After Evita

Eva Peron was a legend during her time as Argentina’s first lady and a source of continuing fascination for years thereafter, but her fame exploded with the success of the Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice musical “Evita.” The show was a big, big hit, deservedly so. Lloyd-Webber’s music is often scorned by sophisticates, but the man is a skilled melodist in the Richard Rodgers tradition, and in every show he gives you at least one ballad that worms its way into your memory for keeps. I can understand some condescension toward “Cats” and “Phantom,” but not toward “Evita.” It is a masterpiece.

The Eva Peron story was, of course, a goldmine waiting to be tapped. Uneducated girl from backwater town becomes girlfriend of General who becomes President with her help. She becomes the star of the Casa Rosada, the darling of the masses, a veritable saint. Then she dies at age 33.

The musical (opera, really) begins with the announcement, in a crowded movie theater, of Evita’s death. The body of the play is then a flashback, tracing the life of Eva Duarte, right to her death and funeral, with weeping crowds mourning “Santa Evita.” The staging was dynamite. The portrayal of Evita (by the likes of Elaine Paige and Patti LuPone) showed the glamorous lady the public adored, while a cynical narrator, Che, balanced the account by pointing out her flaws. The movie, with Madonna in the title role, was excellent. (Who knew?)

But neither play nor movie provided a hint of what happened after Eva Peron died. This was, after all, a play about Evita, not about Juan, who lived 22 eventful years after Eva died. But those 22 years could keep Lloyd-Webber and Rice busy for the rest of their lives, if they were interested in sequels. In fact, there was more dramatic content in the post-Eva years than in the years when she was the toast of B.A., the “Big Apple.”

Here is what Paul Harvey might call “the rest of the story.”

In 1952, three years after Eva’s death, Juan is the victim of a coup and flees to Paraguay, then to Panama. At a party in Panama, he meets a nightclub dancer stage-named Isabel. A month after meeting her, he is living with her, and he takes her to his next stop, Venezuela. (Exiles have to keep moving.) Then, when Venezuela gets too hot, he and Isabel fly to the Dominican Republic, which under Trujillo welcomes dictators on the run. Two years of heaven in the D.R., then, with Trujillo under pressure, it’s off to Spain. Which is where the story gets really interesting.

In Madrid, Juan and Isabel live in an apartment house. (Ava Gardner is a fellow tenant.) Actually, it’s a threesome, because Isabel has fallen under the spell of a man named Jose Lopez Rega. He is a spiritist, a cultist, an astrologer, and an all-round nutcake. But Isabel thinks he’s wonderful. Juan tolerates him, barely.

Now Eva reenters the story: When Juan was deposed in Argentina, the new regime, determined to stamp out all traces of Peronism, caused Eva’s super-embalmed body to “disappear.” Now, after a series of governments have come and gone, powerful people in Buenos Aires send feelers to Juan. Would he consider coming back? First, he says, find Eva’s body and have it shipped to me. They do. The cadaver is dug up from a cemetery in Milan, and it is shipped by truck to Madrid and to Juan’s apartment, where, according to one story, Lopez Rega has Isabel lie atop the coffin while he murmurs incantations designed to transfer Eva’s essence into Isabel’s body.

You think I’m making this all up. I’m not. But wait; there’s more.

Juan eventually returns to Argentina in 1973, after a 17-year exile, where he is appointed President by acclamation. And Isabel is appointed Vice President, also by acclamation! Lopez Rega is also on hand, manipulating Isabel, who manipulates Juan. Juan dies, Isabel succeeds him as President, and Lopez Rega, a certified kook, is suddenly the most powerful man in Argentina.

Now, what do you think Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice could do with that story? Isabelita, anyone?


By now you may be curious to know what happened to Eva’s body. It found its way back to Buenos Aires, eventually, and is today buried deep under the Duarte family monument in Recoletta Cemetery. It is protected by several feet of concrete. I visited the tomb and took the photo you see above, though of course I can’t swear that Eva is really there.

Here Come the Memoirs

George Tenet, the ex-CIA Director famous for calling the Iraq War a “slam dunk,” has just published his memoir, to mostly negative reviews. Thus the parade of memoirists begins. Douglas Feith, one of the principal architects of the war, is readying his War and Decision for publication this fall. Condy Rice has already dropped “when I write my book” into a conversation with a reporter. Paul Wolfowitz, another in the neocon big three (Wolfowitz, Feith, and Perle), just ousted from the World Bank, can be expected to publish his own self-glorifying story. Others will no doubt join the rush to print as soon as the Bush administration is gone and the coast is clear.

Winston Churchill is often quoted as follows: “History will be kind to me. I know, because I will write it.” And indeed he did, turning out what has become the definitive history of World War 2, a dazzling, six-volume work in which generals, admirals, and others are blamed for costly strategic and tactical blunders, while Winston paints himself as the heroic, wise leader who had to deal with their stupidity. In 1942, Japanese soldiers on bicycles rode down the Malay Peninsula to capture Singapore, while the fortress’s big guns were pointed seaward. Does Churchill accept blame for the fall of Singapore? You decide. Here is a letter written by him to General Ismay on 19 January 1942, as quoted in Churchill’s history:

“I must confess to being staggered by Wavell’s telegram of the 16th ….It never occurred to me for a moment……that the gorge of the fortress of Singapore, with its splendid moat half a mile to a mile wide, was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward.”

Then, after railing about what should have been done and wasn’t done:

“How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me at any time when these matters have been under discussion?” (The Hinge of Fate, p.50)

It was all the fault of incompetent subordinates. That’s the way it is when you write the history.

(One wonders whether George W. Bush, after Iraq became a snake pit, ever wrote to Donald Rumsfeld, “How is it that not one of you pointed this out to me….”)


Similarly, Henry Kissinger, in his monumental memoirs, absolves himself for any responsibility in the overthrow and assassination of Chile’s President Allende, thus:

“I told Davis to keep the American Embassy out of the developing crisis. ….That conversation leaves no doubt of the state of our knowledge and of our intentions immediately before the coup. We were aware…..that the military….were seriously considering the takeover….But we were unaware of any specific plan or date. And we were party to none.” (Years of Upheaval, p. 404)

But a few years earlier there had been another coup attempt, this one engineered by Kissinger but (according to him) aborted at the last minute. Here is what Dr. Kissinger says of that episode:

“To assist such efforts seemed right to me then and seems right to me today. I cannot accept the proposition that the United States is debarred from acting in the gray area between diplomacy and military intervention, a shadow world in which our adversaries have as instruments a political party, their own infinitely greater foreign resources, and innumerable front organizations to mask their role.” (White House Years, p. 677)

Kissinger wants it both ways: His hands were clean in the matter of the successful coup, but justifiably dirty in the matter of the unsuccessful coup. Ah, the advantages of authorship!


That brings us back to George Tenet, who argues that his infamous “slam dunk” quote has been taken out of context. But Tenet is no Churchill, nor even a Kissinger, and others, notably Bob Woodward, have a different version of the scene, and they are more credible.

What will Wolfowitz write? Will he spice up his memoir by including a chapter or two on his relationship with Ms Riza? Probably not, though his publisher will surely lobby for it. Others being courted by publishers include the aforementioned Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz as well as Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, and the biggest enchilada of them all, Colin Powell. It is not enough that these people and others will dump their self-serving accounts on us; they will be all over the TV channels, with Larry King, Charlie Rose, Chris Matthews, Bill O’Reilly, and their ilk. There will be book signings at Barnes & Noble and reviews in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Some of the reviewers will have their own axes to grind: To review the Tenet book, for instance, the Journal assigned one of its favorite neocons, Douglas Feith.

I’ll bet you just can’t wait.

Tricks of the Trade

As an old hand at speech writing, I have come to know all the tricks. In this silly season leading up to the 2008 elections, they are all on display. You’d think that the masses would have caught on, would be anesthetized by now, so that all the rhetorical sleight of hand wouldn’t fool anyone any more. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the voters have caught on, and the speechwriters don’t get it. More likely, though, there are still enough gullible listeners to make a difference.

To these people, if any of them are reading this, I offer the following field guide to the tricks of the speechifying trade.

The fact of the matter is……

Whenever you hear a speaker begin a sentence this way, it is safe to assume that what comes next will not be fact. It will be an opinion dressed up as a fact, as in “the fact of the matter is that broccoli is delicious.” The same applies to “the truth of the matter is…” Real facts do not need to be introduced in this way; they can stand on their own two feet. Never trust a speaker who starts a sentence with this construction – especially in the context of a discussion on global warming.

I just want a level playing field.

This bromide was worn out in 1932, but it just won’t die. I remember once, when I was debating trade policy with some industry people in Tokyo, I floated the notion of a level playing field. “Are you kidding?” a colleague asked. “If the playing field is level, we’ll get killed. We want the playing field tilted our way.” We were a small group, in a restaurant, where it was safe to be honest. At a conference the next day, he would plead for a level playing field. So today, when you hear the China-bashers talk about forcing the Chinese to strengthen their currency and thus “level the playing field,” don’t believe a word of it.

I just want everybody to pay their fair share.

Leaving aside the bad grammar for the moment, the concept of fairness is completely in the eyes of the beholder. So organizations with names like “Americans for Tax Fairness” should be recognized as lobbyists with a mission to stack the tax code in favor of their members. When you slice the layers of the onion, you will always find that fairness means that people whose income is higher than yours should pay more, and that you should pay less.

All the polls say…

There are so many polls today that a speechwriter can pick the one that best serves his purpose. Some polls try to achieve a measure of credibility by flying under the banner of a major newspaper or network (as in the New York Times/CBS poll or the Wall Street Journal poll). If by some chance the speechwriter can’t find an agreeable poll, there is always “the only poll that counts is the one in November.”

I believe in capitalism, but….

Or “I believe in free markets but…” Or “I believe in the sanctity of the family but…” The hope is that the speaker will disarm the opposition up front by declaring that he or she is on your side, but… It’s a shabby ploy, and when you hear it you must understand that what will follow is a renunciation of what the speaker allegedly believes in.

We are well positioned for the future.

I hauled this one in from my annual report writing years, but a politician might use it to rebut some short-term problem. What it means is that things are absolutely dreadful, so bad in fact that they could hardly get worse. Being positioned for the future is a safe quasi-promise, because the future could be next year, 10 years from now, or the next millennium.

The power of “but”

As we have already seen, the word “but” is the most powerful weapon the speechwriter has. It is especially useful in the windup of a speech, where one can alter the meaning of a sentence by the simple expedient of switching clauses from one side to the other of the word “but.” Consider the following example:

She’s a beautiful girl, but she’s dumb.

She’s dumb, but she’s a beautiful girl.

In both cases, we present two elements of information. The elements are identical in both sentences. But what a world of difference in the take-away thought!!

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I’ll share more tricks of the trade in future posts.

Climate Change

There are times, and this is one of them, when it seems that the ship of state is foundering. It was like that in 1968, amid the trauma of the Vietnamese War, when anarchy threatened, and it was like that during the Depression, when riots sometimes required the Army to restore order. This time around, there is no draft, so the Iraq War has not sent the young into the streets as it did in the 60s. That aside, our political discourse is becoming unnervingly overheated. There are calls to impeach the President, as there were in the 70s, and Congressional attempts to choke off war funding, as there were then. The letters to the editor in the New York Times are weighted with vitriolic attacks on the President, and those in the Wall Street Journal contain equally vitriolic attacks from the other direction. On television, Sean Hannity can barely control his right-wing rants, and the left has its share of nutcakes, too, including the editor of Rolling Stone, who, on the Charlie Rose Show the other night, pronounced George Bush “the worst President in the history of this country, by far." Paul Krugman of the Times would no doubt agree, since he manages to slip that thought into just about every column.

In the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, the attacks will undoubtedly grow more savage. There will be ad hominem (for Hillary, ad feminam) attacks, because they apparently work, and there will be counterattacks (the don’t-make-the-mistake-Kerry-made rule). Most of us will be sick of the TV debates and the robocalls and ads and mailers long before the elections, but there is no way to turn it off. You shouldn’t even think of turning it off, some say, because the functioning of democracy depends on the existence of a well-informed electorate. (Well-informed, yes; OD’d, no.)

There is no place to hide. The other night, I passed up the Republican candidates’ debate in favor of a “Live at Lincoln Center” concert broadcast by PBS. Surely a Lincoln Center concert would offer sanctuary from political diatribes. But no. A performer named Laurie Anderson chanted (rapped would be a better word) a long, heavy-handed polemic that managed to hit all the bases: weapons of mass destruction, detainees, and global warming (Al Gore’s Oscar included). Whatever the validity of Ms. Anderson’s points, the woman clearly had no business sharing a concert stage with the Juilliard Orchestra, Philip Glass, Wynton Marsalis, and Kelly O’Hara.

Recently – and depressingly – Barak Obama has been given Secret Service protection, probably because of threats in the air. A woman reviewing the film “The Assassination of a President” says her chief disappointment was that it was only a movie. Most Americans would regard that sentiment as repulsive, but the climate of hatred is spreading and intensifying, and that’s a dangerous thing. How dangerous? Within my memory, would-be assassins have shot at three presidents and killed one. That’s four out of the last eleven, so the crazies are batting .364.

The message, then, to the President and his staff and Cabinet, members of Congress, presidential candidates, journalists, op-ed writers, television commentators and anchors, talk-show hosts, comedians, rappers, film personalities, bloggers, and everyone else with access to a microphone, camera, or computer can be summed up in a simple, two-word plea:

Cool it!

Remember The Maine

Katie Couric, on the CBS evening news on April 26, was breathless as she launched her lead story. “Now, in a CBS exclusive,” she announced, “there are new reports suggesting that Iran is only three years away from having a nuclear bomb.”

Thus it begins, the drumbeat for war with Iran, this time not with speeches from the White House or from Paul Wolfowitz, but with hype from the major news agencies, trying to convince us that they are on to Something Big. Have we forgotten that, in early 2003, the same TV networks had the same doomsday message about Iraq? President Bush and the neocons are now generally pilloried for leading us into war under false pretenses, and that’s a valid charge, but they couldn’t have done it without the press – the same press that now leads the posse to lynch Cheney and the other hawks.

In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, I don’t remember the networks warning us that maybe, just maybe, the WMD evidence was rigged by people hell-bent on regime change in Iraq. Instead, we heard the same dire warnings about chemical weapons (“he used them on his own people!”) and aluminum tubes and yellow-cake uranium. It made good copy, and it kept the viewers from changing the channel. You don’t bump your ratings by telling your audience that on a list of threats to the U.S., Iraq ranks just above Uzbekistan.

But what if Iran is really three years away from a nuclear weapon? The fear in some quarters is that this threat could prompt Israel to launch a preemptive attack on Iran - with planes and missiles supplied by the U.S. It could happen. There is so much hatred in the Middle East that an explosion is always possible. In fact, it’s more likely now than ever, and we are smack in the middle of it, because of the horrific carnage we’ve triggered in Iraq and because of our unquestioning support of Israel. There is, in short, more than enough real danger in the world without our news media piling on. It is a time for restraint on the part of the TV anchors and the headline writers. Alas, restraint is not in their toolkit. Ratings and circulation depend on excitement, not restraint, and the most exciting stories are stories of wars waged and wars threatened.

In 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor (either because of a mine or spontaneous combustion; no one knows for sure), triggering a wave of outrage on the pages of the New York tabloids. Artist Frederick Remington was dispatched to Cuba to supply drawings of the scene in a well orchestrated campaign to prepare the public for war against Spain.

“There is no war,” cabled Remington to his boss, William Randolph Hearst. “Request to be recalled.”

“Please remain,” answered Hearst. “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

And he did.

The April Storms

Five inches of rain, winds gusting to 50, and astronomical high tides made a mess of this area a week ago. The roads are still covered with fallen branches, the beach has been eroded, and the pumps are going around the clock in the neighbors’ basements. At the storm’s peak, sea water washed across our road at its entrance, changing our little peninsula into an island. The little sand spit on which this house and 20 others sit will probably be gone in 50 years, maybe sooner. Just a few miles north of here, a seacoast community called Cape Ellis, in the City of Saco, typically sees a house or two wiped out with every major storm. This time, three houses were reduced to rubble. At Kennebunk Beach, the seawall was destroyed.

Somewhere I read that half the country’s population lives within 100 miles of the coast. Without question, the sound, sight, and smell of the sea exert a strong pull on most of us, leading many otherwise sane people to build houses on the most precarious sites. It’s true in Florida, in the Carolinas, on Cape Cod. Here, the zoning ordinance mandates that new or modified construction along the beachfront by placed on pylons, so that the tidal surge will pass beneath the house instead of slamming against it. I like the sound of the surf on a summer night, but I’m not sure I would like to hear it underneath me.

Of course, as evidence mounts that global climate change will cause the sea level to rise, people may lose their appetites for oceanfront living, but don’t count on it. This town, like so many others around the country, now has an oversupply of houses for sale. But only a few of them are oceanfront, and their prices are all in seven figures, with no indication yet that the soft real-estate market is forcing the prices down.

So what does the future hold for little seacoast communities like Kennebunkport? Unfortunately, the irrepressible urge to live on the edge (of the sea) will translate into weakening of the zoning laws, the construction of more condos and other multiplexes, and as a result, ever-higher population density. Those who try to retain the Town’s small-town atmosphere will be brushed aside by arguments based on the need for affordable housing. Which is better, the developers will ask, one $10 million mansion or a 40-unit condominium on the same parcel? Politically, that’s a slam-dunk.

So we will enjoy it while we can. We will even enjoy the wild storms, because if the contest is between nature and Mammon, most of us are pulling for nature.

The Untouchables

Richard Perle gazed off into the distance, looking as profound as the seated Abraham Lincoln in the background. The message wrought by the image was clear: Sometimes a true statesman has to do things that are unpopular and difficult in the greater interest of the Republic. Like invading a sovereign country on questionable grounds. Like taking the heat when things go wrong. “You,” said a woman on the capitol mall, looking Perle in the eye, “are a weapon of mass destruction.”

The scenes were from the excellent PBS documentary, “America at a Crossroads.” The horrific pictures of carnage in other episodes had to be balanced, the producers felt, by an hour given to “the case for war.” So Perle was out front; give him that. He could have begged off, staying in the shadows like his neocon ally Douglas Feith. But there he was, squaring off with Pat Buchanan, who called the Iraq invasion “the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history” and with Richard Holbrook and other foreign policy gurus, most of them severely critical of the war. The most articulate and persuasive of these was Simon Jenkins, an ex-editor of the London Times, who reminded Perle that the Soviet Union, with 300,000 troops, was unable to pacify Afghanistan. That was different, said Perle, because the Afghans didn’t like the Soviets. Oh.

Later, interviewed by Charlie Rose, Perle waved off his role as the architect of the Iraq War. Yes, he had long advocated regime change in Iraq, he said, but if he had been running things, the U.S. would have turned everything over to the Iraqis the day after Saddam was ousted. “Did you argue that position at the time?” asked Rose. Perle said he had, forcefully. At that point, one imagines, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bremer, Franks, and Powell all started throwing things at their TV sets.

Perle, like President Bush, insists that victory is attainable in Iraq. He now wants regime change in Iran just as ardently as he wanted it in Iraq, though he says he is not advocating sending the marines into Iran. (Here Charlie Rose did not ask the obvious follow-up: Why not? If a pseudo threat like Iraq justified sending in the marines, shouldn’t a real threat like Iran justify an invasion? Has Perle, despite his bravado, learned a lesson?)

Being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry. Richard Perle sees himself as the essential patriot, with no patience for those who want to cut and run with the first casualties. He claims moral kinship with Abraham Lincoln and especially with Ronald Reagan. He is sure that he was and is right. Even if not a single other country on the face of the earth agreed with us, he says, it was right to invade Iraq.

The big three neocon hawks – Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith – are no longer in the offices they occupied when they pressed for war. Paul Wolfowitz, for his role in rationalizing the invasion, was rewarded with the presidency of the World Bank, where he is dogged by his reputation and by ethical missteps involving his girlfriend. Wolfowitz has apologized for botching the girlfriend matter, but to those who attack him for the baggage he carries, he says, “That was my old job. I’m not in my old job anymore.” But some observers, noting that the World Bank stopped funding Uzbekistan soon after that country closed a U.S. airbase in its territory, wonder whether he ever left his old job.

Wolfowitz, Perle, and Feith are all survivors. The pro-war movement is strong in this country. The President will defend them, no matter what. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page idolizes them. All three are passionate advocates for Israel, and that brings more political clout. Someday they will retire comfortably and write memoirs, swapping dust-jacket blurbs with each other.

Meanwhile, they buzz around the world, meeting kings and emirs and presidents and doing their best to intimidate them, because, as Perle says, “there’s got to be some advantage in being a superpower.” The advantage includes money, which follows power. Perle was an investor in a venture capital group (Trireme Partners) specializing in defense investments, a consultant to Global Crossing, a Director of Hollinger International. Controversies swirled around all these connections, but no one laid a glove on Perle. He, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith are essentially untouchable men.

Historians 20 or 30 years from now will render their verdicts on the influence of the neocons on the course of human events. If their vision of a mid-east swept by democracy, free markets, and human rights comes to pass, they will be properly credited (along with President Bush, of course) with lighting the spark. If it does not, they will have left in their wake hundreds of thousands of wasted lives and incalculable damage to the country they served.

Mary

August 17, 1924: An 18-year-old girl named Mary disembarked the White Star steamship Celtic in Boston. She had boarded the ship seven days earlier at Queenstown, the port for Cork, Ireland, after riding in a horse-drawn wagon from her parent’s home in Callan, in the county of Kilkenny. On the trans-Atlantic crossing, Mary shared a second-class cabin with two Irish girls en route to a novitiate in the States. Her father had died when Mary was only six days old, and a few years later her mother had remarried, and in time the new couple had three children of their own – along with the stepchild Mary, who, it was decided, would emigrate to Boston, where an aunt and uncle would see her safely settled.

Mary, who was my mother, never saw her mother or stepfather again. One of her half-sisters followed her to Boston five years later, only to drown in a Vermont lake at age 21. She was my godmother.

It’s a familiar story, told with only slight variations by thousands of first-generation Americans. In the stories I have heard, the emigrants rarely came as a family unit. More often, there was a solo crossing, like Mary’s, or a husband came as an advance party of one and then, once he had a job, sent for the rest of his family. They came from across Europe. In the neighborhood where I grew up there were Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, Russian immigrants, and German immigrants. The members of each ethnic group clung together for security and solidarity, and it would take another generation before there was any melting in the pot. Mothers would admonish their young to “stick to your own kind,” but it was ultimately a futile warning, because this was America.

The American experience leads many to wonder why the Shia and the Sunnis can’t learn to get along. But the situations are starkly different. The Irish who lived in Dorchester did not have a centuries-old hatred of the Italians who lived in East Boston. In time the various immigrant groups were assimilated into an embryonic American culture, as were the Poles and the Russians and Swedes. Into what culture do we expect the Shia and Sunnis and Kurds to be assimilated?

Decades after stepping off the S.S. Celtic in Boston, Mary returned to Europe several times, warmly embracing her half-brother and the children of her other half-sister. For 50 years she wrote regularly to the family she left behind, and our old coats and jackets were routinely packed in cartons and shipped to Kilkenny, where they were gratefully received. This, of course, was in the 40s and 50s, long before Ireland became the star of the European Economic Community. These days, the Irish are doing quite nicely, thank you. There are still waves of immigration, but nowadays they are always inbound.

The Great Buying Opportunity

They come in legions, the analysts and the money managers. The CNBC anchors ask them what they think of the day’s 100-point drop in the Dow, and one by one they say that after the recent run-up a retrenchment is not only to be expected but healthy. They say that with so many new jobs being created the country can’t possibly slip into recession. They say you shouldn’t worry about the subprime mortgage problem, because that’s only a tiny sliver of the economy. They say that the stock-market correction is a buying opportunity, and then they tell you which stocks to buy.

Does anyone believe these guys? Does anyone wonder why, of all the guest experts paraded in front of the cameras, not a single one of them says, “Stay out of the stock market, put your money in the bank or in Treasuries or in your mattress, but don’t put it into stocks”? There are times, and this may be one of them, when this is the very best advice you can get, but CNBC is not in the business of scaring viewers out of the stock market, because for a business TV channel that would be suicidal. So today’s buying opportunity becomes tomorrow’s bigger buying opportunity.

Here are some inconvenient truths you will not hear out of the mouths of CNBC commentators:

New subprime loans reached more than $600 billion last year, almost 20% of the total mortgage market (vs 6% in 2000).

House prices would have to fall 22% to get back in sync with consumer price inflation.

85% of all subprime mortgages are of the adjustable-rate variety, and 60% of these have fixed teaser rates for two years and then float upward for 28 years.

The average teaser rate for subprime mortgages was 7.5% in 2005. On the average, that rate will reset to 10% this year.

In the category just above subprime (Alt-A), $400 billion in mortgages were written last year, up from $85 billion in 2003. The default rate on these mortgages has doubled in the last 14 months.

Last year, 47% of total mortgage loans featured buyer inducements (adjustable rate, interest-only, “no-documentation,” etc). That figure was 2% in 2000.

Loans as a percent of property value averaged 94% in 2006.

(I am indebted to economist and friend Gary Shilling for these statistics.)

Mortgage debt, credit card debt, margin debt (a record $321 billion), car loans, student loans – and that’s just the private debt. We will not mention the public debt, because this is a family blog.

Our economy in fact rests on a mountain of debt, or maybe a row of dominoes is the better metaphor. People squeezed by mortgage resets are likely to default on car loans and max out their credit card debt. Watching the dominoes are the politicians, who have already begun to display “righteous anger” at everyone – bankers, Wall Street, fund managers, brokers – everyone, that is, except the individuals who were gullible enough or greedy enough to grab the money and join the rush to the real-estate casino.

Underlying our economic system is the principle that a loan is a contract whose sanctity will be defended by the law. There are cracks in that foundation. Increasingly, borrowers who default are treated, not as deadbeats, but as victims. Ohio is planning to sell a $100 million bond issue to bail out troubled mortgagees, and several other states are drafting similar measures. Congress, with Senator Schumer leading the charge, is making similar noises. The next entitlement may be universal debt forgiveness.

Although our economy is obviously very vulnerable, most stock-market professionals remain complacent. In fact, the majority remains steadfastly bullish. There must be a code of honor here, sort of a “you tout my stocks, I’ll tout yours” understanding. Maybe I’m a cynic, but whenever I hear a stock-market guru telling me to buy a certain stock, something inside me says that if I do, I’ll be buying shares that he (or his wife or his brother-in-law) is selling.

The Candidates

When I started this blog, I said that it would steer clear of politics, and so it has, for the most part. But it is a constraint that as of now is inoperative. Too many important matters cannot be discussed without reference to their political context, so off with the shackles, and into the fray.

We plunge in with a look at the politicians who have announced their candidacy for the presidency. At this point in the cycle, each major party usually has a clear front-runner. That is not so this time around, so let the games begin.

Senator Hillary Clinton. Solid experience in the senate, plus the knowledge that comes from being the president’s wife for eight years, plus a ton of money, plus the highest name recognition in the field. She is also one very brainy lady, and she is attractive. With all that, how can she lose? She can, because she has been typed for too long as a steamroller, and a media-savvy public resents being programmed. Also, because of…..

Barack Obama. In the age before television, Obama would have come and gone in a news cycle. But he looks good on TV and is loquacious and smart, and he has enough money to carry his smile and his words to all our living rooms, month after month. He has two handicaps: his inexperience and his race. He could overcome either of these, but probably not both. But his day will come, possibly in 2012.

John McCain. It is probably foolish to count anyone out 19 months before the election, but I am counting John McCain out. His hawkish pronouncements on Iraq sealed his fate. Also, he is just too serious by nature. Serious should be good in a president, but in a candidate it can be tiresome.

John Edwards. Used goods, though he was not atop the ticket in 2004. His populist message (“two Americas”) plays well to the Democratic base, but not to the country at large. “Americans,” The Economist once observed, “aspire up and resent down.”

Mitt Romney. The recent record of presidential candidates from Massachusetts is not encouraging. Dukakis and Kerry were both liberal Democrats, and Romney is a Republican, but still….. He has a war chest and is considered by many to have a presidential bearing, but that’s not enough. If it were all about being handsome, it would be Edwards vs Romney, but most people want a face with character, like that of…

Rudy Giuliani. Until and unless Fred Thompson enters the race, Rudy is the most adept TV personality in the field. In fact, he sparkles, as he recently did on Larry Kudlow’s show on CNBC. They say he will have a problem with social conservatives, but he is the Republicans’ Obama: street-smart, good-looking, and refreshingly unscripted. He is the one to watch.

Fred Thompson. With practically zero exposure as a presidential candidate, Thompson recently polled 6 percent. That may sound small, but to get 6 percent before spending one thin dime is impressive. He has a “just folks” demeanor that is well honed from his roles as an actor, and he could be a sleeper. An actor as president? It can happen.

Then there are the supernumeraries, the ones who will fill up the stages at the debates: Biden, Dodd, Richardson, etc. Finally, there a few long-shots, who haven’t declared but who could decide to make waves at any time. Jeb Bush or Colin Powell, say.

Flash back to the Republican National Convention in June, 1920. A heat wave had settled in, and the temperature inside the Chicago Coliseum ranged from 90 to 100 all week. On the first ballot, called on Tuesday, there were two front-runners, with the favorite counting 249 delegates. Finishing a dismal sixth, with 58 delegates, was Warren Harding. By the fourth ballot, the leader’s count had climbed to 314, and Harding’s had dropped to 54. By Saturday, eight ballots had failed to yield a winner. The heat was unbearable, and the delegates had used up their supplies of clean white shirts. There was a deadlock among the top contenders, and in desperation the back-room bosses turned to what one of them later called “the best of the second-raters.” Thus, on the tenth ballot Warren Harding became the Republican candidate for President. (He won the general election in a landslide.)

Will 2008 be another year when a dark-horse candidate comes out of nowhere to steal the prize at a deadlocked convention? Probably not; the convention centers these days are all air-conditioned. Still, it’s an intriguing thought.

The Inventors

When one counts the people who have the greatest influence on the quality of our lives today, two men stand atop my list: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. No political leader even comes close. You can say the same about Thomas Edison and the trio of scientists – Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen - who invented the transistor in 1947. Without semiconductors, of course, neither Gates not Jobs could have launched their revolutions. In science, giants always stand on the shoulders of earlier giants.

Parents who struggle to ante up today’s obscenely high college tuitions might mark the fact that Gates and Jobs were both college dropouts – Gates from Harvard, Jobs from Reed. It would be foolish to conclude from that fact that a college education is a waste of money, but there was something in the DNA of these two legendary inventors that would have flourished with or without the college experience. In fact, it is possible that, had either man spent more time in the classroom, he might have missed the moment and the inspiration.

A college education is essential for a doctor or a lawyer, but it is not essential for an inventor. Thomas Edison, the greatest among those earlier giants, lacked even a high school education, let alone college. Edison considered that his education was his own responsibility, not that of his parents or the government, so he read incessantly. Of course, people like Edison, Gates, and Jobs are rare, and most of us need a little help.

The country and the world desperately need people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We need such people more than we need any of the wannabe presidents who fill our TV screens these days. (Come to think of it, a President Gates or a President Jobs might not be the worst thing that could happen to this country.) Inventors can transform our lives in ways we can’t even imagine, and almost always for the better.

We also need people who can recognize genius when they see it. In late 1979, I had dinner at the Oyster Bar in New York with a securities analyst. In those days, securities analysts were expected to analyze companies, not just deliver sound bites on CNBC, and to write long, detailed reports on their subjects. This analyst was one of the best in the business, and at the moment he was filled with enthusiasm for his latest discovery: a personal computer armed with a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc. He fairly bubbled over as he described the power of the spreadsheet to me and my daughter Lucy, a CPA. It was clear that the analyst was on to something big, but we couldn’t see how big or where it would lead. He saw, because analyzing was what he did, and in time that analyst, whose name was Ben Rosen, would parlay his analytical ability into a position atop the computer industry, as Chairman of Compaq. I have to believe that his impressive writing ability helped, too.

We don’t make enough of our great inventors. Yes, the best of them make a lot of money, but their wealth seems to attract resentment as much as it does admiration. I don’t begrudge Gates or Jobs one dollar of their fortunes, which are insignificant compared with the total economic prosperity their inventions have generated. Consider a world without personal computers, word processors, spreadsheets, and data processing. I don’t think we could afford it.

And, most amazingly, both Gates and Jobs are still working hard to bring us all even more technical advances. It can’t be the money; it must be love of the process. Or noblesse oblige: Once you have been designated a wünderkind, it would be almost churlish to pack it in and retire to St. Bart’s. Whatever the reason, we are all lucky to have them thinking up new wonders for us.

So say I, as I type this with the aid of Microsoft Word on my Macintosh computer. Thanks, Bill. Thanks Steve.

Spring at Last

It's spring, and it’s safe to come out now. There are still a few wisps of snow here and there on the ground, but one good rain and it will be gone. There are birds in profusion and a few squirrels scurry about, but so far no flower or shrub has dared to bloom, a good thing, because it was well below freezing last night.

The other day I saw a flock of confused geese flying south, down the coast. Do they know something we don’t? Has the climate in Labrador become suddenly hostile? Does Al Gore know about this?

One of these days I will take my bike off its hook in the garage, fill the tires with air, squirt some oil on the axles, don the yellow helmet my safety-minded daughter gave me, and pedal down the dirt road to the paved street and along the beachfront. For a month or two this will be the ideal exercise, then the paved street will be jammed with cars that leave little room for cyclists, and the bike rides will be chancy, helmet or not.

The snowbirds will come back, and we will be glad to see them. The same can’t be said of the evil seagull, which I swear I saw the other day. As recounted in “The Seagull Wars,” this monster destroyed two screen sliders and otherwise terrorized this house last summer. Now, it appears, he’s ba-ack, and the war goes on – endlessly, it appears, just like Iraq.

The wind is up most of the time, cold from the north, and the seas are choppy. Peak gusts have topped 40 mph on many days lately – strong enough to send trash barrels rolling down the road and ripping the globe from one of the patio lights along our driveway. The beach is still deserted and a joy to walk, but a good jacket is a must, no matter what the thermometer says.

The sky has been a spectacular blue in recent days, with not a trace of a cloud from horizon to horizon, another byproduct of those stiff winds. That pristine sky is shown on the cover of my book, “Searching for Joan Leslie’ (available at lulu.com), and it looks like computer-generated trickery, but no, that’s the sky as it was when my son snapped the picture. All he had to do was add the copy.

In the early evening that bright beacon in the western sky is Venus. It doesn’t hang around very long, but it’s a dazzler. I wonder if the Venusians can look up at their night sky and see Earth, 67 million miles away. Probably not; I read somewhere that it is always cloudy on Venus.

The Tipping Point

By now you must know that half of all income taxes are paid by 5 percent of all taxpayers. No one seems very agitated about this, especially these days when income inequality is such a hot topic along the campaign trail.

Should we be concerned about the top-loading of our income-tax distribution? We should, but not out of pity for all those investment bankers with their huge bonuses. The real problem lies at the other end of the scale. We should be uneasy about the threat to our democratic system presented by the fact that a large and increasing percentage of all voters pay little or no income taxes.

Throughout the last two decades, Congress – Democrats and Republicans alike – has steadily raised the no-tax threshold, excusing more and more voters from paying the cost of running their government. We are now closing in on the tipping point – the point where 51 percent of all voters pay little or no income taxes.

The implications are ominous: Once a majority of voters have no personal stake in the cost of their government, self-interest will lead them to elect representatives who will increase entitlements without limit. That’s where the system goes ballistic, needing more and more tax revenues – always to be paid by someone else – to support more and more services. If the majority could put the whole load on Bill Gates, they would, but that wouldn’t work, so taxes on the minority will have to rise. And rise.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way. But a century of income taxes, the graduated kind, has inevitably brought us here. Candidates demagogue the issue, pushing for more “progressive” taxes, in effect promising more voters a free ride. The latest variation on the theme is to promise to rejigger the tax laws to bring relief to the middle class, which is usually undefined but assumed to be wherever the votes are. (One remembers Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill setting the upper boundary of the middle class at an income level of $50,000 a year, a mindset that led Congress to impose the Alternative Minimum Tax.)

We are on a slippery slope. It may be too late to head off the threat to our democracy that our lopsided tax distribution system poses. Our only hope is that a card-carrying liberal Democratic president comes out strongly in favor of a flat tax. Only he (or she) could make it happen.

Don’t hold your breath.

The Literary Gourmand

I am inept in the kitchen, but I am married to a very ept lady, who cooks wonderful things. The latest wonderful thing is crab bisque, inspired by a dish we ate in a Sanibel restaurant in January. For some reason, the restaurants around here do not serve crab bisque, though there is lobster bisque aplenty and there is always clam chowder, which can range from watery to gummy. You will also find crab cakes on some menus, as well as crabmeat salads. But no crab bisque. So it was time for Jill to do her thing.

It started with a trip to the Food Network web site, which yielded an easy-looking recipe for something called Crabby Bisque, but it ended, as usual, with a variation on the theme. I do not exaggerate when I say that the final product gave new meaning to the term “to die for.” You may have found a useful tip or two if you’ve been reading this blog regularly, but what I am going to tell you now is the most valuable information you are likely to read this year.

Here’s what you will need:

2 15-oz cans of condensed lobster bisque, available at the supermarket under the Gordon’s Naturally Chesapeake label. (Now you see that we are dealing with crab/lobster bisque here.)

1 pint of heavy cream

1 lemon’s worth of lemon juice (squeeze a lemon; don’t buy juice)

2 dashes of tabasco

1 tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley

2 6-oz containers of fresh crabmeat (save a small amount for garnish)


Put the works into a blender, about 1-1/2 to 2 cups at a time, and blend away.

Heat, but do not boil. Serve with crabmeat garnish


That’s it. You will bless me for sharing this gem with you, and you will wonder how anything so simple can be so delicious.

Anthony Powell

We’ve talked about several of the great British authors of the last century or two – Waugh, Greene, Trollope, and others – and now it is time to address Anthony Powell, a true titan, a master of the novelist’s art – and a writer hardly known to the American public.

I was put onto Powell about 30 years ago, when at a financial conference in London I struck up a conversation with a British portfolio manager about – what else? – books. He told me, in a tone that reeked of triumphalism, that he had just finished reading Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time – a second time!! The full impact of this feat hit me only when I learned that Dance is not a book but a series of 12 novels spanning the period from just after World War 1 through two decades after World War 2. The period is well traveled, but Powell’s characters make it seem brand new.

Powell wrote the first novel in the series, A Question of Upbringing, in 1951, the twelfth, Hearing Secret Harmonies, in 1975. How many writers can labor on a single narrative for 24 years? Just keeping the characters straight is an achievement, especially as a character may enter in volume 3, exit in volume 4, and resurface in volume 11, by which time you may have forgotten all about him or her. I found this a problem as I worked my way through the 12 books, and I must also say that the best of the 12 are the first three or four and that the last few are the weakest. The series is nevertheless an impressive achievement and one of the literary landmarks of our time.

The novels begin by examining the friendship of four boys in an Eton-like school in the early twenties: the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, his friends Charles Stringham and Peter Templer, and – unforgettably, Kenneth Widmerpool, one of the major comic creations of twentieth-century literature. At the outset Widmerpool’s cluelessly inane behavior seems to mark him as comic relief, but by the end of the series, the buffoon emerges as a darker, more threatening presence.

Powell (rhymes with pole, not with towel) lived a long, productive life, which ended in 2000 when he was 95. There were many other novels (his first was published in 1931), biographies, critical essays, and at least two plays. He was a contemporary of Waugh and Greene at Oxford. In World War 2 he worked for British Intelligence, and the three Dance volumes dealing with the War are widely regarded as among the best covering that territory.

There is something about a novel series that is especially satisfying. Finish one good read, then greet many of the same characters again in a new book, and so on, until the whole tapestry is hung – at which point you feel either relief or loss, depending on the quality of the story. Some of Dickens’s and Trollope’s best works first appeared as serials in newspapers, with readers anxiously awaiting each new episode. The literary serial seems to be out of style today, the nearest counterpart being a television series like Upstairs, Downstairs or Dallas.

Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, ideal miniseries material, was in fact produced for television in England about 10 years ago. The cast included John Gielgud, Edward Fox, and Zoë Wannamaker. The 50-year span was compressed into four two-hour segments, and reports from abroad say it was superb. For now, we’ll have to take their word for it; the series was never aired in the U.S., nor is it available in the standard (NTSC) format for American VCRs or DVDs. If you have a player that can handle the British format (PAL), you can probably find a tape or disc at Amazon or eBay.

Searching for Joan Leslie

I am happy to say that the printing problems in "Searching for Joan Leslie" have been resolved, and any copies ordered from now on should be bug-free. The book is a 184-page, 6 by 9 paperback containing most of the blog postings of the past year, edited and organized by subject. To learn more, go to www.lulu.com and search under "Van Veen".

The Book (cont'd)

Noting some bugs in the first edition of "Searching for Joan Leslie," I uploaded a new version. The bugs were removed, but a few new ones (some dropped copy) mysteriously crept in. They are not on the pdf, so the problem is with the printer. We'll get it sorted out soon, but meanwhile, I suggest holding off on ordering your copies. I'll let you know when all is well.

The Tragedy of Iraq

It is fashionable in some circles, especially European circles, to take George W. Bush for a fool. I don’t subscribe to this view. I watch his press conferences, the give-and-take with the Washington press corps, all primed with their gotchas, and I see a quick-thinking, rational, intelligent speaker. Sure, his talking points are well rehearsed, but there is enough off-the-cuff repartee to convince me that this man is no fool.

And that makes the Iraq situation doubly tragic. Given the performance of the economy, George W. would be an immensely popular national and world leader today if it weren’t for one egregious misstep: his decision to invade Iraq.

To be sure, there are those of the other political persuasion who would try to make the most out of income inequality, Hurricane Katrina, and the loss of manufacturing jobs. But they would be swept aside under the weight of the facts: low unemployment, low interest rates, high stock prices. Sans Iraq, our President would be walking on water.

Instead, he is drowning. The opposition has in Iraq a weapon of political mass destruction. Congress has been lost, and W’s economic policies are imperiled. His defense secretary resigned in near disgrace, his Vice President’s aide has just been convicted of perjury, his attorney general may be hounded out of office.

Iraq wasn’t a minor mistake. It was, as the President’s enemies charge, the greatest foreign policy blunder in recent memory. Its negative effects will outlive us all. It has made a good portion of the world despise us. It has cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. More than 100,000 Iraqis are dead because we insisted on liberating them. Not least, it has deepened the political divide in this country and sabotaged the President’s own party and his domestic agenda.

George W. Bush now sits at the center of a tragedy as profound as any of Shakespeare’s. As you will remember, the protagonist of every Shakespearean tragedy owed his destruction to some fatal character flaw. What was Bush’s flaw? History will render its judgment, but here’s a stab at it: The President authorized the invasion of Iraq, not because he was dumb, but because he was weak. Surrounded by advisors pushing for invasion, he put aside his own misgivings (I’m sure he had them) and went with the neocon flow. He was Macbeth giving in to the urgings of his wife. Our tragedy is compounded by the fact that there is not, in either party, a Macduff in sight.

It’s an old story, even older than Vietnam. It’s easy to go to war, especially when you’re the Commander-in-Chief and Congress has forgotten that war is technically its prerogative. It looks macho, but it’s really a sign of weakness. A strong president would find the courage to say no to the hawks and yes to the diplomats.

The writer Kurt Anderson reminds us that in 1848 a young Congressman named Lincoln wondered aloud what the dickens the U.S. was doing invading Mexico. President Polk, Lincoln said, must explain the war “with facts and not with arguments…..But if he cannot….then I should be fully convinced that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong, that he plunged into it and has swept on and on till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”

The Beachcomber's New Book

If you enjoy these blogs, you may be interested to learn that most of the postings of the past year are now available in book form. The book is called “Searching for Joan Leslie,” and it is published by lulu.com. It is a paperback, in 6 by 9 format, and it will cost you $10 plus shipping. It will appeal to a very small, very select audience, and only the magic of on-line publishing makes such a book economically feasible. From royalties off the book sales, I expect to net enough to buy lunch at the Olive Garden, if I don’t eat too much.

To learn more, go to http://www.lulu.com. Then search under "Van Veen".

Six Guys Named Vinnie

For a people who pride ourselves on our ability to speak freely, we have become awfully sensitive lately. The latest in a series of absurdities that seems to have no end involves the man who is slated to become the next head of the New York Stock Exchange. He is an ardent advocate of eliminating human specialists from the floor of the Exchange and replacing them with computers – an entirely sensible idea, since the specialists’ function is the sort of mathematical job that computers should be able to do faster and with fewer errors.

In making his case in a recent speech, the man decided to use picturesque language. Specifically, he said that he personally would rather have his transactions handled by a computer than by “six guys named Vinnie.” No sooner had the words left his mouth than some members of the Italian-American community attacked him for making an ethnic slur.

What’s going on here? Who says Vinnie is Italian? All the Vinnies I knew growing up were Irish. Vincent Van Gogh was not Italian, nor was Vincent Price. In the funny TV commercial for TV blockers, Vinnie is the guy hit over the head with a shovel, not the hit man. The only Vinnie I can think of that fills the bill is My Cousin Vinnie, a good-hearted Italian-American lawyer.

And should we all assume that the Big Board specialists are disproportionately Italian? If so, so what? I don’t understand the thought train at work here. The speaker was not talking about six drug dealers or six child-abusers; he was talking about six stock-exchange specialists. I doubt that little kids, even in Brooklyn, taunt each other with “Your old man’s a stock-market specialist!” – much less, “Your old man’s an Italian stock-market specialist!”

In the YouTube era, it is possible to catch virtually anyone saying something that someone can consider offensive. If you are living, breathing, moving, and talking, you are leaving a film trail that someone can use against you. It can be any word or phrase that can be deemed “insensitive.” If you didn’t know you were being insensitive, that’s even worse; it just proves you’re insensitive to insensitivity, which is insensitivity squared.

Yes, there are instances when words can be hurtful, but the First Amendment does not protect only unhurtful speech. It is supposed to protect speech that is stupid, inflammatory, and even hurtful. Speech is either free or not free; it cannot be free with exceptions.

What about someone who yells “Fire!” in a crowded theater? Yes, that’s wrong, but not because the word is wrong. The act is wrong. Yelling “Flood!” or “Cockroaches!” would be just as bad. There is no insensitivity at issue here, only the act of creating panic. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.

It all started, I suppose, back at the dawn of the civil-rights era, although you could also blame the birth of feminism, when Mizz was in and Mrs. was out, and girls were out and young women were in. Suddenly, everyone in America was a member of an aggrieved class, with lawyers urging them on, because you can’t have class-action suits without classes. It would not surprise me to learn that some lawyer is busily recruiting men named Vinnie to pursue a class-action suit against the New York Stock Exchange, which has the deep pockets that are essential in such matters.

Now that we are entering the presidential campaign of 2008, we will be treated to an avalanche of stories about candidates making insensitive remarks. Even now, legions of campaign workers are scouring YouTube and similar sources for ammunition. Mostly, they need victims. Today it is Vinnie. Tomorrow it will be Sol or Pat or Pedro. Since the heinous remark will be caught on tape, denial is impossible, so an apology will follow. We will thus be drowned in a flood of tearful apologies, but they will not be enough for the offended, who will ask – nay, demand - that the offender’s party repudiate the remark or, preferably, boil the offender in oil.

________________________

“I look forward to that happy day when blacks, negroes, colored people, and blacks can all live in peace and harmony together.” -------Steve Martin

The Departed

The South Boston Irish, warts and all, make up the world of Martin Scorcese’s The Departed. They like to drink and womanize, they go to church a lot, and they are capable of turning on each other suddenly and violently, They live and die fatalistically, as if it’s no big deal to kill or be killed, because, as Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) says, when told someone’s old mother is on the way out, “so are we all.”

The Southie of The Departed is not the Southie my Dad always talked about. His Southie was a place of bonding for life. If you were from Southie, you were the salt of the earth. So said my Dad, and on this subject more than any other, his word could be taken to the bank.

But Martin Scorcese was not making a morality play about South Boston. He was making a cops and robbers entertainment, the kind of movie that used to pair Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien, and in this he succeeded brilliantly. Few movies that run for 2-1/2 hours can keep you from looking at your watch along the way (or falling asleep), but in this case the challenge is to keep from falling off the edge of your chair. Two young men, played to perfection by Matt Damon and Leonardo diCaprio, play two moles – one working inside the Massachusetts State Police for crime boss Costello, the other working for the police inside the Costello gang. As Costello and the police try to identify the rats in their midst, the tension rises, and by the end, almost every actor playing a central character in The Departed turns out to be playing the title role.

Most of the film was shot in Boston, very credibly. The three-deckers, the corner groceries, the hahbah, City Hall, the State House, the subway, the Central Ahtery, all are there. All that was missing was a scene shot at Fenway Pahk or the Boston Gahden. Two of the key actors, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg, are native Bostonians, which added to the authenticity. These and the other members of the excellent cast are all clones of characters I ran across every day while spending the first 25 years of my life in Boston. Even their names – Billy Costigan, Frank Costello, Colin Sullivan – sounded eerily familiar. And the scriptwriter just had to be a Billy Monihan.

A few days after watching the movie, Jill and I were driving through Norwood, just south of Boston, when we noticed a funeral gathering by the big Catholic church in the center, St. Catherine’s. The crowd waiting outside the church was made up mostly of young men, sad-faced and tall and splendid in their black suits.

“I wonder who died,” I said as we drove by.

Jill, sizing up the scene, figured it out on the spot.

“Billy Costigan.”

It is a bloody, extremely violent film, in which the only adjectives permitted are four-letter words and their derivatives. The few women in the story exist only as playthings for the men. But the characters in this world act and talk like that. You will not like most of them, but that’s beside the author’s point.

The Departed won the Oscar as Best Picture, and I can’t argue with that. Of the nominees, I saw The Queen (excellent) and Little Miss Sunshine (good, but vastly overpraised). In that small sample, The Departed stood out for its script, ensemble acting, and direction (another Oscar, for Scorcese). I plan to see The Last King of Scotland, another essentially unsavory story about evil men doing evil deeds. Amin wouldn’t have lasted long in Southie, or Costello in Uganda, but from what I have read, the two were cut from the same cloth.

Ethan Mordden on Musicals

As any reader of these posts knows by now, I have long been a follower of musical theater. I have seen most of the classics, many of them in their original Broadway incarnations. My shelves are crammed with original-cast CDs and LPs, video tapes, and DVDs. My heroes are Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Stephen Sondheim, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and their contemporaries who gave us so many wonderful memories. I have read their biographies. I play their songs on my piano.

I take my children to musicals every chance I get, and I rattle on about them when we are together. As a result, they probably think their dad knows more than anyone alive about musical theater. Sorry, kids, but a man named Ethan Mordden knows a thousand times as much about musicals as I do. His knowledge is encyclopedic, and, what’s more, he is a fine writer. If you have even a wisp of interest in the subject, I strongly recommend his series of books on Broadway musicals. The more familiar you are with the great and not-so-great shows, the more you will get out of the books, but even if you’re only dimly aware of South Pacific and The Sound of Music, you’ll enjoy the stories.

The six books in the series cover six decades, to wit:

Make Believe; The Broadway Musical in the 20s.
Sing for Your Supper: The Broadway Musical in the 30s.
Beautiful Mornin’: The Broadway Musical in the 40s.
Coming Up Roses: The Broadway Musical in the 50s.
Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 60s.
One More Kiss: The Broadway Musical in the 70s.

Most people believe that the golden age of the musical was the period from the 40s (Oklahoma!, Carousel) through the 60s (Cabaret, My Fair Lady), and the best of Mordden’s work are the three books covering those decades. As the century wound down, the musicals became less innovative, the music less melodic, the lyrics less clever, and Mordden skewers the musicals of the last 25 years in “The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen.” In this acerbic wrap-up, he doesn’t mince words: Musicals, he laments, have been going downhill, for a variety of reasons. (If you doubt this, consider the number of revivals playing the Great White Way these days.)


Mordden’s writing sparkles. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from his loving description of one of my favorites, the 1963 musical She Loves Me:



It’s a superb story superbly told, an acknowledged glory of the day. The Gay Life tells a good story, but it boasts a more outgoing score and enjoyed excellent production values. The production, now, is gone and the score just a cast album. She Loves Me is a classic, because it will always surprise a willing public. Remember my matinee ladies? As She Loves Me reaches its curtain, Georg and Amalia are leaving the store on Christmas Eve. They’re about to part company. But he knows that he’s Dear Friend. And we know that he’s Dear Friend. Now she has to know. So he quietly sings to her the words of the letter she composed during “Ice Cream.”

Now she knows.

And, as Barbara Cook turned to Daniel Massey with a look at once relieved, ecstatic, and terrified, the Eugene O’Neill Theater broke into tremendous applause even before Cook reached Massey’s arms for the curtain tableau.

I was waiting for that, those women were saying. You presented a lovely tale in a unique way, and now I realize that if I am to be stimulated, inspired, and touched, it needn’t be a musical play that does it. Musical comedy can have magic moments, too.



And here is some of what Mordden has to say about The Music Man:


Now a book scene fixes Hill up with an old crony, who warns him about the local music teacher and librarian, smart and a purist in everything. But Hill’s got a band to sell, and he smoothes into “Ya Got Trouble,” setting the plot proper in motion. Why, that pool table promises nothing less than the arrival of sin in River City! The good people of the town can only protect themselves by herding their youth into a marching band of …yes! Seventy-six trombones!

Okay, we’ve had a startling novelty in the salesmen’s rap number, a mock-traditional “opening” chorus of “merry” villagers – Sigmund Romberg gone sour - and the action has kicked in painlessly, naturally. One thing’s missing – the romance. No: Here comes the music teacher, to prim, self-righteous “walking” music. Hill follows her, masher-style. We’re on.

Clearly, one of The Music Man’s unique qualities is a resuscitation of a culture that, after two world wars, television, and Elvis Presley, had utterly disappeared. Knickers, pianola, cistern, corncrib, dime novels, “so’s your old man,” stereopticon slides, Montgomery Ward, canoodling, - a goodly portion of the show’s content had been retired to the American memory bank by the 1950s. Willson is telling a story that is all but faerie today.



Spending a couple of hours watching a talented company perform one of the classic musicals is one of life’s greatest pleasures. If you can’t get to a theater, listening to an original cast recording is the next best thing. Or reading one of these books and having the plays come to life on the printed page.

The Lost City

Andy Garcia, I am told, has a checkered reputation among the Hollywood cognoscenti. I don’t know anything about that, and I frankly don’t care. What I do know is that his movie The Lost City shows a great deal of artistry, technical skill, and dedication. It is, in fact, a very good movie – not without flaws, which I will come to, but definitely worth watching.

The story is laid in Havana, just before and after Fidel Castro came to power. Garcia was born in Cuba, and in 1961, two years after the revolution, he and his family fled the island for good. Andy was six at the time. Once he became an established movie actor (in The Godfather) with connections, he began nurturing a vision of a movie dealing with the events of the Cuban revolution, set against the sights and sounds (especially the music) of his native land. The movie was released in 2005, and it came and went without much notice. The DVD is available, and that’s how I came upon it.

At the center of the story is a Law Professor at Havana University, his wife, and his three sons. The two younger sons are idealists being drawn into the Castro movement. The oldest son, Frederico (called Fico), strives to remain apolitical as he runs a Havana cabaret (thus the music). Fico wants nothing more than to keep the family together, but in this he is thwarted by the winds of change. The seizure of the palace and the flight of the dictator Batista are recreated believably, and the suffocating rule of the new regime is also on display. (“Remember,” lectures Che Guevara at one point, “the end justifies the means.”)

Garcia’s direction and his strong portrayal of Fico are impressive. The film has an epic look about it, with glorious cinematography (shot in the Dominican Republic) and authentically Cuban music, well performed. The actors playing Fico’s parents and his brothers are excellent, as is the Spanish actress Ines Sastre, who provides the love interest. The script, by Cabrera Infante, is intelligent and moving.

So what’s not to like?

Garcia apparently could not resist the opportunity to cast two “names” in two supporting roles. Bill Murray plays a has-been comedian who attaches himself to Fico and his cabaret, for reasons that are left unexplained. He adds nothing to the story or to the movie. Dustin Hoffman plays the mob leader Meyer Lansky. It’s a small part, and 100 other actors could have done it as well. Worse, it is clear during the “making of” feature, that Garcia indulged Murray and Hoffman inexcusably, allowing them to insert contrived business and lines. Hoffman is tolerable, Murray is not – although it is clear that Garcia thinks he pulled off a coup in hiring his Pebble Beach golf buddy.

The other failing is the film’s length. At the two-hour mark, Fico is flying out of Havana, escaping to New York and a new life, leaving the girl friend and his parents behind. It is a bittersweet moment, and it is also a perfect closing scene. But no. The story line follows Fico to New York, for 20 more minutes of anticlimactic scenes, some with the extra baggage of Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman.

Think about the ending of Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid take off in the plane for Lisbon, while Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains launch a beautiful friendship. Curtain. Would it have made sense to follow the fugitive couple to Lisbon and watch them set up housekeeping? I think not.

These criticisms aside, The Lost City is a movie you will not soon forget. In fact, it could assume cult status at some point, and in post-Castro Cuba it could become a landmark film, a must-see for all those interested in their country’s history.

And why did the movie fail to attract much attraction when it was released? Alas, it quickly became entangled in politics. Some South American governments reportedly banned it because they thought it showed Che in a bad light. It was stiffed by some film festivals, and many defenders of Fidel Castro attacked it. As I watched it, it seemed to me that both Batista and Castro were vilified, but apparently a right-wing dictator is fair game, a left-wing dictator is not.

The Oscars

The Academy Awards show has long been a platform for political messages. Most of us, I think, would prefer that actors stick to acting and leave the politicking to politicians, but this year the distinction was blurred by the multiple roles of Al Gore as (1) the highest ranking member of the Democratic Party on hand, (2) an Oscar winner, for An Inconvenient Truth, (3) an on-stage, on-camera advocate for tougher emission standards for the automobile industry, etc. and (4) the credited inspiration for several other Oscar winners, including the best-song winner, Melissa Etheridge. (You may well ask, “What is a song doing in a documentary on global warming anyway?”)

But that’s okay. By now we all have built-in filters that allow us to ignore all the Oscar’s sidebars, except the host’s monologue and the ladies’ dresses. Our filters block most commercials, the awards for short subjects and sound mixing, and the interminable lists of producers. But we can’t ignore the total incompetence of those Oscar winners who have trouble composing a succinct, coherent acceptance speech. Think of it: Here are people who have known for weeks or months that they were nominated, who moreover make their livings memorizing scripted lines, suddenly relying on a folded slip of paper and then tripping all over themselves trying to deliver four or five intelligible sentences.

The show’s audience is always worth a look, especially the celebrities who rate the choice aisle seats. (It would be fun to eavesdrop on the meetings where such things are decided.) But, filtering aside, it’s a classy event, an occasion at which the film industry shows respect for its craft and its craftsmen – as should we all, for, notwithstanding computers and iPods, movies remain our dominant entertainment medium.

For me, the appetizer for this year’s Oscar show was Christopher Guest’s latest movie, For Your Consideration, which describes the effect on the cast of a low-budget movie (Home for Purim) when it is rumored that one of the actors is under consideration for an Oscar nomination. The Christopher Guest troupe, so hilarious in Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show, is back. Unfortunately, the spirit that made those two movies so special is missing. Catherine O’Hara is fine as the subject of the rumor, as are Jennifer Coolidge as a clueless producer and Eugene Levy as a slimy agent, but the whole thing just doesn’t come off, possibly because Guest departed from his successful mockumentary format, possibly because the gang’s improv skills have been tapped out and it is time for a good script. There are some choice moments in the film, but Guest’s fans will be disappointed.

We should not leave the Oscars without commenting on this year’s host. Ellen DeGeneres was adequate. That’s not a knock; several hosts in recent years have been less than adequate. My own favorites were Steve Martin and Billy Crystal. Crystal seemed poised for a long run, but long runs – like that of Bert Parks in the Miss America pageant – are apparently not in the cards. Or maybe the Academy thinks Miss DeGeneres can build a following. Off this year’s performance, she deserves another shot.

Finally – also making it through our filter is the annual filmed tribute to those film personalities who died since the last Awards show. The list seems to get longer each year, which I suppose is only natural, but this year served up a bumper crop, including Maureen Stapleton, Glenn Ford, June Allyson, Jack Warden, Don Knotts, Jack Palance, Jane Wyman, and Alida Valli. They gave us many hours of entertainment and in fact still do.

The Time Machine

Has it ever occurred to you that we, alone of all the people who ever lived, can experience the sights and sounds of an earlier century? Radio, motion pictures, and television, all creatures of the last 100 years, have given us a time machine whose potential we are only beginning to understand. The people who lived in, say, the year 1632 had absolutely no way to sample the sights and sounds of 1532. And the Dark Ages will always remain dark, because there are no recordings or photos to illuminate them.

Much is made about the miracle of electronic communication, both point-to-point and broadcast. Radio, television, satellites, cell phones, – the electronic harvest is indeed bountiful. We generally measure these miracles in terms of speed or distance, reflecting how exciting it is to sit here in Maine and watch an Olympic event in Asia as it is happening. But there’s another dimension that may be even more important: time. I am not talking about Tivo-like devices that push programs around by days and weeks, but about time machines that can hop whole centuries – millennia, even.

Before the twentieth century, each generation left behind written notes and drawings to tell their descendants “what it was like.” Some even left detailed histories of their times, and for that we are in their debt. But today’s history is being written, not only by the writers, but much more broadly and accurately by cameramen working in every corner of the world. The advent of inexpensive digital photography is creating thousands of visual historians every day. With facilities like YouTube, soon we will all be leaving our footprints on the sands of time.

Would you like to watch and hear a videotaped greeting from one of your ancestors living in the 16th century? You can’t, but, if you choose, you can look your descendants in the eyes and tell them, in your own voice, what life was like in 2007. The prospect may not excite you, but you can be sure that it would excite someone in 2150.

Or you can share your appreciation of an artistic experience with past and future generations. Today, for instance, thanks to Thomas Edison and his fellow inventors, my children don’t have to take my word for it that Fred Astaire was an exceptional dancer; they can watch him dance. My Dad used to tell me that Al Jolson was the greatest entertainer of his time, and if I watch Jolson in one of his movies I am in effect watching him with my father, who saw the very same movie 75 years ago. In a sense, I can compress time, just as I compress space when I watch CNN’s live coverage of events in Iraq.

The depth of a person’s education is a function of the range of his or her awareness, measured in space and time. At some distance in miles and at some interval in years most people lose interest. That near-sightedness may have been understandable 100 years ago, but today, with the ability to view events around the world and far back in time, there is no reason why we should not let our minds take wing. .

I remember the dawn of television and how, while we all watched Milton Berle and Broadway Open House, some visionaries were touting the educational potential of the new medium. For TV’s first half century, the three major networks fed us entertainment, not education. Then came cable, and the game changed. For those who want nothing but sitcoms, they are still there. But for those who want more, there are the History Channel and PBS and Ovation and The Learning Channel. They and channels like them are your time machines. Take a ride.

The Next Bubble: In the Cards

Recently I was three days late in paying a $200 credit card bill, and that delinquency cost me $31.68. That’s 16 percent for three days, or an annual rate of 1936 percent.

Okay, so most of the penalty was a $29 late fee, not interest. Still, it does illustrate what a lucrative business credit cards have become, and why you get a solicitation in every day’s mail. Some of the mailers even include make-believe credit cards, so that you can see how cool your own Citibank card would look in your wallet. You probably throw the mailer in the waste basket, but they knew you might do something like that, so, when you turn on the television, there they are again, in the form of a sorry character asking you, “What’s in your wallet?” the message being that if it’s not a Capital One credit card you are doomed.

The fly in the credit card ointment, from the issuers’ point of view, is that some people always pay their full balance as soon as they get their bills. If everyone did that, the whole business would collapse. Credit-card companies, after all, are in the business of lending money. They are not in the business of providing a no-charge service to you. This is why, when you open your monthly statement, the number most prominently displayed is not your total balance, but the minimum payment now due. Minimum-payment payers are treasured by the banks, full-balance payers accursed, for obvious reasons.

If you persist in ignoring the “minimum payment“ box and paying off your full balance, the bank has another trick in the envelope: ready-to-cash checks, with your name printed in genuine ink. How can you resist what looks like free money? Are you going to tear up those checks and throw them out, after someone has gone to the trouble of printing your name on them?

What’s a credit-card company going to do about these deviants who insist on paying off their full balances even though they don’t have to, and who throw away preprinted checks? Strong measures are called for, and one of these days you may receive a letter from your credit card company, going something like this:

“It has come to our attention that for some time you have chosen not to use the credit facility our institution offers. Therefore, we must regretfully inform you that if you continue to pay your bills on time each month, your account may be terminated.”

Today’s economic model, for better or worse, is driven, not by people with perfect credit ratings, and not by out-and-out deadbeats. It is driven by people who can get credit cards but can’t keep up with the payments. Whoopee.

Immortal Lines from the Silver Screen

Movie plots and movie scripts often go down well traveled roads. The standard genres – backstage drama, war saga, sci-fi, crime, romantic comedy, etc. – offer only so many ways to create and resolve tension. The patterns are so familiar that one doesn’t need to describe them. A line or two of dialogue will bring the whole scene (and possibly the whole movie) into focus. Here are a few examples:


Gee Willikers, Mr. Anderson, Nancy and I were just walking in the field, and a bad thunderstorm came up, and the only place we could go was the old barn. And it kept raining all night. Honest!

I tell you the man came at me with a knife! Why doesn’t anyone believe me? George, you’re my husband, don’t you believe me?

Villiam, my son, I haf been your music teacher for 10 years. You haf great talent. You should be playing Brahms, Schubert, Liszt – not throwing your life avay on this – vat do you call it – jazz?

Yes, Dr. Williams, I am my father’s assistant in the laboratory. But don’t underestimate me because I’m a woman. I have a doctorate in biothermalnucleogenetic physics.

Carter, my name is Sherman Billingham, the Broadway producer. I caught your act, and I have a spot for you in our new show. But I need only one dancer, not a doubles act. It’s your big chance, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the girl behind.

Look you’re the district attorney, and I think you should know there’s corruption in the police force, and I think it goes to the very top, maybe even to the commissioner, or higher. All I need is a few more days and I’ll break this case wide open. Can I count on your support?

These were brave men, colonel, men who volunteered knowing they’d never come back. Their names will live forever in Marine Corps history: Smith, Scalponetti, Callahan, Shapiro, LeBreque, Kreuger, and Sitkowski.

Honey, I know how much you want to settle down and raise a family, and I promise you that after this one show I’ll give it all up.

I’m only a doctor, Fran, and your son needs more than a doctor now. He needs a miracle.

Phyllis, I have to go to the lab to check out some data on cockroach mutation. I’ll be right back. But keep the door locked and don’t under any circumstances let anyone in!

Sanibel

A vacation in Florida in the winter? How trite can you get? Everybody goes to Florida in the winter. Even the geese go to Florida, flying the route with JetBlue and Delta. The very thought of joining the migration was a turn-off. Better by far, we always thought, was spending the winter rounding Cape Horn, transiting the Panama Canal, cruising French Polynesia.

But we had done those things. Now, we decided, it was time to do the unthinkable. So this year we went to Florida for most of January – and we loved every minute of it! We found all the warmth and the sunshine the travel folders promise, interesting flora and fauna, lots of good restaurants, and nice people who will leave you to yourself if that is your preference.

What did we do in Florida? As little as possible, frankly. We sat by the beach, mostly, in 80-degree weather. I read three books, Jill two. We dined out most evenings. We toured a wildlife preserve, visited a shell museum, saw a play, watched a movie. It was, all in all, a blissfully restful vacation in a beautifully serene setting.

The condominium we rented was on Sanibel, an island joined to the rest of Florida by a long causeway. Sanibel is best defined by what it lacks. It has no high rises, the building height limit being the height of the tallest palm tree. It has no traffic lights. Instead, it has four-way-stop intersections, where the drivers are so courteous that four cars may wait all day for someone to make the first move. In fact, as I eventually figured out, each of the approaching drivers is expected to make a mental note of where he or she is in the queue, and you will rarely see two cars in a row enter an intersection from the same direction, while others wait. (If you do, odds are that the second driver is a tourist from Massachusetts.) There are also no parking meters and no big-box stores.

The beach at Sanibel is, I must admit, almost as nice as ours here in Maine. The sand looks and feels just like ours, although the two beaches have quite different geological origins. The beach at Sanibel has many more varieties of seashells than we do, and on more than one occasion I was indeed the literary beachcomber I claim to be. Joining us on the long strand at Sanibel were pelicans (brown and white), egrets, terns, cormorants, herons, and other sea birds. Away from the beach, the hibiscus and the bougainvillea were the showiest of the many colorful flowers along the sides of the roads.

Sanibel is 12 miles long, and at its far end a thread of land connects it to Captiva, another barrier island. There are more resort islands after Captiva, but they are accessible only by sea or air.

So we must revise our opinions and bury our prejudices. Those who spend their winters in Florida are not crazy. (Some will tell you that the crazies are those who stay in Maine, and they may have a point.) You don’t have to play golf to enjoy Florida. You can find places where life is slow-paced, where you can avoid noise and glitz. It’s not the Florida you see on Miami Vice or CSI Miami. (Come to think of it, Miami is giving Florida a bad name.) The people you meet in Florida are just as agreeable as the people you meet in New England, because, face it, they are the same people.

Sanibel is a treasure of a place to live or to vacation, mostly because the residents have successfully resisted pressures to overdevelop their island. But in Florida those pressures are powerful and unremitting. Now under construction is a new, wider, higher, faster bridge linking the island to Fort Myers. Will the new bridge overwhelm little Sanibel? Will more traffic mean traffic lights and parking meters? Will Sanibel’s two-lane main street (Periwinkle Way, if you can believe it) be widened? Will the merchants demand larger parking lots? Will tour buses from Fort Myers clog the island’s streets? I hope the good people of Sanibel are smart enough and tough enough to keep the barbarians from their gates, but it probably won’t be easy.

Morocco

I first set foot on the African continent on a bright May morning in 1992. Our cruise ship, the Royal Princess, had anchored a mile or so off the coast, near Tangier, just across the strait of Gibraltar from Europe, and we had tendered ashore. Tangier looked like a busy little city, and most of our fellow passengers were content to spend their day there wandering around the shops. Not us. From among the available tours, we had chosen the one that would take us farthest into the Moroccan countryside. So we piled onto the single bus bound for the town of Chaouen, about 60 miles south.

There were about 30 of us aboard the bus, which had seen better days. A young man of Morocco stood at the front with a microphone. He offered some basic information on Tangier, which we left behind in no more than five minutes, the one lingering image being that of the beachfront, with camels sitting on the sand. Our guide, trying to establish common ground, told us that the expatriate novelist Paul Bowles had spent many years in and around Tangier, and that the area we were about to traverse was the scene of his most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, written in 1949 and filmed (by Bertolucci) in 1990. (I have since read the novel and seen the film. Don’t bother.)

Tangier has no suburbs. One minute we were in the city, the next minute we were tooling over a two-lane highway in desert flatlands. On the distant southeast horizon were the Rif Mountains. (As an operetta buff, I was reminded of “The Riff Song” from The Desert Song. The Red Shadow had hidden in these very mountains!)

Soon we were reminded that we had entered the third world, as women by the roadside were washing their clothes in little streams. The bus then started gaining altitude as it climbed the foothills of the Rifs, and the road became so twisty that my stomach was begging for the journey to end. Just in the nick of time, we reached our destination, the hillside community of Chaouen.

As we dismounted, we were greeted by our local guide, a smiling Berber of indeterminate age who introduced himself as Toto. Toto, dressed in a white jellaba, had a sunny disposition and spoke better English than one has a right to expect in Chaouen – but with certain idiosyncrasies, such as the overuse of the word “normally” (pronounced “NAHmally.” Later I was able to extract from Toto the fact that he had learned English by listening to the BBC. The word “normally” had obviously fascinated him, and he must have found that it worked like a charm in the tourist trade.

Chaouen was nestled beneath two mountains, not very large but nonetheless imposing because of their proximity. I asked Toto the origin of the town’s name.

“Chaouen means the two mountains,” Toto explained.

“But,” said I, “I have also seen the town identified on some maps as Chefchauoen. What does Chefchaouen mean?”

“Chefchaouen means, Hey, look at the two mountains,” Toto grinned as if he thought this was funny, or rather, as if he knew that I’d think it funny. He was a born tour guide.

The first order of business was lunch, which was served in a very comfortable restaurant in a modern setting. Chauoen, like many tourist towns, has old and new quarters, to provide its guests with whatever amenities they need as well as a look at the way the town was in bygone times. After lunch, Toto led us on a walking tour of the old town – narrow winding streets, houses with whitewashed walls, big blue wooden doors, little children eyeing the strangers, and the market where exotic spices were on display and women’s faces were not.

The old town also had some tourist shops that were obviously favored by Toto, and at one of these a large circular brass piece, serving as a table-top, caught my eye. The brass was about two feet in diameter, and it bore fancy decorative inscriptions that were authentically Berber, according to Toto. After a few moments of haggling, the brass was mine. But I did not warm to the idea of carrying such a big package back to the ship, the airport, etc.

“I would like to have it shipped,” I told the proprietor.

Toto, standing nearby, looked doubtful.

“NAHmally,” he said, “people carry these with them to the ship.”

“But I want this shipped to my home in the United States.”

“No problem,” said the proprietor, and I wrote down my address. Then, since I figured that Toto was somehow related to the shopkeeper, I suggested that I was counting on him to see that the thing was shipped as promised. (Note: A month or so later, the item arrived safely in Massachusetts.)

After the shopping and the sightseeing, it was time to reboard the bus for the long ride back to Tangier. But when we approached the appointed pick-up site, a crowd was gathered outside the bus. Crisis: The bus had a flat tire. It also had no spare. It was now mid-afternoon. The ship was scheduled to sail at 5 PM.

Cruise ship passengers, when choosing land tours, have two choices. One choice is to buy a ship-sponsored tour. The other is to strike out on one’s own, negotiating a deal with one of hordes of taxis clustered around dockside. People will tell you that Option A is better, because you are guaranteed not to miss the boat, while Option B could leave you high and dry. The people who tell you that are absolutely right. In this case, a quick phone call to Tangier alerted Princess that the bus from Chaouen would be late. The Royal Princess would absolutely, positively not sail off and strand us all in Morocco.

A new tire finally materialized, the bus zipped back to Tangier, where a single tender stood by to bring us to Royal Princess, still standing a mile offshore. The seas had been building, and before we could board, the 45,000-ton ship had to reposition itself to place our tender alee. At last, we pulled anchor over an hour late and made for Lisbon.

In recent years Morocco has become trendy, with some of Hollywood’s biggest headliners zipping to places like Tangier and Casablanca and Rabat. Some of them may even have made it to Chaouen, where Toto NAHmally hangs out.

The brass disc, meanwhile, hangs proudly on our living-room wall, a treasured memento of our pilgrimage to the land of the Berbers.