Ask the Rose

Bloom its own

each bud possess.

A poem, too,

wrote or read:

A solitary act.

The rose could tell you that.

Unholy Matters

For a lifelong. practicing Catholic like myself, raised in the glow of the Second Vatican Council, the hard-line reactionary bent of the last two popes has been, to put it mildly, discouraging. Today’s report that the Vatican equates pedophilia with the ordination of women represents not just a new low but also an embrace of the egregiously inane. Meanwhile, as it hopelessly bungles the festering wound of the sexual abuse crisis and insults the intelligence of its own adherents, the Church’s leadership continues to torpedo the prospects for ecumenical progress with its open encouragement of the schism within the Anglican communion and the approaching (or so it seems) canonization of Pius XII, an eventuality that angers many Jews and threatens to undermine the dramatic improvements made in Jewish-Catholic relations. In the case of Pius XII, the Vatican maintains that it is for the Church to decide whom it wishes to honor for “lives marked by the exercise of heroic virtue.” The available evidence suggests that his heroic virtue lay more in personal piety and loyalty to priestly vows than in any act of individual resistance or bold public leadership against the Holocaust. If the decision is made that this is enough to justify his canonization, then the Church will be well advised to prepare the way by creating a category of saints who exemplify how orthodoxy and piety in the private sphere can alone qualify as a life of heroic virtue. A number of Pius XII’s contemporaries could be enlisted in such a litany. Generalissimo Francisco Franco, for example, who led a successful rebellion against the republican government of Spain and ruled for more than three decades as a fascist dictator, not only gave Church teaching on homosexuality, contraception and divorce the force of law but was punctilious in his religious observances and a loyal husband. Monsignor Josef Tiso, who served as the head of the Nazi puppet state of Slovakia, was by all accounts highly virtuous in his personal life. In America, so-called radio priest Father Charles Coughlin became notorious for his fervid anti-Semitic broadcasts but was never derelict in his duties as pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower and demonstrated an admirable docility to ecclesiastical authority when he accepted the silencing that was eventually imposed on him. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a loyal Catholic and a leader in the crusade against communism, might have failed to demonstrate heroic virtue in every aspect of his personal life, but that only goes to prove nobody is perfect, not even saints. And, hey, even if some mistakes are made and some less-than-worthy candidates are canonized, it’s nothing compared to the unholy, sacrilegious thought of a Church in which “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” and the ability to say Mass doesn’t depend on possessing the correct genitalia.

The Real Cost of War

Every time the list of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan is published in the paper, I read the names aloud. The age of the dead continues to startle. The great majority are so young. I’m also struck by where the great majority come from, small towns in the south and Midwest, Brooklyn, the Bronx, etc.—places that are home to the country’s working class and poor. No rich kids need apply. I’m sure there are a few from privileged circumstances, but does anyone doubt that these are the exception? This war—America’s great war on global terror, aka “the defining struggle of the 21st century”—is one in which the upper classes need not fight. This, interestingly enough, was one of the causes of the ferocious Draft Riots that broke in NYC in July, 1863. (Yes, I wrote a novel about them.) Faced with the Civil War draft, a man had several choices. He could enlist and seek one of the bonuses being offered. He could wait to see if his name was picked. He could pay $300 (a year’s wage for an average working man) to be excused from a single round of the draft, or he could hire a substitute to go in his place, which cost about $1500 and which permanently excused him from the draft. (I bet you can guess which one J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould and other Wall Street financers did.) With the all-volunteer army we have created, in effect, an army that excuses the children of the rich from serving but which brings no financial benefit to the country. So, I say, let’s return to the system used in the Civil War. Let’s subject everybody (and sexism be damned, I mean everybody) between 18 and 40 to the draft and give him/her the chance to but his/her way out. For the equivalent of four years of tuition at an Ivy League institution—say $250,000—a person will be excused from a single round of the draft. In the case of sending a substitute, which involves covering the cost of training, outfitting and maintaining a soldier in Whereverstan for a year or so, let’s put it at a ballpark figure of $2.5 million, a fairly piddling sum in comparison to the $25 billion in bonuses paid in 2009 to the country’s top hedge fund managers. This alteration won’t change the situation we now have with the all-volunteer army, which is largely made up of poor and working-class kids from outside urban and suburban cocoons of privilege (like the one in which I live). It will, however, help the moneyed classes to become true stakeholders in the global struggle, not just spectators. (Congress might even consider authorizing purchasers to amortize their investments in deferments over time and authorize lending institutions to bundle loans as collateralized debt obligations, which could then be traded…you know the drill.)

Ulysses on Stone Street

Do me (and yourself) a favor: Mark your calendars for next year’s Bloomsday (June 16th, 2011) so you won’t miss the readings from “Ulysses” hosted at the eponymous pub on Stone Street, in lower Manhattan, by all-around mensch and nonpareil writer, Colum McCann. I know, I know, “Ulysses“ is dense, impenetrable, the literary totem of literary scholars/snobs/wannabees. Except it isn’t. Difficult in some parts, yes. But in others eminently accessible, it is a book that requires work to grasp in its totality. (Said James/Jimmy/Seamus Joyce something to the effect, “It took me 14 years to write, so why shouldn’t take you a while to get through?”) But it’s work that never stops paying off. It’s the only book I’ve read three times. (Does that sound pretentious? Yes. Sorry. Sue me.) When I was working at Time Warner in the infernal salt mines of speech writing and trying to produce my first novel, I kept “Ulysses” in the top drawer of my desk. I arrived two hours before the mine boss’s whistle blew to write what I could of a book that I wasn’t sure I could write and often doubted I’d finish. (It was eventually published as “Banished Children of Eve.”) Those mornings when I was stymied (and, Christ, there were a lot of them), I’d take out “Ulysses,” read a page/paragraph/sentence and be reminded of the magic of storytelling, the plasticity and suggestiveness of language and how a writer/ novelist/fabulist has the right /duty to try anything, to experiment, to seek every chance available to explore what it means to be a human being in the context of a certain place and time. There were times (a lot of them) I was totally intimated by Joyce. I knew that at my best, I’d fall far, far, far short of Seamus at his worst. But more often I was reminded of just how central storytelling is to our species, how every story matters, how the truth is in the telling, and I was motivated to keep going. The enduring triumph of Joyce’s masterpiece hit me again, full force, on Stone Street, the most Dublinesque of New York streets, as I listened to terrific performers like Larry Kirwan and Colum McCann turn words into flesh, a rapturous afternoon, weather and Guinness pregnant with Liffy quiddity, the afternoon capped by Aedin Moloney’s breathtaking, time-bending transubstantiation of Miss Molly, bringing her blazingly, fun-lovingly, fiercely, bloomfully, unforgettably to life. It’s a date, then, no? Next June 16th, Bloomsday, yes, at Danny McDonald’s Ulysses Pub, on Stone Street, yes. Say yes. Yes.

Silver Lining in the Gulf

I’m sick to death of all this whingeing, whining and handwringing about the British Petroleum (BP) disaster in the Gulf. So some shrimp and crabs get slimed. Big deal. We can import plenty more from China at a cheaper price than the domestic brands. (The Chinese versions are probably polluted too, but no one in China will own up to it because, if they did, they might wind up in jail.) If Americans really cared about rotten-tasting sea food, Red Lobster would have been out of business years ago. Once, years ago, after a night of too-much beer and Jameson, I was shanghaied by some friends to a fast-food outlet called Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. (Treacher, a once reputable British stage actor had at this point descended from tragedy to farce, serving as TV sidekick to the talentless, ever-oleaginous Merv Griffin.) My repast at Arthur Treacher’s, which tasted like deep-fried blubber—or what I imagine deep-fried blubber tastes like—left me ill for several weeks and inflicted damage to my digestive system that still lingers. (Thank God, the antibodies from the beer and Jameson’s helped fight off some of the worst side effects.) It took weeks before the oily aftertaste finally left my mouth, and it is only now I realize that Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips was, in fact, a subsidiary of BP, a pioneering experiment by clever British oilmen in plumbing the American appetite for deep-fried soaked-in-petroleum sea food. Though Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips has largely disappeared (thanks to competitors who offer even worse food at a lower price), be prepared to see BP undertake a dramatic revival of its sea food-serving subsidiary. In fact, if I might venture a suggestion, BP should blow up all its rigs in the Gulf and fill the whole damn place with oil. That way, they can turn the Gulf into one gigantic refinery, providing Americans with what we value most—above clean water, clean air and some stupid hurricane-ravaged wetlands: cheap, plentiful gasoline. We can all drive down to New Orleans, which will be great for the still-struggling economy of that post-Katrina town, fill up on two-cents-per-gallon gas and pig out at the all-you-can-eat sea food buffet at Arthur Treacher’s. See ya in the Big Easy!

Memorial Day

Memorial Day in the Hudson Valley. Warm, dry, lovely. I jogged (okay, hobbled on my sexagenarian knees) to Irvington along the Croton Aqueduct, through Dobbs Ferry. I passed two Memorial Day events. Small town commemorations right out of Norman Rockwell. There were several posters emblazoned “Support Our Troops.” I do. It’s the wars I don’t support.

Yesterday I went to BOOK EXPO AMERICA (their caps, not mine) at the Javits Center on New York’s still-undeveloped West Side. (I was working as Governor Hugh Carey’s speech writer when the center opened thirty [sic] years ago and wrote his remarks for the inaugural event–something to the effect that in another generation, this area will be unrecognizable. Guess what? It hasn’t changed a bit. Maybe in another thirty years, which won’t much matter to me, since I’ll be dead and gone.) Where was I? On, yeah, BOOK EXPO. Last time I was there was with my second novel,”Hour of the Cat,” which followed my first novel by eight years. I was at a signing booth. There was a long line in front of me. I was shocked and delighted. All these people for me, I thought. My fans. How wonderful. I had no idea. Then the volunteer assigned to help me with the signing explained that the line was actually the immense, endless overflow, extending down several booths, of people waiting for Donald Trump. Yes, the world’s biggest self-promoter, gas bag and real estate pimp. Several of those in line were kind enough to ask me to autograph a copy of my galley. This year, though the Donald wasn’t in sight, I went filled with a kind of dread about the death of reading, print, the book. I pictured a convention center with about six or seven sorry souls, deflated remnants of the baby boom generation, who were there because of forced retirement and nowhere else to go. But the place was full. There were lots of people who looked as though they’d been born after the presidency of George Bush, Sr. The headline in today’s NYT’s mentions “Anxiety Amid the Chatter.” But what I encountered was enthusiasm, passion, excitement. People still love books. They love to read. They want to meet authors. Many of them want to write books of their own and be published. I signed galleys. There were actually people who’d read some of my other books (and, no, they weren’t relatives). We talked. It was fun. I enjoyed it. When I left, I walked through the baking heat to Bryant Park, behind the NYPL. I drank a bottle of water. It tasted great. As my Uncle Joe O’Brien (he was the night clerk at the George Washington Hotel on Lexington Avenue and makes an appearance in “Hour of the Cat”) was fond of saying, “Dontcha know, kiddo, life is fulla surprises.”

Blogloggia

I am a child of the 19th century. That’s the century before the last century. One of the supreme disciplines of the Catholic grammar school I attended in the Bronx was penmanship. Yes, penmanship! Twice a year, there was a Christian Brother who arrived at our school to inspect our penmanship books. The class with the best penmanship won a banner! I’ve always been proud of my penmanship, as my father was of his. (We attended the same schools. He graduated from St. Raymond’s Grammar School in 1918. I graduated in 1961. My niece graduated in 1978. We all had the same art teacher!) I’ve written all four of my books by hand. I was a speechwriter for over 25 years–for two New York governors and five chairman of Time Inc./Time Warner/AOL (OMYGOD) Time Warner–and wrote every single speech (thousands of them over the years) by hand. Many times I tried to make the transfer to a typewriter but couldn’t. My education and writing career had more in common with that of Charles Dickens (a court reporter/stenographer, don’t forget) and James Joyce (another veteran of parochial schools) than with today’s wired world. I feel like a stranger in a strange land in this terra incognita of Blogloggia. But, hey, here I am, fresh off the boat, an intellectual immigrant from time past who’s set foot on the land of the future, so forgive my ignorance/hesitation/confusion (the fate of all the freshly arrived). Goodbye to the 19th century. Hello to the 21st. I’m going to do my best to fit in. That’s a threat.