School's Out for Summer; Searching for Four-Leaf Clovers
Mrs. M and I were watching the boys march down the aisle at an uptown church last Friday?site of their school's "graduation" ceremonies?and while I snapped photos of Junior and MUGGER III, and marveled at the gentlemanly behavior of the K-4th graders, one word stuck in my mind.
Dodgeball.
I'd seen Alan Colmes earlier that week joust with his cohost Sean Hannity on their Fox-News talk show, spouting some nonsense about how this age-old gym activity ought to be banned, since it lowers the esteem of those children who are small, get picked last or feel like victims. Not to mention the "violent" nature of the game, and, it goes without saying, its militaristic overtones. This country is getting mighty flabby if dodgeball is the latest scapegoat for an educational system that ignores rudimentary subjects like geography and American history, and is consumed instead with punishing kids who publish provocative articles in their school papers or point breaded chicken fingers at classmates or teachers.
There was also Wednesday's Slate "Book Club" entry by earth-mama Katha Pollitt, in which she ruminated upon the merits of Marjorie Heins' Not in Front of the Children with Washington Post/Vanity Fair contributor Marjorie Williams. Aside from Pollitt's typical flat-earth aside of "getting rid of capitalism," which one just skims past, this passage struck me as indicative of why schools?public and private?are in so much trouble today. Too many "educators" agree with this opinion: "[M]uch of the cultural effluvia that strikes me as harmful is completely mainstream. Anorexic fashion models with breast implants! The Bible! Pearl Harbor! If even one kid joins the Navy because of that 10th-rate nationalistic extravaganza, that will be more harm than Deep Throat ever did to its horny viewers. As for the Bible, that is definitely one book that many a young girl has been ruined by, and many a young boy, too. And I'm not even thinking of that child-abusing church in Atlanta where they strip the kids and beat them in public and marry them off at 14."
No doubt Pollitt considers the collected wisdom of Gloria Steinem, Jackson Browne and Barbra Streisand more valuable than the Bible. As for Pearl Harbor, its main problem was distorting history?which you'd think Pollitt would support?by sanitizing the wartime sentiments of an entirely different era. I still have a pin cushion with an outline of a slanty-eyed Jap that my mother used in her infrequent darning chores during World War II. As for kids joining the Navy because of an awful Hollywood blockbuster, that's their own decision. It beats getting involved with the corrupt NAACP or lost-in-utopian-clouds ACLU.
But I kept my temper in check and instead paid attention to the kids onstage. My wife and I were, naturally, very proud that Junior was selected to recite a poem on behalf of the second graders, an honor he'd been practicing for the last two weeks. Afterwards, when we asked if he was nervous he said: "Are you kidding me? Of course I was. I had butterflies in my stomach all morning, but as soon as I got to the microphone they turned into cocoons."
The fourth graders, advancing to the middle school next fall, all gave brief reminiscences of their years in the lower grades, and then sang Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." This was predictable, and a little treacly for my taste, for it'd be far more fitting to pick Dylan's earlier "Dear Landlord," with the lyrics: "Please don't dismiss my case/I'm not about to argue/I'm not about to move to no other place/Now, each of us has his own special gift/And you know this was meant to be true/And if you don't underestimate me/I won't underestimate you."
My boys were anticipating their last day of school for a couple of weeks, even though they both thoroughly enjoy horsing around with classmates, taking computer classes and reading, but who's to argue? I did find it kind of funny last Friday, as Junior and I were watching I Love Lucy at 5 a.m.?I'm thrilled that the classic sitcom is now one of his favorites, and that he laughs out loud at jokes that have no double entendres or outright lasciviousness?that he said, "I've been waiting for this day for nine months!" He was a little distressed upon finding that a suit we'd bought at Harrods two years ago no longer fit, with the pants coming up to his knees, but when Junior and his brother put on their ties and blazers without a fuss it was a memorable parental moment.
That said, I find it a bit ludicrous that such a pageant is made of progressing from one grade to the next. A long time ago, as a preteen, my buddies and I were no less enthusiastic about the final day of school, but the ritual was subdued in comparison to that of my sons. We'd have a half-day, get a fourth-quarter report card, find out what teacher we'd have in three months, and then go down to Milldam Park for a pick-up softball game. Maybe our parents would spring for a lunch at the local deli, a $1 hero from Monaco's, washed down with a Squirt, and then we'd get on with the summer. Which meant, in my case, some heavy tube-time in the morning, reruns of The Donna Reed Show, The Little Rascals and Dennis the Menace; hacking around in the woods behind our suburban ticky-tacky housing development; carving initials in any number of trees; playing games in a dilapidated concrete bunker that was rumored to be a storage facility during World War II; an outing or two to Yankee Stadium and then Boy Scout camp in July.
On Friday night, Mrs. M and I ventured out of the neighborhood to have dinner at Pastis, the snooty bistro in the meat-packing district down the street from Hogs & Heifers. We'd been there when it first opened, and it was dreadful: The food was rushed, the can't-cut-it-as-models waiters and waitresses were rude and distracted and the clientele was just as irritating, most of them looking around the room to spot celebrities. Could be, though, that Pastis has transcended the first wave of notoriety that similar party-page restaurants don't survive and might follow the example of Odeon (the champ) and Mesa Grill, becoming a hybrid of those who patronize the place to be seen and others who simply want to eat.
And, despite the obnoxious rule?certainly not unique to Pastis?that your complete party must be present to be seated, even though we had three out of four, and at 6:30 the attractive dining room wasn't packed, most of the staff now possess charm school certificates. Couldn't complain about the simple grub either: my Caesar salad was outstanding, with several large anchovies on top, and the pork Milanese was accompanied by delicious ripe tomatoes, the kind you'd normally see in August. Similar thumbs up for the seafood soup, steak frites and Bluepoint oysters. Who knows, in a couple of years Pastis might mature to the point?like Odeon?where kids are treated with respect and encouraged to join their parents, instead of being treated like dirt like in so many other velvet-rope restaurants.
After a two-week layoff from Little League?Memorial Day weekend and a rainout?Mrs. M and I spent a delightful five hours watching the kids play their t-ball and junior division games on a Saturday that was finally blessed by constant sunshine. Stupidly, I didn't wear a hat for the occasion and got a sunburn that my dermatologist Brad Katchen?the Soho doctor who's now a superstar in Manhattan society, although we knew him years before he became famous?will disapprove of, considering my pale skin. MUGGER III's team, the Giants, won in a romp, and our lithe six-year-old slugged a few balls down the first-base line and made an unassisted putout by out-racing a runner to the plate.
Junior's 11:30 a.m. game against the White Sox was not quite as successful. His team, the Indians, slept-walk through the first four innings, with a sloppy defense and some hot-dogging on the basepaths. Junior, who like his Dad is no speedster, hit a clean single his first time up and then thought he was Maury Wills and tried to stretch it into a double and was out by a mile. The Injuns rallied in the fifth but the damage was done: the White Sox, who hadn't won a game all season, played like the MLB Minnesota Twins, executing deft plays in the field and swatting balls into the outfield with regularity. I thought our manager, Señor Polar, a quirky Telegraph Ave. type who nonetheless is a devoted baseball fan and a tough but patient instructor, was going to keel over at home plate, watching the disaster unfold, but even middle-aged hippies with ponytails can keep a stiff upper lip when it comes to a competitive contest. Unlike Alan Colmes.
Of course, a lot of the fun at these games is gabbing with other parents, and it's one setting where you can have a heated political debate that's often fortuitously interrupted when one of the kids makes a sensational play. As for the men, who didn't want to be Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams when they were young?
I ribbed my friend Steve Wax for his hideous t-shirt, which was egregious on two counts: the front had a "Gore in 2004" logo, while the back was an advertisement for salon.com, the website that's destined to end its season in the sun just about at World Series time, when the Yankees once again play the Braves.
Despite the standings now, and the Seattle Mariners' jaw-dropping 48-13 start, any Bosox fan just knows that when the firesale of stars from lackluster teams takes place in late July, the Yanks will pick up a Jason Giambi or Jeff Bagwell and proceed, inevitably, to a 27th world championship. I can't bear to recount the fortunes of the Red Sox from the last week; even though they're currently in first place, with catcher Jason Varitek lost for at least two months and Pedro Martinez apparently hiding an injury, it might be a long summer.
And by the way, why has Joe Torre decided to shelter Roger Clemens from facing pitchers at Shea Stadium this weekend? Clemens, who's a Pete Rose-like jerk for his lunkhead moves against Mike Piazza last season, could erase that onus, like John Rocker did, and act like a man by facing angry Mets fans and players.
One of the moms was temporarily surprised when Junior looked at Steve's Gore advertisement and held his nose: she then quickly retrenched and said, "Oh, that's right, you're the conservative in Tribeca." We both laughed. And that's the cool thing about Little League gatherings: If the same comment was directed at me in another venue, the imaginary hair on my chest would stand up and I'd vigorously defend Jeb Bush against the hit-job against him in the July issue of Vanity Fair.
The article's author, David Margolick, who'd worked on the attack for several months and came up short, especially when Bush short-circuited the press with an angry denial of Clintonesque womanizing, had to settle for thin material. Like Bush's "arrogance," the repulsive assertion that he's not close to his parents and siblings, and a ginned-up rivalry between him and his older brother. According to Margolick, who quotes his own cousin Lionel in the article (a businessman who knew the Florida governor as a young man out of college, "recalls Jeb as a good guy, a fine tennis player, and hard worker, though with no particular aptitude for banking"), Jeb's the "smart" one, even though he's?gasp!?against affirmative action and made money in real estate. Margolick's characterization of Bush's wife Columba as an airhead who's interested mainly in shopping and South Beach nightlife is just another example of the elite media's attempt to demonize George W. Bush by stalking his extended family.
A typical excerpt: "Unlike the other Bush men, there is little that is endearing or conciliatory or disarming about Jeb [who declined Margolick's request for an interview]. He once said admiringly of his older brother that there is a political advantage to being underestimated. It is an advantage Jeb will never enjoy. Unlike Dubya, self-deprecation is not in his political arsenal; no one would believe it. Because Jeb seems to know exactly what he is doing and is so sure it is right, it is hard to cut him any slack."
I had a more difficult time keeping my sailor-mouth in check while discussing with a lawyer the obscene judgment against Philip Morris in Los Angeles last week that awarded $3 billion to Richard Boeken, a 57-year-old smoker?and also an alcoholic and heroin addict?who's now suffering terminal lung and brain cancer. Just another example of the legal fascism that subverts the Constitution, not to mention common sense. Boeken began smoking in 1957, seven years before the first Surgeon General's report that tobacco is almost always harmful to a person's health. Boeken's lawyer, Michael J. Piuze, who stands to reap a fortune from the verdict?even as it's eventually downscaled by an appeals court?must be thinking: "That was easy. What's next? We can't sue the heroin black-market dealers, but Seagram's or Anheuser Busch can afford to atone for peddling alcohol to my client."
With the blueprint for a tax overhaul in place, there's no more pressing legislation on President Bush's agenda than tort reform. That a lawyer can sweet-talk and browbeat a sympathetic jury?it's hard to remain objective when a plaintiff with cancer is sitting before you?into a guilty verdict that's intended to help bankrupt a legitimate company is morally wrong. No one disagrees anymore about the potentially lethal effects of tobacco, but whatever happened to individual responsibility? Millions of Americans have quit smoking, often too late to stave off cancer or heart disease, and they haven't sued the manufacturers of this addictive product. If greedy lawyers aren't restrained, and quickly, the next decade will see a rash of suits against other conglomerates?those that sell alcohol, fatty foods, cough medicine and dairy products.
The prevailing notion that Americans can willfully abuse a product and then become rich as a reward is sick. What if someone brought a class-action suit against The New York Times for selling a newspaper that produces brain damage? It'd be great theater, and a welcome comeuppance to that insufferably self-righteous institution, but it would ultimately be as wrong as the legal action taken against tobacco companies. No one forces a reader to buy the Times; you do so knowing the hazardous, and perhaps permanent, effects.
Pop Quiz: Who was the powerful elected official in Washington, D.C. who cracked the joke a couple of years ago that Chelsea Clinton must be the biological child of Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno?
Phil Gramm?
Tom DeLay?
Asa Hutchinson?
Naw, it was the Beltway sweetheart John McCain, telling a funny to worshipful reporters, presumably before admonishing them not to glamorize his Vietnam experience, because he was no hero. That incident, for which McCain apologized, as he always does, except when making light of "gooks," has been forgotten by a media that insists the First Family has to take their twins' brush with the law in stride?for after all, if Chelsea had behaved so irresponsibly, those dirty conservatives would pounce on it.
That's my warm-up for a short discussion about the continuing erosion of The New York Times?an evergreen of a topic, I know, but the paper loses credibility every day it publishes. Again in the July Vanity Fair, Suzanna Andrews contributes a profile of Howell Raines, the Times' editorial page editor who, on May 21, was promoted to executive editor. Raines, inexplicably given credit for enlivening the Times' editorial pages, is also said, by anonymous sources at the paper, to be a major suck-up to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Said a Times "senior person": "Howell has played Arthur from day one. Arthur was a little insecure about his intellectual capabilities, and that's where Howell has been very clear, filling in the gaps." Another said Raines was "the perfect courtier."
How jolly for those of us who actually read the editorial page. The fiction that the Times and Raines were unrelenting in their criticism of Bill Clinton is repeated in Andrews' article; one political reporter, on background, theorized, "People said that there wasn't room for two southern boys in Washington, that Howell went to school with boys like Clinton and didn't like them."
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, who loves to be quoted, offered this opinion about Raines' editorials: "It assumed the worst about Clinton's political character, when the problem was his personal character. It assumed he didn't have the political guts or strength, which wasn't always the case."
But Raines isn't all that clever. True, the Times might've chastised Clinton for his degradation of the presidency, but it endorsed the man twice and was in favor of his acquittal in the impeachment proceedings. Had Raines called for Clinton's resignation, as more than 100 less-influential newspapers did in the fall of 1998, it's likely the political debate would've changed, since many Democratic senators would then have had cover to vote their conscience. Al Gore would have become President, and as an incumbent who restored dignity to the White House would've won the 2000 presidential election by a landslide.
Instead, the Times is now the disloyal opposition, reduced to issuing Democratic Party press releases that seem to argue that the United States is arrogant to believe it's the world's one superpower. How else to explain this pro-China editorial on June 10? Raines and his assistants are troubled that the Bush administration "may be inclined to see China primarily as an emerging military threat." What a daft notion Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have there.
This one sentence, however, is not to be believed: "China has legitimate concerns that its relatively small nuclear missile force could be blunted by an American shield." Yes, Howell, let's worry that, say five years from now, China's attack on Los Angeles might be thwarted by the U.S. military.
One of Raines' pets is "Liberties" columnist Maureen Dowd who after one column (June 3) that was written without pop culture props quickly returned to her funny-farm state of mind. Last Sunday, Dowd's piece, headlined "She's Not Really Ill...," lambasted the medical profession for prescribing Prozac, Paxil, Serzone and other antidepressants that she lumps together as "feel-good pills."
She writes: "I usually avoid sweeping generalizations [advanced stage of denial]. Lately, however, I have come to the unavoidable conclusion that all women have gone crazy. O.K., maybe not all. But certainly most. Sure, it's a little inflammatory to claim that most women are nuts and on drugs and that the drugs are clearly not working. But I have some anecdotal evidence to back it up. First of all, I noticed that a lot of women I know are wacko-bango."
Seems to me, judging by her columns of the past two years, Mo could use a pharmaceutical cocktail or two. Consider the lead paragraph of her June 6 essay, which in an if-you-dig-a-hole-you'll-wind-up-in-China sort of way tries to make sense of today's political drama in Washington. Pop an old-fashioned Valium and read this doozy: "Lucy and Desi did it when they moved to Connecticut. 'Bewitched' did it when Dick York was replaced by Dick Sargent. Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis did it when they did it. Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser did it when had baby Mabel. Laverne and Shirley did it when they moved from Milwaukee to Los Angeles."
Dowd's referring to the "hip and popular" website jumptheshark.com that identifies the moment or event when a sitcom or celebrity becomes part of Entertainment Weekly's "out" list. Dowd continues: "Clarence Thomas jumped the shark watching pornography, and Ken Starr writing it... Karl Rove vaulted Jaws by keeping conservatives so purring that he scared Jim Jeffords and large chunks of the American public [we'll ignore the reality that "large chunks of the American public" have never heard of Rove]... Tom Daschle is riding the tiger, not jumping the shark. And Ari Fleischer, the sultan of the oily and useless press conference, has never even managed to get into the water... And Hillary? Was it the bloated health care plan? The Yankee cap? The great White House gift heist? Nah. The New York senator transcends mere jumping. She is the shark."
I guess that means Hillary isn't "wacko-bango."
Raines' other star, Frank Rich, has deep problems of his own, but his biweekly Times columns don't fall into Dowd's ditzy-broad category. They're just plain disgusting. Rich, whose resentment of his parents and the Ozzie and Harriet version of the 1950s comes up from time to time, had the audacity to scold President Bush in last Saturday's paper. He wrote: "Washington is still aghast at how a presumed Bush team player can, by one dramatic action, expose the sham of an administration's supposedly invincible people skills and the unfairness of its policies. But such indeed has been the coup?a 'coup of one,' as Trent Lott might say?pulled off by Jenna Bush. Had George W. Bush conducted a charm offensive when his daughter was hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy at Christmas?rather than fleeing for golf in Boca Grande, Fla.?would she be in open revolt now?"
Rich, with older children from his first marriage, is hardly in a position to criticize Bush. Was he privy to the details of Jenna Bush's hospital stay and the conversations between her parents? Not likely. Bush can be criticized on many fronts?cozying up to Big Labor on steel imports, not speaking out more forcefully on American citizens jailed in China, his tacit support of Lott and his trying to appease environmentalists are my current peeves?but who is Rich, of all people, to slam the President on his private relationship with his twin daughters?
Rich is a pig, slurping down extra portions at the trough provided by Howell Raines and Arthur Sulzberger Jr.
June 11
Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:MUG1988@aol.com) or fax to 244-9864.