Venus, Jon Stewart and Red Light Districts

CBS Sunday Morning did a piece on Good Housekeeping’s Seal of Approval a few days ago. If a product carrying the coveted seal does not perform as promised, the magazine—not the manufacturer or the retailer—will refund the purchase price or replace the product. Which brings me to today’s mail and a copy of a magazine-sized glossy catalog of women’s apparel from Venus of Jacksonville, Fla. It’s 96 pages of soft porn images of fetching young maidens in bikinis and otherwise come-hither fashions. The back cover headline is “Sexy Sunrises are on your horizon.”

By the way, this hot catalog was not sent to Gilda. It was sent to me! I’m flattered Venus considers me, or Gilda, sexy. But I can’t help but thinking Venus and others of its ilk should adopt a Good Housekeeping-like creed—if their products don’t turn you into the personification of sexiness (at least to your partner’s satisfaction) in say, 60 days, you should get your money back. Or at the very least, they should remove you from their mailing list.

Jon Stewart of The Daily Show is no Sandy Koufax. You’ll remember the southpaw ace of the Los Angeles Dodgers forsook pitching the opening game of the 1965 World Series against the Minnesota Twins because it fell on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Judaism’s holiest day. (For the record, Koufax pitched and won two other games in leading the Dodgers to the baseball title.) Stewart chooses to ignore, and even mock, Jewish holidays, working on Yom Kippur and other holidays including this week’s Passover celebration. Most Jews I know have a liberal sense of humor about our religion, so we laugh along with Stewart’s comedic send-ups. 

Monday night, however, one of The Daily Show’s best puns went unappreciated by what must have been an audience with few if any Jews, given that it was the night of the first seder of Passover. There wasn’t even a hint of laughter when Stewart’s reporting on the president’s trip to Israel was accompanied by the caption, “Barack Atah Adonai.” For the non-believers out there, and anyone else Hebraically challenged, Barack Atah Adonai is a play on “Baruch Atah Adonai” which begins every blessing and means “blessed are you, Lord our God.” In Stewart’s version, the Hebrew translates to “Barack (Obama), you are God.”  

Uh-oh: Retirement may cost me about 50 bucks. Since I don’t travel out of LaGuardia Airport too often these days I was unaware traffic lights were installed on an overhang above the departure ramp of the main terminal. As I drove Ellie and Donny to the United Airlines door, I was softly questioned by my son-in-law about gliding through a red light. 

I stopped at the next one and noticed a camera stationed to the right of the red sphere. Dread descended. No doubt my picture was taken at the prior light. No doubt I’ll get a notice in the mail in a few weeks demanding payment for going through a red light. No doubt my defense that no lights previously impeded my progress down the ramp will not absolve me from having to pay for the infraction. Ah well, it’s a small price to pay for an otherwise enjoyable retirement.

From St. Francis to Diesel Fuel to Summer Camp

Prophetic or Just Lucky? When the programmers at Turner Classic Movies put together their list of flicks for March, do you think they had advance word about the name to be chosen by the yet-to-be-elected pope? 

Tonight at 9:30 the cable channel will air Flowers of St. Francis, an 87-minute paean to St. Francis of Assisi, what TV Guide calls a “lighthearted episodic account of the life of the Italian monk” whose name has been taken by the newly installed pontiff.  

In truth, the coincidence is just fortuitous serendipity. TCM is running a month-long salute to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Flowers of St. Francis is just one of 14 of his films airing this month. However, one cannot help but wonder if there was some higher authority that guided the selection process.

Fill ‘er Up: Did you hear about the trouble President Obama had in Israel with his armored presidential limousine? Seems someone filled the diesel tank with gasoline. For those not familiar with what happens to a diesel engine filled with the wrong fuel, it shortly stops working. Lucky for the president and his Israeli hosts, a second limo was procured from storage in nearby Jordan. 

The incident reminded me of when my boss about 20 years ago visited Italy with his wife. They stopped for lunch at a quaint hillside village after gassing up their rental car, only to find it dead as a doornail when they returned from their delicious meal. He called the rental company which agreed to send a replacement vehicle. It would take several hours, an inconvenience John was more than willing to endure when he realized he had put regular gasoline into the diesel car.  

Parallel Parking: Last Sunday I pulled up next to a late model Ford on South 5th Street in Philadelphia. Just a block away from the National Museum of American Jewish History we wanted to visit, the spot was a tight one for my Toyota Avalon. The others in the car thought it was too small, but I chose to give it a try. After all, last year when I taught in-car Driver’s Education, I told my students the only time they needed to pull off a perfect park was on their road tests. After you pass, you can hit the curb or the cars in front or behind you as often as you like, I told them. Nobody's going to take your license away.

The young couple that had emerged from the Ford as we pulled up lingered across the street, watching my every move, ready to pounce should I nudge their car. I slid in perfectly. When I got out of my car I couldn't resist shouting across the street triumphantly, “I taught Driver’s Ed.” They didn't hear me, but I felt good all the same.

Inside the museum I spent a goodly amount of time at a film display of 30 influential Jewish Americans, people like Sandy Koufax, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg, Irving Berlin, Golda Meir, Jonas Salk, and Louis Brandeis. I don't know why the museum chose the 30 they did, why they left off some pretty important people, luminaries such as Robert Oppenheimer, Louis B. Mayer, Howard Schultz, Marvin Traub, Philip Roth, William Paley. The list can go on and on, from almost every human endeavor. 

Sitting there watching those videographies I missed seeing the second floor exhibit on Jewish cultural life in America. When Gilda asked if I'd seen the pictures of Camp Massad I raced up the stairs for a quick run through of the camp I attended from ages 7-11, from 1956 to 1960. For some reason I was disappointed my picture wasn’t among the few on the wall, though why it would have been there I cannot imagine. 

There was a picture of the arts and crafts building, named after Bezalel, the biblical artisan who crafted the desert tabernacle. My first year crafts project reflected the mores of the time—I made ashtrays for each of my parents, a brown one for my father, a sandstone one for my mother. 

Another camp photo was of the man-made lake, Kinerret, the Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee. I didn’t learn to swim there, as long-time readers know. I remember being cold, standing waist-deep in the water, a thin reed of a boy unable to stay afloat when putting my head in the water, flailing my arms, kicking my legs. How I dreaded going to Kinerret twice a day, once for general swim, once for instruction. I loved everything about Camp Massad except swimming.

Slapping Down a Jester, a King, a Crowley

I’m a big fan of Jon Stewart, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows. But someone needs to tell him that hosting The Daily Show on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, was unseemly. Though he’s not religiously observant, Stewart often refers to his Jewish heritage. Indeed, on his Thursday night show he bantered with Amar’e Stoudemire of the NY Knicks about fasting on Yom Kippur (Stoudemire has traced some Jewish roots). But to the casual viewer, seeing Stewart appear on his Tuesday and Wednesday night shows, both taped during the Day of Atonement observance period, was a discordant signal. Stewart should have emulated Sandy Koufax, and other professional athletes, who chose not to perform on Yom Kippur, even when it meant missing a World Series game. 

Perhaps Stewart’s guest list was limited Tuesday night because of the start of Yom Kippur, but I found it serendipitous to see King Abdullah II of Jordan sitting across his interview desk. Given Jordan’s strategic, or unfortunate, global position situated as it is on the borders of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and Israel, and just a missile’s lob from Iran, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, King Abdullah could be expected to provide an insider’s perspective on the various conflicts in the region. He is considered a moderate among the Arab and Muslim community.

Yet, I was more than alarmed to hear him describe the root cause of Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear program as a response to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. “The reason why they have a nuclear program is what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and the future of Jerusalem,” he said. He asserted if the Israelis and the Arabs solve their problems “then there’s no raison d'être for Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” 

One problem with this reasoning is Iran is not an Arab state. Persians live there, Persians who have fought Arabs for some 3,000 years, including the recent 10-year war with Iraq. The Iranians have no love for Arabs. Now, the king might have couched Iran’s support for the Palestinians as one Muslim supporting another. But here again there is historical reason to question that argument: Iran is Shia; most Palestinians are Sunni. Those two sects don’t like each other. They keep blowing up each other, in their respective mosques, at funerals, in marketplaces. Anywhere. 

Furthermore, by King Abdullah’s reasoning, we would expect not just Iran but also other Muslim countries to want to nuke up their armaments to leverage a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Are we prepared for a nuclear Indonesia? Or Bangladesh? Or Albania? Or any of the other 45 majority Muslim countries of the world? 

Sorry, King Abdullah, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions have little if anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By implying they do, King Abdullah is following the example of dictators throughout the Middle East who have used the conflict as a pretext to keep their own people suppressed, economically and politically. King Abdullah might be considered a moderate, his British-educated accent pleasant to the ear, but his type of reasoning is what has kept tensions in the Middle East at the simmering point ever since Jews started reclaiming the land of their heritage.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing these days about the state of education in the United States. Apparently our educational standards have a long history of laxity. To wit, here’s what one of our Ph.D.s, with a degree earned from Columbia University, no less, recently wrote the day after our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked and four American foreign service officers, including our ambassador, were killed: 

“The Middle East is aflame, much of which is a result of Obama’s policies of helping to dislodge allies like Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Qaddafi and replace them with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. He may use the orchestrated violence as a pretext to act in order to get Americans’ attention off the economy.  I don’t know.  But in any case, Obama must be defeated on November 6 if we’re to have any hope of surviving as a serious world power. Maybe surviving, period.”

Could be I was sleeping through these last 30 years or so, but when did Qaddafi become an ally of ours, much less a “key ally,” as Monica Crowley further elaborated on her written comments during a sit-down with Sean Hannity of Fox News September 12. During the Bush II years America championed the idea of democracy in the Middle East. Now that a democratically elected leader (not to her liking) is seated in Mubarak’s old chair, Crowley is all agog, yearning for those good old days of tyranny and torture, all for the good of the U.S. of A, mind you. Let’s not pretend to care what the Egyptians get out of this change of circumstance.

I also didn’t know America was in jeopardy of losing its status as a serious world power. Can you think of any other country people around the world are clamoring to enter, legally or not? Can you think of any other country even remotely as powerful as we are? Yes, our economy is still in the doldrums, but so is almost every other country’s. Even China is in flux. 

Every time a Democrat is president or running for the office conservatives raise the specter of our own annihilation. Yet they remained silent when the Neocons dragged us into two wars (and ran up the deficit by not funding them on the books). I am despondent to think the viewers of Fox News don’t recognize the absurdities they hear from that channel. Here’s another example: recently Fox News polled its audience to ascertain their election choices. Guess what? 90% favored Romney, 10% Obama. Duh!

Economic Lessons From An Early Age

Choo Choo Coleman is back in town.

I wasn’t a NY Mets fan growing up, nor at present, but I saw Choo Choo play for the Mets in the old Polo Grounds, the team’s first home before Shea Stadium and now Citi Field rose in Flushing Meadows. It was at the Polo Grounds I witnessed first-hand the mastery of Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the Polo Grounds, pitchers would warm up before the game near their respective dugouts. As Koufax warmed up, my brother and I made our way to the front row. I still can visualize the 12-to-6 curveballs Koufax spun during his warm-ups, hear the thumps of his fastballs as they hit the catcher’s mitt.

Choo Choo (nobody called him Coleman) came back to New York for the first time since 1966 to be a featured guest at baseball memorabilia shows and a baseball writers’ dinner (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/sports/baseball/mets-choo-choo-coleman-50-years-later.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=sports).

One of the foundations of any sports show is the showcasing and trading of baseball cards. Like most youngsters I had a massive baseball card collection, cleaned out one day by my mother. I didn’t have a hard to secure Rogers Hornsby card, but I had my fair share of Mickey Mantles, Yogi Berras, Roberte Clementes and Stan Musials.

Baseball cards were not just for collecting. They were also for playing with, often in ways that were sort of like gambling. Just like pitching pennies, where the winner is the one who flicked a penny closest to the wall, kids would cast cards toward a wall. A variation on this game was tossing a card towards a wall already targeted by your opponent; if your card landed on top of your opponent’s, you claimed his card. If it didn’t, he took yours.

Another game entailed holding a card to a wall and letting it tumble down. Your opponent won your card if his fell on top of yours. He lost his if it didn’t.

A fourth game was dropping cards from your hand to match the front or back of your opponent’s cards. One trick we used—if you wanted the card to land on its picture side, you’d hold the card with the back facing out. Fifth game variation: dropping cards from a wall, your opponent trying to match the fronts and backs.

Baseball cards were not just gambling devices. Using clothes pins, kids affixed cards to bicycle wheel spokes to make clicking noises while speeding through neighborhoods. Of course, I didn't do this because I never learned to ride a two-wheeler as a child.

Cards were also used to set up a defensive field in a game of marble baseball. If a batted marble rolled to a pre-determined spot on the field without first touching a card, you reached base safely. But if a marble skimmed over a card, you were out.

Perhaps the greatest contribution baseball cards made to the youth of America was their part in our education into the ways of capitalism.

Baseball cards were our currency of exchange We learned about supply and demand. We learned not all cards had equal value. We learned how to trade for the cards we wanted. We learned how to be good losers. We learned how to size up the competition, how to stay away from sharpies, how to exploit suckers. We learned fortunes could be won or lost in an hour. We learned sometimes it's the smart thing to walk away during a hot streak, that success can be fleeting if based on the flip of a card.

We learned, ultimately, that not everyone shared our values, that what we thought was gold our mothers thought was trash.

We learned to forgive, at least on the outside, but never to forget the simple joys of baseball cards.

And lest anyone think I'd forgotten, mom also threw out my comic book collection.

Ethnic Pride and Shame

Ethnic pride is a powerful cultural marker. What Italian didn’t feel his chest swell when Rocky Marciano won the heavyweight boxing title? Or when Luciano Pavarotti hit a high C note? When rap stars dominate the music business, when the NBA and most Division I college basketball teams feature Afro-Americans, when Barack Obama took the oath of office, how could people of color not be proud?

When I was growing up, my parents always pointed out prominent Jewish actors, playwrights, politicians, physicians, even sportsmen, especially when their names might not have given away their pedigree. Kirk Douglas. Tony Curtis. John Garfield. Arthur Miller. Jacob Javits. Jonas Salk. Sandy Koufax—how proud we were when he declined to play in a World Series game on Yom Kippur (how disappointed I was when Ike Davis of the Mets chose to play a meaningless game on this year’s Yom Kippur).

I wound up doing the same not so subtle identification process for my children.

But just as coins have two sides, ethnic pride is but the positive side of ethnic shame. Here are two prominent residents on my list of shame:

Bernard Madoff
Pamela Geller

Madoff is obvious. Beyond swindling money, helped along, let’s be honest, by the greed of many of his clients, was his total disregard for the impact his illegal activity would have on the numerous social and charitable organizations that blindly invested with him. Sad as it is that many individuals lost their savings, it is far worse that he bankrupted or weakened entities whose sole purpose was to help their fellow human.

If you are not already familiar with Pamela Geller, here’s a link to a profile from Sunday’s NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/nyregion/10geller.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage.

To reject radical forms of Islam that have morphed into violence is not shameful. But Geller has transformed the perception of Islam from a major religion into an extremist movement. She incites hatred, intolerance, bigotry.

It is true. Some Muslims want to kill all “non-believers.” Nothing new here. Religions often are brutally intolerant—Israelites wanted to eradicate all inhabitants of Canaan; Christians killed non-believers during their conquests of the New World; Catholics and Protestants killed each other; New Believers and Old Believers fought for supremacy of the Russian Orthodox Church. Shiites and Sunnis kill each other in the name of Allah. It’s hard to find any religion without blood on its hands, as God always seems to be “on their side.”

But Geller, who went to Hebrew school, should have learned that Jews flourished in the early Middle Ages under Islam. Indeed, Spain was a model of religious tolerance when Muslims ruled there, allowing Jews to rise to the highest levels of government, commerce and the arts. Either through ignorance or intent, Geller turns her back on history to paint an entire religion as evil. Her depictions of Islam are as cruel as any anti-Semitic canard. She is a demagogue empowered by the Internet and cable TV. I shutter to think anyone might think she represents the Jewish community.


Texas Massacre: If you’re a liberal and a New York sports fan, this was a great weekend. First, the Texas Rangers lost two home playoff games to the Tampa Bay Rays. Both teams will travel to Florida for the deciding fifth game of their series to determine who will play the Yankees beginning Friday night for the American League pennant.

Second, the NY Football Giants beat up the Houston Texans, 34-10.

Third, the Dallas Cowboys lost to the Tennessee Titans, 34-27.

Few states bring out the nasty in me as does Texas. For the most part I enjoyed my visits there (I probably traveled to Texas close to 100 times). But I can’t separate the state’s regressive politics (and George W. Bush) from their sports teams. I was delighted the Rangers, Texans and Cowboys lost.

Oh, by the way, Target dodged a boycott bullet as the Yanks defeated the Minnesota Twins at Target Field (and Yankee Stadium).


Have a Seat: Perhaps you saw the Op-Ed piece last Thursday in the NY Times from John Edgar Wideman. He’s a a professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown University. At least twice a week he rides the Acela from New York City to Providence, RI, and back, discovering along the way that he rarely has to share a double seat with anybody. Why? He presumes because he is a man of color. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/opinion/07Wideman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=wideman&st=cse).

From more than 30 years commuting on Metro North, I can tell you he is 100% correct. As I never wanted to stand, I sat next to everyone and anyone, even if it meant taking the dreaded middle seat of a three-seat bench. My only bias was not to be wedged in between two portly passengers. If I sat at one end of a three-seater and a person of color sat at the other end, it was usually a given no one would take the middle seat, regardless of how crowded the train was.

Metro North is not like the subway where races mix, if not easily, at least commonly. Few Afro-Americans commute on Metro North. They are largely avoided. I am not alone in my convictions. Here’s how some other readers responded to Wideman in letters to the editor: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/opinion/l09seat.html?ref=amtrak.


??? For VP: Just as the baseball playoffs got under way, official, and unofficial, Washington entered its fall season with incessant speculation President Obama will shake up his team, switching the positions of Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. For the record, the White House denied any such move is contemplated.

As long ago as March 4, I opined Biden would conveniently and diplomatically be replaced on the 2012 ticket. I didn’t think it would be by Hillary. I picked former Indiana senator Evan Bayh, 55, a moderate young enough to give Democrats a good shot at holding the presidency in 2016 if Obama wins re-election.