Culture Vulture

I used to live in New York, the city, I mean. Actually, I was born there, the Bronx to be exact, which explains, I hope, the nature of my baseball loyalties. That means I'm not a Red Sox fan.
I also spent 14 years living in Brooklyn, after I left college, so between all of that I qualify as a "New Yawker" and I'm proud of it. Not always, but most of the time, I thrilled to the beat and buzz of the big city, and while time has taken its toll, I still enjoy going back for the occasional visit and marveling at how so much has changed. And for the better. The city is cleaner. The subways are cleaner. For someone who remembers the subways of the 1970s and 80s, it's astonishing how much better it all looks now.
A good part of that change is attributable, I think, to the mayoralty of Rudy Guiliani, whose tenure I unfortunately missed while a resident of the Big Apple. I left midway during the late and lamentable one term of David Dinkins, who was truly bad at the job.
This is a rambling way of establishing my bona fides for commenting on the Presidential aspirations of the same Mr. Guiliani, who committed one of those extraordinary political faux pas last week that leave the ordinary person gasping in astonishment at how stupid supposedly intelligent people can be. Maybe our extended presidential campaigns are overlong for a reason. They do have a way of revealing insights that you'd never expect.
About a week ago, I read in the New York Post that hizzoner was rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series, which of course as we now know they won. As anyone who knows anything about Sir Rudy knows, the rest of the time he has cloaked himself in Yankee fandom. He gets the prime seats between home plate and the Yankee dugout for all the big games. He got to ride up Broadway during all those ticker tape parades in the glory years of the late 1990s. So the concept of Rudy rooting for the Sox was a little like Arnold Schwartzenegger telling us he was going in for a sex change.

But the Post is the Post - it's really more for entertainment than the news. It's a fun paper to read and it was the perfect way to pass the time commuting to work on the subway. But let's just say it's got a slight credibility problem. So when they ran a picture of Rudy titled "Rudy - Red coat" - or "Red Goat" - I can't remember now - I immediately thought this was another fun way the Post was laying a goof on the rest of us. No way, Jose, could the Rudster be that dumb, opportunistic, or both.
Well, turns out he was. Last Sunday's New York Times, a real newspaper, ran an article confirming that indeed, Rudy was an American League fan to the core, even if that meant rooting for the hated and reviled Red Sox. Whoa, dude.
Did Rudy think his turncoat display was going to win him votes in Massachusetts or perhaps more critically in New Hampshre, with its upcoming primary now less than three months away (thank God). Does he think voters there are that stupid? It would seem that they could see through this ruse as well as the next person. There would seem to be more votes to be gained by going with Colorado, a state teetering between the GOP and the Democrats, where a tilt towards the Rockies could be critical in a tight race. But when is the Colorado primary? Is there one? Who cares, when the pundits univrsally inform us that the selection process for president through the primary system will be over by mid-February, well before, I believe, Coloradans get a chance to vote.
Now we need to find out who Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, but with Michigan roots, but who is also a Yankee fan, went with during the World Series. My mind has to stretch very far to comprehend how any true Yankee fan could ever possibly support the Red Sox for anything except the village dogcatchers.
So Rudy - will you do anything for a vote? And how can i possibly vote for you now, even if i wanted to, which I really didn't. Despite his pro-abortion stance, there's too much flip-flopping in Rudy's portfolio lately to make me happy. Let's think about the National Rifle Association, or the NRA. When he was mayor, he was all about gun control. Now that he's running for president, well- hey, let's not upset those right-wing fundamentallists who call the shots in the Republican primaries.
It's another story, but sometime I want to weigh in on how despite Rudy's great record as Mayor of New York -notwithstanding despite several blemishes during the end especially when he wanted to delay the election of his successor because of the 9/11 hangover - wow - then the terrorists really would have won - he has to start thinking in what Thomas Friedman, possibly America's greatest living news columnist today calls a 9/12 world. Every other word out of Rudy's mouth seems to be some variant of 9/11. Enough already. What conclusions did you draw from it? And where do we go now?
The sad part is that Rudy did a pretty good job as the mayor of New York, especially during his first term. He got the police department straightened out (well, with the help of his police chief Michael Bratton, whom he later fired because he, Bratton, was getting too much credit for that) - cleaned up the streets and generally showed us thaat New York was not ungovernable. Thatwas a real question when he took over.
His second term was far more mixed. He got into a silly spat with the Brooklyn Museum over a piece of art he found offensive, and revealed himself to have a real freedom of speech blind spot. His focus began to waver and he picked some unfortunate fights with minority groups over policing issues. In fact, had it not been for 9/11, Rudy might very well have left office with no real future, a mayor who started off strong but then wilted, and he certainly wouldn't be running for president today and be leading in the Republican polls.
9/11 changed all that, and Rudy became for a few weeks the face of resilient America against the terrorist criminals who masterminded and carried out the murderous, cowardly attacks. But then he got carried away with it and thought he was indispensable, hence the ill-thought out idea to postpone the election that eventually brough Michael Bloomberg into office. Bad move, very bad move.
But back to baseball.
Rudy, are you just as shameless a political opportunist as the woman you most profess to dislike - Hillary Clinton. Now there is a major league opportunist. She's also a Cubs fan - remember when you trashed her for that? What's not to love about the Cubs?
Shame on you Rudy. Any small chance you might have gotten my vote has evaporated faster than a Joba Chamberlain fastball.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have long been fascinated by the Green Mountain Academy. They are an organization based here in Manchester that hosts all kinds of interesting gatherings, seminars, "brown bag" lunch time meetings, on all the subjects that an inquisitive, inquiring mind would find intriguing. A lot of it involves political stuff, foreign policy and international affairs — all those things I love and cherish — but also a helping of cross-cultural dialogues that cover a range of topics. Year after year, they tap into the wealth of knowledge and expertise that always surprises you exists here — as in I didn't know that guy lived in....... take your pick of towns right here in the neighborhood.
Last night was another example of this when they hosted a panel discussion on the Middle East featuring four really interesting guys — Barrie Dunsmore, the former ABC-TV foreign correspondent and newscaster, Mansour Farhang, a Bennington college professor, Haviland Smith, a former CIA agent who for my money stole the show with his straight talk and Ronald Spiers, a former ambassador and State Department foreign policy expert.

The problem I have with panel discussions like this is that everyone is in broad agreement about what they think about the issue at hand - in this case the numerous problems of the Middle East. Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, Palestine — it never ends.
Panels like this one are great. There can never be too little of informed discusssion, even among like-minded people, of important issues such as those presented in the Middle East. Next time, it would be great to have someone who came at it from the other side, if not a real-deal neocon, then someone who wasn't a card-carrying member of the Bush-is-always-wrong crowd. It would havetaken the discussion to another level.
We did get some towards the end anyway, when a couple of pro-Israeli folks took issue with the suggestion that it was up to Israel to make a few concessions to the Palestinians to move closer to a settlement of the evil seed that poisons everything else in the Miiddle East.
Anyway, like I said, Haviland Smith was for my money the most interesting. Finally someone was willing to come out and state forthrightly to a crowd completely inclined to see the Iraq War - and possibly one coming in Iran - as being all about oil.
Not so, says Smith.
What are they going to do with it but sell it?
There's lots of easier ways of getting oil than going to war over it. Thank you.
So what did the rest of you think about the evening? I'd like to hear.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Originally, when I conceived of this blog, I thought it would be equal parts arts, local politics and my occasioally twisted take on the nature of life in general. Looking back over my blog entries since August, I see I'm skewering a lot more towards the political than the artistic.
That's probably due in large part to this being an election year - even though that won't technically happen until next year, but it feels like an election year already. So politics is in the air on the national level and we're also getting a nice dose of it at the state and local levels as well. A lot of people seem to turn up their noses at politics as being one of those lower order activities that only the power hungry and the debased among us find interesting. To me, politics is what makes the world go around. Finding compromise, even with people you don't like personally or whose positions you find noxious is the essence of how we get along in civil society.
All of which is a long-winded way of getting to my main topic of today — the iminent arrival of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Albany, N.Y. this coming Nov. 15. One month away to the day!
Almost five weeks ago, on the day of the running of the Maple Leaf Half Marathon, tickets went on sale for this event. But I was running in the race and wasn't going to be able to order tickets online when the balloon went up at 10 o'clock that morning. What to do?
I should tell you that I nearly did a major number on myself running on that insufferably hot day, but that's another story. Thanks to the Manchester Rescue Squad, Lynn Greiger and Jay Hathaway, I made it home alive.

The lightbulb went on and I got one of my college-age daughters to log onto to Ticketmaster and wait patiently in front of her laptop screen for nearly an hour, as it turned out, before she could nail down two tickets. I had been so eager to get the tickets — the occasion of which was an anniversary celebration for my wife and me — I had even given her my credit card number.
There are so many interesting aspects to all of this. Just getting concert tickets, for one. There's been a lot of press lately about how secondary buyers and resellers of concert tix jump in and grab the tickets, and have figured out ways around the system, and then they go off and re-sell these at vastly higher prices. Ordinary fans get ripped off. Then there are pre-sell passwords, supposedly the province of fan clubs, that get bought and tickets purchased, and then re-sold again at what the market apparently will bear. Is that free enterprise? Maybe. I've never understood why ticket scalping is a crime. It's annoying, but if you don't want to pay $300 to see Madonna, the Rolling Stones or the Boston Red Sox, you don't have to (why would anyone pay $3 to see the Red Sox?). The world has changed since my concert-going days of the 1970s, when you mailed in the check with your order form and hoped for the best.
I've never seen Bruce before. At this point, I've seen just about everyone from the halcyon days of yesteryear I deemed important. I never saw Eric Clapton in any of his bands — please tell me Cream is going to be staging a reunion tour— but that's about it. Oh yeah, I also need to see John Fogerty. I picked off Simon and Garfunkle last year, Fleetwood Mac the year before that. Crosby, Stills and Nash and the Doobie Brothers fell during the mid-90s. Sometimes I wish I could see concerts in split-screen - once when they/we were young, and what they're like now. I wonder which would be better. The Who, for sure must have been more interesting back in the 70s. CSN shocked me. Those dudes look OLD. But Simon and Garfunkle were GREAT. I can't believe that musically speaking, they were any better way back when. But it wasn't just about the music in 1968-72.
Speaking of Clapton, have you seen his autobiography? It sounds pretty interesting. I've just read some excerpts in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Brings back some memories. How is he even still alive?
So anyway, i'm terribly excited about seeing Bruce. I've bought his new album, I mean CD, and have heard a few of the tracks. Again, back in the old days, I would have listened to it a dozen times already. Somehow, when the work day is over and free time beckons, I'm not in the mood.
So this has gone on long enough. I'll be giving out my critique of the music and then the concert as we go along. After all, Bruce and poitics mix well.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 4:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's big-time tourist season here in Manchester and around the rest of Vermont, a perfect time to vent on a subject raised by Thomas Friedman in an excellent column he recently authored for the New York Times.
A state like Vermont might want to keep sending a message to its Congressional delegation — one that has already gotten on their radar screens but is important enough to be re-emphasized as often as possible — that a Department of Homeland Security run amok is doing us no favors.
The United States should currently be on the receiving end of the upside of a weaker currency relative to those of other nations. It may be a source of pride and better in general for a country’s currency to be stronger rather than weaker, there is, like everything else a benefit both ways. For one thing, it’s a lot less expensive for foreign visitors to come here when our currency values are weaker.
The United States is one of the few nations in the world that is losing volume among travelers in major countries, according to a recent column in The New York Times written by Thomas Friedman. in that piece, the head of the private, non-profit Travel Industry Association, an industry advocacy group, describes that as an unheard of situation, and especially when we’re such a bargain.
The mishandled war in Iraq and bad publicity about torturing suspected Islamic terrorists are part of it, but what’s worse are the horror stories seeping back across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans about what legitimate visitors to this country have to go through just to make it out of the airport.
Periodically one hears about security officials getting it and making this process more easy and rational, but we’ve got a long way to go before we undo the damage of over-the-top over-reaction in the months and years following 9/11. Sure, it’s a different world. Yes, we have a legitimate concern about terrorism and it’s a tough job to sort out the good guys from the bad guys. Let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot either.
Visitors to the U.S. are some of our best ambassadors. When they see what America is really like, the story is a pretty positive one. But instead, our security people seem to try to make it impossible for them to tell it to the folks back home.
It’s not just about good relations and common sense, it’s about money too. Those missing foreign travelers — and that includes Canadians — have money that’s just as good as anyone else. We should be encouraging them to come. There’s a lot of money being left, needlessly, on the table.

Posted by Andrew McKeever at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)