A Writer asks a Famous Writer to Stop Writing Because–Why Again?

Every writer is jealous of other writers.  Whether it’s fame or fortune or talent, we can’t help but snivel a little when they become Them and we’re still just us.

Most of us do it in silence or in the midst of a narrow group of co-commiserators.  Not many (Okay, a few, but they’re gone now) do it as publicly as a writer named Lynn Shepherd did recently when she wrote a blog post on HuffPo UK telling J.K. Rowling she’s had her turn and if she had any decency at all she’d hang it up and give someone else a chance.

Now, who is Lynn Shepherd to be telling the great Jo Rowling she’s being selfish with all that extraneous publishing now that Harry Potter is done and over?  Beats me.  I don’t know and I don’t care.  Honestly, I don’t.  I’m all for audacity and truth-telling but I can’t get past her own admission that she really doesn’t read Rowling.  It’s all about the fame and fortune.  One person apparently shouldn’t have that much.
A snippet of what she said:

"I didn’t much mind Rowling when she was Pottering about. I’ve never read a word (or seen a minute) so I can’t comment on whether the books were good, bad or indifferent. I did think it a shame that adults were reading them (rather than just reading them to their children, which is another thing altogether), mainly because there’s so many other books out there that are surely more stimulating for grown-up minds. But, then again, any reading is better than no reading, right? But The Casual Vacancy changed all that.

.It wasn’t just that the hype was drearily excessive, or that (by all accounts) the novel was no masterpiece and yet sold by the hundredweight, it was the way it crowded out everything else, however good, however worthwhile. That book sucked the oxygen from the entire publishing and reading atmosphere. And I chose that analogy quite deliberately, because I think that sort of monopoly can make it next to impossible for anything else to survive, let alone thrive. Publishing a book is hard enough at the best of times, especially in an industry already far too fixated with Big Names and Sure Things, but what can an ordinary author do, up against such a Golgomath?"

I guess you noticed that she never read any of the Harry Potter books?  Seems odd, doesn’t it, that she would then go on to say, “I did think it a shame that adults were reading them (rather than just reading them to their children, which is another thing altogether), mainly because there’s so many other books out there that are surely more stimulating for grown-up minds.”

Gulp and gasp and get outta here!  I’m a grown-up, I read a LOT.   I loved the Harry Potter books.  I felt a lot of things while reading them, but I’m pretty sure I never felt shame.

So here’s my dilemma, and I’m going to be honest about this.  I don’t much like that this person who puts herself in league with “ordinary authors” (see above) is getting all kinds of attention simply because she’s in a snit over someone else’s fame. (Check out her FB and Twitter hits.  Many more than I (sniff) ever got.  Hmmmph.)   And here I am, adding to the so thoroughly unearned attention

But why Jo Rowling?  Because she had the nerve to move on to “adult” books instead of staying in the kiddie section where she belongs?  Because people are buying her books simply because her name is J.K Rowling?  Because she doesn’t deserve it?

I have a feeling Lynn Shepherd knew exactly what she was doing with this piece.  A friend tried to warn her, but I think she saw it as the perfect attention-getter for her own books.  If that’s what it was, she failed.   Look at this (My bold):

"So this is my plea to JK Rowling.  Remember what it was like when The Cuckoo’s Calling had only sold a few boxes and think about those of us who are stuck there, because we can’t wave a wand and turn our books into overnight bestsellers merely by saying the magic word. By all means keep writing for kids, or for your personal pleasure – I would never deny anyone that – but when it comes to the adult market you’ve had your turn."

Jo Rowling’s success was anything but overnight.  I get that she's talking about her fame giving her a head start with any subsequent books, but Jo Rowling has certainly paid her dues.  There isn’t a writer on earth who doesn’t know about Rowling’s struggles while working on the first Harry Potter book.  She was a single, jobless mom living for a while on welfare and food stamps.  Her fame was not handed to her.  No magic wands.  Not by a long shot.

But, by golly, Lynn Shepherd got what she wanted.   First Huffington Post and now here.  (Oh, I’m kidding!)  I admit I’ve never read her books, but I don’t need to in order to say this:
That was a cheap trick.  I’m sorry I got pulled into it but if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have been able to say publicly that that was a cheap trick.

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. – Albus Dumbledore”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

_______________

NOTE:  I wrote this post last night, before I heard there was a negative-review bomb against one of Lynn Shepherd’s books over on Amazon.  At last count I saw 44 one-stars, most of them published yesterday.  They were all paying her back for what she wrote about J.K. Rowling.

What I wrote above is fair game.  It’s my opinion, just as Lynn Shepherd’s opinion is hers.  What is happening to this writer at Amazon is an attempt to destroy a writer’s work by giving it deliberately low ratings.

I left my post as it was originally written because my thoughts about Shepherd’s piece haven’t changed, but I’m frankly appalled by the outside attacks on works that have nothing to do with what she wrote at HuffPo.  This is chilling to any writer who writes opinions on controversial subjects.

Whatever I said about cheap tricks above goes ten-fold for those who think this is a cool way to get back at her.  Get back at her for what?  I think Jo Rowling will be just fine after this.  Whatever I think about Lynn Shepherd, I don’t want to see her own career ruined over a simple thousand-word opinion.

I hope I’m not alone.
_________________________


Follow Up:  This is what Lynn Shepherd told The Guardian on 2/27/14:
 

Speaking to the Guardian today, Shepherd apologised for upsetting writers and readers alike, explaining that she had "only ever meant to raise the issue of how hard it is for new writers to get noticed and how publishing is much more of a zero sum game than people often think".
"Many writers face the same challenges and frustrations when they're just starting out, and JK Rowling did herself," Shepherd said. "She's been a phenomenal success since then and has millions of fans who are passionate about her books. That's an amazing achievement. With hindsight I'd have written my piece an entirely different way, as I never intended it to upset anyone, and I'm very sorry that it did."

The Story: Pentecostal Snake Handler refuses help and dies. My Reaction: Surprising, even to Me

For days now, since I heard about the death of Jamie Coots, the snake-handling preacher from Middlesboro, Kentucky, I've been struggling with my own thoughts about it.  There is no reason in the world why I should be involved in any of it.  I didn't know him.  I had never before heard of his church.  And I didn't know before this weekend, when I read about his death, that he had been the star of a National Geographic Channel series called "Snake Salvation".

Photo:  National Geographic

 I read about his death--about how he had been bitten by a venomous snake during a church service on Saturday, about how his family carried his unconscious body to their home, about how the family refused help from the EMS team dispatched to their home with the needed anti-venom serum, about how Jamie Coots of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name died without ever waking up again--and before I had even finished reading the article a blog post was already taking shape.

The more I read about this man, about his beliefs, about the origins of Pentecostal snake-handling in the hills of Appalachia, the closer I came to seeing it as a story ripe for ridicule.  And I wrote it that way.  I had some funny lines in there--laugh-out-loud, if I do say--and I had a link to a video that would make Jamie Coots look foolish.  He did look foolish.  To me.  But I couldn't get it right.  I kept coming back to the raw fact that a man had died.  A man was dead and I was trying to create a piece that would be a candidate for Wacky Story of the Week.

It isn't that.  It's a story about belief and trust and how difficult it sometimes is to understand interpretations, perceptions and faith.

It's about the actions of generations of men who invented and relied on their own definitions of a few passages of the bible having to do with the handling of snakes in order to start a new kind of church.

And it's about us, the outsiders, and where we draw the line.

For any church, for any religion, the outsiders are irrelevant. Unless we're directly affected, their methods of worship are their business, not ours. If we don't understand their rituals, they can live with that.

My own sense is that we draw the line when it's evident that during their rituals people can be, and have been, physically harmed.  Then we step in and look around.  In this case, it should be easy to analyze the problem here:  Their religion causes them to show their devotion to God by handling venomous snakes.  As reported in a USA Today article, they don't believe that God will save them from snakebites.  That's not the point:

Professors who study snake handling say worshipers are very aware of the risks they are taking and accept the consequences.

Brian Pennington, a religion professor at Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn., has studied Coots during his research on snake handling in worship.

He said the prominent leader of the snake handling community saw the practice as "an absolute command of God."

"These are not irrational people. These are people who know very well what they're doing every Sunday or Wednesday night — whenever it might be they go into that church," Pennington said. "They know very well the fate that Pastor Coots suffered could be suffered by any of them who does this during a service."

 Throughout the history of the Pentecostal snake-handling movement, mainly based in rural Appalachia, many people have died from snake bites, including the movement's founder, George Hensley.  After being bitten numerous times, one of the bites finally killed him.  He wasn't alone.  There are no accurate records of the numbers of snake bite deaths during these rituals, but it was enough for some states to outlaw religious snake handling.

In 2012,  Mark Wolford, pastor at the Apostolic House of the Lord Jesus, died of snake bite wounds.  These deaths aren't nearly as publicized as that of Coots, who was the star of a TV show and thus better known, but they happen, and are expected to happen.

"A common misunderstanding is that handlers believe they can't get bit or it won't kill them," [Ralph Hood, a religion professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga] added. "What they'll tell you is, `No one will get out of this alive.' They'll also tell you it's not a question of how you live; it's a question of how you die. ... This is how he would have wanted to die."

  The problem, then, and the reason we pay attention--beyond a natural curiosity about something as odd as serpent-handling for God--is that people seem to be willing to die for reasons we will never understand.  They are deliberately putting their lives in jeopardy as a supposed honor to God.  All based on a few slim passages nearly hidden away in the King James version of the bible.

I was angry when I first heard about this--and maybe I still am.  People are dying over something that makes no sense.  But the longer I got into it, the more I came to realize--for my own self--that we can't help them.  We can't understand them and we can't help them. They embrace a literal translation of a few biblical passages and have created an entire religion around it.  A religion that's over a century old now.  That's pretty monumental.  In the end, it doesn't have to make sense to anyone else. 

There is the snake's point of view, of course, and it shouldn't be ignored.  Some say that in order to keep the snakes willing and docile, they underfeed and underwater them.  They keep them tightly together in glass cages and their life span--three to five months--is far below the normal span of 10 to 20 years.  That is animal cruelty and needs to be addressed.

But if it can be proven that no snakes are harmed in the process, I'm all for moving on to something else.  They're going to do what they're going to do with or without our blessing--which, it should be noted, they haven't asked for.

Even now, the next generation is moving to take over where Jamie Coots left off.  Jamie's son, Cody, will follow the family tradition. (Jamie's father and grandfather were both serpent-handling preachers)  Children in these churches are not allowed to handle snakes, but nobody stops them from watching.  If they're brought up in a culture where handling venomous snakes is a major part of honoring their God, it would be the rare kid who wouldn't want to try it as soon as they came of age.  Even the dying part is noble.  But once they're adults, our commitment to watch over them has ended.

According to Knoxville's WATETV. com on Sunday:

 The pastor's son [Cody ]Coots saw the snake bite his father last night.

"The snake that bit him, we've been carrying it for four months. It's been carried hundreds of times and handled all kinds of times. But when it's your time to go, it's just your time to go," Cody Coots said.

Cody says while they're in shock, his family will stand strong in their beliefs.

"I don't think it's dangerous. It's the word of God. We've always said it's a good way to live by and it's a good way to die by," Cody Coots said.

Cody Coots is expected to keep his father's ministry going.

Ugly Politics: When the Meme is "The President Must Die" We Have To Pay Attention

At a Town Hall meeting held last week in Oklahoma, an audience member raised her hand and said to Jim Bridenstine, a congressman from the First District,  “Obama is not president as far as I’m concerned. He should be executed as an enemy combatant.”

Read that again:  "Obama is not president as far as I'm concerned.  He should be executed as an enemy combatant."  (Video here.)

 She then went on to remind Bridenstine and the audience about the Muslims Obama is letting into this country to be pilots on commercial jets, which was proof to her that "this guy is a criminal!"  She blamed congress for doing nothing when Obama "has no authority.  He has NO authority!"

And when she was finished and the camera turned back to him, the first words out of U.S. Congressman Jim Bridenstine's mouth were, "Look, everybody knows the lawlessness of this president."

He went on to describe a Chief Executive so out of control, so power-hungry, that when he couldn't get something done through executive order, "then he used foreign bodies".

He used as an example an effort in April, 2013 to ban certain types of guns, "not because they operated any differently than any other types of guns but because they looked scary". Then he tried to block magazine sizes, which, again Congress blocked.  "Which was the right answer," according to Jim.

But the congressman saved the best--or worst--for last: "Then he wanted universal background checks, which is a national gun registration, let me be clear."  Pause, repeat:  "He wanted universal background checks which is a national gun registration. . .".   And when Obama couldn't get that done he went to the U.N, where they passed an international Arms Trade Treaty, which, according to Jim, says if you have any gun that has any part manufactured in a foreign country, then they have to do more than a national background check, they have to do an international background check and it becomes an international gun registry.  (The Horror!)

Well, of course, this president signed it.  So here's how Jim sees it:

"Now let me be clear.  The Second Amendment of the United States of America is not open for debate by a foreign government."

A woman in his audience has just called for the President of the United States to be executed and this congressman answers her by bringing up the president's push for background checks, gun registration, and his dealings with foreign countries to accomplish the same.

Nobody seems to know where this meeting took place or exactly when, but someone put it on YouTube and it went viral. The press picked it up.  Bridenstine got wind of the flak and put this notice on his web page:

“A public figure cannot control what people say in open meetings. I obviously did not condone and I do not approve of grossly inappropriate language. It is outrageous that irresponsible parties would attribute another person’s reckless remarks to me."

So let's talk about who is being irresponsible.  You kept quiet when an audience member called for the death of the president, and then you added fuel to the fire. You brought up guns and the Second Amendment and insinuated that the President of the United States is in league with foreign players to take American gun rights away.

I hope the Secret Service pays that group a call and I hope you're there when they do.  You all need a lesson in Government, in Civics, in Constitutional and Sedition Laws, and in civility.

I confess that I've never been as fearful of a president's safety as I have with Barack Obama.  The gun nuts are getting bolder and the propaganda against his "otherness" is unrelenting and growing more fierce. 

There is no proof that this president has been threatened more than any other.  (I went looking.)  The Secret Service won't provide those statistics, of course, and Politifact finds no evidence and calls the charges that he has been "false".   But a simple search finds threats against this president by the thousands.  Including this one on Facebook from the Christian American Patriots  Militia (Read more here.):

The rumor is that Ted Nugent got a visit from the Secret Service for saying, "If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will be either be dead or in jail by this time next year."  I hope it's not just a rumor.  We'll never know unless Teddy tells us, but I hope they're doing their jobs.  That was a direct threat. (Not that it would cure him.  I wrote about his shenanigans just last month.  He gets off on this stuff.  Apparently so do a lot of other people.)

Are threats against the president illegal?  It depends.  There is this:

18 U.S. Code § 871 - Threats against President and successors to the Presidency

Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits for conveyance in the mail or for a delivery from any post office or by any letter carrier any letter, paper, writing, print, missive, or document containing any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States, the President-elect, the Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President of the United States, or the Vice President-elect, or knowingly and willfully otherwise makes any such threat against the President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. 

But then there's this from FrumForum on July 21, 2011:

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that comments which encouraged the assassination of President Obama and predicted that he would have “a .50 cal in the head soon” while using racial slurs against him were protected by the First Amendment. While the decision seems to be a plausible reading of existing precedents, a former Secret Service agent contacted by FrumForum thought that it exposed the president to unacceptable risk.

“It was a bad decision,” said Joseph Petro, former agent and co-author of Standing Next to History: An Agent’s Life Inside the Secret Service. He argued that permitting such remarks “creates more potential for someone to do something” dangerous. Petro claimed that, in his experience, it is normal to treat such comments as threats, saying “I’ve seen this before … Back in the Nixon days, there was a guy who put up a billboard in New Jersey saying ‘Kill Nixon.’ He was arrested and the billboard was taken down.”
“We’re all in favor of constitutional rights,” he added, but “there should be some … sensitivity shown for the unique risk that the President faces.”

The former agent suggested that the ruling was part of a pattern of recent events that did not show a proper awareness of the dangers presidents face comparing it to incidents in the past two years in which protesters brought weapons to presidential speeches. Petro also noted that the fact that the accused, Walter Bagdasarian, predicted that Obama would be shot with a .50 caliber rifle while he owned such a gun made the threatening nature of the comments especially clear.

However, two legal experts contacted by FrumForum both agreed with the majority’s central claim that Bagdasarian did not express an intention to personally kill Obama because he merely predicted the president’s killing and encouraged others to shoot him. “The speaker did not tell Obama that if he didn’t do something he would shoot him,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has written extensively on First Amendment issues. “The speech may have been repugnant and ugly … but it did not constitute a threat within the meaning of the First Amendment.”

I'm afraid.  I'm very afraid.  When advocating and encouraging the killing of our president is protected under the First Amendment, it's destined to become as twisted as the Second Amendment to mean whatever the advocates want it to mean.  It'll be open season on wishing the president dead.

Something will have to happen before we wake up to the harm this can bring.  I dread to think what that might be.
_____________________

(Can I just say to those who are already revving up their keyboards to remind me that George W. Bush got death threats, too?  I don't doubt it.  Every president has.  It goes with the territory.  But this was a town hall meeting where a member of congress did nothing to disabuse an audience member of the notion that the President of the United States should be executed as an enemy combatant. Instead, he immediately launched into an attack on "the lawlessness of the president" and his shady attempts to bring in foreign countries to control our guns, showing him to be a dangerous character, indeed.   Let me know when you find something comparable.)

Farewell, Pete Seeger. Peace Be With You.

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Pete Seeger, America's folk singer and man of peace, has died.

He was 94 years old, so we should be grateful that we had him with us for so long.  He was a man whose presence was timeless and inspiring, and the truth is, we needed him.  We need him still.

He was more than a singer/songwriter, although in his case that would have been enough.  He was a man of courage, unafraid to face down fancy fools and demagogues.   In the 1950s he was hauled before Joe McCarthy's Red-scare witch-hunters and branded a communist--a brand he neither confirmed nor denied until much later, when he said he had been a communist for a time but dropped out.  He never failed to remind those who asked that it was never illegal in this country to be a communist.  The young ones were, as you might imagine, surprised to hear it.

He was jailed, blacklisted, and was sentenced to 10 years for contempt of Congress. (That last one was overturned, but he was able to retain the bragging rights.)

During the communist witch-hunts of the early Fifties, however, the Weavers were blacklisted, resulting in canceled concert dates and the loss of their recording contract with Decca Records. Under congressional subpoena to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Seeger asserted his First Amendment rights, scolding the committee, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my associations, my philosophical or my religious beliefs, or how I voted in any election or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked.” - See more at: http://rockhall.com/inductees/pete-seeger/bio/#sthash.Tltp8l5j.dpuf

 In 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He was famously uncooperative, citing the First Amendment (freedom of speech and association) instead of the Fifth (freedom from self-incrimination) when he refused to answer, because he believed there was nothing "incriminating" about knowing communists or being one. Clubs and TV shows canceled the Weavers' bookings, their recording company voided their contract, and their records vanished from stores and radio airplay. Seeger was indicted for contempt of Congress, and sentenced to ten concurrent one-year terms in prison (a sentence he didn't serve, as it was overturned on appeal). Seeger and his band were blacklisted, and for years worked only in tiny clubs willing to take the risk of hiring them.

Pete never failed to let us know he was one of us.  His concerts became one big sing-along, where everyone joined in and became his back-up singers.  (That could be because Pete himself said as a singer he made a pretty good song-writer, but his audiences loved it.)

We knew the words to his songs by heart and understood where the words came from.   He cared about the least of us.  He was a union man.  He was a man of peace who would not submit.

Solidarity forever, Mr. Seeger.  It was a privilege to be on this planet with you.  You will live on.  We'll make sure of that.

Ted Nugent: Obama is Still President. I've Let The Country Down

Let's face it, there is no shaming that bad boy, Teddy "The Nuge" Nugent, the "Motor City Madman",  proud draft-dodging gun nut, NRA spokesman, and Grand Champeen Obama hater.  He thrives on badboyism.  It has made him what he is today.  One look at him tells me he ain't gonna listen to no mamas, so why waste my time?

But it's okay if I make fun of him, right?  Because that's what mamas do when the kids go off the deep end and think they're too cool for school.  Usually the kids in question are still what we might consider kids and have a chance to outgrow it, but, as in Teddy's case, mavericks do cut loose and stay loose.  Sometimes they get lost in their own kid persona and never grow up. It's sort of sad, watching them, but they never stop thinking they're pretty damned cute, so what's the harm?

So here's what that bad Teddy has done this time.  In his agony over not actually having the power after all to unseat/destroy the sitting president, Barack Hussein Obama, and all the stray Democrats (a power he, sadly, truly believed he had--see first sentence below), he's gone back to his old Devil's Thesaurus to find just the right words to settle this thing once and for all.  At the 2014 Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT) last week, he took a moment to tell a reporter for Guns.com what he thought of Barack Obama. That Obama is one bad dude. He is, in fact, according to Teddy, a "sub-human mongrel."
  
Here's Teddy:

I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist, raised communist, educated communist, nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America. I am heartbroken but I am not giving up. I think America will be America again when Barack Obama, [Attorney General] Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton, [Sen.] Dick Durbin, [former New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg and all of the liberal Democrats are in jail facing the just due punishment that their treasonous acts are clearly apparent.

So a lot of people would call that inflammatory speech. Well I would call it inflammatory speech when it's your job to protect Americans and you look into the television camera and say what difference does it make that I failed in my job to provide security and we have four dead Americans. What difference does that make? Not to a chimpanzee or Hillary Clinton, I guess it doesn't matter.

I don't know how Hillary got in there.  I would think it's because she could be a contender--a Democratic contender--in 2016, and that would be bad for his guys. But he's a Hillary-hater from way back.  At a 2007 concert he told Hillary to ride his machine gun and called her a worthless bitch.  (He had some choice words for Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein at that same concert, but you'll understand if I pass on posting them here. )

So.  Two things happened that gave Teddy the idea that he might be more than an old rock star--that he might actually have a future in galvanizing Americans to jump into rabbit holes and view the world in a topsy-turvy setting having nothing to do with reality:  The NRA gave him a position on their board, and Texas Tea Party congressman Steve Stockman got him a seat at last year's State of the Union address.

That last gig thrilled Teddy no end:




He had a good career going there for a while as a singer.  ("Cat Scratch Fever")  He could carry a tune and everything. ("Cat Scratch Fever")  But it could be that the crowds stopped coming (just guessing) and if he wanted to stay in the spotlight he had to find a new gig.

But what's a Medicare-eligible guy to do when he has his big 'ol patriot heart set on saving the country from assorted Muslims and Communists and uppity wimmin but his only talents lean more toward screaming and cussing and prevaricating while making goofy faces and toting big-ass guns?

Beats me.  I'm just glad he's not my kid.

It's the Ego, Stupid

Yesterday New Jersey governor Chris Christie took 108 minutes out of his busy schedule to do something so unprecedented there wasn't a pundit anywhere in the country who wasn't on top of it, who didn't have an opinion about it, and who, almost to a person, saw it as the beginning of the end of that lovable bully.  No White House for you, big guy!

So what happened yesterday was that Chris Christie set up a press conference and stood before reporters for more than an hour and a half to apologize, sort of, for the colossal, politically incorrect, on-purpose screw-up that caused the week-long closing off portions of the George Washington Bridge at Fort Lee, N.J.

The apology for the undisputed fact that his own aides had orchestrated the closing was short and sweet compared to the hand-wringing that followed while Chris Christie, the ultimate victim here, explained to reporters how he felt when he discovered that he had been betrayed by members of his trusted staff.

He felt sad. He was sad.  He was so sad:

"I'm sad. I'm sad. That's the predominant emotion I feel right now is sadness, sadness that I was betrayed by a member of my staff, sadness that I had people who I entrusted with important jobs who acted completely inappropriately, sad that that's led the people of New Jersey to have less confidence in the people that I've selected. The emotion that I've been displaying in private is sad."

The initial blow-up was over the vindictive phony shutting down of toll booths and portions of the insanely busy George Washington bridge.  It ended up causing days of needless chaos for what turned out to be an odd game of supposed retaliation by Christie's staff against Fort Lee's Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, for not endorsing their guy in the last election.  Their guy, Chris Christie!  That guy!

But after all that, their guy Christie, true to form, felt nobody else's emotion but his own.  It's true he mentioned the bridge fiasco a few times, but the main thrust of the news conference was about Christie's own strong feeling of betrayal.  Yes, the buck stops there, and yes, that mess on the bridge was awful, but how can he get across to the reporters in the room just how affected he was by his staff's actions against him? It was as if the chaos caused by the phony toll booth and lane closings was nothing more than collateral damage: The real story was Et tu, Brute?

(By the way, Rachel Maddow made a pretty convincing argument last night that the traffic jam vendetta wasn't really over the mayor but was, rather, against New Jersey Democrats who wouldn't give the Gov what he wanted when it came to Supreme Court justices.  It's all about the timing.) 

Egos are a dime a dozen in politics.  Every politician has one, and usually it's a doozy.  It has to be, in order to go through that whole election process.  When you go into it knowing hundreds if not thousands if not millions of people are going to hate you and make fun of you and try to bring you down in the process, something besides the thought of doing good deeds is driving you.

If, once elected, politicians could check their egos at the door, let's face it--they wouldn't be nearly as entertaining.  The quiet drudges get no press, and that's a fact. Gov. Christie has built a pretty good career on being a callous blowhard while showing signs every now and then of an underlying humanity, often enough to be forgiven for his theretofore signature rudeness.  (See Hurricane Sandy)  But it's Christie's ego that gets him every time.  In the end, it's always all about him.

  A healthy ego can be a marvelous thing (See Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, FDR, Martin Luther King, Jesus), but in the wrong heads it's the malignancy that will be the death of those folks yet.  Witness John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, Thaddeus McCotter, Herman Cain. . .

Chris Christie went to Fort Lee yesterday to meet with the mayor there and apologize personally, even though the mayor all but begged him not to come.  He went anyway, because that's who he is.  He gives orders, he doesn't take them.

But he didn't give the order to mess with the toll booths and set up the cones of artifice on the George Washington Bridge.  Because what do you think he is--stupid?

What's in a Name? Depends on Who's Calling It.

Over this past week I packed and cleaned and wore myself out getting ready for a long trip toward the places where I'm hoping merry holiday spirits abide. It would be a cruel trick if they didn't.

During our long, long travels we got caught in not one but two snowstorms.  We spent three nights on the road when one night in a motel would have been more than enough.  When we could finally travel we had to drive well under the speed limit watching for black ice.  Here in Michigan we try not to think about the fact that winter won't even officially begin until Saturday.  We are sick of it already.  (Oh, I know--you New Yorkers have it much tougher, even though--may I remind you again--nearly every storm you get has already come roaring through our neck of the woods.)

You can see where I'm at these days, so forgive me if I don't give two shits about what somebody I don't even know is saying out loud, even if it offends more than half the country's tender sensibilities.

Megyn Kelly said on Fox News that there is no question that Santa and Jesus were two white guys.  This was in answer to an article in Slate by Aisha Harris, who wrote that maybe Santa shouldn't be an old white man anymore; maybe he should be a penguin, instead.

Maybe it was just my mood--I was looking for something to laugh about--but I found the whole thing hilarious.  In fact, I must remember to thank Megyn for putting a ray of sunshine in what was otherwise a bleak couple of days.  The fact that she's not the brightest bulb on the tree was a foregone conclusion even before she said what she said.  Nothing has changed, except that, honest to God, I got an email asking me to sign a petition to get her off the air!  Are they nuts?  For what?  Being so successfully bad at what she does?

And then there's Phil Robertson, that long-bearded Duck Dynasty guy:  I'm betting he was an established oddball long before he said what he said about gays, the bible, anuses and vaginas.  I caught about 20 minutes of that show once, and after the first 10 minutes of it nothing any of them might say would ever surprise me.  But yesterday I got an email from a friend asking me to sign a petition to demand that A&E come to their senses and put the guy back on the air. If the petition hadn't suggested that the suspension was blatantly anti-Christian, I might have been tempted to sign it.  Nobody should be forced out of a job over a few rancid words.  Even that guy.

When MSNBC fired Martin Bashir for saying something truly foul about what should happen to Sarah Palin in order to make her understand how terrible slavery really was, I objected to that firing, too, even though I thought Martin went way over any decent line.

If MSNBC had wanted to fire Alec Baldwin for dismal ratings they were well within their rights--his ratings were dismal--but they chose instead to tell the public he was fired for uttering a homophobic slur while lashing out at a photographer.  It's not as if MSNBC didn't know going in that Baldwin was a loose cannon.  That must have been part of his appeal for them.  In fact, his (or their) decision to play it straight (as it were) is probably what killed the show.  He was no Jack Donaghy.  He was barely even Alec Baldwin.

None of these people are politicians or leaders.  What they say has no impact on policy-making; nor does it change anything for any stranger who might feel victimized by their words.  We don't know those people and they don't know us.  I'm not defending any of them--every one of them said something stupid--but how sensitive is too sensitive?  Is a single utterance reason enough to cause someone to lose a job?

After a successful career spanning decades, the ever-entertaining Howard Cosell found himself at the center of controversy for directing the term "little monkey" to a black player during a televised football game in 1983.  Cosell, clearly no racist, had used the term at least three other times within a span of about 10 years.  He refused to back down, and left broadcasting at the end of that  season.

Thirty years later, we're still looking for insults inside stupid sentences.  It's as if we've never experienced a comments section.  

Read the comment section of any article smacking of even a hint of controversy and you'll see name-calling soaring to spectacularly vile heights. Some of it comes after a public figure has done the wordy deed and the commenters respond in kind, as if they're competing to see how ugly it can get.

Some participants in the comment sections have a talent for it; the vast majority don't.  F-bombs and its various variations dropping all over the place, as if there is no word it can't replace.  MFing L-bombs lobbed at even little old liberal ladies (just saying. . .).

So here I'll make a confession.  I hate the F-word.  I don't just hate it, I despise it.  I have never used it, never written it, and even now, when its usage is more common than breathing, it still offends me.  I grew up in a time when it was so rarely used it was shocking to hear it spoken out loud.  We saw it in writing even less. But even when it's directed at me I don't fall apart over it. What kind of sissy would I be if I went off pouting or calling for heads to roll every time I heard it used in a way that I found offensive?  (Which, for me, don't you know, would be every way.)

I was a young adult when feminism grew strong enough to become an F-word itself. I've heard it all. Words hurled at me by strangers have almost always been meaningless.  They can't hurt me unless I let them.  And why would I let them? Water off a duck's back.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me. 

And nyah nyah, you lousy cootie.

The Terrible Horrible No Good War on Happy Holidays

I’ve been sending out Christmas cards since I was around 16 years old, when my mom told me I was old enough to start sending out my own cards.  The cards I chose over the course of many,many, many years depended on a lot of things, but it never occurred to me—ever–to wonder if my choice of card would offend anyone.

My choices could be anywhere from Currier and Ives winter scenes to merry Santas to red nosed reindeer to Christmas trees to peace doves to celebrations around the world to the Christ child in the manger.  Over the years I’ve received many more cards than I’ve ever sent and I’m happy to say I’ve enjoyed them, each and every one.

Sometimes I would choose my card based on the inside greeting.  It might say “Merry Christmas to you and yours” or “Happy Holidays!” or “Great Joy and Glad Tidings” or “Peace on Earth”.  Something along those lines.  (“Season’s Greetings” went to people I didn’t know very well but felt obliged to send a card.  You know how it is.)

I’ve wished people I barely know a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays without giving a thought to how they might take either salutation.  I love Christmas.  I love the entire happy holiday season from beginning to end.  It’s a wonderful time of the year and once I get my damn shopping done and cook whatever the hell I’ve promised to cook, my heart is full of great joy and glad tidings.

I, a non-religious now, still love the Christian part of Christmas.  The story of the nativity is breathtaking and beautiful.  The Christmas concerts in our local churches are uplifting and glorious.  Christmas carols sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir never fail to cause my heart to swell and my eyes to tear up.

During the Christmas holidays our collective hearts swell so much it’s a known fact that charity toward others grows exponentially as the days of December wane.

There is no question that Christmas is the holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ. The joy of that event has long translated into Joy to the World.  December 25 is a date Christians chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.  It corresponds to early pagan solstice celebrations, the sharing of which, for decades, was no big deal.  Those of us who are religious celebrate it in one way and those of us who aren’t choose another.  It is and always has been the joy of Christmas that bound us together.  We honestly thought it was enough.

Now we are engaged in a great religious war.  A baffling religious war.  A religious war that, if I weren’t so immersed in the aforementioned joy of Christmas, I might even call the worst bad joke in centuries.  As jokes go, award-winning bad.  An insult to anyone who has ever celebrated Christmas.

The escalation of this phony war on Christmas came out of the head of one super showman. Oh, there might have been some grumblings over the years about the commercializing of Christmas—a righteous reason to grumble, in fact.  But it was one Bill O’Reilly who turned the War on Christmas into an annual event, assigning two words—Happy Holidays—as the opening salvo to Christmas, and thus Christian, Armageddon.  (Note lack of O’Reilly links.  I don’t want them here.  You can find them for yourself if you choose.  They’re all over the place.)

Along the way O’Reilly has recruited some surprising foot soldiers.  People I know well are now talking about this supposed War on Christmas, as if it were real and not just somebody’s clever but hateful idea of a ratings guarantee.

I would ask these people:  Where is the battleground?  Where are the bodies?  Who has been injured?  What army has forced them to stop celebrating a Christian Christmas?

Have the churches been shuttered?  Has the singing of Carols been outlawed?  Has any single Christian been inconvenienced at all by the non-religious celebrations of the Christmas Holidays?

I saw a sweat shirt the other day with this banner:  “I’m Not Afraid to Say Merry Christmas.”

Huh?  Who is?  Who in America is afraid to say “Merry Christmas”?

News Flash:  Nobody is afraid.  That would be stupid.  But just in case, since I was going to do this sometime anyway, let’s give it a whirl and see what happens:  (If I’m wrong and I end up dead or something, let me just say right now. . .Really??)

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Why Martin Bashir's Apology Should Have Been Enough

Until Martin Bashir either resigned or was let go by MSNBC this week, I was a loyal fan. I watched Bashir because the things that engaged him usually did the same for me.  At my house, in the Eastern Time Zone, he was on at 4 PM, which meant whatever had happened that day had already been dissected to death by the daytime pundits.  But he had the ability to find something fresh and insightful and, yes, funny, about what was going on out there.  Maybe it's his accent, his enunciation, his eyebrows--I don't know. He is a devilishly clever wordsmith--smarmy, but in a good way.  I have been known to hurry things up just so I can get home in time to watch him.

So I was home and watching on the day he went into that thing over Jake Tapper's interview with Sarah Palin--the part where Palin would not back down from comparing the national debt to slavery.  Tapper gave her many outs, bless his heart, but she stuck by every word.

The interview went like this:

TAPPER: Mitch McConnell has said no more government shutdowns. He didn't think it was a smart idea.
If you were advising Senate Republicans, would you encourage them to do a --
PALIN: What shutdown? What shutdown?
It was a --
TAPPER: Partial shutdown.
PALIN: -- 17-day slim down -- no, a 16-day slim down of about 17 percent of the government. We need to rein in government.
And when is the time, finally, for people to open their eyes and for the media to -- to open its eyes?
What is the time and the magic number, when it comes to debt, when it comes to this trajectory of government growth, for people to say, we do need to start slimming this thing down?
TAPPER: So, you obviously feel very passionate about the national debt. The other day, you gave a speech in which you compared it to slavery.
PALIN: To slavery. Yes.
And that's not a racist thing to do, by the way, which I know somebody is going to claim it is.
TAPPER: Don't you ever fear that by using hyperbole like that -- obviously, you don't literally mean it's like slavery, which cost millions of people their lives and there was rape and torture. You're using it as a metaphor.
But don't you ever worry that by using that kind of language, you -- you risk obscuring the point you're trying to make?
PALIN: There is another definition of slavery and that is being beholden to some kind of master that is not of your choosing. And, yes, the national debt will be like slavery when the note comes due.
TAPPER: So you're not -- you're not work -- I mean I'm -- I'm taking it as a no, but you're not -- you're not concerned about the language --
PALIN: I'm not one to be politically correct, evidently.
TAPPER: OK.
PALIN: And, no, I don't -- I don't worry about things like that, because no matter what I say, no matter what a lot of conservatives say, they're, you know, they'll be targeted and distractions will be attempted to be made to take the listener and the viewers' mind off what the point is, by pointing out, oh, she said the word slavery in a speech, and, I did say the word slavery, because I want to make a point.
TAPPER: You can understand why African-Americans or others might be offended by it, though?
PALIN: I -- I can if they choose to misinterpret what it is that I'm saying. And, again, you know, I'm sure if we open up the dictionary, we could prove that with semantics that are various, we can prove that there is a definition of slavery that absolutely fits the bill there, when I'm talking about a bankrupt country that will owe somebody something down the line if we don't change things that is, we will be shackled. We will be enslaved to those who we owe.

Oh, Sarah.  Clueless, smug, privileged Sarah. Why is anyone still interested in what you have to say?

See, this is what grinds some of us who think the serious stuff should be left to serious thinkers.  The issue of our country's debt crisis is clearly not something Sarah Palin has studied judiciously.  And clearly her audiences don't expect anything more from her than some funnin' over the fuss the liberals make over every nutty thing the Republicans come up with.

So when CNN's Jake Tapper sits down with Palin for what seems like a real interview with a real leader, giving her the deference a real leader might deserve, some of us, including or maybe especially Bashir, feel the tops of our heads threatening to blow off. 

When Bashir began his segment on Palin's national debt/slavery connection, I was all ears. Here we go! Give it all you got, Mah-tin!

He called her an idiot right off, and I, how you say, blanched. Nooooo! Amateur hour. Don't even go there!

Then he told the story of a sadistic Jamaican plantation overseer named Thistlewood who meted out unspeakable punishments to his slaves.  Punishments involving feces and urine.

If Bashir has ended his piece with the hope that Sarah Palin might never have said what she said if she fully understood what real slaves had to go through, it would have been a case of lesson learned.  Thank you, Martin, for reminding us all. . .

I fully expected that was where he was going. But he wasn't. Reading from a teleprompter with blowup shots behind him of an African slave about to be punished on one side and Palin on the other, this is what he said:

When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.

Call me prescient but I saw trouble ahead.

Bashir apologized, of course, on his next show, and he meant it sincerely.  So sincerely, I wondered how it could have happened in the first place. It wasn't something uttered in the heat of the moment.  The segment was planned, the words were scripted, he said them on the air. Sometime during the hours it took to produce the segment, the initial fury over Palin's noxious jabbering should have abated.

It's a mystery why it didn't, but there it was.

The internet went crazy.  The Right--wouldn't you know?--grabbed this unexpected but oh-so-welcome gift and ran with it.  Alec Baldwin, no stranger to controversy, wanted to know why he was suspended for spontaneous raging at a reporter but Martin wasn't for planning and airing this icky diatribe against Sarah Palin.  The cries for punishment never let up. 

It was an awful, awful moment, but it was a moment come and gone.  It was an ugly flub in an otherwise smart and often enlightening body of work.  It did not reflect who Martin is, was or ever will be. What he said in that one single utterance, egregious as it might be, was not enough to kill a good man's otherwise trouble-free career.

Martin Bashir has lost his job.  Resigned under pressure, forced out--no matter.  He is among the unemployed because he said something stupid and he should have known better.

We've always been cavalier about someone else's job, and there's no reason to believe it will ever be otherwise. Nobody is out there protesting his dismissal. MSNBC is under no pressure to take him back.

So, Martin, I will miss you.  I wish you the best.  I hope to see you again soon, because you know I will follow you anywhere.  

The Politics of Cruelty

I'm coming off of my Thanksgiving week high, settling down, and what's the first thing I think of when I get back to my desk to do some writing?  Cruelty. Institutional cruelty, at that.  Political cruelty.  The kind of cruelty that knows no bounds and fears no punishment.  A new kind of cruelty, right out in the open and expecting rewards.  The New America, courtesy of the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

I had a lovely week.  Our dinner was great, I avoided Black Friday, we celebrated a good man's birthday, and our 350 mile trip back home was uneventful.  No wind or snow or traffic jams, and the ferry, our lifeline, was running on time.

Maybe it was because of that fine respite--I don't know--but at my desk those thoughts about where we are on the inhumanity front kept coming through. 

If there is a catalyst, I blame Joe Arpaio, the infamous, publicity-seeking sheriff of Arizona's Maricopa County.  He's the guy who thinks it's cute to keep his prisoners in pink underwear.  He stays awake nights trying to come up with ideas to humiliate and demoralize the inmates in his care.  He gets a real kick out of it and never misses a chance to publicly tighten the screws.

To save money, Arpaio says, he feeds his prisoners only twice a day on between 15 cents and 40 cents a meal.  The meals are vegetarian, no salt and pepper.  He's working on charging them a dollar a meal, because, he says, "Everybody else has to pay for their food, why should they get freebies?"

Last Wednesday he took the time to tweet his Thanksgiving menu: 

"Thanksgiving menu is all set! Hope the inmates give thanks for this special meal being served in the jails tomorrow." 

 

Five ounces of turkey soy casserole and donated brownies.  56 cents a meal.  Did he do it to save money?  Sure.  Did he have to do it?  No.  (Did he eat it himself?  Have you seen him?)

But Joe is small potatoes compared to the various Federal, state and local leaders busy thinking up ways to stick it to the little guy.  Governors refusing Federally endorsed Medicaid for their citizens.  A $40 billion cut in food stamps.  A fight to block minimum wage hikes.  Cuts in unemployment benefits.  Cuts in Veteran's aid.  Cuts in public education.  Complete and total neglect of crumbling infrastructure.  Refusal to recognize the Affordable Care Act, along with a hearty wish that that damned website would just die already. 

Cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel, and cruel.  Every "no" vote, every obstruction sentences hundreds of thousands to needless suffering.  But because that kind of cruelty is now the American version of politics-as-usual, some of us rail (and not for the first time) while some of us cheer, but in the end, the power is no longer with the people.  Endless, needless, avoidable suffering and nobody goes to jail.  

Except Joe Arpaio, but only long enough to torment his inmates for yet another day.  Then he gets to go home, where nothing can hurt him.  Ever.