Jackie Mason and Raoul Lionel Felder
In all of the thousands of photographs of Hillary on the campaign trail she always appears wearing trousers - not even one photograph with her wearing a skirt. Not a peep on the subject from any commentator or member of the media. Yet, if on a particularly steamy day campaigning in Florida or Georgia, Senator McCain wore a skirt, it would be the major story on every media outlet. Is this fair?
There was, rightfully, outrage when an MSNBC commentator referred to Mrs. Clinton as “pimping” out her daughter. The comment was disgusting beyond disgusting, but the point attempted to be made, while foul in its expression, might be valid in its underlying concept. The exploitive use of a particular person in a way where that individual’s personae is connected to a cause when the person’s views or expertise is unilluminating or irrelevant on the issues, is worthy of note, in an appropriate manner (as opposed to what was done on MSNBC). Chelsea Clinton was paraded about not because of anything she could offer by way of sagacity in foreign or domestic affairs. Let us be frank: she was on the tour because it pointed out Hillary’s non-robotic side – that she also is a mother – something that hopefully would resonate with other mothers.
But to be fair: They all do this. The Edwards campaign exploited Mrs. Edwards’ cancer. President Bush had his half-Latino Spanish-speaking nephew working his campaign in areas where his speaking Spanish and his ethnicity would help him. Celebrity endorsements are just another – perhaps more remote – manifestation of this same sort of campaign strategy.
All of this is fair game for comment IF the commentary is couched in appropriate and non-offensive language. Worse would be a paralyzing fear that frightens us into silence – even when it involves legitimate observations.
Obama has run a brilliant campaign, is a mesmerizing speaker, and has captured the yearnings and hopes of millions of people. He has transcended, in his appeal, race, ethnicity, age and sex. But the fact is that he is experienced in running no enterprise and yet seeks to run the largest enterprise in the world. He is virtually inexperienced in government, domestic and certainly foreign policy – all of which should be at the heart of any president’s expertise – and yet the same could really be said of Lincoln, and to some degree Franklin Roosevelt. But somewhere, somehow, what Churchill referred to as “a little mouse of thought” must be considered: That is, if Obama were white, given his lack of experience, he would not be in the lead for his party’s nomination for President of the United States.
Commentators should have the intellectual honesty to note this, as well as the fact that it might be, in effect, a good thing. His candidacy, with all of his lack of experience stands as a stark contrast and home for those people who are fed up, or, to be charitable, disenchanted with Washington’s business-as-usual, and the usual group of subjects simply playing musical chairs in the running of this country. Credit must also be given him for not claiming experience when it does not really exist – which is precisely what Hillary Clinton has done. Her experience basically has been to sleep with the President (hardly a unique claim – at least for females under eighty years of age in the Washington area), become an enabler for the President to carry on with his extra-marital activities and, as all first ladies, arrange for the catering of State dinners – hardly fitting the job description for a President.
Nobody mentions the fact that senators, of both parties run for president and ask us for our support, money, effort and loyalty. But yet these same senators do not have enough faith in their own cause to quit their day job and leave the senate. Putting aside the fact that if they are running for president, they cannot put in full time to do their jobs in the Senate (for which we pay them), why should we have faith in them and give them our money when they hedge their bets? Would it not make more sense to say to them, “When you show me you believe in yourself and your cause to the extent you give up your other job, then we will support you”? Is there any business where you can say to your boss, “Keep paying me my full salary for two years while I spend my time looking for another job”?
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
Give Me Halloween
By Raoul Felder
Oh, what’s love got to do, got to do with it,
What’s love but a second-hand emotion.
Tina Turner
Valentine’s Day is about romantic love: gushing, vibrant, tender, heartbreaking, heart pounding, pulse quickening, knee weakening, lump-in-your-throat-can’t-eat-or-sleep love. If you really want to know about love, ask me. I am a divorce lawyer.
Putting aside the kind of love that results from a train wreck of crashing hormones (best confined to the backseats of Chevrolets), and the purest of loves – familial, parental or grandparental – the love they sell the cards about, is the product of habit or fear – or both.
Habit: Human beings follow Newton’s First Law:
Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.
In Sheldon Harnick’s lyric, Tevya asks Goldie:
Do you love me?
Goldie: Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes,
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house,
Given you children, milked the cow…
For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him,
Fought him, starved with him,
Twenty-five years, my bed is his,
If that’s not love, what is?
No less an authority on the subject than I, Jackie Mason points out that the only two questions answered by a number are about marriage or prison sentences (some might arguably make a connection between the two). He points out that if you ask a man if he liked a steak, or a particular movie, he will not hesitate to answer “Yes” or “No”. Ask the same man if he is happily married, and the likely answer is a shrug of the shoulders and “25 years.”
Fear of: Being alone, dying alone, being able to get the laundry done, bringing up the children, poverty, fear itself.
There are things worse than being old and alone: To be old together, filled with hate, or worse, indifference – two sexless lumps, staring across the truce line of a morning breakfast table waiting for the other to die, or having to attend a dribbling, feeble and ruined carcass of a memory.
The institutionalization of romantic love is, of course, marriage — but marriage in America is a failed institution. The usual statistic is one out of three marriages end in divorce. But if you add the married couples who live apart (for which there are no reliable statistics), and those slugging it out in court (who have not yet become statistics), and the really big Number: People who are simply unhappy, but stay together “for the children” or for economic reasons, “We two shall be lapt together in a five-percent exchequer bond.” (Eliot), the relevant number – the marriage failure rate – must be in excess of 50%. There is no product in the world (except perhaps commercial Xerox machines) that have a 50% breakdown rate and are still in business.
The underlying problem may be that monogamy is a learned societal trout. Out of 4,000 mammalian species, only a handful are monogamous. These include beavers and a couple of other rodents – hardly desirable bedmates.
Valentine’s Day, humbug! Give me a holiday with real meaning, like Halloween.
Oh, what’s love got to do, got to do with it,
What’s love but a second-hand emotion.
Tina Turner
Valentine’s Day is about romantic love: gushing, vibrant, tender, heartbreaking, heart pounding, pulse quickening, knee weakening, lump-in-your-throat-can’t-eat-or-sleep love. If you really want to know about love, ask me. I am a divorce lawyer.
Putting aside the kind of love that results from a train wreck of crashing hormones (best confined to the backseats of Chevrolets), and the purest of loves – familial, parental or grandparental – the love they sell the cards about, is the product of habit or fear – or both.
Habit: Human beings follow Newton’s First Law:
Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.
In Sheldon Harnick’s lyric, Tevya asks Goldie:
Do you love me?
Goldie: Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I’ve washed your clothes,
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house,
Given you children, milked the cow…
For twenty-five years I’ve lived with him,
Fought him, starved with him,
Twenty-five years, my bed is his,
If that’s not love, what is?
No less an authority on the subject than I, Jackie Mason points out that the only two questions answered by a number are about marriage or prison sentences (some might arguably make a connection between the two). He points out that if you ask a man if he liked a steak, or a particular movie, he will not hesitate to answer “Yes” or “No”. Ask the same man if he is happily married, and the likely answer is a shrug of the shoulders and “25 years.”
Fear of: Being alone, dying alone, being able to get the laundry done, bringing up the children, poverty, fear itself.
There are things worse than being old and alone: To be old together, filled with hate, or worse, indifference – two sexless lumps, staring across the truce line of a morning breakfast table waiting for the other to die, or having to attend a dribbling, feeble and ruined carcass of a memory.
The institutionalization of romantic love is, of course, marriage — but marriage in America is a failed institution. The usual statistic is one out of three marriages end in divorce. But if you add the married couples who live apart (for which there are no reliable statistics), and those slugging it out in court (who have not yet become statistics), and the really big Number: People who are simply unhappy, but stay together “for the children” or for economic reasons, “We two shall be lapt together in a five-percent exchequer bond.” (Eliot), the relevant number – the marriage failure rate – must be in excess of 50%. There is no product in the world (except perhaps commercial Xerox machines) that have a 50% breakdown rate and are still in business.
The underlying problem may be that monogamy is a learned societal trout. Out of 4,000 mammalian species, only a handful are monogamous. These include beavers and a couple of other rodents – hardly desirable bedmates.
Valentine’s Day, humbug! Give me a holiday with real meaning, like Halloween.
Monday, February 4, 2008
CAMELOT OR A CESSPOOL?
Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder
The Kennedys recently endorsed Barack Obama, and Teddy Kennedy drew a parallel with President Kennedy – a vision of a new Camelot rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the Bush Administration. Either he was addressing the largest group of amnesiacs ever gathered in one place in history or the media and much of America has been eating funny mushrooms and is in the throes of a mass delusion.
Back to reality: The late President Kennedy bears responsibility for the initiation of one of the bleakest episodes in modern American history – the Vietnamese War. Only because Khrushchev had more common sense than he, did we avoid an enormous catastrophe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Russians' secret files were opened, we learned (among other bits of knowledge, such as the fact that the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian atomic spies) that there were functioning, deployed, short- and mid-range atomic missiles in Cuba. If we ever, as threatened, tried to land troops directly after the Bay of Pigs debacle on Cuban shores, our troops would have been slaughtered – one missile, thousands of Americans annihilated. This is all not to mention that the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was authorized by President Kennedy himself, and then he left the Cuban patriots out to dry by withholding promised air support.
Many of Kennedy's private and cabinet sessions were secretly recorded; and many years later, one of these recordings from the time of the Bay of Pigs episode reveals Kennedy musing that for a President to go down in history he has to have a war. "Where would Lincoln be without the Civil War?" A cynic might therefore suggest that Kennedy's trip to the brink of a nuclear holocaust was not the result of his inexperience but, rather, it had a more selfish origin. On the domestic front, he accomplished little, and his promises had to be delivered by President Johnson. He did, however, inaugurate the White House revolving door policy as far as women were concerned, and even in this area it needed a subsequent President (Clinton) to bring it to a point of perfection.
The other members of the Kennedy bunch are also hardly poster boys for responsible government – or even human beings. The liberals hug Robert Kennedy's memory, but choose not to remember that he personally authorized the wiretaps on Dr. Martin Luther King. He also carried on the President's policies; and, as in many families, there were traditions such as passing down clothing from an older to a younger child – only they did this with women. (The most well known of these involved the late Marilyn Monroe.) After the President was through with her, he passed her down to Bobby. Ultimately, as we all know, the poor woman eventually killed herself.
There are, of course, the gaggle of Kennedy relatives who have been arrested and charged with everything from drunk driving, to rape, and even murder. This, of course, brings us to the present Bloviator-in-Chief, Teddy Kennedy. It would be easy to write him off as another senatorial windbag. But he bears a distinction born by no other Senator: He has killed someone – and not while serving as a member of the armed forces. After a drunken party, he drove off a bridge and left his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, alone to drown to death, trapped in his car.
All of this makes us wonder at the judgment of Mr. Obama, or the American public. Camelot, once the fairytale aspect is put aside, is as attractive as a cesspool – and may even smell a lot worse.
The Kennedys recently endorsed Barack Obama, and Teddy Kennedy drew a parallel with President Kennedy – a vision of a new Camelot rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the Bush Administration. Either he was addressing the largest group of amnesiacs ever gathered in one place in history or the media and much of America has been eating funny mushrooms and is in the throes of a mass delusion.
Back to reality: The late President Kennedy bears responsibility for the initiation of one of the bleakest episodes in modern American history – the Vietnamese War. Only because Khrushchev had more common sense than he, did we avoid an enormous catastrophe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Russians' secret files were opened, we learned (among other bits of knowledge, such as the fact that the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian atomic spies) that there were functioning, deployed, short- and mid-range atomic missiles in Cuba. If we ever, as threatened, tried to land troops directly after the Bay of Pigs debacle on Cuban shores, our troops would have been slaughtered – one missile, thousands of Americans annihilated. This is all not to mention that the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs was authorized by President Kennedy himself, and then he left the Cuban patriots out to dry by withholding promised air support.
Many of Kennedy's private and cabinet sessions were secretly recorded; and many years later, one of these recordings from the time of the Bay of Pigs episode reveals Kennedy musing that for a President to go down in history he has to have a war. "Where would Lincoln be without the Civil War?" A cynic might therefore suggest that Kennedy's trip to the brink of a nuclear holocaust was not the result of his inexperience but, rather, it had a more selfish origin. On the domestic front, he accomplished little, and his promises had to be delivered by President Johnson. He did, however, inaugurate the White House revolving door policy as far as women were concerned, and even in this area it needed a subsequent President (Clinton) to bring it to a point of perfection.
The other members of the Kennedy bunch are also hardly poster boys for responsible government – or even human beings. The liberals hug Robert Kennedy's memory, but choose not to remember that he personally authorized the wiretaps on Dr. Martin Luther King. He also carried on the President's policies; and, as in many families, there were traditions such as passing down clothing from an older to a younger child – only they did this with women. (The most well known of these involved the late Marilyn Monroe.) After the President was through with her, he passed her down to Bobby. Ultimately, as we all know, the poor woman eventually killed herself.
There are, of course, the gaggle of Kennedy relatives who have been arrested and charged with everything from drunk driving, to rape, and even murder. This, of course, brings us to the present Bloviator-in-Chief, Teddy Kennedy. It would be easy to write him off as another senatorial windbag. But he bears a distinction born by no other Senator: He has killed someone – and not while serving as a member of the armed forces. After a drunken party, he drove off a bridge and left his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, alone to drown to death, trapped in his car.
All of this makes us wonder at the judgment of Mr. Obama, or the American public. Camelot, once the fairytale aspect is put aside, is as attractive as a cesspool – and may even smell a lot worse.
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