Thursday, September 13, 2012

Perhaps The Stupidest Thing Ever Said About 9/11


And there have been so many. (Conspiracy theorists, I do so mean YOU.)

But my personal choice is something Bill Maher said, a week or two after this tremendous outrage, when he said that the hijackers of the airlines hadn't been "cowardly." "Say what you want," Maher said (or in words to that effect), that wasn't cowardly."

Now, what's wrong with that assertion? Well, it's astoundingly callous (self-centeredness is rather an obvious trait in Maher's manner of discourse), terribly, terribly stupid and presumes that hijacking a plane full of innocent victims and them crashing it into a building in hopes of killing many other innocent victins is somehow "brave." Say what you want, Maher remains an amazing fool in many ways (including his oft-stated core misogyny), and that more people didn't call him out on his scabrous remarks remains beyond me 11 years later. It doesn't seeem to affect his ability to get name guests for his HBO show, either..

There is an old episode of the show where Bob Newhart ran an inn in Vermont ("it's "Newhart!", right?) that features an appearance of Maher from his acting days. He plays a former suitor of Stephanie's who returns to try and win her back. He's unsuccessful. (Thank goodness, or that very funny show would have immediately become unwatchable for me.)

The thing that struck me the most about Maher's appearance there, however, is how utterly unimpressive the man seems when measured up against other human beings free of the fawning which seems to infect his current tv show. Not only is he terribly short, he's simply wimpish-looking, a bit squashed, with a bad hairline and a worse nose. And if these observations strike others as cruel, fine. They're really no more cruel than the sort of things Maher regularly says about people he dislikes (politically, socially, whatever). The guy has no physical impact,  no Eastwoodian oomph, whatsoever.

I bet it bugs the hell out of him, too.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

The Day After Is Always A Harder Slog

I waited until the day after "the day" to post here. My belief that the day after a tragedy, when we really start attempting to make sense of what happened, however inadequate the tools and information we may have at hand then, is usually the more important day.

It was this way in 2001, anyway. There is a Park-Ride lot for NJ Transit buses near where I reside, and the day after 9/11/01, even while so many businesses were closed, there were an awful lot of cars still parked there from the day before. Then not so many on 9/13. Then less than that on 9/14. And it seemed obvious that the drivers of at least some of those cars were never coming home. (Tow trucks in the lot the following week seemed to confirm that.) There are life lessons to be learned from and in parking lots (as an early Beach Boys song, "In The Parking Lot," reminded us), honest.

I also walked the streets of the "Muslim section" of Paterson last week, as I sometimes do. Duly noted the demurely and Koranically properly attired traffic coming in and out of the large store right off Main Street which sells burqas. (I don't know why I'm surprised that several stores in Paterson sell these and hijabs too, I didn't comparably believe that local Muslims hand-sewed their own garments in the comfort of their own homes.)  And also paid attention to the posters thrown upon local walls.

There is, it seems from these posters, an entire circuit of speaking engagements in venues, usually hotel ballrooms, from Paterson to Michigan, where American Muslims gather to hear speakers who from their short bios and teasers for their talks are distinctly from the militant, fundamentalist side of Islam. Several of these gatherings also seem to feature, for some jarring reason, the former British Parliament member George Galloway, who in the British press was long described as the "MP from Baghdad" for both his closeness to Saddam Husssein and stalwart defense of Islamic fundamentalism but is certainly not terribly well-known here. Except that he seems to regularly appear at gatherings of the Muslim faithful in this country.

I also went into two Muslim bookshops, asked to see a copy of "The Protocols Of The Learned Elders of Zion" and in both stores was asked if I preferred a hardcover or a paperback edition. And it's scary that it is sold so openly and that there seem to be so many copies lying about. (It is not that easy, after all, to find, say, a white supremacist bookstore in Jersey.) Who buys this stuff? Who takes this notorious Czarist-era forgery by the Russian secret police even half-seriously, believes that "Zionism" is intent on world domination? (Besides Iran's Ahmadinejad, that is, and the neo-Nazis out there with whom he shares some ideological affinity.)

This led me, in turn, to wonder if American Muslims ever in fact help constitute the crowds which still flock to see "The Book Of Mormon" on Broadway. Mormons may indeed grit their teeth over this show, I don't know, but they don't demand it be shut down. Maybe they do in Salt Lake City at Temple Square, but not in the NY metro area. They may not laugh, but they also don't riot. Nor, however, can I ever imagine a like-minded show called "The Koran" running to similar acclaim. (Even the NY Times' theater critics, I'd bet, would flee into cowering silence on this one.) Anywhere in the world, let alone on Broadway. Just to write such a show would be an act of great moral courage, though to do so would also be to automatically incur a fatwa, I'm quite sure.

What most baffles me is why moderate voices in the Muslim world remain silent, outrage after outrage. (And there are plenty of sites covering them, believe you me, which detail the seemingly almost daily litany of incidences of suppression of freedom and speech and non-Muslim religious belief in Muslim majority countries; just start with googling sites which feature the commentary of historian Daniel Pipes.) Of course, too, another such outrage occurred just testerday, thanks to a country which, strangely enough, Obama seems to think we're now pals with. A better-covered one than so many others, to be sure, but really, just yet one more outrage in a long skein of them.

That this outrage supposedly occurred, both in Libya (only maybe, given what seems to be coming to light on, yep, the day after - who, after all, brings Kalashnikovs and rpg's to a supposedly free-form and "spontaneous" street demo?) and Egypt over a movie which may not even exist and one that certainly its protesters have never seen, doesn't make it any more explicable. So what, in terms of American-style free speech, if it offends a certain form of Islamic religious sensiibility?, you might even plausibly say. This may just be part of the cost of genuine freedom, and to maintain otherwise might be merely to foolishly defend dreadful cultural backwardness. Americans have already endured, ever since the silent film era, any number of movies about religious flim-flam, phony faith healers and lecherous preachers. (Some, such as the Burt Lancaster version of "Elmer Gantry," even garnered awards and Oscar nominations.) And we have not comparably rioted and made "demands" of Hollywood. Even Jews (who after all basically created the American film industry in the first place) never so much as demonstrated even in Brooklyn when Laurence Olivier played the most old world-ish of rabbis dismissing his son Neil Diamond for wanting to be a "jazz singer." Now really, if American Judaism could display such amazing patience over that one...

So here goes: things will not really get appreciably better re religious tolerance amongst fundamentalist Muslims until the Muslim world produces its own version of "The Book of Mormon." (No matter, either, that its creators would be in deep doo-doo with their co-religionists; such danger has to be part of the equation, I fear.) And I think its local premiere should be in Paterson, which has a perfectly fine multiplex in its downtown mall.

Call me, maybe, if this ever happens.

PS: By way of coming attractions for this site, look for comments soon upon the Congressional election between Rabbi Shmuley, the "love rabbi" whose securing of the Republican nomination suggests better than most other horrors I can think of the essential foolishness of the Republican party in Passaic County, and Democratic incumbent William Pascrell, the former Paterson mayor (his tenure and subsequent Congressional career seems a nice example of the concept of "failing upwards") whose signed photos are easily found in Muslim-owned shops and restaurants in the Paterson-Clifton area. This one will be a massacre, folks.

And also for what bids fair to be a regular feature of this blog, the first installment of a "Star-Ledger death watch."

Monday, September 10, 2012

There's Only One Sayreville?

Here's today's challenge, the first of an ongoing series, and it involves a town which, for all the years I've lived in Jersey never ever seems to attract kindly disposed or even halfway appreciative comments.

It's Sayreville, where Jon Bon Jovi hails from. But really, what else distinguishes Sayreville? As one approaches it heading south on the GSP. for example, all one can make out is that "lake" on the west side of the road. And that "lake" has always fascinated me with its otherworldly color. It's akin to the postcards well-meaning friends send you from this Carbibbean isle or that, a vivid blue that is best viewed on either a clear, cold winter's day or a blazing hot summer afternoon.. But friends with first-hand experience in Sayreville's industries and/or with college-level chemistry have also assured me that this "lake" actually cannot support anything resembling life. Perhaps, one suggested, there are some very tiny mutant fish in there. But certainly nothing else and nothing edible even by the most ravenous of seagulls.

(Which reminds me of what used to be called "Swan Lake" in East Rutherford, a pond which was fed by the two businesses immediately down the hill from it,  Royce Chemical Co., which made among other things "Royox" household cleaner, and Standard Bleachery , which was actually a piece and dye works for fabrics. Both apparently emptied their waste products into Swan Lake. And, even though Swan Lake was regularly rented out for picnics, though not for swimming,  eventually things got so bad there that the namesake swans began suffering agonizingly and obviously, to the point where their young were clearly, well, mutations of a sort. I remember one carcass on the shore which was in fact a two-headed swan. Eventually, Swan Lake was filled in and condos were built on the spot. No matter how focused the pre-construction clean-up efforts may have been, however, the very thought of such construction still gives me a shudder. And this occurred in a town which already for some decades had sheltered a manufacturer of asbestos products, where next-door Rutherford once heartbreakingly reported a spike in juvenile cancer occurrences in a neighborhood right across the railroad tracks from the abestos plant. For so long, as well, the surgical syringes produced in East Rutherford by the Becton-Dickinson Co., were in fact the preferred works of NY metro area junkies, as even a brief eye scan of Times Square-area garbage cans always used to regularly indicate.)

Oh, and there's also, hard by the GSP exit for Sayreville, an evangelical Christian "mega-church." One so large that you could actually stash a properly stocked ark inside it. But that's about it for the town's high points, so far as I know.

So go ahead, see if you can find something admirable about Sayreville to note here. If you do, I'll happily post your response. Because all my life, I have yet to come across ANYONE who has anything good to say about Sayreville.  It seems to be a "Jersey joke" in and of itself. There are many seemingly hopelessly mingy towns indeed in Jersey  -  Lodi comes right to mind in Bergen County, for example, but in its favor it's also the home town of rock's Glen Danzig, he of the Satan-loving bellow  and "The Misfits" fame -  but perhaps only one Sayreville. Please do try and prove me wrong.

Monday, September 3, 2012

This blog, created purposely on Labor Day, will be a collection of "oddments" about life in the Garden State: politics, culture (something I often suspect is at best a relative term in modern Jersey) and just the simple slog of getting through day after day in a state which I've watched through the years become a not-very-pleasant place to live in for so many. Even if so many also might not notice or wish to acknowledge this.

I also, however reluctantly, promise some (again, probably relative) "good news" about "Nu Jersey." Some will perforce expect this kind of coverage. Fine, as long as such  an expectation is matched to the realization that life in this state is generally so blasted that our Democratic party allowed an obvious boob like Jon Corzine to not only buy their hearts for a Senatorial nomination with his wallet, then allowed him to only compound the moral felony by purchasing its gubernatorial nomination when he so rapidly (if not terribly inexplicably) tired of serving as our then-duly elected Senator.

So I'll wish myself well here in lieu of waiting for others do so. I'll also point any readers who might pop up (however accidentally or inadvertently) towards what might just be the best ever "Jersey novel." It is "Dead City" by Shane Stevens and, no matter that much else is both better-known and highly touted, Stevens' novel is much more a hard kick to the gonadian zone than, say, Janet Evanovich's series of novels about Stephanie Plum

Something real and more substantive will be posted later this week. In the interim, if anyone can get hold of a copy of "Dead City," please do read it. Besides its sheer verbal power, Stevens is the rare writer about organized crime in NJ who isn't at all taken in by the myth that our "OC's" (organized crime members, who can as easily be Russians, Dominicans, ghetto gang bangers and 1%ers as Mafiosi), our "LCN's" (bona fide La Cosa Nostra members and their associates) and "Italians" (a term law enforcers often use among themselves, though they seem to get into trouble with their image-conscious superiors if they utter this one publicly) are actually often quite cuddly and even personally likable. No, they're not, not at all, and they're generally just unregenerate scumballs. Like oir love Stevens' novel, which dates to sometime back in the 70's, he knew much better and he wrote with all the groin-driven intensity of James M. Cain at his best. (Cain is a writer very much worth reading. His original source novel of "Mildred Pierce," for example, is not at all the dainty exercise that the recent Kate Winslet TV series for HBO seemed. And his "Double Indemnity" has a very different, near-dreamlike ending than the movie version.)

Enough for now. To all and sundry, then, please have a wonderful rest of what constitutes Labor Day in 2012 America (which of course has as much to do with Samuel Gompers or Joe Hill as it does with Bugs Bunny or the Book of Mormon and much more to do with the fortunes of Macy's and Kohl's  -  but then, too, should either chain go, it is probably all over for the rest of us as well).