NOTIONS OF SURREALISM

“Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.” 
― Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind: And Other Aphorisms

When I was a lad in high school, bereft of many friends, certainly no popularity contest participant or winner, I found my solace not in my studies, but in reading encyclopedic reams of science fiction.   All the greats—Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, Dick, and others too numerous to mention.  This did not help my academic achievements, which was only to graduate.   I had few dates, no girlfriend only friends who were girls, many of whom probably were as lonely as I was.

Books transported me from my 1950s home to other worlds, to scientific discoveries, that could then only be counted as imaginary fantasies:   Missions to Mars,  spaceships that could go at warp speed or bend the space time continuum to reach worlds the distance of which could only be measured in light-years. My humdrum, stultified, early teen years, were wondrously engaged by this pastime.   I did not play many sports in high school, because my athletic genes were sparse, I received no parental encouragement, and books were just there for the taking. 25c paperbacks, library books, books borrowed from friends allowing me to escape my father’s obsession with the holocaust and his extended absence from my life.

Many of the films of today and even the 1970s saw their genesis in the imaginations of those 1950s novels.

And yes, this is going somewhere.

In those days, people thought the devices we now enjoy were products of someone’s hyperkinetic imagination, thinking that phones and watches that were essentially computers were products of pure fantasy.  People worked in factories, enjoyed the miracle of a tiny black and white television screen and even air conditioning that might filter out the radioactive fallout from a Soviet nuclear blast.   During mandatory air raid drills we shuddered under wooden desks at school as if they would shelter us from kilotons of hydrogen bombs.  I served in the ground observer corps, stationed in a ramshackle building on the 71^st street beach, where diagrams of Soviet airplanes festooned the walls.  We pored over the latest books of Russian aircraft and watched our own H-Bomb tests annihilate Pacific atolls, their mushroom clouds rising in the atmosphere, nightmarish images of what could happen to us. Peering over the horizon with our binoculars, we were certain that  the Russians were clearly coming to Miami Beach.

Red baiters such as Joseph McCarthy and the house un-American activities committee "protected" us from the likes of Hollywood fellow travelers and “pinkos,” as my uncle, a rich 7^th avenue dress manufacturer, used to call them.   Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Jews, were executed as spies, after being represented by Jewish lawyers, prosecuted by a Jewish lawyer, and sentenced to death by a Jewish judge.  They were the first spies to be executed in peacetime by the United States.   Protests of the ultimate price they were doomed to pay manifested itself all over our country, and books were written about the injustice of the penalty.  Hysteria, paranoia and fear permeated our lives.  Protesters marched in Washington DC over the impending executions at Sing-Sing.   Demagogues such as Roy Cohen and Joseph McCarthy terrorized ordinary citizens with their fear mongering, implicating innocents as communists, and destroying the lives of screenwriters, actors and artists, as well as many other citizens.

Fast forward to a world where much of the scientific imaginations of the past have come true. 

But politically the same demagoguery is rampant in the Presidential campaign of 2016.   With minds shaped by an Orwellian dystopic quest for power, the Republican political candidates  seem no different than their earlier power-hungry prototypes.  Trumpotopia, overtaking the panicked Republican establishment seems a surreal LSD-invoked hallucination of a psychedelic Woodstockian rock concert gone wild—a hodgepodge of stream of consciousness political huckster who has bamboozled “low information” voters into believing that America will be made “great again” by his Manichean, narcissistic, bombastic ramblings and who has actually appeared as an apocalyptic figure in a Joseph Conrad novel.   Colonel Kurtz lives.  He lives thanks to a corrupt, anachronistic political system infested by unlimited funds and super PACs on both sides of the aisle.  But Republicans have excelled at the game, powered by corporate greed and a Supreme Court rationalizing that those same corporations are individuals who can buy elections.  And no, I am not supporting Bernie.

This nightmare scenario has produced a zombie Dracula, coming to “take our country back.”  The adoring masses of angry, disaffected white voters are massing in throngs to the demagogic drumbeat of isolationism, fear and despair.   They cheer in unison at political rallies, reminiscent of Munich in 1939, the mad ravings of a man who people did not take seriously, and later plunging the world into an abyss.

All this is so hard to believe.  President Obama, an analytical intellectual, has done his part to keep us from war, invested in infrastructure, clean energy, a deal keeping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, the treaty agreed to by a host of other nations, and who has initiated health care for 30 million Americans who had none and has conducted himself with class and dignity, besides being the first African-American President and a credit to his race.  Even after enduring the slings and arrows of what can only be called racism from the right.

It all makes no sense.

Running for Mayor of Miami Beach, or How I Stopped Worrying and Love the People

Malefactors of great wealth

“. . . [these men] combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization.”

Theodore Roosevelt 1907

The  Miami Beach campaign is over. 11,000 of 48,000 registered voters have spoken, and Mayor Levine got over 6000 of those votes, and we got under 4000.  Encouraged by activists into the lions den, I emerged chastened, more humble, yet unbowed.  I realized some crucial mistakes, sorely needed debate preparation, and a media coach.  The debate coaching should have included being able to meet Philip Levine's spiffy song and dance routine, because I emerged with the knowledge that the political debate in this election, consisted of dumbed-down discourse, platitudes, non-existent "accomplishments," and a non-stop retinue of mailers, pamphlets, banners, advertisements and slick videos of Mayor Levine descending from the heavens, with a voice over Hollywood, echo-chamber narrator, his deep tones preparing the Mayor for the next Papal beautification.  "Mayor Philip Levine," it droned.

So the Mayor won, his great fortune deployed against me to protect his vested interest in the financial or political reward to be gained by the continued unfettered redevelopment of Miami Beach.  Along the way, I had the good fortune to meet many interesting, dedicated people, who sincerely had the city's best interests at the center of their idealism.  I wish to personally thank Daniel Ciraldo, Peter Erlich, Alex Fernandez, Randall Hilliard, Charles Urstadt, Clare McCord, Tonya Bhatt and last but not least, my faithful, loving wife Catherine who supported me throughout this entire speed-dating effort.

The editorial board of the Miami Herald, fecklessly endorsed Mayor Levine's candidacy as one that would, through "flashy TV ads” carve a more paradisiacal Miami Beach, a city that would inevitably succumb to his consolidation of power, his "vision" for its betterment.  They hoped for his ethical rehabilitation as well as less arrogance during his second term.  They confided to a colleague that I was "flat" in my presentation to them, the crux of which they affirmed in an intellectually dishonest editorial, praising me, questioning my experience (despite my twelve years of service) and toughness and endorsed the Mayor.  There followed in succeeding days, simply a printed list of "names only" endorsements   preceding the election.  People carried that list into the booth.  They did not think.  They did not read. Ten percent of the vote probably gone in a puff of editorial smoke, cavalierly brushing aside the PAC, the shakedowns and the ethical issues that should have mattered to good journalists.  Let's not even mention the early blackmail attempt reported to the MBPD, which later took only perfunctory steps to identify the perpetrator, despite a video identification by my campaign worker and a clear bank security photo of the messenger who dropped it off.

The mayor even attempted to have elected a intellectual dwarf who, sitting on the commission would have ensured an even more bullet-proof majority (he probably has one anyway). 

It might, however, be despoiled by a hard working candidate who was elected, despite the late endorsements of her opponents expressing fealty to the Mayor's slate.

The city charter is now effectively abrogated.  Miami Beach will be here for "hundreds of years," Mayor Levine has said.  After all, he sold his business for $300 million, so it must be true.  And he is even featured in an article in this month's "Vanity Fair."

Perhaps Mayor Levine is correct.  The city needs a Napoleon.  Too many pesky gadflies, tree-huggers, preservationists, sea level rise believers, self-appointed retired lawyers who appear at city commission meetings and "scream," the Mayor said, ever magnanimous, in victory.  Churchill needn't worry. The government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich--a true plutocracy backed by deep pocketed Russian oligarchs, constructing towers for hedge fund managers and ejecting the middle class. A town perhaps doomed to suffer the fate of looking like another gleaming, skyscrapered, hedge-fund Xanadu, a characterless zombie-like towered, Sunny Isles Beach-like entity where people believe that the sine qua non of status  involves an elevator ride to one's apartment in your Porsche 911 turbo.

Stay tuned for more demolitions of historic homes on places like Star Island, the Venetian causeway,

and on North Bay Road.  Keep watching the other parts of our city as big block white houses replace the buildings of mid-century Miami Beach as bulldozers roam with impunity carrying demolition orders.

December is my last month after 12 years of service on two city boards and my last month as chairman of the Historic Preservation Board following six years of service there. I hope against hope that the city commission appoints people of the same quality with whom I had the privilege to serve.  Insightful and aesthetically sensitive, we monitored almost 700 projects, most of which helped Miami Beach maintain its status as a predominant world destination.

I felt that I had an obligation to the dedicated community activists who so ardently supported me and who engaged an army of volunteers to fight a gigantically funded city political machine, headed by a twenty-first century Boss Tweed, despite whom, we defeated a major thrust into the treasured Ocean Terrace historic district.  Keep fighting folks, be on guard, be vigilant and protect our precious city, our young city, only a 100-years-old fragile lady, now more vulnerable than ever.

                                      *                      *                    *

We'll always have Paris.

I apologize for the absence of this blog since May.  Running for office has its constraints, and some of them include not offending anyone.  Those fetters are now removed. 

Our local problems seem minuscule compared to the debate now surfacing in the wake of the Paris attacks by bloodthirsty, mayhem-spreading Islamist terrorists, their twisted version of a religious ethos compromising the normally safe feelings we feel in major Western cities.  This climate where the practitioners of Islam refuse to speak out against the atrocities, is underwritten by a Saudi Arabia that practices the same brand of violence, subjugation of women, and religious intolerance, subsidizing a plethora of Mosques and radical Imams who preach hatred of the west.  Our values are perverse, our women are prostitutes and for this, we deserve to die grisly deaths while sitting in Restaurants or attending a rock concert.

Here politicians scramble to sound tough, prescribing remedies, such as limiting war-torn refugees from entering the states, and recommending (Donald Trump) that all Muslims be "registered."

Talk of this is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Police patrol the center of New York City, Paris, and London, armed to the teeth with submachine guns and riot gear, a Gestapo look and security panic mode in tow.  And even here in Miami Beach, going to the movies even seems a bit risky, because targets here are softer than most places.  Metal detectors in theaters cannot be too distant from now.

Since I last wrote about the Republican candidates, they seem to have entered a new level of craziness.

Dr. Carson thinks that women should bear children of rape and incest, and that Jews would have shut down the Whermacht if they had been packing heat.  Never mind that the mighty German Army shunted aside the armies of France and Belgium and almost destroyed the British army at Dunkirque, except for the miraculous evacuation.  But Jews in the small villages, armed with handguns could have stopped it all.  Only Christians should be President, he says.  Really?  Does the Constitution mention that?

The Donald would build a "beautiful" wall on the Mexican boarder and deport 11 million aliens and their children, whether born here or not, violating the constitution.  He does not mention that immigration from Mexico is negative now, so the wall would keep them in, not out.

I could go on with this nonsense.  But I will stop for now.

Great to be back!

Republicans on the March, Democrats, and a Socialist, too. Get ready America.

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.

H.L. Mencken

So now the race for the White House has begun.   A Kentucky Derby field, eventually diminishing to a Preakness and a Belmont horse race of Republican politicians all of whom have a new prescription of their vision for the future, of course tempered by political expediency, PAC money and a host of other issues, not the least of which should be how they will govern.  But the real issues reaching the American public will really be the distillation of focus groups, advertising slogans, negative ads, and last but not least the torrent of money from the Koch Brothers, and Sheldon Adelson,  who are, shall we speculate, interested in advancing their bottom line through bought politicians (through unlimited campaign contributions.)

All this a result of the disastrous Citizen’s United case, conservative Republicans justifying it all by claiming that it has unleashed millions to the Unions thereby balancing the equation.   In fact, it has not.  The flood of PAC and super PAC money has corrupted the system, lengthened and polarized  gullible voters with a flood of advertising from both sides of the aisle, 95% of which has no substance.

On top of all that, we have the warmonger class, the chicken hawks, here at home asserting that Iran should be bombed now and that if we do not bomb them now, we will be faced with a nuclear armed Iran, itching to explode the streets of Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem—to wipe out the Jewish State, interposing an Armageddon, an existential threat to the entire world.   John McCain and Lindsey Graham, among others are beating the drums as loudly as they can.   And, of course, denouncing any deal as another Munich, if you want to buy the argument of the false equivalence of Iran being another Nazi Germany.

CNN is already chomping at the bit, filling its 24 hour news cycle with repetitive irrelevancies such as Hillary’s hair color and the utterances of crazy people like Ted Cruz, who, I am assured by people who knew him at Princeton, was a brilliant debater.   He had, supposedly, the ability to take a side in an argument, it did not matter which, and argue the other side into submission.   Except he often outsmarted himself and came in second.   I hope, of course, that he has not the ability to fool most voters who should see through his creepy façade.  He even looks like Joseph McCarthy.

As I have written previously, the American Electoral system is a creaking remnant of the 19^th century, except it was better then, because party bosses picked the candidates, and we were spared two years of primaries, talking heads and assorted other imbeciles who have no idea where it is all going, but sit on pundit panels prognosticating and picking out who will prevail.

Rand Paul, for example, has now moved from being a libertarian isolationist to a semi-hawkish statesman wannabe.   This past week he sat with a bunch of Orthodox lunatics from Brooklyn, possibly telling them he is actually a member of the IDF and the Mossad, and also arguing at the same time that it was a mistake to take out Saddam Hussein and Mummar Quadafi.  I am not making this up.  This is not an acceptable position to the conservative base, but presumably he is already thinking about the general election.

Mike Huckabee is campaigning on his God and Jesus platform, clearly believing that the rapture is on its merry way, and that Jesus will return to the holy land and save Jews, who, incidentally will not qualify for heaven without converting to the true faith. 

Jeb Bush, trying to overcome the baggage of his brother’s destruction of Middle Eastern power balances, and the invasion of Iraq on WMDs that did not exist, proclaiming "mission accomplished," is not quite sure which path to choose.  He says his brother was a good President, but he also is stuck with the mess W. made, having to overcome the production  of a lot of maimed and disabled Americans who have families that do not want another war at a cost of another three trillion dollars that might be better spent repairing our 19th century infrastructure. In addition, the science challenged, religiosity litmus test position of his brother’s administration in the appointments at the NIH the CDC and other government scientific agencies of religious sycophants does not help big brother (no pun intended) to convince Americans that another Bush is suitable for office.    Tragically, though, he is the best the Republicans have.   

Chris Christie, an arrogant, pompous, scandal encased leviathan of political ambition, does not seem to be made of Presidential timber, an office that requires a temperate, even well-ordered ability to  relate to the voter.  Not one that is inherently abrasive, who tells people to "shut up" if they happen to inquire about a position or even a personal family issue.  Or, not to mention, a bridge scandal and political revenge baked into his obnoxious persona.  And now, the kicker, his three staff members who have been indicted yesterday over the George Washington Bridge scandal, and may yet implicate him as a vengeful, retribution seeking dude who very well knew what was happening or at least created an atmosphere that allowed it to happen.   Good riddance.

Scott Walker, who enraged working people for shutting down protests for a living wage, a man who disparaged the teachers union and other elements of Wisconsin society to advance his right wing political agenda.  He mentions nothing about income inequality or that the top 1% now control 90% of the wealth.  

Rick Santorum, a religious zealot, who does not understand the secular trend of American 21st century life, is considering another run, but he is yesterday’s news, thank goodness.  He thinks women should stay home and bear children, not much else.  He is a latter day Christian ayatollah and pretty stupid at that.  His understanding of the new demographic of America is staggeringly ignorant.

Rick Perry thinks that there is a conspiracy to take away everyone's  AK-47 assault rifles and is "studying up on Foreign Policy."  Perhaps this time he will  remember which country is which and which government department he will abolish.  It certainly will not be the Defense Department.

And let us not forget the Donald, who this week blamed the Baltimore riots on the President, referring to him as African-American, but in a demeaning context.   Can one imagine Trump as president “if he decides to run?”   He has a fix for the Baltimore situation, but does not say what.  Presumably he will unleash his concierges, headwaiters and croupiers to calm down the looters and rioters, when he emerges from his solid gold apartment on 5^th avenue, leading his legions.  I hope they are at least his Miss Universe contestants.

Last but not least, there is Marco Rubio, a panderer who will say anything to get elected.  The thought of him becoming President is frightening. He talks about 21^st century ideas, but is firmly stuck in the 1960s.  Gay marriage? No.   A woman’s right to choose? No.  Religion in the schools? Yes.   Immigration reform? Maybe.  Trickle down economics that have not worked?  Yes, for sure.  Repeal Obama care? Yes.   Any admission on the administration's progress on unemployment? No.  Any admission that the Auto industry was saved?  No.  Any acceptance of climate change as a threat to future generations, or that his home state Florida may soon be under water? "I am not a scientist.." Well what about the 99% of climate scientists say so?  "I am not a scientist, so I do not know."  How about is your steak cooked enough?   "I am not a chef." 

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, a socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, but is an independent, seeking the Democratic nomination.  Bernie, you are seeking the Democratic nomination, are you a Democrat? "No, I am an independent."   Bernie, you need to be a party member if you want to win the nomination.   If you want to win the lottery, buy a ticket.

Hillary and Bill are going to make a fine President and First Gentleman if they can overcome their integrity issues.  Whitewater, Benghazi, and now we have the email “scandal.”    I do not think they will make Mount Rushmore, but they may be the best choice we have.  At least they have some ideas that might make the country functional, or semi-functional, depending upon one's point of view.

Auschwitz 70 years After

              

            Prisoners were forced by the Nazi Guards to stand before the gallows and watch as a child hung from a noose, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes.  And we had to look him full in the face.  He was still alive when I passed in front of him...

Behind me, I heard the same man asking,

"Where is God now?"   And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He?  Here He is--He is hanging here on the gallows."

Elie Wiesel

                              Growing up with a secondary survivor.

            My father, Bernard Wieder, 18, arrived in America in 1923 with big plans to bring his entire family here from the same small Hungarian town, Maramoros Sighet, where Elie Wiesel was born.  He worked in Miami Beach as a busboy and then as a waiter in 1923 at the Nemo hotel in the winters and gambled at the dog track and horse tracks. He bought some striped pants and promoted himself to headwater.   Miami Beach had only two policemen then and one of them was let go in the summer.  "Nothing for the other one to do." he said wistfully. Miami Beach extended no further north than 5th Street.  He met my mother, who was vacationing with her mother, in the 1930s at the Miami Beach Kennel Club on 1st Street.   Her family did not like him, because he was not formally educated.   He was self-educated, though, saying that he would read the New York Times, not the Forward when he first arrived to America "to learn English."  He moved easily between Miami Beach and New York, where he had various jobs, eventually becoming a successful hotel owner in Sharon Springs, Lake Mahopac, as well as in Miami Beach.

But I do not want to get ahead of myself.  

The US Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924, announcing "Jews Keep Out" a year after my father arrived at Ellis Island.  Dad had 6 brothers and sisters, conscientiously sending insulin to his diabetic father, until September 1939, when the war erupted with Hitler's panzers crushing Poland.  As it happened, Dad had married my mother in November 1938, planning to take her to Hungary to meet his parents.  Of course, that never happened.  All his family perished except two younger sisters who managed to survive Auschwitz.  They arrived in New York in 1946, and built lives for themselves, living in Brooklyn until they died in the 1990s. 

How that happened is a story of courage.

           
            In 1948, my father had returned to Miami Beach to live and became active here, participating in the construction of the louche Shore Club Hotel in 1950. I was an 8-year-old, swimming in the pool when the police raided the cabanas housing bookies in green eyeshades, who had always given me candies.  Banks of black telephones lined the tables. "Here kid, take this chocolate," they said, semi-annoyed that I was distracting them from their calls.  They knew I was the owner's son.  Dad was partnered with another much wealthier man, whose also 8-year-old daughter was my swimming playmate.  Her name was Priscilla.  We lived two blocks away, in an post-war modern two-story apartment house, and during the hurricane of 1950 a two-by-four board crashed through the window almost killing my sister, aged 3 or me.   I screamed, "Mommy! Mommy!," running in terror to her room.  Mom was an optimistic stoic, extremely comforting.

            My father was involved until the early 70’s in many Miami Beach iconic hotels, including the Martinique, which he sold in 1974.  My father had completely transitioned in post-war America to the hotel business, after working in Long Island City at the Sperry plant making Norden bombsights during the war and also working as a dress salesman for my mother's brother, a successful 7th avenue dress manufacturer and hotel owner who was connected to people, some of whom were characters of Damon Runyonesque proportions, later appearing before the Kefauver committee investigating the rackets in New York City.  One individual, particularly influential, was instrumental in helping my father achieve his goals of getting his sisters to America.  He personally knew congressmen and that was what Dad needed for his mission of mercy.   Mr. Al Cobb (name changed) had taken the 5^th amendment a hundred times when called to testify before the Kefauver committee.  If you wanted to move a dress out of your stitching factory, you had to use his trucking company, its tentacles spread all over the garment district.

            It was through this connection that Dad was able to circumnavigate the American anti-Semitic immigration barriers to allow his sisters and 21 others from his home town entry into the United States, including posing as a Colonel in the US Army to get to Europe just after the liberation, and find his sisters.  How he accomplished that is a story rife with intrigue. Dad had managed to obtain a “commission” as a US Army colonel, involving a trip to Washington, DC and a visit to a congressman who shall go unnamed and the details of which involved an exchange of, shall we say, consideration.  Dad was introduced to some people at the War Department, received a brief orientation, a few uniforms festooned with eagles, and was told that if he was discovered, “we do not know you.” With his commission in hand, and MATS transit orders (military air transport command) he returned to New York, and headed to Roosevelt field to depart for Europe.  He boarded a C-47, later known as a DC-3, flying to Gander, Newfoundland, Shannon, Ireland and on to Paris.   At the time, no commercial air traffic was available from New York to France, where he was headed.  Arriving in Paris, he set up his headquarters at the Hotel California, on the Rue de Berri, across from the New York Herald tribune and near the Etoile.  It was from there that he needed to requisition an ambulance, a jeep and a driver to get to Hamburg and Bergen-Belsen.  How he did all this required huge confidence and an abundance of testosterone.  He knew that he did not want his sisters in a DP camp, where conditions were devastatingly filthy, and with many of the prisoners in near-death condition. Even George Patton had remarked that the Jews there were like filthy animals, the stench overwhelming.  Patton, despite his military genius, was in line with the fashionable Antisemitism of the time and the racist mien of America.  Dad knew that his two sisters could not survive much longer.

            On route to Bergen-Belsen, he made the mistake of dropping into an officer’s mess (Colonels and up) and was almost discovered, because he was not properly attired.  “I’m sorry, sir but I cannot admit you here in these clothes,” informed an MP.   He was in fatigues and dress uniforms were de riguer. He promptly exited, fearing discovery.  From then on, as he told us later, he stuck en route to enlisted men’s mess.

            Undeterred, however, he was going to get his sisters to America; they would not have to wait for a year or two for a visa.  Not his two sisters, 60 and 70 pounds each. Not the emaciated remnants of the young and beautiful sisters he had remembered, and in his mind, abandoned.  Not the sisters who suffered because he did not act earlier. Not the sisters who were still now, under British occupation living in squalor and the walking dead.  They told him about the gassing of their siblings and their mother.   My grandfather died before that of diabetic shock, in 1940.  “He was lucky,” Dad later told me.

            Dad was about 5’10, with black hair and green eyes.  Many people, especially women, said he was the spitting image of Spencer Tracy, and photographs reveal some of that, only Dad might have been a bit better looking.  He had an easy time with women.   While in Paris, he arranged for the Hungarian women in town who were there either through his efforts or some other means, to come to his hotel room for baths.  He had hot water, a precious commodity.  Through a common cousin and Auschwitz survivor, Olga Lengyel, (author of "Five Chimneys,") He met my future wife’s family in Paris and they housed my fragile aunts and his niece at their apartment while they were waiting for visas to come to America. Those visas were, I think, also provided through “the 7^th Avenue connection.”   Twenty years later, when I travelled to Europe for the first time as a student, he told me to look up his old friend, a Paris physician, who later became my father-in-law.   My mother-in-law, still lucid at 100 years of age told me how charming and probably promiscuous my father was during those times.

            My first memory of him was as a three year old, with my mother calling me to the phone for, in those days, was a "transatlantic call." He had been gone 18 months, leaving my mother to tend to me alone.  

           

            So my father was a survivor also, even though he spent the war in America.  After the war, after he returned home,  he thought about Auschwitz every day, he spoke about it every day, read about it continually and until the day he died, carried that torment and guilt with him of being unable to save his family.  He cogitated in a darkened room, chain smoked, had his meals sent in, and at times, could not speak to anyone.  As I grew up, I did not nearly understand the depth of his despair.  He developed a schizophrenic relationship with religion. He popped Phenobarbitals. He wept for years. He spoke of a bloodthirsty God that he rejected because God was either "powerless or evil."  He never overcame his depression and he visited it upon my sister, my mother and me.  He needed us to be nearby, he was warm and financially generous to us, but emotionally he was not there. In the end we gravitated toward our mother who tried to protect us from his emotional storms.

            I did not have the skills then to talk to him, to convince him it was not his fault.  That only one in a thousand people would have had the courage to do what he did.  I think often how different it would be if I could just talk to him one time now and tell him it was not his fault, not my fault that his guilt should abate, that he could let it go.  But it was not to be. It is too late.

            As a child and now as a grown man with my own grandchildren, I still cannot reconcile my Holocaust-torn relationship with my father, the damage it caused to our relationship and the scars from it that I carry to this very day, 70 years after Auschwitz.

A Few Thoughts on 2014 and Beyond

Pessimistic thoughts

This has been a year of war, pestilence, famine, terrorism, religious zealotry, as well as startling and gruesome examples of man's inhumanity to man. 

The Arab world, convulsing in paroxysms of unspeakable religious sangfroid, hatred and brutality, provokes undue existential anxieties in the West. Our drones fly around and kill people without trial or jury, assuaging our fears, but not our consciences.   We have been at war for thirteen years with no end in sight.  The government snoops in our personal business and belongings and runs us through scanners to see if we are weaponized. Explosives become more sophisticated.   Airliners are shot down by a kleptocratic, self-absorbed, homophobic, egomaniacal, murdering ex KGB officer who wishes to destabilize Europe to preserve his notions of being the next Czar and possibly forging a new Soviet Union.  It will not happen;  Russia is now a second rate power  with a sputtering economy.

Google, Amazon, and other Internet giants invade our privacy, foretelling a dystopian, Orwellian denouement. The top 1% of the American public controls 90% of the wealth and the middle class is caught in a technology vice displacing their jobs, their security, and their self-esteem.    Robots threaten to replace almost all human tasks within a hundred years.   Many scientists, including Stephen Hawking say that we are engineering our own demise, and that evolution is about to take a quantum leap with the frail, imperfectly designed human  about to be discarded on the slag heap of history.  Either we will be slaves of the machines or their masters, probably the former, he says.

Climate change threatens to inundate coastal cities in a slew of super storms, melting glaciers and drowning polar bears.

Some light

Despite all that, in the short term, there is reason to hope that the world is getting better.   Religious fervor is diminishing in most nations, the younger generation yielding to social pressures and the new religion of the Internet, technological innovation and scientific skepticism about age-old myths.

The Obama administration, empowered by its freedom from voter approval is set upon a course of leaving a transformational legacy, despite what promises to be a more ossified congress.  The great recession is over, the doomsayers have been proven wrong about the economy, unemployment is at a new low, the US Auto industry is on the upswing, the stock market is at new highs, medical science is on the verge of curing a host of intractable diseases including many cancers and other maladies, corporate profits are roaring, the US is now energy independent, and Petro nations including Vladimir Putin's Russia are reeling from one trick pony economies that are in free fall. People have health care and cannot be dumped by their insurance companies for pre-existing conditions.

Cuba

Here in Miami, some old-line Cubans are decrying the new move toward relations with Cuba, long overdue.

Fifty years of a failed policy, despite Marco Rubio's disingenuous bloviating, are correctly to be jettisoned along with an immigration policy that has failed miserably.    On the other hand, the younger generation of Cuban-Americans, born here and with no intention of returning to Cuba to become sugar farmers, cigar rollers, or nightclub impresarios, are mostly happy with the new direction of US policy.

The Cuban government fears that its chief oil supplier, Venezuela, will be a failed government.  Nicholas Maduro, the successor to Hugo Chavez, is running into increasing problems running his economy, because his oil revenues are down 60% and his social programs are not sufficiently funded, which could lead to riots in the street, not a good image for his socialist paradise.  Watch out for this in 2015.

Some of us remember the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs, the bungled CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel with an exploding cigar and a number of other intelligence fiascos involving Cuba.  We have always conducted diplomacy with a host of dictatorships---Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Soviet Union, East Germany, etc.  Why not Cuba?  The arguments for punitive disengagement in the case of Cuba, a small nation just off our shores, and embargo is so 20^th century. It has failed miserably.  Nations follow their interests and do not always do well on a diet of morality, even be it the ultimate ideal.

Opposition lies in a small cadre of Cubans who have controlled Florida swing-state voting.   Clearly that is why a moderate like Bill Nelson has voiced opposition to a movement he would normally favor, since he is ordinarily quite progressive.

National polls in other states mostly favor trade with Cuba, or at least diplomatic relations, and just think of it, those who still smoke Cuban cigars will no longer have to smuggle contraband through Canada.   What is next for Florida? Humm, let me think.   Legalized weed in Cuban cigars and Gay marriage?

Flying Misery Class 2014

I fondly remember flying Eastern Airlines from Miami to New York when I was a child.  My dad made me put on a sport coat and tie, we rode to the airport, left our car in the small parking lot off Northwest 36th St., handed our bags to the clerk and boarded the DC 6 and were on our way.  While on the plane, we were served with real food, on a linen tablecloth, and Eastern Airlines cutlery that included glassware and a hot entree.  Dad had a complimentary Scotch and Soda, his drink of choice. The seats were spacious and comfortable and the flight attendants cheerful and buoyant. And that was not first class.

Last Sunday, November 30th my wife and I, after a family reunion, were to return home on an Air France flight from Paris to Miami.

Arriving at Charles de Gaulle Airport three hours early to enable us to do some leisurely duty-free shopping and relax before the flight, we were greeted by a throng of perhaps 1000 people checking in to various flights, and only two ticket agents at the counter.  (There were places for at least 10 agents.) The lines were totally gridlocked.  The sight was horrifying.  People, all in the same queue, resembled an assemblage of chickens in an industrial coop on a Perdue chicken farm (at which animal rights activists are concerned mightily about cruelty to animals)   But I digress. 

After fuming in the lines for about a half an hour and going nowhere, I proceeded to the counter to complain to the station manager.  He apologized, but had advised my wife "he had no personnel."  Enraged, I told him he should be sacked straight away.

A few feet away were some Air France people who were standing around doing nothing at the First Class check in area.  When I remarked that they should go over and help the others check the passengers in he said, "That's not my job."

Advised that the flight would be delayed because of the overly lengthy check in times, we thought we would have time to shop and catch the plane.   The check in process consisted of going to a bank of boarding pass machines, some of which were out of order or concealed by the throng, and no one to direct on using them or guide us through the process, then standing in another line to deposit one's bags.

By this time, 2 1/2 hours had passed and the information supplied by the check in agent that the flight would be delayed because of the length of check in turned out to be deceptive misinformation deliberately calculated to assuage an angry slew of passengers.   The few check in agents were overwhelmed by total managerial incompetence, and disdainful of angry customers.   "I am just one person," was the contemptuous response from one of the clerks.

After this passage through a depressing medieval  Star Chamber clearly designed for religious heretics, we had to race down the one mile walkway, and then catch a train to the terminal.  Along the way. we walked at break neck pace past shops we wanted to visit, but barely had time to make our plane, before they closed the doors.  Chock full of people most of whom had already boarded from connecting flights, the overhead racks were full and we had to struggle to find a place for our carry-on bags. As we had passed through business and first class seating, we envied the priced-out-of-reach wide seats, some of which could be beds during the ten hour flight to Miami and the condescension of the first class passengers, who clearly felt superior.  But they were not, they just had paid an unconscionable amount of money simply to be treated as human beings.

One cannot not justify the multi thousand-dollar price difference between the classes.  After all this was not a two-week cruise where some semblance of a rationale for the price could be made.  And being over 70 years old and wanting to have enough money to retire without living in the street is a reasonable argument for pragmatism.

As we struggled to our seats, they narrowed to the extent that anyone over the size of a Hobbit could fit. In addition, I suffer from a bad back, a result of back surgery that limits my sitting time.   The armrests squeezed my hips and I knew that for ten hours, I would be crushed in an orthopedic vice, not to mention my knees colliding with the seat in front.  Fortunately there was a nice young man in front of me who did not recline after I had knocked the wine off my tray table (if you want to call it that), spilling it on the passenger next to me, a pleasant German fellow who said he would not send me the cleaning bill.

My wife wrote a letter of complaint to the Air France and their apology consisted of an offer of a $50 gift certificate for her inconvenience.  Thanks a lot.  Two first class tickets would be an apology.  A $50 gift certificate is an insult, and further evidence of the contempt with which the airlines regard their customers.

This is not a unique story and I know that I hate air travel more and more.

Update December 9:  Since I wrote this rant, I received a slew of emails from readers who shared experiences not dissimilar to mine.  

Election Post Mortem 2014

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Gore Vidal

It is enough that the people know there was an election.  The people who cast the vote decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin


President Obama now faces a 2 year lame duckdom of dealing with a newly constituted congress, controlled by Republicans, and a new senate majority leader to be  who had vowed to see to it that Mr. Obama was only a one term President. He did not get his wish, but now he has gotten his power.  Mr. McConnell and Mr. Obama clearly have different perspectives and, even worse, bear each other no good will.

Now, in the majority, McConnell faces the prospect of doing something to endear his party to alienated Democratic and minority voters who, except in Kentucky, saw him and Mr. Boehner as the principal choreographers of obstructionism.   That may not be entirely true now; they are freed of the Tea Party albatross since that group of feckless individuals are now consigned to the fringe where they belong.

Progressives who are now either apoplectic or almost in a suicidal funk may not be as disappointed by the next two years as they think, since the "evolving values" of the GOP are now faced with the prospect of building some sort of defensible record against what will probably be the Clinton juggernaut.  Now they must govern or at least create the perception that congress is getting something done.  Angry voters will make them pay the price in two years if they do not.  

The Democratic candidates were certain that they wanted less to do with the President during their campaigns than the Ebola virus.   The President, increasingly isolated, was glad to oblige.  He seems like a pale shadow of Woodrow Wilson, who could not sell his agenda to the American public either.  

Both are misplaced academics, with Obama having the additional strike against him of either race, or an unwillingness to deal with those in congress with whom he regards with thinly disguised contempt.  His remarks at the national press club this year were telling, and although supposedly a joke, his revulsion of having a drink with McConnell was clearly enunciated.  “You have a drink with Mitch McConnell,” he said in reply to those who suggested that he do so.

Despite all this animosity and polarization, and the lack of attention to pressing issues,

the country faces a crisis of income inequality, climate change, decaying infrastructure, foreign policy threats, national defense, NSA eavesdropping and an economy that shows declining unemployment to a rate of now below 6%, a figure made less impressive by the fact that people who are not looking for jobs any longer because they cannot locate them and are not included in the lower figure for job growth.  Although the United States is currently doing better than the rest of the advanced nations in terms of growth, and has an upcoming energy windfall (we will be a net exporter, not importer of energy).  The fact remains that the old jobs done by many humans are now supplanted by robots and computers. So even though corporate profits are soaring, the stock market is booming, the sad problem is that most of the wealth generated in our new economy goes to the top 1%.   The middle class is losing the battle of fulfilling the American dream of home ownership and having children who are doing better than their parents.

This angers and frightens voters and that is what happened in this election.

The campaigns, conducted mostly on a local level, as do most mid-terms, had focused on the incompetence of the national administration, and showered their opponents with negative ads.  The gubernatorial race here in Florida set a new standard for money spent and unusually obnoxious negativity.   No discussion of issues important to the state permeated any of the debates, if you want to call them that.  Moreover, the obscene amounts of money spent for TV ads dissing the opponent may have won the election, but served no use in advancing a sane national agenda.  If Florida can vote for an amoral businessman to “create jobs” (the economic recovery having nothing to do with it) then the voters get what they deserve.

On the other hand, a Republican friend of mine correctly pointed out that a President needs to lead and there was not much evidence of that leadership in the last few years.  Aside from the isolation that is inherent in living at the White House, the President’s circle of friends and advisers has shrunken.

Obama did not lead; he thought that his ideas were so good that opponents would fall in place because those ideas  were of such quality they could not be disputed.   Getting down and dirty to get what he wanted was out of the mix;  LBJ did not do that.  FDR did not. JFK did not. Neither did Lincoln.  They were politicians who moved in a political world.  It seems clear now that Obama is incapable of making any such gestures.  He was fine as a campaigner, but in the business of governing a messy democracy, heavily influenced by talk radio, a 24/7 news cycle, huge amounts of advertising money, and pundits analyzing his speeches almost before they are finished, the evolution of the political animal must be as fast as tweets.   People no longer tune into Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley.  The network news is almost as anachronistic as Billy Graham, a cavalcade of hemorrhoid medications, blood pressure pills and other remedies for the geriatrics who tune in.

The fact is that Obamacare is increasingly successful, the stimulus worked, the auto industry was kept alive, the economy although weak, is recovering slowly.  But many of the things which happen in the currents of history fall outside the scope of Presidential power.   For example, the revolutions in the Middle East, financial collapse in 2008, the bubble in the stock market, Ebola, ISIS, Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile, Russian aggression and the limits of American power, emanating from a world that is increasingly amorphous and disparate as well as "allies" who now have national interests that differ from ours. And people, let’s not omit Junior Bush’s invasion of Iraq on hyped intelligence and following up with occupation misfeasance that set the wheels in motion for ISIS, and empowered Iranian ambitions for both nuclear weapons and Middle Eastern hegemony.

But in the final analysis the American public is more and more subject to the economic sledgehammer of inequality.  That inequality stems from less and less of us able to afford a home, or a higher education for their children.  CEOs making obscene salaries and 15% of the public living below the poverty level as well as the vanishing of the middle class. This does not make happy voters.  Republicans or Democrats who ignore these issues do so at their peril and even worse, at the peril of our republic.  Whether the Republican formula that funnels more tax breaks to the rich and ignores the needs of the middle class in their philosophy of "job creation" and trickle down economics works or will work is still open to question.  It has not worked in the past.  Moving to the center does work and that is what Republicans have not done, focusing instead on red herring social issues such as abortion, climate change denial, religious hypocrisy,  and the 47% who are sucking at the teat of big government.  

So, Republicans, I wish you success, because now, in your hands, rests the fate of our floundering ship of state.