Seven Miles to the Horizon

I note this week even Hitler saw the sunny side of the Munich agreement.

Most historians agree the pact tied the angry dictator's hands at the same time he was intent on war. At first blush they are right. Upon further reflection, the Fuhrer realized the very generals who opposed agression against the Czechs would be retired when actual hostilties commenced, and was, for a time, content to wait them out.

This would not have been the case had Herr Schickelgruber taken his tea alongside the old timers I was with the past few days for they've never retired.

One, serendipitously, is the daughter of a General who had a hand in winning the war Hitler started after his recalcitrant generals took their pensions - her father, a cavalry officer, played polo with Patton at Ft. Riley when old Blood & Guts was inventing American armored tactics, and before both men riding Sherman tanks swept across the deserts of Africa and the French plains.

Another, at age 97, plays gospel hymns on the piano at nursing homes in Richmond. She led us, holding hands in a circle, singing love given away always comes back like a penny well spent.

Come Wednesday morning in senior camp at the Shrinemont Episcopal Retreat Center, atop Mt. Jackson, the agenda listed conflicting workshops. One featured a new Bishop who'll replace the old bishop upon his retirement; the other called Stories to Pass On.

Choosing Stories, implying nothing untowards the new Bishop, who seems an earnest young man, follows a personal pattern of avoiding situations where any whiff of ambition is present. I've never understood why I resent ambition. It might have something to do with a lack of the quality in myself instead of the person to whom the resentment is mis-directed - yet, when you sail farther from shore, closer to the horizon, even small ambitions, never realized, drop away, freeing the personality to pursue nobler things, or nothing at all, if you so choose.

When asked to tell stories they wish to pass on, an elegantly dressed woman revealed, living as a child, on Park Avenue, at 92nd street, she saw a stoller begin to slide down a hilly sidewalk, only to be rescued by the family dog who grabbed the handle by his teeth.

A 100-year old woman described her life purely in economic terms, recalling a 60 cent water bill in 1946, $7 rent, $5 a week for wages, and 2 cents a quart more, by picking strawberries, butter beans and blackeyed peas (and happy to get it!).

The aforementioned piano player told of Mennonite gatherings at harvest time and attending Princeton when Einstein was in residence. She advised us to always sing the meaning of hymns.

When travelling by car, rather than plane, I carry a multitude of books which I arrange in stacks around the unfamiliar room, so upon awakening, I may spend time, as I do at home, in the shifting worlds I'm currently investigating. It's not surprising to any Spotsyltuckian reader that the idea of the American small town is a subject to which we frequently return.

Two books in one stack on the bedside table, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, and Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, contrast ambition and reflection as did the selection of workshops. The former tells the story of a young woman determined to beautify a Midwestern town; the latter contains meandering tales of what Anderson originally called grotesques which carry no ambition but to draw only upon episodic emotion.

A third, on a second stack, Lipton on Lipton, also ventures here, describing the split of method acting schools, one following Action-Objective and the other pursuing Emotional Memory; the first relies upon action to induce emotion, the second, drawing upon emotion to instigate action.

Shrinemont itself for Virginia Episcopalians is a small town where action invests motion, and then all emotions, henceforward, are informed through action. The circumstances of individual visits blur while the emotions of tradition linger to open a heart so that even a foolish love song offered by a 97-year old saint carries effortlessly the quaint wisdom of gentility.

There's a reknown soft-serve ice-cream stand in our fair town. If I park around back, an elderly gentleman inevitably appears to warn my pick-up projects too far out in the passing lane. He was similarly advising another patron a few weeks ago when a man with a gun ordered him to sit on the ground. When he refused, the robber fled, only to return and demand his wallet, also, to no avail.

The intrusion of violence belongs not to this story. When the circle of ancient Episcopalians concluded their stories, I told them how I worry, approaching retirement, that the structure gluing my life together may not hold, and I'll be lost, as if an assailant disrupted the night.

After basking otherwise in the light of this honorable company of women, I now imagine sailing the last seven miles to the far horizon trailing only a gentle wake marking courageous passage.

Say it Aint So, Moe

I note this week amazing changes in the offing.

Have you heard of the A-11 offense? This is where High School coaches play two quarterbacks and nine receivers since its believed offensive lines can't stop linebackers who've evolved too fast to block.

Progress like this isn't always physically possible. Scientists say there's a foreign language gene, for example, which turns itself off after adolesence. I don't doubt it judging by the way the genes in my body controlling brazil nut allergy and lactose intolerance flick on and off like light switches.

Apparently age is key: Joseph Horowitz' new Artists in Exile tracks careers of younger Europeans who flourished in America, older ones who couldn't adjust, and some, like Garbo, who achieved a certain stasis, not returning home, yet keeping their distance.

Its not just about space, though, it's time too.

A recent concert at Lisner Auditorium featured Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester playing German hits from the 1920's. According to the Post, "Introducing the hit "Mein kleiner gruner Kaktus, Max briefly outlined the plot - cactus falls from a balcony onto a neighbor's head - adding, this song is still very popular in Germany because we still think this situation is funny."

Speaking of relevant comedy, turning onto TCM last Saturday morning, waiting for sister Jill to arrive, I watched The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze - another situation you still think is funny or you never did.

I opt for the former. Look, all the classic elements are present in this film - even the ancient Niagria Falls Slowly I Turn gag, not initiated here by the usual Curlian, "Moe, Larry, the Cheese," triple-chant, but by Larry playing Three Blind Mice on a snake charmer's pipe.

Even so, when this film was produced in '63, the times they were a'changin: an attempted double-eye poke is retrieved by a chagrined Moe, who says, "We don't do that anymore," referring to the PTA's dubious campaign of the day to rein in the faux violence.

I couldn't help wondering if they were around today, might the Stooges visit Dr. 90120? Could botox, a facelift, and a reality show where the three boys lived together as off-kilter roommates, revitalize this beloved trio for contemporary audiences?

I gotta tell ya - as I was flipping channels before landing on TCM (the Today Show on 4, the Early Show on 9, 'The Suite Life of Zack & Cody on Fox), nothing was remotely competitive. The actors playing Zack & Cody appear to be the same cookie-cutter 'stars' I never recognize on the Red Carpet runway shows prior to the Emmys.

Wasn't there a time you knew everybody? I had a paperback once with short bio's of every Major Leaguer including five rotating Cubs managers. The Eye Magazine Rock Pile poster on my bedroom wall displayed members of every rock band who counted. It was all so manageable.

Speaking to friend Larry this week I previewed an upcoming Spotsyltuckian piece on how Harvard, for God's sake, is growing unstereotypically competitive -- I thought Ivy League schools still played walk-on's - you know, where someone in the quad on Thursday with a megaphone shouts, "hey, who wants to play on Saturday?"

"C'mon Spotsy," Larry responded, "do you live in a Marx Brothers movie?"

Turning down hometown Caroline Street, espying Jack Elam leaning hard against the wall of Hunan Gardens flipping a coin, I know who and what to fear. Stopping off at the fire station to pet Sammy the Dalmation, spotting Burt Mustin asleep in his chair, I recognize how to grow old usefully by grace. Barry Fitzgerald, sweeping the steps of St. Georges, exemplifies a natural practice of faith. Drinking a milkshake at Goolricks, next to William Schallert, kindly scion to the Patty Duke family, and countless others, teaches all I need know regarding the dispensation of fatherly wisdom.

A scurrilous rumor going round says if Moe hadn't died in 1975, the Stooges intended to team up with the Ritz Brothers to make an R rated movie.

Say it aint so, Moe.

The Remains of Rummikub

I note this week the extent I've married into a competitive family.

There is no Sunday dinner unaccompanied by a rousing board or card game.

Just as it was playing Invisible Ed years ago in hearts, the trouble is I play the hand in front of me as if there was no past or future.

When you consider the overwhelming options facing you on one turn in Rummikub, it uncomfortably numbs.

How decisions are sorted through fashions the narrative of Fateful Choices, the latest by prolific historian, Ian Kershaw, who possesses the knack (marred by a professorial habit of repeating himself) for delving into the very areas for which you've always longed to obtain extensive clarification.

Such is the case for May 1940, when the French were losing to the Germans, and Britain faced the choice to negotiate or fight on. It came down, as it so often does, to two duelling protagonists, here Churchill and Halifax, persuading three other members in the War Cabinet toward their conviction.

This past week I was embroiled similarly - not that the fate of a nation hung in the balance, but, instead, the outcome of a multi-million dollar project.

In both, mistakes were made by others leading to the crisis point. Winston had warned of the dangers of appeasement for a decade. I faced project leaders who failed to test new machinery adequately so that it failed upon attempting to go live.

Where Churchill was already familiar with the limited composition of a wieldly 5-member War Cabinet, I had to fashion both an ad hoc crisis advisory group of trusted loyal experts reporting only to me, and assess the composition of the body of decision-makers I had to convince. It was also necessary to restrict lines of communications to control events and eliminate the go-arounds which might harm the unified credibility of the arguments I would make.

Like Winston, it was necessary, or at least to be perceived, as keeping alternatives open while events took their course. Much time was spent by the War Cabinet deciding whether to approach Mussolini, at the request of France, as an intermediary to Hitler, and to prevent Italy from entering the war, while France was not yet beaten before it became a moot point -- I likewise bought the time needed for the manufacturer of the peripheral but critical product for which I'm responsible to retool their processes in compensation for the inadequate machine testing.

Terms of any debate must be pre-established. Churchill took time prior to the arguments to consult the wider institutional Cabinet, not only to guage their thoughts in terms of future support for the outcome he desired, but to gain the lift of shoring up his confidence.

Whereas Churchill was the prime decision-maker, even though he needed the unified consent of the War Cabinet for public consumption, I am not, so a crucial component of any strategy in this regard is to pre-brief the highest official involved to assess their perspective and to set terms of a civil debate where logic gains the opportunity to overcome emotions of those adhereing to illogical positions out of pride.

Although sniping continues and guarding the flanks is still the order of the day, I remain in control of the field so that 'fateful choices' may be made to overcome the crisis.

Last week in Sunday School we serendipitously considered whether there is anywhere in the world where such manipulation as described above isn't necessary.

I had once thought it was our parish.

Then, one after the other, we fought: over whether the Priest or featured praise band controlled the contemporary service; along the lines of a generational multi-family squabble which drew boundary lines among old friends; about whether the church should move from a former blue-collar neighborhood now turned Latino; to a congregational divorce after the consecration of Bishop Robinson.

What remains after the rummikub universe of choices was exhausted is a faithful Episcopalian congregation not geared toward inherent manipulation since there are no battlements to defend.

Openness and hospitality are the core values of present parish existence. Suzanne questioned, in Sunday School, whether non-manipulation is possible continually as the newly constituted parish consolidates around people and side issues. Eric says he doesn't think any group can exist for long without some sort of manipulation. I respond, maybe so, but what's left of the original St. Margaret's Episcopal Church remains the least manipulative environment of which I have direct experience.

When core values truly lived-out are positive by nature, participants need not sow seeds of new dystunctional maladies.

Long Memory

I note this week a certain nostalgia for the Cold War.

It arrived noticeably as I watched Torn Curtain on TCM. Paul Newman portrayed a double-agent defector tricking an East German egghead into revealing a missing mathematical equation needed to finish an ABM system which will end nuclear war.

Right.

Unlike the cardboard version, and more like thousands of the 'Greatest Generation' who are passing each day, a real espionage player, Wolfgang Vogel, the lawyer at the heart of the most famous Cold War spy swap, Gary Powers for Rudolph Abel, has died at age 82. Abel was the first modern 'James Bond' I read about in the Classic Comics Illustrated Story of Espionage which began with Joshua at Jericho and ran straight through the Pinkertons and Mata Hari to the contemporary times of my childhood.

In aid of manning the last vestigal Cold War ramparts, I worked, upon coming to Washington in the late 1970's, alongside folks who drew concentric circles around major U.S. cities to estimate survivable fall out should the Russkies drop the Bomb. I'd been prepped for this sort of employment at UCF where we'd studied Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear War,' and 'On Escalation,' discovering among other quaint theories, it would be alright for the elderly to consume radioactive food since they'd die naturally of old age anyway before the inevitable cancers ate them alive.

There's a nostalgia afoot in Russia too these days which pre-dates the Cold War.

We've just learned their Supreme Court has recognized Czar Nicholas II and his family as victims of the Revolution and consequently rehabilitated the Romanovs ninety years after their execution in a Siberian basement.

Why now?

After KGB archives released in the 1980's revealed the full extent of Stalin's crimes and the sham of constructed Soviet history around them, the nation required a new national mythos to justify its legitimate accomplishments in the 20th century and its status today as a great nation which it has seemingly always needed to confirm since Peter of Great insisted on it. What's emerging thematically now is the same pre-1917 patriotic and Orthodox panorama Stalin himself employed to rally the country in World War II and the same supposed golden age touched upon in the last book by Solzhenitsyn.

Upon Solzy's passing, Rod Dreher, the Dallas Morning Herald editorialist, condemned liberals for turning against him after the famed Harvard speech. What Dreher has failed to internalize, as a non-minority American, is a revitalized Imperial Russia, even under a sort of freely elected Putin, or a puppet, is impossible in lieu of welcoming home the vicious ancient running dogs of chauvinism and anti-semitism.

The Bolsheviks weren't all wrong in sweeping away despotic royalty - they just replaced it with something worse, and its return doesn't bode well for anyone.

Or, more plainly, its return means settling obscure European scores like ones represented by the beautiful silk topographical map I possess once used by the Kaiser's General Staff to plan for war in remote Salonica.

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great, in another example, invited Germans, and their technical modernizing influences, to settle on the Volga. Alongside other ethnic minorities, like the Chechens, Stalin eventually deported them all to Siberia. After his death, a small number returned, but as time moves on, unless more Germans emigrate to bolster the region's identity, this cultural enclave will disappear. As long as an agressive Russian nationalism constitutes the basis for foreign policy such emigration is unlikely.

After the hard-line coup attempt, and genuinely democratic reformer Boris Yeltsin on the cusp of power in 1994, the obvious question was 'will democracy hold?' Tragically, it wasn't to be, since Yeltsin's authority ended similarly to DC's own Marion Barry -- addicts who became footnotes and punchlines. Putin, in contrast, photographed this week in martial arts togs in that wierd Red style (Mao swimming the Yangtse) bridging past and future: a steely-eyed KGB-cum-Czar black belt.

Last week I noted I was reading Figes' The Whisperers about the nature of private life in the Soviet Union. As a third-generation American of paternal Polish Shetl descent, I embody an old country Eastern Slav soul as much as the maternal English half which most often fails to balance things out.

Rather than The Whisperers, the book of my life yet to be written is called The Brooderers.

This biography floats impossibilities of political idealism minus fatalism - in America where flexibly bends left or right according to the times, fatalism is positively negated and culturally approrpriated. In a country otherwise lacking checks and balances, and a marketplace insufficiently vast to subsume all in its wake, it's far easier to express existential doubt and grief through aggresive internal and external policies while looking contemptuously upon those who struggle through the confusions of choice and freedom.

While witnessing first-hand the critical contempt in the sad doe eyes of Eastern emigre summer vacation waitresses on the Outer Banks, I asked a friend just back from Russia if she thought youth there were moving beyond politics to American-style consumerism. She confirmed fashion and traffic in Moscow were decidedly Western. Most folks crinkle their noses at American pop culture; I'd rather see people shopping than committing genocide.

Why would any foreign policy today want to play to the worst fears of the Russian psyche by encircling the Motherland with missile systems and antagonistic neighbors? How better to supply a rationale for a super-nationalist patriotism needed to overcome an eternal national inferiority complex?

--For dwindling world-wide gas and oil resources, of course, and to indefinitely feed an industrial-military complex which not only must fight active guerilla wars but can only sustain itself, long-run, through promoting the idea that conventional wars amongst major powers over seemingly obscure issues like the rights of Volga Germans are still a nostalgic desirability and in the national interest.

And so the forces of capitalism ever ignite the dialectic fires of fascist totalitarianism, no longer Communist, but attired in the royal finery of Czars.

Sic Hefner Tyrannus?

I note this week a meeting at St. Margaret's on how to launch a children's program called Godly Play.

Since Christmas is just around the corner, the suggestion was made that we hold a pageant to stir enthusiasm.

There was a gasp.

"No pageants!"

"Why not, for heaven's sake," I gasped back.

An extended inquiry later revealed the underlying Montessori-like ciricculum of Godly Play is founded upon a 'theology of playful orthodoxy.'

In his book, The Whisperers, Orlando Figes describes another sort of educational game called Search & Requisition. Boys played Red Army Requisitioners who menaced girls playing bourgeois speculators hiding grain.

Sounds like fun.

Figes continues, there were schools where children were encouraged to organize their own police; invited to write denunciations; and to hold classroom trials.

One young lad, encouraged by this mother, established The Central Bureau of the Russian Committee of the Association of Children of the World. As they marched through the streets carrying home-made banners and singing revolutionary songs, crying out, "window-watcher, shame on you," to observers fortunate enough to be watching the parade from home.

The point of it all, according to Figes, was to create absolutists who'd broken free of convention by supplanting love of family with party loyalty.

Speaking of female encouragement, or not, every time I'm caught watching The Girls Next Door, I change channels immediately lest my absolutist wife tut-tut every five seconds. Where I envision a new kind of, albeit highly attractive family, free of old conventions, the Mrs sees Bimbos.

Could Hef be the ultimate catalyst for the fulfillment of Leninism?

Twenty years after the clubs closed in Chicago former Bunnies held a reunion. Their ranks included writers, feminists, real estate executives, an accupunturist, even a retired homicide detective.

When they worked for Playboy, they were well paid for that time; there was equal opportunity for women of color; and there were strict no-paw rules for patrons. According to one, "Believe it or not, Hef was ahead of his time when it came to issues of sexual harrassment."

I note last week the funeral of Russian journalist Magomed Mutsolgov who officials say was shot trying to take away an officer's gun but whose lawyer says was shot in the head point-blank.

We sometimes wonder why Russians desire strong leaders. It's not hard to see how, building upon existing Czarist repression, the education of Soviet children conditioned them to accept Stalinist show trials where millions were exiled and shot.

The Whisperers asks if it's possible to retain any sense of morality when private life goes public.

In The Girls Next Door private life also turns public.

According to sociologist Max Weber, "in an individual society, religion became a private matter, so the USSR abolished individuality and privacy, with the Party taking its puritanical place."

Puritanical ideology inevitably turns lethal; libertine culture may eventually empower or denigrate women.

Murderour dictatorship or anything-goes

There's a lot at stake here.

Best to hold a Christmas pageant, don't you think, just to be safe?