by Charley James

So I’m scrolling through The New York Times Saturday morning when, much to my horror, I read that Pope Benedict is again apologising to one more group of victims for having been sexually abused by priests when the adults were innocent children in the eyes of his church.

This time it’s in Ireland but the land of St. Paddy is simply another entry on a rapidly growing list of places where rampant sexual abuse was given a wink and a nod by the church hierarchy.

How many times does the Pope think he can get away with doing this and still have any moral standing in the world, let alone among Catholics?

It’s not that apologies aren’t needed and decades overdue, and goodness knows how many tens of millions of dollars have been deservedly paid by the church in compensation to its hapless victims. But come on! When an institution has a serious problem that keeps repeating itself in one part of the world after another, does it occur to anyone in the Vatican to ask, “Has anybody else wondered if we ought to be be doing stuff differently?”

It’s not enough that the supposedly celibate priests running the Catholic Church demand girls remain virgins until they get married, or men who’ve never had to support a family tell parishioners – from impoverished peasants in third world countries to working class Irish in Boston scraping by from paycheque to paycheque – to not use birth control.

It’s not enough that the Vatican is so wealthy its bank willingly laundered money for the Nazi’s and Fascist’s during the war and apparently did so willingly because it took a slice of vigerish for its Christian kindness, yet by not distributing that same wealth it allows followers in many parts of the world to starve to death or die because they don’t have clean water or access to medical care.

It’s positively obscene that a church supposedly devoted to the followings of Jesus, Peter, Paul and Mark – the modern world’s first community organisers for social justice and equality – excommunicates priests fighting for social justice in unjust parishes and nations, and sharply scolds those it doesn’t just boot out altogether.

For how long will the Pope and Tiger Woods and John Ensign and Mark Foley and scores of other hypocritical politicians, and damn near every celebrity, real and pretend, think they can keep saying “Whoops, sorry! Didn’t mean it.” to make all well with the world again?

Protestants aren’t much better and evangelicals are the worst. Damn near every one of the sex scandals in the US Congress over the past four or five years has involved a so-called “born again, evangelical, I found the true path” Christian fundamentalist. Some evangelical sects may speak in tongues but the tongues are forked.

Maybe this makes more sense to sociological anthropologists than it does to me. All I’m able to do is shake my head in angry disgust.

We’re hardwired for bereavement; it’s the cost of our emotional sensitivity. And what could be sadder than a daughter unexpectedly losing her mother at one of the pinnacle moments of her life? So we all became lump-in-the-throat cheerleaders for the poised and poignant figure-skating star.

We wanted her to skate brilliantly partly because we know what’s coming next for her: The hard-slogging, seemingly endless, work of grief.

Grief has found its way into the news lately in unexpected ways. There was British designer Alexander McQueen, who hanged himself, reportedly distraught over his mother’s death. There was the shocking death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili at the start of the Olympics. And there was a study published this week that confirmed our longevity has increased. Nothing sad about that but it does change the future of grieving.

As more of us live longer, one of the stranger effects will be a raft of newly created “orphans” in their 60s and 70s as their parents don’t die until 99. At a recent gathering, everyone laughed darkly when someone quoted a friend saying, “My mother dying practically ruined my 70s!”

The interest in grief as a passage, an art, an inevitability, has intensified as we boomers see off not only our parents but also our contemporaries.

Grief in the 21^st century may have some distinctly modern elements – memorial services with shamelessly cool production values; e-mailed condolences; death announcements by Twitter – but what everyone discovers is that grieving takes up an inordinate amount of personal time, no matter how fast-paced a society we’ve become.

It’s also far messier than psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross led us to believe with her famous five stages of death and dying: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It became the paradigm for grieving.

In a recent essay in The New Yorker on finding a better way to grieve, writer Meghan O’Rourke argued that this staging “turns out largely to be a fiction” and that “grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process – sometimes one that never fully ends.”

Correctly, from my experience, O’Rourke doesn’t think our modern society does a bang-up job of acknowledging grief. We may bring in grief counselors by the truckload but we’ve adopted “a sort of ‘ask, don’t tell’ policy,” she writes. “The question ‘How are you?’ is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out that it shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual inquiry.”

And yet grief is so infinitely interesting. It’s practically the last way to be sad in our society that isn’t turned instantly into a pathology.

One of the discoveries I made when my sister Janice died is how hugely important it was to spend time with her body. So, I made my way to her suburban Minneapolis home and there she was, in her bed, wearing an old favourite, a green wooly bathrobe from Target and, except for her pallor and gaunt body from the ravages of cancer, looked cozy.

People talk about their hearts breaking but I felt, instead, that my head was bursting with one phrase, as if the words, in different fonts and sizes were swelling my head beyond bearing. The words that came from my throbbing brain, but not my lips, over and over, were “Thank you. Thank you.” Thank you to a sister who shaped my life with her encouragement and admiration.

In a recent anthology, The Heart Does Break, various Canadian writers tell the story of their own grief, from Marni Jackson’s funny and moving account of her father’s cremation, to Jill Frayne who wrote that “the state of emergency that came with her death has passed, and I have a sense of her again, not in the world, of course, but in myself, in memory and in dreams, but strongest in my body, in breath and bone, as if by physical feat I have incorporated her.”

This past January, I felt the familiar stone in my chest as I approached the 12^th anniversary of my mother’s death. It was like living the moment over and over again. But this year, I surprised myself by sitting down and writing Joyce a letter, catching her up on all that has happened since she died, most of which would absolutely delight her: Barack Obama is president; much of the art she acquired over the years turned out to be – despite Phil’s pooh-poohing it when she brought it home in the Sixties and Seventies – major museum pieces; Belle, Joyce’s beloved dog who lived with her until she died, lived with me until she was 17 and I now have another Retriever; and possibly the news that I am finally seeing a dentist regularly.

I felt a little foolish, but the more I wrote the lighter my heart became, until the stone disappeared and my day seemed full of possibility again.

Grief changes us, deepens us, surprises us. Joannie Rochette made all of us who grieve ache a little more profoundly on her behalf. She has a whole country of people mourning her loss – not to mention their own.

(UPDATED) by Charley James

It turns out that Scrooge – Ebenezer or McDuck, take your pick – is alive and well and running the Canadian province of Alberta . On Thursday, Conservative Premier Ed Stelmach told reporters the provincial government wouldn’t be donating a nickel of its lush, oil-and-gas royalty enriched treasury stash to aid in Haitian relief efforts.

Instead, Stelmach told reporters that Alberta contributes to humanitarian aid in other ways, largely through charitable tax deductions for individuals.

“That is the best tax deduction in Canada , so those individuals that want to contribute to humanitarian aid will see that tax credit,” Stelmach stated proudly..

Huh? Even George Bush, the original “compassionate conservative,” is doing more to help the quake-levelled island nation.

Meanwhile, far poorer provinces and the federal government were busy putting Alberta to shame. Canadian forces search-and-rescue teams were among the first to arrive in Port-au-Prince , showing up on military aircraft within hours of the disaster, and Ottawa pledged $50-million in relief and rebuilding efforts. The Ontario government, struggling under the weight of massive unemployment in its huge automotive, manufacturing and financial services sectors, managed to scrape together $1-million to donate as did Canada’s poorest province, Newfoundland and Labrador. Even sparsely populated Saskatchewan , where agriculture rather than energy drives the local economy, found $250,000 to add to the relief effort.

Stelmach’s comments did not go down well in Alberta , incluing among its overwhelmingly conservative base of voters, and his stinginess was roundly booed by people across the political spectrum – and across the nation. The chorus quickly grew so loud that, by Friday, the premier was back in front of television cameras to say he changed his mind: Alberta would somehow scrape together $500,000 to donate to relief efforts.

While that sounds like a noticeable chunk of money, when compared to Newfoundland and Labrador where the major industry is poverty and the largest business sector is unemployment, this is chump change. Alberta probably spends more on coffee and sweet rolls at government meetings each year than it is giving to Haitian relief. And as a percent of its provincial tax revenue, it is as if Newfies were contributing something like $30-million, dwarfing Alberta’s miniscule contribution; in those same comparative terms, it’d be like Saskatchewan turning over the proceeds of an entire year’s crop to help ease the suffering in Haiti and contribute to rebuilding the country as opposed to Alberta’s paltry donation.

Meanwhile, Alberta ’s oil-and-gas fields’ pump out nearly $500,000 in royalty payments to the province every week – maybe more – and the province’s political sway on Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the primary reason Canada played mostly an obstructionist role at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December.

It’s amazing that Canada , with its deserved global reputation as a generous, caring nation, could produce an Ed Stelmach, as much of a Scrooge as a Disney character and as big a dinosaur as the fossil fields that are uncovered regularly in Canada ’s prairie land.

Bah humbug, Premier Stelmach, because you are – with apologies to Keith Olbermann – today’s worst person in Canada.

UPDATE: According to a press release from the Alberta Premier, he seems to have bowed to the pressure and will contribute $500,000 (CAN) to the Haitian relief effort.

(Great story-tellers like Charley come along once a generation. Enjoy every word of this one, I did. -Ed.)

by Charley James

Families with any luck whatsoever have a relative who is larger than life, a genuine character that leaves behind a trail of remarkable anecdotes that celebrate a life well lived. Mine was doubly blessed because we had two, Joe and Norman.

Supposedly, they were my great uncles but who the hell knows.

My dad’s mother believed that, somehow, in some way, everyone was related so when she summoned her very extended family to an annual “cousins club” gathering each August, everybody came to Milwaukee from wherever they lived, including Joe and Norman. Nobody said no to Caroline, a true matriarch in every sense of the word. As a very little boy at one sweltering gathering of the clan, I was told by grandma that Joe and Norman were my uncles so my uncles they were.

I remember them as huge, gregarious men with rumpled, Matthau faces creased with permanent smiles, marshmallow stomachs and thick sausages at the end of their hands where most people had fingers. They spoke with traces of the old world dialect where they came from around the time of the Kerensky revolution, calling soup “zoup” and saying “tanks” to express appreciation. They’d lapse into Yiddish occasionally, usually when kids were nearby who were too young to hear a dirty joke. Their breath smelled of cigars but they were the only men on either side of my family at the time who wore after-shave lotion.

Even as a child, somehow I recognised Joe and Norman as snappy dressers, adding to their exotic mystique. Like everybody else at cousin’s club, my mother – who hadn’t yet blossomed into the well-coiffed fashionista that she became in her mid-30s and that lasted the rest of her life – wore shorts, sleeveless blouses and sandals, and my dad donned “wash pants” with a faded pullover shirt. But Joe and Norman always arrived in crisply pressed, brightly patterned shirts and pastel pants that didn’t look like anything hanging in closets around our house. Their shoes were very shiny and I remember they wore gaily coloured, argyle socks. I’d never seen coloured socks before, only white or black.

They fascinated me for reasons only a pre-schooler could possibly understand: They were friendly, familiar, foreign and glamorous all at the same time.

I saw them once every summer until grandma died suddenly of flu sometime in the mid-1950s. After the unyielding, unifying force in my dad’s family passed into memory, so did cousin’s club. Oh, it limped into one more summer but, without Caroline’s iron will enforcing the invitation, half the family didn’t show up. The following year, no one even bothered trying to organise the party.

Yet the Brothers Alperson continued to flutter in and out of my life over the next decade.

When I was about 11, a family vacation took us to Disneyland and Los Angeles which, it turned out, is where Joe, Norman, their wives and a handful of cousins – real cousins, not just members of grandma’s expansive definition of “family” – lived. I was dazzled, not only by the Magic Kingdom’s magical rides but by the entire experience. For one thing, I discovered that everybody in LA seemed to dress like Joe and Norman. For another, the two each lived in houses in Beverly Hills so massive I got lost wandering around – several times – with pools and manicured gardens and lemon trees and something called a racquetball court. When I asked for a soda, an actual maid in a uniform scurried off to fetch it. One of them had a Rolls Royce parked on the circular drive leading to the front door.

Huh? What’s going on here? My still-developing brain was registering a huge non-compute.

Back home, everybody I called a relative or neighbour or buddy lived in ordinary houses in ordinary neighbourhoods with Chevy’s or Ford’s in the driveway. So did friends of my parents, many of whom they’d known since high school. Certainly neither set of my grandparents lived like Joe and Norman. Yet here were these two relatives living in homes that were like, well, like pictures of where movie stars lived.

“They did well in business,” was my dad’s simple yet vague explanation that evening back at the motel. Phooey, I thought. I knew my father was “in business” too, so pop must have been doing something terribly wrong.

It was only years later that I learned how – and why – Joe and Norman “did well in business,” discovering luck is as important as smarts in the world in the process.

Peabody here. Sherman, set the way back machine to the depths of the Great Depression.

It’s the mid-1930s in Milwaukee and everybody was struggling: My dad’s first job was hawking newspapers when he was eight, his father drove a laundry truck and grandma would do some of the washing and ironing that didn’t quite make it to the plant before grandpa finished his daily route. When he returned clean clothes a few days later, he pocketed the money for the laundry grandma had done. They let an attic room in their rented duplex to “George mit der schlissel” – George with the keys, a guy who never worked but had so many keys my dad and his sisters figured the guy could open any door in town.

As for Joe and Norman, they hadn’t worked in two or three years. They lived in a rotating cycle of relative’s apartments, basements or attics, took odd jobs when they could find one, sponged a meal where they could get one, and probably looked like many of the urban sufferers captured in Dorothea Lange’s iconic photographs of the time.

Trying to change their luck, around 1935 or 1936 they scraped, borrowed and maybe stole enough spare change to buy a jalopy, fill the tank, bid farewell to Milwaukee and – not unlike Dust Bowl Okies – set out for Los Angeles, their few possessions wrapped in cardboard suitcases held together with rope. The money and gas ran out in Springfield, Illinois.

Joe and Norman did what anyone on the skids, broke and hungry, might do when stranded in a strange town: They walked around looking for a brothel. Not because they wanted to get laid; they couldn’t afford a hooker if they did. But they figured that even during the Depression, brothels were making money which meant they might have a job open, especially in a state capitol. Springfield was filled with crooked politicians, glad-handers – now called the more genteel “lobbyist” – who were eager to exchange cash or provide a prostitute for a vote, hangers-on and others who had money to spare.

Their hunch paid off and, by dinner, found a whore house whose Madame hired them. Because Norman was bigger than Joe, he became a bouncer while his brother could sort-of bang out three jazz tunes on the piano – the only three he knew. During off hours, they cleaned rooms, carted out garbage and empty bottles, ran errands and kept the girls amused. Whatever that meant.

It took them at least a month to earn enough to fill up the jalopy and hit the road again with a little cash in their pockets. By then, they’d decided it made sense to brothel hop from one state capital to another. Their trek west followed blue highways to Jefferson City, Lincoln, Denver, Carson City and Sacramento before finally making Los Angeles – seven months after starting out.

There are different accounts floating around my family of what happened next, including several variations told by Joe and Norman themselves.

What is agreed upon is that, somehow, the brothers became swamis who hired out to Hollywood parties. Their qualification? They bought a few dish towels at Woolworths, wrapped them around their heads, got a couple of capes from a used costume shop and developed a patter. Entirely by happenstance, Joe and Norman began entertaining movie swells gathered for parties at the homes of “A” list stars. They called themselves Prince Oombah and Prince Boombah, the all-knowing seers of the exotic east.

Only if East Odessa is considered exotic.

The money wasn’t great yet the work was steady and a lot easier than dealing with drunks, druggies and dishes in a bordello. They still lived in the same rundown rooming house they moved into when they arrived in LA but ate more-or-less regularly and had a roof over their heads.

Late one night in 1939, Joe was walking to the bus on Hollywood Blvd. after a gig – in those pre-war days, LA had superb public transit and Norman took the car to a different party in Pasadena – when a drunk stumbled out of a bar, fell down on the sidewalk and began crawling to his auto. Knowing that the guy was in no shape to drive, Joe put him in the passenger seat, looked at the car registration hanging on the steering wheel to find his address, and drove the drunk home to Santa Monica. When a startled, half-asleep woman in a nightgown and robe opened the door of a very large house, Joe handed her his Prince Oombah card and a passed-out husband, then made his own way home.

Several days later the pay phone rang in the boys’ rooming house: Someone was calling Prince Oombah. When Joe grabbed the receiver, an efficient-sounding female voice on the other end asked if she was speaking to the man who helped Mr. Raymond home a few nights earlier. Joe didn’t remember the drunk’s name but said he had assisted a gentleman who wasn’t able to drive.

“Good. I’m Mr. Raymond’s secretary,” she explained, “and he would like to invite you to lunch to thank you.”

Joe accepted immediately and, thinking quickly, mentioned that his brother also helped. Could he come to lunch, too? Even though Norman was on the other side of Los Angeles, a free meal was hard to come by and the brothers took care of each other.

“Certainly,” the woman stated matter-of-factly before giving Joe the name of a swank restaurant in Beverly Hills and suggesting a time and date to meet.

When the boys arrived at the appointed hour, they were greeted by a man who introduced himself as A.E. Raymond. During the lunch in the fanciest restaurant either Joe or Norman had ever eaten in in their life, Raymond thanked them profusely for helping him out, admitting he wasn’t much of a drinker and probably would have killed himself if he tried driving home that night. Raymond said that he remembered very little of the evening. Then he asked a peculiar question: Did they like being swamis?

“It’s a living,” one of them said.

“Ever thought of doing something else?” Raymond asked.

“Like what?”

“Like going into the scrap metal business,” was the answer. Raymond explained that he was vice president of engineering at Douglas Aircraft so if Joe and Norman would open a junk yard, he’d tell them what kind of scrap to buy that Douglas needed and then purchase it from them.

“It’s the best way I can re-pay you,” Raymond said.

The two brothers looked at each other briefly and decided immediately: Being junk men wouldn’t be any worse than being swamis so they agreed on the spot. Raymond then lent them $100 – a fortune in those days – to find a suitable spot for their new business, and to buy the metal detailed on an initial list of the kinds of metals Raymond and his fellow engineers at Douglas required for the planes they were designing and building.

“Call me when you’re set up,” Raymond said, shaking each of the boy’s hands as they parted company after lunch.

Within a month, they were in business. They’d located a large, vacant lot on the Southeastern edge of LA’s downtown that was already surrounded by a fence and had a small shack in a corner of the property. After paying the first month’s rent, they used the balance of Raymond’s $100 to begin buying scrap metal. To save money, they moved out of the rooming house, bought two Army surplus cots and moved into the shack. A second hand hot plate and ice box were found and, like many immigrants starting a new business, lived “above the store.”

With Raymond helping them, Joe and Norman began making money – not a lot but more than they made telling fortunes to movie stars – and were learning the scrap metal business. What they didn’t sell to Douglas, they sold to steel mills, other junk yards, and to people who wandered in looking for an old part or a piece of tin that they needed for whatever.

By mid-1941, they had a thriving business. Joe and Norman were making enough money to rent small homes; they each bought a car and met the girls they’d eventually marry. True to his word, A.E. Raymond kept telling the brothers what kind of metal to acquire and Douglas bought as much of it as they could lay their hands on.

Then, one Sunday morning, Pearl Harbor was bombed.

America was at war and, suddenly, every aircraft maker, ship builder and munitions manufacturer in the country needed scrap metal. Telegrams, phone calls and letters ordering metal poured into the junk yard from the War Dept.. as well as companies stretching across all 48 states.

For the next four years, the junk yard expanded as rapidly as the boy’s bank accounts. By 1945, the war had made them wealthy young men and they began looking for opportunities beyond selling scrap metal. They acquired a small steel mill sometime in the late Forties, turning their own scrap into finished products that help build the post-war boom of the 1950s. When they bought the mill, it was a non-union shop and, much to the amazement of a lot of people, invited in a steel worker’s union to represent their employees.

“We got lucky in the war,” Joe explained to me many years later, “and we wanted to be sure that our workers who were off fighting felt they were lucky, too, now that they were home.”

Over the next 25 years, there never was a strike at the mill.

It was this progressive attitude – some called it Communist at the time, and for a while the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated the pair but found nothing other than two generous men – that permeated their politics for the rest of their lives.

Joe attended the 1956 Democratic National Convention, not as a delegate but to watch the action. When Adlai Stevenson threw his vice presidential selection to the floor, Joe became fascinated by Jack Kennedy and the apparatus of family and loyalists he brought to the contest. Joe said he wanted Kennedy to win but, after Eisenhower was re-elected by a large percentage of Americans who simply wanted to go about their lives without a lot of ruckus from Washington, he concluded it was the best thing to happen to JFK’s political future.

Perhaps only Kennedy’s father was an earlier supporter and financial backer than Joe when Jack began thinking in 1958 about running for president. He convinced Norman to throw his money behind Kennedy, as well, and estimates that the two of them contributed roughly $50,000 to JFK’s primary and general election campaign. In 1960, that was a lot of money to give to a politician. And unlike today, they didn’t tie their contributions to a wish-list of legislative or regulatory desires or because they wanted to be ambassadors or receive a job in the New Frontier. All they wanted was Kennedy to be elected president.

The Democratic Convention was held in Los Angeles in 1960 and one morning Joe received a call from Bobby Kennedy. “Jack wants to get away from the (Ambassador) hotel for a while. Can he spend the afternoon at your place?”

By then, Joe and his wife Sadie were living in a little palace on Sunset Blvd., just past the western end of the Strip. It was a 5,000-square foot home with just two humongous bedrooms and three nearly-as-large closets on the second floor, perfect for an almost-presidential nominee who wanted a bit of privacy. And so, shortly after lunch, a white Chrysler Imperial pulled into the driveway and Jack got out, alone. No aides, no press pool, no camp followers, no security, no Secret Service detail; in those days, the Secret Service didn’t establish a security bubble until final results were known on election night. Just John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his driver, who waited in the car.

The trio had lunch at the pool, chatting about politics, golf, sailing, kids – Jacquelyn was pregnant at the time and was having a difficult time; Joe and Sadie were unable to have children – and more politics. As they were finishing, a maid appeared in the garden to say that a visitor had arrived to see Sen. Kennedy.

Joe later recounted that Jack flashed them his famous smile and, as he rose to follow the housekeeper, beckoned the couple to follow them.

Waiting in the front vestibule was Marilyn. As in Monroe. Introductions were made, the four made their way back out to the pool and small talk was made. Joe later told me that neither he nor Sadie knew quite what to say to the couple seated across the wrought iron table. “What do you say to the next President of the United States and the most famous movie star in America when they’re sitting in your yard?” he explained to me much later.

At one point, Kennedy leaned over and whispered something to Joe who nodded a “yes” and whispered back. With that, Jack and Marilyn walked into the house and disappeared for about an hour. When Kennedy rejoined his hosts, Monroe had left. The three shared a Scotch, John and Joe smoked Cuban cigars that JFK had brought along, and an hour later Jack left.

About five or six months later, the man who spent a warm Los Angeles afternoon with Uncle Joe and Aunt Sadie stood in front of the Capitol and swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”

Meanwhile, I spent that summer and fall in Minneapolis, stuffing envelopes in an un-air conditioned campaign office volunteering for Kennedy.

Fast forward to February, 1962.

I was taking the obligatory junior high spring break trip to Washington in late March and my father called Joe to ask a favour: Could he possibly arrange for me to meet Kennedy while I was there?

A very long week passed before a return call came from LA. Yes, the president would meet me in the Oval Office. I was to report to the Northwest Gate of the White House on the Wednesday I’d be in DC at a specific time and ask for Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s appointment secretary. So nervous and excited was I that I walked back and forth in Lafayette Park across from The White House for at least an hour before my scheduled meeting ‘lest I be late. It occurred to me as I was writing this that if it my trip happened today, I’d probably arouse suspicion pacing in the park and quickly find myself surrounded by a heavily armed SWAT team and as many Secret Service agents.

At the appointed time, I approached the gate and gave my name to the policeman, said rather grandly that Mr. O’Donnell was expecting me and, after the cop made a phone call, was allowed to enter. I remember every one of the several dozen steps from inside the gate to the West Portico: Looking up at the mansion, wondering if Caroline or Jacquelyn was looking down at me from the second floor living quarters, realising how much larger the building is up close than it looked in photos. A Marine honor guard opened the door to the West Wing for me and I was inside. I realised my hands were sweaty and I hoped I wasn’t leaving a stain on a copy of a book Kennedy had written, The Strategy of Peace, that I’d brought along for the president to sign.

The receptionist in the waiting room – it was much smaller than I expected it would be – welcomed me by name as I stepped to her desk. Suddenly, there was O’Donnell shaking my hand and asking me about Uncle Joe.. Then, he handed me off to a very large and very polite Secret Service agent who walked me through a maze of hallways, past three or four desks where secretaries were working, and knocked on a door. He opened it a crack and from inside I saw Pres. Kennedy motion for us to come in.

The next 90 or so seconds passed in a blue. JFK walked towards me and shook my hand; as he did, I spotted the famous rocking chair from the corner of my eye. Somebody snapped a photo and the president was signing my book as he made some comment about Joe and Norman. I think I said something in reply but who-the-hell knows. Then, Kennedy shook my hand again and I was ushered out into a different hallway.

It was over.

I’ve no recollection of how I got there but suddenly I was back on Pennsylvania Ave. I turned and glanced back, wondering if I’d ever enter the building again in my lifetime. I opened the book and looked at the scrawl Kennedy had made; only much later did I discover that, apparently, he started to sign it on the wrong flyleaf because at the back of the book is a small, aborted chicken scratch.

The book has accompanied me from city-to-city, remaining one of my three or four most-prized possessions. Not wanting it to end up being sold for a dollar at a yard sale of the remains of my day after I’m gone, I donated it this year to a fund raising auction held by The Nation magazine, which doesn’t accept advertising; someone in Massachusetts paid nearly $1,000 for it in a spirited, on-line bidding war.

Joe and Norman, and their wives, died many years ago. The last time I was in LA, I drove past the house on Sunset and wondered if the current occupants have any idea that their home is an asterisk in American political history.

I hadn’t thought of the two brothers in a long time. But for most of my life, I always kept an eye open for a drunken businessman stumbling out of a bar late at night who may need help getting home. Turns out that lightening doesn’t strike twice.

A deeply appreciative h/t to the research librarians at the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

by Charley James

Responding quickly to the Christmas Eve terrorist threat aboard a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit from Amsterdam, the US Dept. of Homeland Security announced new security procedures today in addition to not letting passengers use toilets one hour before landing.

Enhancing its screening passengers at security checkpoints, starting tomorrow all passengers on every flight arriving, departing or flying over the US will be required to remove their trousers or skirts at boarding gates for a last-minute underwear check.

According to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, news reports that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – the man accused to trying to blow up NW253 – concealed explosives in his underpants are accurate “so we want to be sure that, along with making people walk barefoot through check points, and banning shampoo and deodorant, no one is trying to sneak explosives aboard in their knickers.”

She also announced that, as part of the new measure, passengers will be required to put their underwear on the outside of their clothes at checkpoints and, halfway through each flight, flight attendants will have each passenger give their bra’s, panties and briefs or boxers to the person sitting directly in front of them “who will wear them for the balance of the flight.”

Dismissing suggestions that this is a slapstick strategy straight out of Bananas, a 1971 Woody Allen film in which the famed writer-actor accidentally takes over a South American dictatorship, Sec. Napolitano told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday “this new tactic will absolutely foil anyone from using their own underwear as a terrorist weapon.”

Admitting that some passengers may not wear any underwear at all, Sec. Napolitano insists DHS is prepared.

“Part of the new regulations requires airlines to carry spare underwear on all planes,” she says, “so everyone will be subjected to the same rigorous inspection requirements.”

On Wall St., news of the enhanced security procedures sent stock prices of apparel manufacturers Hanes and Jockey soaring in heavy trading Monday afternoon.

by Charley James

They’re baaaack..

Having disappeared under a rock after being exposed as frauds during Iraq on a scale matched only by the Wizard of Oz, the neo-con foreign policy lug nuts are sticking their heads out again, looking for a shadow by calling for renewing a policy that totally destroyed America’s moral, ethical and political standing in the world, especially among Moslems: Launch another pre-emptive strike in the Middle East.

T’was the night before Christmas when Dr. Alan J. Kuperman, director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas-Austin, penned an Op-Ed in The New York Times urging Pres. Obama to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran in a pre-emptive strike to end its nuclear enrichment programme. Never mind that authoritative sources that actually know what they’re talking about, ranging from UN inspectors to the CIA to noted Middle East authority Dr. Juan Cole, say there’s no evidence that Iran wants anything more than to enhance its electrical generating capacity and, possibly, have a stand-by ability to make nuclear bombs in an emergency the same way Japan has such capacity. Phooey, snorts Dr. Kuperman: Drop bombs tonight, insisting “The sooner the United States takes action, the better.”

Sure, why not? The Cheney Doctrine worked so well the last time America shot itself in the foot following it so let’s try again and to hell with any repercussions.

“Iran could retaliate by aiding America’s opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it does that anyway,” Dr. Kuperman writes dismissively. He’s equally dismissive of history.

Blasé About Facts
In fact, Tehran has been quietly cooperating with the US since 2001 by ensuring Afghan insurgents don’t flee into Iran and trying – unsuccessfully – to stem the flow of option out of Afghanistan. Moreover, the Islamic Republic didn’t start meddling in Iraq to assist various Shiite factions until Civil War broke out with Sunni’s during the US-tolerated ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. In any event, Sunni’s and Shiites have been fighting with each other since sometime around 700, long before there was an Iraqi or Iranian state, more than a full millennia before the US was even created and some 1,900 years before Bush charged head first into Iraq.

You’d think an academic such as Dr. Kuperman wouldn’t be quite so blasé about facts.

In what amounts to a throwaway line, Dr. Kuperman concedes that “bombing might not work” before going on to argue, essentially, “So what?”

For evidence, he reaches back 30 years to cite Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor. Dr. Kuperman claims it deterred Saddam Hussein from further pursuit of nuclear weapons, “a fact that eluded American intelligence until after the 2003 invasion.”

Still Cherrypicking Facts
What history books does this guy read?

Saddam Hussein didn’t rebuild Osirak because he needed money for his Army to fight a war with Iran. Then, UN sanctions effectively cut him off from funds, supplies and equipment to build any nuclear capability, civilian or military, even if he wanted to do so. Moreover, it’s been well-documented that intelligence agencies in London, Berlin and Washington knew full well that Iraq had no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons long before the 2003 invasion; it’s just that Bush and Cheney cherry-picked the information they revealed to the UN, Congress and the American people.

Indeed, just a few weeks ago, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted on BBC’s Newsnight he knew in 2003 there weren’t any such horrors waiting in Baghdad when he tag-teamed with Bush to invade Iraq.

If Dr. Kuperman wants to cherry-pick facts, as his fellow neo-con’s did all during the Iraq folly, you’d think he would have learned by now to at least pick those that are true.

Not content with one bombing run, Kuperman proclaims “Iran’s atomic sites might need to be bombed more than once to persuade Tehran to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

Tehran will just sit there and take it, of course, before crying “Uncle.” They won’t fire off a few missiles at Israel, Turkey and US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. They won’t flood either country with arms or maybe even troops. And the Iranian dissident movement won’t collapse, supporting its nation when the US attacks.

The saddest thing about Kuperman is that the Times gave him serious space in a supposedly serious newspaper to spout the same discredited nonsense that got us into a mess in the Middle East at the same time Pres. Obama is trying to extricate the world from the chaos unleashed the last time the neo-con war mongers had their way.

Peace on earth and all of that.

by Charley James

Florida’s 22nd Congressional District is a narrow stretch of heavily gerrymandered coastal land stretching from Ft. Lauderdale north to Jupiter, mostly hugging beach communities but occasionally meandering inland to grab bits of West Palm Beach –Palm Beach’s down-market cousin, home to the black and Hispanic domestics, gardeners and roustabouts who work in the Palm’s posh hotels, luxury condos and gated estates – as well as Coral Springs and Cooper City.

To really see the district, stay off the interstate and crawl through the small towns that blur together along US 1 from Lauderdale to Jupiter. They’re towns where the humidity hangs like a panting dog, school test scores are further south than the state itself, gun shops dot an unending parade of strip malls, and waitresses in small diners wearing big hair and nylon uniforms serve coffee to Lou and Mario and Eudora.

You won’t find many yachts in the harbours; they’re up in Palm Beach or down in Lauderdale. The marinas here mostly berth sea-battered fishing boats, second or third-hand 22’ runabouts with goofy names like “Phil’s Pholly” or “Mary’s Movin,” and little sloops so far past their use-by date that only a fool would dare take them outside the breakwater.

It’s like stumbling into a John D. MacDonald novel; stop for lunch and you half-expect Travis McGee will saunter in right behind you.

The district is also where Allen West, a former lieutenant colonel who was drummed out of the Army for torturing an Iraqi prisoner by holding a mock execution after allowing men under his command to repeatedly beat the detainee, has the GOP endorsement to run for Congress in 2010.

America’s Worst
The military boasts that its personnel are among America ’s best. And, for the majority of officers and enlisted people serving bravely, with distinction and without incident, it’s true. But people like West give lie to the boast.

So why did Sid Dinerstein, chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party and author of a self-published right wing political manifesto, Adults Only, hand the GOP endorsement for Congress in FL22 to a man who effectively admitted to committing two war crimes?

The case against West stems from an Aug. 20, 2003 incident at a military base in Taji, just north of Baghdad , when West was interrogating an Iraqi policeman who was thought to have information about a plot to ambush a US convoy.

In testimony at his Article 32 hearing – a military grand jury – West said the policeman was not cooperating so he allowed four soldiers he commanded to beat the detainee’s head and body. Then joining in the festivities, West admits threatening to kill the prisoner. Military prosecutors said West followed up by taking the blindfolded suspect outside, putting his head in a weapons clearing barrel and firing his 9mm pistol into the barrel one foot from the prisoner’s ear.

According to an August 2009 article in The Washington Post, West told the beaten Iraqi that “this is where it will end,” meaning that West would kill him if he did not talk. When faced with another refusal, West said, he took the Iraqi’s head under his arm, pushed it into the barrel and shot twice with his pistol a foot from the Iraqi’s ear. He said he pointed the gun away.

How thoughtful; West is a real officer and a gentleman.

When West testified that he had “no malice toward (the detainee)” and that he “just wanted information,” prosecutors presented West’s typed statement prepared after the incident, ordering him to read aloud his report to the court: “In my anger, I couldn’t remember how many shots were fired.”

In Dec. 2003, the Army took action. West was fined $5,000, relieved of all command responsibilities and allowed to retire in what amounts to a plea bargain. The Army could have held a court martial where, if found guilty, he could have faced 11 years in prison, according to military prosecutors.

West’s GOP and tea party supporters in Florida ’s 22nd call him a hero. But military prosecutors say he committed torture, violating articles 128 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“By all rights, he (West) should have been put on trial, convicted for war crimes and sent to prison,” says a former Army judge advocate who is familiar with the case. “But (then-Maj. Gen. Raymond) Odierno, the top commander in the area, just wanted the case to go away. All hell was breaking out in Iraq at the time. Although it wasn’t yet public, Abu Ghraib was happening and neither top brass nor the (Bush) administration wanted to risk bad news leaking out about bad officers.”

Sidestepping
Trying to short circuit the humiliation of his military record being publicly exposed, West responded to the Washington Post by criticizing coverage of his Army misdeeds, stammering in a news release, “If we continue to have our Country led by … ‘perfumed princes’ the security of our Republic is threatened. I would challenge President Obama and Attorney General Holder to find the intestinal fortitude to make hard decisions, and not be cowards prosecuting those far more honourable.

“I shall not allow the future and legacy of my Country to be left to petulant, intellectual elites who would sacrifice our Liberty and Freedom,” West fumed. Yet for a man who expresses disdain for “intellectual elites” and “perfumed princes” – whatever that means – his election website boasts of the three degrees West earned, including two Masters. Uhm, doesn’t that put him in among the perfumed intellectual elite?

And yet he sidesteps the key issue of the charges against him: Torturing prisoners. The closest he comes is saying, “I made a simple statement at my Article 32 hearing when asked if I would take the same action again, ‘If it is about the safety and lives of my men, I would go through hell with a gasoline can’.”

West doesn’t bother explaining how an unarmed and bound prisoner being held at a secure Army base posed a risk to “the safety and lives of my men” that justified a beating and mock execution.

Yet despite West’s shameful military record and triangulating on his plea deal, neither the Palm Beach County Republican Party nor Dinerstein, its chair, are stepping back from their endorsement.

Cut Taxes, Monger Fear
Florida’s 22nd is represented by Ron Klein, a member of the House’s New Democrat Coalition, a self-described group of “moderate, pro-business Democrats” – read “ConservaDem” business shills – who often vote against much of the party’s platform. First elected in 2006, Klein is seeking his third term in 2010. Yet as marginal a Democrat as Klein might be, West makes him seem like Markos Moulitsas by comparison.

For example, in a campaign appearance that was taped and made its way around the right wing blogosphere, West says repeatedly that the US is fighting “Islamic jihad” – fundamentalist code words calling for a Christian war on Islam. He ignores the reality that even the Pentagon and CIA have concluded the insurgency in both countries is between rival religious factions, tribes, warlords and criminal gangs. Both government and independent investigations have stated unequivocally that many Afghan fighters are farmers with no particular political views who either simply want foreign armies out of their country or are being paid $5-to-$10 a day to plant roadside bombs and lob RGPs out of the hills at US and other forces.

But West’s debunked claim is typical of how the GOP operates, relying on unsubstantiated fear mongering and distorting facts to try scoring points.

Worse, his prescription for fixing America ’s broken health care system is more of the same: “Our health care system needs reforms … These reforms can be instituted within the classic conservative principles of limited government, liberty, individual responsibility and accountability, and free market solutions.”

I guess “individual responsibility” means the 47-million people without health care coverage better stay healthy.

He is equally off-kilter on energy, stating on his website that “In the late 70s we were importing some 18-20% of our energy resources from foreign sources. Today we are importing close to 65% of our energy resources from foreign sources, making the failures of the Department of Energy evident to everyone.”

That both the US and its economy grew over the last 30-some years, more than quadrupling the demand for energy, isn’t mentioned nor does West explain the tautology of somehow equating rising consumption with the Dept. of Energy – which has nothing to do with determining how or where oil comes from. Forget about alternative sources. To West, it’s all drill, baby, drill.

Finally, in a district thick with immigrants, he concludes that “furthering the illegal immigrant agenda over that of America, I consider them seditious and treasonous … Talk radio host Michael Savage sums this issue up nicely: Borders, culture, and language.”

Since America is a land of immigrants, I’m not sure what he means by “furthering the illegal immigrant agenda over America .” What is the illegal immigrant agenda, anyway? And why is a black candidate quoting the words of Michael Savage, an avowed racist?

Don Dinerstein
Enter Sid Dinerstein, godfather of the Palm Beach GOP apparatus, who handed the endorsement to West.

According to Pete Corson, a Florida political observer and partially disabled Vietnam veteran, “Palm Beach has the clout on this one, so Sid gets his way. Most of us have had a hard time figuring this one out. Sid is not a racist per se but he is damn close. There has to be a deal in here somewhere.”

In his self-published book, Dinerstein lashes out at immigrants, blaming them for so-called “multiculturalism” by writing “As long as there were many cultures, English was essential. Now that there is one other extraordinarily large culture…the Hispanic culture…English is even more essential. In Canada , they have friends and ‘amis’ – and Separation referenda. If we have friends and “amigos,” our “e pluribus” will stop becoming ‘Unum.’”

Excuse me, Sid, but Canada has had two separation votes, both defeated, and Québec nationalism all but died off after the last vote in the early 1990s. And how does someone speaking Spanish destroy the concept of e pluribus Unum?

And when Democrats are in control, Dinerstein is a fiscal hawk, writing “Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans . Congress and the President are going to chip in $100-billion to help them rebuild that town, and we say “OK.” Where’s it coming from? The answer is, nowhere. It’s Off Budget. That means that it doesn’t change the 200 billion dollars one bit. But it adds $100-billion to next year’s debt. It’s Off the budget and On the debt. Nice!”

Sid conveniently forgets that it was George Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress that did this off-budget sleight-of-hand year after year – including costs for the illegal Iraq misadventure and the botched Afghan war.

Toss Up
According to Corson, “(West’s) appeal has been minimal in the more moneyed ‘white’ areas of the district, so most observers regard his candidacy as a wash. The conventional wisdom is he loses in a close race to Ron Klein because he isn’t Jewish and he won’t get enough “black” votes to offset the low turnout in the country club areas.

“Otherwise, insiders are sticking tightly to the existing script, believing that they represent truth, justice, and the American Way ,” Corson concludes.

So Allen West campaigns in FL22 by crying out for taking back the country – but from whom?

I seem to recall rather large elections in 2006 and again in 2008 in which the now-sitting president and Democrats running for House and Senate seats were elected by an overwhelming majority of voters who were dissatisfied by, and fed up with, the other party’s ideas, demagoguery, lack of respect for the Constitution, and a total and complete disregard for American laws, traditions and values..

Candidate West is a living example of why Republicans – those like him as well as those who actually put country ahead of party – were tossed from office in the last two elections. And why he should be kept as far from Congress as possible.

h/t to Steve Kufus

by Charley James

According to five clinical psychiatrists who describe themselves as being politically aware, Joe Lieberman’s behaviour over the last few weeks of the Senate health care debate reveals numerous signs that he is increasingly “unbalanced.”

All five caution that, while it is difficult to make a specific diagnosis without seeing a patient in their office, Lieberman’s public statements show growing evidence of an individual who is disconnected with pieces of the reality around them.

“If somebody called me and described the symptoms in their spouse that Joe Lieberman is displaying, I’d recommend they come in for an appointment or two so an initial assessment could be made,” says Dr. Stanley Shapiro, who retired recently from his practice and says he is a lifelong Democrat. “From what I’ve watched on television and read in the papers, he’s acting clinically unbalanced.”

At the same time, senior Senate aides from both sides of the aisle report that while Lieberman has always been unpredictable and difficult to work with, it’s a trait that became magnified after he lost his primary challenge to Ned Lamont in 2006.

The psychiatrists all spoke in their professional capacity and, to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently interviewing only doctors who tilt left, I asked each to identify their political views. Of the five, one described their views as progressive or Democratic, two say they lean towards “conservative” or “Republican” and one refused to indicate their political position. Some would speak for attribution but others requested anonymity, citing professional concerns.

“He contradicts himself from day to day,” notes Dr. Irvin Wolkoff, citing as an example Lieberman’s statement last Friday that he would wait for the Congressional Budget Office to “score” the then-compromise version of the Senate health care bill before deciding whether to support the bill – and then appearing on Face the Nation two days later voicing die-hard opposition.

Dr. Wolkoff, a self-described conservative, summed up Lieberman in two words.

“He’s meshugener,” the psychiatrist stated matter-of-factly, using the Yiddish word for “crazy person.” Asked if this is a personal or professional opinion, Dr. Wolkoff replied half-jokingly, “maybe a bit of both.”

In other words, no one – people working on the Hill, Pres. Obama or people in The White House, voters back in Connecticut or cable news’ talking heads – should be surprised that it’s impossible to negotiate with Lieberman on health care or anything else substantive. He’s simply acting crazy.

The Beytrayed’s Revenge
The question is why; what might explain Lieberman’s behaviour?

“No doubt, Lieberman felt betrayed by voters in 2006,” says a Boston analyst who does not want her name used, “and this is his unconscious acting out a sort of ‘revenge of the betrayed.’ I see it frequently in my practice with patients who are angry that their spouse had an affair or who lost their job in circumstances they consider unfair.”

Several other psychiatrists echo her judgment.

“When he felt cornered, he even abandoned his own long-held policies,” states a Chicago psychiatrist under assurances of anonymity. “He’s favoured a Medicare buy-in since 2000 but dropped (his support) in a day because a liberal Democrat in the House said it was a good idea.

“This is the mark of someone grappling with major psychological issues,” the politically independent doctor concludes. “He needs help and, meantime, he’s damaging himself and the nation.”

Hillside Manner
Senate staffers are as worried about Sen. Lieberman as are mental health professionals.

A half-dozen senior aides interviewed for this article expressed varying degrees of frustration and despair in dealing with the Senator and his staff. None allowed their name to be used because they’re not authorised to speak to the media on-the-record.

“He’s always been a problem child,” says a senior staff member of a Republican senator, “but in the last few years Sen. Lieberman often seems disconnected with what is happening around him.”

When that occurs, said another who works for a long-time Democratic senator, “he lashes out.”

In her Friday column in the New York Times, Gail Collins, who has covered Lieberman since the days when he was a Connecticut state senator, is more colourfully blunt:

Observers who have known him for a long time feel as though they’re living out a scene in a science-fiction movie when the guy who’s just been bitten by the vampire-moose comes home and sits down to dinner, unaware that he’s sprouting antlers.”

by Charley James

Crank up the schmaltz and mix in a preposterous plot. It’s nearly Christmas and for the next few weeks we’ll be bombarded with movies that give me hives.

We’ve all had the experience of wandering into the wrong bar and immediately realizing that, unless we leave quickly, something horrid will occur. This has happened to me in Toronto, once in Detroit, twice in Jamaica where every local bar seems to have something bad happening in it, and in Manhattan’s meat packing district. In each case, I sized up the situation fast, realised that my life hung in the balance and beat a hasty retreat.

This is exactly how I feel about Christmas movies.

If I turn on television and the words “John Hughes,” “Chevy Chase,” “Tim Allen” and “Dan Aykroyd” pop up on the screen, my blood runs cold, my temples throb and I switch over to Fat Boy Hackeysack on ESPN2, or faux history shows like Ancestors in the Attic and Ice Road Truckers. I’d rather watch more bad news from Afghanistan on BBC World, or even Céline Dion on Ice.

In fact, I’ll watch almost anything other than Christmas movies, which have one of only four plots: Cuddly, cloying, cretinous and cute.

It’s a Wonderful Life, a story about a small-time banker with a heart of gold, manages to combine all four elements as it inexplicably lionises a mulyak who risks the financial health of his entire community by making a series of bad loans to people who are in no position to repay them. Particularly unsuitable for holiday viewing this year, the 1947 Frank Capra-corn film should be re-titled It’s A Wonderful Subprime Life, with Bernie Madoff and the entire AIG board in digitally manipulated cameo appearances.

A Christmas Carol, in any of its myriad versions, perpetuates the myth that the obscenely rich can be made to see the error of their ways and be rehabilitated even though anyone who has ever dealt with someone obscenely rich knows it isn’t true.

Miracle on 34th Street, in which a department store Santa goes on trial to prove that Kris Kringle actually exists, has been tugging at heartstrings for so long that everybody’s heartstrings are completely tugged out.

Where Old Stars Die
More recent Christmas movies resemble elephants’ graveyards where deposed matinee idols go to die. How sad to see Robert Mitchum, at the tail end of his brilliant career, trading one-liners in Scrooged with a smarmy Bill Murray. How distressing to see Jamie Lee Curtis, once the very hottest of the hot, served up as a paunchy sight gag in a skimpy bikini in Christmas with the Kranks. How unsettling to see Robert Duvall in Four Christmases.

These are people were stars. Not stand-up comics like Will Ferrell or Chevy Chase or Vince Vaughn cast in films only because they sell tickets, but bona fide movie stars. Christmas With the Kranks is so bad that after 20 minutes, I switched the audio from to French from English and SAP’d Korean subtitles hoping it would make Aykroyd seem amusing.

Pas de chance.

The kids in Christmas films don’t help.

The precocious tyke who rides in Santa’s sleigh in The Santa Clause is so overbearing that I keep hoping Dancer and Prancer will leave him behind on an ice floe to get ripped to shreds by polar bears. The moppets in Miracle on 34th Street, Jingle All the Way, and Elf make me ask if there are no orphanages. Even Home Alone, which was entertaining enough when first released, ultimately becomes impossible to watch. Not only did it lead to Home Alone 2, Home Alone 3 and Daniel Stern’s career, but because Macaulay Culkin eventually turned into the kind of showbiz monster the entire planet should forget.

Along with my Aunt Fay, a niece in my ex-wife’s family was born on Christmas morning. Not long after she first drew breath, I began haunting video stores, buying up every copy of Dolly Parton’s A Smoky Mountain Christmas so that she would never witness the holiday depths to which Hollywood could sink. As it turns out, a great advantage of having a niece born on Dec. 25th is that Christmas babies, without exception, revile Christmas movies.

Some Respite
Of course, there are some Christmas movies that do not induce nausea or hives.

Love, Actually is redeemed by Bill Nighy’s memorable turn as a washed-up rocker trying to cash in on the holiday season. Once you get past all the bayonets, tear gas and intestines flying through the air, Joyeux Noël – an odd 2006 French flick about an improbable Yuletide truce during the First World War – is bearable enough. Then there’s the strange Un Conte de Noël, starring Catherine Deneuve. Putting Catherine Deneuve in a Christmas movie is a cheap trick because Catherine Deneuve is France’s Christmas gift to humanity. Merci beaucoup. Merci, mille fois.

Oh. Before I forget, in Un Conte de Noël Deneuve plays a woman dying of leukaemia who hates her kids. This is the French idea of Christmas cheer.

If I could give a gift to Christmas Day itself, it would be the promise that there would never be another Christmas movie. Obviously I can’t do this because Christmas Day is an abstraction that can’t receive gifts and I don’t have the power to make such a guarantee anyway.

Until then, I stick to my all-time favourite Christmas movie: Bad Santa, a vicious, uncompromising attack on the entire genre featuring Billy Bob Thornton as the grumpy old elf in an unrelentingly funny performance almost on a par with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers. A particularly acrid feature of Bad Santa is casting child actor Brett Kelly as a dim witted porker who honestly believes that Thornton’s debased department store Santa is the real McCoy. I only wish that my aunt had lived long enough to see this film; she would have loved it.

And if you’re truly in a foul mood as a result of watching too many Christmas movies, there’s always Sarah Silverman’s classic holiday music video.

I wish you the best of the holiday season – which is more likely to happen if you avoid holiday movies. They’re so cute you could puke.

(He’s not called The Progressive Curmudgeon for Nothing! We love you big guy! Happy Holidays -Ed.)

by Charley James

It wasn’t the kind of genteel discussion the world’s highest-level bankers probably expected when a large group of them gathered at a posh Surrey country house hotel in England this week for a conference under the cosy auspices of the very friendly Wall Street Journal and billed as the “Future of Finance Initiative.”

I’ve covered this sort of conference in the past and, other than the topic, they’re all basically the same: A group of mostly-men, nearly all very white, all very wealthy, typically in their late 50s and early 60s, wearing very expensive suits sitting in a comfy room somewhere plush listening to what they want to hear. The meals are lavish, golf outings plentiful, the time convivial and private jets wait at a nearby strip to ferry them home when it’s over.

So they must have been dumbstruck when Paul Volcker, head of Pres. Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and former chair of the Federal Reserve, rose to his considerable full height to deliver one body slam after another. He scolded them like they were school boys who got caught being naughty and are sloughing off what they did as a harmless prank.

First, he took after the billions in salaries and bonuses bankers in the room are still hauling in, even in the wake of the financial sector meltdown that almost ruined the global economy. Volcker fumed, “Has there been one financial leader to say this is really excessive? Wake up, gentlemen. Your response … has been inadequate.”

The colour must have drained from the assembled faces and pink may not have had time to return to the well-fed cheeks when he delivered another round-house punch. He attacked the rise of incomprehensible products such as credit default swaps, the instrument that brought down AIG and almost took a half-dozen major banks along with it.

“I wish someone would give me one shred of neutral evidence that financial innovation has led to economic growth — one shred of evidence,” Volcker slapped.

No Real Innovation
According to a report at Times On-Line, no one in the audience disputed him, instead arguing that “innovation” was a necessity for bankers while claiming re-regulating the sector would sound a death knell for any new clever products. A clearly irritated Volcker shot back that the biggest innovation in the banking industry over the past 20 years was the cash machine.

Why didn’t Pres. Obama deliver this speech when he spoke to bankers on Wall St. a few months ago? Better late than never, I suppose, and bankers are slightly more likely to pay attention to Volcker than to Obama as evidenced by the fact that several major US bank CEOs turned down the invitation to hear the president speak.

Volcker went on to note that financial services in the US increased its share of value to 6.5% from 2%, demanding to know whether it’s “a reflection of your financial innovation, or just a reflection of what you’re paid?”

A mighty sigh of relief must have filled the chamber when Volcker sat down. Little did they know that another chilling contribution from Sir Deryck Maughan, a partner in private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and a former head of investment bank Salomon Bros., was awaiting them.

Sir Deryck took after bank’s risk management techniques, warning delegates that many of the flawed mathematical models underpinning the banks failed approaches are still being used, saying that the industry had not “faced up to the intellectual failure of risk management systems, which are still hardwired into many banks and many trading floors.”

He also questioned whether taxpayers should continue to underwrite many of those risks.

“There’s something wrong about large proprietary risks being taken at the risk of taxpayers,” he insisted.

Earlier Baroness Vadera, an adviser to the G20 and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during the banking crisis — warned that European lenders had yet to acknowledge the scale of their losses and bad debts, something the Obama administration has been quietly admonishing senior government officials in France and Germany about. She said, “… some of the continental banks still have (serious) issues.”

She said she continues to have nightmares about how close the banking system came to total collapse last year.

Meanwhile, US multi-billionaire investor George Soros told the group the same thing he told Congress earlier this year: Credit default swaps should be banned. The billionaire investor likened them to buying life insurance and then giving someone a licence to shoot the insured person.

A Lost Moment
It’s too bad that Volcker’s speech wasn’t webcast into the office of every Senator and member of Congress back in Washington. They needed to hear the message as much as did the bankers.

The fact is that while many Democrats in Congress struggle to come up with some kind of meaningful re-regulation of banks and the financial services sector generally, the very same people who were rebuked by Volcker at the conference flew home to the States to lobby on behalf of keeping the status quo. Helped by Republicans and “conservative” Democrats who receive more-than-generous campaign contributions from the very institutions that sunk the economy and millions of individuals, it’s likely that Volcker’s words will be ignored at best, forgotten at worst.

If that happens, then what Pres. Obama likes to call “a teachable moment” will be lost.

(It also would be good if the US followed the UK’s lead and imposed a 50% tax on all banker bonuses above £25,000 - plus income taxes. -Ed.)