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The Blame Game... Blame Canada, Blame Grandma...

As we move into the hopefully final unproductive week of summer, the question of where things go on healthcare reform is both wide open... and pretty well wrecked. It's hard to see how progress can be made on the current mish-mash of bills (especially the painfully nonexistent bill yet to be produced by Senate Finance), but any sense of the alternatives, or a negotiated deal or giving up all together... is entirely unclear.

Already, the Washington, mass media conversation is moving away from specific reforms to "horse race" questions of who's up, who's down, and what went wrong... along with mournful sobs of "if only Teddy were here" which continue to overstate what Kennedys actually do. It would be helpful to have a Ted Kennedy just now for two rather basic reasons: he knew stuff, and he did the work to get it done. Beyond that, progressive dreams that Teddy would have ended private health insurance when no one else could... are pretty much fantasy.

Without agreeing to the rules of the blame game, I think it is probably time to asses what's not working, figure out some sense of why, and figure out if anything can be done. Ever the optimist, I think we will, ultimately, see some sort of healthcare reform. My bet, though, is that it will be modest, fairly incremental, and please probably no one... a result that will hurt Democrats and the President more than Republicans.

Morning Morsels: The Saturday Unsurprise

Mostly, it's a Hollywood Minute:

• News story we didn't bother reading: Noel Gallagher Leave Oasis Over Fallout With Brother
• News Story we did wind up reading, but pretty much turned out to be what we thought: DJ AM found dead in New York apartment
• But if you really want to fry your brain, try and figure out why anyone would care what Heidi Montag thinks about Brody Jenner getting tasered during a fight with Joe Francis (no bonus points fo asking "who?" to any of them)
• Okay seriously... you are going to see The September Issue, right?
• Gail Collins fears the robot menace. Why don't you?

Friday Evening Floralude

jinb

The Two Dominick Dunnes

I always thought there were two Dominick Dunnes - one was a really heroic, principled, angry defender of the voiceless, especially women, killed in acts of brutality and violence. Martha Moxley. Nicole Brown Simpson. His daughter, Dominique. When he wrote about their cases, the injustices done to them, the protections afforded to men, especially men of wealth and power and celebrity, it was bracing.

The other Dominick Dunne seemed to be a starfucker of the worst order.

To read "Dominick Dunne's Diary" in Vanity Affair was to be awash in drivel. The name dropping was sycophantic, compulsive and bordered on tasteless. The insights were minor, the gossip, on nearly every level, banal. Even the sort of breathless wonder of "who will he mention next? Porfirio Rubirosa? Catherine Deneuve?" became rather a dull exercise of recitation of the Palm Beach/Monte Carlo/Bel Air circuit he seemed so overly impressed with, and so eager to please, if also to tease.

Dunne's story was a fascinating story of reverse accomplishments - his real celebrity prominence, the real culmination of his career, came very late. He took to writing late, made a success of it late. He is not a bad suggestion of the possibility of ultimate reinvention - you could, really, figure out how to make something of your life even at 60, or later.

Aside from eventually abandoning reading his column - the rewards of the occasional insight, or some private moment about Elizabeth Taylor, came at the price of too many of my brain cells - I was always struck by his novels, not necessariuly in a good way. When I was in college, getting home was a long enough slog that I tended to buy diverting trash to read along the way. That's how I wound up devouring The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. And because I loved trashy books adapted into trashy minseries, I watched far more of An Inconvenient Woman (starring Rebecca DeMornay and Jill Eikenberry) than one should ever have.

In both cases, I was struck again, by Dunne's relentless crusade against injustice, and his derivative attention to gossipy drivel. That's especially true of The Grenvilles, because it is basically an attempt to do, in a downmarket way, what Truman Capote always seemed to intend with Answered Prayers. And he did it by exploiting the story of Ann Woodward, who killed herself when a thinly veiled version of how she might have murdered her husband became part of La Cote Basque 1965. In one sense, it's a brilliant conceit: Woodward's story was never fully examined, and using a Capote-esque approach was a genius touch. But the result is grim: Dunne doesn't so much blow old WASP class notions as revel in them, and he paints his Ann Woodward - Ann Grenville - as a grasping embarrassment, whose ostracization by high society was entirely deserved.

Dunne's upper class instincts never really wavered; and really, his takedowns of the powerful - like OJ Simpson, and Michael Skakel - were of a piece with his overall attention to class; his contempt was often laced with judgment for them not meeting the class expectations of wealth and taste of which he seemed so enamored. His dissections of those old preppy notions of class were initially revelatory because few in his set really open up publicly about them. Inherent in those class conventions though is the kind of society that evaporated in the sixties and seventies - rigid notions of the "right people" (who, it should be noted, also rejected Dunne in middle age) which exclude minorities, disdain strivers, and relegate women to roles as decorative objects.

Out of that decidedly mixed bag of the two Dunnes, perhaps it's perfect irony that Dunne in death (he died yesterday) will be overshadowed by the family he disdained so much. I'm sure Dunne could have gotten a novel out of it. Or at least a column. And, you know... I'd have liked to read it.

Because Acceptance Isn't Terrible, I Don't Regret It, And It's Not A Bargain (Why I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For)

I mentioned last week that I've been on a quest for new sites to explore, partly because older sites and familiar bloggers have been, well, letting me down.

I've also mentioned, somewhat obliquely a specific site which I no longer find welcoming... and though I try to quit it, I don't entirely succeed.

But to give you a more dispassionate, less tetchy take on what's been bugging me... let's talk Shakesville for a moment, and what's got me down.

Recently, Melissa McEwan opened a new dialogue, called "The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck" talking about the tension between being a feminist and actively working on gender issues and dealing with the appearance of casual misogyny (her word; I'd tend to use sexism, which I'll explain further) in people, especially men, to whom she is close.

It's a very touchy, and obviously personal subject. One of the hard parts of responding to it is the very personal nature of it - who can really deny another person's feelings or sensitivities, and minimize their importance? But Liss is going for a more universalized point: that this happens, often, and needs discussion, and exposure. And it's the generalized, universal sense of such conflicts that got me thinking, and wondering why I was so inclined to disagree.

Reaction has been, to put it mildly, mixed. You wouldn't necessarily know that to read a Shakesville comments section - but I already kind of mentioned my own tensions there - but it's put a number of men, me included, in the awkward position of trying to accept a criticism, or perhaps challenge some of the preconceptions, and obviously, in some cases, angrily reject any suggestion of misogyny or anti-woman bias.

In a sense, this isn't about me; as sensitive as I've been feeling about advancing ideas at Shakesville lately, I know the kind of person and the kind of comments under discussion are ones I've always been conscious of, and am not interested in perpetuating. I've had people toss out casual, antigay, racial or sexist (and yes, misogynist too) comments in my presence, and yes, it can be disconcerting, especially in someone I think of as a fellow traveler, sensitive to those issues.

But I also have to say... some of that's about me, and my expectations.

Notes From A Death March

1. I'm beginning to realize that the problem in cable news is not a particular event - like a death - but the cavalcade of pseudo-events that follow. Today Ted Kennedy's body is moved from Hyannisport to the Kennedy Library, prompting hours of live (i kid you not) coverage and endless discussions among people who essentially have nothing left to say. And it's only Thursday... and the actual funeral is Saturday. This same mass of nothingness attended Michael Jackson's death, and one could expand it to the Inauguration of Obama, I suppose, and work backwards from there. And I'm not sure how we can ever get past it.
2. These are the days when I'm grateful for CNBC.
3. A real quick measure of whether to take a particular observer seriously, I'm realizing, is how they try to minimize or explain away Chappaquiddick.
4. Oh, and by the way: Liberalism is not dead. Just Ted Kennedy.
5. I don't mind the political rush to rename health reform "The Ted Kennedy Health Reform Program" or some such... but let's just admit, up front, that it's cynical trying to use a cheap sympathy ploy to solve an enormous structural PR problem.
6. Likewise, the fairweather voices of poitical rectitude who suddenly realize that 145 days is to long to wait for a replacement... don't have my sympathy either. And, as I said before, I think "Because Mitt Romney is no longer Governor" is a fantastically lame excuse to change the Senatorial replacement process... and really, who wants Deval Patrick picking the next Senator? Does that soudn like anyone's idea of a good plan? He's no Rod Blagojevich, to be sure... but he's not exactly exceptional, either, is he?

Mediocrity... And The Black Man

If there's a moment to point to when David Paterson's time was up - as I expect, some time soon it will turn out to be, and he decides not to run for another term as Governor - it was probably over the weekend. And as much as Paterson walked himself into yet another disaster, I think what went wrong, at least this time, was as much about society's failings as his own.

Paterson, moaning about his mistreatment and how he's not given a break, told a radio host that he felt part of it, at least was about his being black, and that it was like the barrage of criticism coming to Barack Obama, That, perhaps surprisingly, got a swift rebuke from the White House, which wanted to do with suggestions of racial bias Paterson's comment, also, apparently netted a long conference call between his aides and Democratic leaders, who essentially told the aides to get Paterson to back off.

It didn't take long - Paterson wilted yesterday and said he meant no such implication, but the damage is probably done. In addition to the piling on from Obama spokespeople, David Dinkins came out personally to say much the same thing, pointing out that the best way to steer clear of criticism, is to well, not be worth criticizing, or basically, to be really good at what you do. Implicit in Dinkins' rebuke: ... and you're not, David.

Dinkins, himself, was subject to a lot of negative critiques as Mayor of New York, and his washout term led to Rudy Giuliani and by extension to Michael Bloomberg, and the end of pure Democratic control of the City. Dinkins has the grace not to make a big deal of it (I've met him, in passing, and he really is a terrifically classy guy), but clearly, criticisms based on his race were part of the effort to bring him down.

The role of Dinkins is also crucial because the Harlem Democratic scene which produced both Dinkins and Paterson is central to their success. If Paterson can't hold onto an ally as key as Dinkins - going so public and not particularly mincing words - then it strikes me the writing is on the wall. Combined with rumblings that Giuliani might run for Governor (which I find somewhat fantastical, at best, never mind him actually being able to win), it seems clear that the moment of crisis has arrived and it's time to express the obvious: it's not Paterson, and he needs to go.

Still, the need for black exceptionalism is, iself, a problem that rarely gets the examination it deserves. It's not enough, often, for minorities to be "good enough." Though clearly he's had some enormous problems (and perhaps pinning the entire breakdown of the state Senate on him is unfair), Paterson has managed the state in difficult times and under the murky circumstance of Elliot Spitzer's collapse. That's a lot to deal with, and that Paterson has been well, merely adequate, is the real problem. He had to better than good... and he wasn't' And isn't.

When I was in Boston Red and I discussed the similar lukewarm, adequate but only just, reputation Deval Patrick has developed there, to similar results - while he may eke out a second term, it seems likely that a charismatic outsider may manage to unseat him. Like Paterson, Patrick isn't just dealing with a large disaffected white vote, he's dealing, more painfully, with a lack of enthusiasm in the black voter base. The myth of black exceptionalism - that one has to be twice as good to be seen as equal - is hardest to combat when one realizes how internalized it is: it's how we expect each other to be, what we expect of our leaders to be seen as excelling.

At some point, it has to be said: until we can elect a mediocre black person to a high elective office, and then reelect him or her despite, well, being mediocre, perhaps we haven't really made the right kind of progress. When everyone has to be superstars - or Sidney Poitier, or Diana Ross, or Michael Jordan - we're still not saying we have equal treatment regardless of race. And yes, our next test on this score may well be Barack Obama.

The Dream Never Dies

I suspect that, for anyone under the age of forty, finding the significance in Ted Kennedy's death will be less a direct experience than the received wisdom of two generations of older folks: those like my mother who are of Kennedy's generation; and liberals of the baby boom, the ones who truly canonized "the Kennedy mystique" into some sort of religious fervor.

The latter, especially, probably deserve their moment to elevate Kennedy's life and work and celebrate what was best about him. He is one of the longest serving US Senators ever. He crafted significant pieces of legislation. He carried on his family's traditions of service to the community. He was, most certainly, a defender of the basic ideas of liberal thinking at a time when those principles - helping the less fortunate, believing in government, finding equality and justice for all - were under attack and in decline. For all of this, and more, he deserves to be remembered as a great man.

But that is not all of who he was, and it was never the whole story. More than his brothers, or sisters, Ted Kennedy embodied the tensions of the storyline that elevated the Kennedy clan into American royalty: too much, too soon, the good and virtuous living side by side with the failures and the excesses... and all so very, very Catholic.

It's hard - very hard - now to remember the barriers that Catholics, and the Irish, had to face in society. How much resistance there was, really, to John Kennedy, as a Catholic, running for President (the first, we should recall, Catholic President - and, actually, the only one so far). That was Ted Kennedy's experience, the world he helped to change. And it is yes, within living memory. But for a younger generation... that story is going to seem awfully far away, and that kind of discrimination - between and among white ethnic groups, between Catholic and Protestant - has been relegated to the low end of perceived outrages. For those who lived it... I doubt it ever became less significant.

I prefer a more holistic kind of memory, one that embraces the person as he or she was, flaws and all, mistakes and successes. Ted Kennedy wasn't a monster... but by the same token, his greatness as a legislator should be tempered by remembering his failings - certainly Chappaquiddick, probably his role in the Palm Beach rape case, and the messy personal distractions. It was all part of who he was, and all of it impacted a national, larger than life story, in all its complexity.

Without the temperance of his flaws, it's too easy to overstate who Ted Kennedy was, what he did, why it mattered... and to still compare him, unfavorably, to the greatness of his brothers. Beyond that, it remains too easy to deify the Camelot fantasy of the American left, which really serves no useful purpose anymore, if it ever did. For Ted Kennedy, perpetuating that storyline both elevated the left wing and also undermined it; "the legacy of the Kennedys" was his mantle and his burden. The dream never dies. The person does, and did. And the myth of the Kennedys... probably should. Seeing Ted Kennedy for who he actually was - and what he wasn't - does him the best service, by preserving his humanity.... and lifting him from the shadow of his siblings to let him be seen for himself, good and bad, flaws and all. He deserves that, and the chance to rest in peace.

Bitter, Small Party of Several Thousand

As the heat dies down and vacations end, the story of this August is, in some ways, the story of a mythical phoenix rising from the ashes... I'm speaking of course of the sudden "resurgence" of the Republican Party.

Day after day, the drumbeat of polling suggests that opposition to health reform, as well as the challenges of other governmental projects (like Cash for Clunkers), and the general sense of economic distress has "ruined" president Obama's popularity and sent many folks rushing back to the Republican Party.

Aside from the fact that I think poll driven news writing is the worst kind of lazy journalism (except possibly trend articles based on pseudo science), I tend to think the newfound appeal of Republicans won't translate into much... at least for now. Republican - and the conservatives who feel they are stuck with their party - have not solved the very basic problems made clear in the last two election cycles. Indeed, if anything, the August "resurgence" tends to underline what hasn't happened more starkly than ever: without compelling alternative ideas, and without fresh leadership, Republicans have, in fact, little to offer but the same brew of anger, bitterness, sarcasm and resentment that the modern conservative movement has been relying on for years. That tactic is old, and relying on it to defeat healthcare, in particular, will amount to little.

It's a little, though, that could make a difference, if only a small difference. Small shifts in public sentiment built on appeals to anger and fear will make some of the more vulnerable members of Congress - especially in the House - potential victims. The bigger reality, though, is that Republican marginalization has put big, long term success out of reach... and that hasn't changed.

The Haze of Summer Lawns

Yes, I took the weekend off - well, not exactly, since I sold coffee all weekend long, but I took a writing and thinking break... and I've been a little slow to get restarted.

The heat finally broke sometime last night, as Hurricane Bill finally pulled the hazy humidity out to sea behind it (after flooding rains on Saturday afternoon in Westchester County), and so I could finally do a regular task this morning... mow the lawn.

Like many weboys my age, I have a lifelong enmity with lawn care. We were the last generation, or so Ifind, of suburban youth where weekend awn mowing was the teenage version of slave labor: paid nothing, or possibly subsistence wages called "an allowance" we were forced for hours at a time, to plow fields of a half acre or more, strewn with vines, flower gardens and whatnot.

Opposition to lawn mowing was one of my real efforts at rebellion - I didn't have the temperament or the energy for it, and (as I try to explain to this day), my 16 year old girl mentality didn't see why "because you're a boy" answered my preferences for shopping, reading magazines and styling my hair.

I still have that girl in my head.

But I am older, the lawn is smaller, and now I find lawn mowing to be a surprisingly serene act: orderly rows fall beneath the blades, and a lush green carpet replaces an unruly field. My one weakness is that I like to have something to show for mowing the lawn... so it generally gets extremely overgrown before I can muster the will.

And then, too, I find myself  wondering why we need so much open lawn - I have been advocating a switch in the backyard to make it more of a garden, which I feel is what it wants to be - now that I've seen the lush, overgrown meadow that grows up where grass, generally, won't, I think the yard is teling us something... if we choose to listen. And in middle age, I find listening to nature, heeding its directives and not ours to tame the wild, to be the more compelling choice.

I also have to admit I am grateful that we have a lovely neighbor, just now, who lends her lawn mower for our use (in exchange for a cooperative arrangement where I hit her yard too). My mom will not relent in her belief that a small manual push-cutter can get the job done... though it can't. In my youth, I may have argued more but resentfully followed through with her wishes. These days, I find myself being just guy-ish enough to prefer the call of power tools with loud motors, after whicvh one can retire to watch the game in the den. Although we don't have a den. I get the appeal though, now. Just like I get the sense of accomplishment that comes, when the lawn is done, and I can smell the fresh scent of newly cut grass. Simple pleasures on a summer afternoon... in the haze of summer lawns.