Excused Lame

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dan Simpson writes that embattled Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter switch parties. James Taranto does his usual skillful job eviscerating Simpson’s arguments, but this was striking to me:

The first time I met Mr. Specter was in 1974 as the state department desk officer for Rhodesia. The Nixon administration was trying to repeal the Byrd Amendment, which had America importing chrome from Rhodesia in opposition to most of the rest of the world.

Mr. Specter was representing a steel state and was not inclined to vote on the issue with the Republican president. I was told before seeing him that he was hard-minded and sometimes short-tempered. Nonetheless, he heard out the State Department argument, made no commitment and eventually avoided a vote. But he was fair and did not take the obvious position automatically. He was judicious.

Just one leetle problem. Pennsylvania’s senators in 1974 were Hugh Scott and Richard Schweiker. I dunno. Maybe to Mr. Simpson all Republicans look alike.

Harry Kalas, Voice of the Phillies since 1971, is dead at 73. He collapsed in the broadcast booth before today’s game against the Nationals. What better place to go than at the ballpark?

And news has just come through that Mark “The Bird” Fidrych died today in an accident on his farm in Massachusetts. He was 54.

Mark Kleiman is unhappy that Norm Coleman persists in his election bid:

If I were a Minnesotan, I think I’d be pretty angry about the way that Norm Coleman and his friends in the national Republican Party have deprived the state of half its representation in the Senate.

Sadly, for the moment, the North Star State lacks two solons sticking their trotters into the slop trough.

Sad, but not unprecedented. The last decade of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th saw a sizable number of occasions when a state had only one senator due to the failure of the legislature to elect anyone:

53rd Congress: Wyoming

54th Congress: Delaware

55th Congress: Oregon

56th Congress: California, Delaware, Montana, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Utah

57th Congress: Delaware, Nebraska

59th Congress: Delaware

Delaware was a particularly egregious case. In the 57th Congress, Delaware had no senators at all. Philadelphia gas magnate J. Edward Addicks, who controlled a bloc of Delaware’s legislators known as “Union Republicans,” wanted to be one of the state’s senators but lacked to votes to put him through. However he controlled enough votes to prevent anyone from the “Regular Republican” faction from being elected. Eventually, a compromise was reached and at the very end of the Congress, L. Heisler Ball of the Regular Republicans and J. Frank Allee of the Union Republicans became Delaware’s senators.

It was antics like this that led to the 17th Amendment. Still, a state can be left in effect without a senator through illness; nothing forces a senator to resign. Most recently, Tim Johnson of South Dakota was absent from the Senate for 10 months due to a stroke, but returned and was re-elected in 2008.

Some never did, though. Karl Mundt of South Dakota suffered a stroke in 1969 that left him incapacitated. Loath to give up the opportunity for enhanced pension benefits, his wife ran his office until his term expired in 1973. Charles McNary of Oregon and Clair Engle of California were felled by brain tumors that left them incapable of functioning effectively.

Senile decay kept Carter Glass of Virginia away from the Senate from 1942 until his death in 1946, but he remained Virginia’s senior Senator despite calls he step down. In Robert Caro’s words:

Democrat Carter Glass of Virgina had ascended to the chairmanship of the Appropriations Committee in 1932, when he was seventy-four. During the 1940s, Glass was very ill – had been very ill for years, sequestered in a suite in the Mayflower Hotel that always had a guard at the door. He had not even appeared on Capitol Hill since 1942. By 1945, there were even suggestions that perhaps Glass, then eighty-seven, should resign. But, as [Allen] Drury reported, “from the guarded suite…through whose doors no outsider has passed in many months to see what lies within, has come the usual answer. Mrs. Glass has replied for the Senator. The suggestion will not be considered.”

Through all this, the Republic hasn’t been well served but it has survived. And so it will be here. I myself don’t think Norm Coleman stands a chance, but I also don’t want to enshrine the view of the New York Times that every vote should be counted until the Democrat comes out on top, at which point everything has to stop.

We ourselves had a slightly paler version of Stump’s saga. Our Miss Lacey, after a distinguished specials career, was felled by a near-fatal case of pyometria in September, 2005. She was only just saved by our own perceptiveness (she didn’t want her dinner that evening) and skilled surgery at County Animal Hospital in Mason, Ohio.

As she had to be spayed, Lacey could no longer be shown; only intact dogs are eligible for AKC shows. There is one exception: a spayed or neutered dog can be shown in the Veterans classes at an independent specialty. We entered Lacey in Veterans at the 2006 Borzoi Club of America National Specialty for one last show. She was first in the 7-10 year old Veteran Bitch class, then went on to Best in Specialty Show under sighthound judge Espen Engh, her 269th and sweetest Best of Breed win.

Stump (Ch. Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee), a Sussex Spaniel handled by Scott Sommer, won the 2009 Westminster Kennel Club dog show under judge Sari Brewster Tietjen. At 10 years old, Stump became the oldest dog ever to win Westminster, coming out of retirement for one last appearance.

Well done, Stump. Well done, Scott. And well done, the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University, whose vets pulled Stump through a near fatal illness in 2005. Need a good vet? Get an Aggie!

1) Spend lots of money

2) Er…

3) That’s it.

Where else but in the New York Times?

President Obama is letting bipartisanship stand in the way of what’s best for America.

We need a still-larger stimulus package, not one pared down to obtain the votes of a recalcitrant Republican minority that has already spurned cooperation.

We need to increase immediate aid to the unemployed and the poor and to the states, not dilute the stimulus to placate the party whose bankrupt philosophy got us into this mess.

Emphasizing once more the failed conservative theory that tax cuts cure all ills to buy support from Republicans is unnecessary and dangerous.

It is time to reject the antidemocratic notion that a Republican Senate minority has the right to veto legislation that is supported by the president and by a majority of each house of Congress.

If we need to get rid of the filibuster to avoid economic collapse, so be it. But compromise with rule-or-ruin Republicans for the sake of “unity” is a sad mistake.

Remember the days of “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”? Naaah, neither do I.

The political and economic autopsy of a nation. There’s this:

Very few… are prepared to enter politics… This is not due to the lack of public spirit, but to the personal abuse to which candidates are subjected and to the feeling that, if elected, they would be suspected of being associated with corrupt dealings. A certain number… have been ready to embark on a political career, but the professional classes generally have not responded. “Politics” have come to be regarded as an unclean thing which no self-respecting man should touch; the very word “politician” is virtually a term of abuse which carries with it a suggestion of crookedness and sharp practice.

And this:

The simple-minded electorate were visited every few years by rival politicians, who, in the desire to secure election, were accustomed to make the wildest promises involving increased public expenditure in the constituency and the satisfaction of all the cherished desires of the inhabitants… The country was thus exposed to the evils of paternalism in its most extreme form. The people, instead of being trained to independence and self-reliance, became increasingly dependent on those who were placed in authority; instead of being trained to think in terms of the national interest, they were encouraged to think only of the interests of their own district. Even within a district… there was no public spirit; in the struggle to secure a decent living, the average man sought only his personal advantage. The Government was looked upon as the universal provider, and it was thought to be the duty of the Member for the constituency to see that there was an ever-increasing flow of public money… The people were in fact taught to look to the Government for everything and to do as little as possible to provide for their own requirements.

And this:

Unfortunately, the benefits… were almost wholly discounted, as we shall show, by a reckless disregard of the dictates of financial prudence. The 12 years… during none of which was the budget balanced, were characterised by an outflow of public funds on a scale as ruinous as it was unprecedented, fostered by a continuous stream of willing lenders. Easy money… was looked for and was deemed in part to have arrived. In the prevailing optimism, the resources of the Exchequer were believed to be limitless. The public debt… was in 12 years more than doubled; its assets dissipated by improvident administration; the people misled into the acceptance of false standards; and the country sunk in waste and extravagance. The onset of the world depression found [it] with no reserves,… its credit exhausted. At the first wind of adversity, its elaborate pretensions collapsed like a house of cards. The glowing visions of a new Utopia were dispelled with cruel suddenness by the cold realities of national insolvency, and today a disillusioned and bewildered people, deprived in many parts of the country of all hope of earning a livelihood, are haunted by the grim spectres of pauperism and starvation.

Sound like the events of today? Actually these excerpts are from the Amulree Report of 1933, a Royal investigation into the catastrophic state into which the Dominion of Newfoundland had fallen.

As an independent nation, Newfoundland never recovered from the Great Depression. Great Britian took it into receivership during the rest of the 1930’s. Almost defenseless at the outbreak of World War II, it was as much as occupied by the U.S. and Canada. After the war, in a controversial plebiscite, its citizens opted to become a province of Canada.

Looks like the new hope-n-changey environment has deflated one artistic balloon:

No theatrical event of 2008 captured the political mood of the country quite like the Public Theater’s hit revival of the Vietnam-era rock musical “Hair” in Central Park last summer. Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain were sparring daily about whether to withdraw troops from Iraq; “Hair” and its antiwar anthems gave voice not only to the anger that many people felt about the 2003 invasion, but also to the hopes that many of them had invested in Mr. Obama.

He is President Obama now, and soon both he and the country will come to a reckoning point in Iraq, as his administration prepares to withdraw tens of thousands of troops over the next 16 months. And the New York theater world is reflecting that national moment, just as the Public did with “Hair,” by mounting several significant productions this winter and spring that wrestle with themes of war, its legacy, and responsibility and accountability.

But will theatergoers continue to be interested in issues raised by war? Given Americans’ exhaustion with the war in Iraq, and the departure of President Bush, not to mention the nation’s dire economic landscape, will there be a demand for war plays? Once again, “Hair” may prove to be a reflection of a national mood: the producers are transferring it to Broadway in early March, and they have had difficulty lining up investors to cover costs (a deepening recession is, of course, also a factor). Will audiences stay away?

Now that the departure of President Bush from the scene has deprived the monochromatically independent playwrights of their primary target, perhaps they will turn to never-before-explored facets of the human comedy for inspiration, such as:

• The soul-deadening nature of suburbia
• How hard it is to be an urban gay
• Middle-class couples and their empty marriages
• The all-embracing evil of corporations
• Child-molesting clerics (preferably Catholic)
• The wisdom and insight imparted by the homeless, drunks and minorities
• The horror visited upon sensitive intellectuals by Midwest and Southern Republicans

Headline: “Biden to Attend Munich Security Conference”

Headline: “Biden Apologizes Over Roberts Joke”

This article in Sunday’s Washington Post illustrates just about every cliché among the Democrats Abroad crowd, from “I-have-to-pretend-I’m-Canadian” to “my-European-friends-ask-me-about” to getting hugged on the street by perfect strangers suddenly keen on America now that we’ve elected the kind of person who could never hold office in Europe or Asia.

Am I the only one perplexed by these anecdotes? I lived and worked in England for 18 months from 1983 to 1984, while America and the world were being ravaged by the terror reign of Ronald the Blood-Drinker, the previous Worst President of the United States. Not only wasn’t I attacked on the street by strangers who heard my non-Canadian accent, none of the people I worked with ever discussed American politics or the President with me, except for one occasion when one afternoon in a pub I replied to a thrust briefly, quietly and savagely. That was the end of that: whatever the political views of my colleagues were, the subject never came up again.

So how do we explain the social life of misery expatriates suffered under Chimpy McBushitler and the popularity they enjoy under our new President? I very much doubt that polite people, even the French, talk about America and its politics unless the Americans themselves talk about it. I’m speculating, of course, but I think that far from not identifying themselves as Americans, those interviewed in this story beat their breasts and lamented loud and long to their foreign friends about That Man In The White House.

Barack Obama has been inaugurated at the 44th President of these United States. The last band in the parade has passed, the last dance spun. Workers are now cleaning up the mountains of trash (no doubt Green and eco-friendly) left on the Mall, not to mention the rivers of sycophantic drool and splooge from our courageously independent media.

Despite the gall of Tom Brokaw to compare the inauguration to the Velvet Revolution, the reins of government passed from predecessor in one party to successor in the other with the continuity that has marked our history. This, of course, puts lie to the gibberings of the more deranged species of Bush haters that he was planning some “fascist coup.” Poor dears! They so want to feel persecuted so they can think of themselves as “dissidents,” while the only threat they actually face is the fish sticks served in the faculty cafeteria.

I sincerely wish the new President the best. How could I not do so? To wish him ill is to wish our country ill. He is my President and the President of my country. In saying this, I want to disassociate myself from others of his supporters: the November patriots, the ones who have been sporting the “Not My President” bumper-stickers, the “Re-Defeat Bush” crowd, the “Arrest Bush Now” mob, the war-crimes tribunal proponents. Now that their guy is in charge it’s “from 52 to 48 with love.”

Oh, no. Barack Obama is my President, but he’s not my President with you. For the last eight years, we’ve heard a lot from the I’m-ashamed-to-be-an-American types. Well, now I’m ashamed to be your fellow citizen.

No, we’re not really showing anyone right now. My lovely bride is shivering in Ohio and any showing would be limited to nearby events, of which there won’t be any until Indianapolis next month.

On Saturday, I thought I’d go to the Fort Bend KC show in Rosenberg, just to stay for a little while and see some Borzoi. After the judging, which was fairly early, I passed the Chief Ring Steward and asked her if she needed any help. Oh yes, she said, could I please fill in for someone at lunch? No problem: at 11:00 I went to that ring and took over.

Instead of filling in for half an hour, the other steward never returned. I had to stay until the end of the day, after which I staggered off and had something to eat. I thought I’d go back to see where the Hound Group was in the order. I was nabbed again and asked whether I’d take over at another ring. Finally, at 4:00, my day was over. Home and collapse.

Moral of the story: never volunteer for anything.

Samuel Barber’s haunting chamber opera A Hand of Bridge (libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti), performed by the Opera Theater of the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.