Not On My Watch

A good if somber speech from the president last night from Fort Bragg. If you told George W. Bush on the deck of the aircraft carrier two years ago that he would have to convince his fellow Americans that the war is still – still! – worth fighting, he and his staff would be dumbfounded. Still, it was impressive when Bush ticked off the countries from which the insurgents are flowing: Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. If only this president could bring down the boot on the Saudis to clean up their backyard or lose their pampered status but this is the tragic blind spot of this president. Although there is good news in Iraq, the carnage from the insurgency drowns it out. One part of the speech struck a wrong note: for some reason, I hate when politicians give out web site addresses. It seems jarring and not very presidential. And why does the America Supports You Web site seem like a Band-Aid on a major chest wound? Does this administration think that we need more yellow ribbons on the back of SUVs? Clearly, we need more troops, better armor, a secure Iraqi border and some better PR. And don’t forget luck.

Run, Katie, Run

Attention all People, US magazine and In Touch staffers: don't make any vacation plans for the last weekend of the summer.

With a psycho-boyfriend melting down before our very eyes, Katie Holmes is going to cancel her engagement to Tom Cruise and head for the hills. The bug-eyed Runaway Bride from Georgia can breathe easy as every tabloid and infotainment show calls the overwhelmed actress the New Runaway Bride when she comes to her senses and flees for her life. Her publicist will announce that the engagement is off on the Saturday of the Labor Day weekend and although Katie and Tom remain friends, she is enjoying some quiet time in the Rain Forest or serving as a medic in Iraq.

You have been warned: Labor Day weekend. Get those photographers and cheesy headlines ready.

Must-Watch Character: Drama

There are quite a few pleasures on HBO's feather-light sitcom Entourage. Along with a never-ending parade of lithe LA beauties, Jeremy Piven's Raptor-like agent Ari, there is Kevin Dillon's Drama. Dillon plays the older and slightly more experienced actor brother to the main star's Vincent. Drama came to Hollywood sooner, landed some roles on a grade-C cop show and is now struggling to find work and not appear to glom off his red-hot younger brother. You can see the frustration and the sheer desperation in his eyes, his walk and hear it in his voice as he tries to revive a mediocre career that might be replaced with a new job that could easily be titled "trim coordinator." He is desperate and charming: during one episode he was convinced he wasn't getting roles because he has skinny calves. For the rest of the show, he checks out every waiter/surfer/gym trainer for their leg muscles.

Kevin Dillon's Drama. Funny and one character that makes me smile when he walks on screen. Check out Heaven Help Us from a billion years ago to see this guy in action.

Game Rover

Did Karl Rove play the Senate and House Dems like a piano with his speech in NYC the other day? He told the conservative audience that while conservatives wanted action after 9/11, some liberals wanted to offer therapy, self-reflection and lay the blame with the US. A sweeping generalization but not without a grain of truth, all in all.

Senate and House Dems responded with indignant fury at the Bush Mastermind's remarks and demand Rove's resignation. In their outrage, they remind journalists and their constituents that they voted for the war on terror, the liberation of Iraq and their support for the men and women in uniform.

Brilliant, Karl.

Got Clipboard?

Scene: Lafayette Street on a sunny spring day at lunchtime.

Characters: Phil, co-worker Rob, Environmental Guy and Cute Environmental Gal both holding clipboards.

Action: Phil and Rob walk down Lafayette Street to buy some lunch. Nice, earnest-looking Environmental Guy holding clipboard asks about our concerns for the environment.

Phil: I HATE the environment. Pave it right now.

Environment Guy: (Laughs and lets Phil and Rob pass by).

Phil and Rob buy their lunches at separate stores and Phil returns to the office alone.

Cute Environmental Gal: (Pointing to Environmental logo on her chest) Hi, can I ask you to --

Phil: Sorry, baby. I say pave the environment.

Cute Environmental Girl looks at Environmental Guy in disbelief.

Environmental Guy: That's the guy.

Now with More Gay Banter!

I have a gay co-worker who believed that after the 2004 election, he was a marked man. Chalk it up to a close race and disappointing results for his column, but he was genuinely scared for himself and all gays everywhere.

I have no fears for gays. If you compare the current state of gay-rights affairs with American history, this is 1962. Back then, it was a few months before Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today, the religious right is working hard and fast because it realizes that time is not on their side. Older Americans with a distaste for gay rights are growing older and dying off while younger and more tolerant Americans, who have lived with the notion of gay rights, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Tom Cruise/Ricky Martin/Ellen Degeneres/Al Franken are no longer shocked by the sex lives of their fellow Americans. The Christian Right fully recognizes that the party is almost over.

Case in point: I read a workbook to my daughter during Black History Month about Rosa Parks. When I read the passage that black people weren't allowed to sit next to whites, Nora's face crinkled in disbelief. It made no sense to her at all.

In 10 years, the anti-gay rights foes will be geezers in their wheelchairs complaining about the air conditioning and the loud music in the nursing home. Trust me on this.

Can This -- or Any -- Marriage Be Saved?

The New York Times Magazine had an interesting and respectful profile of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. If the same magazine ran this piece two years ago, he would have been photographed with the standard greenish, up-from-the-swamp lights the art directors usually reserve for religious, red state conservatives, that the same magazine has used in the past. I still remember one profile of a religious midwestern family the magazine profiled a decade ago -- the photographer shot them like freakish cadavers in a Diane Arbus portfolio.

One passage of the profile struck me of the Catholic senator. The author asked him about if his marriage was threatened by gay marriage and he immediately answered "yes." I was disappointed when then the reporter didn't use a simple follow-up question: why?

Why is Santorum's marriage and my marriage, for that matter, threatened if a gay couple are also joined in wedlock? Why? How is my 13-year union in any way diminished?

Perhaps it's because a club becomes less exclusive when anyone can join, but I am not so sure. I think marriage is a civilizing and settling institution and whether or not two men or two women get married, who the hell cares?

On the other extreme, I feel a couple who live together and have kids without getting married is far more destructive to my family and community than Steve and Jerry who might want to live next to us. The couple who shack up are far-more destructive to my family's sense of marriage, commitment and love than a pair of female gym teachers.

Now that that's settled, the pro-gay marriage folks have to answer one question: If gay men and women can marry, then why can't I marry another woman or my sister or my first cousin?

Two questions to think about...

Let's Get Clinical

Is a movie any good if you would rather watch it again with the sound off? We saw Kinsey last night and although it was quite good, I can't wait to re-watch it with the director's comments on. Liam Neeson and Laura Linney are quite good as Prock and Mac, the married couple who helped shepard post-war America into the sexual revolution. Some conservatives complained that the film didn't make any value judgments on Kinsey's research into sex offenders but the scene with William Sadler as a spectacularly repellant subject nailed it for me. Writer/director Bill Condon also helmed Gods and Monsters, a wonderful picture of 1950s Hollywood through the eyes of the director of The Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. Condon reminds me of Paul Schrader in that he creates these little worlds that we think we know and then shines a light on the people inside. Definitely check out Kinsey for the smart direction, Frederick Elmes' stirring cinematography, and the stellar performances from Neeson, Linney, Peter Sarsgaard, and a priggish John Lithgow, who sounds like a methodist Foghorn Leghorn. And keep an eye out for recovering actor Chris O'Connell and Tim Hutton, who borrows Sean Penn's mustache from The Falcon and the Snowman.

Armageddon Impatient

It looks like there might be a compromise in the Republican threat of using the nuclear option when it comes to the Senate filibuster. Damn those moderate Republicans and sane Democrats. They are hatching a plan where Dems will approve a vote for some conservative judges if the Republicans promise not to us the NucOp every again. What's going on, people? Shut the Senate down!

The only people who would notice a Senate-free country would be Chris Matthews, the senators themselves, and the liberals who think that the government needs to grow. (I am including the Bush White House in this group, who will go down in history as Big Government Conservatives.)

With the Senate shut down, the member of this august body (Ha!) will be free to explain why this move is such a sad day for the nation. But life will go on, people will wake up and go to work, movies will arrive and leave our local multiplexes, days will pass into months and no one will really notice. If there is another attack on US soil or the Social Security checks stop coming, the senators will have some hard questions to answer. They will have to explain why the Democrats fought to keep the rules as is (sounds conservative, no?), while the Republicans sought to bend the rules in their favor (a liberal notion, donchya think?).

If the senate shuts down in the summer, does it really matter?

More Die of Heartbreak

Saul Bellow passed away today at the age of 89. The dean of American letters, followed by John Updike and Philip Roth, wrote some of the best post-war fiction but I seem to have only read his minor works. I've read his two early works The Victim and Dangling Man, which he says helped him to write his masterpiece The Adventures of Augie March. I hate to admit that I've only read about one-seventh of that book and it's on my To Read list, alongside Moby Dick and Madame Bovary. I read and enjoyed Herzog and wondered what the fuss was about Humboldt's Gift. Frankly, I enjoyed the sterile The Dean's December, which I read in a cramped Book of the Month Club edition with a small type on lousy paper, and the bitter Mr. Sammler's Planet than the exhausting and pointless Humboldt.

Oddly, one of the Bellow books I truly enjoyed was More Die of Heartbreak, which I read as a lifeguard at a retirement community and was the first book that signaled that the writer was growing old and his powers might be fading. I still remember passages and bits of dialogue. I loved the scene where the botanist who marries into a wealthy family realizes that his wife might not be the perfect match when he admires a plant that always sat beside her in their grand dining room and discovers that it is plastic. Nice.

I have read a good portion of Augie March but I remember Martin Amis' introduction where he advises the reader to stop looking for the Great American Novel -- this is it, he says. I'll read it and also finish the last hundred pages of Henderson the Rain King -- I think I read that Jack Nicholson was once set to play the violinist/pig farmer who goes to Africa to find his calling -- to complete my Bellow chase. I also have to re-read Herzog but if I return to More Die, I am almost certain it won't live up to my original enjoyment. Books are like flowers that way -- walk away and the petals fall.

I read the NY Times obituary and they didn't mention Bellow's work to champion William Kennedy. Legend has it that Bellow liked the Albany novelist's books and demanded that his publisher buy and distribute Kennedy's most recent work about a bum who tries to confront his ghosts in a lousy working-class city north of Manhattan. The book was Ironweed.

Saul Bellow is dead. John Updike and Philip Roth have just moved up a wrung.

A 600-Foot Tunnel?

If the Holy See had not passed away this weekend, I can not think how the recent attack on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison would not be at the top of the news hour. Now, the headline in the New York Times is "Second Attack On Iraq Prison in 48 Hours." This time, a tractor driver blew himself up and wounded half a dozen Iraqi civilians. This follows a well-coordinated and very ballsy attack on the prison known for torture by the hands of unsupervised US soldiers and over-eager intelligence officers.

The details of the recent story are startling. "Last week, prison officials discovered two tunnels at Camp Bucca, one of them 600 feet long, dug by prisoners in a failed attempt to escape."

Either the insurgency needs to liberate a few prisoners for a much-needed infusion of talent or the prison itself has become synonymous with the hatred at the American occupation and its attempts to create a democratic Iraq. Either way, it's clear that the prison is a true hotspot and needs help. I hope someone at the Pentagon is ramping up the security.

Happy Jo Moore Day

If you're a business executive or a government official with bad news to deliver, I'd wait until Friday. With the entire news media focusing on Rome for the Pope's funeral, you might not get a chance to release and bury any bad news until, oh, when a new pope is chosen in a few weeks! Mickey Kaus of Slate calls it Jo Moore Day, after the British official who sent out an e-mail on September 11, 2001 suggesting that the tragic day would be a fine time to release any bad news. Poor kids not getting their free breakfasts? Utility companies dumping toxins into the river? More unchecked illegal aliens in the country than ever before? Release those pesky reports on a bad or busy news day and your front page story will be reduced to a few paragraphs in the next day's weekend edition. We all read the Saturday paper, don't we?

Kaus says Sandy "These documents would look nice in my boxers" Burger knew what he was doing when he plea-bargained on Friday.

Pope John Paul II

I remember back in 1979 when the Vatican announced that an unknown cleric from Poland would be the next Pope. It was odd because we had just named a new Pope a month before. I even remember joking with my eighth grade friends about the new one that was in the process of being elected. He better outlast the last one. Maybe two months, we said. Later at mass, I remember the young hotshot priest of the church reading some one-liners delivered by the new Pontiff to his adoring crowd. The attendees of the five o'clock mass in St. Joseph's chuckled at the mild jokes of the new Pope. Maybe he'll be special, I remember my mom telling me. She was amazed that a non-Italian was now the leader of the church, the first one in more than four hundred years. Now the talk is the new Pontiff will be either an Italian or an African in order to shore up the church's base. I still think we might see a cardinal nominated from South America because that seems to be the real strength of the faith. This will be an interesting few weeks.

Life Serial

It's been an exhausting week in this "culture of life." A woman in Florida who has lived in a vegatative state for more than a decade and a half survived thirteen days without food and water. Similarly, a priest in Rome is living out his final hours after enduring Parkinson's, a tracheotomy, kidney failure and the lingering effects of an assassin's bullets. People have an amazing capacity to hang on and to fight for life. Throughout the entire Terry Schiavo debate, I wondered what would be the harm in allowing her to be fed and cared for by her family. Her husband reported that she said that she would not want to be kept in this condition but according to a few press reports, he shared this confession years after her condition became clear. Would erring on the side of life be that awful?

And now the Pope. Those close to the holy father said he wanted to show the dignity of suffering and surrendering oneself to Christ. Fine. Catholic leaders lead by example. They have to be better, stronger, wiser and more devout than the rest of us. That is their role. And I found it oddly moving to see the Pope -- a man who recognized the evils of communism alongside Reagan and Thatcher -- submitting himself to God's brutal plan.

It's been an exhausting few weeks and death has been busy. All we can do is pray and look forward to spring. Life marches on.

The Pie of the Beholder

Good for William Kristol. The editor of The Weekly Standard was speaking at Earlham College when a student walked on stage and pelted him in the face with an ice cream pie. According to the press reports, Kristol wiped his face, walked back to the microphone and said "Just let me finish this point" to a round of applause. And good for the members of the audience that jeered the pie thrower, a fellow student at the Quaker college, and good for one of the questioners who, though he didn’t agree with Kristol’s neocon views, apologized for his fellow student’s thuggish behavior.

I guess we should be surprised but this episode proves something I’ve felt for a while: the left hates debate. Like extreme members of the right, the anti-Bush left hates opposing views and feels so threatened that they often adopt the tactics of the enemy they despise. Maybe it’s the campus echo chamber where liberal views are the norm and any hint of an opposing idea is poison. It has to be especially confusing and infuriating when the Bush Doctrine -- democracy good, dictators bad -- is working and gaining traction on the Middle East.

When the topic turns to Bush, their minds and judgment shuts down. For a smart bunch of folks, they are quick to equate a pre-emptive war against a brutal dictator with the fascists who shoveled six million Jews, gays, gypsies and physical and mental defectives into the ovens in the 1940s. Nazi is the new “N” word. The 26 million Iraqis who can now choose their own government? It doesn’t hold a match to the dozens of prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib. Libya, Syria and Egypt promising to get their houses in order and adopt more democratic measure? It doesn’t mean a thing unless Germany and France are on board.

Just like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the left is reduced to watching history happen without them. No wonder they’re frustrated.