Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Between the Covers: Stephen Hunter on "Soft Target"
[Click on article title to hear interview - jtf]
Charles Dickens’s Inner Child
While it’s tempting to see Charles Dickens as a fusion of his heroes and villains, on the great British novelist’s 200th birthday his true gifts should be recognized: a respect for childhood and a willingness to atone for his mistakes.
By Christopher Hitchens
André Carrilho
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/hitchens-201202
Those who study Charles Dickens, or who keep up the great cult of his admiration, had been leading a fairly quiet life until a few years ago. The occasional letter bobs to the surface, or a bit of reminiscence is discovered, or perhaps some fragment of a souvenir from his first or second American tour. The pages of that agreeable little journal The Dickensian remained easy to turn, with little possibility of any great shock. At least since The Invisible Woman, Claire Tomalin’s definitive, 1991 exposure of the other woman in Dickens’s life—the once enigmatic Nelly Ternan—there hasn’t been any scandal or revelation.
And then, in late 2002, The Dickensian carried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. And not only met him but elicited from him the exact admission that we would all have wanted the great man to make. Here is how it goes in English, as summarized by Dostoyevsky in an 1878 letter to a certain Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky. According to this, the two men met at the offices of Dickens’s own personal magazine, All the Year Round. And here’s how the confessional session went:
He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.
So convenient and neat was this package that many first-time recipients endorsed it without even bothering to cut the ribbon, let alone ask why something as tasty as a Dostoyevsky original had lain unscrutinized for so long. Original? Come to think of it, where is the Russian version? Between 1862 and 1878—in other words, the dates of the meeting and the report of it—what was S. D. Yanovsky doing to busy himself? We know little about him, other than that he treated the great writer’s hemorrhoids. The Russian version of their correspondence doesn’t seem at all traceable now.
So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter. It could have happened, but I doubt it. That’s the wonderful thing about the celebration of Charles Dickens: he truly is ranked among our immortals, and it truly doesn’t matter if the legend should sprout and then drop a Dostoyevsky or two.
We can certainly count the coincidences between his biography and his fiction among the things that make Dickens eternally fascinating. Opening his own memoir, the most inept fictional narrator of my generation showed that he was out of his depth by dismissing “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Mr. Holden Caulfield may one day be forgotten, but the man who stumbled across the little boy trapped in the sweatshop basement, and realized their kinship, will never be. In the second chapter of David Copperfield, and not in any tongue-in-cheek exchange with the expert on the lower depths of St. Petersburg, is where we find the clue:
This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.
Charming, is it not—seductive even—the manner in which that somewhat overpunctuated Victorian sentence suddenly gives way and yields a deposit of “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased.” It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.
But imagine the power that Dickens had. By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side. We have verbatim reports—sometimes in letters from the author himself—of the speeches he made to enthusiastic crowds in halls across the nation, just as we have the author’s cue cards for the electrifying evenings in 1869 when he staged the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, so it’s clear that Dickens had the sort of demagogic power that could have been dangerous in other hands. It’s also quite clear that he can’t have modeled a villain like Sikes, or a heroine like Nell, on his own character. No, he was drawing on much wider and deeper sources of potency. The main one was the sheer stubborn existence of so many people whom the system had disregarded. Begin thinking about it and you start to whisper a list to yourself: the pathetic Jo, the crossing sweeper; Smike; Mr. Micawber; Amy Dorrit; Mr. Dick—all of them with pain to feel and a life to lead, and many of them kept going (like poor Dick Swiveller) only by a certain unique sense of humor and the absurd. Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming its conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself, and always remembering, as he noted in the last stages of The Old Curiosity Shop, to “keep the child in view.”
And here’s my birthday or anniversary present to you. You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time. As Jane Smiley notices in Charles Dickens:
The first ten parts of Oliver Twist were written at the same time Dickens was writing the last ten parts of Pickwick. Each section of Oliver Twist ran to about eight thousand words, and each section of Pickwick ran to about that or a bit more, so Dickens was writing ninety pages a month of these novels, while also working on other essays, articles, speeches, and plays. Evidence is that he would write the dark, ironic chapters of Oliver Twist first, then the light, comic chapters of Pickwick.
So it’s all right to confuse Podsnap and Pecksniff, or to ask whether the incident of the mutton chops in the fireplace is at Mrs. Todgers’s establishment or Mrs. Jellyby’s, and whether the missing baby belongs to either or both of them, or to Mrs. Gamp—a character over whom Dickens quite lost control. The same goes for the settings: the Circumlocution Office and the High Court of Chancery—indeed the whole vast apparatus of the Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce lawsuit—are all part of the same narrative. Cut into it at any point and you have taken a simultaneous tranche out of Sydney Carton and the “infant phenomenon.” That Dickens should have had the nerve to call himself, simply, “the Inimitable” may seem conceited. All right then, so it was.
We can’t hope to “read” all of Dickens by the light of this single candle of access to boyhood. He showed his biographer John Forster a section from the autobiography he never completed that said quite a lot about his apprenticeship to the grime and shame of the blacking factory so that Forster could write about “the attraction of repulsion” as the spring of David Copperfield, and indeed of everything he wrote. This leaves a nice little area of darkness in which we can speculate about the motives of the lad as he maneuvers for his liberty. On the other hand, we don’t have so much guidance on which to rely when it comes to the pallid, worried, wraithlike little girl who slips disturbingly through so much of Dickens’s fiction, taking here the shape of Little Dorrit, and of Florence Dombey with her brother, and then the infant Agnes and—above all—Little Nell. It seems impossible that no such rapidly evaporating diminutive female haunted Dickens’s own life at some stage. Possibly he simply and shrewdly “knew” that Victorian guilt about the endangerment of such creatures was a continuous “draw” (“Is Nell dead?” they say the New York crowds cried out as the dreaded installment of The Old Curiosity Shop was freighted to the waiting wharf), but we have to draw our own conclusions from scanty evidence.
For instance, and from a deep boiling layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British rule. We have the Dickens who joined his friends Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin against Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and execution and reprisal against the rebels of that country. We have—this is in some ways the most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious hatred for Americans, even as he was making his way from one scene of their immense hospitality to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly licences what he wrote in private to his friend the actor William Macready about America’s being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was “driven by a herd of rascals Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak is quite something when you strike it.
This renders it all the more impressive when he tries to make restitution. For instance, he was obviously very impressed when a prominent Jewish lady, Mrs. Eliza Davis, wrote him an anguished letter after the 1838 publication of Oliver Twist. She was obviously terribly upset about the character of Fagin and was not even quite willing to concede that some Jews had been involved in the stolen-goods racket. At any rate, Dickens went into the matter and convinced himself that he’d been part of an injustice. He thereupon did three things: He softened the description of Fagin in later versions of the book. When he himself took part in public “readings” from the story, he downplayed the “Jewish” characteristics of the villain. And he then created a whole new character to order. In Our Mutual Friend, we encounter a Jewish moneylender named Mr. Riah, who is friendly and helpful to Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. I admit that I find this personage almost too altruistic to be true, but it says something for Dickens, surely, that he would take someone who had the same occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was easy to stir up. The story isn’t as well known as it ought to be.
The next instance of the victory of the large spirit comes from his second visit to the United States, in 1867. Dickens did his very best to clean up after himself, once again accepting lavish hospitality, but this time not taking revenge for it in a nasty, boring novel named Martin Chuzzlewit or a cruel and hastily written travelogue named “American Notes” (For General Circulation), in which the not-too-clever pun suggests that American currency is bankrupt. Having successfully miscalculated the exchange rate, Dickens publicly offered to include a speech of praise for the U.S.A. in reprints of his two books about the country—and actually kept the promise even after the wild applause had died away and he had gone back home to England. Possibly he would not be an American hero if he had not performed this now forgotten act. But then, the “attraction-repulsion” principle, of which he spoke so readily, seems to have meant that he could sometimes let himself be “claimed” by those—from his neglected children to the mobs that he so feared—who loved him in spite of himself.
By Christopher Hitchens
André Carrilho
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/hitchens-201202
And then, in late 2002, The Dickensian carried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. And not only met him but elicited from him the exact admission that we would all have wanted the great man to make. Here is how it goes in English, as summarized by Dostoyevsky in an 1878 letter to a certain Stepan Dimitriyevich Yanovsky. According to this, the two men met at the offices of Dickens’s own personal magazine, All the Year Round. And here’s how the confessional session went:
He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. Only two people? I asked.
So convenient and neat was this package that many first-time recipients endorsed it without even bothering to cut the ribbon, let alone ask why something as tasty as a Dostoyevsky original had lain unscrutinized for so long. Original? Come to think of it, where is the Russian version? Between 1862 and 1878—in other words, the dates of the meeting and the report of it—what was S. D. Yanovsky doing to busy himself? We know little about him, other than that he treated the great writer’s hemorrhoids. The Russian version of their correspondence doesn’t seem at all traceable now.
So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter. It could have happened, but I doubt it. That’s the wonderful thing about the celebration of Charles Dickens: he truly is ranked among our immortals, and it truly doesn’t matter if the legend should sprout and then drop a Dostoyevsky or two.
We can certainly count the coincidences between his biography and his fiction among the things that make Dickens eternally fascinating. Opening his own memoir, the most inept fictional narrator of my generation showed that he was out of his depth by dismissing “all that David Copperfield kind of crap.” Mr. Holden Caulfield may one day be forgotten, but the man who stumbled across the little boy trapped in the sweatshop basement, and realized their kinship, will never be. In the second chapter of David Copperfield, and not in any tongue-in-cheek exchange with the expert on the lower depths of St. Petersburg, is where we find the clue:
This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood.
Charming, is it not—seductive even—the manner in which that somewhat overpunctuated Victorian sentence suddenly gives way and yields a deposit of “freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased.” It is all there to emphasize the one central and polar and critical point that Dickens wishes to enjoin on us all: whatever you do—hang on to your childhood! He was true to this in his fashion, both in ways that delight me and in ways that do not. He loved the idea of a birthday celebration, being lavish about it, reminding people that they were once unborn and are now launched. This is bighearted, and we might all do a bit more of it. It would help me to forgive, perhaps just a little, the man who helped generate the Hallmark birthday industry and who, with some of his less imposing and more moistly sentimental prose scenes in A Christmas Carol, took the Greatest Birthday Ever Told and helped make it into the near Ramadan of protracted obligatory celebration now darkening our Decembers.
But imagine the power that Dickens had. By a few brilliant strokes of the pen, he revived and restored a popular festival and made it into a sort of social solidarity: a common defense against the Gradgrinds and the Bounderbys and the men who had been responsible for the misery of the Hungry Forties. For the first time, the downtrodden English people were able to see a celebrity, a man of wealth and fame, who was on their side. We have verbatim reports—sometimes in letters from the author himself—of the speeches he made to enthusiastic crowds in halls across the nation, just as we have the author’s cue cards for the electrifying evenings in 1869 when he staged the murder of Nancy by Bill Sikes, so it’s clear that Dickens had the sort of demagogic power that could have been dangerous in other hands. It’s also quite clear that he can’t have modeled a villain like Sikes, or a heroine like Nell, on his own character. No, he was drawing on much wider and deeper sources of potency. The main one was the sheer stubborn existence of so many people whom the system had disregarded. Begin thinking about it and you start to whisper a list to yourself: the pathetic Jo, the crossing sweeper; Smike; Mr. Micawber; Amy Dorrit; Mr. Dick—all of them with pain to feel and a life to lead, and many of them kept going (like poor Dick Swiveller) only by a certain unique sense of humor and the absurd. Dickens was able to mine this huge resource of London life, becoming its conductor and chronicler like nobody since Shakespeare himself, and always remembering, as he noted in the last stages of The Old Curiosity Shop, to “keep the child in view.”
And here’s my birthday or anniversary present to you. You can forget that sense of guilt you have. The one about being not quite sure which character is from which book. None of us really knows, and there is no shame in it. Probably Dickens himself wasn’t certain much of the time. As Jane Smiley notices in Charles Dickens:
The first ten parts of Oliver Twist were written at the same time Dickens was writing the last ten parts of Pickwick. Each section of Oliver Twist ran to about eight thousand words, and each section of Pickwick ran to about that or a bit more, so Dickens was writing ninety pages a month of these novels, while also working on other essays, articles, speeches, and plays. Evidence is that he would write the dark, ironic chapters of Oliver Twist first, then the light, comic chapters of Pickwick.
So it’s all right to confuse Podsnap and Pecksniff, or to ask whether the incident of the mutton chops in the fireplace is at Mrs. Todgers’s establishment or Mrs. Jellyby’s, and whether the missing baby belongs to either or both of them, or to Mrs. Gamp—a character over whom Dickens quite lost control. The same goes for the settings: the Circumlocution Office and the High Court of Chancery—indeed the whole vast apparatus of the Jarndyce-and-Jarndyce lawsuit—are all part of the same narrative. Cut into it at any point and you have taken a simultaneous tranche out of Sydney Carton and the “infant phenomenon.” That Dickens should have had the nerve to call himself, simply, “the Inimitable” may seem conceited. All right then, so it was.
We can’t hope to “read” all of Dickens by the light of this single candle of access to boyhood. He showed his biographer John Forster a section from the autobiography he never completed that said quite a lot about his apprenticeship to the grime and shame of the blacking factory so that Forster could write about “the attraction of repulsion” as the spring of David Copperfield, and indeed of everything he wrote. This leaves a nice little area of darkness in which we can speculate about the motives of the lad as he maneuvers for his liberty. On the other hand, we don’t have so much guidance on which to rely when it comes to the pallid, worried, wraithlike little girl who slips disturbingly through so much of Dickens’s fiction, taking here the shape of Little Dorrit, and of Florence Dombey with her brother, and then the infant Agnes and—above all—Little Nell. It seems impossible that no such rapidly evaporating diminutive female haunted Dickens’s own life at some stage. Possibly he simply and shrewdly “knew” that Victorian guilt about the endangerment of such creatures was a continuous “draw” (“Is Nell dead?” they say the New York crowds cried out as the dreaded installment of The Old Curiosity Shop was freighted to the waiting wharf), but we have to draw our own conclusions from scanty evidence.
For instance, and from a deep boiling layer of anxiety and rage that goes well beyond anything Dostoyevsky might or might not have been told about, we have the Dickens who wrote to his best female friend, Angela Burdett-Coutts, in 1857, telling her of his yearnings to “exterminate” the Indian rebels against British rule. We have the Dickens who joined his friends Thomas Carlyle and Ruskin against Darwin, T. H. Huxley, J. S. Mill, and the other Victorian humanitarians, to support Governor Eyre of Jamaica in his war of torture and execution and reprisal against the rebels of that country. We have—this is in some ways the most depressing of all—Dickens’s surreptitious hatred for Americans, even as he was making his way from one scene of their immense hospitality to the next in the 1840s. Admittedly, he had a qualified beef with those Yankee publishers who wouldn’t part with royalties, but this hardly licences what he wrote in private to his friend the actor William Macready about America’s being “a low, coarse and mean nation” that was “driven by a herd of rascals Pah! I never knew what it was to feel disgust and contempt, ’till I travelled in America.” The Dickens mean streak is quite something when you strike it.
This renders it all the more impressive when he tries to make restitution. For instance, he was obviously very impressed when a prominent Jewish lady, Mrs. Eliza Davis, wrote him an anguished letter after the 1838 publication of Oliver Twist. She was obviously terribly upset about the character of Fagin and was not even quite willing to concede that some Jews had been involved in the stolen-goods racket. At any rate, Dickens went into the matter and convinced himself that he’d been part of an injustice. He thereupon did three things: He softened the description of Fagin in later versions of the book. When he himself took part in public “readings” from the story, he downplayed the “Jewish” characteristics of the villain. And he then created a whole new character to order. In Our Mutual Friend, we encounter a Jewish moneylender named Mr. Riah, who is friendly and helpful to Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren. I admit that I find this personage almost too altruistic to be true, but it says something for Dickens, surely, that he would take someone who had the same occupation as the infamous Shylock, but none of Shylock’s vices, and insert him at the heart of business, at a time when vulgar prejudice was easy to stir up. The story isn’t as well known as it ought to be.
The next instance of the victory of the large spirit comes from his second visit to the United States, in 1867. Dickens did his very best to clean up after himself, once again accepting lavish hospitality, but this time not taking revenge for it in a nasty, boring novel named Martin Chuzzlewit or a cruel and hastily written travelogue named “American Notes” (For General Circulation), in which the not-too-clever pun suggests that American currency is bankrupt. Having successfully miscalculated the exchange rate, Dickens publicly offered to include a speech of praise for the U.S.A. in reprints of his two books about the country—and actually kept the promise even after the wild applause had died away and he had gone back home to England. Possibly he would not be an American hero if he had not performed this now forgotten act. But then, the “attraction-repulsion” principle, of which he spoke so readily, seems to have meant that he could sometimes let himself be “claimed” by those—from his neglected children to the mobs that he so feared—who loved him in spite of himself.
Joe Paterno’s first interview since the Penn State-Sandusky scandal
By Sally Jenkins
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
January 14, 2012
STATE COLLEGE, PA. — Joe Paterno sat in a wheelchair at the family kitchen table where he has eaten, prayed and argued for more than a half-century. All around him family members were shouting at each other, yet he was whispering. His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks. Lung cancer has robbed him of the breath to say all that he wants to about the scandal he still struggles to comprehend, and which ended his career as head football coach at Penn State University. The words come like gusts. “I wanted to build up, not break down,” he said.
Crowded around the table were his three voluble sons, Scott, Jay, David, daughter Mary Kay, and his wife of 50 years, Sue, all chattering at once. In the middle of the table a Lazy Susan loaded with trays of cornbread and mashed potatoes spun by, swirling fast as the arguments. “If you go hungry, it’s your own fault,” Paterno likes to say. But Paterno, 85, could not eat. He sipped Pepsi over crushed ice from a cup. Once, it would have been bourbon. His hand showed a tremor, and a wig replaced his once-fine head of black hair.
Paterno’s hope is that time will be his ally when it comes to judging what he built, versus what broke down. “I’m not 31 years old trying to prove something to anybody,” he said. “I know where I am.” This is where he is: wracked by radiation and chemotherapy, in a wheelchair with a broken pelvis, and “shocked and saddened” as he struggles to explain a breakdown of devastating proportions. Jerry Sandusky, his former assistant coach at Penn State from 1969 to 1999, is charged with more than 50 counts of sexually abusing young boys over a 15-year period. He maintains his innocence. If Sandusky is guilty, “I’m sick about it,” Paterno said.
How Sandusky, 67, allegedly evaded detection by state child services, university administrators, teachers, parents, donors and Paterno himself remains an open question. “I wish I knew,” Paterno said. “I don’t know the answer to that. It’s hard.” Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively.
“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” he said. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”
Former athletic director Tim Curley and school vice president Gary Schultz face charges of perjury and failing to report suspected child abuse, based on their inaction. They have pleaded innocent. Though he is not charged with a crime, Penn State president Graham Spanier was fired on Nov. 9, along with Paterno.
Paterno is accused of no wrongdoing, and in fact authorities have said he fulfilled his legal obligations by reporting to his superiors. Nevertheless, the university Board of Trustees summarily dismissed him with a late-night phone call four days after Sandusky’s arrest. At about 10 p.m., Paterno and Sue were getting ready for bed when the doorbell rang. An assistant athletic director was at the door, and wordlessly handed Sue a slip of paper. There was nothing on it but the name of the vice chairman of trustees, John Surma, with a phone number. They stood frozen by the bedside in their nightclothes, Sue in a robe and Paterno in pajamas and a Penn State sweatshirt. Paterno dialed the number.
Surma told Paterno, “In the best interests of the university, you are terminated.” Paterno hung up and repeated the words to his wife. She grabbed the phone and redialed.
“After 61 years he deserved better,” she snapped. “He deserved better.”
The firing provoked a riot on campus that night.
To Penn State students, Paterno was less a person than a beloved monument. He had arrived at a “cow college” in 1950 as an assistant coach armed with a flathead haircut, a Brooklyn accent and a degree from Brown. As the head coach from 1966 on, he struck an austerely iconic pose, managing to be both fierce and bookish, with his black cleats and his thick black-framed glasses. To his rivals, he was a holier-than-thou prig who intimated he was more principled than they were.
Under his leadership Penn State football became a kind of gross national product as he won more games than any other coach in history, yet regularly posted high graduation rates — his team was ranked No.1 academically out of the top 25 football teams in 2009 and 2011 by the New America Foundation’s Academic Bowl Championship Series. The “cow college” grew into a public research university with $4.6 billion in revenue and buildings as large as airplane hangars. Beaver Stadium was renovated and enlarged six times during his tenure.
But after 61 years on the campus, Paterno cleared out his office in the space of one day. It was an end he was unprepared for. Yet it came with the realization that as the face of the university, people assign him greater responsibility than other officials.
“Whether it’s fair I don’t know, but they do it,” he said. “You would think I ran the show here.”
Over two separate conversations on Thursday and Friday, Paterno discussed his career and his actions relating to Sandusky. His attorney Wick Sollers of the Washington law firm King & Spalding, and a communications adviser, Dan McGinn of TMG Strategies, monitored the conversations, in part to be sure Paterno was lucid, since he has experienced fogginess from his chemo treatments, one of which he underwent the day before the first interview.
Since the scandal broke, Paterno has been largely silent while dealing with his health issues, despite scathing criticism that included accusations that he protected Sandusky and wielded more power in the cloistered community known as Happy Valley than the university president.
Paterno was initially reluctant to speak because “I wanted everybody to settle down,” he said. But he is so eager to defend his record that he insisted on continuing the interview from his bedside Friday morning, though ill. He was hospitalized for observation later in the day due to complications from the chemo but, according to the family, had improved by Saturday morning.
Mostly he sat in his wheelchair covered by a blanket, surrounded by pictures of his children and grandchildren, in the modest stone-and-plate-glass home he bought for $9,000 in 1966. The home, and the fact that his address and phone are still listed in the State College phone book, have oft been cited as evidence of his regular-Joe values. A good deal of what he earned has gone back to the university, in the form of donations to a library that bears his name and a campus spiritual center.
“My father said about money: ‘You have to have some. But you don’t have to have all of it. Just be honest with yourself.’ ”
He displays only a few mementos of his football career, jumbled in a glass case in a dark corner of his old study, a small, woody space. Most of the items in the case are personal souvenirs. Tucked in one corner is a card that says, “This marriage is interrupted for football season.” There are game balls, the most prominent one from Oct. 29, 2011, when the Nittany Lions defeated Illinois, 10-7, to make Paterno the winningest coach in the annals of major college football, with 409 victories.
Sandusky was arrested just a week later.
What Penn State officials knew about Sandusky and when is the subject of no fewer than five formal investigations. They range from state Attorney General Linda Kelly’s criminal investigation of Sandusky, to an NCAA inquiry, to Penn State’s in-house inquiry led by former FBI director Louis J. Freeh. The best-case scenario is that the institutional leaders were guilty of blindness, and an unfeeling self-absorption. The worst case is a criminal cover-up to protect a wealthy university’s reputation.
This is Paterno’s own account:
On a Saturday morning in 2002, an upset young assistant coach named Mike McQueary knocked on Paterno’s door to tell him he had witnessed a shocking scene in the Penn State football building showers. Until that moment, Paterno said, he had “no inkling” that Sandusky might be a sexual deviant. By then Sandusky was a former employee, with whom Paterno had little to do. Although Sandusky had been his close coaching associate and helped fashion Penn State defenses for three decades, their relationship was “professional, not social,” as Paterno described it. “He was a lot younger than me.” Sandusky had been out of the program for three years, and in fact, Paterno said he cannot recall the last time he had seen or spoken to Sandusky. “I can’t,” he said.
Sandusky retired in 1999, shortly after Penn State made the Alamo Bowl. The timing was curious. Paterno’s understanding was that Sandusky took early retirement on his recommendation after Paterno told him frankly that he would not become his successor. The state was offering 30-year employees a handsome buyout, and Paterno believed Sandusky should take it. Paterno was frustrated that Sandusky spent so much time working on his youth foundation, The Second Mile, that he was not available to help in recruiting and other coaching duties. Authorities now say Sandusky used Second Mile to meet and groom his alleged victims.
“He came to see me and we talked a little about his career,” Paterno said. “I said, you know, Jerry, you want to be head coach, you can’t do as much as you’re doing with the other operation. I said this job takes so much detail, and for you to think you can go off and get involved in fundraising and a lot of things like that. . . . I said you can’t do both, that’s basically what I told him.”
Paterno insists he was completely unaware of a 1998 police investigation into a report from a Second Mile mother that Sandusky had inappropriately touched her son in a shower. The inquiry ended when the local prosecutor declined to bring charges. “You know it wasn’t like it was something everybody in the building knew about,” Paterno said. “Nobody knew about it.”
Paterno contends that ignorance was the context with which he heard McQueary’s disturbing story in 2002. McQueary, sitting at Paterno’s kitchen table, told him that he had been at the football building late the evening before when he heard noises coming from the shower.
“He was very upset and I said why, and he was very reluctant to get into it,” Paterno said. “He told me what he saw, and I said, what? He said it, well, looked like inappropriate, or fondling, I’m not quite sure exactly how he put it. I said you did what you had to do. It’s my job now to figure out what we want to do. So I sat around. It was a Saturday. Waited till Sunday because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. And then I called my superiors and I said: ‘Hey, we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ Cause I didn’t know, you know. We never had, until that point, 58 years I think, I had never had to deal with something like that. And I didn’t feel adequate.”
At that point, Paterno set up a meeting for McQueary and Curley, the athletic director, and Schultz, who oversaw university police. McQueary has testified that he gave both men a far more graphic description of what he witnessed, which he believed to be Sandusky sodomizing a boy of about 10, who had his hands against the shower wall. At the preliminary hearing for Curley and Schultz on Dec. 16, McQueary said he had been reluctant to go into similar “great detail about sexual acts” with Paterno, out of respect for the coach, who was 75 at the time.
Schultz and Curley have maintained that McQueary failed to impart the seriousness of what he saw to them as well. They never told police about the allegation, instead informing Sandusky he could no longer bring children to university facilities. Prosecutors say Sandusky continued to abuse boys for six more years.
Paterno has said, “In hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
Paterno’s portrait of himself is of an old-world man profoundly confused by what McQueary told him, and who was hesitant to make follow-up calls because he did not want to be seen as trying to exert any influence for or against Sandusky. “I didn’t know which way to go,” he said. “And rather than get in there and make a mistake . . .”
He reiterated that McQueary was unclear with him about the nature of what he saw — and added that even if McQueary had been more graphic, he’s not sure he would have comprehended it.
“You know, he didn’t want to get specific,” Paterno said. “And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
Paterno declined to judge Sandusky, or his other Penn State colleagues. “I think we got to wait and see what happens,” he said. “The courts are taking care of it, the legal system is taking care of it.”
According to Sollers, the attorney, Paterno has no legal exposure in the Sandusky case. Paterno has cooperated fully with the investigation, and has “met on multiple occasions voluntarily” with representatives from the attorney general’s office, Sollers said. “In my judgment Coach Paterno has no legal liability in this matter. In fact, he acted completely appropriately in reporting the only allegation he received to his superiors and had every expectation that the allegation would be investigated thoroughly.”
Paterno has felt smaller repercussions.
His son Scott says Paterno has been “shunned” by many in the university, though he did hear from current Penn State President Rodney Erickson last week when he made a $100,000 donation to the school. His name has been removed from trophies. The Maxwell Football Club of Philadelphia has discontinued its Joseph V. Paterno Award, which was to be given to coaches who made a positive impact. A nomination for the Presidential Medal of Freedom was withdrawn.
But Joe Paterno is not the victim here, he reminds you.
“You know, I’m not as concerned about me,” he said. “What’s happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen great grandchildren. I’ve had a wonderful experience here at Penn State. I don’t want to walk away from this thing bitter. I want to be helpful.”
The Paternos say they think about the real potential victims every time they look at their own children. “I got three boys and two girls,” Paterno said. “It’s sickening.” His knee-jerk response is to go back to Flatbush. “Violence is not the way to handle it,” he said. “But for me, I’d get a bunch of guys and say let’s go punch somebody in the nose.” Sue Paterno is more blunt. “If someone touched my child, there wouldn’t be a trial, I would have killed them,” she said. “That would be my attitude, because you have destroyed someone for life.”
She sighed. “It’s a bad scene for this happy valley.”
The Sandusky investigation has torn apart a cloistered town-and-gown community where everyone knows everyone — including Sandusky. Old friends cannot talk to each other because criminal trials are imminent. Recently Sue went to the funeral of Tim Curley’s mother. The Paternos have known John Surma for years — Paterno recruited his brother. Underneath the tension is the complicated knowledge that if Sandusky is guilty, he was as good at seducing the adults as he was the children.
If nothing else, the Paternos say, perhaps the Sandusky case will raise consciousness in other communities the way it has been raised in theirs. “We are going to become a more aware society,” Sue said. “Maybe we will look for clues.” She wonders what signs she missed all those years, when they felt so successful and sure of themselves.
“I had no clue,” she said. “I thought doctors looked for child abuse in a hospital, in a bruise or something.”
It remains to be seen, barring any new revelations, whether there will be a reappraisal of Paterno’s life and record at Penn State. Eventually, his family hopes, there will be healing and forgiveness in the community, and the outlines of the man they insist Paterno is, and not the monument or monumental target, will reemerge: A modest, decent, fundamentally devoted coach who always loved books more than money.
His starting salary was just $20,000. In 1972 the New England Patriots offered him $1.3 million to become coach and general manager. But at 5:30 a.m. on the day he intended fly to Boston to accept, Paterno woke up and realized it was mistake. He said to his wife: “You went to bed with a millionaire but you woke up with me. I’m not going.” He stayed at Penn State, though he was making just $35,000. In 2008 his salary of $1.03 million was still fractional compared to peers, some of whom now make $4 million.
Paterno’s record is not perfect. Anyone who won on his scale has an ungenerous competitive streak and nascent ego. His love for higher learning — he likes to name-drop Puccini and Virgil — could tip over into superiority. He could show a temper, as he did in 1995 when a camera caught him delivering a profane on-field tirade.
His football program was not immune to the problems of big-time college athletics. An ESPN inquiry found that from 2002 to 2007, 46 Penn State football players faced criminal charges. But he liked working with problem cases and turning them around. “Hotshots,” he still calls them today. The 2007 team had 19 players who earned Academic all-Big Ten honors. “The bigger the problem the guy was, the more I enjoyed it when we had success,” he said.
Over the course of his career, 47 of his players made Academic all-American, the third-highest total among institutions playing at the championship level.
He loved his work. “They were all days I looked forward to,” he said. His philosophy was simple. “My thing was play as hard as you can, don’t be stupid, pay attention to details, and have enough guts in the clutch that you’re not afraid to make a play,” he said. “Some things I thought were important for a young man to know.”
Early on, Paterno vowed that he would try to never lose perspective. In 1968 he said: “We’re trying to win football games, don’t misunderstand that. But I don’t want it to ruin our lives if we lose. I don’t want us ever to become the kind of place where an 8-2 season is a tragedy.”
Asked if he succeeded in keeping the vow, he said: “I stayed on the track I wanted to stay on. I don’t think I deviated from what I’m all about and what I thought was important. Whether you want to call that a legacy, or whatever you want to call it.”
These are the things Paterno would prefer to reminisce about. Instead, he is tying up the loose ends of the abrupt end to his career. There are mounds of mail to deal with, 12,000 letters (his grandchildren counted them). Former Penn State running back Franco Harris, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer, checks in regularly and is leading a furious campaign to depose the Board of Trustees for their handling of the scandal and Paterno’s dismissal. Paterno tries to play peacemaker, although he admits his first reaction was, “Raise hell.” There are still details to work out with the school, because he remains a tenured professor. On Jan. 2 the university sent him a retirement letter.
“Right now I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do,” he said. “Cause I don’t want to sit around on my backside all day.” He grins and there is a light behind his glasses. “If I’m gonna do that I’ll be a newspaper reporter.”
Nevertheless, sitting is mostly what he does, surrounded by the photographs that have accrued on the walls for almost a half-century. They provoke memories. His father, Angelo, studying late at a kitchen table to become a court clerk, impressing on him the open-endedness of learning. His deep pride at being admitted to Ivy League schools, followed by chagrin when he visited Princeton and no one in the eating clubs would speak to him. “Bunch of stuffed shirts,” he said. His wound when frat boys at Brown frowned at him for wearing sweaters instead of tweeds and said, “How did that dago get invited?” His mother, when he called to tell her that he was finally ready to wed at 34, to a young woman he had met, of course, in the library.
“I’m getting married.”
“To who?”
“Susie. You know Susie.”
“That big German girl?”
“Yes, Ma, she’s German.”
“What the hell are you gonna eat?”
The big German girl is in fact slender as a schoolgirl and still has world-class cheekbones at 75. She tends to Paterno gently, ushering him from kitchen table to bedroom and back again, clasping his hand when it trembles. “Speak up,” Sue tells him. Paterno smiles and rasps, “Ordinarily she tells me to shut up.”
Every little while, Sue pulls a picture from a wall and shows it to Paterno or shares it with one of his many visitors. They are invariably photos of children, of sons and daughters and grandchildren. The children are captured in time and they are all beautiful. They are new, unmarked, angel-faced, radiant. These are the images the Paternos cling to, through all the levels of distortion, the press maelstrom, the impending trials, the grotesqueries described on witness stands. Whenever someone in her family loses their emotional way, and sits at the kitchen table weeping for something that’s been lost or torn down, Sue holds a frame out to them and shows them a photograph of unspoiled familial innocence.
“Look at this picture,” she tells them. “This is who we are. And no one can take us from us.”
MORE ON THE PENN STATE SCANDAL:
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Excerpts from interview with Joe Paterno
Photos: Images of Paterno at home and through his career
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The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
January 14, 2012
Former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno gestures at his home in State College, Pa., during his first interview since being fired two months ago. (John McDonnell / Associated Press)
STATE COLLEGE, PA. — Joe Paterno sat in a wheelchair at the family kitchen table where he has eaten, prayed and argued for more than a half-century. All around him family members were shouting at each other, yet he was whispering. His voice sounded like wind blowing across a field of winter stalks, rattling the husks. Lung cancer has robbed him of the breath to say all that he wants to about the scandal he still struggles to comprehend, and which ended his career as head football coach at Penn State University. The words come like gusts. “I wanted to build up, not break down,” he said.
Crowded around the table were his three voluble sons, Scott, Jay, David, daughter Mary Kay, and his wife of 50 years, Sue, all chattering at once. In the middle of the table a Lazy Susan loaded with trays of cornbread and mashed potatoes spun by, swirling fast as the arguments. “If you go hungry, it’s your own fault,” Paterno likes to say. But Paterno, 85, could not eat. He sipped Pepsi over crushed ice from a cup. Once, it would have been bourbon. His hand showed a tremor, and a wig replaced his once-fine head of black hair.
Paterno’s hope is that time will be his ally when it comes to judging what he built, versus what broke down. “I’m not 31 years old trying to prove something to anybody,” he said. “I know where I am.” This is where he is: wracked by radiation and chemotherapy, in a wheelchair with a broken pelvis, and “shocked and saddened” as he struggles to explain a breakdown of devastating proportions. Jerry Sandusky, his former assistant coach at Penn State from 1969 to 1999, is charged with more than 50 counts of sexually abusing young boys over a 15-year period. He maintains his innocence. If Sandusky is guilty, “I’m sick about it,” Paterno said.
How Sandusky, 67, allegedly evaded detection by state child services, university administrators, teachers, parents, donors and Paterno himself remains an open question. “I wish I knew,” Paterno said. “I don’t know the answer to that. It’s hard.” Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively.
“I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was,” he said. “So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way.”
Former athletic director Tim Curley and school vice president Gary Schultz face charges of perjury and failing to report suspected child abuse, based on their inaction. They have pleaded innocent. Though he is not charged with a crime, Penn State president Graham Spanier was fired on Nov. 9, along with Paterno.
Paterno is accused of no wrongdoing, and in fact authorities have said he fulfilled his legal obligations by reporting to his superiors. Nevertheless, the university Board of Trustees summarily dismissed him with a late-night phone call four days after Sandusky’s arrest. At about 10 p.m., Paterno and Sue were getting ready for bed when the doorbell rang. An assistant athletic director was at the door, and wordlessly handed Sue a slip of paper. There was nothing on it but the name of the vice chairman of trustees, John Surma, with a phone number. They stood frozen by the bedside in their nightclothes, Sue in a robe and Paterno in pajamas and a Penn State sweatshirt. Paterno dialed the number.
Surma told Paterno, “In the best interests of the university, you are terminated.” Paterno hung up and repeated the words to his wife. She grabbed the phone and redialed.
“After 61 years he deserved better,” she snapped. “He deserved better.”
The firing provoked a riot on campus that night.
To Penn State students, Paterno was less a person than a beloved monument. He had arrived at a “cow college” in 1950 as an assistant coach armed with a flathead haircut, a Brooklyn accent and a degree from Brown. As the head coach from 1966 on, he struck an austerely iconic pose, managing to be both fierce and bookish, with his black cleats and his thick black-framed glasses. To his rivals, he was a holier-than-thou prig who intimated he was more principled than they were.
Under his leadership Penn State football became a kind of gross national product as he won more games than any other coach in history, yet regularly posted high graduation rates — his team was ranked No.1 academically out of the top 25 football teams in 2009 and 2011 by the New America Foundation’s Academic Bowl Championship Series. The “cow college” grew into a public research university with $4.6 billion in revenue and buildings as large as airplane hangars. Beaver Stadium was renovated and enlarged six times during his tenure.
But after 61 years on the campus, Paterno cleared out his office in the space of one day. It was an end he was unprepared for. Yet it came with the realization that as the face of the university, people assign him greater responsibility than other officials.
“Whether it’s fair I don’t know, but they do it,” he said. “You would think I ran the show here.”
Over two separate conversations on Thursday and Friday, Paterno discussed his career and his actions relating to Sandusky. His attorney Wick Sollers of the Washington law firm King & Spalding, and a communications adviser, Dan McGinn of TMG Strategies, monitored the conversations, in part to be sure Paterno was lucid, since he has experienced fogginess from his chemo treatments, one of which he underwent the day before the first interview.
Since the scandal broke, Paterno has been largely silent while dealing with his health issues, despite scathing criticism that included accusations that he protected Sandusky and wielded more power in the cloistered community known as Happy Valley than the university president.
Paterno was initially reluctant to speak because “I wanted everybody to settle down,” he said. But he is so eager to defend his record that he insisted on continuing the interview from his bedside Friday morning, though ill. He was hospitalized for observation later in the day due to complications from the chemo but, according to the family, had improved by Saturday morning.
Mostly he sat in his wheelchair covered by a blanket, surrounded by pictures of his children and grandchildren, in the modest stone-and-plate-glass home he bought for $9,000 in 1966. The home, and the fact that his address and phone are still listed in the State College phone book, have oft been cited as evidence of his regular-Joe values. A good deal of what he earned has gone back to the university, in the form of donations to a library that bears his name and a campus spiritual center.
“My father said about money: ‘You have to have some. But you don’t have to have all of it. Just be honest with yourself.’ ”
He displays only a few mementos of his football career, jumbled in a glass case in a dark corner of his old study, a small, woody space. Most of the items in the case are personal souvenirs. Tucked in one corner is a card that says, “This marriage is interrupted for football season.” There are game balls, the most prominent one from Oct. 29, 2011, when the Nittany Lions defeated Illinois, 10-7, to make Paterno the winningest coach in the annals of major college football, with 409 victories.
Sandusky was arrested just a week later.
What Penn State officials knew about Sandusky and when is the subject of no fewer than five formal investigations. They range from state Attorney General Linda Kelly’s criminal investigation of Sandusky, to an NCAA inquiry, to Penn State’s in-house inquiry led by former FBI director Louis J. Freeh. The best-case scenario is that the institutional leaders were guilty of blindness, and an unfeeling self-absorption. The worst case is a criminal cover-up to protect a wealthy university’s reputation.
This is Paterno’s own account:
On a Saturday morning in 2002, an upset young assistant coach named Mike McQueary knocked on Paterno’s door to tell him he had witnessed a shocking scene in the Penn State football building showers. Until that moment, Paterno said, he had “no inkling” that Sandusky might be a sexual deviant. By then Sandusky was a former employee, with whom Paterno had little to do. Although Sandusky had been his close coaching associate and helped fashion Penn State defenses for three decades, their relationship was “professional, not social,” as Paterno described it. “He was a lot younger than me.” Sandusky had been out of the program for three years, and in fact, Paterno said he cannot recall the last time he had seen or spoken to Sandusky. “I can’t,” he said.
Sandusky retired in 1999, shortly after Penn State made the Alamo Bowl. The timing was curious. Paterno’s understanding was that Sandusky took early retirement on his recommendation after Paterno told him frankly that he would not become his successor. The state was offering 30-year employees a handsome buyout, and Paterno believed Sandusky should take it. Paterno was frustrated that Sandusky spent so much time working on his youth foundation, The Second Mile, that he was not available to help in recruiting and other coaching duties. Authorities now say Sandusky used Second Mile to meet and groom his alleged victims.
“He came to see me and we talked a little about his career,” Paterno said. “I said, you know, Jerry, you want to be head coach, you can’t do as much as you’re doing with the other operation. I said this job takes so much detail, and for you to think you can go off and get involved in fundraising and a lot of things like that. . . . I said you can’t do both, that’s basically what I told him.”
Paterno insists he was completely unaware of a 1998 police investigation into a report from a Second Mile mother that Sandusky had inappropriately touched her son in a shower. The inquiry ended when the local prosecutor declined to bring charges. “You know it wasn’t like it was something everybody in the building knew about,” Paterno said. “Nobody knew about it.”
Paterno contends that ignorance was the context with which he heard McQueary’s disturbing story in 2002. McQueary, sitting at Paterno’s kitchen table, told him that he had been at the football building late the evening before when he heard noises coming from the shower.
“He was very upset and I said why, and he was very reluctant to get into it,” Paterno said. “He told me what he saw, and I said, what? He said it, well, looked like inappropriate, or fondling, I’m not quite sure exactly how he put it. I said you did what you had to do. It’s my job now to figure out what we want to do. So I sat around. It was a Saturday. Waited till Sunday because I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. And then I called my superiors and I said: ‘Hey, we got a problem, I think. Would you guys look into it?’ Cause I didn’t know, you know. We never had, until that point, 58 years I think, I had never had to deal with something like that. And I didn’t feel adequate.”
At that point, Paterno set up a meeting for McQueary and Curley, the athletic director, and Schultz, who oversaw university police. McQueary has testified that he gave both men a far more graphic description of what he witnessed, which he believed to be Sandusky sodomizing a boy of about 10, who had his hands against the shower wall. At the preliminary hearing for Curley and Schultz on Dec. 16, McQueary said he had been reluctant to go into similar “great detail about sexual acts” with Paterno, out of respect for the coach, who was 75 at the time.
Schultz and Curley have maintained that McQueary failed to impart the seriousness of what he saw to them as well. They never told police about the allegation, instead informing Sandusky he could no longer bring children to university facilities. Prosecutors say Sandusky continued to abuse boys for six more years.
Paterno has said, “In hindsight, I wish I had done more.”
Paterno’s portrait of himself is of an old-world man profoundly confused by what McQueary told him, and who was hesitant to make follow-up calls because he did not want to be seen as trying to exert any influence for or against Sandusky. “I didn’t know which way to go,” he said. “And rather than get in there and make a mistake . . .”
He reiterated that McQueary was unclear with him about the nature of what he saw — and added that even if McQueary had been more graphic, he’s not sure he would have comprehended it.
“You know, he didn’t want to get specific,” Paterno said. “And to be frank with you I don’t know that it would have done any good, because I never heard of, of, rape and a man. So I just did what I thought was best. I talked to people that I thought would be, if there was a problem, that would be following up on it.”
Paterno declined to judge Sandusky, or his other Penn State colleagues. “I think we got to wait and see what happens,” he said. “The courts are taking care of it, the legal system is taking care of it.”
According to Sollers, the attorney, Paterno has no legal exposure in the Sandusky case. Paterno has cooperated fully with the investigation, and has “met on multiple occasions voluntarily” with representatives from the attorney general’s office, Sollers said. “In my judgment Coach Paterno has no legal liability in this matter. In fact, he acted completely appropriately in reporting the only allegation he received to his superiors and had every expectation that the allegation would be investigated thoroughly.”
Paterno has felt smaller repercussions.
His son Scott says Paterno has been “shunned” by many in the university, though he did hear from current Penn State President Rodney Erickson last week when he made a $100,000 donation to the school. His name has been removed from trophies. The Maxwell Football Club of Philadelphia has discontinued its Joseph V. Paterno Award, which was to be given to coaches who made a positive impact. A nomination for the Presidential Medal of Freedom was withdrawn.
But Joe Paterno is not the victim here, he reminds you.
“You know, I’m not as concerned about me,” he said. “What’s happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen great grandchildren. I’ve had a wonderful experience here at Penn State. I don’t want to walk away from this thing bitter. I want to be helpful.”
The Paternos say they think about the real potential victims every time they look at their own children. “I got three boys and two girls,” Paterno said. “It’s sickening.” His knee-jerk response is to go back to Flatbush. “Violence is not the way to handle it,” he said. “But for me, I’d get a bunch of guys and say let’s go punch somebody in the nose.” Sue Paterno is more blunt. “If someone touched my child, there wouldn’t be a trial, I would have killed them,” she said. “That would be my attitude, because you have destroyed someone for life.”
She sighed. “It’s a bad scene for this happy valley.”
The Sandusky investigation has torn apart a cloistered town-and-gown community where everyone knows everyone — including Sandusky. Old friends cannot talk to each other because criminal trials are imminent. Recently Sue went to the funeral of Tim Curley’s mother. The Paternos have known John Surma for years — Paterno recruited his brother. Underneath the tension is the complicated knowledge that if Sandusky is guilty, he was as good at seducing the adults as he was the children.
If nothing else, the Paternos say, perhaps the Sandusky case will raise consciousness in other communities the way it has been raised in theirs. “We are going to become a more aware society,” Sue said. “Maybe we will look for clues.” She wonders what signs she missed all those years, when they felt so successful and sure of themselves.
“I had no clue,” she said. “I thought doctors looked for child abuse in a hospital, in a bruise or something.”
It remains to be seen, barring any new revelations, whether there will be a reappraisal of Paterno’s life and record at Penn State. Eventually, his family hopes, there will be healing and forgiveness in the community, and the outlines of the man they insist Paterno is, and not the monument or monumental target, will reemerge: A modest, decent, fundamentally devoted coach who always loved books more than money.
His starting salary was just $20,000. In 1972 the New England Patriots offered him $1.3 million to become coach and general manager. But at 5:30 a.m. on the day he intended fly to Boston to accept, Paterno woke up and realized it was mistake. He said to his wife: “You went to bed with a millionaire but you woke up with me. I’m not going.” He stayed at Penn State, though he was making just $35,000. In 2008 his salary of $1.03 million was still fractional compared to peers, some of whom now make $4 million.
Paterno’s record is not perfect. Anyone who won on his scale has an ungenerous competitive streak and nascent ego. His love for higher learning — he likes to name-drop Puccini and Virgil — could tip over into superiority. He could show a temper, as he did in 1995 when a camera caught him delivering a profane on-field tirade.
His football program was not immune to the problems of big-time college athletics. An ESPN inquiry found that from 2002 to 2007, 46 Penn State football players faced criminal charges. But he liked working with problem cases and turning them around. “Hotshots,” he still calls them today. The 2007 team had 19 players who earned Academic all-Big Ten honors. “The bigger the problem the guy was, the more I enjoyed it when we had success,” he said.
Over the course of his career, 47 of his players made Academic all-American, the third-highest total among institutions playing at the championship level.
He loved his work. “They were all days I looked forward to,” he said. His philosophy was simple. “My thing was play as hard as you can, don’t be stupid, pay attention to details, and have enough guts in the clutch that you’re not afraid to make a play,” he said. “Some things I thought were important for a young man to know.”
Early on, Paterno vowed that he would try to never lose perspective. In 1968 he said: “We’re trying to win football games, don’t misunderstand that. But I don’t want it to ruin our lives if we lose. I don’t want us ever to become the kind of place where an 8-2 season is a tragedy.”
Asked if he succeeded in keeping the vow, he said: “I stayed on the track I wanted to stay on. I don’t think I deviated from what I’m all about and what I thought was important. Whether you want to call that a legacy, or whatever you want to call it.”
These are the things Paterno would prefer to reminisce about. Instead, he is tying up the loose ends of the abrupt end to his career. There are mounds of mail to deal with, 12,000 letters (his grandchildren counted them). Former Penn State running back Franco Harris, the Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Famer, checks in regularly and is leading a furious campaign to depose the Board of Trustees for their handling of the scandal and Paterno’s dismissal. Paterno tries to play peacemaker, although he admits his first reaction was, “Raise hell.” There are still details to work out with the school, because he remains a tenured professor. On Jan. 2 the university sent him a retirement letter.
“Right now I’m trying to figure out what I’m gonna do,” he said. “Cause I don’t want to sit around on my backside all day.” He grins and there is a light behind his glasses. “If I’m gonna do that I’ll be a newspaper reporter.”
Nevertheless, sitting is mostly what he does, surrounded by the photographs that have accrued on the walls for almost a half-century. They provoke memories. His father, Angelo, studying late at a kitchen table to become a court clerk, impressing on him the open-endedness of learning. His deep pride at being admitted to Ivy League schools, followed by chagrin when he visited Princeton and no one in the eating clubs would speak to him. “Bunch of stuffed shirts,” he said. His wound when frat boys at Brown frowned at him for wearing sweaters instead of tweeds and said, “How did that dago get invited?” His mother, when he called to tell her that he was finally ready to wed at 34, to a young woman he had met, of course, in the library.
“I’m getting married.”
“To who?”
“Susie. You know Susie.”
“That big German girl?”
“Yes, Ma, she’s German.”
“What the hell are you gonna eat?”
The big German girl is in fact slender as a schoolgirl and still has world-class cheekbones at 75. She tends to Paterno gently, ushering him from kitchen table to bedroom and back again, clasping his hand when it trembles. “Speak up,” Sue tells him. Paterno smiles and rasps, “Ordinarily she tells me to shut up.”
Every little while, Sue pulls a picture from a wall and shows it to Paterno or shares it with one of his many visitors. They are invariably photos of children, of sons and daughters and grandchildren. The children are captured in time and they are all beautiful. They are new, unmarked, angel-faced, radiant. These are the images the Paternos cling to, through all the levels of distortion, the press maelstrom, the impending trials, the grotesqueries described on witness stands. Whenever someone in her family loses their emotional way, and sits at the kitchen table weeping for something that’s been lost or torn down, Sue holds a frame out to them and shows them a photograph of unspoiled familial innocence.
“Look at this picture,” she tells them. “This is who we are. And no one can take us from us.”
MORE ON THE PENN STATE SCANDAL:
Complete coverage
Excerpts from interview with Joe Paterno
Photos: Images of Paterno at home and through his career
Video: Sally Jenkins discusses the interview
Chat, Monday, 10 a.m.: Submit your questions for Jenkins
Your comments on Joe Paterno
#paternospeaks on Twitter
Poll: How do you feel about Paterno’s actions?
Saturday, January 14, 2012
From the Ranch to the Vatican
A ride with Ronald Reagan and his first ambassador to the Holy See, Bill Wilson.
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
President Reagan horseback riding with Earle Jorgensen and William Wilson at Rancho Del Cielo. 7/2/83.
http://spectator.org/
President Reagan horseback riding with Earle Jorgensen and William Wilson at Rancho Del Cielo. 7/2/83.
If you ever find yourself in Ronald Reagan's bathroom, you may notice something peculiar about it. There's nothing all that unusual about the facilities themselves. It's a plain old bathroom. But one decoration stands out.
Hanging on the wall above a towel rack is an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ child. I suppose a bathroom wall isn't a typical place to hang such an icon, but it is rather curious that it would be hanging in a so-called Protestant bathroom (not that I have any clue what a "Protestant bathroom" ought to look like).
The icon was a gift from the Reagans' longtime friends William and Betty Wilson. Bill, himself a convert to Roman Catholicism, presented the icon to President Reagan while serving as the country's first Ambassador to the Holy See. On this week's 28th anniversary of his nomination to the post, it might be suitable to commemorate the late Ambassador's enduring relationship with our 40th President.
Ronald met his friend Bill through Nancy, who was a close friend of Bill's wife, Betty. From dinner parties to buying houses, the couples did nearly everything together. The latter activity helped change the world.
Edmund Morris, Reagan's official, controversial biographer had this to say about his subject in Dutch: "Go to the Ranch. That's where you'll find his soul."
Rancho del Cielo, as Reagan would never hesitate to say, was found by Bill Wilson. The Wilsons had lived on an avocado ranch just down the mountainside north of Santa Barbara, California, and knew that Ronald would fall in love with the property.
Indeed he did. Reagan would often refer to it as his "open Cathedral." It was where he retreated from the Washington gridlock and where he gathered his strength. It represented his vision of America: its vastness, fertility, potential, and life.
Wilson was Reagan's ranch sidekick. They both found solace in riding the boundless horse trails. It was a deeply personal and spiritual activity the two men did together. One that seemed to steel their backbones in the war against the Evil Empire. Without the Ranch, Reagan's son Michael once said, "the [Berlin] Wall still stands."
And without Bill Wilson, the United States would still be stuck in 1867, the year Congress repealed funds for diplomatic relations with the Vatican. That didn't stop Reagan from appointing his friend Bill as a Personal Representative of the President to the Holy See in February of 1981. He even complained in his diary that the State Department was too slow in processing the appointment and suggested that someone ought to "get off his ass" and get this done.
Reagan then maneuvered his way through a Democratic Congress to establish full diplomatic relations with the Holy See and elevated Wilson to Ambassador.
Reagan was anxious to meet the newly elected Pope John Paul II and wanted Wilson to help develop a historical relationship. In June of 1982, Reagan and the Pope sat alone in the Vatican Library for almost an hour discussing their "divine mission." Reagan said to the Pope of their surviving assassination attempts: "Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened."
As Paul Kengor explains in his spiritual biography God and Ronald Reagan, "Reagan and the Pope translated their divine mission into a practical mission to maintain Solidarity." A close Cardinal to the Pope admitted that "the Holy Father and the President committed themselves and the institutions of the church and America to such a goal." Reagan and Wilson sought, and received, the Vatican's invaluable participation in assigning the Soviet Union to the ash heap of history.
Even though Wilson resigned from his post in 1986 amid some controversy, he remained close to his old friend. As compiled in Reagan: A Life in Letters, Wilson wrote Reagan in February of 1987 to tell of a troubling meeting he had with William Cardinal Baum. The Cardinal expressed concern that Europe is "beginning to experience a spiritual fatigue leading to a moral fatigue."
Reagan wrote back agreeing that secularism "is so prevalent today," especially in public education. He concluded by reminding his friend that churches that "stick closely to the Bible are showing an increase in followers. Maybe there is a clue there for all of us" -- Catholic and Protestant alike.
Hanging on the wall above a towel rack is an icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Christ child. I suppose a bathroom wall isn't a typical place to hang such an icon, but it is rather curious that it would be hanging in a so-called Protestant bathroom (not that I have any clue what a "Protestant bathroom" ought to look like).
The icon was a gift from the Reagans' longtime friends William and Betty Wilson. Bill, himself a convert to Roman Catholicism, presented the icon to President Reagan while serving as the country's first Ambassador to the Holy See. On this week's 28th anniversary of his nomination to the post, it might be suitable to commemorate the late Ambassador's enduring relationship with our 40th President.
Ronald met his friend Bill through Nancy, who was a close friend of Bill's wife, Betty. From dinner parties to buying houses, the couples did nearly everything together. The latter activity helped change the world.
Edmund Morris, Reagan's official, controversial biographer had this to say about his subject in Dutch: "Go to the Ranch. That's where you'll find his soul."
Rancho del Cielo, as Reagan would never hesitate to say, was found by Bill Wilson. The Wilsons had lived on an avocado ranch just down the mountainside north of Santa Barbara, California, and knew that Ronald would fall in love with the property.
Indeed he did. Reagan would often refer to it as his "open Cathedral." It was where he retreated from the Washington gridlock and where he gathered his strength. It represented his vision of America: its vastness, fertility, potential, and life.
Wilson was Reagan's ranch sidekick. They both found solace in riding the boundless horse trails. It was a deeply personal and spiritual activity the two men did together. One that seemed to steel their backbones in the war against the Evil Empire. Without the Ranch, Reagan's son Michael once said, "the [Berlin] Wall still stands."
And without Bill Wilson, the United States would still be stuck in 1867, the year Congress repealed funds for diplomatic relations with the Vatican. That didn't stop Reagan from appointing his friend Bill as a Personal Representative of the President to the Holy See in February of 1981. He even complained in his diary that the State Department was too slow in processing the appointment and suggested that someone ought to "get off his ass" and get this done.
Reagan then maneuvered his way through a Democratic Congress to establish full diplomatic relations with the Holy See and elevated Wilson to Ambassador.
Reagan was anxious to meet the newly elected Pope John Paul II and wanted Wilson to help develop a historical relationship. In June of 1982, Reagan and the Pope sat alone in the Vatican Library for almost an hour discussing their "divine mission." Reagan said to the Pope of their surviving assassination attempts: "Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened."
As Paul Kengor explains in his spiritual biography God and Ronald Reagan, "Reagan and the Pope translated their divine mission into a practical mission to maintain Solidarity." A close Cardinal to the Pope admitted that "the Holy Father and the President committed themselves and the institutions of the church and America to such a goal." Reagan and Wilson sought, and received, the Vatican's invaluable participation in assigning the Soviet Union to the ash heap of history.
Even though Wilson resigned from his post in 1986 amid some controversy, he remained close to his old friend. As compiled in Reagan: A Life in Letters, Wilson wrote Reagan in February of 1987 to tell of a troubling meeting he had with William Cardinal Baum. The Cardinal expressed concern that Europe is "beginning to experience a spiritual fatigue leading to a moral fatigue."
Reagan wrote back agreeing that secularism "is so prevalent today," especially in public education. He concluded by reminding his friend that churches that "stick closely to the Bible are showing an increase in followers. Maybe there is a clue there for all of us" -- Catholic and Protestant alike.
Ron Paul beckons GOP to Fortress America
By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
January 13, 2012
In the 2010 election the New Hampshire Republican Party took 298 out of 400 House seats, 19 out of 24 state Senate seats, and all five seats on the Executive Council. A little over a year later, in the state's presidential primary, the same (more or less) electorate gave over 56 percent of its votes to a couple of moneyed "moderates," one of whom served in the Obama administration and the other of whom left no trace in office other than the pilot program for Obamacare. Another 23 percent voted for Ron Paul. Supporters of the three other "major" candidates in the race argue that, if only the other two fellows would clear off, a viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney would emerge. In fact, even if you combine Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum's share of the vote, it adds up to a mere 19.5 percent: Were Bain Capital to come in and restructure the "conservative" candidates into one streamlined and efficient Newt Perrtorum, this unstoppable force would be competitive with Jon Huntsman.
According to George Mason University's annual survey of Freedom in the 50 States, New Hampshire is the freest state in the union, so one would expect there to be takers for Ron Paul's message. On the other hand, facing a very different electorate in Iowa, Paul pulled pretty much an identical share of the poll. It may be time for those of us on the right to consider whether it's not so much the conservative vote that's split but whether conservativism itself is fracturing.
No candidate is ideal, and we conservatives are always enjoined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good – or in this case the enemy of the mediocre: sitting next to me last Tuesday on Fox News, the pollster Frank Luntz said that Romney in his victory speech was now starting to use words that resonate with the American people. The main word he used was "America." On Tuesday night Romney told us he wants to restore America to an America where millions of Americans believe in the American ideal of a strong America for millions of Americans. Which is more than your average Belgian can say. The crowd responded appreciatively. An hour later a weird goofy gnome in a baggy suit two sizes too big came out and started yakking about the Federal Reserve, fiat money and monetary policy "throughout all of history." And the crowd went bananas!
It's traditional at this point for non-Paulites to say that, while broadly sympathetic to his views on individual liberty, they deplore his neo-isolationism on foreign policy. But deploring it is an inadequate response to a faction that is likely to emerge with the second-highest number of delegates at the GOP convention. In the end, Newt represents Newt, and Huntsman represents Huntsman, but Ron Paul represents a view of America's role in the world, and one for which there are more and more takers after a decade of expensive but inconclusive war. President Obama has called for cuts of half a trillion dollars from the military budget. In response, too many of my friends on the right are demanding business as usual – that the Pentagon's way of doing things must continue in perpetuity. It cannot.
America is responsible for about 43 percent of the planet's military expenditure. This is partly a reflection of the diminished military budgets of everyone else. As Britain and the other European powers learned very quickly in the decades after the Second World War, when it comes to a choice between unsustainable welfare programs or a military of global reach, the latter is always easier to cut. It is, needless to say, a false choice. By mid-decade the Pentagon's huge bloated budget will be less than the mere interest payments on U.S. debt. Much of which goes to bankrolling the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Nevertheless, faced with reducing funding for China's military or our own, the latter will be the easier choice for Washington.
So the assumptions of the last 60 years are over – and not just because of the cost. If America's responsible for 43 percent of global military expenditure, why doesn't it feel like that? Why does the United States get so little bang for the buck? It is two-thirds of a century since this country won a war (and please don't bother writing in to say: What about Grenada? Or Panama?). In the days after 9/11, many Bush administration officials assured us that this time it would be different, and even liberals believed them. A decade later, Washington can't wait to get the hell out of the Hindu Kush, and the day after they do it will be as if they never set foot on that benighted sod. Illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer have tied down the hyperpower for twice as long as it took America to win the Second World War. Something is wrong with this picture.
Ron Paul says he would pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan "as quickly as the ships could get there." Afghanistan is a land-locked country, but hey, that's just the kind of boring foreign trivia we won't need to bother with once we're safely holed up in Fortress America. To those who dissent from this easy and affordable solution to America's woes, the Paul campaign likes to point out that it receives more money from America's men in uniform than anybody else. According to the Federal Election Commission, in the second quarter of 2011, Ron Paul got more donations from service personnel than all other Republican candidates combined, plus President Obama. Not unreasonably, serving soldiers are weary of unwon wars – of going to war with everything except war aims and strategic clarity. I would hazard that the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses is a coarser comment on the same psychosis, and the folly of fighting a determined and murderous enemy by distributing to your officers bulk orders of that charlatan's best-seller "Three Cups of Tea." There is a logical progression from three cups of sweet tea to those acts of micturition that the Pentagon would do well to ponder.
That said, the isolationists are delusional. Two centuries ago, when Napoleon sold a constrained Appalachian republic the port of New Orleans, he crowed, "I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride." Instead, a young America enjoyed (excepting one or two hiccups) the blessings of the Pax Britannica for over a century. It's relatively easy to be a romantic isolationist republic when the Royal Navy's out there enforcing global order. Likewise, after 1945, Britain's imperial decline was cushioned by Washington's assumption of the old lion's role as order maker. But the notion that America can retain all the comforts and prosperity of global dominance while shrugging off all the responsibilities is fantasy. "Fortress America" is less a fortress than a state of denial, yet it's one with increasing appeal to many Republican voters.
With characteristic timidity, Mitt Romney says that as commander-in-chief his Afghan strategy would be determined by the "commanders in the field." More tea and sympathy! But a lazy deference to the inviolability of the present arrangements for another two-thirds of a century of unwon wars will not suffice. I am in favor of a leaner, meaner military – emphasis on both adjectives. A broke America will perforce wind up with the first. But, if we want the second, the foreign-policy right will have to make a better case than it has this primary season.
©MARK STEYN
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
January 13, 2012
According to George Mason University's annual survey of Freedom in the 50 States, New Hampshire is the freest state in the union, so one would expect there to be takers for Ron Paul's message. On the other hand, facing a very different electorate in Iowa, Paul pulled pretty much an identical share of the poll. It may be time for those of us on the right to consider whether it's not so much the conservative vote that's split but whether conservativism itself is fracturing.
No candidate is ideal, and we conservatives are always enjoined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good – or in this case the enemy of the mediocre: sitting next to me last Tuesday on Fox News, the pollster Frank Luntz said that Romney in his victory speech was now starting to use words that resonate with the American people. The main word he used was "America." On Tuesday night Romney told us he wants to restore America to an America where millions of Americans believe in the American ideal of a strong America for millions of Americans. Which is more than your average Belgian can say. The crowd responded appreciatively. An hour later a weird goofy gnome in a baggy suit two sizes too big came out and started yakking about the Federal Reserve, fiat money and monetary policy "throughout all of history." And the crowd went bananas!
It's traditional at this point for non-Paulites to say that, while broadly sympathetic to his views on individual liberty, they deplore his neo-isolationism on foreign policy. But deploring it is an inadequate response to a faction that is likely to emerge with the second-highest number of delegates at the GOP convention. In the end, Newt represents Newt, and Huntsman represents Huntsman, but Ron Paul represents a view of America's role in the world, and one for which there are more and more takers after a decade of expensive but inconclusive war. President Obama has called for cuts of half a trillion dollars from the military budget. In response, too many of my friends on the right are demanding business as usual – that the Pentagon's way of doing things must continue in perpetuity. It cannot.
America is responsible for about 43 percent of the planet's military expenditure. This is partly a reflection of the diminished military budgets of everyone else. As Britain and the other European powers learned very quickly in the decades after the Second World War, when it comes to a choice between unsustainable welfare programs or a military of global reach, the latter is always easier to cut. It is, needless to say, a false choice. By mid-decade the Pentagon's huge bloated budget will be less than the mere interest payments on U.S. debt. Much of which goes to bankrolling the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Nevertheless, faced with reducing funding for China's military or our own, the latter will be the easier choice for Washington.
So the assumptions of the last 60 years are over – and not just because of the cost. If America's responsible for 43 percent of global military expenditure, why doesn't it feel like that? Why does the United States get so little bang for the buck? It is two-thirds of a century since this country won a war (and please don't bother writing in to say: What about Grenada? Or Panama?). In the days after 9/11, many Bush administration officials assured us that this time it would be different, and even liberals believed them. A decade later, Washington can't wait to get the hell out of the Hindu Kush, and the day after they do it will be as if they never set foot on that benighted sod. Illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer have tied down the hyperpower for twice as long as it took America to win the Second World War. Something is wrong with this picture.
Ron Paul says he would pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan "as quickly as the ships could get there." Afghanistan is a land-locked country, but hey, that's just the kind of boring foreign trivia we won't need to bother with once we're safely holed up in Fortress America. To those who dissent from this easy and affordable solution to America's woes, the Paul campaign likes to point out that it receives more money from America's men in uniform than anybody else. According to the Federal Election Commission, in the second quarter of 2011, Ron Paul got more donations from service personnel than all other Republican candidates combined, plus President Obama. Not unreasonably, serving soldiers are weary of unwon wars – of going to war with everything except war aims and strategic clarity. I would hazard that the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses is a coarser comment on the same psychosis, and the folly of fighting a determined and murderous enemy by distributing to your officers bulk orders of that charlatan's best-seller "Three Cups of Tea." There is a logical progression from three cups of sweet tea to those acts of micturition that the Pentagon would do well to ponder.
That said, the isolationists are delusional. Two centuries ago, when Napoleon sold a constrained Appalachian republic the port of New Orleans, he crowed, "I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride." Instead, a young America enjoyed (excepting one or two hiccups) the blessings of the Pax Britannica for over a century. It's relatively easy to be a romantic isolationist republic when the Royal Navy's out there enforcing global order. Likewise, after 1945, Britain's imperial decline was cushioned by Washington's assumption of the old lion's role as order maker. But the notion that America can retain all the comforts and prosperity of global dominance while shrugging off all the responsibilities is fantasy. "Fortress America" is less a fortress than a state of denial, yet it's one with increasing appeal to many Republican voters.
With characteristic timidity, Mitt Romney says that as commander-in-chief his Afghan strategy would be determined by the "commanders in the field." More tea and sympathy! But a lazy deference to the inviolability of the present arrangements for another two-thirds of a century of unwon wars will not suffice. I am in favor of a leaner, meaner military – emphasis on both adjectives. A broke America will perforce wind up with the first. But, if we want the second, the foreign-policy right will have to make a better case than it has this primary season.
©MARK STEYN
Friday, January 13, 2012
WHO WOULDN'T ENJOY FIRING THESE PEOPLE?
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
January 11, 2012
Earlier this week, Mitt Romney got into trouble for saying, "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." To comprehend why the political class reacted as if Romney had just praised Hitler, you must understand that his critics live in a world in which no one can ever be fired -- a world known as "the government."
(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn't mean he is "Wall Street." A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not "Wall Street.")
Romney's statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)
Talking about insurance providers, he said:
"I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."
Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.
And no one will be able to fire them -- unless they're caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.
Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can't be fired.
The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse's aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.
Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as "circumstantial." (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)
But surely we'll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.
Psychiatric technician Gregory Powell was working at a government center for the mentally retarded when he hit a severely disturbed individual with a shoe so hard that the impression of the shoe's sole was visible on the victim three hours later. A psychologist who witnessed the attack said the patient was cowering on the couch before being struck.
Powell was fired, but, again, the California Personnel Board ordered him rehired.
Now, let's turn to New York City and look for any clues about why it might be the highest-taxed city in the nation.
For years, the New York City school budget included $35 million to $65 million a year to place hundreds of teachers in "rubber rooms," after they had committed such serious offenses that they were barred from classrooms. Teachers accused of raping students sat in rooms doing no work all day, still collecting government paychecks because they couldn't be fired.
After an uproar over the rubber rooms a few years ago, Michael Bloomberg got rid of the rooms. But the teachers still can't be fired.
Wherever there is government, there is malfeasance and criminality -- and government employees who can never be fired.
In 2010, 33 employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission -- half making $100,000 to $200,000 per year -- were found to have spent most of their workdays downloading Internet pornography over a five-year period. (Thank goodness there were no financial shenanigans going on then, so the SEC guys had plenty of time on their hands.)
One, a senior lawyer at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., admitted to spending eight hours a day looking at Internet pornography, sometimes even "working" through his lunch hour. Another admitted watching up to five hours a day of pornography in his office. (Would that Bernie Madoff had posted naked photos of himself online!)
Not one of the porn-surfing employees of the SEC was fired.
In 2009, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation was forced to abandon an investigation of grant fraud when he stumbled across dozens of NSF employees, including senior management, surfing pornographic websites on government computers during working hours.
A senior official who had spent 331 workdays talking to fully or partially nude women online was allowed to resign (but was not fired). I hope they gave him his computer as a parting gift.
The others kept their jobs -- including an NSF employee who had downloaded hundreds of pornographic videos and pictures and even developed pornographic PowerPoint slide shows. (And you thought PowerPoint presentations were always boring.)
They weren't fired or even embarrassed. One appealed his 10-day suspension, complaining that it was too severe. The government refused to release any of their names.
These are the people who are going to be controlling your access to medical services if Obamacare isn't repealed. There will be only one insurance provider, and you won't be able to switch, even if the service is lousy (and it will be).
Obamacare employees will spend their days surfing pornography, instead of approving your heart operation. They can steal from you and even physically assault you. And they can never be fired.
That's one gargantuan difference with "Romneycare" right there: If you don't like what your insurer is doing in Massachusetts, you can get a new one.
Now, wouldn't you like to be able to fire people who provide services to you?
COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER
http://www.anncoulter.com/
January 11, 2012
(And a tip for you Washington types: Just because a person became rich without working for government doesn't mean he is "Wall Street." A venture capital firm in Boston that tries to rescue businesses headed for bankruptcy, for example, is not "Wall Street.")
Romney's statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)
Talking about insurance providers, he said:
"I want individuals to have their own insurance. That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don't like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need, I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me."
Obamacare, you will recall, will be administered by the same people who run the Department of Motor Vehicles. They will operate under the same self-paced, self-evaluated work rules that have made government offices the envy of efficiency specialists everywhere.
And no one will be able to fire them -- unless they're caught doing something truly vile and criminal, such as stealing from patients in nursing homes.
Oops, I take that back: Government employees who rob the elderly also can't be fired.
The Los Angeles Times recently reported that, after a spate of burglaries at a veterans hospital in California several years ago, authorities set up video cameras to catch the perpetrators. In short order, nurse's aide Linda Riccitelli was videotaped sneaking into the room of 93-year-old Raymond Germain as he slept, sticking her hand into his dresser drawer and stealing the bait money that had been left there.
Riccitelli was fired and a burglary prosecution initiated. A few years later, the California Personnel Board rescinded her firing and awarded her three-years back pay. The board dismissed the videotape of Riccitelli stealing the money as "circumstantial." (The criminal prosecution was also dropped after Germain died.)
But surely we'll be able to fire a government employee who commits a physical assault on a mentally disturbed patient? No, wrong again.
Psychiatric technician Gregory Powell was working at a government center for the mentally retarded when he hit a severely disturbed individual with a shoe so hard that the impression of the shoe's sole was visible on the victim three hours later. A psychologist who witnessed the attack said the patient was cowering on the couch before being struck.
Powell was fired, but, again, the California Personnel Board ordered him rehired.
Now, let's turn to New York City and look for any clues about why it might be the highest-taxed city in the nation.
For years, the New York City school budget included $35 million to $65 million a year to place hundreds of teachers in "rubber rooms," after they had committed such serious offenses that they were barred from classrooms. Teachers accused of raping students sat in rooms doing no work all day, still collecting government paychecks because they couldn't be fired.
After an uproar over the rubber rooms a few years ago, Michael Bloomberg got rid of the rooms. But the teachers still can't be fired.
Wherever there is government, there is malfeasance and criminality -- and government employees who can never be fired.
In 2010, 33 employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission -- half making $100,000 to $200,000 per year -- were found to have spent most of their workdays downloading Internet pornography over a five-year period. (Thank goodness there were no financial shenanigans going on then, so the SEC guys had plenty of time on their hands.)
One, a senior lawyer at SEC headquarters in Washington, D.C., admitted to spending eight hours a day looking at Internet pornography, sometimes even "working" through his lunch hour. Another admitted watching up to five hours a day of pornography in his office. (Would that Bernie Madoff had posted naked photos of himself online!)
Not one of the porn-surfing employees of the SEC was fired.
In 2009, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation was forced to abandon an investigation of grant fraud when he stumbled across dozens of NSF employees, including senior management, surfing pornographic websites on government computers during working hours.
A senior official who had spent 331 workdays talking to fully or partially nude women online was allowed to resign (but was not fired). I hope they gave him his computer as a parting gift.
The others kept their jobs -- including an NSF employee who had downloaded hundreds of pornographic videos and pictures and even developed pornographic PowerPoint slide shows. (And you thought PowerPoint presentations were always boring.)
They weren't fired or even embarrassed. One appealed his 10-day suspension, complaining that it was too severe. The government refused to release any of their names.
These are the people who are going to be controlling your access to medical services if Obamacare isn't repealed. There will be only one insurance provider, and you won't be able to switch, even if the service is lousy (and it will be).
Obamacare employees will spend their days surfing pornography, instead of approving your heart operation. They can steal from you and even physically assault you. And they can never be fired.
That's one gargantuan difference with "Romneycare" right there: If you don't like what your insurer is doing in Massachusetts, you can get a new one.
Now, wouldn't you like to be able to fire people who provide services to you?
COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Defined by a Smile and a Drawl
By Jeremy Egner
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 5, 2012
IN the premiere of the new season of “Justified,” beginning Jan. 17, a dashing psychopath makes a casual reference to this Kentucky crime drama’s signature prop, the Stetson worn by the protagonist, United States Marshal Raylan Givens.
“Not much call for cowboys these days,” the thug says in a syrupy, menacing drawl.
The lawman responds, “You would be surprised.”
The line is an in-joke, a reference to the baroque backwoods adventures that Raylan, a sort of 21st-century Gary Cooper with a dry wit, has endured during two acclaimed seasons of this FX drama. But the exchange also functions as a career appraisal for the man who plays him. Timothy Olyphant, 43, has worked steadily since the 1990s, but in this easygoing, volatile marshal he has found his defining role. Not that he’s willing to admit it.
“The bottom line is, someone gave me a television show and I figured I’d make the most of it,” he said during a recent visit to New York. “The words do all the work for you.”
Based on stories by Elmore Leonard, “Justified” captures his darkly funny, morally murky tone and spikes the traditional crime procedural with hooch and Oxycontin, tracking its hero’s attempts to thwart colorful drug dealers and gunrunners and negotiate his own fractured relationships. The series unspools in an oddly captivating alternate South peopled by whimsically twisted archetypes and marked by sudden shifts between folksy black comedy and graphic violence. (The thug in the premiere is known as the Ice Pick.)
Last year the series won a Peabody Award, and its second season was among the most lauded of 2011, netting four Emmy nominations, including a first for Mr. Olyphant and a supporting actress win for Margo Martindale, who played a crime matriarch. Ratings for Season 2 increased 15 percent in total viewers, and an average of just under 2.2 million watch each new episode on Tuesday nights, an audience that grows to nearly 4 million each week when it includes DVR viewers, though they still lag behind those of FX dramas like “Sons of Anarchy” and “American Horror Story.” The challenge for the show’s producers is to build on the series’s momentum from last season and transform from critical favorite into critically acclaimed hit.
“It’s coming off one of the best seasons any series put forth last year, and that’s a really tough act to follow,” said John Landgraf, the president of FX. “But when you have a virtually ideal central character and central performance, audiences are going to find it.”
As the face of the series Mr. Olyphant has perhaps the most impact on whether the show will continue to succeed. By all accounts it’s a job he takes most seriously, playing an active role behind the scenes as well. Mr. Leonard himself calls the actor’s performance the best screen adaptation ever of a Leonard hero, a category that includes names like George Clooney and John Travolta.
“He played Raylan exactly like I heard him when I was writing him,” said Mr. Leonard, an executive producer of the series. (“Raylan,” a new novel by Mr. Leonard about the character, comes out on Jan. 17 as well.)
Mr. Olyphant expressed appreciation for that appraisal but inserted a note of pragmatism. “If George Clooney was starring right now in a big Elmore Leonard thing, I bet Elmore would be very complimentary of George as well,” he said, laughing.
An actor of rangy grace and wolfish good looks — his easy grin seems designed to induce swoons and suspicion in equal measure — Mr. Olyphant has carved out the career of a man Hollywood isn’t quite sure how to use. He has seesawed between charismatic criminals in films like “Go” and “Live Free or Die Hard,” and checkered heroes in projects like the FX legal thriller “Damages” and HBO’s Shakespearean western “Deadwood.” (Another hat role, it was Mr. Olyphant’s most notable performance before “Justified.”)
“People just like him, and yet there is something a little dangerous there,” said Graham Yost, the creator of “Justified.” “So he gets the combination of the good-guy, bad-guy thing.”
Walton Goggins, who plays Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and nemesis, added, “Tim’s hat is never entirely white.”
Such shades of gray are right at home in the Kentucky of “Justified.” The same sharp-edged nonchalance that makes Mr. Olyphant something of a square peg in a conventional blockbuster is well suited for a place where smooth-talking cops and robbers trade both barbs and gunfire with something like affection.
“In the world of Elmore Leonard, people are defined not by good and bad but by whether you’re a jerk or not,” Mr. Olyphant said.
He expounded upon that world from a perch about as far removed from it as possible. At an airy ninth-floor restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, he sipped a cappuccino as he looked out toward the bristly gray winter canopy of Central Park.
A laconic presence on “Justified,” Mr. Olyphant is affable in person and projects less a lawman swagger than the ease of a former athlete; he swam competitively at the University of Southern California. His face is striking, if unconventional — all smooth, wide planes and chiseled edges. His hair is more brown than gray, but the gray is climbing from both sideburns. A wispy array of white whiskers curls around his chin like smoke.
“The camera does not hate the dude,” said Natalie Zea, who plays his ex-wife and current love interest on “Justified.”
Neither did the nearby patrons who sneaked glances over the rims of their coffee cups. Mr. Olyphant professed a delighted but measured attitude about the recognition that has come from “Justified.”
“You see a bus drive by with your picture on it, and you think, ‘That’s cool, that’s new,’ ” he said. “I try to embrace all that comes with it and at the same time know that most of that stuff has nothing to do with me. It’s just part of the job.”
The museum was his idea. Mr. Olyphant majored in fine art at U.S.C. and was a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, when he lived in New York with his wife of 20 years, Alexis. (They have three children.) Of his artistic output now, Mr. Olyphant grinned and said, “I can doodle with the best of them.”
It was a moment of wry, Raylanesque self-deprecation in a day spent mostly trying to convince a reporter that he was nothing like the character. But ask nearly anyone involved in “Justified” about Mr. Olyphant, and before long it comes out: The reason Mr. Olyphant works as Raylan is because in various ways he is Raylan. His colleagues point to his sharp sense of humor and casual verbosity, a gift of gab common to Leonard characters. (He also has a Leonardian flair for profanity, as exemplified by an unprintable reaction to an outré Korean art installation at the museum.)
Most often they mention a charged quality that Mr. Olyphant shares with the character, an understated intensity that animated previous projects like “Deadwood” but has “reached its sort of apotheosis in Raylan,” said Mr. Landgraf, who first proposed him for “Justified.” As David Milch, the creator of “Deadwood,” put it: “I think Tim is a guy that doesn’t let himself be known easily. It’s what allows him to continue to do such interesting work.”
Mr. Olyphant, who grew up in Modesto, Calif., began acting in New York in the mid-1990s with roles in short-lived television projects and brief appearances in movies like “The First Wives Club.” Larger roles followed. He was a killer in “Scream 2,” a boy-toy in an episode of “Sex and the City.” As a sardonic drug dealer in “Go,” from 1999, a frenetic cult comedy about young night crawlers in Los Angeles, he showed off his comic chops with a caustic riff on “The Family Circus.”
“There have been roles that, had the movies been bigger, would have probably changed my life,” Mr. Olyphant said. “If ‘Go’ had been a huge box office success, I would have had tons of opportunities, I imagine.”
Instead, it was followed by mostly forgettable films until Mr. Olyphant joined “Deadwood” in 2004 as the conflicted sheriff Seth Bullock, the simmering straight man to Ian McShane’s silver-tongued rogue. The role revealed in Mr. Olyphant a capacity for explosive, nuanced performance barely suggested by earlier roles.
“He seemed to understand the contradictions in the character as well as his most fundamental purposes, and that’s a terrific mix,” Mr. Milch said.
But the show’s sudden end after three seasons cast him back into the wilderness of the working actor. The period that followed included some high-profile roles — he was a nefarious super-hacker in “Live Free or Die Hard” in 2007 — but not much fulfillment. Mr. Olyphant finally reached a sort of breaking point during the shooting of a film he declined to identify, when, he said, he found himself in some Eastern European country doing risible junk. “And you think, ‘How did I end up here?’ ”
(It’s perhaps worth noting that “Hitman,” a 2007 action film starring Mr. Olyphant that was based on a video game, was filmed largely in Bulgaria.)
“You go from working with David Milch to just doing stuff to pay some bills,” he said. “You think, ‘There’s got to be a way to bring these two things together.’ ”
The answer, he decided, was to play a larger role in shaping the projects he acted in, beginning with “Damages” on FX. “Justified” brought his first producer credit.
“Often on shows that really doesn’t mean much,” Mr. Yost said. “On this show it actually doesn’t reflect the depth of his involvement, which would be an even bigger credit.”
Mr. Olyphant’s co-stars joke that he leaves no scene unturned during filming, constantly proposing new angles and questioning whether a piece of action or dialogue is true to the show’s founding sensibility. He comes to the set on his off days to coach guest stars and admitted that anyone not willing to really dig into the material is “of absolutely no use to me.”
Mr. Goggins said: “Tim is the biggest reminder for everyone that we’re in the Elmore Leonard world. And that it needs to be funny and dark and twisted, and it needs to speak with all of those voices at the same time.”
Mr. Olyphant can be evangelical about Mr. Leonard’s stories, praising the specificity that breathes believability into gonzo characters and situations. But he predictably plays down his behind-the-scenes contributions to “Justified,” even as he allows that his own deep involvement has helped to reinvigorate a career that felt as if it had gone awry.
In that respect the show has gotten Mr. Olyphant back on track toward the deceptively simple goal he set when he began acting nearly 20 years ago.
“What I hoped is that it would be something I could do for a long time and would want to do for a long time,” he said. “So — so far, so good.”
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 5, 2012
IN the premiere of the new season of “Justified,” beginning Jan. 17, a dashing psychopath makes a casual reference to this Kentucky crime drama’s signature prop, the Stetson worn by the protagonist, United States Marshal Raylan Givens.
“Not much call for cowboys these days,” the thug says in a syrupy, menacing drawl.
The lawman responds, “You would be surprised.”
The line is an in-joke, a reference to the baroque backwoods adventures that Raylan, a sort of 21st-century Gary Cooper with a dry wit, has endured during two acclaimed seasons of this FX drama. But the exchange also functions as a career appraisal for the man who plays him. Timothy Olyphant, 43, has worked steadily since the 1990s, but in this easygoing, volatile marshal he has found his defining role. Not that he’s willing to admit it.
“The bottom line is, someone gave me a television show and I figured I’d make the most of it,” he said during a recent visit to New York. “The words do all the work for you.”
Based on stories by Elmore Leonard, “Justified” captures his darkly funny, morally murky tone and spikes the traditional crime procedural with hooch and Oxycontin, tracking its hero’s attempts to thwart colorful drug dealers and gunrunners and negotiate his own fractured relationships. The series unspools in an oddly captivating alternate South peopled by whimsically twisted archetypes and marked by sudden shifts between folksy black comedy and graphic violence. (The thug in the premiere is known as the Ice Pick.)
Last year the series won a Peabody Award, and its second season was among the most lauded of 2011, netting four Emmy nominations, including a first for Mr. Olyphant and a supporting actress win for Margo Martindale, who played a crime matriarch. Ratings for Season 2 increased 15 percent in total viewers, and an average of just under 2.2 million watch each new episode on Tuesday nights, an audience that grows to nearly 4 million each week when it includes DVR viewers, though they still lag behind those of FX dramas like “Sons of Anarchy” and “American Horror Story.” The challenge for the show’s producers is to build on the series’s momentum from last season and transform from critical favorite into critically acclaimed hit.
“It’s coming off one of the best seasons any series put forth last year, and that’s a really tough act to follow,” said John Landgraf, the president of FX. “But when you have a virtually ideal central character and central performance, audiences are going to find it.”
As the face of the series Mr. Olyphant has perhaps the most impact on whether the show will continue to succeed. By all accounts it’s a job he takes most seriously, playing an active role behind the scenes as well. Mr. Leonard himself calls the actor’s performance the best screen adaptation ever of a Leonard hero, a category that includes names like George Clooney and John Travolta.
“He played Raylan exactly like I heard him when I was writing him,” said Mr. Leonard, an executive producer of the series. (“Raylan,” a new novel by Mr. Leonard about the character, comes out on Jan. 17 as well.)
Mr. Olyphant expressed appreciation for that appraisal but inserted a note of pragmatism. “If George Clooney was starring right now in a big Elmore Leonard thing, I bet Elmore would be very complimentary of George as well,” he said, laughing.
An actor of rangy grace and wolfish good looks — his easy grin seems designed to induce swoons and suspicion in equal measure — Mr. Olyphant has carved out the career of a man Hollywood isn’t quite sure how to use. He has seesawed between charismatic criminals in films like “Go” and “Live Free or Die Hard,” and checkered heroes in projects like the FX legal thriller “Damages” and HBO’s Shakespearean western “Deadwood.” (Another hat role, it was Mr. Olyphant’s most notable performance before “Justified.”)
“People just like him, and yet there is something a little dangerous there,” said Graham Yost, the creator of “Justified.” “So he gets the combination of the good-guy, bad-guy thing.”
Walton Goggins, who plays Boyd Crowder, Raylan’s longtime friend and nemesis, added, “Tim’s hat is never entirely white.”
Such shades of gray are right at home in the Kentucky of “Justified.” The same sharp-edged nonchalance that makes Mr. Olyphant something of a square peg in a conventional blockbuster is well suited for a place where smooth-talking cops and robbers trade both barbs and gunfire with something like affection.
He expounded upon that world from a perch about as far removed from it as possible. At an airy ninth-floor restaurant in the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, he sipped a cappuccino as he looked out toward the bristly gray winter canopy of Central Park.
A laconic presence on “Justified,” Mr. Olyphant is affable in person and projects less a lawman swagger than the ease of a former athlete; he swam competitively at the University of Southern California. His face is striking, if unconventional — all smooth, wide planes and chiseled edges. His hair is more brown than gray, but the gray is climbing from both sideburns. A wispy array of white whiskers curls around his chin like smoke.
“The camera does not hate the dude,” said Natalie Zea, who plays his ex-wife and current love interest on “Justified.”
Neither did the nearby patrons who sneaked glances over the rims of their coffee cups. Mr. Olyphant professed a delighted but measured attitude about the recognition that has come from “Justified.”
“You see a bus drive by with your picture on it, and you think, ‘That’s cool, that’s new,’ ” he said. “I try to embrace all that comes with it and at the same time know that most of that stuff has nothing to do with me. It’s just part of the job.”
The museum was his idea. Mr. Olyphant majored in fine art at U.S.C. and was a frequent visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1990s, when he lived in New York with his wife of 20 years, Alexis. (They have three children.) Of his artistic output now, Mr. Olyphant grinned and said, “I can doodle with the best of them.”
It was a moment of wry, Raylanesque self-deprecation in a day spent mostly trying to convince a reporter that he was nothing like the character. But ask nearly anyone involved in “Justified” about Mr. Olyphant, and before long it comes out: The reason Mr. Olyphant works as Raylan is because in various ways he is Raylan. His colleagues point to his sharp sense of humor and casual verbosity, a gift of gab common to Leonard characters. (He also has a Leonardian flair for profanity, as exemplified by an unprintable reaction to an outré Korean art installation at the museum.)
Most often they mention a charged quality that Mr. Olyphant shares with the character, an understated intensity that animated previous projects like “Deadwood” but has “reached its sort of apotheosis in Raylan,” said Mr. Landgraf, who first proposed him for “Justified.” As David Milch, the creator of “Deadwood,” put it: “I think Tim is a guy that doesn’t let himself be known easily. It’s what allows him to continue to do such interesting work.”
Mr. Olyphant, who grew up in Modesto, Calif., began acting in New York in the mid-1990s with roles in short-lived television projects and brief appearances in movies like “The First Wives Club.” Larger roles followed. He was a killer in “Scream 2,” a boy-toy in an episode of “Sex and the City.” As a sardonic drug dealer in “Go,” from 1999, a frenetic cult comedy about young night crawlers in Los Angeles, he showed off his comic chops with a caustic riff on “The Family Circus.”
“There have been roles that, had the movies been bigger, would have probably changed my life,” Mr. Olyphant said. “If ‘Go’ had been a huge box office success, I would have had tons of opportunities, I imagine.”
Instead, it was followed by mostly forgettable films until Mr. Olyphant joined “Deadwood” in 2004 as the conflicted sheriff Seth Bullock, the simmering straight man to Ian McShane’s silver-tongued rogue. The role revealed in Mr. Olyphant a capacity for explosive, nuanced performance barely suggested by earlier roles.
“He seemed to understand the contradictions in the character as well as his most fundamental purposes, and that’s a terrific mix,” Mr. Milch said.
But the show’s sudden end after three seasons cast him back into the wilderness of the working actor. The period that followed included some high-profile roles — he was a nefarious super-hacker in “Live Free or Die Hard” in 2007 — but not much fulfillment. Mr. Olyphant finally reached a sort of breaking point during the shooting of a film he declined to identify, when, he said, he found himself in some Eastern European country doing risible junk. “And you think, ‘How did I end up here?’ ”
(It’s perhaps worth noting that “Hitman,” a 2007 action film starring Mr. Olyphant that was based on a video game, was filmed largely in Bulgaria.)
“You go from working with David Milch to just doing stuff to pay some bills,” he said. “You think, ‘There’s got to be a way to bring these two things together.’ ”
The answer, he decided, was to play a larger role in shaping the projects he acted in, beginning with “Damages” on FX. “Justified” brought his first producer credit.
“Often on shows that really doesn’t mean much,” Mr. Yost said. “On this show it actually doesn’t reflect the depth of his involvement, which would be an even bigger credit.”
Mr. Olyphant’s co-stars joke that he leaves no scene unturned during filming, constantly proposing new angles and questioning whether a piece of action or dialogue is true to the show’s founding sensibility. He comes to the set on his off days to coach guest stars and admitted that anyone not willing to really dig into the material is “of absolutely no use to me.”
Mr. Goggins said: “Tim is the biggest reminder for everyone that we’re in the Elmore Leonard world. And that it needs to be funny and dark and twisted, and it needs to speak with all of those voices at the same time.”
Mr. Olyphant can be evangelical about Mr. Leonard’s stories, praising the specificity that breathes believability into gonzo characters and situations. But he predictably plays down his behind-the-scenes contributions to “Justified,” even as he allows that his own deep involvement has helped to reinvigorate a career that felt as if it had gone awry.
In that respect the show has gotten Mr. Olyphant back on track toward the deceptively simple goal he set when he began acting nearly 20 years ago.
“What I hoped is that it would be something I could do for a long time and would want to do for a long time,” he said. “So — so far, so good.”
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Terror in Tampa
By Jacob Laksin
http://frontpagemag.com/
January 11, 2012
Earlier this week, the FBI announced the arrest of Sami Osmakac, a 25-year-old Muslim man from the former Yugoslavia. In the process, the agency thwarted what might have been a horrific terror spree targeting populous civilian and commercial areas in Tampa, Florida.
According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Osmakac, a naturalized American citizen, had been planning a massive terror attack targeting everything from businesses to nightclubs and bridges with the aim of killing and injuring as many people as possible. As part of the attack, he intended to set off a weapon of mass destruction planted in a parked car, then capping off the attack by detonating a suicide belt. Instead, Osmakac’s plans were foiled by a masterful FBI sting operation. Undercover agents tracked the would-be terrorist for months, monitoring his every move and even supplying him with the (secretly non-functional) weapons that he had planned to use before moving in this week to make a decisive arrest.
But what should be an open-and-shut counter-terror success is now being called into question by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and further obfuscated by academic apologists for Islamic radicalism. No sooner was Osmakac in handcuffs than CAIR spokesman Hassan Shibly suggested that the FBI was more culpable in the case than the jihadist in their custody. “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?” asked Shibly, before expressing his “concern about a perception of entrapment.”
A closer look at the facts of the case shows this perception to be wholly unfounded. While it’s true that the FBI provided the weapons, the fact remains that it was Osmakac, an al-Qaeda-sympathizer, who had sought them out. Moreover, according to an FBI affidavit, the undercover FBI agent who sold Osmakac his non-working arms had repeatedly tried to convince him to give up his plans and seek a normal life. In one recorded conversation, the agent urged Osmakac to consider getting married and having a family rather than going ahead with his plan. That is the opposite of entrapment. In the event, Osmakac refused, insisting that he would be rewarded by Allah in paradise for carrying out his attack. Given his intention of doing just that, it’s to the FBI’s great credit that the agency made sure Osmakac never had access to anything but defective arms.
Osmakac’s clearly expressed conviction that Allah required him to commit terrorism points up another emerging and equally misguided assessment of the case – namely, that religion had nothing to do with Osmakac’s motives. “I don’t think his Islamic religion has anything to do with what’s going on,” claimed Dr. Barbara DeGeorge, identified by local Florida media as an “Islamic studies expert,” following the arrest. Even the FBI made a concession to political correctness, with the head of the agency’s Tampa Bay division assuring the press that Osmakac’s case “is not about the Muslim religion.”
All the available evidence indicates otherwise. In an eight-minute video laying out his intentions, Osmakac declared that he felt no compunction about killing innocents because non-Muslim “blood” was less valuable than that of Muslims. Osmakac also had a message for non-believers: “My message is if you don’t accept Islam you’re going to hell.”
Nor did he spare his co-religionists. “What’s the matter with you?” Osmakac demanded in the video. “Trying to follow their ways? Trying to go to nightclubs, like them? Trying to fornicate, like them? Trying to get with their women? . . . Submit to the rule of Allah.” Not least, Osmakac yearned for a death as a Muslim martyr, announcing that the authorities “can take me in five million pieces,” a reference to the suicide belt he planned to explode. Notwithstanding the apologists, it’s clear that, in Osmakac’s mind at least, the “Islamic religion” had everything to do with his planned attack.
Rather than pandering to political sensitivities, the FBI would be better served by touting the truly salutary aspect of the case: the crucial cooperation of the Tampa Muslim community in securing Osmakac’s arrest. An unidentified Muslim citizen, who became alarmed at Osmakac’s request for al-Qaeda flags when he visited his or her store, first tipped off the agency to his intentions. Thanks to that tip, the FBI was able to track Osmakac every step of the way. If the FBI truly wanted to bolster American Muslims’ image, it should focus on their commendable efforts in helping to stop an Islamic fanatic from killing in the name of his religion.
http://frontpagemag.com/
January 11, 2012
Earlier this week, the FBI announced the arrest of Sami Osmakac, a 25-year-old Muslim man from the former Yugoslavia. In the process, the agency thwarted what might have been a horrific terror spree targeting populous civilian and commercial areas in Tampa, Florida.
According to the FBI’s criminal complaint, Osmakac, a naturalized American citizen, had been planning a massive terror attack targeting everything from businesses to nightclubs and bridges with the aim of killing and injuring as many people as possible. As part of the attack, he intended to set off a weapon of mass destruction planted in a parked car, then capping off the attack by detonating a suicide belt. Instead, Osmakac’s plans were foiled by a masterful FBI sting operation. Undercover agents tracked the would-be terrorist for months, monitoring his every move and even supplying him with the (secretly non-functional) weapons that he had planned to use before moving in this week to make a decisive arrest.
But what should be an open-and-shut counter-terror success is now being called into question by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and further obfuscated by academic apologists for Islamic radicalism. No sooner was Osmakac in handcuffs than CAIR spokesman Hassan Shibly suggested that the FBI was more culpable in the case than the jihadist in their custody. “The weapons and explosives were provided by the government. Was he just a troubled individual, or did he pose a real threat?” asked Shibly, before expressing his “concern about a perception of entrapment.”
A closer look at the facts of the case shows this perception to be wholly unfounded. While it’s true that the FBI provided the weapons, the fact remains that it was Osmakac, an al-Qaeda-sympathizer, who had sought them out. Moreover, according to an FBI affidavit, the undercover FBI agent who sold Osmakac his non-working arms had repeatedly tried to convince him to give up his plans and seek a normal life. In one recorded conversation, the agent urged Osmakac to consider getting married and having a family rather than going ahead with his plan. That is the opposite of entrapment. In the event, Osmakac refused, insisting that he would be rewarded by Allah in paradise for carrying out his attack. Given his intention of doing just that, it’s to the FBI’s great credit that the agency made sure Osmakac never had access to anything but defective arms.
Osmakac’s clearly expressed conviction that Allah required him to commit terrorism points up another emerging and equally misguided assessment of the case – namely, that religion had nothing to do with Osmakac’s motives. “I don’t think his Islamic religion has anything to do with what’s going on,” claimed Dr. Barbara DeGeorge, identified by local Florida media as an “Islamic studies expert,” following the arrest. Even the FBI made a concession to political correctness, with the head of the agency’s Tampa Bay division assuring the press that Osmakac’s case “is not about the Muslim religion.”
All the available evidence indicates otherwise. In an eight-minute video laying out his intentions, Osmakac declared that he felt no compunction about killing innocents because non-Muslim “blood” was less valuable than that of Muslims. Osmakac also had a message for non-believers: “My message is if you don’t accept Islam you’re going to hell.”
Nor did he spare his co-religionists. “What’s the matter with you?” Osmakac demanded in the video. “Trying to follow their ways? Trying to go to nightclubs, like them? Trying to fornicate, like them? Trying to get with their women? . . . Submit to the rule of Allah.” Not least, Osmakac yearned for a death as a Muslim martyr, announcing that the authorities “can take me in five million pieces,” a reference to the suicide belt he planned to explode. Notwithstanding the apologists, it’s clear that, in Osmakac’s mind at least, the “Islamic religion” had everything to do with his planned attack.
Rather than pandering to political sensitivities, the FBI would be better served by touting the truly salutary aspect of the case: the crucial cooperation of the Tampa Muslim community in securing Osmakac’s arrest. An unidentified Muslim citizen, who became alarmed at Osmakac’s request for al-Qaeda flags when he visited his or her store, first tipped off the agency to his intentions. Thanks to that tip, the FBI was able to track Osmakac every step of the way. If the FBI truly wanted to bolster American Muslims’ image, it should focus on their commendable efforts in helping to stop an Islamic fanatic from killing in the name of his religion.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Gehry’s Ghastly Eisenhower Memorial
Frank Gehry and members of the Memorial Commission view model of Gehry's Eisenhower proposal
Introducing his two-volume biography of the 34th president of the United States, Stephen Ambrose offered a simple, and accurate, judgment: “Dwight Eisenhower was a great and good man. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the Western world of [the 20th] century.”
He also spent more consecutive time at the center of national and international affairs than any other American of his time: longer than either of the Roosevelts, longer than Henry Stimson, longer than anyone. For 18 years — from the moment in November 1942 when he took command of the Allied Expeditionary Force whose invasion of North Africa began the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich, until Jan. 20, 1961, when he handed the burden of the presidency to John F. Kennedy — Dwight David Eisenhower was in the cockpit of history. And it made a great difference that he was there.
He was supreme commander of the greatest political-military coalition in history, holding it together despite great centrifugal forces (both political and personal) until that coalition won what Eisenhower memorably called its “crusade in Europe” and the “Thousand-Year Reich” was no more. He led an Ivy League university; he helped forge NATO into one of the instruments that prevented another totalitarian power from dominating Europe; he helped keep the Republican party from drifting into the irrelevance of isolationism. Despite the criticisms of the nation’s high-cultural and journalistic tastemakers, he was a successful (and crafty) president, one of the few two-term chief executives who left the Oval Office a highly popular man. Americans, now and in the future, ought to know that this country can produce men of such accomplishment.
No one will learn any of this, however, from the Eisenhower Memorial that will soon be built in the heart of monumental Washington: unless, that is, Congress moves quickly to force a reconsideration of a historical and aesthetic travesty.
The present Eisenhower Memorial design, by postmodernist Frank Gehry, has virtually nothing to do with the Dwight David Eisenhower of history. Plans call for Ike to be memorialized in sculpture as a barefoot farmboy on the Great Plains: not the great wartime leader; not the soldier-diplomat; not the chief executive of the United States who presided over eight years of peace and prosperity. The Gehry conceit seems both obvious and entirely in tune with the postmodern deconstruction of history: There are no great men; there are no great virtues; there is no great striving; nor is there great accomplishment or great service to others. No one, visiting the Eisenhower Memorial as designed by Frank Gehry, would have the slightest reason to grasp the truth of the man himself, as Stephen Ambrose once described him:
As a soldier, he was, as George C. Marshall said at the end of the war, everything that the U.S. Army hoped for in its finest products — professionally competent, well versed in the history of war, decisive, well disciplined, courageous, dedicated, and popular with his men, his subordinates, and his superiors. His leadership qualities also included a high degree of intelligence, integrity, commitment to basic principles, dignity, organizational genius, tremendous energy, and diplomatic ability. As a man, he was good-looking, considerate of and concerned about others, loyal to friends and family, given to terrible rages (which he learned to control), ambitious, thin-skinned and sensitive to criticism, stubborn and inflexible about his habits, an avid sportsman and sports fan, modest (but never falsely so), almost embarrassingly unsophisticated in his musical, artistic, and literary tastes, intensely curious about people and places, often refreshingly naïve, fun-loving — in short, a wonderful man to know or be around. Nearly everyone who knew him liked him immensely, many — including some of the most powerful men in the world — to the point of adulation.
None of this is conveyed by the sculpture of a barefoot boy on the plains. None of it is conveyed by the other elements in the Gehry design: 80-foot-tall, nondescript cylindrical posts (they can’t even be properly described as pillars) holding up perforated metal “tapestries,” creating what Gehry himself once called a “theater for cars.” But what does a “theater for cars,” or any other kind of postmodernist knock-off of a Fifties drive-in, have to do with creating a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander who planned the invasion of Normandy, the president who ended the Korean War and who proposed “Open Skies” as a means to lower the temperature of the Cold War?
Nothing. And that, one is forced to conclude, is the idea: Visitors will be asked to admire a barefoot boy, one of many from the Kansas plains, not the unique and historic figure the barefoot boy became. No wonder that Eisenhower’s grandchildren now oppose the design of his memorial.
It is not only history and aesthetics that are travestied in this fiasco. The Gehry design was chosen in a closed competition, which itself suggests that the fix was in for Frank Gehry from the beginning. Having seen his design for a new wing of the Corcoran Gallery of Art go unrealized, Gehry and his acolytes at the General Services Administration now seem determined to get a Gehry into monumental Washington, even if, in the process, they distort history with another postmodernist confection that speaks to no one outside their small, gnostic sect. Yet if the National Capital Planning Commission gives a favorable review to the Gehry design in February, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission may well seek to break ground immediately in order to create a fait accompli.
Congress will have a lot on its plate in the first weeks of 2012. But it should move quickly to stop the current Eisenhower Memorial process and order an inquiry into precisely how and why a design that says nothing about the great achievements of the man being memorialized was approved. And when the answer becomes clear — that this was a closed, opaque process unbefitting a democracy intent on honoring one of those who helped save democracy in an hour of peril — Congress should order the present design scrapped in favor of an open process of design competition and selection, like those that produced the World War II and Vietnam Veterans Memorials. Moreover, Congress should ensure that that process is not dominated by those determined to impose a postmodernist architectural vocabulary, irrespective of its distortion of history, on monumental Washington. Meanwhile, Congress would do well to put a hold on the funding for the Eisenhower Commission that was hastily approved as part of an end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill.
The memory of Dwight David Eisenhower deserves better than the travesty that has, to date, steamrollered through the federal bureaucracy. So does the country Eisenhower served so well, and the city where he lived as both soldier and statesman.
— George Weigel is distinguished senior fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center and is an adviser to the National Civic Art Society. The Society’s comprehensive critique of the Gehry design for the Eisenhower Memorial and the closed competition that led to its being chosen is available at www.civicart.org.
Monday, January 09, 2012
Billy Joe Shaver returns to Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom - Jan 13
By Julie Wenger Watson
The Current
http://www.currentland.com/
January 2012 (Vol 9, No 1)
TULSA (OK) - Texas musician Billy Joe Shaver and his band are riding into Oklahoma this month. They will play Grady’s 66 Pub in Yukon on Thursday the 12th and the Cain’s Ballroom on lucky Friday the 13th. Book Smart Tulsa will also host a book signing with Shaver at Dwelling Spaces at 5:30 pm prior to the Cain’s concert. Shaver will read excerpts from and sign copies of his book Honky Tonk Hero, which will be available for purchase. In anticipation of this Oklahoma run, I recently spoke with Shaver.
The historic Cain’s Ballroom and this Outlaw Country icon would seem to be a match made in roadhouse heaven, and indeed, Shaver has played this venue before. “Oh, yes, many times,” he told me. “I wrote a song years and years ago called ‘Oklahoma Wind’ and I wrote it at the back of the Cain’s Ballroom. Yeah, I sat down in my truck and wrote it.”
He laughed and went on about his previous visits to the Cain’s, “Yeah, I was kind of shook up when I saw the floor kind of moving, and I thought ‘what in the world is going on?’, and it was that they had springs in the (dance) floor. Everybody had played there..Hank Williams and everybody, I guess. Yes, it’s quite a thing for me. I always thought it was great.”
Like a classic Country Western song, Shaver’s life has had its share of passion, heartbreak, hard times, and a close brush or two with the law. There’s even religion and redemption, if you’re looking for it. It’s easy to imagine that Shaver has never had to search too far for songwriting material. His own life has been one long honky tonk tune.
Shaver’s 2007 Grammy-nominated release, Everybody’s Brother, was produced by John Carter Cash. His songs have been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and even Elvis Presley. “Yeah, I’ve been around a while. It just seems like a lot of stuff happens to me. I think I was born to be a songwriter. I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid...I don’t know, I guess I’m lucky, well, I know I’m lucky that I’ve been blessed with that ‘cause I’ve always got a job,” Shaver reflected.
Shaver’s talents aren’t limited to music. He’s met with success as an author and actor, as well. The autobiographical Honky Tonk Hero was published in 2005. “Bobby Duvall got after me. Robert Duvall, the actor, you know,” Shaver commented by way of explanation. “He and his wife Luciana (Pedraza), they just kept telling me I ought to be writing a book, so I finally started writing one. I wish I’d waited a little longer ‘cause a lot of crazy stuff happened to me after that, and now everybody is after me to write another one. I think I might do it because it seems like it might be more exciting than the first one.” Shaver paused and laughed, “The first one is pretty good. It ain’t bad.”
Shaver’s association with actor/producer Duvall has led to Shaver’s appearance in several movies, including The Apostle (1999) and Secondhand Lions (2003). Duvall and his wife Luciana Pedraza even produced and directed a documentary about Shaver’s life, The Portrait of Billy Joe (2004). Says Shaver of his friend Duvall, “He’s a really down to earth good guy. Just a regular fella. I enjoy being around him. Everybody else does, too.”
Shaver believes his experience as a musician helps with his acting. “I’ve done a lot of acting. Sometimes you have to do a lot of acting to entertain and keep from getting people down, ‘cause that’s the last thing you want to do is get anybody down.” The transition to film was a natural one for him. “It worked out good for me ‘cause I just had to be myself, which was really easy...The first thing Bobby (Duvall) told me...he said, ‘Billy, every chance you get, don’t act.’ I said, ‘Okay. I can handle that.’”
Shaver’s days of hard living and years on the road have taken their toll on his health, although the 72 year-old Shaver shrugs it off with good humor. “Yeah, I’m doing all right. I ain’t having much trouble. I’ve had a few stints and things put in and stuff like that. I’ve had shoulders that went out on me. Ahh, you don’t want to hear all this, “ he laughs. “I’m wired together, but I’m still getting around all right. You could jiggle me out, I guess, and get more than what I’m worth. I’ve had a lot of screws and bolts and things in me. Both shoulders and broke my neck three times and a heart attack and a four-way bypass, good lord, and got a new knee put in, and that helps. Yeah, it’s really pert near everybody that is a performer that’s been around for a while has a lot of pain. It helps you with the blues songs.”
As a genre now mainstream enough to justify its own satellite radio station, it’s hard to remember a time when “outlaw country” was rebel music. However, when Shaver and his contemporaries first bucked the Nashville trend with their scruffy appearance and raw-edged honky tonk, they were the counterculture. “Back in the day when (Waylon Jennings’) Honky Tonk Heroes came out, we were kind of like ‘outcasts’ more than anything up there in Nashville,” Shaver recalled. “More of the ‘outcasts’ than the ‘outlaws’. The way it just went against the grain. They had a big machine. It was sequin suits and stuff...It wasn’t working that good, but they didn’t realize it. We came in there just being ourselves, wearing blue jeans and playing, and all the guys that had anything to do with it were from Texas, really.” He paused a minute, then continued, “It just caught a hold. It caught a hold and changed things around. In a good way, ‘cause now they’re building on that foundation. It’s good for them.”
For tickets to the Cain’s show, go to www.cainsballroom.com For more on Shaver, including some great stories from his past, tune into Folk Salad Radio Show www.folksalad.com this Sunday January 8 at 7:00 pm on KWGS 89.5 FM.
Photo: http://www.countrycalifornia.com/hardly-strictly-bluegrass-2009-recap/
The Current
http://www.currentland.com/
January 2012 (Vol 9, No 1)
TULSA (OK) - Texas musician Billy Joe Shaver and his band are riding into Oklahoma this month. They will play Grady’s 66 Pub in Yukon on Thursday the 12th and the Cain’s Ballroom on lucky Friday the 13th. Book Smart Tulsa will also host a book signing with Shaver at Dwelling Spaces at 5:30 pm prior to the Cain’s concert. Shaver will read excerpts from and sign copies of his book Honky Tonk Hero, which will be available for purchase. In anticipation of this Oklahoma run, I recently spoke with Shaver.
The historic Cain’s Ballroom and this Outlaw Country icon would seem to be a match made in roadhouse heaven, and indeed, Shaver has played this venue before. “Oh, yes, many times,” he told me. “I wrote a song years and years ago called ‘Oklahoma Wind’ and I wrote it at the back of the Cain’s Ballroom. Yeah, I sat down in my truck and wrote it.”
He laughed and went on about his previous visits to the Cain’s, “Yeah, I was kind of shook up when I saw the floor kind of moving, and I thought ‘what in the world is going on?’, and it was that they had springs in the (dance) floor. Everybody had played there..Hank Williams and everybody, I guess. Yes, it’s quite a thing for me. I always thought it was great.”
Like a classic Country Western song, Shaver’s life has had its share of passion, heartbreak, hard times, and a close brush or two with the law. There’s even religion and redemption, if you’re looking for it. It’s easy to imagine that Shaver has never had to search too far for songwriting material. His own life has been one long honky tonk tune.
Shaver’s 2007 Grammy-nominated release, Everybody’s Brother, was produced by John Carter Cash. His songs have been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and even Elvis Presley. “Yeah, I’ve been around a while. It just seems like a lot of stuff happens to me. I think I was born to be a songwriter. I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid...I don’t know, I guess I’m lucky, well, I know I’m lucky that I’ve been blessed with that ‘cause I’ve always got a job,” Shaver reflected.
Shaver’s talents aren’t limited to music. He’s met with success as an author and actor, as well. The autobiographical Honky Tonk Hero was published in 2005. “Bobby Duvall got after me. Robert Duvall, the actor, you know,” Shaver commented by way of explanation. “He and his wife Luciana (Pedraza), they just kept telling me I ought to be writing a book, so I finally started writing one. I wish I’d waited a little longer ‘cause a lot of crazy stuff happened to me after that, and now everybody is after me to write another one. I think I might do it because it seems like it might be more exciting than the first one.” Shaver paused and laughed, “The first one is pretty good. It ain’t bad.”
Shaver’s association with actor/producer Duvall has led to Shaver’s appearance in several movies, including The Apostle (1999) and Secondhand Lions (2003). Duvall and his wife Luciana Pedraza even produced and directed a documentary about Shaver’s life, The Portrait of Billy Joe (2004). Says Shaver of his friend Duvall, “He’s a really down to earth good guy. Just a regular fella. I enjoy being around him. Everybody else does, too.”
Shaver believes his experience as a musician helps with his acting. “I’ve done a lot of acting. Sometimes you have to do a lot of acting to entertain and keep from getting people down, ‘cause that’s the last thing you want to do is get anybody down.” The transition to film was a natural one for him. “It worked out good for me ‘cause I just had to be myself, which was really easy...The first thing Bobby (Duvall) told me...he said, ‘Billy, every chance you get, don’t act.’ I said, ‘Okay. I can handle that.’”
Shaver’s days of hard living and years on the road have taken their toll on his health, although the 72 year-old Shaver shrugs it off with good humor. “Yeah, I’m doing all right. I ain’t having much trouble. I’ve had a few stints and things put in and stuff like that. I’ve had shoulders that went out on me. Ahh, you don’t want to hear all this, “ he laughs. “I’m wired together, but I’m still getting around all right. You could jiggle me out, I guess, and get more than what I’m worth. I’ve had a lot of screws and bolts and things in me. Both shoulders and broke my neck three times and a heart attack and a four-way bypass, good lord, and got a new knee put in, and that helps. Yeah, it’s really pert near everybody that is a performer that’s been around for a while has a lot of pain. It helps you with the blues songs.”
As a genre now mainstream enough to justify its own satellite radio station, it’s hard to remember a time when “outlaw country” was rebel music. However, when Shaver and his contemporaries first bucked the Nashville trend with their scruffy appearance and raw-edged honky tonk, they were the counterculture. “Back in the day when (Waylon Jennings’) Honky Tonk Heroes came out, we were kind of like ‘outcasts’ more than anything up there in Nashville,” Shaver recalled. “More of the ‘outcasts’ than the ‘outlaws’. The way it just went against the grain. They had a big machine. It was sequin suits and stuff...It wasn’t working that good, but they didn’t realize it. We came in there just being ourselves, wearing blue jeans and playing, and all the guys that had anything to do with it were from Texas, really.” He paused a minute, then continued, “It just caught a hold. It caught a hold and changed things around. In a good way, ‘cause now they’re building on that foundation. It’s good for them.”
For tickets to the Cain’s show, go to www.cainsballroom.com For more on Shaver, including some great stories from his past, tune into Folk Salad Radio Show www.folksalad.com this Sunday January 8 at 7:00 pm on KWGS 89.5 FM.
Photo: http://www.countrycalifornia.com/hardly-strictly-bluegrass-2009-recap/
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