The Cave or the Prism?

So Donald Trump suffered his first legislative loss as the nation’s leader. Did he take any responsibility for the defeat of the health care bill? No. He let House Speaker Paul Ryan do that—which, in part, was Ryan’s proper response. After all, Ryan and his leadership team should have known well in advance that the bill was unwinnable among the far right of his own party, and that appeasing them would only create a bubble of dissent among the moderates and madden the party liberals. But Trump did more than simply deny any responsibility for the failure of his signal legislative promise, made months and months ago; he assigned the loss to the Democrats, just as Trump assigns failures of any kind to other actors and never to himself. I think this is because his mind is a flawed prism through which the blended light of reason, trust, rightness of purpose, and personal accountability cannot enter without being corrupted, distorted, and discolored.

Donald Trump’s prism of decision-making, when exposed to the clear white light of public need, does not yield a robust spectrum of ideas and possibilities. It does not even issue beams of shades of gray, where some compromise is possible. Donald Trump’s prism only casts black and bleak shadows on the wall of the cave of denial he has fashioned for himself. In this shadowy cave, Trump sees only his world and no other world, his point of view and no other point of view. He refuses to embrace the reality that there are Americans unlike himself outside the cave, people with needs beyond his limousine’s darkened windows, people living lives of quiet desperation far below his penthouse on 5th Avenue, or gazing through the gates of the White House or Mar-a-Lago. Trump eschews the common man and woman, unless they can be of some use to his own selfish goals.

Well, welcome to Washington, D.C., Mr. Trump. This may not look like much of a town to you, but this is America’s city. It is not really a shining city on a hill, but it is a city nonetheless dedicated to the proposition that all Americans deserve fair and equal representation. Of late, that proposition has taken some body blows. I admit—after living here for more than six decades, and working as an employee of the people for nearly four of those decades—I have seen the capital do a better job of representation and fairness. We’ve had our share of shady officials—from presidents to members of both chambers of Congress. And we’ve had our share of political division that threatened—even carried out—government shutdowns and great pain to the citizenry. But, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “Here, sir, the people govern.” The people, Mr. Trump. The people. The same people President Lincoln referred to in the Gettysburg address, “…of the people, by the people, for the people.”

We are not a nation full of sheep to be sheared, Mr. Trump. Disabuse yourself of that notion and you may begin to make some progress in Washington where the citizens of America deserve better than a leader who attempts to rule through lies, disinformation, prevarication, dissembling, artless legerdemain, and willful ignorance of the most basic processes. What happened to you on Friday, Mr. Trump, was a classic example of personal hubris trying and failing to overcome political will.

It was an also an example of your failure know what a constituent is, to understand and appreciate that the moment you won the election, you became the leader not just of your supporters, but of all of us. Listen to members of Congress who pushed back against the health care bill, Mr. Trump. The experienced ones—the ones who know their districts; not just the far-right-wingers who mimic their PACs—know that every one of their constituents has a prism through which they view the success or failure of their Congressman or Senator at the local level. Those prisms don’t just break the light of legislation into red or blue beams—they cast the full spectrum of issues directly into the lives, the jobs, and the pocketbooks of every citizen. You don’t know those constituents, Mr. Trump, because you’ve never had any. Not one. Unlike every other modern president from JFK onward, you have never stood for any elective office. And all your posturing, posing, bravado and blustering does not gain you one whit of understanding of who the average American is, what we need, or what we expect from a leader. Frankly, you scare the hell out of a lot of us with all that you don’t know and apparently don’t care to know about what matters to us—at home, locally and globally.

You may have come away from your campaign rallies with the impression that you would be loved and followed unconditionally simply because of the reactions you got to certain words and phrases designed to ensnare the gullible or the desperate, the dissatisfied or disaffected people in those crowds. God knows you have drilled those words and phrases into your White House staff who parrot them at every convenient microphone. But that strategy is running on fumes now, Mr. Trump. You saw that on Friday. Words and phrases, threats and bluffs, carry only so much energy, and eventually that energy dissipates and entropy takes over, thinning out your improbable promises, your vague and uninformed notions of government, and your credibility.

Unlike many critics who say you’re too old at 70 to change, I don’t believe your reluctance to accept the reality of the presidency is due to age; I think you simply don’t want to get it. You don’t want to discard your darkened prism for a clear one that spreads the full colors of the American way of life across your cave wall. You’re afraid of what you’ll see. You’re afraid to come out of the cave of shades and shadows. How sad. I pity you, Mr. Trump.

Thank you, Carol Griffee

Carol Griffee 1937-2011

On a day when we celebrate strong women (that is to say, all women), I want to share one strong woman with my readers. Unfortunately, Carol Griffee is no longer with us, but I can say, unequivocally, that had Carol not been in my life when I was a teenager looking for work in the news business, it is quite likely I would have chosen a less demanding, less fulfilling line of work. Carol was tough love personified, and she was one hell of an editor.

Carol gave me my first chance to cover a story and take pictures on Memorial Day, 1967, when she was the managing and executive editor of the Northern Virginia Sun--a local daily here in the DC area. All I had to do was go to a local cemetery in Alexandria, take pictures of a wreath-laying, interview one or two people, describe the ceremony, and then return to the paper (on a Monday, as I recall), develop the film, write a paragraph or two, write a caption for the photo, and give everything to the press foreman who was setting up the next day's paper. The paper was closed that day, so I was let in by the press foreman, ushered into the silent newsroom, shown the darkroom, and left alone. 

Well, I botched most of the negatives (Tri-X) in the darkroom when I was putting the film on the metal reel, preventing most of the images from even touching the developer). I barely got through the story (how hard is it to write one darn paragraph about a wreath-laying?), and I screwed up the cutline for the one remaining image (the only one of 36 that survived my darkroom disaster). I was also supposed to make a plastic plate of the photograph using a Klischograph machine--an early scanner technology--with which I'd had no experience at all! A nightmare in the making.

The Dreaded Klischograph Machine

Thanks to a kindly pressman ("Kid, you're supposed to write  a caption, not a novel") and a Linotypist (what's your byline, kid? I gotta make a slug of type for your byline.") who helped a floundering idiot on that Monday afternoon, the picture and story ran the next day.

Carol called me in Tuesday afternoon--I was still in high school--and said that the two guys back in the printing plant recounted my fumbling first day as a reporter/photographer. We went through the whole megillah--from start to finish, with Carol probing each point of my account. When I got to the part about the darkroom, she was barely hiding her laughter at the near disaster. She finally broke down with deep, smokey guffaw when I told her about the Klischograph and how the press boss had to show me every step in the process and get me straight about writing the caption. 

I had not been completely honest with Carol about my skills--obviously--but I really wanted the job, so I'd bluffed (I thought) my way into the assignment. Carol had spotted that right from the get-go, but she'd given me the assignment anyway--just to see.

As I stood in front of her desk that Tuesday, she peered over her glasses, her cigarette-stained voice penetrated my teen-stupid brain and she said (here, I have to paraphrase, but I'm pretty sure I'm very close), 

"Don't ever lie to me again. You did good work, the guys in the back said you learned quickly, and you can have the job, but when you don't know something, tell me. We can work it out." 

She was only 30 then, but her voice was the voice of wisdom and guidance for this newcomer. For a year, I covered everything from social club meetings to the police beat to the riots in Washington, to the assassination of Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi party. Under Carol's tutelage, my writing got tighter, my pictures improved with richness and focus (and I learned how to use that damn Klischograph and type a few lines of type on that ancient Linotype machine with its buckets of hot lead). 

When it was time for me to go off to college a year later, Carol gave me a great final assignment--a full story and a double truck of pictures of a big airshow at Dulles airport--to round out my portfolio. And then she handed me two letters of recommendation (one to the dean of the J school at Boulder, and one to any potential news editor) to take out to Colorado, where I got my next paper job at the Longmont Daily Times-Call...and all the good stuff followed.

Thanks, Carol.

http://m.arkansasonline.com/obituaries/2011/jan/27/carol-griffee-2011-01-27/

The Geese--A Short Story From a Distant Winter

The Lake, in Summer

I got out of my bed, dressed in jeans, sweater, and boots, quietly opened the guest room door, and walked down to the lake in the mid-November darkness. The early morning air was clear and cold, with a hint of dampness rising from the night’s accumulation of frost.

Years earlier, I had taken my son and his best friend to my parents’ farm for an overnight camp-out down by our lake. We had walked down to this meadow in the fall, and the night sky was ablaze with fiery stars, bright planets, and sizzling meteors all set against the endlessly deep river of the Milky Way.  We spent the first part of the evening tracing the constellations and pondering the ancient names of Sirius, Aldebaran, Procyon, Deneb,Vega, Arcturus, and Rigel.  By the time the heart of the galaxy wheeled high overhead, the boys were fast asleep in their tent, and I was stretched out on a blanket, bathed in the light of distant suns.

This morning, the stars did not keep my attention, though their beauty spoke to me in the words of Antoine St. Exupery’s The Little Prince when he said, “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly.” St. Exupery had had an encounter with the universe on a starry night many decades earlier, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, where he had set his plane down for the night. The small boy of St. Ex’s conscience reduced the search for truth to such a basic thought. “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly.” As I made my way down to the lake, I searched in my own heart for such a truth…and I could not find it. In the house behind me, my mother lay dying, and that was the only truth I knew. 

 

A waning moon hovered low over the front range of the Appalachians, casting a blue-white spotlight on our modest little lake. From where I stood on the hill overlooking the water, I saw the forms of nine large male Canada geese gliding across the mirror smooth surface. They were muttering and arguing among themselves in the mid-winter stillness. The ganders had been up all night, maintaining their vigil over their flock of almost eighty birds. Calling to one another in the pre-dawn hours, the males' rich bass utterances carried easily across the ice-flecked water. Occasionally their bickering banter was broken by sharp honks and the smashing of wings and webbed feet against air and water in territorial disputes, which ended as quickly as they began. 

Generally silent throughout the night, the rest of the goose population began to stir as the first light of morning edged the surrounding hills. Many of the younger birds and older females rose from their nests on a small island near one side of the creek-fed lake; about two dozen more birds were station-keeping just offshore.

I quietly made my way back to the house, padded softly to the front hall closet and borrowed my father’s fleece-lined jacket and a blue knit cap someone left on the shelf. I grabbed a binocular case from a hook in the closet, and, with the addition of a pair of purloined gloves, made my way back to a natural blind of deadfall branches I’d not yet cleared from the meadow. From my position, I could see down the length of the lake, to the far end where most of the geese had congregated in the pre-dawn hours.

As the night grudgingly gave way to the day, the dominant geese – those birds who earned their leadership over years of experience with this flock – took up an insistent and raucous tone, calling to the geese on the island and on the shore, urging them to shake off the morning chill and swim out on the lake in preparation for the first flight of the day. One by one, then in twos and threes, and finally in whole groups, the geese plunged into the water and shouted in the new morning.

On the far side of the foothills lying several miles to the southeast, the sun worked its way up the morning sky, its first tentative rays transforming a high layer of cirrus clouds into a swirling abstract of purples, crimsons, and silver-lined pinks. The injection of the sun's energy into the chilled air lofted tenuous streamers of mist off the water and ascend several hundred feet above the lake.

Unimpressed with the veils of fog surrounding them, the geese exercised their wings and jockeyed for position as the flock collected near the island. The birds organized themselves into gaggles of eight to ten, while a dominant gander in each group prodded his charges toward mid-lake.

From the end of the lake behind the geese, a flight of mallard ducks suddenly burst off the water with frantically beating wings. They climbed quickly into the cold morning sky, and peeled off sharply to the north. Below them, the geese honked an irritated good riddance.

With each passing moment, the valley filled with a clear yellow radiance. A wave of sunlight spilled over the eastern hills, illuminating the ridges to the west before flowing down the lower meadows and farm lands and sweeping across the lake. The cool blue shadow that had surrounded me during my vigil yielded to the surging dawn and was swept across the snow on the crest of the advancing light.

As if responding to a new tension in the valley, a gaggle of twenty geese moved quickly away from the others. Reaching the middle of the water, the geese wheeled about in one long line abreast. Facing the luminescent brilliance of dawn, and softly visible through the gauzy mist rising off the water, the birds let loose with a great chorus of honking and shouting. As the noise reached a frenzied climax, the geese shot forward and raced across the lake, their long and powerful wings driving air down to the surface, pushing the birds away from the water's viscous grip until the bond was completely broken. Holding their altitude to just a few feet off the water, the gaggle accelerated toward the earthen dam at the eastern end of the lake. Through the binoculars, I watched the powerful downbeat of the leader’s wings flatten the water beneath him. His face was set in a black and white mask of patient determination as his formation approached the dam.

When all the birds were up to speed and on track with the lead gander, the gaggle climbed as one bird, up and over the earthworks and, turning in a graceful chandelle to the right, soared away from the lake. Behind them, another gaggle had already begun its takeoff surge, while the remaining geese were lining up to take to the air. Flight after flight of geese lifted off the water and swung low over the rising meadow, passing within yards of my blind, so close that I could hear their wing beats and breathy exhalations.

Once up and formed on their respective leaders, each gaggle circled the lake until all the geese were airborne and loosely collected in one large formation. They spread out into half a dozen "Vs" and headed south, crossing the lake again, this time much higher, cruising over the frost-quilted Virginia hunt country in search of corn fields scattered with kernels left behind from the fall harvest. After the last formation passed above the meadow, a hush fell over the hills and lake, and the calm of the winter morning settled in. 

I walked across the field, trudging along the bluestone path that led around the west side of the property and up to the garage and the main gate.

Narrating My Grandfather's Book--and Being Him In Love!

When I took on the challenge of narrating my grandfather, Charles Brackett’s, 1934 novel, Entirely Surrounded, I was not prepared for the emotional jolts hiding, ready to leap out to shock my sensibilities in many of story’s dialogues and scenes. I’d read the book often enough over the past fifty years—it sat on our family’s bookshelves, along with Charlie’s four previous novels and his Academy Awards—and I was familiar with the overall story line:

It is 1934. Red-headed Henry Cook, fresh out of Amherst and excited about working on his first book at an infamous writers’ colony, arrives at the Vermont island retreat at the invitation of its owner, Thaddeus Hulbert, a boisterous, bellowing, bloviated curmudgeon, whose reputation as a novelist, columnist, and radio commentator has vaulted him to national prominence.

Additional island guests include Clarence Fitch, the editor of a prominent New York magazine; Agnes Sterner, an elegant, mature woman, also an author and close friend of Hulbert’s; Daisy Lester, a nationally-known nightclub singer also known by Hulbert and friends to be a heavy drinker if not watched carefully; and Leith O’Fallon, an artist, writer, and liberal cause protester for whom Henry falls hard.

Among the supporting characters are Mr. Veitch, the slow-drawling Vermonter who navigates the mail boat to and from the island, and Jenny, the shrieking housekeeper and cook who tends—genially if not loudly—to the needs of Hulbert’s guests.

Entirely Surrounded is a slightly venomous roman à clef poking satirically at the habits of several of the Algonquin Round Table notables: Alexander Woollcott (Hulbert), Alice Duer Miller (Sterner), Dorothy Parker (Lester), Harold Ross of the New Yorker (Fitch), and Neysa McMein, popular magazine cover illustrator (O’Fallon). The novel’s author and narrator, my grandfather Charles Brackett (Cook), had been a regular at the Algonquin for several years before leaving for Hollywood at the peak of the group’s notoriety.

 

Through Entirely Surrounded, Brackett deconstructs the Round Table’s core elite and re-assembles them on their lake-encircled hideaway to endure each other’s company, play croquet, backgammon, cribbage, and anagrams, all under the withering, snide and cutting bombasts of their host, Hulbert.

My grandfather’s avatar, the story’s narrator Henry Cook, is written in as the mean gang’s naïve foil, surrounded as he is by the idols of his literary dreams, viper-toothed gods who pick petty fights over silly games, and chide each other, and Henry, mercilessly over points of literature and social graces. And yet, there is compassion and love to be found on the island, and a twist to the tale that brings Henry face-to-face with his deepest insecurities. 

Brackett, one of the earliest New Yorker drama critics, prolific magazine columnist, and short-story author and novelist, brings to Entirely Surrounded elements of his own New England upbringing, his Ivy League education, his curious marriage, and his not-well-concealed need for social and professional approval. Brackett knew all the players quite well, and though the book is a biting commentary on the group’s interrelationships and foibles, Brackett received grudging congratulations even from Woollcott and Parker who took most of Brackett’s jabs. Long after my grandfather moved to Hollywood to write and produce movies, his Algonquin playmates often called on him, or visited him in California. 

The one bit of license I did take in narrating the character of the real-life person, Alexander Woollcott, was to change the register of Woollcott’s voice, and rough it up to make him sound brutish, cranky, and bellowing. In real life, Woollcott’s voice was higher, thinner, almost Truman Capote-esque in its softer edges and slight effeminacy.

The real trick to narrating the story was in suspending my relationship with my grandfather just enough to read his character well, but not so much as to cut the emotional tie completely. There are two scenes in which Henry Cook connects with his love interest, Leith O’Fallon—modeled after my grandfather’s close friend, Neysa McMein, of whom my grandfather was smitten. That the Cook-O’Fallon relationship could go from flirtation to bedroom passion challenged me to step inside my grandfather’s affection for McMein to narrate the path of the consummation of the characters’ relationship—which was never formally acknowledged in either Brackett’s or McMein’s later diaries or histories.

The foreshadowing of their intimacy begins with a mid-story scene in which Henry is about to go for a late-night walk by the lake, having been forced out of bed by the loud snoring of two other cabin guests in nearby rooms.  Henry goes downstairs to find Leith O’Fallon napping on the main room’s couch, in front of the fireplace. She rouses, they talk for a moment about the snoring companions, then Henry takes a closer look at Leith.

Henry Cook was standing in front of the fireplace. The top of the blanket wrapped around Leith had fallen back. She was wearing a sheer nightgown which half revealed the loveliness of her breast.

Henry’s eyes must have betrayed their direction, for she tossed the stub of her cigarette into the fire and pushed up the blanket around her shoulders.

“Well, run along,” she said. “Good night.”

As Henry let himself out, he could see her head settling into the pillow with drowsy sensuousness.”

Henry return from his walk, chilled by the cold fall air. The encounter continues:

He tiptoed to the hearth.

Leith was asleep. Her lashes were dark against her cheek; one arm had slipped down.

Henry stood gazing. He would do no more than gaze, he knew. That he might do even that was because, in a sophisticated group, one pretended that one knew no urgencies.

Leith O’Fallon opened one eye, looking funny for a moment, then the other.

“So you’re back.” She smiled at him.

“Yes.”

“Frozen?”

He nodded; then fighting wildly against the impulse, he took the two steps which brought him to the couch.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” he choked.

“What can’t you stand?”

He could only fall on his knees beside the couch and repeat what he had said before.

“I can’t stand it any longer.”

Leith put out her hand and touched his cheek, then leaned from the couch and pressed her lips against his.

Henry Cook’s heart beat with a wild happiness. He stretched out his arms.

“You must remember,” Leith whispered, “that this room is practically Grand Central Station. Good night, sweet.”

As I narrated these scenes and dialogues, I found myself, at first, withholding the emotions of the moment, trying to stand away from the relationship I knew had once been very real to two very important people in my life—my grandfather and a woman he desired from not so far away, someone he had written about, and treated, with great affection. He was married at the time of the novel, and was much older than his character, Henry Cook (Cook was written as about 21, Brackett, in 1934, was 42) but still younger than McMein who was 46 in real time, but 33 in the story. Fitting one’s grandfather into the body of a young man half his age does require a bit of vocal and emotional license.

But as I recorded, then re-recorded the flirty banter between Henry and Leith, I started to settle into the relationship, I began to absorb and give back to the narration the young man’s eagerness and the mature woman’s smoky caution.

As the story approaches its peak action—a possible suicide—Henry and Leith are once again brought together, miserable in their fears for the victim, alone with their thoughts in the middle of a rainswept night in the middle of a small island in the middle of Vermont. Earlier in the day, Leith had rebuffed another of Henry’s attempts to increase the depth of their relationship, and he was crestfallen. 

Let’s pick it up after Henry has retired to his room:

Rain beat on the roof that slanted above him, a disconsolate wind bemoaned its grievance without surcease. But it was neither wind nor rain that kept Henry from sleeping.

Leith! Leith! Leith!

He was sorry about Daisy, but regret hadn’t numbed his other emotions.

He remembered his exultation of last night, when he had thought Leith’s kiss was a promise—remembered it with a groan.

Evidently the blood of that mysterious father of his was strong in him. It throbbed and pounded. He had never before suspected what proportions desire could achieve.

Leith! Leith! Leith!

Clarence Fitch began his regular snoring.

Henry tried turning over on his stomach, burying his head in his arms. It was uncomfortable. There was no use twisting and turning all night.

Flat on one’s back was the way to sleep.

There was the faintest of sounds, the turning of a bolt. The stir of air.

Henry sat up.

“Who is it,” he whispered.

“It’s Leith. I don’t want to stay in that room.”

“Oh, my God!”

Her hands were cold, and her teeth were making little cold noises.

“I want to be alive.”

Henry pushed back the blankets, and she slipped in beside him.

The storm beat on, implacable as a rage that feeds on itself.

Narrating my grandfather’s book was one thing—his voice and mine have many similarities according to my family, so reintroducing his sound so many years after his death is rather comforting—but giving his very young avatar an older lover, a lover my grandfather pined for in real life, that was a voice challenge unlike any other I’ve attempted.