Tom Watson

High and Inside

Last night as I sat in the woods with the scouts looking at the stars, my daughter texted me - the Mets were up big, the Phillies were losing and the baseball season we've shared was still alive. Now, after Glavine went out throwing batting practice to the Marlins and the Mets have nearly completed their terrible collapse, that's the worst part of this late baseball season. I'm pretty jaded about professional sports franchises and the reality of highly-paid players' allegiances to their teams; I suspect, at times, that we root for the uniforms and the logo, and our lost youth.

Jerry Koosman wasn't around to put the stop on the Mets' swoon, not Tom Seaver. Hell, the Mets didn't even have a Gary Gentry to hand the ball to. Sure, I rooted 'em on but it's not the same as it is for the kids - I had Cleon Jones and Gil Hodges and Tommie Agee and Tug McGraw. They've got Carlos Beltran's third strike freeze frame, and this year's disaster.

And they've got this year's version of the New York Yankees to contend against - they already knew they were second fiddle franchise types, but the Yanks have put on quite a show in the Bronx this year. And they've finally become A-Rod's team. With Alex Rodriguez putting up the finest season in New York since the days of DiMaggio, the Yanks should go all the way on the breeze. Reyes and Wright suffer by the contrast - especially Reyes, whose exposure to Rickey Henderson has been a horrid experiment.

So, it's wait till next year. And time to clean house - too many aging veterans, too little pitching. At least Mrs. Mannion and Blue Girl are happy.

Morning in the Promised Land

Walking from Grand Central to that big old shed of a Sheraton on Seventh Avenue for the Clinton Global Initiative takes me past St. Patrick's through Rockefeller Center (I always take the most scenic route around town, by old habit). This morning, that brought me smack up against a crowd of thousands squeezed between granite curtain walls as the roadies for the E Street Band scurried about a tiny stage tweaking the instruments. Roy Bittan, looking like a keyboard-humping Uncle Junior in a porkpie hat, got into place. There was violinist Suze Tyrell (I dig the strings on the new record), and Max Weinberg climbed onto the short riser. I decided immediately that Rupert Murdoch and Muhammad Yunus could wait.

Bruce  opened up with Promised Land, then swung through the new single Radio Nowhere. The third tune was Livin' in the Future from the new record, and he described it like this: "this song is called Livin' in the Future but it's really about what's happening now...about the things that are happening in this country that shouldn't be happening in this country." It's a rollicking up-tempo tune, and Springsteen delivered it sans guitar, gesturing like some white, wild-haired 50-something Beastie Boy - but the message of the song is deadly serious:

Woke up election day
Sky's gunpowder and shades of grey
Beneath the dirty sun
I whistle my time away
Then just about sun down
You come walkin' through town
Your boot heels clickin' like
The barrel of a pistol spinnin' round

Don't worry, darlin'
No baby, don't you fret
We're livin' in the future
And none of this has happened yet

The band skipped into My Hometown, and as I walked away the sound actually improved, and I turned west on 51st Street, singing along...those assembly jobs are going boys, and they ain't coming back.

Hacking Philanthropy

  _DSC4406 
  Originally uploaded by andrewparker915.

At some point I'll have more to say about this over at onPhilanthropy, but in between blog posts here at the Clinton Global Initiative, I wanted to put up a quick piece about a half-day well spent up at Columbia on Tuesday. Thanks to Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, a group of about 40 technologists, philanthropists, analysts, investors and entrepreneurs gathered at Casa Italiana to discuss new models for philanthropy. It wasn't all technology, it was systems and governments and story-telling as well and I came away with a lot of ideas.  Scott Edward Anderson does a great job setting the scene:

Imagine a room packed with a ton of brain power, knowledge, and expertise from the world of venture capital, technology, social change, and philanthropy and you've some idea what I walked into yesterday up at Columbia's Casa Italiana.

Yeah, he's right. It was great to be invited and the entire session pushed me on some of my own conventional wisdom on the sector. Fred has a post , USV's blog post is here. And there's a Flickr album as well. I'm still thinking about it...

Must-See Thursday TV

And so we beat on, bloggers against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past of 1960 and a cartoonish (but strangely addictive) New York of consumers, mixed drinks, smoke-filled rooms, child abuse, faux beatniks and vintage underwear. MA Peel has the rudder tonight, broken ankle and all, over at newcritics. You know the drill: Mad Men at 10 PM EDT on AMC and in our little silk pajama-clad clan (TM Jim Wolcott, All Rights Reserved). And while your over there, check out the fast-and-furious argument over Jack Kerouac's On The Road. (Lance and Jason have posts). Fifty years on, and still  culturally controversial.

Inside the Government in Exile

  Angelina Jolie 
  Originally uploaded by onPhilanthropy.

I walked off of West 52nd Street today and into a government in exile, of sorts. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and I are at the Clinton Global Initiative the next few days - along with 1,300 other people, including 52 heads of state, a bunch of CEOs, some NGO heads, and a roomful of bloggers and media types here in the basement. So my blogging here will be light as a brief late-summer rain. But I will say that I'm struck once again with the skill that former President Clinton employs in concocting this gathering - and how a new American spirit of global collaboration is so damned necessary after January, 2009. Sure, I'm a skeptic, but the very gathering is inspiring. My posts and those of my partner in onPhilanthropy, the brilliant Susan Carey Dempsey, are here. Hope you check in.

Hanging Tree

Don Imus has been gone from the morning airwaves for four months now, and that national dialogue on race that the ad sales suits at CBS promised us still hasn't happened. Color me shocked. The I-Man's unwitty, cool dude wannabe "nappy-headed ho's" aside had Al Sharpton on the march, successfully demanding the morning man's job. Besides, it was one lame-ass departure for a man who claims Mort Sahl as one of his comedic role models.

Defended by the lawyer for Lenny Bruce - another I-fave - Imus came in for a six-figure settlement of his contract, but his name has entered the lexicon of race relations as roughly the synonym for "white man who is clueless about black people." There are nuances, depending on the particular edition of your dictionary. Liberals generally order up a secondary definition: "also, a racist scalawag." The conservative dictionary reads: "also, victim of a media witch hunt."

Meanwhile, WFAN here in New York replaced the Imus morning zoo (and its regular roster of Matthews, Russert, McCain et al) with a washed up lefty quarterback boasting less than half the pro resume of Ken "The Snake" Stabler, and a guy named Craig Carton - a shock jock in the Stern mode who made his jump from Triple-A on the back of such hilarious material as "Operation Cucha Gotcha," his humorous attempt to incarcerate Hispanics in the Garden State. Mort Sahl, indeed. You have to love the ethics of CBS management and "National Dialogue" Moonves.

There may be nothing on whilst I run a razor blade over my jowls each morning, but the discussion of race in a post-Imus world proceeds apace. Indeed, many are the mornings I miss the voice of the late Steve Gilliard and his fearless writing on the black-white divide, here in New York and elsewhere. I was wondering this week what Steve would have made of the extraordinary events in Jena, Louisiana, where a runaway prosecutor named Reed Walters and the local judiciary have kept a 17-year-old high school student in jail for nine months for his actions in attacking a white student after three nooses appeared on the notorious whites-only oak tree on the grounds of the local high school.

"I can be your best friend or your worst enemy," Walters told students at the school. "With a stroke of my pen, I can make your lives disappear."

The Jena case involving black six students charged with crimes and a group of white students facing the horror of in-school suspension is every inch the miscarriage of justice that the Duke lacrosse case was, and DA Walters' actions are as bad as the disbarred and jailed Mike Nilfong. Yet, they happened on the other side of the racial divide in this country - the political divide that lets prejudice hide under the cloak of "conservatism."

So it's not surprising that wingnut bloggers like Glenn Reynolds declared a kind of hands-off policy toward the debate over Jena (wait till all the facts come out), while others fell into paroxyms indignation over the appearance of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson down south. Michele Malkin: "I’m not going to join the knee-jerk race-hustlers in celebrating the “civil right” to beat white people unconscious to rectify institutional racism. Is this the legacy Martin Luther King, Jr., would have sanctioned?"

The insane over-charging of a minor as an adult with attempted murder (carrying a minimum sentence in Louisiana of 20 years) in an incident where the victim attended his class ring ceremony the same night did indeed have the "knee-jerk race-hustlers" out by the thousands in the streets of Jena, where letters defending the town as preserving a way of life from the 1950s are presented on the municipal website without a hint of irony. But that cluelessness (to be kind) or willing blindness (to be accurate) is endemic of at least half of the American political landscape.

In other words, Malkin's knee jerked alright - and just the way conservatives tend to flex those particular tendons when race is the topic.

It's 2007 and the gap between black and white on the right side of the political blotter couldn't be wider or more apparent. Witness the surprise registered by Bill O'Reilly when he visited a restaurant in Harlem and realized he wouldn't be accosted by thugs and subjected to gang rules.

"And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin... That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea.'"

Apparently, that fear is what's keeping the major Republican presidential candidates from attending a debate moderated by the wildly popular mainstream talk show host Tavis Smiley - who has never been reported to have shouted "more iced tea, mofo!" to anyone - at historically black Morgan State University this week. John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson all snubbed Smiley and the debate will go on with the five lesser GOP hopefuls, a development that had the likes of Newt Gingrich decrying the snub as a "terrible mistake."

I think Smiley's reaction to the empty chairs he'll face at Morgan State was unblinking and correct:

"No person, black, white, or brown, Democrat or Republican, male or female, no person should be elected president in 2008 without speaking to communities of color."

And that's because race is still a problem in these United States, and too few of us want to face up to it. It tinges the national debate on immigration, it brands a scar of prejudice on law enforcement policy, and it clearly taints this administration's greatest domestic failure.

Imus has become a verb, but I for one would have been very interested to hear an honest discussion of race from a prominent - if humbled - white man's point of view. Sometimes humor unleashes more honesty than endless talking heads stacked end to end. Some of the material Larry David has used on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in particular, does the job of shining a light on a cultural gap many liberals would rather wish away into the past. David plays himself as a clueless, rich, white guy stumbling through an almost alternative cultural landscape whenever he meets someone with brown skin. It is hilarious, almost without exception.

But it also portrays a cultural divide - one that allows some Americans to wear Confederate flags without community  censure - that we all ignore at our peril.

Thursday Night's Appointment

They derided the French for their crazy iron tower. William Seward was ridiculed for buying Alaska. And they said the Twin Peaks movie was a silly idea. Well, what do they know, anyway. We may be deluded in following the long, occasionally yawn-inducing path that is character development on AMC's Mad Men, but dammit Jim, we're not gonna quit now! Sure, last week's episode veered into ersatz David Lynch territory - if David Lynch were doing massive Lithium cocktails and working in public access television (and he may well be). Hell no, we're onto something with the live-blogging and the snark and the witty banter over at newcritics every Thursday night. It's gonna be big, people. Huge. And it's always darkest after the worst episode in any stylish but essentially vapid and historically innacurate series on a B-list cable channel - everyone knows that. Even the whore-children. And besides, I'm out of the driver's seat tonight - the fab M.A. Peel is behind the wheel and she's got quite the psychic Mapquest printout going, let me tell you. She's clutching that map in one hand, and gripping the wheel of that '58 Buick in the other. The highway is alive tonight. Next exit: the Mad Men zone. (Did I mention 10 pm EDT at newcritics? Did I?)

UPDATE: It's a bleepin' repeat. What a head-fake! But we shall return...

When Your Team Goes Bad

The days are getting short, the daily schedule is a nightmare (hence the light posts), and the New York Mets are tanking. If they lose tonight - and John Maine just collapsed, surrendering two different four-run leads to the lowly Nationals - they'll be but a game and a half up on the Phillies, that lunatic team from down the Turnpike. They're a whisker from a reverse storybook season, as a Bizarro Bob Murphy might have put it, and it has me in a funk.

At 45, I'm loathe to admit the antics of a bunch of young guys on a ballfield can still affect my inner self - but they can.

Been that way since '69 and it's not going to change. This year's team is an enigma, loaded with talent and a deep lineup and incapable of making a run or playing extended periods of solid baseball. David Wright has come back to have an MVP-type year, but Jose Reyes has faded badly. Pedro's back and fooling hitters with his guile and movement, but the young guys Maine and Perez are anybody's guess. And the bullpen is a hideous charnel house of failure.

During these long days of September as work cranks up and the hours get longer and longer, you look for that ballgame, that good play, that great boxscore. And after a long season in first place, you can feel the anticipation for the post-season - those truly mesmerizing playoff games - begin to build. Yet it might not be there. It's cool in New York this week, and for Mets fans, winter may come early.

But it's worse for Dodgers fans - Brooklyn Dodgers fans, that is. Sam Anderson writes about a half-century's malaise in New York magazine this week. Here's a taste:

“When the Dodgers left, it didn’t rip the heart out of the borough,” says [author Michael Shapiro]. “That’s too much. I think people said that because they couldn’t quite put into words the sense of what was lost. The departure of the Dodgers denied Brooklyn, for half the year, this common conversation—the idle chitchat you have with people on the subway or waiting for the elevator or going to the butcher. Baseball informed so much of that. ‘Can you believe that Furillo last night? Snider’s a bum! Is Hodges gonna get a hit?’ It created a relationship between strangers—you felt close to them, if only for a minute or two. What was lost was each other.”

Or as Rabbi Paul Kushner says of modern baseball: "It’s a private, profit-making corporation taking advantage of the innocent lambs who are foolish enough to be their fans."

Tell me about it.

My Hometown

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair and say son take a good look around this is your hometown

I grew up in Yonkers, New York and by the 1960s, the city had seen better days. My father worked for The Herald Statesman, the daily paper and commuted every day on the bus to the paper down near the river. When we visited the office or ventured downtown, I was always struck with the steep rise of the hills of the city, rising high over the Hudson. You'd come over the rise and find yourself staring from the backseat of the wagon at these long, strange vistas of mostly empty industrial buildings, run-down three-story houses and the Palisades across the river. In college, I got a a job as a sportswriter working for the same paper as my dad, who toiled in the layout department of what was by this time a chain of newspapers under the Gannett corporate seal. They combined it all into one countywide paper a few years ago, The Journal News, and it was there I read about the death of Army Staff Sgt. Courtney Hollinsworth from my hometown.

Hollinsworth joined the Army at 17 with a required signature from his mother, and was assigned to the 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division, based in Fort Riley, Kansas. He died this week in an attack in Baghdad by insurgents using grenades and an improvised explosive device, according to the Defense Department. A career NCO, he was an experienced 26 years old, nine years of service contributed to his nation for low pay and long days and nights.

Last night, Hollinsworth's commander in chief proved yet again just how unworthy he is of that title - how much less of a man he is than Courtney Hollinsworth of Yonkers, New York was.

He sat before the cameras and claimed that a principle he dubbed the “return on success” mandated that U.S. soldiers remain in the hopeless Iraqi meat-grinder - to be released only if and when they "succeed" in pacifying a massive civil insurrection, the sectarian tribal struggle that he alone ignited four long, long years ago. And then the President pledged something that is not in his diminishing power to deliver - an enduring American military presence in Iraq. “The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home,” he promised. Win or die.

Bush's strategy is to run out the clock and dump Iraq on his Democratic successor, to make permanent the greatest American mistake of our generation, our grand national failing of the 9/11 challenge. It's the only card he has left to play, but I think he'll be called on it nonetheless. This will always be Bush's war, Bush's horror, Bush's terror and residents of Crawford and Greenwich and Kennebunkport will feel the local disgrace of having raised such a man and sent him to lead for some time.

The President's supporters are limited now to the few, the proud, the foolish. Consider House Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner who said this week that the war was an "investment" and - as Lance Mannion put it - "that all the dead soldiers and Marines, all the wounded, crippled, maimed, and broken men and women coming back home from Iraq are a 'small price' to pay to achieve whatever goal the war supporters decide this week has been the goal of the war all along."

Of course, the President's supporters also include the entire Republican Presidential field, not one of whom has repudiated the failed and immoral Iraq policy. They're all for the war and the Bush vision of endless occupation, from Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani (who infamously blamed the troops and not the President for the Iraq mess) to John McCain and Mitt "Double Gitmo" Romney. None of them, in my view, can be an American commander in chief. None are worthy of Sgt. Hollinsworth.

Courtney Hollinsworth joined the Army right out of Saunders Trades and Technical High School, a big sprawling box of a school on Palmer Avenue just across the muni golf course a few blocks from where I grew up. He'd done two tours, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq,  but "some of the people from his platoon were called back up and he felt obligated to be with them so he reenlisted for a second tour," his aunt told the Daily News.

In Yonkers, his family heard from Sgt. Hollinsworth about three weeks ago.  "He was down. He said a couple of guys in his unit were killed," his mother said. "And he said that the insurgents had gotten stronger - that they had gotten a lot stronger than before - and there was more violence than the first time around."

His grandmother opposes the war, but naturally supported her grandson. "I'm always on the computer e-mailing senators about it - Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid," she said. And his mother believes the country got lost following President Bush.

"So many lives have been lost - not just U.S. lives but the lives of children over there. You get to the point where you don't want these guys to have died in vain. No, I don't support the war, but I definitely support the soldiers. My prayers are with them."

According to the paper my Dad I both worked for, the Yonkers cops are expected to form up on the eastern end of the George Washington Bridge when the hearse bearing Sgt. Hollinsworth's body crosses the Hudson this weekend. They'll ride as an honor guard north up the Henry Hudson Parkway through Van Cortlandt Park and take the local streets up and over the big hills and down to North Broadway and the funeral home. Then they'll bury a son of Yonkers, New York who wanted nothing more than to be a soldier and serve his country.

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to your hometown

Waldorf Salad

Yesterday, I was honored to be a speaker at the 2007 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize Symposium in New York. I'll wrote about it for onPhilanthropy, but I've been mostly offline for more than a day. It was worth it: the Symposium drew a crowd of more than 300 leaders in philanthropy and provided a rare global perspective on the confluence of development work, government policy, and the world economy. The keynote address was delivered by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who saw the need for greater cooperation between philanthropic organizations and the world body - “Civilians continue to bear the intolerable brunt of crises not of their own making….and life-saving assistance cannot wait for the next round of peace talks.”

The Symposium was at the Waldorf. I figure I've spent several weeks of my life in that building over the years, from political dinners in my reporting days to the endless round of fundraising galas. The name comes from William Waldorf Astor, who built the original where the Empire State Building stands. The "new" Waldorf has been on Park Avenue since 1931 and it's as New York as it gets, even though it fairly crawls with tourists. The ballroom is essentially New York's parish hall, where the dances and fundraisers and more upscale, star-studded type of bingo night are held near-nightly.

The Waldorf's been a home for visiting movies stars and Presidents, as any walk down one of the back hallways will tell you in black and white photography, but my favorite Waldorf movie is The Out-Of-Towners with Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis as the Ohio couple who barely survive muggings, various strikes, and some bad 1970 New York attitude on the way to discovering that middle America is more aligned with their true selves. So okay, I hate the stupid ending. But I love the 1970 New York and the collection of character actors that inhabit it.

Would that AMC's Mad Men had gone a similar casting route. (Yes, that was a long way to get to what is essentially a reminder that I'll be live-blogging Mad Men tonight at 10 PM EDT over at newcritics.com). Outside of Robert Morse as Bert Cooper, there's more essential New York in almost any episode of Sesame Street (or any classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, for that matter). Still, last week's was the best episode to date and thanks to the fab MA Peel, well-blogged as well. I'll try to keep up my end tonight. Please show up.