January 2009 Archives

JOHN UPDIKE, who died this week at the age of 76, was never one of my favorite authors. He was a little too, I don't know -- suburban? -- for my taste. Like if Rob Petri worked at The New Yorker, lived in New Rochelle, and instead of tripping over the ottoman on his way in the door, stumbled into bed with a neighbor's wife, while his wife got it on with Robbie's swimming coach and in the end everyone felt guilty and unsatisfied.

There was much more to John Updike, but I missed most of it until close to the end after I met the man a few years ago at a writer's conference at Montgomery County Community College. While driving there on Rt. 73 (Limekiln Pike) through Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, I passed a small street named Rabbit Run, which I dutifully reported to Mr. Updike when I had the opportunity. "NO!" he said, delighted. He was cordial, approachable and astoundingly devoted to his home state. He was a Pennsylvania gentleman.

For some reason I always thought of Updike as a New England writer when in fact he had a keystone heart as natural and durable as a mortarless stone wall. In the couple of hours I spent in his company he referenced his Berks County roots and his Middle Atlantic values repeatedly in a formal address and casual conversation. He was in awe of the majesty of Philadelphia and the vitality of Pittsburgh. He felt a bit like a country boy on the edge of Pennsylvania big city life. And even into his mid-70's his boyish innocence in person remained as affecting as his urbane and world weary sexuality in his writing. I feel honored to have shaken his hand in friendship.

DURING THE SAME WEEK that America's caramel colored First Family made its debut before a delighted nation and a fascinated world, I saw two new TV commercials for national brand-name products featuring biracial married couples. In one, the husband was black and the wife was white. In the other, the husband was white and the wife was black. In both commercials the wives did the talking. I don't remember ever seeing a biracial couple in a commercial before, so seeing two in one week caught my eye. Could this be a sign of the new Obama nation? Or is it merely commerce imitating reality?

I'm old enough to remember when a biracial couple in Philadelphia meant an Italian boy dating an Irish girl. I remember when Protestants were forbidden friends and Jews were exotics, people mentioned in the Bible by the nuns who taught us not to hate them, which was easy because I never met one. I remember when blacks were Negroes and whites were Caucasians and Jews were something else altogether. Muslims were nonexistent, except in stories about the Crusades, and even then they were called either Arabs or Mohammadeans. As for Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans or Scientologists. . . fuhgeddaboudit.

I grew up a Catholic school Philadelphian back in the day. I didn't have a black or Jewish classmate, let alone friend, until junior high school, when I became a Public. In grade school I had one Protestant friend named Elliott Jones, who lived on my street, and I kept trying to convert him to Catholicism. He was an Episcopalian, which to me meant he was something like a Communist. I was both naive and shameless and comfortable in my prejudice. That was how I grew up. Those were my values.

I get annoyed and impatient with people who explain their wrong thinking, if not behavior, with the words "that was how I was raised" as if everything there is to learn in life stops at the age of ten. As if not doing to their own children what their parents did to them is a betrayal of mom and dad. My father used to beat me and my brothers with a belt he would snap like a lion tamer before he whacked us. This was considered normal when I was growing up.

Somehow what I learned from this experience was never to hit my children. And I never have. In a single generation what was once common in my family had become unthinkable. And in America, what was unthinkable a generation ago has become our face to the world.

MR. SMITH WENT TO WASHINGTON yesterday, with Barack Obama playing the role of Jefferson Smith, the feel-good movie starring Jimmy Stewart about an unlikely United States Senator who lead his countrymen, women and children to their common senses and their common purpose. To say that I shed a tear or two would diminish the national deluge that greeted President Obama's oath of office. With a single, "So help me God." this unlikely candidate, and even unliklier winner, became our 44th president.

If it seemed like a movie, it was. It was a national spectacle filled with famous and anonymous faces of Americans who realized that a page in human history has been turned, millions of whom have been dreaming and praying for just such a day. America, at long last, has proved to itself and the world that it means what it says because it believes its own founding myth. That all men are created equal and that we the people control our own destiny.

Jimmy Stewart is the perfect role model for Barack Obama in the role of the people's president. He even started his presidency with a Jimmy Stewart stammer because of the crossed signals during Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert's recitation of the Constitutionally-mandated Presidential oath of office. At the same time the cast of characters surrounding the event looked like every hero and villain from Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's other Jimmy Stewart classic, It's a Wonderful Life. Tell me that outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney didn't look like he was doing a Lionel Barrymore impersonation as the evil miser Mr. Potter when he rolled onto stage in his wheelchair and cane.

It was great theater and it was a great day for America and for the world. The only thing missing was Zuzu's petals and the sound of a bell ringing. For somewhere in heaven an angel certainly earned his wings for showing us all that a single life can indeed change the world. Oh happy day.

"MY FELLOW AMERICANS, our long national nightmare is over," said the president who followed the first United States president to resign from office. Those words were spoken by Gerald Ford after being sworn in as president in August 1974. He was talking about the mess his predecessor, Richard Nixon, had left the country in following two years embroiled in the Watergate scandal. Both were Republicans.

I can almost guarantee that Democrat Barack Obama will not criticize George W. Bush in his inaugural address other than to express gratitude to his predecessor and disagreement with the results, if not Bush's intentions. Barack Obama would never say what I'm about to say:

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our idiot president, George Bush, is history. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a different declaration, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires" that I should "declare the causes which impel" me to call the president an idiot. Let me count the ways.

He lied to us. He knew he'd get caught. He tried to bluff his way through. He sent us to war against a sovereign foreign power based on a non-existent threat he argued relentlessly was imminent to convince our nation and the world his actions were just. Future historians will see George Bush for what he was, a pride-obsessed tragedian within a Shakespearean-Fruedian drama who sought to avenge his wronged father, Bush the Elder, who lost a presidential election after going to war for the right reasons against an obnoxious dictator.

On this twisted stage Saddam Hussein was the equivalent of Hamlet's evil uncle, but George Bush was no tortured Hamlet. He did not brood so much as posture and sneer. He did not doubt. And so we went to war for all the wrong reasons. And thousands and thousands and thousands died, including 4,200 Americans, who would not have died if George Bush had not been president.

Why was he an idiot? Because he failed the test of non-idiocy. He didn't get it. He still doesn't get it. He leaves office with minor regrets about a "Mission Accomplished" banner rather than taking responsibility for launching the still unaccomplished mission. After six years of war America has four times as many troops in Iraq, a country we shouldn't have invaded, than in Afghanistan, a country we should have invaded. Since New Year's day almost twice as many American troops have died in Afghanistan (10) than in Iraq (6). And 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is still a free man. That's the American reality on the day before George Bush leaves office, the final day of our long national nightmare.

And so The Itchy and Scratchy Show goes on for at least another week. The Eagles playoff victory over the New York Giants guarantees that I will be both uncomfortable and unsightly at least until next weekend, pending the outcome of the NFC Championship game between the Eagles and Cardinals.

At least until then, and possibly longer, I will be wearing my Eagles victory beard, as shaggy a shaggy dog story about this football season as ever there was to tell. Or as Fox NFL pregame court jester Frank Caliendo (playing Tony Soprano) said before kickoff yesterday, "Did you notice that Andy Reid is growing a beard on one of his chins?"

I first noticed the reddish stubble on Reid's chinny-chin-chins during that unbelieveable Sunday when the Eagles came back from a fourth-and-fuhgeddaboutit chance to make the playoffs and then proceeded to blow out the Cowboys. It was during the fourth quarter of that sweet stomping of Dallas that I declared (unfortunately in front of witnesses at a Grays Ferry bar called the Krunch Inn) "I'm not going to shave until the Eagles lose."

Growing a beard is a rite of passage that most guys go through at least once in their lives. Usually with disappointment the first time out in their late teens or early 20's. There are those "patches" issues to contend with. That's where the first-time beard grows luxuriantly in certain places and barely at all in others. The net effect is that the young man's beard comes in looking like a dogleg par four complete with sand traps on the back nine at Cobbs Creek.

That's when he discovers that mom's mascara isn't just for girls anymore. It's the beard equivalent of a comb over and it fools no one.

In later years, say in his early 40's, a man who decides to grow a beard discovers to his amusement that gray hair shows up in his face hair before his head hair. This gives him his first taste of youthful salt-and-pepper maturity, which gets old real quick.

And then there is the man of a certain age, say a man of about my age, who when he decides to grow a victory beard to support his team in the NFL playoffs, learns that his formerly salt and pepper beard is now nothing but a foaming white sea with occasional lonely dark flecks resembling lifeboats after a ship wreck.

This is the beard I see when I look in the mirror. It makes me look like a hobo hunched over a gurgling crackling cauldron in some train yard. The only thing worse than how it looks is how it feels. What it is that makes me think that wearing such a hideous hood ornament will help the Eagles win a Superbowl? What do I know that Andy Reid doesn't? Apparently not a gosh darn thing.

AS A WISE MAN ONCE SAID, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son." So there I was on a brilliant sun shiny January morning dancing up Broad Street wearing an over-sized satiny dress with about 2,000 similarly dressed whack jobs, looking for all the world like Dean Wormer's worst nightmare, when it occurred to me that nowhere but in Philadelphia can so many guys look like frat brothers from Animal House on New Year's Day and consider it a way of life.

What would Philadelphia be without the mummers? Another city certainly.

Mummers are the bad boys of the western world. The Deltas in an Alpha culture. Been that way since the Romans called it Saturnalia. Kings dressed as slaves. Men dressed as women. City folk dressed as farm boys. The best fool became the wisest man. It was an extended solstice festival, like Christmas through Carnival. And any bozo who dragged it out past the end of March was labeled an April fool.

Philadelphia takes care of all that in a single day, or thereabouts. And that single day identifies Philadelphia to itself. The world may not know mummers but we do. This past New Year's parade clocked in at a record six hours and 30 minutes. It was a cold glorious day. Brilliant winter light shined on Broad Street as if the sun was a spotlight at the Navy Yard.

And yet the crowds took a hike. The fans and first timers remained and had a great time. What's not to like? A wonderful parade on a beautiful day. But there was nobody there. I'm talking nobody-deep on the west side of Broad and Pine when the ninth string band passed.

I know why, of course. Who would bring their family out to watch a parade that might not happen? Or if it does happen there might be a work stoppage? Or if there is a parade it might turn violent if the fat, drunk and stupid parts of both cultures act up. So the bad press about the mummers-City Hall conflict cooled off the size of the crowd as much as the cold day. And boy what a great show they missed.

But one thing is for sure, the mummers are as big a part of Philadelphia as any sports team and the thought of a New Year's Day without a parade is a unthinkable as a spring without the Phillies or an autumn without the Eagles. And the powers that be ought to accommodate that reality into the annual budget instead of acting like the mummers can be put double secret probation.