The Real Deal
  ¶ 2:49 PM 0 comments

  A Real Live Actress I drove down to New Jersey this weekend, no mean feat for a hobbit like me, but boy was it worth it. I went to see two one-act plays at Drew University, "The Author's Voice" and "The Actor's Nightmare."

My daughter Sarah was in "The Actor's Nighmare," a brilliant play about a recurring dream that actors, both amateur and professional, all have, when the director tells you that Edwin has been in a car accident and you have to play the role and you don't know the lines and you don't even know what play it is.

So there are sections from Noel Coward's "Private Lives" and "Hamlet" and Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" and "A Man for all Seasons," and probably others.

Besides doing a star turn as Ophelia, Sarah played Amanda in "Private Lives" -- decked out in a Roaring Twenties Charleston-era dress -- and she was so glamorous and delivered her lines so perfectly, I saw right there and then, not a student in a college production, but a real live actress, a great actress, just like her great-grandma said.

I know I'm not impartial, but I know the real thing when I see it, and it's a great delight to see it all coming true. I saw so much of her mother -- grace and charm and confidence. I can say nice things about my ex here because she never reads my blog. Don't tell her!

All the other actors were excellent, too, as was the set design, the lighting, the costumes, the directing, the props, the music, you name it -- Go Drew U!

It's a great place to learn the craft of theater.  ¶ 6:51 PM 0 comments

  Who Is This I.F. Stone Guy? If you've read the Apology of Socrates (by Plato), then you probably have the same reverence for Socrates that I always had, until I read "The Trial of Socrates" by I. F. Stone. This astonishing work reversed everything I had ever imagined about ancient Athens.

And if you put it up to me now whether Socrates should drink the hemlock, I'm very, very close to saying, "Chug-a-lug, pal!"

Socrates was an enemy of democracy. At one time his disciples took over the city, with the help of the Spartans, Athens' ancient enemy, and murdered more than 1,500 citizens. In many ways, Socrates was like the blind sheik, who was convicted under US law for inciting others to commit acts of violence.

Socrates was a great admirer of Sparta, which is ironic because Sparta did not allow philosophers. He would have been killed there. Sparta had a type of democracy that Bill O'Reilly would really like: The question is put to the assembly with no debate. And there's no counting votes. The loudest shouting wins.

The most telling criticism of Socrates, my former hero, is that he wanted to censor the works of Homer. Socrates admired Agamemnon, and believed the bad things Achilles said about him should be expunged, somehow, from this national Greek epic that everyone already knew by heart, which the Roman emperor Caligula also knew by heart four centuries later.

Censor Homer? This guy has got to be a butthead. I intend to publish one or more blog entires about why Agamemnon was the ultimate butthead, from the slaughter of his daughter to the greed he showed, the indifference to the suffering of his soldiers. And this was the guy Socrates most admired!

At one point one of Socrates' disciples asks him if a ruler should be allowed to kill someone for telling him the truth, and Socrates goes into one of his long song and dance routines. But one thing he definitely does not say is, "No."

Then I went to the showing of this film, "War Made Easy," based on the book by Norman Solomon, and I learned that I. F. Stone was the only American journalist to question the veracity of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized US military action in Vietnam. All the rest were led along like sheep.

And that's a big pain in the ass because now I have to go read everything this guy wrote. Well I guess you pick your problems.  ¶ 10:07 PM 1 comments

  His Name Was Hugh As I mentioned in a previous entry, I recently purchased a copy of National Geographic for a dollar - way more than I would usually pay - because it had an article by Dwight D. Eisenhower about his friend Sir Winston Churchill.

After looking over the images and the articles, I'd pay a lot more for this issue, August 1965. There's a photo of Churchill testing carbines with Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, and a great shot of him with some soldiers in a rifle pit on the coast. (As if a rifle pit was going to stop a German invasion! These blighters would be gone with one shell from an German 88. The war was won in the air and on the sea.) There's even a portrait of Sir Winston painted by... Dwight Eisenhower!

Here's the opening of an article by National Geographic staff writer Howard La Fay. I'd pay a buck just for this snippet from real life:

He was a middle-aged Scot and his name was Hugh. He had taken three days of vacation to come down from Edinburgh for the funeral, and now we huddled together in the slow, frozen queue winding toward Westminster Hall.

Inside, beyond the statues of Cromwell and Richard the Lionheart, Sir Winston Churchill lay in state. For five hours Hugh and I shuffled slowly, foot by cold, tedious foot, toward the hall. And he told me why he'd come:

"I was a subaltern at Dunkirk, and the Nazis kicked my unit to death. We left everything behind when we got out; some of my men didn't even have boots. They dumped us along the roads near Dover, and all of us were scared and dazed, and the memory of the Panzers could set us screaming at night.

"Then he got on the wireless and said we'd fight on the beaches and in the towns and that we'd never surrender. And I cried when I heard him. I'm not ashamed to say it.

"And I thought, 'To hell with the Panzers. We're going to win!'"  ¶ 6:33 PM 0 comments

  Broad, Sunlit Uplands I am not an apologist for the British Empire, nor do I excuse Sir Winston Churchill's disparaging remarks about Mahatma Gandhi -- though Gandhi himself would, in an instant. From what I've heard, he was not a guy to hold a grudge.

But I want to offer this bit of oratory for those who might not have heard it before, as a sample of the power of words to stir people's souls, like Tom Paine in the American Revolution. "These are the times that try men's souls... The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shirk..."

Winston Churchill's ancestors were officers in George Washington's army who had heard these words and taken them to heart -- his mother was American -- and when the time came he was able to summon the same great power to mobilize a people. I think it has a lot to do with cadence -- like with the blind Greek guy.

Here's what Sir Winston had to say after Hitler conquered France, and things were not looking good for Great Britain:

"The Battle of France is over. I suspect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire.

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.

If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"  ¶ 6:54 PM 0 comments

  An Old Magazine People always want too much for National Geographics. They have two huge bundles bound up with twine and they want a buck apiece or else take the whole bunch for ten bucks. I don't generally buy them, but I did pay a buck for this one edition. It had an article by a guy I heard of named Dwight D. Eisenhower, writing about a friend of his, Winston Churchill.

"Sir Winston always spoke to me with pride of his American heritage," Ike says, "and I am certain this link with the New World made him acutely conscious of the common goals of the English speaking peoples. As he once expressed it: 'My mother was American and my ancestors were officers in Washington's army. I am myself an English-speaking union.'"

Imagine that! The great-great-great grandson of Washington's officers is Prime Minister of England and Hitler is knocking at the door. Do not imagine for one instant that there were not fahionable politicians advocating alliance with Hitler. There were many.

Hitler would have been happy to guarantee Britain its empire, if they would only turn a blind eye to what the Nazis were doing in Europe. Churchill would have none of this, and for a long time it was an open question whether Britain would capitulate.

John F. Kennedy said of Churchill, "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle." Admonitions like, "Be ye men of valour," were not just rhetoric. They were from the heart.

"On that gray and moving winter day when his soul was committed to the hands of God amid stately pageantry," Ike remembers, "I knelt in St. Paul's Cathedral. Around me were old flags, old shields, old prayers -- all the evidence of Britain's long continuity."

"And I wondered if we in the United States, with our devotion to the new at the expense of the old, to the future at the expense of the past, are not forsaking something precious. For only a nation steeped in history could produce a Churchill."

I think that insight is worth a buck, don't you?  ¶ 7:38 PM 0 comments

  My Friend Ian My friend Ian passed away yesterday, but he died a long time ago, a victim of the great god alcohol. While I honor him for the wonderful person he was, my thoughts are more with the people he harmed terribly, recklessly and needlessly.

That would include his wonderful children and their wonderful moms, his wonderful mother and father, and many others. I say this because I know that Ian in his right mind would want me to speak the truth.

He was my friend since the sixth grade. We spent hours playing pool on a warped table with a single record: Highway 61 Revisited: "They're selling postcards of the hanging. They're painting the passports brown..."

We were both in the Peter Pan generation, so I guess you could say we failed to grow up together. I guess we knew each other about as well as any two people ever did.

He was brilliant and superbly fit and beautiful. Women said he looked like a Greek god. On top of that, he was rich. And his sense of humor was exquisite. You know those people you want to send a really good joke to? Ian was one of those people. We had many a great laugh.

I'll put the rest of this together somewhere else, but fast forward many years -- kids, marriages, etc. and I get a call from Ian.

How's it going, I ask, and he says not so good. How's Spence, I say -- his wife -- and he says she keeps forty-fiving him.

I say well sixty-nining is good, but forty-fiving sounds bad, and he says yea, that means getting committed for 45 days.

Prior to this, I should say, Ian had drunk himself into the hospital when his liver got so enlarged that it was rubbing against... never mind. I had said to Spence, with whom Ian had just had a son, that if Ian were in his right mind he would say what I was saying and that was that the marriage vows do not include sticking around with someone drinking himself to death.

So back to the phone call. Ian says, "My mother was here."

I say, "Oh, Yeah?"

He says, "Yeah. She said I love drinking more than I love my wife. More than I love my kids."

"mmmm" I say.

So he continues "I said, 'Why don't you die? You're seventy-six years old. Why don't you die?'"

That's what he said to his mother. I realized I wasn't talking to Ian, but to the great god alcohol, who had conquered his soul. Ian went through a lot of incarceration and a lot of treatment after that. Whenever he got arrested he always added an assault and battery on a police officer. He just couldn't help it.

He would call me from time to time, and I hope to tell you all about that somewhere else as well, if you're interested. It twisted me around some just hearing about it. But right up to the end, for him it was, "Why are they doing this to me?" He was just so proud and so stubborn that he couldn't be cured.

The lesson I hope anyone who reads this will take away is this: Alcohol is an enormous, demonic force that no one -- not even a mighty, brilliant force of nature like Ian -- can deal with by themselves. Whether it's you or someone near you, you need help from people who know how to help, and they are all around you. All you have to do is reach out.

But you have to reach out. If you tackle it yourself, you'll just find yourself circling the drain. My friend couldn't be helped because he refused to believe that he was just like everyone else.

Ian is one of many millions of beautiful souls destroyed by alcohol. Don't be one. And don't let anyone else be one. And if you're dealing with this enormous, demonic force, don't be so stubborn and pigheaded that you can't get help.  ¶ 6:36 PM 2 comments