In Defense of Death

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

By DAVID BROOKS
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
January 13, 2009

William D. Eddy was an Episcopal minister in Tarrytown, N.Y., and an admirer of the writer and theologian Richard John Neuhaus. When Rev. Eddy grew gravely ill about 20 years ago, I asked Neuhaus to write him a letter of comfort.

I was shocked when I read it a few weeks later. As I recall, Neuhaus’s message was this: There are comforting things you and I have learned to say in circumstances such as these, but we don’t need those things between ourselves.

Neuhaus then went on to talk frankly and extensively about death. Those two men were in a separate fraternity and could talk directly about things the rest avoided.

Neuhaus was no stranger to death. As a young minister, he worked in the death ward at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, a giant room with 50 to 100 dying people in it, where he would accompany two or three to their deaths each day. One sufferer noticed an expression on Neuhaus’s face and said, “Oh, oh, don’t be afraid,” and then sagged back and expired.

Much later, Neuhaus endured his own near-death experience. An undiagnosed tumor led to a ruptured intestine and a series of operations. He recovered slowly, first in intensive care, and then in a regular hospital room, where something strange happened.

“I was sitting up staring intently into the darkness, although in fact I knew my body was lying flat,” he later wrote in an essay called “Born Toward Dying” in his magazine, First Things. “What I was staring at was a color like blue and purple, and vaguely in the form of hanging drapery. By the drapery were two ‘presences.’ I saw them and yet did not see them, and I cannot explain that ... .

“And then the presences — one or both of them, I do not know — spoke. This I heard clearly. Not in an ordinary way, for I cannot remember anything about the voice. But the message was beyond mistaking: ‘Everything is ready now.’ ”

That was the end of Neuhaus’s vision, but not his experience. “I pinched myself hard, and ran through the multiplication tables, and recalled the birth dates of my seven brothers and sisters, and my wits were vibrantly about me. The whole thing had lasted three or four minutes, maybe less. I resolved at that moment that I would never, never let anything dissuade me from the reality of what had happened. Knowing myself, I expected I would later be inclined to doubt it. It was an experience as real, as powerfully confirmed by the senses, as anything I have ever known.”

Most scientists today would say that Neuhaus’s vision was the product of him confusing an inner voice for an outer voice. He was suffering the sort of mental illusion that sometimes befalls epileptics before a seizure.

Neuhaus took it the other way. While most people might use the science of life to demystify death, Neuhaus used death to mystify life.

When he wrote about his experience later, his great theme was the way death has a backward influence back onto life: “We are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already under way.”

Neuhaus spent the next days, months and years impressed by the overwhelming fact of death. This made him, he writes, a bit blubbery. “After some time, I could shuffle the few blocks to the church and say Mass. At the altar, I cried a lot and hoped the people didn’t notice. To think that I’m really here after all, I thought, at the altar, at the axis mundi, the center of life. And of death.”

It also made him almost indifferent about when his life would end. People would tell him to fight for life and he would enjoy their attention, but the matter wasn’t really in his hands, and everything was ready anyway.

He quoted John Donne who also was changed by a near-death experience: “Though I may have seniors, others may be elder than I, yet I have proceeded apace in a good university, and gone a great way in a little time, by the furtherance of a vehement fever.”

Cancer returned, and Neuhaus died last week. In his final column for First Things, he wrote again about his mortality.

“Be assured that I neither fear to die nor refuse to live. If it is to die, all that has been is but a slight intimation of what is to be. If it is to live, there is much I hope to do in the interim.”

This awareness of death, and of the intermingling of life and death, gave Neuhaus’s writing an extra dimension — like a metaphysician who has been writing about nature within earth’s atmosphere and suddenly discovers space.

Rickey Henderson earns baseball's greatest honor in near-unanimous vote

By Cam Inman
Contra Costa Times columnist
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune
Posted: 01/12/2009 05:16:37 PM PST
Updated: 01/13/2009 05:56:39 AM PST

In this May 2, 1991 file photo, Oakland Athletics' Rickey Henderson holds up third base after breaking Lou Brock's all-time career record for stolen bases during the fourth inning of a baseball game against the New York Yankees in Oakland, Calif. (Alan Greth/AP)


FORMER A'S outfielder Rickey Henderson did not celebrate his election Monday to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in the stereotypical ways we all craved.

He didn't declare himself the greatest of all time, even though he is baseball's best-ever leadoff hitter, run scorer and base stealer. Rickey didn't speak about Rickey in the third person. Nor did he do a headfirst slide at the nearest ballpark and lift a base over his head.

But he indeed was on the move, driving with his family to the airport when the Hall of Fame called. He hurried to catch a flight to New York, where he'll return for his July 26 induction into baseball's fabled hall in Cooperstown.

"I've got to run. They're about to close the (plane) door," Henderson said to end his conference call with the Baseball Writers' Association of America, whose members welcomed him to the Hall of Fame by naming him on 94.8 percent of their ballots.

Leave it to Rickey — a name that stands by itself in baseball lore, and in his classic third-person quotes — to leave the door cracked on his 25-year, nine-team playing career, including four stints with his hometown A's.

"The Hall of Fame means a great deal for me. It's been a long time waiting," said the 50-year-old Oakland Technical High School product. "I wanted to continue playing ball, but I guess this was my time."

To him, he's served his penance, sitting out the past five seasons to comply with requirements for Hall of Fame entry. He'd like to suit up one last time with the A's, even though he gave their cap only "the edge" as he decides which club's insignia will appear on his Cooperstown plaque.

"My career of playing in Oakland was fantastic," Rickey said. "I wouldn't give it back for anything else. I had a wonderful time. The fans were the best, they were behind me and pulled for me. Even when I left and came back with another team, they cheered.

"We just didn't get an opportunity to say goodbye for the last time. "... When I get inducted, maybe they'll give me that day or two to come back."

A's owner Lew Wolff's statement honored Rickey's past rather than any wild notion of a comeback: "We are proud that much of Rickey's career was spent here in his hometown of Oakland, where he provided Bay Area fans with so many thrills as perhaps the most exciting player of his generation."

It'll be absurd if Rickey doesn't don an A's cap again for at least his Hall induction, where he'll be enshrined with former Boston Red Sox outfielder Jim Rice and Veterans Committee selection Joe Gordon. (Rickey can request which hat will be on his plaque, but the Hall gets the final call.)

Denied for a third straight year by Hall voters was Henderson's former A's teammate Mark McGwire, whose support fell from past years. He drew 21.9 percent of the vote this year, 23.6 percent last year and 23.5 in 2007.

Rickey said McGwire deserves to enter the Hall, that he "played the right way." McGwire's suspected steroid use, however, resonates with baseball writers, 28 of whom didn't even vote for Rickey out of 539 ballots cast.

Henderson left Major League Baseball in 2003 atop its all-time lists for runs (2,295), stolen bases (1,406) and walks (2,190; a mark Barry Bonds eventually surpassed). He won two World Series rings — with the 1989 A's and the 1993 Toronto Blue Jays — after joining those teams via midseason trades. He was a 10-time All-Star, the 1990 American League MVP and the 1989 American League Championship Series MVP.

His greatest accomplishment: "It's the runs-scored record. That's my vote."

He was at his stolen-base best in 1982, when he swiped a single-season record 130 bases to cap the "BillyBall" era under the late Billy Martin, whom he thanked Monday for being a father figure.

One moment forever etched in the memories of A's fans came when Rickey surpassed Lou Brock atop the all-time stolen base list May 1, 1991. His famous quote to the Coliseum crowd: "Lou Brock was the symbol of great base stealing. But today I am the greatest of all time."

These days, he's still deemed "the most dangerous player of all time," as described by former A's manager Tony La Russa at his annual Animal Rescue Foundation gala Saturday night when the crowd clamored for Rickey stories.

Henderson was a member of the Athletics (1979-84, '89-93, '94-95, '98), New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays, San Diego Padres (two times), Anaheim Angels, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Boston Red Sox and, in his supposed swan song at age 44, Los Angeles Dodgers.

Now, he's simply a Hall of Famer. At least until he pops up in uniform again.

Reach Cam Inman at cinman@bayareanewsgroup.com.

Enter smiling

Long wait ends as Sox slugger Rice, never one to court the media, wins writers' votes for Hall of Fame in last time on ballot

By Dan Shaughnessy,
Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/
January 13, 2009


At a press conference following the Hall announcement, Rice stayed composed and thoughtful while taking questions for 15 minutes. He told jokes -- "Yes, I would be making $27 million today," he said -- and became emotional only once, when he talked about how much Yastrzemski meant to him. Rice gave Yaz credit for teaching him how to play the left field wall at Fenway, and for stepping aside and playing first base to allow Rice to take over in left.

"Yaz only played with one outfielder's glove," Rice said, his eyes moistening. "And I have it at my house."
(Globe Staff Photo / Jim Davis)


He crushed baseballs for 16 Boston summers, rarely pausing to take a bow, shake a hand, or play the fool for the 6 o'clock standup. When his career was over, he hung around to teach hitting and, amazingly, wound up behind a television sports desk, offering opinions before and after Red Sox games.

In 20 years of retirement, Jim Rice never acknowledged that he cared about the Hall of Fame. He wasn't going to tell us how much it hurt if he didn't get in.

Rice's vote total was embarrassingly low (29.8 percent) in his first year of eligibility, but momentum grew, and he inched agonizingly close to Cooperstown. Yesterday, in his 15th and final year on the writers' ballot, Jim Ed Rice was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame by a margin of eight votes. He was named on 412 of 539 ballots, pushing him to 76.4 percent, a shade over the required three-quarters.

And so the handoff is complete - Boston's left-field torch of immortality is passed. Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Jim Rice. Hub Hardball's Tinker to Evers to Chance. Three left fielders. Three Hall of Famers. One half-century.

Rice's reaction in his moment of glory?

"It's a big relief. It is over with, and I feel really good."

Rice's candidacy, in contrast to his career, was highly political in its final years. This player who despised the media became something of a press box lightning rod as his vote total grew.

In the slugger's early years of eligibility, there was a popular notion that scribes were punishing Rice for his lack of cooperation in his playing days. More recently, as he snared more votes, there was a backlash among new-age, basement-dwelling number crunchers who found flaws in Rice's résumé (always borderline by Cooperstown's lofty standards). The stat geeks sniffed at Rice's pedestrian on-base percentage (.352) and charged that his numbers were skewed because half his games were in hitter-friendly Fenway Park.

There was a touch of irony in the emergence of veteran writers as staunch supporters of the Rice candidacy. These were the same people with whom Rice famously clashed in the 1970s and '80s, the ones who supposedly didn't vote for him because he was a nasty interview. But the older writers had the benefit of being eyewitnesses. They watched Rice hit and saw the nightly fear in the visitors dugout at Fenway.

October 27, 1986

In the end, Rice was able to lurch across the finish line with the help of veteran Sox publicist Dick Bresciani, who carpet-bombed the electorate with data advocating the slugger's election. Rice got additional support from former Yankee closer Goose Gossage, a contemporary who was the only player elected last winter. The recent exposure of modern stars who artificially inflated their stats with steroids also advanced the case for Rice.

Lastly, Jim Ed was buoyed by the dearth of boffo names on the 2008 ballot. Rickey Henderson, the greatest leadoff hitter in baseball history, was the only slam-dunk new candidate, which ultimately encouraged a lot of scribes to cast a vote for Rice.

Henderson, who played briefly with the Red Sox in 2002, will be inducted with Rice in Cooperstown July 26. Henderson led all candidates with 94.8 percent of yesterday's vote. Rickey's speech should be a beauty.

"I'm going to let Rickey do all the talking," said a smiling Rice. "I'm going to make it short and quick and that's it. Let Rickey run."

That fits. Rice was always eager to let others do the talking. It started in 1975 when he was overshadowed by fellow rookie Fred Lynn. In that magical season, Rice hit .309 with 22 homers and 102 RBIs in 144 games, while Lynn batted .331 with 21 homers and 105 RBIs in 145 games.

Peter Gammons dubbed them the "Gold Dust Twins," but the glitter was sprinkled on the fair shoulders of the Californian Lynn, who walked away with MVP and Rookie of the Year honors. Rice, meanwhile, had his hand broken by a Vern Ruhle pitch in September and didn't even get to play in the Greatest World Series of All Time.

Typical. Jim Ed was never a spotlight kind of guy.

In 1978, he wrecked the American League with one of the greatest offensive seasons of all time (.315, 46 HRs, 139 RBIs, 406 total bases), but that was the year in which the Sox blew a 14-game lead on the Yankees and lost the Bucky Dent playoff game.

When Rice finally made it to a World Series in 1986, he failed to knock in a run in seven games against the Mets. The drought had much to do with the fact that broken-down Bill Buckner batted in front of Rice and ended a lot of innings, but like Ted Williams, Rice came up wanting in the only World Series of his career.

Managers loved Rice. They put his name in the lineup every day and that was that. Rice played hard and played when he was hurt. He worked overtime to make himself better defensively.

He was no clubhouse lawyer. He came to work, did his job quietly, and went home. He never seemed close to his teammates. In 1987, Rice said, "They're not friends, they're associates."

Explaining his cold war with writers yesterday, he said, "Maybe they thought I was arrogant, and that wasn't true at all. My thing was I was very protective of the players that I played with. I got in a lot of trouble by not giving the writers what they wanted - and that was a story for them to probably talk about another player."

No. It's fair to say that Rice was shy and uncomfortable talking about himself. He never made excuses. He arrived with the city of Boston in a particularly inflammatory racial climate, which must have been difficult for a 21-year-old man from South Carolina. But to say he got in trouble by not talking dirt about his teammates is simply false. Rice was churlish more often than not. Not just with writers. Sometimes with his adoring public.

"The only man in baseball who can make tying his shoes a hostile act," wrote Ross Wetzsteon in Inside Sports.

None of it matters anymore. From now until the end of time, he is going to be Jim Rice, Hall of Famer. And he earned it. He took the baton from Yaz, who took it from Teddy Ballgame, and they are forever united in Cooperstown.

Blyleven frustrated by small vote increase

By LA VELLE E. NEAL III
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/
Last update: January 13, 2009 - 4:53 AM


Two votes. That's how much progress Bert Blyleven made in his quest to be elected into baseball's Hall of Fame.

The former Twins righthander finished fourth in balloting for the second year in a row, receiving 338 votes from the Baseball Writers' Association of America, two more than his 336 last year. Blyleven received 62.7 percent of the votes cast, short of the 75 percent required for election.

Leadoff monster Rickey Henderson (who received 94.8 percent of votes) and hard-hitting outfielder Jim Rice (76.4) were elected to the Hall. Andre Dawson was third, getting 361 votes (67 percent).

Former Twins pitcher Jack Morris, in his 10th year on the ballot, finished sixth with 237 votes, good for 44 percent.

Blyleven was participating in the Twins' annual fantasy camp in Fort Myers, Fla., Monday.

"Of course I was frustrated by the results because of my small increase,'' Blyleven, in his 12th year on the ballot, wrote in an e-mail. "I am very happy for Henderson and Rice. Isn't it strange that Rice had to wait 15 years? Don't think his career numbers changed!''

Blyleven lost out in a bid to join Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Paul Molitor. Steve Carlton, Dave Winfield and Kirby Puckett as Hall of Famers with ties to the Twins. Blyleven won 287 games in his career -- 149 of those coming during two stints in a Twins uniform, from 1970-76 and 1985-88.

Blyleven's candidacy continues to be a curious case. He finished 13 victories shy of the magical 300 mark but supporters point to his 3,701 career strikeouts (fifth all time), his 60 career shutouts (ninth) and that he played on some terrible teams. Detractors point to the lack of sustained dominance and no Cy Young Awards.

"I really think it’s weird when my career numbers are surrounded by current HOF pitchers and it has taken so long to get to where my percentages are now,’’ he wrote. "Guess almost two-thirds of the writers think I belong and the others don't. It would be nice, if I ever make the HOF, that I am on this side of the grass.''

Blyleven received 17.5 percent of the vote in 1998, his first year on the ballot. But he received just 14 percent the next season. After getting just 121 votes in 2001 (23.5 percent) Blyleven told the Star Tribune: "This is a message to all the writers. Don't vote for me at all."

They didn't listen.

Blyleven began to get more and more support. He received 35.4 percent in 2004, 40.9 in 2005, 53.3 in 2006. Support dropped to 47.7 on 2007 but jumped to 61.9 percent last year, suggesting that his time was coming.

Blyleven and Dawson now will have to contend with a 2010 class that includes Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin and Fred McGriff.

Henderson, baseball's all-time steals leader with 1,406 and runs scored with 2,295, becomes the 44th player to make the Hall during his first year of eligibility. Rice, in stark contrast to Henderson, was in his 15th and final year of eligibility for the BBWAA balloting.

Notes From the Chairman

By BONO
Op-Ed Guest Columnist
Dublin
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 11, 2009


Once upon a couple of weeks ago ...

I’m in a crush in a Dublin pub around New Year’s. Glasses clinking clicking, clashing crashing in Gaelic revelry: swinging doors, sweethearts falling in and out of the season’s blessings, family feuds subsumed or resumed. Malt joy and ginger despair are all in the queue to be served on this, the quarter-of-a-millennium mark since Arthur Guinness first put velvety blackness in a pint glass.

Associated Press file photo

Bono, lead singer of the group U2, shakes hands with Hoboken native Frank Sinatra after Sinatra was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 36th annual Grammy Awards in 1994. Bono, who sang "I've Got You Under My Skin" with Sinatra on Sinatra's "Duets", takes a close listen to the Chairman of the Board for his new column in the New York Times.

Interesting mood. The new Irish money has been gambled and lost; the Celtic Tiger’s tail is between its legs as builders and bankers laugh uneasy and hard at the last year, and swallow uneasy and hard at the new. There’s a voice on the speakers that wakes everyone out of the moment: it’s Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” His ode to defiance is four decades old this year and everyone sings along for a lifetime of reasons. I am struck by the one quality his voice lacks: Sentimentality.

Is this knotted fist of a voice a clue to the next year? In the mist of uncertainty in your business life, your love life, your life life, why is Sinatra’s voice such a foghorn — such confidence in nervous times allowing you romance but knocking your rose-tinted glasses off your nose, if you get too carried away.

A call to believability.

A voice that says, “Don’t lie to me now.”

That says, “Baby, if there’s someone else, tell me now.”

Fabulous, not fabulist. Honesty to hang your hat on.

As the year rolls over (and with it many carousers), the emotion in the room tussles between hope and fear, expectation and trepidation. Wherever you end up, his voice takes you by the hand.


•

Now I’m back in my own house in Dublin, uncorking some nice wine, ready for the vinegar it can turn to when families and friends overindulge, as I am about to. Right by the hole-in-the-wall cellar, I look up to see a vision in yellow: a painting Frank sent to me after I sang “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” with him on the 1993 “Duets” album. One from his own hand. A mad yellow canvas of violent concentric circles gyrating across a desert plain. Francis Albert Sinatra, painter, modernista.

We had spent some time in his house in Palm Springs, which was a thrill — looking out onto the desert and hills, no gingham for miles. Plenty of miles, though, Miles Davis. And plenty of talk of jazz. That’s when he showed me the painting. I was thinking the circles were like the diameter of a horn, the bell of a trumpet, so I said so.

“The painting is called ‘Jazz’ and you can have it.”

I said I had heard he was one of Miles Davis’s biggest influences.

Little pithy replies:

“I don’t usually hang with men who wear earrings.”

“Miles Davis never wasted a note, kid — or a word on a fool.”

“Jazz is about the moment you’re in. Being modern’s not about the future, it’s about the present.”

I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.

If.


•

If you want to hear the least sentimental voice in the history of pop music finally crack, though — shhhh — find the version of Frank’s ode to insomnia, “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” hidden on “Duets.” Listen through to the end and you will hear the great man break as he truly sobs on the line, “It’s a long, long, long road.” I kid you not.

Like Bob Dylan’s, Nina Simone’s, Pavarotti’s, Sinatra’s voice is improved by age, by years spent fermenting in cracked and whiskeyed oak barrels. As a communicator, hitting the notes is only part of the story, of course.

Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know — as opposed to what they don’t want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this — the loss of naïveté, for instance, which holds its own certain power — interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused.

Want an example? Here’s an example. Take two of the versions of Sinatra singing “My Way.”

The first was recorded in 1969 when the Chairman of the Board said to Paul Anka, who wrote the song for him: “I’m quitting the business. I’m sick of it. I’m getting the hell out.” In this reading, the song is a boast — more kiss-off than send-off — embodying all the machismo a man can muster about the mistakes he’s made on the way from here to everywhere.

In the later recording, Frank is 78. The Nelson Riddle arrangement is the same, the words and melody are exactly the same, but this time the song has become a heart-stopping, heartbreaking song of defeat. The singer’s hubris is out the door. (This singer, i.e. me, is in a puddle.) The song has become an apology.

To what end? Duality, complexity. I was lucky to duet with a man who understood duality, who had the talent to hear two opposing ideas in a single song, and the wisdom to know which side to reveal at which moment.

This is our moment. What do we hear?

In the pub, on the occasion of this new year, as the room rises in a deafening chorus — “I did it my way” — I and this full house of Irish rabble-rousers hear in this staple of the American songbook both sides of the singer and the song, hubris and humility, blue eyes and red.

Bono, lead singer of the band U2 and co-founder of the advocacy group ONE, is a contributing columnist for The Times.

A New Circus Comes to Town

They're going to need more than three rings.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
01/19/2009, Volume 014, Issue 17
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


Is it too soon to talk about the failed Obama presidency just because Obama isn't president yet? That depends upon how quickly Barack Obama is able to apply the lessons he's learned from Management Secrets of the Illinois Governors. So far he's not doing very well. He has allowed America's current number one jackleg, crackpot, smut-mouth, slime-licking politician to give the Obama Senate seat to a lovable old African-American doofus whom no one has the heart to execrate. Roland Burris will be the kind of ornament to this year's Senate that the broken plastic Rudolph with its antlers missing was to last year's Christmas tree.

Then Obama took Bill Richardson--one of his earliest important supporters and among the smartest, most experienced, and, certainly, most affable of Washington insiders--and put Bill at the Department of Commerce. I will read from the roster at the Secretary of Commerce Hall of Fame, its inductees dating back to the Harding administration:


Norman Mineta
Mickey Kantor
Ron Brown
Robert Mosbacher
Howard Malcolm Baldrige Jr.
Philip Morris Klutznick
Maurice Stans
Henry Wallace
Harry Hopkins
Herbert Hoover


Even a Blagojevich knows that Washington isn't Chicago. In Washington you don't place a loyal and able political ally in some obscure public office to garner campaign contribution boodle from local highway contractors. And--oops, that seems to have been the problem with the Bill Richardson nomination.

Come on, Obama, what kind of Democrat are you? I thought Democrats were supposed to be good at this stuff. It's us Republicans who stink at political corruption. One clumsy little elephant misstep and it's GOPterdämmerung with villainy that lives on in popular legend for generations--McCarthyism, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Enron, Jack Abramoff. But when Democrats get their hand (or other body part) caught in the till, folk heroes ensue--Boston's James Curley being reelected while jailed, Washington's Marion Barry being jailed while elected, Quixotic Bill Clinton unfazed by the Rush Limbaugh windmill and riding off into the sunset with fair Dulcinea Lewinsky unceremoniously dumped from the saddle. And, of course, there's Obama's Toddling Town, the Windy City of Richard and Richie Daley with its "corruption that works."

So what's the big deal about Bill Richardson and the highway contractors? You want those highway contractors making their Democratic presidential contributions during the primary campaigns of 2012 when the "failed Obama presidency" is being challenged at the polls by Hillary Clinton?

Speaking of "witch," am I the only person who experienced an unexpected surge of warm fellow-feeling for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when Hillary was named secretary of state? I wouldn't wish dealing with her on my worst enemy, who'd be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I think about the next four years of Hillary's dutiful efforts at global peacemaking, and I hear a chorus of voices echoing around the world--from Israelis and Palestinians, Iraqis and al Qaeda, Taliban and NATO troops, Pakistanis and Indians, Sri Lankans and Tamil Tigers, Georgians and South Ossetians, Colombian soldiers and FARC guerrillas, Hutus and Tutsis, Congolese rebels and other Congolese rebels--all saying, "Thanks, but we'd rather be killed by each other than nagged to death by you."

Mr. future ex-President Obama, if I may address you personally, let's discuss your laundry list of hope and change. In your opinion how often is change really a good thing? Changing a tire. "You'd better change your ways." Change of life. "Spare change, Man?" Any change in a wart or mole.

If change came in a box, what kind of box would it come in? You've read your Bulfinch's. After Pandora opens her container (made of recycled material so that death and disease leave a small carbon footprint) and all the evils that plague mankind have been loosed on the world, what's left inside? Do you think it's a good sign when nothing remains but hope? What would your girls have liked best for Christmas? A kennel with a puppy? Or a carton full of empty promises?

In the language of politics there is only one translation for the phrase "hope and change," to wit, "big, fat government." Mr. Obama, if you're going to give us big, fat government, you need to be a big, fat politician. You need to be a Tip O'Neill, a Teddy Kennedy, a Richard Daley, a Bill Clinton at the very least. And you don't seem to be a big, fat anything--literally or otherwise. You seem to be .  .  . smart and organized. Like Jimmy Carter!

So we may speak without compunction of the failed Obama presidency. What a blessing that it's a failure. Things are bad enough the way they are. There's already a huge ongoing government intervention in the economy. Bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, "Dad burned dinner, let's get the dog to cook." Now the government's going to take over the auto industry. I can predict the result--a light-weight, compact, sustainable vehicle using alternative energy. When I was a kid we called it a Schwinn. And next in line for political therapy is health care. Voting will cure what ails you. Go to the doctor when you've got cancer, and he'll say, "Don't worry. Everything will be fine. I'm going to treat your disease by going inside this small, curtained booth and putting an 'X' next to a very special name."

If we want this sort of thing and lots more of it, we'll need somebody better--that is to say worse--than Barack Obama. Is Obama the man who can make the wolf of partisan spoils dwell with the lamb of public interest, and the leopard of increased political power lie down with the kid of individual liberty; and the calf of personal responsibility and the young lion of social engineering and the fatling of free enterprise together; and a lawyer from Hyde Park will lead them? (And will Nancy Pelosi eat straw like Dennis Kucinich?)

No. Barack Obama doesn't have the outsized personality and flair for bunkum that is necessary to lead even America's sheep-like electorate into such ravenous company. Thank God.

Barack Obama is not a P.T. Barnum of the Washington Big Top. The real P.T. Barnum had a side-show attraction where a lamb, a wolf, a leopard, and a lion had been trained to stay with each other in one cage. Asked if this was difficult Barnum said, "No. But every now and then we have to get a new lamb."

P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

A gaping hole in the public square.

by Joseph Bottum
The Weekly Standard
01/19/2009, Volume 014, Issue 17
http://www.weeklystandard.com/


Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Robert Wilken, Richard John Neuhaus after a board meeting in June 2008.

He was the greatest reader I ever met. The greatest reader, and a cigar smoker, and a walker, and a preacher, and a brewer of some of the worst coffee ever made. What odd items the mind latches onto in moments of grief: the tilt of a friend's head, the way he used his hands when he spoke, an awful meal shared a decade back, a conversation about a book only a month ago.

Only a month ago--it was only a month ago that he was still whole, still sharp, still himself. Novels and movies always seem to me to get it wrong. Grief doesn't conjure up ghosts. Grief renders the world itself ghostly. The absent thing alone is real, and in comparison, all present things are pale, gray, and indistinct: a vague background to the sharp-edged portrait of what is gone.

And, oh, what sharp edges Richard John Neuhaus had. He wrote and wrote and wrote--a discipline of writing that almost every other writer I know has told me feels almost like an indictment: 30 books, and innumerable essays, and all those talks he flew around to give. And, just as an incidental, 12,000 words a month poured out in the column, The Public Square, that anchored every issue of First Things, the magazine he founded.

He loved to tell the story of the time when he was complaining--boasting, really, in the guise of complaining, the way young men do--about how busy he was and how he didn't want to fly to Cincinnati to give again the speech he had just given in Chicago. And his friend and mentor Abraham Joshua Heschel said to him, "You think you're such a big shot, they know in Cincinnati what you said in Chicago? Go to Cincinnati, Richard."

That was back in his radical 1960s days, of course, when he was the Lutheran pastor of a large, mostly black congregation in Brooklyn and, together with Rabbi Heschel and Fr. Daniel Berrigan, had founded one of the largest antiwar groups, Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. He was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr., a McCarthy delegate to the 1968 Democratic convention, and a radical candidate for Congress in 1974. He was also, in those days, the author of an essay called "The Thorough Revolutionary," which proclaimed: "A revolution of consciousness, no doubt. A cultural revolution, certainly. A non-violent revolution, perhaps. An armed overthrow of the existing order, it may be necessary. Revolution for the hell of it or revolution for a new world, but revolution, Yes."

He could always turn a phrase, couldn't he? But it's a long way from there to being the Catholic priest of whom, on all the life issues, George W. Bush would say, "Father Richard helps me articulate these things." This journey from left to right has become the received account of Fr. Neuhaus's life: the narrative you can read in all the obituaries over the last few days, the problem of his biography that so many commentators have set themselves to explain since he died on January 8.

But in his autobiography--the internal narrative by which he understood himself--Richard John Neuhaus didn't think he had changed all that much. Oh, "The Thorough Revolutionary" embarrassed him a little, and the loss of his friends on the left hurt him a lot. But, generally, he imagined that the world had done more changing than he had.

Take abortion, for instance. In 1968, he won the award for best editorial of the year from the Catholic Press Association--Catholics liked giving awards to a Lutheran in those days; they thought of it as being bravely trendy and ecumenical--for an essay in which he cried, "The pro-abortion flag is being planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide." It ought to be those heartless conservatives who want to define the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue; it ought to be caring liberals who want to expand the community of care to embrace the unborn.

If he later came to have a kinder view of conservatives, that was because he finally met some of them. But the pattern established by abortion continued through to his death. His work in founding the communitarian movement in 1977 came not because he thought he had changed but because he thought the United States was abandoning its commitment to families and all the voluntary associations that Tocqueville observed as a defining part of a liberal republic. He wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square--his 1984 argument against the attempt to secularize every part of shared life--because he thought the nation was in danger of losing the religious dynamism that had fueled everything from Abraham Lincoln's speeches to Martin Luther King's protests.

Even his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, and his ordination as a Catholic priest the next year, could be understood as a standing-still while the world altered around him. This was a man, after all, who titled his account of conversion "How I Became the Catholic That I Was."

Still, all such pilgrimages have costs, and one of the great things about Fr. Neuhaus was that he was always willing to pay them. His mind was a grown-up mind, and when he decided on a position, he advanced it with the same rhetorical power and energy with which he had advanced his earlier positions.

I remember him, sitting on the couch, taking me through the argument of a book he had just finished reading--and making the argument clearer than the author had ever managed. I remember his puffing on his cigars, and his constant jaywalking across the streets of Manhattan in utter confidence that the cars would stop, and his Lutheran-style preaching, and his bad coffee. I remember the way he would tilt his head when he smiled, and the way he used his hands when he talked, and the brilliant conversation about a book only a month back.

Only a month. But in that time, for those who knew him, the world has been inverted. Present still are all the noise and bustle of New York, the work in the office, the ringing phones, the demands for attention. But they all seem weak and gray and ghostly. Only his absence now is real.

- Joseph Bottum, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editor of First Things.

Hollywood's Latest Is All About Redemption

by A.W.R. Hawkins
http://www.humanevents.com/
01/12/2009

There are moments in life when you just know you’ve encountered something great; something so above and beyond the norm that you are awed by it. This is particularly so when you realize you’ve come across something real; something other than the façade which 24-hour news outlets or political campaigns have created for gain. These moments tend to leave you in silence; the kind of silence that fills the movie theater while the credits roll at the end of Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.


(Center) Sue (AHNEY HER) and Walt Kowalski (CLINT EASTWOOD) in Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures drama "Gran Torino", distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.


In this film, Eastwood plays the part of Walt Kowalski, an unchanging, elderly Korean War veteran who worked for Ford Motor Company for 50 years, only to find that his grandchildren don’t know where (or what) Korea is and one of his fortyish-year-old sons drives a Toyota.

Kowalski lives in a Michigan suburb that had once been populated solely by white people who worked at the Ford plant. But in the movie, which is set in 2009, the only white people remaining in the neighborhood are Kowalski and an elderly lady across the street. Most of the people in the suburb are Hmong, from Southeast Asia, and thus remind Kowalski more of those at whom he shot during the war than those with whom he served. Continued

Amid this social mix, Kowalski’s home is easy to spot: it is the only one with the perfectly manicured lawn, the clean, fresh paint, and the American flag flying in the wind.

Eastwood’s character is bitter over the fact that his once proud neighborhood is now inhabited by “gooks,” “swamp-rats,” and “zipper-heads” -- fellow humans whom he confronts with phrases beginning with “you people,” then peppers with four-letter words and ending with “stay off my lawn.”

One of the first things that grabs you and refuses to let go during this movie is the fact that these “racist” comments do not offend the theatergoer’s post-modern sensibilities. For, as the story unfolds, the viewers realize they are seeing something they have not seen in a long time: Kowalski’s character is as stereotypically cast (and viewed) as any in the film.

Moreover, sensibilities are not offended in this film because it takes the audience beyond pettiness, niceties, and the false world of political correctness and transports them to a place where words mean something, while placing the audience in the midst of a tension that is palpable.

This tension grows throughout the film as Kowalski chooses to vent his frustration particularly toward a teenage neighbor boy named Thao. Kowalski sees weakness in Thao, and he is even less tolerant of weakness than he is of the Hmong people in general.

The movie turns on this recognition of weakness by reminding the viewer that there are ideals to which men of all races aspire -- ideals which lead to pride or shame depending on how well one adheres to them. Ironically, Kolwaski sees his own weakness, his own estrangement from these ideals through his interaction with Thao and Thao’s older sister, Sue.

Kowalski’s once blue-collar neighborhood is also overrun with the violence that arises when Asian gangs and black gangs clash. As gang activity proliferates, Kowalski goes from hating his neighbors to relating to them and finally protecting them. In this way, Gran Torino is actually a story of redemption. Not simply the redemption of the “old man,” as Thao calls Eastwood’s character, or of “those people” who live next door to Kowalski, but of the ideals of the melting pot culture that once made possible the co-existence of different races and ethnicities in this country.
By his own admission, Kowalski is “old school.” And his way of handling situations includes not only calling things as he sees them but also putting his gun in an attackers’ face and recounting his Korean War experiences as a way to assure the assailant that he has no qualms about pulling the trigger.

This approach often leads to comical yet substantive exchanges between Kowalski and his late wife’s 27 year-old priest; a priest who promised Kowalski’s dying wife that he would visit and watch over her husband once she passed away. Good to his word, the young priest is ubiquitous throughout the movie as he tries to persuade Eastwood’s character to come to the church for confession and to call the police once in a while instead of handling things with his rifle, as if he were still in Korea at war.

After witnessing Kowalski’s approach, many of the Hmong call him a “hero,” but his neighbor Sue calls him “American.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a theater with only a handful of seats empty when the movie starts. Of course, it’s also been a long time since I’ve come across something great -- something that speaks to ideals of heroism, sacrifice, and honor in a way that is so real it moves you to believe, to recall, and to wish it were true.

By the way, there is a green 1972 Ford Gran Torino in Kowalski’s garage that I almost forgot to mention. It is in mint condition. I think it slipped my mind because I was lost in the lesson that people mean more than things. This is the lesson that Eastwood’s character will re-teach everyone who takes the time to watch this excellent movie.


HUMAN EVENTS columnist AWR Hawkins has been published on topics including the U.S. Navy, Civil War battles, Vietnam War ideology, the Reagan Presidency, and the Rebirth of Conservatism, 1968-1988. More of his articles can be found at www.awrhawkins.com.

Litigation Nation

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, January 11, 2009; B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/


Called to a Florida school that could not cope, police led the disorderly student away in handcuffs, all 40 pounds of her 5-year-old self. In a Solomonic compromise, schools in Broward County, Fla., banned running at recess. Long Beach, N.J., removed signs warning swimmers about riptides, although the oblivious tides continued. The warning label on a five-inch fishing lure with a three-pronged hook says "Harmful if swallowed"; the label on a letter opener says "Safety goggle recommended."

No official at the Florida school would put a restraining arm around the misbehaving child lest he or she be sued, as a young member of Teach for America was, for $20 million (the school settled for $90,000), because the teacher put a hand on the back of a turbulent seventh-grader to direct him to leave the classroom. Another teacher's career was ruined by accusations arising from her having positioned a child's fingers on a flute. A 2004 survey reported that 78 percent of middle and high school teachers have been subjected to legal threats from students bristling with rights. Students, sensing the anxiety that seizes schools when law intrudes into incidental relations, challenge teachers' authority.

Someone hurt while running at recess might sue the school district for inadequate supervision of the runner, as Broward County knows: It settled 189 playground lawsuits in five years. In Indiana, a boy did what boys do: He went down a slide headfirst -- and broke his femur. The school district was sued for inadequate supervision. Because of fears of such liabilities, playgrounds all over America have been stripped of the equipment that made them fun. So now in front of televisions and computer terminals sit millions of obese children, casualties of what attorney and author Philip Howard calls "a bubble wrap approach to child rearing" produced by the "cult of safety." Long Beach removed the warning signs because it is safer to say nothing: Reckless swimmers injured by the tides might sue, claiming that the signs were not sufficiently large or shrill or numerous, or something. Only a public outcry got the signs restored.

Defensive, and ludicrous, warning labels multiply because aggressiveness proliferates. Lawsuits express the theory that anyone should be able to sue to assert that someone is culpable for even an idiotic action by the plaintiff, such as swallowing a fishing lure.

A predictable byproduct of this theory is brazen cynicism, encouraged by what Howard calls trial lawyers "congregating at the intersection of human tragedy and human greed." So:

A volunteer for a Catholic charity in Milwaukee ran a red light and seriously injured another person. Because the volunteer did not have deep pockets, the injured person sued the archdiocese -- successfully, for $17 million.

The thread connecting such lunacies is a fear permeating American life. It is, alas, a sensible fear arising from America's increasingly perverse legal culture that is the subject of what surely will be 2009's most needed book on public affairs -- Howard's "Life Without Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law."

A nation in which the proportion of lawyers in the workforce almost doubled between 1970 and 2000 has become ludicrously dense with laws. Now legal self-consciousness is stifling the exercise of judgment. Today's entitlement culture inculcates the idea that everyone is entitled to a life without danger, disappointment or aggravation. Any disagreement or annoyance can be aggressively "framed in the language of legal deprivation."

Law is essential to, but can stifle, freedom. Today, Howard writes, "Americans increasingly go through the day looking over their shoulders instead of where they want to go." The land of the free and the home of the brave has become "a legal minefield" through which we timidly tiptoe lest we trigger a legal claim. What should be routine daily choices and interactions are fraught with legal risk.

Time was, rights were defensive. They were to prevent government from doing things to you. Today, rights increasingly are offensive weapons wielded to inflict demands on other people, using state power for private aggrandizement. The multiplication of rights, each lacking limiting principles, multiplies nonnegotiable conflicts conducted with the inherent extremism of rights rhetoric, on the assumption, Howard says, "that society will somehow achieve equilibrium if it placates whomever is complaining."

But in such a society, dazed by what Howard calls "rule stupor" and victimized by litigious "victims," the incentives are for intensified complaining. Read Howard's book, and weep for the death of common sense.

georgewill@washpost.com

Hanging tough with the old master Clint Eastwood

BY RENE RODRIGUEZ
The Miami Herald
http://www.miamiherald.com
rrodriguez@MiamiHerald.com
December 21, 2008

As Gran Torino opens, Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood) has just buried his wife -- and with her, his remaining interest in the world around him.

An unapologetically racist, judgmental and foul-tempered misanthrope, the only thing Walt cares about is the cherry 1972 Gran Torino he keeps in his garage, a car he helped assemble decades ago as an autoworker for Ford Motor Co. You can imagine his reaction, then, when he catches Tao (Bee Vang), the teenage son of the Hmong family that has moved in next door, trying to steal it as part of a gang initiation ritual.

The relationship that ensues between the young man and the cranky coot forms Gran Torino, which opens Christmas Day and marks what may well be Eastwood's final screen performance.

As far as acting swan songs go, Gran Torino is hard to beat. Walt is a taciturn, flinty, furious man -- he's so angry at the world, he literally growls when displeased -- and he's also haunted by a violent past that he refuses to speak about with anyone.

In other words, it's a part tailor-made for Eastwood, who has built his career playing men of few words with restless souls who find redemption in the unlikeliest of places.

Eastwood recently talked on the phone with The Miami Herald about Gran Torino, his return to acting and his thoughts about the possibility of finally winning a Best Actor Oscar.

Q:The character of Walt Kowalski is in a way a summation of many of the iconic characters you've played in the past -- men with violent pasts at odds with the world around them. What was your reaction when you first read the script?

A: I liked the whole message of it, the whole idea that you're never too old to learn tolerance and take an interest in other people. I've met a lot of people like Walt in my life, older people who were set in their ways and didn't want to be a part of anything or anyone new. At the same time, that's an obvious message, so you have to bring it in from a really far distance and make it dramatic. Otherwise it's just a guy who goes "Oh, they're just people, too.''

Q:You had said in interviews after Million Dollar Baby that was probably going to be it for you as an actor.

A: I've said that a few times, and I always renege on my promise [laughs]. When Million Dollar Baby came along, I thought this was a character I could play, I was the right age, etc. After Baby, I thought "That's enough of that. I'll stay behind the camera from now on.''

But then this came along, and I couldn't think of anyone who was more right for this character than I was, at least on the surface of it. Because of the history of the characters I've played -- [Million Dollar Baby's] Frankie Dunn or [Heartbreak Ridge's] Gunnery Sergeant Highway -- this one sort of sums it all up, one old bigot and his family. So I decided I'd play him and live with him for a while and see how things go.


(L-r) Walt Kowalski (CLINT EASTWOOD), Thao (BEE VANG), Vu (BROOKE CHIA THAO), Grandma (CHEE THAO) and Sue (AHNEY HER) in Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures drama "Gran Torino", distributed by Warner Bros.


Q: Walt wants nothing more than to be left alone, but he's also extremely lonely, even though he's constantly driving people away.

A: He seems to be an equal opportunity insulter, doesn't he? [laughs] I liked the way [screenwriter Nick Schenk] showed how Walt's family didn't have much time for him. They give him lip service on the day of his wife's funeral, but they don't want to hang with him too much. They'd much rather ship him off to an old folks' home, which is typical here in America. When he tells his son ''Your wife went through your mother's jewelry,'' we know what he's talking about -- attacking the jewelry boxes when the matriarch of the family dies. Walt understands all that. So he'd rather just be left alone.

Q: In the film, you often frame Walt with a lot of empty space around him. The movie is in a way a paean to a vanished America: The neighborhood he lives in almost seems deserted. Walt's way of life is practically an anachronism in the area where he lives.

A: Even before the problems auto workers are having right now, you could see Detroit was almost becoming an obsolete place. Ford and GM and Chrysler were not having the illustrious years they've had in the past. Highland Park, which is the neighborhood where we shot, is an obsolete place. It was a neighborhood that had mid-range executives from Chrysler and GM, and it was a nice neighborhood. And then they had riots in the 1960s, and everybody took off. There are a lot of nice people trying to bring it back today, but it still has a lot of crackhouses and a lot of problems that sum up exactly what you're saying. It's a time in America that's gone now. I don't know if it will ever come back.

Q:The filmmaking in Gran Torino has the feel and rhythm of Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. It looks from the outside fairly effortless. Has telling stories of this kind of small scale become second-nature to you over the years?

A: If it looks easy, that's good. Whether it's easy or not, I don't know. I think it's easier for me now than it was years ago because I'm just enjoying myself now, telling the stories I want to tell with no regard for anything else. The one thing about getting to the age of 78 is you figure, ''Well, you know, people can get mad at you, but what can they do to you?'' [laughs] All they can do is call you an old guy and obsolete. That's no big deal.

I'm at a time in my career when I can tell a lot of stories like Letters from Iwo Jima and Changeling and things they wouldn't expect [me] to do. Younger directors have to worry about a good Friday night opening and having a strong opening weekend. But I don't have to worry about that. Naturally, I'd like the film to open well and for people to see it. But it's not the main consideration.

Q: You're somewhat of an anomaly among Hollywood filmmakers in that you've continued to direct -- and receive great recognition for it -- way beyond your supposed prime.

A: That's true. People being put out to pasture has happened a lot in the past. Billy Wilder stopped directing in his 60s. Here's a guy who had done some wonderful films and lived well into his 90s. What the hell did he waste all those years for? I knew Frank Capra pretty well socially: I always liked him a lot. He was a lucid guy as an older man. He made some wonderful films, and I always wondered why it couldn't just go on. But once he did Pocketful of Miracles, and that didn't do very well, he just backed off. You can't be discouraged if one thing doesn't work.

Q:You've won Oscars for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, but you've never won one for acting. If Gran Torino really is your swan song as an actor, then this is your last shot at a Best Actor prize. Is that something that's important to you?

A: I suppose I wouldn't mind. [laughs] I've gotten a few for directing and producing. But I suppose most would love to have one in their first profession, which for me is acting. But you don't really think about that. It's hard to say. Naturally, you don't want to be disingenuous and say, ''Who gives a crap?'' But just the fact that someone is saying we appreciated that, and that's fine. Yeah, that's OK. I don't put people down for that. Then again, an awful lot of bad films have won Oscars. . . . It's just a matter of what captures people's imaginations at the time and who campaigns the best. And having just watched a two-year presidential campaign, the idea of launching another campaign myself is a bit much.

Clint Eastwood: What I've Learned

http://www.esquire.com/
December 15, 2008, 7:15 AM


In a rare interview as he stars in Gran Torino, the Hollywood legend opens up about the "pussy generation," America's blasé remembrance of 9/11, Barack Obama achieving the unimaginable, the beginning of his acting career (hint: good-lookin' chicks), and, yes, that grunt.

By Cal Fussman
[more from this author]

Born in San Francisco and raised throughout northern California, Eastwood attended Los Angeles City College under the G. I. Bill and served as mayor of Carmel, California from 1986 to 1988.

In the first place, I was taller than most kids in my classes. In the second, we were always moving. Redding. Sacramento. Pacific Palisades. Back to Redding. Back to Sacramento. Over to Hayward. Niles. Oakland. So we were constantly on the road, and I was always the new guy in school. The bullies always thought, Here's this big gangly guy. We gotta take him on. You know how kids are. We gotta test him. I was a shy kid. But a lot of my childhood was spent punching the bullies out.

I kind of had a feeling "Make my day" would resonate, based upon "Do you feel lucky, punk?" in the first movie. I thought that Smith & Wesson line might hang in there, too. But "Make my day" was just so simple.

I still get it a lot.

As you get older, you're not afraid of doubt. Doubt isn't running the show. You take out all the self-agonizing.

What can they do to you after you get into your seventies?

Even in grammar school they taught you to go with your first impression. It's like multiple-choice questions. If you go back and start dwelling, you'll talk yourself out of it and make the wrong pick. That's just a theory. I've never seen any studies on it. But I believe it.

As Jerry Fielding used to say, "We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking."

My father had a couple of kids at the beginning of the Depression. There was not much employment. Not much welfare. People barely got by. People were tougher then.

We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody's become used to saying, "Well, how do we handle it psychologically?" In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you'd be left alone from then on.

The band guys were looked down upon when I was a kid. I remember playing the flügelhorn and everybody said, "What the...?"

I don't know if I can tell you exactly when the pussy generation started. Maybe when people started asking about the meaning of life.

If I'd had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

You wonder sometimes. What will we do if something really big happens? Look how fast -- seven years -- people have been able to forget 9/11. Maybe you remember if you lost a relative or a loved one. But the public can get pretty blasé about stuff like that. Nobody got blasé about Pearl Harbor.

I remember buying a very old hotel in Carmel. I went into an upper attic room and saw that all the windows were painted black. "What was going on here?" I asked the prior owners. They said they thought the Japanese were off the coast during the war.

The Korean War was only a few years after World War II. We all went. But you couldn't help but think, Shit. What the hell? What have we gained? One minute you're unleashing the tremendous power of nuclear fission, and then a few years later you're jockeying back and forth on the 38th parallel. It seemed so futile.

In Changeling, I tried to show something you'd never see nowadays -- a kid sitting and looking at the radio. Just sitting in front of the radio and listening. Your mind does the rest.

I remember going to a huge waterfall on a glacier in Iceland. People were there on a rock-platform overlook to see it. They had their kids. There was a place that wasn't sealed off, but it had a cable that stopped anybody from going past a certain point. I said to myself, You know, in the States they'd have that hurricane-fenced off, because they're afraid somebody's gonna fall and some lawyer's going to appear. There, the mentality was like it was in America in the old days: If you fall, you're stupid.

You can't stop everything from happening. But we've gotten to a point where we're certainly trying. If a car doesn't have four hundred air bags in it, then it's no good.

My father died very suddenly at sixty-three. Just dropped dead. For a long time afterward, I'd ask myself, Why didn't I ask him to play golf more? Why didn't I spend more time with him? But when you're off trying to get the brass ring, you forget and overlook those little things. It gives you a certain amount of regret later on, but there's nothing you can do about it. So you just forge on.

Smaller details are less important. Let's get on with the important stuff.

I've got a good crew that is very familiar with me. I don't have to say a lot to 'em. We just set up the shot, and I depend on everybody to do their parts. I just say, "Okay...."

What happened is I was going to college in 1950. L. A. City College. A guy I knew was going to an acting class on Thursday nights. He started telling me about all the good-lookin' chicks and said, "Why don't you go with me?" So I probably had some motivation beyond thoughts of being an actor. And sure enough, he was right. There were a lot of girls and not many guys. I said, "Yeah, they need me here." I wound up at Universal as a contract player.

People love westerns worldwide. There's something fantasylike about an individual fighting the elements. Or even bad guys and the elements. It's a simpler time. There's no organized laws and stuff.

The last one I did was in '92. Unforgiven. That was a wonderful script. But it seemed like it was the end of the road for me with the genre, because it sort of summarized everything I felt about the western at that particular time.

I had an issue before the council. I remember getting up, and there was a lady who sat and knitted the whole time, never looked up. "No, no, no," she said. And I thought, This can't be. When you're elected, you have to at least pretend like you're interested in what people are there for. How do you have the chutzpah to just sit there, not pay attention, not interact at all? It needed to be corrected.

Winning the election is a good-news, bad-news kind of thing. Okay, now you're the mayor. The bad news is, now you're the mayor.

It's making sure that the words "public servant" are not forgotten. That's why I did it. 'Cause I thought, I don't need this. The fact that I didn't need it made me think I could do more. It's the people who need it that I'm suspect of.

Barack Obama was unimaginable back when I was a kid. Count Basie and a lot of big bands would come through Seattle when I was young. They could play at a club, but they couldn't frequent the place.

When you listen to Ray Charles, there's never any doubt whose voice that is.

You should really get to know somebody, really be a friend. I mean, my wife is my closest friend. Sure, I'm attracted to her in every way possible, but that's not the answer. Because I've been attracted to other people, and I couldn't stand 'em after a while.

I'm past doing one chin-up more than I did the day before. I just kind of do what I feel like.

I have children by other women. I gotta give Dina the credit for bringing everyone together. She never had the ego thing of the second wife. The natural instinct might have been to kill off everybody else. You know, the cavewoman mentality. But she brought everybody together. She's friendly with my first wife, friendly to former girlfriends. She went out of her way to unite everybody. She's been extremely influential in my life.

I'm not one of those guys who's been terribly active in organized religion. But I don't disrespect it. I'd never try to impose any doubts that I might have on anyone else.

A good joke is a good joke whenever. But my kids make me laugh now.
Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life, that you learn something new all the time. That's the secret to life, really -- never stop learning. It's the secret to career. I'm still working because I learn something new all the time. It's the secret to relationships. Never think you've got it all.

As you get older, you like kids a lot more.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues -- what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it?

No, I don't have to practice that grunt. You just do it. Once you're in character, you're in character. You don't sit there purposely thinking, Well, I'll grunt here, or I'll groan there.

That's why I don't rehearse a lot and why I shoot a lot immediately. I have ideas of where I'd like to take the character, but we both end up going together.

We were doing In the Line of Fire, and John Malkovich was on top of the building, and he has me in a real precarious situation. My character is crazed and he pulls out a gun and sticks it into John's face, and John puts his mouth over the end of the gun. Now, I don't know what kind of crazy symbol that was. We certainly didn't rehearse anything like that. I'm sure he didn't think about it while we were practicing it. It was just there. Like Sir Edmund Hillary talking about why you do anything: Because it's there. That's why you climb Everest. It's like a little moment in time, and as fast as it comes into your brain, you just throw it out and discard it. Do it before you discard it, you know?

It keeps coming back to "We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking."

You look at Velázquez in his dark years and you wonder, How the hell did he get that way? I'm sure he didn't say to himself, "I'm in my dark period right now, so I'm going to paint this way." He just did it. That's when real art gets a chance to come into play.

Million Dollar Baby won the Academy Award. That was nice, that was great. But you don't dwell on it. An awful lot of good pictures haven't won Academy Awards, so it doesn't have much bearing. Letters from Iwo Jima was nominated for an Academy Award. We didn't win it, but that picture was still as good as I could do it. Did it deserve it less than some other picture? No, not really. But there are other aspects that come into it. In the end, you've just got to be happy with what you've done. There you are.

- Eastwood stars in Gran Torino, currently in theaters. It is his twenty-ninth film as a director.

Interviewed by Cal Fussman, November 3, 2008

RELATED STORIES:
EARLIER: Anatomy of Clint Eastwood, American Icon
WHAT I’VE LEARNED: More Wisdom and Damn Good Advice from Hundreds of Headliners!

Glasvegas makes its move on America

By Shay Quillen
San Jose Mercury News
http://www.mercurynews.com/
Posted: 01/08/2009 12:00:00 AM PST

Last year, Glasvegas went from being a Scottish act with two obscure singles under its belt to being one of the most celebrated young bands in Great Britain. And as 2009 begins, the group is setting its sights on America — a country whose musical past plays a crucial role in its look and sound.


Glasvegas. L-R: Rab Allan, James Allan, Paul Donoghue, Caroline McKay (Photo Credit: Steve Gullick)

In Britain, "the name's out there, and people are getting it," says bassist Paul Donoghue, speaking from a tour stop in Manchester last month. "Now we need to go to America and really put a lot of work and a lot of effort into that."

The quartet — which also includes singer-songwriter James Allan, guitarist Rab Allan (James' cousin) and stand-up drummer Caroline McKay — played some East Coast dates last year but just embarked on its first jaunt across America. It's marking the U.S. release of its self-titled debut album, which hit No. 2 in England last year, with two national TV spots and a handful of club dates, including a Popscene show tonight at 330 Ritch St. in San Francisco.

Monday, Glasvegas played "Geraldine" on "Late Night With David Letterman." Next Thursday, the band will wrap up the tour with an appearance on "The Late Late Show," hosted by fellow Glaswegian Craig Ferguson.

It's a remarkable turn of events for a band that still lives in the gritty East End of the Scottish city that inspired its tongue-in-cheek name.

"It's like any other working-class city in Britain: It's got its bad points, but it's also got a lot of electricity and a lot of romance to it," Donoghue says in a Glaswegian accent so thick that, at times, it's unintelligible to American ears. "I love the East End of Glasgow, and I don't think I'd ever move."

The bassist says that when the band started about five years ago, James Allan's songs showed promise, but he hadn't quite arrived at what would become the band's signature sound — soaring, heart-on-sleeve vocals in a thick Scottish accent over music that manages to suggest both the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Shirelles.

"They were a lot more poppy," Donoghue says of Allan's early efforts. "I still think Glasvegas make pop music, but back then it was a lot more of the indie, color-by-numbers thing, jangly guitars and stuff like that. As James' confidence grew, that wasn't what he wanted to do. . . . He realized if he wanted to be true to himself, he had to completely change the style of songwriting."

Fueled by long record-listening sessions at McKay's house, the musicians began gravitating toward vintage American sounds by artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Dion.

The band broke out of Scotland with the self-released "Daddy's Gone," voted the No. 2 single of 2007 in the influential English music magazine NME. The song was re-recorded for the band's debut album and became Glasvegas' biggest hit to date in the U.K.

"Where we were in Glasgow, there's so many broken families," Dougherty says. "Be it a child whose father left or a father who's left children — people will come up and say the song really affects them."


JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)


Last winter, NME's staff awarded the band, which had yet to release an album, the Philip Hall Radar Award, an honor that previously had gone to Franz Ferdinand and the Kaiser Chiefs. The award was presented by the Libertines' Carl Barat, who will perform a solo opening set at tonight's show.

Glasvegas is the kind of up-and-coming British act music fans have come to expect on Thursdays at the little room at 330 Ritch St. Over the past 13 years, Popscene — a series co-founded and booked by "Live 105" Music Director Aaron Axelsen — has given the Bay Area an early, up-close look at such soon-to-be-massive acts as Bloc Party, Muse and Amy Winehouse.

Axelsen voted the British import of "Glasvegas" as his No. 1 record of 2008, and his Popscene partners share his love for the band.

"The first thing I noticed while listening to Glasvegas was this incredible sound that reminded me of all the records I love — the shoegaze ones, the doo-wop ones, the space rock ones," writes DJ and marketing maven Nako Hashizume via e-mail. "I just wanted to drown in those waves of sound."

Contact Shay Quillen at squillen@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-2741.


Glasvegas has plenty of potential import

By STEVE WILSON
Special to The Kansas City Star
January 16, 2009

The resounding debut album from Glasvegas opens with “Flowers and Football Tops.”

Sung by James Allan, a 29-year-old from Glasgow’s tough east side, its perspective is that of a mother who’s just learned of the death of her young son. The lyrics don’t specify what events brought the police to her door, but the song evokes the story of young James Bulger, the Liverpool boy killed by two boys scarcely his senior.

Guitarist Rab Allan, the singer’s younger cousin, opens the song with a full minute of glacial, harmonic distortion that sets the stage for Caroline McKay’s whopping Phil Spector backbeat and James’ raw, impassioned vocal.

Allan sings like a cross between Joe Strummer and a Glaswegian Joey Ramone. Assuming the persona of a grieving mother is a potential landmine for any male singer, but Allan makes the grief dramatic and dignified.

Remarkably Glasvegas maintains the pace established by “Flowers and Football Tops” throughout most of its 11-song program.

The songs of James Allan are not basic pop fodder, tending instead toward evocative portrayals of working class life in Glasgow — its perils and iniquities. “Stabbed” evokes the everyday horrors of gang life. “Go Square Go” is sung by a young man steeling himself for a showdown with a playground bully (the refrain is terrifically catchy, but its repetitive use of the f-word won’t garner much media play). “Geraldine,” like “Football Tops,” finds Allan in female persona, this time as an empathetic social worker.

Especially powerful is “Daddy’s Gone,” a song for both an absent father and the young protagonist himself, which combines regret, resignation and defiance.

Beginning in 2003 as an Oasis cover band, only gradually did James Allan start writing songs for the band. Like so many of rock’s powerful ensemble sounds, Glasvegas’ was built piece by piece by trial and error.

Performing initially at blistering punk tempos, they found that slower tempos breathed life into Allan’s gritty songs.

Bassist Paul Donoghue and McKay lay down a propulsive foundation. Rab Allan’s mammoth guitar sound is derived from Will Sergeant (Echo and the Bunnymen), the Edge, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.

In a curious way it also updates the slap-back echo of early Sun Records recordings. He frames his cousin’s vocals with a strum and drone, pedal tone-heavy palette that’s huge and dense.

And while that density can be overwhelming, it’s consistently affecting.
As it’s already one of Britain’s most popular bands, it will be interesting to see how this latest, potent British import translates to an American audience.

Concert Review: Glasvegas

Glasvegas
Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY - 01.06.09
Filter Grade: 86%

by Samantha Barnes 01.09.2009
http://www.filter-mag.com/

JANUARY 05: Musician James Allan of the band Glasvegas performs onstage at Virgin Megastore Union Square on January 5, 2009 in New York City.(Getty Images)

The scene was a cold and rainy night, perfect to make Scotland’s hottest import, Glasvegas, feel right at home in New York City. Playing an overly sold-out show at SoHo’s Bowery Ballroom on the day of their debut album’s U.S. release, the band was set to encounter a New York audience full of hipsters, industry wigs, fellow musicians and music fans eager to see if the act lived up to they hype. Surely a tall order to fill, but despite minor distractions, the band showcased just why Bowery was the place to be that night.

With no introduction needed, the band, all clad in black, took the stage to the backdrop of moody blue strobe lights and kicked right into the 7-minute pulsing album opener, “Flowers And Football Tops.” Frontman James Allan’s vocals soared over the dark room with his repeated pleas to his “baby,” evoking another generation’s Danny Zuko with his leather jacket, mini-pompadour and soulful croon. As the song built intensity, so did the light show, until bona fide stadium lights flared at the 550-capacity venue, causing most to turn away from the stage and some less forgiving concert-goers to yell out for relief. Concluding the song with a heartbreaking rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” they prepared the crowd for exactly what was in store for the following 40 minutes – brooding sounds with spot-on vocals and a dreadfully inappropriate light show.

The quartet played through several songs without acknowledging the crowd, slowly building the excitement while loosening up to the typically stagnant New York audience. By mid-way through the relatively short 10-song set, they found just the chord to please the crowd. The lush sounds and sharp guitars of UK chart-topper, “Geraldine” had the room swaying and bopping along, led the whole time by Allan’s pitch-perfect voice. Following the crowd’s warm embrace of “Geraldine,” they switched to their darker side with the dramatic, building “Ice Cream Van,” showing only haunting shadows to the enraptured crowd while organs filled the air. Other set stand-outs include the stomping “Go Square Go” which broke into an all-out dance party and of course the highlight of the night - the powerful sing-along set closer “Daddy’s Gone.”

While the night may have ended too soon for some, Glasvegas proved that less is more with their concise set, only leaving the crowd wanting more, despite the potential retinal damage. Rest easy New York, they will return again with a little more confidence, a few more songs and perhaps a little less gusto for lights.

Set List

1. Flowers And Football Tops
2. Lonesome Swan
3. It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry
4. Please Come Back Home
5. Polmont On My Mind
6. Geraldine
7. Ice Cream Van
8. Go Square Go
9. Stabbed
10. Daddy’s Gone

Today's Tune: Glasvegas - Flowers and Football Tops

(Click on title to play video)

Baby
why you not home yet
baby its getting late
i wish you would be home by now.
door bell rings
who could it be at this time
police on my left and right
my sons not coming home tonight

baby, they dont need to show
its over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know
baby, baby, baby, why you?

no sweeping exits
no hollywood endings
flowers and football tops
dont mean a thing.

my baby is six feet under
just another number
my daughter without her brother

baby, they dont need to show
its over, i know
baby, they dont need to show
flowers and football tops, i know

my baby is gone?

(you are my sunshine
my only sunshine
you make me happy
when skies are grey
i hope you noticed
how much i loved you
how could they take my sunshine away)

W. D. Zantzinger, Subject of Dylan Song, Dies at 69

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 10, 2009

William Devereux Zantzinger, whose six-month sentence in the fatal caning of a black barmaid named Hattie Carroll at a Baltimore charity ball moved Bob Dylan to write a dramatic, almost journalistic song in 1963 that became a classic of modern American folk music, died on Jan. 3. He was 69.


Baltimore Sun
William D. Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six months in 1963 in the death of Hattie Carroll

His death was confirmed by an employee of the Brinsfield-Echols Funeral Home, who said Mr. Zantzinger’s family had prohibited the release of more details.

Mr. Dylan took some liberties with the truth in the song, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” though there is disagreement over just how many. He recorded it in 1964 for the Columbia album “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” for some reason dropping the letter “t” from Mr. Zantzinger’s name. It begins:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane he twirled around his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’.

The incident occurred on Feb. 8, 1963. Mr. Zantzinger, a 24-year-old Maryland tobacco farmer, and his wife, Jane, had stopped with friends at a restaurant on their way to Baltimore’s annual Spinsters’ Ball, a white-tie affair.

Mr. Zantzinger was wearing a top hat and carrying a toy cane he had picked up at a farm fair. At the restaurant, he became disorderly, hitting employees with the cane, then left with his group after they were refused more drinks.

The party moved on to the ball, at the Emerson Hotel. A recapitulation of the evening in The Washington Post Magazine in 1991 said Mr. Zantzinger had entered bellowing: “I just flew in from Texas! Gimme a drink!”

As the evening progressed, he hit several hotel employees with the cane and used racial epithets. Time magazine said he pushed his wife to the floor. He later strode to the bar and ordered a drink from Mrs. Carroll, 51. But she was too slow, he said, and began criticizing her. Then he repeatedly struck her with the cane. Fleeing to the kitchen, she told co-workers that she felt “deathly ill.” An ambulance was called.

Mr. Zantzinger was charged with disorderly conduct and released on $600 bail. But on the morning of Feb. 9, Mrs. Carroll died of a stroke. Now Mr. Zantzinger was charged with murder.

In the trial, Mr. Zantzinger testified that he could not remember hitting anyone. His lawyers said Mrs. Carroll’s stroke could have been caused by the hypertension she was known to have. A three-judge court agreed that the caning alone could not have caused the death and reduced the charge to manslaughter.

Mr. Zantzinger was convicted in June, and in August he was sentenced to six months in prison.

On Aug. 29, The New York Times published a dispatch by United Press International, reporting on the sentencing. A friend of Mr. Dylan showed the singer the article. Some accounts say he wrote the song at an all-night coffee shop on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, others that he wrote it at the singer Joan Baez’s house in Carmel, Calif.


Baltimore Sun
Hattie Carroll

The literary critic Christopher B. Ricks wrote a chapter about the song in his book, “Dylan’s Visions of Sin” (2004), praising Mr. Dylan’s “exact control of each word.”

Clinton Heylin, in his book “Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited” (2001), countered that the song “verges on the libelous” because of “its tenuous grasp of the facts of the case.” One criticism was that Mr. Zantzinger’s “high office relations,” as Mr. Dylan called them, were overstated: his father had been a one-term state legislator and a member of the Maryland planning commission.

The song did not mention that Mrs. Carroll was black, although listeners made that correct assumption. It also did not refer to the reduced charge of manslaughter, only the six-month sentence.

One error of fact in the song was that Mrs. Carroll had 10 children; she had 11. Critics suggested that 11 did not fit the meter.

Time magazine called Mr. Zantzinger “a rural aristocrat,” who enjoyed fox-hunting. He attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington and the University of Maryland. The magazine Mother Jones reported in 2004 that he had worked alongside his farm employees, including blacks.

After prison, Mr. Zantzinger left the farm and went into real estate. He sold antiques, became an auctioneer and owned a night club.

In 1991, The Maryland Independent disclosed that Mr. Zantzinger had been collecting rent from black families living in shanties that he no longer owned; Charles County, Md., had foreclosed on them for unpaid taxes. The shanties lacked running water, toilets or outhouses. Not only had Mr. Zantzinger collected rent for properties he did not own, he also went to court to demand past-due rent, and won.

He pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of deceptive trade practices, paid $62,000 in penalties and, under an 18-month sentence, spent only nights in jail.

Information on Mr. Zantzinger’s survivors was unavailable. Though he long refused interviews, he did speak to the author Howard Sounes for his book “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan” (2001) , telling him of his scorn for Mr. Dylan.

“I should have sued him and put him in jail,” he said.