently outlines.

CNBC's tough questioning drew squeals from the GOP, which now wants total control of future debates, such as the selection of moderators and pre-approval of questions I suppose. The Democrats can give the GOP a good model, with a "candidates forum" next week moderated by MSNBC liberal ranter Rachel Maddow.

In this so-called news event, Maddow will ask questions of each Democratic candidate individually in what promises to be a real smooze-fest. Or snooze fest, as my spell checker wanted to say.

I can see the GOP matching that with a forum in which say Fox News right wing zealot Sean Hannity tosses softballs at each Repblican candidate. But with a field of 16, such a forum would quickly test the patience of even the most rabid Republican. 

The Maddow event is not officially sanctioned by the Democratic Party. The GOP, though, wants to officially sponsor its controlled debates.

 

Lillian Ross, at 97, receives fresh acclaim for New Yorker work

Lillian Ross is celebrated for her profile of Ernest Hemingway and her book on director John Huston's filming of "The Red Badge of Courage." Yet she hasn't received the veneration given to other New Yorker writers like Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling and E.B. White. 

In a notorious memoir, Ross disclosed her longtime relationship with famed New Yorker editor William Shawn, published while Shawn's widow was still alive. The scandal over that book overshadowed Ross' reputation as a New Yorker writer.

Now, Ross deserves fresh acclaim for her New Yorker work, with the publication of a collection,  "Reporting Always: Writings From the New Yorker." The book includes her late 1940s profile of Hemingway, which defined the boorish "Papa" character of the writer's final years.

Ross began writing for the New Yorker in 1945 and continued until 2011. Like the still active Roger Angell, she began her career at the magazine when legendary founder Harold Ross was still alive, and stayed there through the great years and then decline under Shawn, the years adrift under Robert Gottlieb, and the revival under Tina Brown and David Remnick. 

At 97, Ross received recognition from a chronicler of today's young New York hipsters; the noted writer of profiles was profiled herself in The New York Times' Thursday Styles section. While The Times' Penelope Green reports that Ross has lived in the same upper East Side apartment since 1958 amid furniture selected by Shawn, she highlights Ross' ability to remain current into the 21st century with her New Yorker work. As Brown reflects in the article, Ross in her later years stayed energized by the newest movies and young stars. The piece emphasizes a profile of Robin Williams that Ross did when Williams was just emerging as a star.

While Ross kept writing until the post 9/11 era, she is known for witnessing the glittering postwar era that lasted into the 1960s when well-known people mingled at New York restaurants and night spots. The worlds of Broadway, Hollywood and New York publishing merged in a budding celebrity community. TV was not yet the dominant medium.

In the new collection, as well as a book several years ago on the reporting craft, Ross values her reporting. Mitchell, a nonfiction writer, is more recognized as a writer. Indeed, Mitchell's reputation as a reporter suffered when a recent biography disclosed that many of Mitchell's noted characters were composites and that he created situations and dialogue. 

While Mitchell wrote celebrity profiles early in his career, the work for which he is most remembered looked at unknown people. Ross, in contrast, built most of her career writing about the famous. Unlike Mitchell, she never had writer's block. Along with profiles and features, she remained an energetic reporter of "Talk of the Town" pieces.

In the Times piece, Brown says Ross always saw herself as a "girl reporter" who fell in love with an older editor. Brown bonded with Ross because she herself as a young reporter fell in love with her editor, Harold Evans. Perhaps Ross doesn't receive the same acclaim as that given to Mitchell and other male New Yorker workers because she continued to identify herself as a reporter. Yet her pieces can stand with any the magazine has published.

Green in her profile goes too hyperbolic with her claim that Ross with her Hemingway piece invented the modern celebrity profile; the genre was long-established by then. But Green is on solid ground when she calls Ross a new journalism pioneer. Mitchell received recognition from a new generation with the publication of a collection of his New Yorker writings in the 1980s. Ross' collection deserves the same acclaim. 

 

 

Rising temperatures to fry Mideast

Rising temperatures will make the Mideast uninhabitable in a few years, according to a recent report. The region already stands close to that dire situation; temperatures in Iraq and Iran last summer hit 130, the highest ever recorded. Fantasy cities like Dubia will seek to exist in an air-conditioned bubble. That won't last.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has noted the environmental causes of the Syrian civil war and upheaval in countries like Yemen. Drought is a primary factor in the rising number of Syrians fleeing their country for Europe. If the Mideast turns into a vast empty desert, more and more people will be crowded into relatively habitable places such as Europe and North America.

Those places will have plenty of water: Greenland's melting, as the New York Times reported today. Soon, melting glaciers and the poles will send the oceans rising over inland cities. More and more people will retreat to whatever land's left.

This is not a fantasy, as the GOP believes. Our grandchildren will inherit an increasingly unlivable planet. Who needs Mars? The Earth is turning into the Red Planet.

 

Gene Ellis' joyful spirit enriched Atlanta's poetry community

Gene Ellis loved poetry with elemental joy. A talented architect, gifted pianist and wonderful poet, he took visceral pleasure in language's music and intellectual joy in a poem's structure. 

Gene, a warm and welcoming presence at Callanwolde Arts Center poetry events for many years, recently died at home under hospice care at age 83. A valiant supporter of poetry in Atlanta, he cheerfully carried out whatever duties needed to be done, from selling tickets to organizing readings and conferences.

For years, Gene was a guiding spirit in the Callanwolde Poetry Weekends, which drew poets such as James Merrill, Paul Muldoon and Amy Clampitt for readings and workshops. The event's demise after the 1996 Olympics left a hole in Atlanta's cultural landscape.

Gene soldiered on supporting poetry, organizing open mike readings as well as those of better known poets. I remember his laugh, his Lebanese joy at life, and his wonderful white hair. I also remember the wit and style of his poems.

A lasting memory is of a bright Saturday afternoon when he and other poets came to my house for an impromptu party after a poetry reading. He sat at the grand piano in our living room to play American songbook standards by heart.  During his stirring performance, Gene disclosed that in college days he'd  earned money playing in nightclubs. When I sit down at the keyboard today, I'll remember Gene - I'm sure his notes still reside in the keys.

He was a beautiful man, who left the world with a a bit more love, laughter and light.

New Yorker theme issues grow frequent; New York Times writers analyze the World Series

The New Yorker frequently publishes special themed issues these days - fashion, money, fall books, etc. I suppose such issues are seen as an enticement to sell ads. The special issues are usually well-done, with interesting pieces. Yet the increasing number of themed issues represents the rise of advertising values over the wide-ranging journalism that used to distinguish the magazine.

I'm somewhat interested about money and business, less so about fashion. Although I might not want to read several articles about a particular field, I'm now often subjected to such a limited menu. The magazine once offered variety and a sense of discovery, rather than covering the same subjects already written about in other publications.

In an effort to not appear too commercially driven, the New Yorker never prints the theme on the cover. Instead, the artist's cover illustration subtly conveys the message. The reader might not realize he's perusing a special issue until he comes to the Table of Contents, which does run a special issue's title, such as this week's "The Food Issue."

I groaned at the arrival of yet another special issue. My appetite for food articles is not nearly as hearty as my appetite for crab cakes or barbecue brisket. Instead of a selection of pieces about different subjects, I'm given a surfeit of food writing. It's like a restaurant selling nothing but pancakes. 

At least the food issue marks the return of Calvin Trillin, who wrote a piece on North Carolina barbecue. Trillin, among those writers who've defined the magazine, rarely appears these days. He's best known for his reports on food, but through the years he's written many other memorable pieces, including the moving memoir about the death of his wife, Alice, and his recollections about growing up in Kansas City and moving to New York.

With the Mets playing the Kansas City Royals in the World Series, I'd like to hear Trillin's thoughts on the matchup.Trillin with his wry humor and eye for detail could put the baseball matchup in the broader context of the two cities' cultures.

Meanwhile, the World Series prompted The New York Times to ask some of its news writers to give predictions about which team will win. This resulted in several overwritten imaginative flights, but overall the pieces were entertaining.

The best was by Joe Drape, my former Atlanta Journal-Constitution colleague who has made his name at the Times covering horse racing. Drape, also a Kansas City native, came off the best by not focusing on baseball. Instead, in musing about making bets on the series with his colleagues, he wittily champions Kansas City's native cuisine as superior to New York's.

The pieces today continue a creative resurgence for the Times sports department. That imaginative spirit was shown after the Mets swept the Cubs in the National League Championship Series. Times writer Dan Barry, in light of the fact that the Cubs haven't won a championship since 1908, wrote about the deciding game in the florid style of early 20th century sportswriting. The piece tried too hard to match the old-time purple prose, but Barry, who donned the byline D. Francis Barry, still smote a couple of four-baggers.

"The ignominious rout of the valiant but overmatched hometown squad turned the deafening cheers of the Chicago multitudes into plaintive keens, for now their agonizing wait for another championship — the last in 1908, during the presidency of the rough-riding Theodore Roosevelt — must continue," Barry opined in the article that sported the great headline, “Cubs’ Dreams Dashed in Loss To Metropolitans; Prayers Of Wrigley Faithful Go Unanswered."

I thought the Cubs would at last overcome the goat's curse this year. The ghost of Fred Merkle must have haunted the Chicago nine in revenge for the 1908 loss that gave the Cubs the pennant over the New York Giants. A historical recounting of Merkle's infamous base-running blunder that led to the Giants losing the pennant to the Cubs was another recent Times jewel.

 

 

 

Baseball hopes Mets give World Series ratings boost

The celebrated 1975 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Cincinnati Reds marked a turning point when baseball left behind its traditional World Series day games for nighttime broadcasts on national TV. As Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci relates in last week's issue, New York Times columnist Red Smith and other traditionalists fumed and fussed about the game's selling out to TV and leaving behind its hallowed agrarian past.

Verducci reports that NBC's broadcast of the famous extra-inning game six won by the Red Sox drew 34 million prime time viewers. Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk's frantic gestures motioning his clinching  home run to remain fair are among the game's most iconic moments. The network's capturing Fisk's antics on tape was a happy accident, leading to "reaction shots" becoming a staple of TV sports.

The article leaves the impression that the 1975 World Series marked the triumph of nighttime broadcasts. Verducci, who also does analysis for Fox's World Series broadcasts. doesn't explore the dramatic decline in World Series viewership over the last 40 years.

Once, the World Series flew high above the Super Bowl in popularity. From the pinnacle of 1975, World Series ratings have sunk while the NFL's championship game has ascended. Now, the Super Bowl broadcast is the most watched TV event of the year, a dominant cultural centerpiece. Over the last decade or so, World Series ratings have plunged, with the "fall classic" struggling to draw 15 million viewers. 

This year, World Series ratings are likely to receive a boost from the New York Mets winning the National League for a matchup against the American League's Kansas City Royals, who have little national following.  The Chicago Cubs, whom the Mets defeated in the National League Championship Series, likely would have generated even more interest.

But even a series with the Mets' dynamic young pitching staff and the vast New York audience is unlikely to outdraw a mediocre NFL matchup. A telling sign is that baseball scheduled the series to begin on Tuesday night, avoiding competition with Monday Night Football.

Cultural commentators claim that baseball's slow pace can't compete with the NFL's violent action, although studies have shown that there's a small amount of actual plays in a football telecast. My theory is that baseball has diluted World Series excitement with too many playoffs rounds.

In the old days, the World Series stood on its own, played out in early October. Now the postseason drags on, with too many games. By the time the World Series arrives, casual fans are weary with baseball. The NFL playoffs raise excitement because each game could end one team's season. The NBA's playoffs drag on even longer than baseball's. Yet, the NBA with its fast action slowly builds enthusiasm. Its finals are the high point.

In baseball, though, the World Series often feels like an anticlimax. This year, the Mets-Cubs matchup in the National League Championship Series generated broad interest, with the Mets' unexpected sweep of the Cubs ending the drama quickly. The Mets-Royals matchup is less exciting, but many fans will tune in if the Mets' Cinderella story heads to a grand finale.

 

  

 

From Agincourt 600 years ago to Balaklava, St. Crispin's Day Big in English History

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers." So goes one of the greatest pre-game pep talks ever,as  imagined in William Shakespeare's "Henry V." 

The play depicts Henry's stunning victory at the battle of Agincourt. The battle's 600th anniversary arrives Sunday, St. Crispin's and Crispian's Day, also referenced in Shakespeare's speech. Whether Henry, shown at right, really made such a speech to rally his outnumbered, bedraggled and dysentery-ridden soldiers is unclear. But his small English army defeated a much larger French force on a muddy field in northern France.

The English archers with their long bows proved the decisive factor in the battle. The French force, including top members of the country's nobility, were pummeled by the archers' volleys. Then they got bogged down in the muddy field, where Henry's men hacked them to death. 

After the battle, in a shocking betrayal of medieval ethics, Henry ordered the French prisoners killed.  His English noblemen refused, but the common men in his army - those lethal archers - carried out the killings. Shakespeare and other of Henry's defenders have sought to justify the killings, claiming the French could have returned to battle and reversed their defeat. Others have condemned the executions as brutal war crimes.

The battle endures as one of the most prominent chapters in the 100 Years War in which English kings sought to establish rule over France. The British on Sunday will commemorate the victory, although some oppose glorifying Henry, seeing him as a war-thirsty monster.

Their world was much different from ours, but basics of human mortality never change. The battlefield, which remains intact today much as it was in 1415, lies near the site of World War I battles. Weapons technology changes, but the stench and horror of death have been the same since war began. I'm fascinated by the boundary between their reality and our historical memory. They experienced the battle as it unfolded in real time all of those years ago.

Another famous English battle, this one depicted as a noble defeat, also occurred on St. Crispin's Day, in 1854, during the Crimean War. That was the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, also memorialized by a great English poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Those 1960s hipsters who ever listened to the band "Pearls Before Swine" might remember its record named after the battle. The record had a scratchy recording of the Light Brigade's trumpeter recalling the charge, in which all of the "noble 600" were killed.

Tennyson's "theirs not to reason why/theirs but to do and die," describes the situation of soldiers throughout history, including Agincourt, Azincourt in the French spelling. Another line of Tennyson's applies to warfare, past and future:"Into the valley of death..."

Although St. Crispin's and Crispian's Day stands tall in history, the Catholic Church no longer recognizes the twin saints, originally canonized in 225. Thanks to Shakespeare, and Tennyson, and British national pride, the day will continue to be remembered.

 

American literature and the wilderness myth

New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz criticizes Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" for its adolescent values. Schulz says that Thoreau extols American teen values of narcissism, resistance to authority and pursuit of leisure over work.

Schulz's criticism reflects the authoritarian drive to control dissent. In that view, voices of protest are always seen as irresponsible and childish. Those influenced by Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience, from Ghandi to Martin Luther King, were subjected to that same infantalizing effort.

Thoreau in "Walden" was one of the originators of the American fascination with the wilderness and suspicion of  civilization. The ever perceptive Schulz - she shows the potential of matching Adam Gopnik's overblown writing - sees that Thoreau in "Walden" invents himself as a character. She finds this violates modern standards of non-fiction, but should we apply these to such a seminal work?

That adolescent desire to escape civilization lights a path through American literature. Huck Finn, in what is held up to be the first novel in a truly American idiom, "lights out for the territory." His rejection of the prevailing social code paradoxically is an act of full maturity, when he accepts Jim's humanity and says "all right, I'll go to hell."

Henry Adams, Henry James and others sought to return to more mature European values, while showing the conflict between American innocence and the old world's sophistication.  The American drive to escape social strictures and seek hedonistic enlightenment in the wilderness shows up vividly in Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," in some respects a dead end. It keeps churning through the fiction and nonfiction of Norman Mailer and the novels of Philip Roth, John Updike and David Foster Wallace. Young writers remain haunted by the pulse between order and disorder.

Schulz points out that Thoreau's thought is also mirrored in Ayn Rand, libertarianism and the Republican's now prevailing rejection of government, launched by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Old lefties like me find it somewhat strange that now the right rejects government - that was a staple of the 1960s counterculture, which despised liberals as much as today's Tea Party zealots.

Big, ambitious novels  and memoirs continue to be written, but literature no longer stands as the primary cultural force. The fractured and amorphous cultural landscape weakens artistic protest, and the country's red and blue states speak different languages. Thoreau's ethos still surges in the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

 

New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz tosses mud at Thoreau

New New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz in her first piece stirred up Henry David Thoreau admirers with a takedown of the transcendentalist writer, particularly his "Walden," considered an American classic. The piece in the Oct. 19 issue has a regrettable title, "Pond Scum," but Schulz strikes home with many of her points.

Shulz rightly points out that "Walden" is marred by swatches of indigestible writing. Along with many others, I had a tough time reading "Walden" in my school days. I did listen to it a few years ago on my Walkman while running laps around Oglethorpe University's track. The narrator sounded like a crazed street person hectoring me on the sidewalk. Yet, the writer's language rang in my mind with its wild, poetic flights. I felt I was engaged with a keen creative intelligence.

Schulz is right that Thoreau was a misanthrope, and that his theory of personal conscience as outlined in civil disobedience would be severely limited if applied to an entire society. She points out that his life in Walden wasn't that much of a retreat; he still had easy access to family and friends. But there's a contradiction in her own logic; she criticizes him for seeking to withdraw from society, then admits that he continued to enjoy society. She accuses Thoreau of straying too far from the facts of his time at Walden pond, discounting the value of his creative imagination. In her view, genius counts for little.

She singles out one famous sentence, "The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation," for criticism, claiming it's false because he doesn't apply it to all people.  This puzzling, off-base gibe holds little relevance to the statement's validity. Nor does she bother to engage other phrases of the book that have become part of our cultural heritage. In this, she ignores the book's immense historical influence.

She does admit that Thoreau is a writer of genius in his descriptions of the natural world. To me, Thoreau's best book is not "Walden," but "Two Weeks on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers," in which his descriptions of nature and the physical joys of his journey down the river with his brother, John,  reach the highest levels of writing. I suppose I'm biased because I published a poem about Thoreau's ecstatic vision.

Schulz rightly exposes Thoreau's flaws and contradictions. She also shows a lack of understanding of his work; she says Thoreau lacks a sense of humor, not realizing that "Walden"  is a work ofadmittedly heavy handed satire. 

Another contradiction rises in her claim that the book is one of those classics more talked about than read. After making this claim at the beginning, she finishes the piece by saying that many people do read it in high school. What she means, I suppose, is that it's a book that adult Americans rarely think about outside of the well-known phrases within it.

 Schulz criticizes "Walden" for its adolescent outlook - Thoreau's philosophy is that of a typical teenager, she says. One could say the same about other books that are part of the high school curriculum that frequently draw criticism: "The Catcher in the Rye," "Huckleberry Finn," "The Great Gatsby." A worthy cultural debate would be why so many American books considered classics are seen as suited for high school readers rather than adults. Does America even have classic books that adults continue to read?

Schulz's criticisms of Thoreau and "Walden" will be valuable if they lead to a reconsideration of the author and his work. My initial response is that Thoreau's value as a thinker, nature writer and philosopher outweigh the problems she enumerates. I am pretty confident that none of her words will join Thoreau's as immortal.

 

 

"Sleepless in Seattle" shows America's lost optimism

"Sleepless in Seattle," Nora Ephron's 1993 fairy tale romance starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, shows a much freer America. The movie, shown on TCM Tuesday night, reveals an era that seems closer to World War II's vibrant spirit than today's pessimism. 

The characters do have computers - but the Internet has not yet disrupted the economy. Air travel is easy in those pre-Sept. 11 days. It's preposterous that even then a young child could make a cross-country plane trip, but more plausible than today. The characters can ride up to the Empire State building's observation deck without standing for hours in long security lines. Hanks' architect character Sam can easily relocate from Chicago to Seattle. Middle class people dreamed big about the future.

Meg Ryan's character Annie works as a writer for a prosperous Baltimore Sun. As a survivor of those days when newspapers were awash in money, I found it entirely believable that her editor would send her to Seattle on a whim for a feature story. Now, the Sun and other once vibrant papers limp along chasing phantom Internet profits.

The story is highly unbelievable, a frothy mix of Ephron's nostalgia for 1950s romantic comedies, Manhattan glamour and the American songbook. Still, the characters' optimism and sense of possibility reveal the historical truth that this was once a free country.