Category Archives: Politics

Now, getting back to my personal Dorothy Parker….

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It should surprise no one familiar with her writings that as soon as decently possible after her so casual, offhand invitation to stop in for a drink the next time I found myself in her Manhattan neighborhood around that time of the afternoon, I did just happen to find myself around Madison Avenue and the upper ’40s.  When I gave my name to the deskman at the New Weston Hotel, for him to ask whether he should let me go up, it would not at all have surprised me for him to turn me away – but by golly he didn’t!  I can’t recall who else had already dropped in on Dorothy that afternoon, but I soon discovered that she had obviously extended that casual invitation to a  fairly wide circle, for I never appeared there without finding at least one visitor already on hand.

Informed Parker fans may have wondered why, in my dropping the resounding name of Dorothy Parker, I haven’t gone all the way and called her Dottie – as did virtually everyone else who knew her at all – so let’s get that cleared up right now.  At first it would have seemed to me something close to lèse-majesté for me to have presumed to call her that, and I hadn’t known her long before a chance occurrence one afternoon answered my unasked question.  A woman friend of Dorothy’s and I formed that afternoon’s group; I’ve forgotten that visitor’s identity but she also had a sort of nickname problem, and it transpired that I’d unknowingly ingratiated myself with her by not using it.  The conversational byplay prompted by that included Dorothy’s saying: “Paul calls us by our right names”, adding that she’d always hated the nickname she got stuck with during her periods of Hollywood servitude.  Naturally I never once, during the time we remained in contact (until a Hollywood gig she felt forced to accept took her back there around Christmastime 1948), called her anything except Dorothy.

If anyone asked me to name the saddest woman I ever knew, I wouldn’t even have to reflect before naming Dorothy.  Research shows that she even attempted suicide on three occasions.  She’d lost her Jewish mother a few months before her fifth birthday, and her Jewish father had then married a shiksa – about whom Dorothy told me a psychologically important tidbit I’ve never seen anywhere in print:

“She brought me up to look down on my father the same way she did, because I was only half-Jewish and he was all-Jewish.”  She immediately added: “Of course in later life that made me two hundred percent Jewish.” 

She grew up on Manhattan’s upper west side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, no doubt at the decision of her stepmother – who, in turn, died before Dorothy turned ten.  She also attended Miss Dana’s School, a stylish finishing school in upper-class Morristown, New Jersey.  Her formal education ended completely not long after her thirteenth birthday.  When “The Paris Review” interviewed Dorothy many years later, she said she’d learned nothing during her school years except that a pencil eraser will erase ink “if you spit on it.”

In all those 1948 afternoons we drank together – and she always had plenty of drink of various kinds on hand, with endless reinforcements only a room-service telephone call away – I don’t recall having ever seen her actually drunk . . . but a moment’s reflection reminds me that I myself probably got too sozzled to have even noticed her own state. 

I’ve read somewhere that her closest friend Lillian Hellman’s long-time lover Dashiell Hammett couldn’t stand Dorothy, because of what he regarded as her duplicity, her two-faced behavior, but I myself caught only one brief glimpse of that.  At one point during those years three young Manhattan débutantes turned up fairly frequently in the gossip columns as stars of what someone during that period dubbed Café Society.  I recall one of their names as Brenda Frasier, but one of the other two, whose name I’ve forgotten, also dropped into the New Weston one afternoon and the deskman called up for Dorothy’s instructions.  She did tell him to send her up, but during the few minutes it took her to arrive at Dorothy’s apartment door, Dorothy absolutely demolished her, mercilessly ridiculing everything conceivable about her.  Then the doorbell rang, and Dorothy’s manner instantaneously underwent a total transformation; to revert to a Texas expression, you could have poured her on a waffle.  Two-faced?  Hypocritical?  To trot out another Texas locution, those terms hardly covered it.

(During that period I also rejoiced in occasional meetings with another well-known writer, Dawn Powell, a Greenwich Village neighbor of mine the literary pope Edmund Wilson highly esteemed and in a “New Yorker” essay praised to the skies.  One afternoon at Dawn’s – also, inevitably, over drinks – Dorothy’s name came up, and I told her how distasteful I’d found the episode with that débutante.  Dawn said she understood what I meant, but she had a personal theory about Dorothy that I can at least reliably paraphrase: “She fires those demolition jets of vitriol in swift little volleys, and that takes care of it, right then and there.  I think the rest of us do more or less the same thing, only we spread it out over a lot more time.”)

My most memorable single experience of Dorothy took place one night after whoever else had come that afternoon had left, leaving Dorothy and me alone.  I’d noticed earlier that evening that she seemed unusually depressed, and for that reason I’d not left, for I didn’t want to leave her all alone in that desolate mood.

With her sitting in one corner of her not terribly spacious hotel living room and me diametrically across the room from her, we exchanged respective miseries, undoubtedly doing the exact opposite of bucking each other up.  Some time prior to that I had gone into psychoanalysis – beginning one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, not because of psychoanalysis per se, but because the coincidence of outrageous fortune had landed me on the couch of an analyst my worst enemy might have selected for me – so that evening I had an abundant reservoir of raw material to hold up my own end of our ever more and more lugubrious colloquy.  Three epithets at the end of one of Dorothy’s sentences branded themselves forever into my memory; speaking of herself at that time of her life, after her divorce from Alan Campbell, she summed up her autobiographical summary at 55 with these whip-lash words: “elderly, ugly, and alone.”

To my dying day I’ll regret not yielding to my spontaneous impulse to rush across the room and enfold her in my arms . . . but I didn’t.  Why not?  Well, for one thing her identity as the Dorothy Parker still overawed me.  Another factor also inhibited me: Dorothy had a reputation for losing her heart to sensitive young men a great deal younger than she, a category in which I definitely belonged, and I did not want to get involved in that kind of predicament.  (Talk about unlucky in love: Dorothy married homosexual Alan Campbell not once but twice; they divorced in 1947, remarried three years later, and remained together on and off until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood – the largely gay section of Los Angeles.  I recall reading somewhere that in her cups her fundamental hostility towards him did not stop short of homophobic twitting, even in the company of others.)

That evening she and I did somehow manage to yank our spirits up at least a bit higher than rock-bottom, but before I finally left she pointedly quizzed me about my own personal situation at that stage of my life.  Not long before that I’d lost the script-writing job at RKO-Pathé (which an unorthodox, graphology-influenced, possibly almost clairvoyant employment agent had sent me into, thus officially enabling me finally to call myself a writer), and I faced a bleakly uncertain future with virtually no money in the bank.  When Dorothy demanded details, I gave them to her.  Without another word she went to another area of that two-room apartment and came back with one of those big out-sized check ledgers you see mostly in places of business.  She sat down and wrote out one check, then folded it to conceal the amount and handed it to me with this envoi: “I’ve had some unexpected royalties recently, so here’s a month.  Have a month on me.”

The fact that she’d even done such a thing struck me almost totally dumb, but as soon as I even began trying to put into words the grateful fullness I felt in my heart, she wanted none of that.  I couldn’t see the amount she’d written, but I did catch a glimpse of the top-level private bank where she had her account: Brown Brothers Harriman - as I recall, Averell Harriman, one of the richest Democrats in the country, had at least a hand in running it.  (Reflection subsequently led to my conclusion that Dorothy had not exactly thrown away the bounteous reimbursement she’d received from those Hollywood chores for which she had such contempt.  She and Alan Campbell co-wrote more than fifteen films, at salaries as high as $5,200 a week, an all the more enormous sum during those post-1929 depression years.)

Before I even got into the elevator, naturally I unfolded the check and damned near fainted when I saw the amount: $500.  At RKO-Pathé they’d paid me $50 a week; for my dark little warren down on West Tenth Street I paid exactly $31 a month.  For me at that time, $500 would go a long, long, long way farther than the month she’d mentioned.  In context, I believe that topped, for sheer generosity, any other benefaction that’s come my way ever since.

A standard reference work summarizes Dorothy Parker as “best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th-century urban foibles.”  Well, yes, I suppose so . . . but also someone much, very much more than that.  She took a passionate interest in social issues; any kind of social injustice outraged her.  Her outrage never drove her quite into actually joining the Communist Party, but she made no secret, especially in Hollywood, of her left-wing sympathies.  The infamous vigilante outfit called “Red Channels” came right out and called her a Communist.  With Mussolini’s fascist Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany destroying Spain’s elected Republican government while the leading democratic world powers merely looked on, she actually went to Spain herself, and wrote about what she experienced there for the not officially Communist but definitely Party-lining intellectual weekly “New Masses”, which also published two little-known poems of hers, “Not Enough” and “Sophisticated Poetry – and the Hell With It”.

In 1967, at the comparatively early age of 73, Dorothy died of a heart attack in her suite at the high-class Volney residential hotel in New York City, in a reasonable facsimile of which she set one of her last literary efforts, a collaboration entitled “The Ladies of the Corridor”.  Her will bequeathed her entire estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Foundation; following King’s death, it passed on to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  For whatever reason, her best friend and executrix, the equally left-wing playwright Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested that disposition.  Dorothy’s ashes remained unclaimed, in various places including the filing cabinet of her attorney Paul O’Dwyer, for about seventeen years.  The N.A.A.C.P. eventually claimed them and designed a memorial garden for them outside its Baltimore headquarters.  The plaque there reads:

“Here lie the ashes of Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967), humorist, writer, critic.  Defender of human and civil rights.  For her epitaph she suggested, ‘Excuse My Dust’.  This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  October 28, 1988.”  Dorothy’s image appeared on a 29¢ commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued on August 22, 1992, Dorothy’s 99th birthday.

One might say Dorothy summed up her fundamental Weltanschauung in the eight lines of the little poem she laconically entitled “Résumé“:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

I could, and easily, write a lot more about my indelible personal experiences involving Dorothy, but I hope this unfairly brief mini-memoir will at least suffice to present another aspect of her intricate personality, at such variance with the predominant reputation that’s survived her.

My own personal Dorothy Parker

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On this day 114 years ago, a New York couple named Rothschild, who had a summer cottage in the little New Jersey beach town of Long Branch, became parents of a baby they named Dorothy.  (A brief momentary aside: on this same date, 79 years ago, a German couple named Stockhausen living near Cologne became parents of a baby boy they named Karlheinz – but let’s stick with Dorothy; I may or may not eventually come back to Stockhausen [anyone interested?], whose path and mine have crossed on fairly numerous occasions starting during his teeth-cutting electronic days at Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk about half a century or so ago, when Time had me fly there from Berlin to provide its first story about him.)

But as long as I seem in a veering mood, let’s veer back for just a moment to that name Rothschild.  Virtually all the world connects it with the unique European banking family (some of my fellow codgers may recall George Arliss decades ago in a Hollywood epic called “The House of Rothschild”), which by clever distribution of progeny established a unique international web of banks, and Anglophone eyes tend to divide that surname wrong - approximately Roth’s Child – whereas the original (meanwhile archaic) German spelling, pronounced Roat-Shild, means simply Red Schield – get it?  (I’ll exert myself not to veer yet once more and pause to tell you about finding myself on the same BEA plane from Salzburg to London with a latter-day descendent who’d become Lord Rothschild - with me at that point accompanying the great (Soviet) Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on a dream assignment the German magazine stern laid on me to spend two or three weeks travelling with Richter and Nina Dorliac, the Russian soprano everyone at that point took for his wife, to three of Europe’s most important annual music festivals: Salzburg, Edinburgh, and Lucerne.  [I'll really have to exert myself to keep from veering off yet again about Richter's introductory meeting with Marlene Dietrich in Edinburgh's George Hotel, with me on hand . . . but that'll have to wait until I finally get around to taking that Memory Lane stroll here through the Marlene Dietrich neighborhood I recently discovered has long since become my home here in Berlin.])

Now then – getting back to that newborn New Jersey child Dorothy Rothschild.  When she grew up, she married a gentleman named Parker, and since American anti-Semitism made his surname professionally preferable for a budding writer, she became, forevermore, Dorothy Parker.  I first heard her name at a very early age during my El Paso childhood, from the brother of my Texan sister’s New Mexico rancher fiancé, whose literarily inclined younger brother Jim described her work as “caustic”, a word also new to me, which he kindly defined for me.  I thus had a pre-conceived notion that jibed, I believe, with the vast majority of people’s opinion of the slim volume of literary treasures Dorothy Parker left us when she died.

One night in New York during the mid-1940s my telephone rang and I heard the voice of Hallie Faulk, whose approaching second marriage had recently brought her up from Texas, where for part of the summer of 1942 I’d roomed with her and her brilliant first husband John Henry Faulk (about whom I could also write a short book – but more of him later, too) in their house out on the bank of the Colorado River as an 18-year-old senior at the University of Texas in Austin.  (During her later years Hallie enjoyed a modest folk-singer success as Hallie Wood, recording at least one LP.)  Halfway through the evening in question she telephoned me in my dark, tiny apartment down in the unfashionable part of Greenwich Village from a party up on lower Park Avenue, where they had a piano that needed someone to play it, so how about my coming up? 

I reacted to news that with an equanimity bordering on coma until she started going down the list of people present.  During those pre-McCarthy days, when the dividing line between anti-fascist and pro-Communist frequently became blurred, almost everyone I knew in that era’s New York classified as left-wing, and Hallie had telephoned me from a fund-raising party for an organization I’d never before even heard of: U.N.A.V.A, which stood for United Negro-American Veterans’ Association or something similar.  The choreographer Jerome Robbins (later pilloried by the McCarthy mob as a one-time member of the Communist Party of the United States of America) had made available for it the furnished apartment down in the un-chic lower part of Park Avenue he’d temporarily sublet from the photographer George Platt Lynes.  I knew Jerry slightly, through mutual friends including Leonard Bernstein (with whom he’d made a simultaneous introductory splash with their ballet “Fancy Free”) but not until Hallie mentioned Dorothy Parker as one of the guests did I really snap to attention.  Needless to say, I hightailed it up to that party as fast as Manhattan’s subway system (which in those days cost a nickel) could get me there.  (Taxis?  Me, at that stage in my life?  Don’t make me laugh – not even the sooner to get to meet my adored Dorothy Parker.)

I found her the way S. J. Perelman had also found her at their introductory encounter: visibly gassed.  Literary gossip about her already legendary self had it that she’d tried Alcoholic Anonymous – but without lasting success.  Lynes had one of those modest waist-high pianos I believe the manufacturers (inaccurately) called spinets, and almost as soon as I sat down I had Dorothy’s face directly in front of me, elbows on top of the little piano, chin cradled in her hands, gazing directly into my utterly enchanted eyes from only a few feet away, with a dreamy smile on her face I could without exaggeration call almost adoring - catapulting me of course directly into seventh heaven.  She quite clearly took an immediate shine to me – I hardly need go into my own reaction to that totally unanticipated development – and primarily for her I proceeded to trot out virtually my entire repertoire, and to hell with the fact that only a small circle close around us really listened to the musical pearls I so lavishly cast before them.

I guess I could fairly say that I moved from seventh up to eighth heaven when the party broke up, during the no longer very wee hours of that morning, and with genuine cordiality she casually extended to me one of the most appreciated invitations of my entire life.  At that time, between her two marriages to her considerably younger writing collaborator Alan Campbell, she had moved into a two-room suite at the largely residential semi-bohemian New Weston Hotel, on Madison Avenue in the upper forties.  Almost off-handedly, unaware of the accolade her invitation automatically amounted to, she said that any time I happened to find myself in the New Weston’s neighborhood around cocktail time, I should feel free to drop in for a drink.

. . . Now I hate to frustrate those of you I know I have drooling to read absolutely everything I can tell you about my fairly numerous visits to her in that apartment, but it grows late here in Berlin and I did want to write this little tribute on her birthday.  Tomorrow looms uniquely large in my life – 4 a.m. E.D.T. will find me at one of Berlin’s regional City Halls collecting the certificate that will proclaim me a brand-new citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (after living here for almost all the past 56 years), and tomorrow afternoon will find me making my debut – albeit merely as a modest Anglophone voice - at Berlin’s pinnacle Deutsches Theater, where Max Reinhardt worked his theatrical wonders until the brownshirt goons who took over in 1933 threw him out for his suddenly criminal Jewish origin.  Please don’t go away mad, though – I assure you that I myself want to wrap up my memories of Dorothy Parker every bit as eagerly as you do, okay?

Noel Martin and the Right to Die

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Two dear old unmarried sisters, who live two floors above me and have spent most of their lives in this Wilmersdorf section of Berlin, much of it in this house, recently called my attention to nearby locations associated with the pre-emigration years of Marlene Dietrich, so this afternoon I finally got around to making a little Marlene pilgrimage, with the original intention of writing about that here.  Meanwhile, though, something else has confiscated my attention, a topic of particular interest to me (cf. my book Die Freiheit zum Tode (Rowohlt Verlag, 1973 – published only in German), literally the freedom to die, which I’d originally entitled Death Is Not the Worst, borrowed from Sophocles’ tragedy Elektra: “Death is not the worst; rather, in vain / To wish for death, and not to compass it.”  (If my book interests you, apparently a total of forty-three copies remain available at http://tinyurl.com/yq5djq.)

On June 16, 1996 in Mahlow, a village (pop. 4,900) in the formerly East German state of Brandenburg (which surrounds the city-state Berlin), two local neo-Nazi thugs, 17 and 24, took exception to their foreign neighbor Noel Martin, and savagely attacked him with the evident intention of killing him.  They took exception to Martin’s black skin (a British national, he originally came from Jamaica), almost certainly even more specifically to the fact that Martin, who had found work in Mahlow as a construction worker, had also found true love and a happy marriage to a lily-white local girl.  Last September, the Anglophone version of Germany’s crackerjack weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported this from Birmingham:

“Noel Martin plans to take his own life in less than a year.  Just over 10 years ago, a neo-Nazi attack left him paralyzed from the neck down.  He plans to fight right-wing extremists to the very end. 

Noel Martin has only 297 days left. But time, he says, is also limited for the neo-Nazis who ruined his life.

“Noel Martin has only 297 days left. But time, he says, is also limited for the neo-Nazis who ruined his life.

“Noel Martin has already chosen July 23, 2007 to be the day he dies” – his 48th birthday.  “On that evening, his pulse will gradually slow down until it stops completely.  He has decided to die as a result of a lethal blend of drugs — administered in Switzerland by Dignitas, an organization that offers its clients medically assisted suicide.”  (You can read that entire Spiegel account by clicking here.)

In June 1996, I had returned to Berlin the previous autumn from the worst single mistake of my entire life – thirteen ill-starred years back in my country of origin, twelve of those in San Francisco – and as an incurable news junky I naturally paid almost masochistically close attention to the Noel Martin tragedy – for several intertwined reasons.  My parents both had originally come from Mississippi, and I can still hear my father’s voice telling in El Paso how southern friends – or so he claimed - had no intention of attending the World’s Fair back in the 1930s scheduled for Chicago, ”up there where they call a nigger Mister.”  My early years turned me into a lifelong militant anti-racist, a Weltanshauung that in time got turned inside out, so to speak: I first came to Germany fifty-one years ago inexorably convinced of the unatonable guilt of every living German, only to have a concatenation of corrective therapeutic experiences during the intervening decades turn me into an unconventional kind of anti-racist: one ready to come out swinging whenever I encounter anyone showing indications of what I have come to lump together as blanket, knee-jerk anti-German racism.

Tonight Noel Martin turned up here on Kulturzeit, my favorite Kulturmagazin five times weekly on our consistently high-class tri-national German-language TV network (non-commercial, naturally) called 3sat, for Austria, Germany, and Switzerland - for today, according to his original plan, he had looked forward to finally dying.

Well, he hasn’t changed his mind; he has, though, postponed his anticipated rendezvous with Death.  Kulturzeit quoted him as saying he still has a number of loose ends he wants to tie up.  To quote that account: “Much remains to get into order, especially property questions connected with his house and the lot where his wife lies buried and where he wants to be buried in the near future.  ‘What others can take care of in two days takes me two weeks’, Martin says.”

And those two savage neo-Nazi punks who came so close to killing him?  To quote the Spiegel once again: “Two young Germans, Sandro R. and Mario P. [German law prohibits publication of under-age defendants' full names], had thrown a lump of concrete at Martin’s car.  They were 17 and 24 years old at the time and their motive was ‘explicit xenophobia,’ as a court later determined.  They were sentenced to five and eight years in prison.  Noel Martin never got an apology, but by now he doesn’t care any more.  ‘It would be a waste of time.  God will take care of them,” he says, “life will take care of them.”  Both of his attackers are now free.  [Their own skins must set some sort of record for thickness, for after serving their prison terms they returned to Mahlow, the scene of their almost lethal crime.]  But Martin is still imprisoned — in his own body.”

No doubt you’d have preferred for me to write today’s contribution here about something more pleasant, like for instance Marlene Dietrich, but when material like this ambushes me I turn into the incorrigible old fire-horse reacting to the sound of the firehouse-bell.  I haven’t relinquished my original idea of writing about my own two brief but personal encounters with Dietrich, one when she returned to Berlin for the first time since leaving it for Hollywood in 1932, where Hitler’s rise to power decided her to stay, and one in Edinburgh at her first meeting with the great pianist Sviatoslav Richter, with me one of only five persons present in The George Hotel’s almost totally darkened dining room around three a.m. - fairly rich material I’ll get around to just a.s.a. conveniently p.

You know Goya’s cycle "Los Desastres de la Guerra"?

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By comparison those graphic horrors look like a day in the country with Uncle Don when you read this journalistic triumph just published in “The Nation” – long, very long, but well worth reading in its entirety if you sincerely care about what the Bush administration has perverted the USA into during the past few years….

If you can’t take the time for that really exceptionally long article – damned near book-length – you can also find a conscientious summation of it in London’s “Independent”, Great Britain’s official newspaper of record, replacing the Murdoch-castrated once great “Times”.

Political humor at its most trenchant

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A used item discarded onto a sidewalk in my Berlin neighborhood took me back down Memory Lane this morning to a splendid example of political humor that came my way back during the Eisenhower administration.  (Can you remember?  Five-Star U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, victorious as Supreme Commander of the British, French, and American Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II - born 1890 in Denison, TEXAS - served as thirty-fourth President of the United States of America from 1953 to 1961.)

One day in the White House, bucked all the way up via the Secretaries of Commerce and State, came an order from the Soviet Ministry of Health in Moscow that demanded decision at the very highest level.  It stipulated 12,000,000 condoms with only one additional detail: they should all uniformly measure 30 centimeters in length.  A uniformed aide consulted the Library of Congress and informed the President that in real measurements that amounted to 11.82 inches precisely.

Ike summoned his entire Cabinet on the double, where from the perspective of Realpolitik this order posed a real problem, what with the Cold War right at its coldest and all and all.  Brows furrowed in a silence broken solely by the tense sound of drumming fingers.  Ike’s more hard-nosed fellow Republicans on hand favored advising the Reds exactly where they could shove their order, but their kinder, gentler, more realistic and intelligent crypto-ComSymp colleagues said no, the nation’s economy at that point could definitely do with such an unexpected international trade bonanza – and who could tell what else it might lead to? 

With the Cabinet split 50-50, Ike said he’d like to sleep on this overnight, and would let them know his decision the following morning.

That night his unremitting tossing and turning made things hell for Mamie, and finally she said, “Ike, honey, what’s got you so upset?” – so he told her.  Within minutes the President had finally lapsed into a profound sleep, and he woke up a few hours later ready and eager to greet the new day.  He found his office already full of high-level aides with uniformly expectant faces, so he wasted no time before enlightening them.

After highest-level consultation (for tactical reasons he left Mamie out of this), he had decided that the country which had become the bastion of western democracy could indeed accept the Soviet order – under two preconditions.

First, each item would bear a stamp reading “Made in USA”.

And underneath that: “Medium size”.

(A quick historical footnote: State Secretary John Foster Dulles around that time coined a two-word phrase immediately adopted into American politics, referring to what the Reds could expect if they got funny with God’s Country, and an American diplomat in Munich spontaneously quoted that when I told him this joke: “Massive retaliation!”)

From your incorrigible octogenarian activist

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I’d like to zing in an enthusiastic plug for two estimable websites I’ve just discovered mere minutes ago: <http://afterdowningstreet.org> and <http://carryabigsticker.com/>.

If you’ll check ‘em out, you’ll immediately see why.

The first thing at the former that caught my eye and warmed my heart:

“Our Anti-War Shirts are Illegal

“3 new shirt designs feature names of 3,461 fallen U.S. troops.

“Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Louisiana have outlawed our shirts.  Congress could soon ban them nationwide.
We also sell magnetic bumper stickers, buttons, fridge magnets, bike stickers, & other liberal products.”

Now, any outfit engaged in that kind of seditious activity can’t be all bad, right?

John Irving reviews Günter Grass’s autobiography

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When this book, now published in English translation as Peeling the Onion, appeared here in Germany last year, it caused one hell of a flap because Grass’s previous books (which won him the Nobel Prize) had long since established him as a sort of living conscience of the German nation and now here he for the first time mentioned – sixty-two long years after the fact – his having briefly served, as a teen-ager, in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS, the military fighting auxiliary of the arch-criminal “General” SS that administered all Hitler’s concentration camps, including the six specific extermination camps the SS established on the soil of occupied Poland.  Here you have two salient paragraphs from John Irving’s lengthy review:

    ” . . . It’s important to understand that the man has made enemies.  Twenty-five books and the Nobel Prize (in 1999) precede Grass’s autobiography, “Peeling the Onion,” which was published in German (“Beim Houten der Zwiebel”) last summer to a chorus of controversy.  While it was acceptable to Grass’s critics that he had volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of 15, the revelation that he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, the combat force of the SS, in 1944, when he was 17, was a shock.  Grass spent the final months of the war with the force — later convicted en masse of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal.

    “Why had he waited so long to tell? his critics asked.  (As if there had ever been a time when he wouldn’t have been criticized for it!)  A historian, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wondered why the revelation had come out “in such a tortured way.”  (As if there wasn’t ample evidence of what was “tortured” about Grass in all the books leading up to this one!)  Another writer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine conjectured that the last, unfulfilled mission of Grass’s Frundsberg tank division was to get Hitler out of Berlin.  (“In other words, Grass could have freed Hitler.”)  A writer in the tageszeitung accused Grass of “calculating”; shouldn’t he have written to the Swedish Academy and offered a premature refusal?  (“A former Waffen-SS man would never have been considered for this prize.”)  A piece in the [Swiss] Neue Zürcher Zeitung said of Grass: “Posing as a self-assured moralist…. ” and so on.  Both the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau complained about the lateness of the admission.  But good writers write about the important stuff before they blab about it; good writers don’t tell stories before they’ve written them. . . !

John Irving makes no secret of his virtually boundless admiration for his German colleague (and apparently friend: he writes that he’ll probably attend one of two big birthday parties planned soon to celebrate Grass’s eightieth).  By clicking here you can read his entire review from day after tomorrow’s “New York Times Book Review”.

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All hail my stateside media hero Keith Olbermann!

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I’ve just discovered a link to his MSNBC “Countdown” program that’ll keep you thoroughly up to date on his uniquely commendable campaign for honesty and democracy in Washington.

From now on I myself, even from here in Germany, intend to pay regular attention to this admirable American – the kind that makes me sincerely proud of the finest of American democratic traditions.

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Keith Olbermann: today’s Edward R. Murrow?

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Egbert Roscoe Murrow, later known as plain Ed Murrow, born April 25, 1908 near Polecat Creek, near Greensboro, in Guilford County, North Carolina, half a century ago set the standard for responsible American television journalism.  His finest hour came on March 9, 1954, when a half-hour documentary quoting the documented utterances of Wisconsin’s hysterically red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy brought the turning point in that vile demagogue’s career and led directly to his self-disgrace and downfall.  I vividly recalled that telecast when I watched, fascinated, Keith Olbermann’s latest commentary in his “Countdown” program on MSNBC.

He has laced into Dubya and his gang before, but this blast goes far above and beyond any of those excoriations yet to come to my expatriated attention.  For me, like Murrow in the 1950s, Olbermann – especially in the degenerate age of Fox News and such repulsive journalistic excrescences as Ann C**lt*r – has firmly restored journalism to the status of an honorable profession.

I both marvel and rejoice that MSNBC keeps Olbermann on the air; they assuredly cannot find it easy to find sponsors for him.  During that bygone Murrow era, his own network, CBS, ranked head and shoulders for quality over its rivals NBC and ABC, but when Murrow and his equally courageous producer Fred Friendly launched their Person to Person series, CBS chickened out and left it to Murrow and Friendly to pay for their own newspaper advertising of their new series. 

From that distant time, Murrow’s telecasts – especially the one that so skillfully maneuvered McCarthy into self-destruction by means of incontestably documented fact – remained so memorable that the Koch Vision label reissued them.

Letters, telegrams, and phone-calls at the time deluged CBS by the thousands, running 15 to 1 in support of Murrow.  In a later A&E network tribute to Murrow, Fred Friendly recounted how, for instance, truck-drivers would pull up to the curb when they spotted Murrow on the street and call to him: “Good show, Ed!”

On this July 4th Independence Day I personally find precious little for Americans to celebrate, but I make a salient exception for Keith Olbermann in general and for this installment in particular, and I whole-heartedly commend it to you on this particular day as reassurance that the American principles laid down in 1776 - the present White House mob notwithstanding - have definitely not died.

Amb. Wilson: Administration "corrupt to the core"

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My No. 1 stateside television hero Keith Olbermann, bless him, has dropped one of his better journalistic blockbusters on the administration in Washington during an interview he conducted with former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom he reached by telephone out in Santa Fe.  Clicking here will get you a powerful double feature: not only the videoclip of that interview but also the news account about it that’s appeared in Editor and Publisher. 

Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame, you’ll recall, had her cover as a covert CIA operative blown in obvious revenge for Wilson’s having testified that Dubya had no legitimate cause for launching his rotten war against Iraq, which has not only killed thousands on both sides but also run up a cost well above $400,000,000,000.

Among other tidbits, Amb. Wilson accuses the President of participating in “the obstruction of justice”.