Too Bad to Fail

by Sherman Yellen

During the banking crises, the billion dollars bailout was given to those reckless, behemoth banks that were called too big to fail; the argument was that they would bring down the entire American economy if they were allowed to suffer the consequences of their greed-driven gambles. We learned of that shadow world of devious derivatives, short sales, and swinish swaps, etc. none of which meant a damned thing to me, but meant mega fortunes for Goldman Sachs and their brothers in that high stakes gambling casino called American banking; a casino in which the house always won, because the people would cover the losses. We were essentially held hostage to these banks, not daring to risk their failure which then might spread across the nation and the world and transform a horrible recession into a devastating depression.

Thus we had the Obama policy of bailout before they destroyed the entire world economy; note that both the scheme for bailout and the destruction had been in place before Obama came into office. And still, months later, the jobs situation is critical for millions despite the assurances of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers. A situation made more critical by the stone-hearted Republicans who refuse to extend the unemployed benefits for the long term unemployed. Lionel Barrymore and Edward Arnold played these guys in the old thirties movies, political friends of the millionaires, and the enemies of the downtrodden, but Jimmy Stewart always saved the day. Where is Jimmy now that we need him? Can Obama find his inner Jimmy Stewart? We can only hope so. If this is class warfare it is unique, because it is a revolution started by the super-rich. 

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The Pelican and Me

by Sherman Yellen

I know I should call this piece The Pelican and Us because I don’t own the rights to the feelings of horror, anger, outrage and repulsion at the sight of the great bird covered in oily slime, doomed to suffocation and death, pictures that have come to symbolize the horrors of the BP oil spill. I know that eleven men have died as a result of that tragic event, but men who do dangerous work know the risks they undertake, although some might argue that they are forced to do so given the limited opportunities to make a decent living in hard times. But these birds are the innocent victims of this “spill” and stand forever as the symbol of a culture which placed greed above nature, and the death of those birds seems to be the direct result of that greed. The child in me feels as if Big Bird had been killed, and all Sesame Street is in mourning.

These real birds, and the many species that inhabit the gulf area; turtles, dolphins, and the fish they live on, are in military terms collateral damage like the armless child who is mutilated or destroyed by the missile meant for the terrorist. BP – no – not the British people, is a multi-national company driven by greed and ruled by dividends; for them the endangered pelicans are not amazing creatures with which we share our finite world, but really bad PR, a public relations nightmare making viewers of the birds destruction cringe in horror and dismay.  Continued...

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Ocean's Thirteen: Crime without punishment

by Sherman Yellen

Nobody knows if BP will be able to cap the raging oil well and end the spill in the coming days, weeks, or months. But what we do know is that there will be no real punishment for its crimes against our environment, our wildlife, and the men and women who have for generations lived for the sea and by the sea. This is no mere accident. It is a high crime against men, women, children, and the natural world. 

Punishment means that the company’s top execs spend some real time in the slammer for the deaths of twelve workers, and for those environmental crimes which occurred through their cost cutting practices and Cheney chicanery. In an ideal world the company and all its profits would be confiscated: their billions used to clean up the mess if the cleanup is even possible. And that’s for openers.

There is of course the Cheney question. Nobody knows what happened in those secret meetings with oil company execs which Cheney held in the White House, but an educated guess would be that the relaxation of safety standards that brought about this tragedy came in with Halliburton’s Oil Slick Dick – deregulation for fun and profits.

Disgrace is what happens to most of these people, but disgrace is hardly a true reckoning for BP and its minions, the BP execs behaving as if the very questioning of their motives and competence is an act of incredible colonial rudeness.  Continued...

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That Acrid Smell in the Air

by Sherman Yellen

Oh how I hate an ism. Born in the first half of the twentieth century I've lived through them all. That century was cursed with fascism, communism, and McCarthyism. In the twenty first we have Islamic terrorism. 

I must apologize if I am adding to the already overcrowded list of isms -- but with the threats from Republican Congressmen, the bulls-eye targeting of Sarah Palin of the Democrats she disagrees with, and the racist and homophobic curses from the Tea Party ringing in our ears after the passage of the health care bill, I suggest that we take a look backwards at the sad story of Timothy James McVeigh and see the McVeighism that is festering. 

Here was a man so filled with rage and resentment against the government for its Waco and Ruby Ridge raids, and a generalized hatred for American foreign policy, that he used explosives to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in April of 1995 killing 168 people, injuring 450 others, nineteen of them small children in a day care center. Continued...

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That Age Mocking Super Bowl Ad

by Sherman Yellen

Okay, maybe I’ve lost my sense of humor in my seventies but there’s one Super Bowl ad that I hated, and it’s the one that is getting the most attention.  It featured the elderly but ever game Betty White as a football player who gets tackled and trounced on in the field, only to be transformed into a youthful male player when given some magical energy by a Snicker candy bar.  The joke ad has an additional payoff when the young player is tackled again and turns into the seriously old Abe Vigoda.  

What’s the ad saying?  That it’s a young man’s worst nightmare to get old, first - God help him - as an old woman, then as a decrepit old man, both lying in the mud,  looking weak and ridiculous - only to be rescued by the magic of cheap chocolate covered candy – one that is sure to rot his teeth and his mind.    I can see the geniuses at the ad agency thinking that one up.  Gramps and Grandma tackled, roughed up and lying face down in the mud  - the decrepit duo knocked down and messed up by young football players – America’s gonna love that one.  Well, here’s an American who didn’t.   Continued...

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Hope for Esperanza in 2010

by Sherman Yellen

Today, right before the New Year begins, Esperanza and her two daughters came to visit my wife and me in our New York apartment. Thirty four years before today's visit, Esperanza was a runaway from a South American embassy in Manhattan that had virtually kept her a slave, having taken her to America from her native Peru to care for the Ambassador's children. They paid her no salary, gave her no days off, and confiscated her visa so she could not return home. She made her escape one night and, being homeless and penniless, began riding the subway, back and forth from Manhattan to Brooklyn, lost, frightened, and alone. She only spoke Spanish, and did not know where or how to reach out for help. It was her good fortune that Maria, a woman who worked as a housekeeper in our apartment building, was riding on that very subway car, and had heard that my wife and I needed a baby nurse for our infant son so that my wife could return to work. I've told some of this story before on the Huffington Post, but bear with me, it's worth retelling, and today I bring it up-to-date. Best of all we can all use a tale of hope in a time when so many feel hopeless.

Maria introduced herself to the frightened girl and told her of this chance for work, a decent salary and warm shelter working as a baby nurse for a family with two small boys. She advised Esperanza to keep silent, say yes when nudged, and let Maria do the talking. Maria introduced Esperanza to us as her "dear cousin" from South America, here on a visit and in need of work. Maria assured us that Esperanza understood English but was very shy about speaking it. Thanks to that wonderful lie we hired her. My wife spoke no Spanish, only high school French, and my high school Spanish, taught by the stern Senorita Pulaski, left me speechless after my first Buenos Dias. Nevertheless, we were drawn towards the small, bright eyed, intelligent-looking girl of eighteen whose profile might have been the model for a face on a Mayan ruin and whose long black braid gleamed like a raven's wings. So Esperanza arrived in our lives to take care of our two young sons, and we were privileged to watch the amazing development of a human being.  Continued...

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In Praise of Bad Cooking and Good Mothers: A Thanksgiving Memory

by Sherman Yellen

I've never been a big fan of Halloween -- I don't scare easy and I don't believe in ghosts, not the spooky kind. Ah, but Thanksgiving! My favorite holiday; one filled with the real ghosts of my childhood. My mother Lilly -- movie star beautiful, generous, kindly -- would roll up the sleeves of her floral printed housedress, put on a clean ironed apron and meet this holiday as her great culinary challenge: that awesome and awful Thanksgiving dinner. And I would watch her in wonder during my childhood in the nineteen thirties and forties.The first order of business was dealing with the turkey from hell, sent to us live in New York City in a crate by my mother's crazy joker of a younger brother, Albert, who lived upstate near the Canadian border. Less a gift than a curse, the bird was exiled to our bathtub for a week, clucking away, fed birdseed and always on the verge of becoming a pet rather than a feast before being snuck out of our house by my father to meet his fate at the local butcher.

When finally presented at the feast the creature was so overcooked by my mother, who didn't believe in timing her cooking, that it had become mummified enough to be worthy of an archeological exhibition. The corpse was surrounded with a neat row of sliced canned cranberry slabs, a culinary sarcophagus. A pile of store bought soft sugary rolls nestled nearby.

Sweet potatoes with half melted marshmallows inside were passed about, and wintery-pale pink sliced tomatoes resting on a cold crunch of iceberg lettuce were offered as sides, while a dish of defrosted Birds Eye creamed spinach (be still my heart) was followed at last by scoops of Rushmeyer's ice-cream fit for any hungry pilgrim.

There was not a dish or a pot in our home that was not used in making that meal. Each contributed to the creation of the overcooked and the underdone. My mother, a truly marvelous woman, was, as I have suggested, an awful cook. And I dare say that was a small part of what made her so marvelous. Continued...

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A Death in the Family

by Sherman Yellen

John McNamara 1965-2009

This has been a summer for famous people dying. The iconic anchor man Walter Cronkite and Frank McCourt the notable Irish American author of “Angela’s Ashes” recently left the scene. I write here of another Irish American’s death; my nephew by marriage, John McNamara, called Johnny Mac by his friends, who died yesterday after a three year battle with cancer. And what a battle it was. He fought like a champion to stay alive, enduring every form or medical treatment so as to be there for his two year old son Jack and his wife Jennifer. He lost that battle but he left behind a legacy as valuable as that of Cronkite or McCourt; a legacy of helping out in troubled times.

John was a New York City fireman. Plain - but not simple. He worked tirelessly at the cleanup after 9/11, exposing himself to every known and unknown toxin that settled in the air at Ground Zero; toxins undisclosed and misrepresented by our then panicky and disingenuous leaders. It can be truly said that his work there cost him his life. He later rushed to volunteer in New Orleans after Katrina, rescuing people and animals, living in those polluted waters, sending home messages for relief packages for the survivors, and looking for homes for lost dogs. He was that rare creature – an altogether good man who found his deepest pleasure in helping others. Virtue, old fashioned virtue comes in short supply these days; it is so rare that it is often suspected of being faked, but John had it real and in abundance. He lived by his word. Because John made decency seem so easy one mistook it for simplicity, like watching a great athlete or actor – the effortlessness of true talent. His was a genius for kindness. Continued...

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Murder by Mortgage: Foreclosed and Prepared to Die

by Sherman Yellen

It seems I’ve known Molly* forever, at least for the fifty six years that I have been married to my wife. My wife had met Molly in High School where they suffered the terrors of Mme Farley’s French class together. They became close friends: Molly, the fashionable but flighty odd girl, too tall, too talkative, and too needy, and my wife whose staggering beauty and self control commanded every room she entered, and whose kindness enabled her to embrace a girl whom others might have mocked and ignored. Their fellow classmate in those long ago Brooklyn days was Ruth Bader (Ginsberg) with whom my wife served on Boosters – a selective do-gooders club that the High School ran. Molly was then, as ever, not amongst the chosen.

We have lost Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the court but have kept in touch with Molly over the years except for a brief period during Molly’s early marriage to Joe, a man who verbally brutalized her, making it impossible to keep up our relationship since we would not willingly be witnesses to such abuse and knew no way to stop it. When she finally summoned up the courage to divorce Joe, or maybe it was the unfaithful Joe who walked out on Molly and her two young sons, we started seeing Molly again. Lest I diminish her charms, Molly had a gift for telling a great story in all its details, a memory that could be used as a search engine into the shared past, good looks that came with maturity, and a giggle, a generosity, and a warmth that marked her as one of nature’s good and charming people as well as an easy mark.

Yes, she talked too much, often digressing from her subject, with streams of anecdotes branching out of that river of talk, she loved too much and did so with the utmost indiscretion, spent too much on clothes for herself and meals for her friends, gave too much to charity, lent her money to needy sons, but she was Molly, a lifelong friend even as we saw in her the traces of Flaubert’s “Madam Bovary” – the romantic spendthrift who ends a suicide. In a month Molly, now in her middle seventies and in poor health will be foreclosed by the bank that holds her mortgage, leaving her with no money, no home, and nowhere to go.

Continued...

*name changed for privacy

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And the Rains Came

by Sherman Yellen

This has been the wettest month of June in recent memory. Is it a coincidence that the word rain is a jumbled version of Iran where civilization has had a nervous breakdown? Is our climate having a breakdown as well? Climatologist's point to global warming as the cause of this rain, and my soggy mind has been occupied with building an ark – the kind Noah had constructed when faced by the great flood – only I’m building it inside my roiling brain. Now comes the big question With whom do we fill it?

You, of course, reader, are welcome aboard, but without your flat screen TV, gas guzzler van, exhausted cell-phone and whining children with ipods glued to their ears. Being human I would go for my own family first. Taking care of one’s own comes with the Good Book seal of approval. Noah didn’t leave his family out to surf the rising waves. Both my sons and their significant others, together with my grand-daughters, my good wife, the family Labrador Sam, and cats Byron and Kittay would make it aboard.

Of course I’d invite congenial friends, preferably ones with musical or story telling skills to while away the long hours in the darkness as we rocked and rolled in that raging sea. Plenty of biscuits and bonine aboard. My family doctor would be welcomed with her family. She’s kind and gorgeous and skilled and must be saved. The caring nurse who sees me through the ups and downs of my chronic illness will be among the invited along with various physicians who qualify as full human beings rather than MRI technicians. Cats allowed but no catscans. Janet Ritz, the brilliant environmentalist, would be there to give us some tips on how to survive it all. And we would need some folks who are skilled with aqua-agriculture and can mix up a self-restoring batch of salad greens to keep all of us fed. We would all be vegetarians. None of those two by two animals on board would be there for the slaughter. The trouble this modern Noah faces is that virtually every wild animal is now an endangered species, as is much of mankind, so rule number one is no eating the passengers. Continued...

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My Eyes Are on the Prize

by Sherman Yellen

The other day I sent an email to the President of Bard College, my Alma Mater, protesting an award sponsored by the college that was restricted to novelists under 39 years old. It wasn't about my feeling excluded from that competition. I'm well over 39 but I am not an older novelist shut out of a chance for some prize money and a job, nor am I a professional protester. But it seemed to me that the college had taken a misstep in its prize-giving. If they had asked me I would not have called it the Bard Fiction Prize but the Jack Benny Prize after that beloved comedian who foolishly and forever gave his age as 39.

Clinging to 39 was part of Benny's radio act, which centered on his comic vanity -- his effort to fight aging with a preposterous lie. Along with his shtick of stinginess, playing the violin badly, and wearing a toupee, middle age-denial was Benny's comic persona. Old age wasn't even considered a viable subject for humor then. People died much younger in the 1940s, and those who lived long were more often revered for their wisdom than mocked for their frailties. It was called respect and it came as a part of our human equipment. Now the elderly are often the butt of many a bad TV ad and when not mocked, they are marginalized, trivialized, and Viagravized (sorry about that one). It gets far worse; they are more often ignored. Continued...

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How My Mother Fooled Me

by Sherman Yellen

I was one of the lucky ones. I had a great mother. The fact that I did not fully appreciate that until after her death makes me typical -- I fear -- rather than special among sons. She easily forgave my obsession with my work, more than I now forgive myself for not making more of that time we had together.

I'm sure I sent her a card on Mother's Day, and I remembered her birthday -- October 13th -- and I bought her Christmas gifts (here with some help from my wife) but I regarded these as chores rather than pleasures. What do you buy for a woman whose only fashion weakness was earrings? More earrings? No, I did not neglect her. I lived a few blocks from her apartment and saw her once a week when I was in New York, mostly for dinner and to talk about the fortunes and misfortunes of our family. Most of all she expressed such pride in my young sons that she could never get enough of them. Although she was a constant presence in my life, I did not then realize that she was the great foundation on which my life was built.   Continued...

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Old? Me? The Politics of Aging

by Sherman Yellen

Last Tuesday when I went to bed I was just thirty three years old. Imagine my astonishment when I woke up Wednesday morning to find myself seventy-seven. I guess we all live out an episode of The Twilight Zone as we get older, finding ourselves adrift in that strange and mysterious land of the aging and not remembering how we arrived there. I've got two sons, one in his mid thirties; the other in his forties, who are now older than I feel myself to be today and I'm no Benjamin Button. It wasn't always this way. More than a decade ago I was diagnosed with a metastasized cancer. I figured that was the end. But with the help of some great doctors, good treatment, and a magnificent wife, I managed to live out the past decade in reasonable health and comfort; a life in remission which is all anyone really has; grateful to have the past ten years to be with my family and do my work writing plays, adding chapters to my never-ending memoir, seeing the birth of grand-children, and dropping some grouchy opinions here and on the Huffington Post from time to time.

Since I did all my serious thinking about death long ago I give it very little thought these days. Sure, I'm going to die, probably sooner than later, but that won't keep me from living every day that's left to me to its limit, sometimes with generosity and more often with an old guy's prerogative to snarl at the stupidity and cruelty he sees. Funny, I don't mind being considered an old man, but in the politics of aging I'll be damned if I let anyone call me a senior citizen. Continued...

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Life Isn't Fair but Media Should Be

by Sherman Yellen

A couple of years ago the autos that were parked overnight in the streets of New York City were having their car radios heisted by agile crooks. Car owners were then removing their radios from their dashboards overnight and posting hand written signs in their windows announcing "No car radio" in the hope that they would avoid a broken window.

After listening to Rush Limbaugh one day I put a sign in my old Volvo reading "No hate radio." So my car was spared by some right wing thief. Somehow this form of thievery lost its luster, and the clever crooks found more lucrative forms of boosting; flat screen TVs, Prada handbags, Florida elections, hedge funds and sub prime mortgages. But the idea of no hate radio still appeals to me - or at least balancing the preponderance of conservative hate radio with other voices.

I know that hate speech is protected as free speech by our Constitution. And no, I don't advocate imposing love radio (a yawn inducing notion) on the world but creating a forceful plain-talking progressive radio, one that should have a place on our radio airways and television. No, not another Air America which floats about the ether, lost to anyone who tries to find it, but an effective, pervasive, easy to find voice for progressive views.

The truth is that hate speech can often be funnier than reasoned talk. And it has a long tradition in our democracy going back to the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, and Lincoln with their savagely mocking, duel fighting and libel tossing opponents. Hate sells. Always has. Sadly, it always will. The trouble with its use during the McCain/Palin campaign was that it teetered on encouraging serious hate action by the desperate Republican candidates by demonizing our now President elect Obama as a secret traitor, and we all know what they'd like to do to traitors.

Rush Limbaugh, Oxycodone's own Oliver Hardy, has been bringing joy and gladness to the Repubs for years by pounding on liberals relentlessly, and his rewards for doing so have been enormous. I say let him go on ranting and rolling. Let him have his ditto-heads, his mansions, his forbidden little pills and his fat cigars. Let him mock a critically ill actor, Michael J. Fox, let him rave on against the reality of AIDS, let him declare war on the environment, not for me to stop him. And that goes for his fellow right winger Sean Hannity as well in that Hannity/Comes show where Hannity, the fast talking radical right guy with the gift for gab outshines the dim bulb that is his nerdy liberal opponent, Alan Colmes. A Foxy set up if I ever saw one. I must admit that I was troubled by the debates in this election which excluded Nader who was desperately running on the Egotist Party ticket, and Libertarian Bob Bar from at least one of the debates. I felt that their absence diluted the debates and diminished the discourse.

All of this is just a preamble to my view that we must restore the old Fairness Doctrine.

Sexism, Racism, Bad Jokes, and that McCain Ad

by Sherman Yellen

I was going to write about my celebration of the birth of my twin grand-daughters three days ago, a joyful move over Brangelina post, but in the midst of all this family happiness I came upon the McCain ad comparing Obama to Britney and Paris. And it stopped me cold. What's that about? And why did it trouble me so?

Let me get the really nasty stuff off my chest right away. Comparing Obama to Paris Hilton is another of McCain's tasteless and inept jokes. Paris Hilton is a no-talent nobody blessed with the good looks and good fortune that have made her a shameless somebody to our giddy press. Like John McCain, she came from affluent circumstances. And like him she is a survivor; he survived a long imprisonment in a brutal war, and she survived a spoiled brat childhood in Beverly Hills. I don't mean to denigrate his suffering, or hers, but the sad fact is that both of them seemed to learn so little from it. You couldn't send either of them to the grocery story for a container of milk and expect them to identify it -- the store or the milk. Like McCain, Paris is one tough cookie, someone who lives in the world without apparently being effected by the less fortunate around her. Clearly Ms. Hilton has far more in common with John McCain than with Barack Obama.

In different ways Paris and McCain both inhabit their own plastic bubbles comfortably. She has charmed the besotted paparazzi, bent them to her will, and prevailed, posturing on life's red carpet, slinking towards oblivion or middle age -- whichever comes first. McCain has made it to his Republican presidential nomination by charming an infatuated political press that never seemed to ask him a tough question. He lightened his moral load as he aged by tossing off whatever burdens of decency and character he intermittently demonstrated. Now, having tossed aside reality as well in his statements about the oil crises, the economy, the war, veterans affairs (his is one of the worst voting records for vets) he is light enough to survive the run without any onerous burdens like truth or integrity.

Poor Britney doesn't deserve to be classified with Paris or even McCain. She is a talented mess who inherited nothing, made a fortune from her adolescent musical talents, whatever you think they may be, worked hard from childhood to rise above her humble origins, and for all her aberrant behavior should not be placed side-by-side with Paris or McCain, both charter members of that infamous lucky sperm club.

John McCain -- unlike the mythical Good Joe American he hopes to bamboozle with his vicious anti-Obama ads -- is an elitist/opportunist who abandoned a sick wife, carried on with an attractive blond beer heiress and married her, survived corruption charges as one of the Keating Five, and became a proxy billionaire through that romantic transaction which has helped to finance his political ambitions. To suggest that Obama, a brilliant man from a modest background, one who made his own luck and life through his intelligence and strength of character, has something in common with these Hollywood girls is less than an insult to Obama, who has young daughters and clearly loves them; it is an embarrassment to McCain, as it reveals his low view of women. They are dirty jokes to him. Be it a young Chelsea Clinton's awkward adolescent looks, or women being raped by gorillas, he finds the denigration and victimization of women a source of infinite jest. None of this is accidental. It all fits in with that infamous ad. If you wanted to contrast Obama to a dubious celebrity there are so many untalented men who fit the category -- too many to list here -- but McCain chose two feckless, reckless young white women to bring his opponent low by stating that there was little substance to back up Obama's fame and popularity. In making that ad McCain went well beyond his stated intention to show his opponent as an empty suit. It's so easy to see the ad for what it is and read "black man, promiscuous young white women, wink wink." Wouldn't it be splendid if the mainstream press suddenly opened its eyes to that ploy? Continued...

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Obama and My Achy Breaky Heart

by Sherman Yellen

Last week I was quoting the great poet Emily Dickinson to express my unease about the Obama campaign's swing to the right which is now erroneously called the middle. The radical right has been falsely claiming that ours is a conservative country -- forgetting that we were born in revolution and have thrived on revolutionary invention, innovation, the expansion of human rights and the use of talents that cross racial and class barriers. As a sign of how far the right wing has succeeded in creating a new reality, this past Sunday The New York Times Magazine in its cover story anointed Rush Limbaugh a genial voice of America, a good guy disguised as a snarling bully, just an entertainer at heart, a kind of genius rap artist, a seller of right wing political products with a heart of gold and a toilet seat to match. So much for the judgment of the Times and its editors, and the effectiveness of the past years of conservative propaganda.

I hate to join Limbaugh's knee jerk attacks on Obama but I've had some doubts lately, and though reluctant to express them, I've never had a doubt that I could hold back on. What Limbaugh mocks in Obama is what drew me to him, the idealism, and the possibility of his leading America with fresh insights and courageous decisions. I am one among many who saw in Obama a chance for America's moral and economic restoration, and like most folks who give their heart to someone, I don't take easy to disappointment. So I am abandoning Emily Dickinson and going hard core today, quoting the lyrics of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart," a song that has survived the early nineties better than Bill Clinton's reputation as a great politician. Sorry Emily, I love you dearly, but sometimes there is nothing but country music to tell it like it is. I offer a few of its choice lyrics. It's a plea for Barack not to toy with my affections and to stay the Barack who won my heart.

"Oh, you can tell your friends just what a fool I've been

And laugh and joke about me on the phone...

But don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart

I just don't think it'd understand...

You can tell your Ma I've moved to Arkansas

Or you can tell your dog to bite my leg...

But don't tell my heart, my achy breaky heart

I just don't think it'd understand...

Ooo"

Here are a few steps on the road to heartbreak. Obama fudging on FISA, fudging on the Court's gun control strike-down, the faith based charity funding -- no way that it doesn't compromise the separation of church and state. So far Obama seems to be testing the waters, seeing what will work for him in order to gain more independent voters, while still keeping his core beliefs intact. There's some fudging going on here but not yet the world-class flip-flopping such as George W. promising the electorate that he would have nothing to do with nation building.

Flip flopping as we know it today is the exclusive province of John McCain: once anti-torture, now pro torture, once a friend of judicial moderates now the would be appointer of more Roberts/Alito justices, enemy of evangelical bullies, now a man who never met a right wing evangelist he wouldn't hug. He's the undisputed champ of the flip-flop. I am expecting Obama to continue to speak out about the wrongs of torture, the obscenity of the oil profits, and the forlorn and forgotten American worker reeling under NAFTA. I expect him to stand fast on the Bill of Rights and see the Constitution as a living document, not as the Dead Sea Scrolls. I am looking over my left shoulder and I don't like some of what I see calling itself "moderation" because it looks like a losing strategy shaped by experts whose expertise is in knowing how to lose elections.

Of course over my right shoulder is John McCain, a gas bag who in the name of fuel economy has become a wind-bag. Give him presidential power and that arrogant political hack (Keating Five) disguised as a maverick will complete the wreckage of the country that George W. Bush set in motion. Right now the pussycat press seems content to live with its McCain delusions. He is their revered POW and affable guest on Saturday Night Live. So who cares if he has no plans for this economically distraught country? So what if he is clueless? How bad can he be? Plenty! He is more dangerous than Dick Cheney because he wears a smile over his sneer, tells jokes that cover his irrational explosiveness, and carries his ignorance with senatorial pride. He doesn't have a notion as to what he will do to extricate us from the myriad economic and global messes of his predecessors, other than appoint more repressive, right wing judges to the court. What will a McCain Presidency accomplish in its first hundred days? If he sweeps in some additional Republican Congressmen and Senators we will finally have that offshore and Alaskan drilling that will ultimately end up in millions of Chinese and Indian cars that will complete the polluting of a suffocating universe. And of course there will be more tax breaks to stimulate the economy at Cartier and Tiffany? Against such a man there is no choice for me. Obama with all his flaws and his threat to my achy breaky heart keeps my vote. I suppose I'm just a fool for love.

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Contributing writer, Sherman Yellen, screenwriter, playwright, and lyricist, has won two Emmy Awards, first for his drama John Adams, Lawyer in the PBS series The Adams Chronicles, and later for An Early Frost, a groundbreaking drama about AIDS in America. His Beauty and the Beast was nominated for an Emmy and won the Christopher Award. Yellen was nominated for a Tony Award for his book for the Broadway musical, The Rothschilds. Yellen's other plays include Strangers, December Fools and Josephine Tonight! Sherman Yellen received a lifetime achievement award in Arts and Letters from Bard College.
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My Mother: A Nana for Obama

by Sherman Yellen

I can truly say that I was the youngest person in America to vote for FDR in his first term election. When she pulled the lever for Roosevelt I was in my mother’s womb, so I suppose I could be called an intra-utero Democrat. My mother, Lillian Yellen, is long gone now. Had she lived she would be one hundred and five and voting for Obama. She was run down by a reckless driver in Manhattan twenty five years ago as she was bringing some food to a poor, sick woman who was a member of her Hadassah group. That driver jumped the curb while she was waiting for a light to change and took her life. Mother was eighty at the time. We rented the smallest room in the Riverside Chapel for the funeral service knowing that she had outlived most of her friends and family and believing that few would come to the ceremony of a private woman who was not famous. But to our amazement the room soon overflowed with so many people we had never met, and we were obliged to hold the service in the largest room available for the many whose lives she had touched with her wisdom and quiet generosity, the many who came to pay her tribute.The reason for this crowd was simple. Mother cared about the welfare of others on both a personal and a political level, and she did it naturally, graciously. Generosity was her gift, her talent, her life’s work. She simply helped those in need on a daily basis, and her politics were simple: vote for people and programs that would improve the lives of those in need. And since such progressive programs were “good for the Jews” it was an easy decision for her to make.

As a three year old Jewish child who had escaped the pogroms of Russia, she understood oppression, and as an adult who had seen the consequences of the Holocaust she cared deeply about the fate of Israel as a homeland for the survivors. My mother, Lilly, had grown up in great poverty and knew life shattering tragedy early on. As a nine year old child she experienced within a year the loss of her mother, her older sister and brother to the “white death” of tuberculosis when they lived in squalid conditions on the Lower East Side. Her first school teacher was a Miss Emily Stokes, a young African American woman who favored the beautiful motherless Lilly, helping her with her lessons, teaching her the lovely flowing handwriting she used for a lifetime, and giving her a wonderful rag-doll, the only doll my mother would ever own. That personal experience Lilly had of the daughter of a former slave taught my mother to see beyond skin color to the value of the humanity within.

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In Defense of Marriage

by Sherman Yellen

Last week someone asked me as a long married man what I thought of gay marriage. I said I was all for it; it was straight marriage I sometimes have my doubts about. I was joking, but like most jokes there was a kernel of truth in it. With the rate of divorce in this country at a record high level I wonder how the right wing keeps their self-righteous rhetoric going on the sacredness of traditional marriage, and why it feels so threatened by gay people who want the ceremony, the respect, and the legal rights of marriage. The denial of those rights seems outrageous in any country that considers itself a civil society. And there is the embarrassing fact that Republican John McCain, Libertarian Bob Barr, and half the Republicans and Democrats in Congress are divorced or serial adulterers, not counting those defenders of marriage who are lusting after Senate pages, and engaging in toilet booth toe tickles. Yes, I do believe in defending marriage but not by setting up walls of discriminatory law to prevent others from enjoying its privileges, its joys, and its struggles.

A few years back when many people mocked or condemned Hillary Clinton for staying married to Bill after the Monica mess, I thought it was among her bravest decisions. She would not let scandal or humiliation, a relentlessly prurient press, or a husband who was half a genius and half a jerk force her to end a marriage that for all its flaws meant a great deal to her and to her daughter. There was a better history to that marriage that she was not going to toss out to satisfy her critics during the impeachment. Marriage can be a litmus test for how a person might govern. Bill’s screw up within his marriage was not totally disconnected to some of his bad Presidential decisions, including his pardon of Mark Rich, and his embrace of NAFTA; suggesting immediate gratification without a thought of the consequences to his own reputation or to the nation’s workers.

I might even draw some political conclusions from the easy yet spirited and loving marriage of Michelle and Barak Obama, suggesting that he would be a leader who would respond to the country’s needs in a thoughtful and caring way:

Then look at the Bush marriage. Laura and George existing in separate worlds even as they inhabit the same space; the sad disconnect of a cheerful looking couple who have only one thing in common, an inability to face the facts: George, in his constant losing battle with reality, Laura smiling her ladylike library smile from one denial to another denial about the toxic consequences of her husband’s presidency. I might even contrast Obama with John McCain, whose marital history shows a streak of cruel opportunism, suggesting a man who will always abandon his principles and the welfare of the disadvantaged, as he abandoned his first disadvantaged wife when it proved expedient.

Having said that I have to step back a little for nobody, and that includes this writer, has the right to pass too harsh a judgment on other people’s loves and marriages, which doesn’t mean that I don’t do so from time to time. What I do know is that marriage is occasionally an arrangement, sometimes a marvel, often a mess, and always a mystery. I have observed that love ties us up in its amazing contradictions and confusions, and never more so than in a marriage.

Falling Cranes and New York’s Growing Pains

by Sherman Yellen

The dangerous hypocrisy of overbuilding in Bloomberg’s New York.

It happened again. A crane has fallen in New York City, killing a construction worker, wrecking an apartment building nearby, terrifying and disrupting the lives of nearby residents who must scramble about looking for someplace to stay, find their pets, try to recover their precious possessions, and hear the same blather from the current city administration. Tighter restrictions, more inspections will be called for.

This same event occurred a short while ago a few blocks down from Yorkville in the Beekman Place section of the city. And it will happen again and again because it is now a familiar part of Mayor Bloomberg’s New York where a crane hangs dangerously over the world below every few blocks. Indeed, it is a direct result of the policies in place in the city. Build! Build! And build more until they have wiped out the sky altogether. This is the way it is in Hedge Fund Heaven – a/k/a New York City.

The secret of living in this New York is to live in a protected area of historic brownstones and town houses such as the Mayor lives in; a place which cannot be taken down to be rebuilt as a monster residential building; a secret that now requires the possession of several million, no, possibly several billion dollars.

The trick for the rest of us is not to get killed or driven from our homes by the reckless overbuilding that has overtaken New York since Bloomberg became Mayor, which coincided with the great building bubble here and elsewhere. An impotent, toothless, realty based (not reality based) Landmark Commission has done little to protect the environmental, esthetic, or plain safety of the city and its citizens. A building inspection commission designed to encourage building and turn a blind eye to infractions in existing laws is embedded into the culture of the city.

Real estate is the true religion of New York and it requires constant devotion by its adherents, which means, put up yet another tower next to another tower, ad infinitum. Sure, I know that real estate is a vital part of our tax base. But this does not mean that it cannot be challenged, or replaced by other forms of revenue.

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