The Painted Veil

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Somerset Maugham was a good story-teller, not, in my opinion, a good writer, but a very good story-teller. There’s a difference. Graham Greene was one of the best story-tellers (The Third Man, The Quiet American, The End of the Affair, The Heart of the Matter, etc), but as a writer he could not compare with Evelyn Waugh. Greene wrote with the screenplay in mind, and actually turned several of his novels into scripts, whereas Waugh’s movies rarely made good movies, the exception being the wonderful British miniseries Brideshead Revisited.

But back to Maugham. Recently a friend recommended a movie based on a Maugham story, The Painted Veil. I wasn’t able to see the movie (but will one day), but found the story in my library, in a volume called The Maugham Reader. At 200 pages, it is longer than the usual Maugham short story, but it is worth the time. Like most of Maugham’s work, it is stiffly written, but what a story! It was first made into a movie in 1934, starring Greta Garbo, but the version my friend recommended was the 2006 film, with Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, and Liev Schreiber. The drama takes place in China, and the movie was filmed on location. I’m sure that the movie was much better than the printed page, and I thought while reading it that it would have made an excellent subject for Merchant and Ivory. I was not overjoyed by the ending, but others will disagree. Anyway, the screenwriter may have altered the final scenes. I’ll have to see.

The story involves a flighty, attractive young English woman who, anxious to be married before her younger sister trots down the aisle, marries a bacteriologist whom she can barely tolerate. The two travel to Hong Kong, where the bacteriologist has a mid-level civil post. Bored to tears, the bride (Kitty) enters into a torrid affair with a fast-rising British magistrate. The husband, a dutiful, dull sort (but very intelligent), finds out, and in a confrontation agrees to a divorce on two conditions: The lover’s wife must also agree (in writing) to a divorce, and the lover must agree to marry Kitty once the decree is final. The bacteriologist (Walter) is far ahead of his wife in this game: As he expected, the lover wanted Kitty only as a plaything, not a wife, and he is much too ambitious to permit a scandal.

Walter then announces that his research will take him to the interior of China, where there is a cholera epidemic, and he wishes his wife to accompany him. I have told you enough. You will have to find the story at the library or, better still, find the 2006 movie. When I see it, I will let you know what I think.

Note: My thoughts on the movie appear in a blog dated June 15, 2012.

The Facebook Fiasco

The rules that apply in the stock market have changed, apparently. People placed orders to buy Facebook stock a week ago, swallowing the hype that promised a 10- or 20-point jump in the IPO, offering the first buyers a handsome profit, guaranteed. But it closed 20-plus percent down, meaning a hefty loss for many. Horrors! You mean stocks can go down as well as up? That's unfair, if not illegal. Better call my lawyer. Better yet, convene a Congressional committee. The Massachusetts Attorney General, never one to resist a headline, has subpoenaed the underwriter. It's a voter's constitutional right to scalp a profit on a hot IPO.

There were glitches in the system, certainly. But buying stock in an IPO expecting to flip it for a quick gain (as most were) is a gamble. I was not a player in this game, but I do trade stocks, and decades of experience have taught me that profits are never guaranteed, no matter how euphoric the CNBC talking heads are. In fact, the more giddy those folks are, the more you'd better watch your wallet.

The rules have changed. The old paradigm, in which new ventures siphon talent from established companies by offering stock options and grow, creating jobs and wealth aplenty, is under attack. The new President of France wants to outlaw stock options. In the U.S., the whole economic system is being challenged by the "Occupy" movement, backed by large segments of the press. Never mind that this is the same system that lifted millions of immigrants into a prosperous middle class and saved the world from communism and fascism. The new war cry is "What have you done for me lately?"

Blame the banks for the economic meltdown. Blame investment bankers. Blame private equity. Blame anyone but the people who borrowed recklessly, because those people vote. We are going to hear more of this nonsense in the next six months, because the blame game plays well in a sound-bite world. Candidates Obama and Romney are equally culpable because both are telling voters what they want to hear. Telling them what they need to hear is politically lethal.

I have no sympathy for those who lost money on Facebook. Maybe if they hold their stock, they'll recover; maybe not. The losers will complain that the system was rigged against them. If they really believe that, they shouldn't have put their money at risk. They should have stowed their dollars under their mattress.

Wegmans.....The Musical!

I was one of 900-plus people lucky enough to squeeze into the auditorium of the Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough, MA the other night. The occasion was the one and only performance of Wegmans…The Musical!. The production, staged by Algonquin’s Advanced Drama Class, began as a 20-minute skit, but the class kept hanging subplots and musical ideas on the tree until it blossomed into a full, two-act musical. The concept was inspired, and the execution was terrific.

If you’ve never heard of Wegmans, some explanation is in order. It is a chain of grandiose grocery stores in the northeast, and its first venture into New England was the Northborough store, which opened last fall. The Northborough Wegmans is as innovative as it is huge – so innovative that a battalion of Russians, armed with cameras and notebooks, descended on Northborough to capture the store’s essence, with an intent to clone it in Moscow. (Good luck with that.) Words can hardly describe the Wegmans experience, but let’s say that a hurricane has just hit the New England grocery scene.

The story of Wegmans….The Musical! pivots around twin brothers. One (Teddy) manages Wegmans, and the other (Roy) runs a competitor, Acme Foods. Teddy is all good, and Roy is all bad, jealous, and determined to rain on Teddy’s parade. Roy hires a young clerk, Sheldon, and convinces him that his destiny is to become a Jason Bourne and save the world from the evils of Wegmans. So Sheldon takes a job at Wegmans and tries to dig up dirt on Wegmans and its manager, Teddy. There are enough subplots to keep the cast of 18 busy. There are a couple of romances and there is a senile old man who is determined to walk to Wegmans with his walker (think of a shuffling Tim Conway). It’s all over the top, but once you accept that, it’s hilarious.

The music is “imported” from Les Miz, West Side Story, Rent, Fiddler, and other Broadway hits, with situational lyrics grafted onto the familiar tunes. Examples: Act One closes with a parody of the barricade scene from Les Miz, with the faux marching and, in place of the tricolor, a waving Massachusetts state flag, all to lyrics that celebrate “One Great Store.” And the show opens with “Seasons of Love” from Rent translated into “Wegmans We Love” (“525,600 square feet”).

Only two members of the cast could really sing: Steve Tzianabos (Teddy) and Juliana Fiore (a Wegmans worker). (Few hit musicals have more than two good voices, and many, like My Fair Lady, don’t even have two.) But the entire cast could act, which is what you’d expect from an Advanced Drama Class, and the enraptured audience helped create a sense of jubilation. Among the enraptured were representatives of Wegmans, and a video record will surely find its way to Wegmans’ Rochester headquarters.

So hats off to Maura Morrison’s Advanced Drama Class at Algonquin (known to its students as “the Gonk.”) They showed great enterprise, imagination, and talent in pulling this together.

Families

I read a lot, and most of what I read in the New York Times, the Economist, the Financial Times, and other periodicals is depressing. There are little wars raging all over the world. Not big wars, but little wars, with mobs on the streets, soldiers shooting at them and the mobs shooting back. It’s the same story in Syria, Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia, Yemen. The world is awash in guns, some of them supplied by us to help throw the Russians out of Afghanistan and now in the hands of the “insurgents,” shooting at the “coalition forces.” The guns outlive their owners and are passed from hand to hand, from the graves of one generation to a new generation of liberators, en route to new graves. Depressing.

Among the more depressing statistics I came across the other day was this: In this country, 73 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock last year, 53 percent of Latino babies, 29 percent of white babies. It seems the so-called nuclear family is on the way out. Technically, “out of wedlock” doesn’t have to mean that, but it seems to. That is the most worrying trend of all. Families are the glue that holds our civilization together, and, though I can’t prove it, there must be a link between the collapse of the family and all those little wars, the collapse of order in the streets, in politics, in diplomacy. There may be a better way to organize humanity than in family units, but I certainly don’t know of one.

The state of the economy is often blamed for the decline of the family. If the father can’t find a job, the story goes, of course the family will break up. Nonsense. We’ve been through tough times before – much tougher, in fact. In the 30s, my mother pushed a baby carriage, with me in it, around the streets of Dorchester looking for a rentable flat, while my father looked for a job, any job. Millions of Americans were in the same boat, but in those days half the babies weren’t born “out of wedlock.”

Maybe technology has made things too easy for us. Want to be entertained? Click. Want to find out something? Google it. Want to communicate with someone? There’s Facebook, iPad, iPhone. Who needs family?

I watch the News at 11, where the anchor says “Good evening,” and then proceeds to tell you all the reasons why it wasn’t. A car crashed in Scarborough, a house burned down in Kennebunk, a child molester was arrested in Freeport. That’s the way it is, not just in Maine, but everywhere, because tragedies are part of life, and you can’t click your way out of them. But somehow even the worst tragedy is bearable when a family decides to get through it together.

Mad Men

Calling Sterling Cooper. Here’s the challenge: How do we keep from losing the Mad Men audience, now that all the leading characters have lost their appeal? Don Draper has turned into a sleezebag. Betsy Draper has become a shrew. Peggy Olson is a weirdo. The less said about Roger Sterling, the better. There is not a single “Falling Man,” but a castful of falling men and women.

It’s a problem, but not the only one faced by the series. Another is the commercials. One of the features of the series has been its use of actual sponsors (Lucky Strike, American Airlines, Vicks), which adds to verisimilitude. But the actual sponsors of Mad Men (including Clorox, Miller Beer) are represented by commercials that would make Don Draper throw up. Whatever else you may think of the creative team at Sterling Cooper, they do show good commercial judgment, which is in short supply at Mad Men’s actual sponsors.

I was an advertising manager in the late 60’s, and I have to admit that Mad Men’s client-agency meetings are reasonably authentic. Whoever handles the costumes, hairdos, and general ethos of agency life in that era knows the territory. To a point. The smoking and on-the-job drinking are overdone. My own experience was in Boston, and New York agencies may have been more licentious, but I wonder. As for womanizing, the writers would have us believe that Madison Avenue was just one orgy after another. I, Claudius revisited.

I have watched every episode of Mad Men, and I am tired of the falling people. I watched the most recent episode, in which Don Draper did a lot of coughing. Maybe his chain-smoking will finally do him in. Maybe poetic justice will finish off all the characters of this once-gripping, now tiresome series. Maybe that’s the moral of the story: Quit while you’re ahead.

The Republicans

When I was in the South Pacific in January, there was only one television channel that was dependable no matter whether the ship was in Rarotonga or Rangiroa: Fox News. Once in a great while, a satellite gave us CNN, but there was always Fox News. I don’t know why that was so. Maybe Fox has better satellite coverage. I do know that the passengers were fed up with Fox’s nonstop blather about the Republican primaries. Enough already, was the anguished cry. I joined the chorus, although I am the prototypical Republican. Most of the Republican presidential wannabes are scrambling to win the favor of the hard right, which means that on foreign policy most of them are trying to sound like the second coming of Dick Cheney.

After Vietnam, we thought that the lesson had been learned. After Iraq, we thought it had been etched in our psyche. With the recent tragedies in Afghanistan, there is no doubt, right? Wrong. The hawks are in control, as they always seem to be, and a weak president, in an election year, is afraid to stand up to them. We must not cut and run, he says, when it is becoming obvious to a majority of the public that this is exactly what we should do.

Among the Republican candidates, there is only one voice that has been consistently right on foreign policy, as he is on the financial challenges we face: Ron Paul. It is unlikely that he will be the Republican candidate, but if he is, I will vote for him, enthusiastically. If he is not, I will vote for the candidate I believe is the least likely to involve us in a war where the security of this country is not directly and unambiguously threatened.

In those Republican debates, carried endlessly on Fox News, there was one topic that never came up: the circumstances that led this country to invade Iraq in 2003. No wonder. Arguably the biggest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history occurred on a Republican president’s watch. But the words of Seymour Hersch, in his book Chain of Command, are worth remembering.

How did eight or nine neo-conservatives who believed that a war in Iraq was the answer to international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the government and rearrange long-standing American priorities and policies with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the press, mislead the Congress, and dominate the military? Is our democracy that fragile?

The Society Islands

If you asked the passengers on the Rotterdam which was the most beautiful island they visited on the cruise, most would probably choose Moorea. The island is beautiful, to say the least, so beautiful that it was chosen to stand in for Bali H’ai in the film South Pacific and was used in the filming of several other movies. It has a mountainous coastline which is easily seen from Papeete, the chief city in Tahiti. Papeete is ,for that matter, the metropolis of French Polynesia.

I had been to Moorea, Bora Bora, and Tahiti before, and I had taken “grand tours” on all three islands, so my curiosity was easily satisfied by short walks around the ports. A fourth island, Raiatea, was easy to navigate because the ship docked right “downtown,” as it did it Tahiti.

I had remembered the islands as conspicuously successful, with resorts (like the Club Med at Bora Bora) doing a thriving business. Alas, the recession has reached Polynesia, and a number of resorts have closed their doors. Tourism is the economic driver for these islands, and when it's weak, Polynesia suffers..

The top photo shows the bustling streets of Papeete, the middle one shows the Rotterdam anchored at Moorea, and the bottom one shows a church at Bora Bora. The traffic in Papeete is heavy, but if a pedestrian makes just the slightest move to cross the street, it all comes to a dead stop. Either the drivers are impressively polite or the gendarmes are very strict.

In Papeete, a native lady was selling tours at dockside. Struck by her charms, I complimented her. “Polynesian women must be the most beautiful women in the world,” I said. It was hardly an original thought, but she thanked me sweetly, and then, pointing to her garland of flowers, added this:

“My flowers are not real. But I am real.”

Gauguin would have appreciated that.

Rarotonga

After sailing 1000 miles to reach Tabuaeran Island, we had even farther to go, 1500 miles, to reach our next island: Rarotonga. Rarotonga is in the Cook Islands and is one of a 15-island archipelago tightly linked to New Zealand (though it is an independent country). The village you see in the photo is Avarua, the capital of Rarotonga.

We did not anchor off Rarotonga; we drifted, as did another cruise ship nearby, the Seabourn Odyssey. At the point where I took the picture, the sea was 6000 feet deep, so anchors were impractical. The sea was more turbulent that it looks, so passengers were advised to tender ashore only if they were ready for a rough ride. Still lame from my experience at Tabuaeran, I decided to forego the pleasures of Rarotonga – a decision that I now regret.

Just off the right-hand edge of the photo is the small Rarotonga airport. While perched on the Promenade Deck, I noted a couple of propjets taking off and figured they were ferrying people to nearby islands. That conclusion was probably correct, but I greatly underestimated the distances within reach of the island. Twice a week an Air New Zealand 777 checks in to Rarotonga en route from Los Angeles to Aukland. Why? The population of the island is only 14,000, much greater than most of the other islands we would visit, but still, fewer people than live in Biddeford. The answer probably lies in the posh resort hotels that New Zealanders and Australians patronize.

At some point, I may catch up to Rarotonga. It looks like a fine place to spend some time when the snow sweeps down on Maine.

Tabuaeran (Fanning) Island

Tabuaeran is a low-lying atoll on the equator, rarely visited by tourists. It belongs to the country of Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas), which is a scattering of about 30 islands in three widely separated groups in the mid-Pacific. Tubuaeran is in the easternmost group, the Line Islands, and is separated from its country’s capital. Tarawa, by 2000 miles, which is a long drink of water. There is no airstrip on Tabuaeran, and the supply ship, the Moamoa (a creaky-looking affair which was present when we visited and is shown above) calls three or four times a year. Tabuaeran is, in other words, a very lonely, very isolated place.

We arrived at Tabuaeran after a 1000-mile voyage south from Hilo, Hawaii and tendered to shore. We were advised about Tabuaeran’s isolation and poverty and the island’s needs, especially school supplies for the children. So many passengers brought ashore bags of notebooks, pencils, sharpeners, pens, and the like, much of it purchased at stores in Hawaii. The many children of Tabuaeran looked on with delight as the passengers came ashore.


Passengers were also warned not to expect any conveniences like drinking water, toilets, etc. on the island, and some opted to admire the island from the decks of the Rotterdam. But I was determined not to miss the most primitive place we would see on our voyage and hopped on a tender. On the return passage, “hopped” is the right word; the tender lifted as I began my jump from tender to platform, and the result was a leg strain that hobbled me for the rest of the cruise. Still, the close-up look at Tabuaeran was worth it.

Tabuaeran is also called Fanning Island, after an American sea captain who visited it in 1798. Its country, Kiribati, was given its independence from Great Britain in 1979 and is a full member of the UN and the IMF. It is a curious country, spread as it is over 1.35 million square miles of ocean (an area bigger than India!). The good folks who live on Tabuaeran had better hope that the Moamoa is more reliable than it looks.

Rangiroa

Rangiroa is an atoll in the Tuamotu Islands in the South Pacific. It is one of the largest atolls in the world, which may not mean much until you understand just what an atoll is.

An atoll is a coral island typically shaped like a necklace. Rangiroa's lagoon – the water enclosed by the necklace – occupies 630 square miles, although the area of the necklace itself is only 15 square miles! So if you’re on one side of that skinny necklace it is not possible to see the rest of the island; the lagoon is too big.

The Rotterdam anchored just inside the lagoon (there are hundreds of breaks in the necklace) and we tendered in to a village called Avatoru. The scenery was a Hollywood South Sea Island set, complete with beautiful beaches, palm trees, Polynesian men pounding drums, and pretty Polynesian girls selling black-pearl necklaces. I sashayed over to a pair of teenagers and asked them how many people lived on Rangiroa. The puzzled looks told me I was speaking in the wrong language. So I tried French, which worked. The girls huddled, first to agree on the answer to my question, then to figure out how to communicate it to me. Then one girl whipped out a calculator, typed some numbers, then showed it to me: 2000. The new universal language is digits.

Some brave tourists plunged into the water and swam; others, I among them, strolled along the dirt road that led to the other side of Paradise.

There are hotels on Rangiroa, and even an airport, so one can fly the 365 miles from Tahiti. But Rangiroa is not Palm Beach, and anyone venturing to Rangiroa should bring along a few good books to read.

And the scenery is beautiful, but unvaried. An atoll is an atoll, after all, and there are no mountains to climb or valleys to explore. But for a beachcomber, it’s as good as it gets

South Pacific

The Pacific Ocean is big. I mean VERY big. I have just wandered through 10,000 miles of it, and I didn’t begin to scratch its surface. I did see enough of it to pass along some observations, though, which I'll relate in this and future blogs.

The voyage began in San Diego and headed west, toward Hawaii. Then, after calling at three of the Hawaiian Islands, it headed south, to Tabuaeran (or, if you’re a Westerner, Fanning Island) in the country of Kiribati. Then another 1500 miles south, to Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, an independent country that shares a currency and a history with New Zealand. Then a tour of the Society Islands (Raiatea, Bora Bora, Moorea, Tahiti), then a stop at Rangiroa atoll in the Tuamotos, then to my favorite place, Nuku Hiva, in the Marquesas Islands. From Nuku Hiva it was a mere 3200 miles back to San Diego.

The immensity of the Pacific: In 30 days of sailing, we saw nary a single ship. (A few cruise ships were in ports with us.) As befits a voyage in the Pacific, the seas were for the most part calm, the weather sensational.

I had been to Tahiti and its neighbors before, so those islands held no surprises for me. But let me tell you about Nuku Hiva. The Marquesas, 10 islands of which six are inhabited, are the peaks of submerged volcanoes, so they are dramatically mountainous and fertile. Spanish explorers discovered them in 1595, and in the next centuries the white men came, bringing gifts like syphilis, smallpox, measles, malaria, and TB – and nearly wiping out the native population of Polynesians.



The village on Nuku Hiva we tendered to is Taiohae, a trim little place that sees a cruise ship only a few times a year. Taiohae has a Town Hall, a bank, a few markets, and the impressive Notre Dame Cathedral. The main road, fringed with flame trees, hugs the bay where the ship was anchored, and it is in surprisingly good shape (no ice or snow, of course). The people are friendly and helpful – just as Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Paul Gauguin, and Captain Cook found them. They owe their allegiance to France, speak the French language, and use the French Polynesian franc as currency. As I found out when I was looking for a ride back from the Cathedral to the tender pier, there is no local transportation available. With an island population of 2700, why would there be?

We were on Nuku Hiva for only a day; then it was back to the sea, for the six-day voyage to San Diego. I will tell you more about Tabuaeran and some of the other ports of call, but Nuku Hiva earns a special place in the story.

Last Voyages

Robert Louis Stevenson was a sickly man, probably owing to a bronchial malady that confounded nineteenth-century doctors. But in spite of his illness he was a cheerful man, well liked by all who new him. And of course he was a skillful and hard-working writer, who had published Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped before his fortieth birthday,

Stevenson, a native of Scotland, thought his homeland’s cold, damp climate was partly to blame for his poor health, and he dreamed of finding relief in the islands of the South Pacific. And why not? Royalties from his writing were substantial, and the world was waiting. So, in mid-1888, he set sail from San Francisco on a chartered 93-foot sailboat, complete with hired captain and crew. He first destination: the Marquesas Islands, more than 3000 miles southwest. Remember, this was 1888, when there was no radio, radar, sonar, or GPS. The sailboat, named the Casco, eventually made it, and Stevenson spent some time on the islands before sailing farther southwest, to the Tuamotus and Tahiti. Then, after spending months at a Tahitian village, the party headed north to Hawaii.

If “the party” consisted of a wealthy author, captain, and crew, this would be just another story of the sea. But Stevenson took along his wife Fanny, his mother Maggie, and his stepson. (His wife was married before.) His mother was barely 10 years older than his wife, who was 10 years older than RLS. With such a cast of characters, you can well imagine the chemistry on board the Casco.

Eventually, and after chartering two more ships, Stevenson explored the western Pacific, finally settling in Samoa, where he built a fine house – and died, at age 44. So Stevenson’s expedition was in fact a last voyage.

The tale is told in an interesting book called Treasured Islands, written a few years ago by Lowell Holmes, a Professor of Anthropology and an accomplished sailor.


Another “last voyage” is a 1960 movie of the same name, starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone. What makes this film notable is the fact that the producers, hearing that the famed liner Ile de France was headed for the scrap yard, decided to film the story of a sinking ocean liner aboard a sinking ocean liner. No mock-up, no computer graphics, no model ship in a Hollywood tank. This was the real deal. When the ocean bursts through the liner’s dining-room wall, it looks real because it is real. (Actually, fireboats were hired to shoot water through the walls.) Stack and Malone are a couple of vacationing passengers, George Sanders is the ship’s captain, and Edmond O’Brien is an engine- room chief. The movie is in color, which is only right, and among the shipboard extras you’ll see more than a few Asian faces, as the filming location was in the Sea of Japan.

The cast, by the way, really earned their pay on this shoot. O’Brien and Stack in particular had to slosh their way through sea water repeatedly, and the attractive Dorothy Malone was forced to play her role mostly submerged up to her chin. I doubt that these three ever had a more arduous assignment than The Last Voyage.

The Ile de France had achieved notoriety before, rescuing passengers of the Andrea Doria when she sank off Nantucket in 1956. But her movie debut was uncredited. The French Line understandably insisted that all references to the liner’s real name be deleted. The ship is called the Claridon in The Last Voyage.


The third "last voyage" I happened upon is that of the RMS Republic, which collided with the steamer SS Florida south of Nantucket in 1909. Most people associate the dawn of radio, or at least of its notoriety, with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, but three years earlier, thanks to the use of the new Marconi radio on board the Republic, 1600 lives were saved. Exactly 100 years later, an amateur radio station in Britain (GB5CQD) celebrated the centennial by contacting other amateurs, among them this one. I received the postcard confirming the contact and bearing a beautiful photograph of the Republic in happier times.

Television Discovers the Fifties

The fifties are hot. They are far enough away to be covered in gauzy nostalgia, and few of us really remember that much about them. I do, and they were great years, maybe the best decade of the twentieth century, for folks in the United States. Yes, the Cold War was on, and houses were being built with bomb shelters, but most of Europe and Asia had been severely ravaged by the war, and it seemed as if nothing could stop the USA. We had a bonafide hero as president. On television, still a novelty, we had Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, and the Bell Telephone Hour. And everybody smoked.

At least that’s how it looks on Mad Men, and that’s how I remember it. I was working on the periphery of advertising in the fifties, and the look of the fifties on Mad Men is exactly as I remember it. The dress, the hairdos, the music, the expressions all ring true. Mad Men is a well crafted show, at its best in the agency-client meetings at Sterling Cooper, at its most hackneyed in the bedrooms of the ubiquitous philanderers. (But hey, they have to have something for the 18-to-35 crowd.)

Mad Men isn’t the only program to mine the fifties. The BBC recently gave us The Hour, which was lavishly praised in the press. The Hour takes place in and around the Beeb’s studios in the 50s, the time of the Suez crisis. Egypt seized the Canal, and Britain and France threatened war, but Eisenhower, wasn’t buying. (I remember it as Ike’s finest hour.) Against this backdrop, the BBC is featuring soft news about London society, infuriating a young journalist whose priorities are more serious. Throw in rumors of a Russian mole at the BBC and an affair between the producer and the anchor of a new current-affairs program (called The Hour), and you have the ingredients of a juicy miniseries. It’s good entertainment, so good that BBC is planning a second installment, but it doesn’t have the period as well nailed as Mad Men does.

In the fifties I graduated from college, went into the Army, got married, bought my first house, had my first child. It all came out well, so if they want to celebrate the period on television, I’m buying.

Give My Regards to Buxton

Buxton, Maine is a small town on the Saco River, about 20 miles northwest of here. There is nothing especially noteworthy about Buxton, if you don’t count the fact that Tim Robbins goes there after being released from prison in The Shawshank Redemption. And if you don’t count Jennifer Porter.

Jennifer is the principal actress, singer, writer, composer, jazz pianist, and all-round impresario at Buxton’s little theater, a century-old Grange Hall that sits precariously on the east bank of the often-raging Saco. The little theater group that holds forth at the Grange Hall is led by Jennifer and her husband, Dana Packard. Dana’s mother collects the tickets, and the whole enterprise is more or less a family affair. Jennifer and Dana are both the kind of talent that attracts other talent found in the towns around Buxton, and, surprisingly, there is a lot of talent to be found.

If this calls to mind Mickey Rooney saying, “Hey, why can’t us kids put on a show at the old Grange Hall?” that’s not far off. The old Grange Hall is a second cousin to the barns that Mickey and Judy played, with minimal facilities. But the talent is there, and the good burghers of Buxton are smart enough to know talent when they see it, and Porter, Packard and Company always play to a full house. (Surveying the Grange Hall audience is almost as much fun as watching the performers on stage.)

The theater group calls itself The Originals, and they stage two or three plays a year. These are supplemented by concerts by classical pianists, operatic singers, and country musicians. The other night I attended a concert by Jennifer Porter, backed by four instrumentalists. Jennifer has a good voice, but it comes out better than that because she uses it so wisely. She sang, pre-intermission, songs by Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, etc. My kind of music. In the second act she broadened the program by adding country (Patsy Cline). Then it was on to a few operatic arias – the kind that she could handle, even with a cold lurking.

The quartet of instrumentalists were topnotch, especially Matt Langely on sax. Joe Arsenault. Jim Lyden and Dana Packard handled the keyboard, bass, and drums as if they have been playing together forever (which they may have been). Jennifer had her own keyboard, but a good piano would have given her more latitude to show off her skill.

As if the Grange Hall weren’t enough. Jennifer has just wrapped up a movie, a thriller called 40 West. It was written by Jennifer Porter, stars Jennifer Porter (and Wayne Newton), and it was directed by Dana Packard. It was filmed in (where else?) Buxton, Maine.

Let the Games Begin

The Christmas shopping season is about to begin, and the executives at Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, Best Buy, J.C. Penny, Sears, Macy’s, and hundreds of other big retailers are ready to offer us all bargains that are absolutely irresistible, even in these tough times. You won’t see this, or anything like it, in Moscow or Beijing or anywhere else. It’s the magic of free-market capitalism. Yes, it has its flaws, but no one in all recorded history has ever found a better system for distributing wealth. You offer customers a better deal, you win; you don’t, you lose. Over the next month, we’ll see a lot of deals, and we’ll vote with our wallets.

This year there’s a different spin: The customers are hurting, but the retailers are hurting, too. In a nearby mall (see my blog “Overmalled”) the latest casualty is Lowe’s. That closure follows the shuttering of Old Navy, Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, and Linens and Things. It’s only a matter of time before other stores in that unneeded mall throw in the towel. So there will be signs of desperation in the sale prices. Sony and Panasonic have already cut back TV production under withering competition from Korea, and the pressure will be on to slash TV inventories.

Some say the national sport is baseball; some say it’s football. I say it’s shopping, and my guess is that, recession or no, this will be a barnburner of a Christmas season. The retailers’ bottom lines may not look pretty (free shipping costs money), but their top lines will look fabulous.

Will a robust Christmas season kick-start the economy? It’s possible. Pessimism about the economic outlook is sky-high right now, and a jolt of good news might be just the tonic we need.

They're B-a-a-a-ck!

After Vietnam, Americans thought that if there were any silver lining in that awful cloud, it was the fact that this country had learned a lesson, that never again would we be snookered into a foreign war where national defense was not an issue. North Vietnam was obviously never going to attack our homeland, so the hawks had to invent a domino theory that they sold to the public and three presidents. Well, we hoped, never again!

But the hawks, now rechristened as the neocons, never gave up, and after 9-11, the ducks were in a row for them. All they had to do was sell the public a story about weapons of mass destruction, and once again we went to war against a far-away country that posed no credible threat to the United States. Over a hundred thousand lives and a trillion dollars later, we are skulking out of Baghdad and Kabul. Some of us were hoping that this time we had truly learned our lesson.

But no. The neocons are at it again. This time they have seized on an ambiguous UN report to make their case for an attack on Iran or at least to green-light an Israeli attack. In this political season, the Republican presidential candidates are all peddling a muscular response to Iran’s nuclear program. All except Ron Paul, who doesn’t see why we should start a new war with any country that doesn’t credibly threaten the U.S., especially after the experience of the past decade. But Ron Paul isn’t going anywhere politically, so the question on this voter’s mind, as I survey the Republican field, is this: Which candidate is most likely to initiate a new war? Who is the least likely?

It isn’t as easy as it sounds. The American psyche doesn’t automatically embrace peaceniks. Few politicians will call the Iraq War a mistake, because to do so would dishonor the brave soldiers who were killed in that remote land. Politicians like Chuck Schumer grandstand by verbally attacking the Chinese. And the anti-Iran hysteria is phrased, not as a call to arms, but as a noble defense of little Israel, surrounded by hostile neighbors. The politicians of both parties know that Americans want their leaders to sound heroic in matters of national security. Of course, it all depends on how one defines national security.

Last night I watched, once again, The Americanization of Emily, a terrific movie scripted by Paddy Chayefsky. As you probably know, the hero (or anti-hero) is a Navy officer in WW2, played by James Garner. Garner’s objective is to skate through D-Day without getting killed, and in the course of the film he delivers a powerful argument for survival, a case for not celebrating heroism, because that only feeds the pro-war propagandists. Garner’s apologia for survivalism might have come right from Ron Paul, if Paul were as skilled as Paddy Chayefsky.

Anyway, the Republican primaries are worth watching as a gauge of the national pro- or anti-war fervor. To measure the temperature, watch the neocons. Watch for op-ed pieces by John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and of course Dick Cheney. Do not sell them short. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan are already fading.

Democracy and Catch-22

Europe has now captured the attention of the entire financial world. Here, the stock market soars one day, plummets the next, depending on the news from Greece or Spain or Italy. At the moment, the market is in plummet mode, as Italy’s 10-year bond yields have run up to over 6 percent.

The central problem in Europe is that the strong, mostly northern economies are unwilling to bail out the weaker, mostly southern members of the Eurozone unless these countries swallow some hard medicine, much of it involving tax-collection procedures and the size of their public sectors. In Greece, Prime Minister Papendreou said okay at first, then decided to put the question to the voters in a referendum. Most people expect the public to defeat austerity resoundingly, and that is the current crisis du jour.

Now, it is clear that Papendreou is putting austerity to the vote, not because he has an abiding love of democracy, but because he knows he is not strong enough to force his people to swallow the castor oil. Neither is Silvio Berlusconi, Prime Minister of Italy. So all a weak leader has to do is call for a referendum. Vox populi, right? The problem is, the public will vote, not for what is necessary to save the Eurozone, but for a continuation of what some call a Club Med culture.

That brings us to the Occupy Wall Street protests, in which the self-styled 99 percent want the other 1 percent to pay higher taxes. Well, of course they do, especially when half of them pay no income tax at all. If you put the issue to a vote, 80 percent would vote to raise taxes on 20 percent. President Obama knows this ("it's not politics, it's math") and is campaigning accordingly.

Democracy is a two-edged sword. That’s why the founders of our country designed a constitutional democracy, framed to prevent the 99 percent from ganging up on the 1 percent. But Thomas Jefferson and George Washington did not have to contend with polls, in which CNN and the New York Times and CBS tell us daily that 78 percent of the public believe such and such. With such precision, who needs elections?

The Occupy crowds, like the Greek voters, may not have the specialized knowledge needed to design a solution to a frustratingly complex problem. But they are loud, and in this political season their voices will be amplified by vote-hungry politicians. One hopes that there are enough sensible people out there to keep the world from sliding into a de facto pure democracy, because that way lies Catch-22 and chaos.

The Lady Running IBM

This week IBM named a new CEO to succeed Samuel Palmisano, who transformed the old “business machines” maker into the world’s preeminent supplier of business solutions. The new chief executive is Virginia Rometty, who sounds like exactly the right person for the job.

You’ll remember that about 10 years ago IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. You may also remember that when Sam Palmisano decided to build a services company, he used an acquisition – PriceWaterhouseCoopers Consultants – as his platform. At the time the acquisition was roundly criticized, but he made it work, thanks to the executive he charged with bringing the consultants on board. That person was Ms Rometty. “She did the deal, and she made it work,” Palmisano said.

Compare this smooth-as-silk transition to the recent fiasco at Hewlett-Packard. At IBM, the new CEO is a 30-year Company veteran who has proved herself and won the respect of the workforce, the Board of Directors, and her predecessor. H-P reached outside the Company for its last three CEOs. Of the tens of thousands of employees, none was deemed CEO material - not once, but three times. What does that say about succession planning at this iconic technology Company?

(Today, it was reported that H-P has decided to scrap its planned divestiture of its computer business. Its recently fired CEO had planned to follow the IBM paradigm, exiting the computer business and concentrating on services and software. What H-P lacked, apparently, was a Virginia Rometty.)

Virginia Rometty’s well deserved promotion raises another point: A good woman as CEO is a wonderful corporate asset. I was reminded of that this morning, when listening to Ellen Kullman, the CEO of DuPont, as she was interviewed on TV. Ms Kullman displayed a comprehensive knowledge of DuPont’s strategy, a razor-sharp ability to discuss the Company’s various businesses, and – most tellingly – the personality to stream all the DuPontiana enthusiastically and without once sounding brittle.

My late wife would have made a great CEO. Instead, she was a great stay-at-home Mom. I have two very bright daughters, either of whom would be a terrific company president. Some women, like some men, should never run companies. But I have a hunch that corporate America is discovering the formidable potential that is there for the taking in its female workforce.

Moneyball

Along with the trash that Hollywood shovels at us these days, there is the rare gem, the movie written and directed for thinking adults. Such a film is Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, written by Steven Zaillian and Andrew Sorkin, and directed by Bennett Miller. They deserve all the awards they can pick up. So does the supporting cast, especially including Jonah Miller and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Moneyball tells the story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics, a small-market baseball team that must find a way to be competitive against the American League goliaths, New York and Boston. General Manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) decides that the key lies in statistics, as massaged by a young Yale economics graduate (Jonah Hill). And the new system that Beane crafts works. The Athletics have a fine season, along the way breaking the baseball record for consecutive wins. Of course, there is always resistance to change, especially in a tradition-bound game like baseball, and the tension between the old guard and the young rebels gives the film its edge. But the film is notable, not only for what it includes, but for what it does not. There is not a single sex scene. Robin Wright, as Beane’s ex-wife, shows up for a few milliseconds and appears on the posters, but anyone who is drawn to the movie by her presence is going to be disappointed, for her character could as easily have been played by the check-out girl at your Wal-Mart. And there is no violence, save for a few of Billy Beane’s temper tantrums, which don’t count.

What gives Moneyball its flavor is the honest portrayal of the characters in the front office, the back office, and all the offices in between. And “characters” is the word. It gives us a picture of the machinery of baseball that is lacking in any other baseball movie, including my ex-favorite, Bull Durham. Sorry, Crash Davis, but as of now you’re second best.

Moneyball is a feel-good movie. Well, maybe feel-better, since the Oakland team didn’t win the World Series or even the pennant in 2002. But that, in an odd way, is one of film’s strengths. If Billy Beane’s bunch of misfits had won it all, that would have been too Hollywood. Life is imperfect.

Inside baseball: Paul DePodesta, the young nerd played (under a different name) by Jonah Hill, is now VP for Player Development with the Mets. He also looks more like a movie star than a nerd, but the producer must have thought that one handsome guy was quite enough. (The producer was Brad Pitt,) Anyway, Jonah Hill is perfect in the role, providing a nice roly-poly contrast with the trim Pitt. Columbia, which had first dibs on the film, bowed out in protest over script revisions. (The script is one of the film’s major strengths.)

I don’t know how many Oscars Moneyball will win. Maybe none. Maybe, like the 2002 Athletics, it will have to be satisfied with having a good run. That counts in my book.

Stock Talk

In the years since I began writing this blog, I have refrained from commenting on the stock market. Some friends wonder at this, since I spent a quarter century as an intermediary between a fair-sized company and Wall Street, watching market behavior on a minute-by-minute basis. I have been silent on the subject for one reason: The more you know about the market, the less you know.

Still, certain principles must be respected, and they are these:

1. Day trading is idiocy. If you make money doing it, you have been lucky, not smart. The chances are you’ll eventually lose your shirt.

2. The same applies to short sales. I didn’t always feel that way, and I used to “pair trade” – balancing a long position with a short in the same industry. But now I realize that rule 2 is a corollary of rule 1.

3. If you believe that the dollar is overvalued because of investor nervousness (as I do), owning stock in a good company is wiser than owning dollars. Take Apple as a proxy for “good company,” an unarguable proposition. There are about a billion shares in Apple. So if you buy one share, at about $380, you own one billionth of the Company. No matter what happens to the dollar or to the stock market, your share will always be one billionth of the Company. (Dilution is a non-factor, since Apple has tons of cash.) Which would you rather own, a slice of Apple (or any other profitable, growing company) or dollars, euros, or bars of gold, given almost any political or economic scenario? (Full disclosure: I own Apple.)

4. Dividends matter. Why would any sane person accept 0.25 percent on a T bill or 0.75 percent on a bank CD when one can get 4 or 5 percent from a solid utility stock? Bonus: Dividend-paying stocks tend to behave better than growth stocks at times when the market craters.

5. Irrespective of the above, it makes sense to limit one’s exposure to equities. The older you are, the lower this limit will be. One expert suggests subtracting your age from 90, and setting that as your maximum exposure to the stock market, but I think the right number is whatever lets you sleep at night.

6. Never, ever buy stocks on margin.

7. Never buy a stock on a takeover rumor. Whoever is spreading the rumor owns the stock and is “talking his book.” The same warning applies to anything you hear from a CNBC talking head. I watch the channel, but often with the audio muted.

8. Buy what you know. This is the old Peter Lynch rule, and it makes sense. If you food-shop, be aware of what’s moving off the shelves. If you buy clothes, know what’s hot and what’s not. If you are a techie, buy technology. And don’t buy stocks in a business you know nothing about.

9. “Occupy Wall Street” makes a nice sign or headline, but it shouldn’t affect your investment decisions. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s impossible to rationalize.

There. I put my oar in the water, and now I will pull it out again and return to matters I know more about, like books, movies, music, and plays.

The Magic of Steve Jobs

Poll question: Which of the following luminaries has made the biggest positive change in the quality of your life?

George W. Bush
Barack Obama
Warren Buffett
Steve Zuckerberg
Nancy Pelosi
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
Timothy Geithner

Most people would name Steve Jobs. That’s not the real surprise, though. The shocker is that no one else comes close. Do we have only one game-changer? I guess we do.

I am typing this on a MacBook Pro. My office computer is a Mac Mini. My music is stored in an iPod. It is only a matter of time before I buy an iPad and an iPhone. I, like hundreds of millions of others, live in a universe that was created by Steve Jobs. They are calling him a visionary, but that grossly understates his achievement. Any dreamer with a good imagination can have a vision; the hard part is translating a vision to reality, and Steve Jobs did that better than anyone in at least a century.

The talking heads are dissecting the magic of Steve Jobs. Some say it was his quest for perfection, some say it was his ability to sense the public’s taste, some say it was his passionate attention to detail. I have a different read. I never met Jobs, but Apple’s success speaks volumes about its CEO. It says that he had an uncanny ability to identify, attract, and inspire talent. You can’t build a Company like Apple without recruiting and motivating good people, people like Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive and dozens of others behind the headlines. Steve Jobs had a nose for talent, and he could tell the real McCoy from the many pretenders that inhabit Silicon Valley. And that’s how Apple became the most exciting technology company of the digital era.

There is a message here for our politicians. No politician, not even the President, has the knowledge or the skill to improve our lives except at the margin. The best thing a politician can do is make sure the entrepreneurs, the future Steve Jobses, have the freedom to follow their instincts.

A little encouragement wouldn’t hurt, either.

Reflections on the Baseball Playoffs

I’ve been a baseball fan ever since the days when Boston had two major league teams, the Braves and the Red Sox. As a matter of fact, I hustled peanuts and Cokes and ushered at both Fenway Park and Braves Field, and I still have an autograph book with the signatures of Boo Ferris and Tex Hughson and Whitey Wietelman. You never heard of them? Ah, well.

I was watching TV the Night of the Great Comebacks. By now everybody knows that the Tampa Bay Rays were down to the Yankees 7-0 with only six outs separating them from extinction, and, the Red Sox had the champagne ready, with closer Papelbon sitting on a 3-2 lead over Baltimore with two outs in the ninth inning.

You know what happened next, but you may not know that someone has calculated the odds of the Rays and the Orioles pulling both games out at 1 in 278 million. In the only game where “it ain’t over till it’s over,” the only game without a clock to end the contest, a miracle happened – twice, less than an hour apart.

The broadcasters and the sportswriters had a field day. But no one, not even the best of them, could capture the drama of last Wednesday night. It was one of those moments that you can appreciate only from a distance. They’ll still be talking about that night 20, 30 years from now.

So now it’s on with the playoffs, which seem destined to end just before the Super Bowl. There are eight teams still alive, which seems six too many to me. Finishing atop the league standings after 162 games ought to qualify a team for the World Series. But of course baseball is not the only offender here. All sports extend their playoffs, some to the point where it is possible for a team with a losing record to qualify for the post-season.

But we watch the games, so we can’t complain too much. And there is, occasionally, a brilliant double play or an exciting suicide squeeze or a sensational catch in the outfield. Baseball played by the best professionals is a beautiful sport to behold.

The extras are another matter. Heading the list of my pet peeves are the renditions of the national anthem. “Oh say, can you see,” the singer begins, splitting the word “see” into three notes. “See” is not a three-syllable word. God Bless America is more of the same, with the “love” in “land that I love” embellished beyond recognition. Three syllables seems to be standard, but I have heard four.

At one recent sporting event, management decided to replace the live singer with the Kate Smith recording of God Bless America. I wanted to stand up and cheer.

Let us not leave the subject of baseball without a moment’s silence in honor of the just-deposed Red Sox manager, Terry Francona. Life is unfair. Francona wasn’t the one who decided to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for the non-performers, but he will take the blame, because that’s the way the system works.

Now Red Sox Nation is all abuzz with speculation about the new manager. The possibilties include all unemployed managers, but I have my own candidate. He has never been a Big League manager, but I think he has the perfect temperament for the job, and he has obvious public relations skills. My choice for Manager of the Red Sox: Brad Pitt.

Hewlett-Packard

I’ve been reading the stories about the continuing saga at Hewlett-Packard with a great deal of sadness. That this once-proud Company has been reduced to a joke is nothing to cheer about, even if you’re a competitor, because the moral is that if it can happen to H-P, it can happen to anyone.

Back in the 50s, I worked for General Radio, once the world leader in electronic test and measurement and then engaged in a vigorous competition with a fast-moving upstart in Palo Alto. In a broader sense, the competition was between Route 128 and Silicon Valley, between MIT and Stanford, between private offices and cubicles. General Radio had a vast catalog of instruments, much larger than its size could justify, and HP would pick off one product line after another, first frequency meters, then impedance bridges, then microwave instruments. And they were usually very successful.

“Hewlett-Packard has just passed us in sales," I remember saying to one of our officers in the 50s.

“They’ll pass us again on the way down,” he answered.

But of course they never did, and eventually they became a test and measurement juggernaut. But Dave Packard, in reflecting on his career, gave full credit to General Radio, founded in 1915, for having blazed the trail. I am sure that Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett had a twinge of regret when GR foundered, just as I do today as I read about the debacle at Hewlett-Packard.

What is the lesson to be learned from H-P’s collapse? It is this: Being bigger is not the same as being better. The technology graveyard is filled with companies whose undoing was wrong-headed acquisitions. Owning the test and measurement market was not enough for H-P, so the Company jettisoned its heritage and became, via acquisition, a computer company, a leader in a business it has now decided to exit.

It is hard to resist the siren song of acquisitions. If you are the CEO of a large company, you are constantly serenaded by the M&A specialists from Wall Street, singing the anthem of synergism. By eliminating redundancy you will increase profits. Your company will move up in the Fortune 500 list. We are all taught that size equals power, and the larger your company is, the more powerful it is.

The old Hewlett-Packard and the old General Radio were all for growth, but it had to be organic, not the result of buying other companies. Both companies eventually succumbed to the siren song, only to find out it was a dirge.

__________________________


For an account of the early days of the test-equipment industry, read The General Radio Story, available from lulu.com.

Seven Days in ?

Do you remember the movie Seven Days in May? If you saw it, either on its release in 1964 or on TV since, you probably have not forgotten the story. Four-star General James Matoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) attempts a coup d’etat, believing that the President (Frederic March) has been mortally wounded by his advocacy of a treaty with the Soviets. It is a good, suspenseful film, but most of us thought the plot was just this side of science fiction.

Well, maybe not. JFK believed that the plot described in Seven Days in May was plausible, and he encouraged Hollywood to produce the film. (The Pentagon is reported to have been opposed.)

I have long thought that, especially in the YouTube/Facebook era, presidents are weaker than the press makes them out to be. Let us suppose that Barack Obama decided to pull every last troop out of Afghanistan. And, for good measure, out of Iraq. Clean break, saving billions if not trillions of dollars and untold lives.

The scene: The Oval Office. General Blackstone enters, salutes his Commander-in-Chief. The President motions for him to be seated, but the General remains standing.

Blackstone: I understand you have decided to cut and run from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama: That’s correct, General.

Blackstone: It’s my duty to advise you that that would be a grave error.

Obama: I’ve discussed it with my team, and my mind is made up, General. As the head of our armed forces in that area, you would be expected to support my decision.

Blackstone. I will not, Mr. President. And I must remind you that, if it comes to a confrontation, the American people will not support you. Your poll numbers are terrible, while I have the overwhelming support of the United States Congress and, I believe, of the American public.


Now, I hasten to say that, as far as I know, all our top generals are staunch defenders of the constitution and would have none of such dialogue. But self-styled patriots are legion in Congress and the Pentagon. They were in power before 2008, and they are poised for a comeback. And they know from experience that what matters is not who sits in the Oval Office, but who has his ear. They have found out that most presidents are not like Frederic March, who in the final climactic scene faced down Burt Lancaster.

It doesn’t have to come down to a shoot-out, as it did in Seven Days in May. The pressure is exerted more subtly: Do you know, Mr. President, that if you close Guantanamo, three retired Generals will condemn your action on Fox News tomorrow? Or: Mr. President, the CIA has information that suggests that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are not secure. Talks with the Pakistani government have been unproductive, and they recommend a quick invasion. The Joint Chiefs concur, and the CIA says it’s a slam dunk. What’s your decision, Mr. President?

It’s a setup. The whole conversation will eventually be revealed in a Bob Woodward book or in Wikileaks, and the safest course for the President is to go with the flow.

Once in a great while, the President decides to hang tough, as Truman did in his historic confrontation with General MacArthur in 1951. MacArthur was ousted by Truman, and MacArthur chose not to raise the stakes, although he was a bonafide hero and adored by the public. That was then. Now, with access to an ocean of digital media and cable TV, the General might have weighed other options.

The Hour

I remember the so-called Suez Crisis as Dwight Eisenhower’s finest hour. I am sure that England, France, and especially Israel didn’t see it that way, but that’s how I saw it, as world affairs began to intrude on my young consciousness. The parallels to the Libya situation are obvious. Qadaffi is not Nasser, but in 1956 the flow of oil through the Suez Canal was to many Europeans a casus belli and today, for all the talk about human rights, Libyan oil is more than a trivial consideration. In the Suez affair, England and France expected the U.S. to join their anti-Egyptian outrage, but Ike was not buying.

What brings this to mind is the BBC’s six-part drama called "The Hour," now running on BBC-America. If you can tolerate the channel’s commercial breaks (hard to do), this is a good miniseries, revolving around Freddy Lyons, a young BBC firebrand who wants the Beeb to spend less time on celebrity gossip and more on the storm brewing in Egypt. The drama’s title is also the name of a new current affairs program, with an anchorman who has looks and connections but not much substance (sort of like the William Hurt character in Broadcast News).

Freddy Lyons is played convincingly by Ben Whishaw, and the equally credible anchor is Dominic West. The obligatory romantic triangle is rounded out by Romola Garai, as the producer of The Hour

I have seen only three of the six episodes, so my comments are subject to revision, but here they are: There is real irony here: In the play, Freddy Lyons is understandably frustrated by the BBC’s preference for the trivial over the consequential. Check. Then why on earth does The Hour spend so much time on the weakest story line, the aforementioned triangle, and so little on the main thread? Probably because the writers were afraid that the audience would not grasp the gravity of the Suez crisis. So they turned instead to the old “will she or won’t she?” formula.

Still, there’s more than enough grist to keep one interested, and the acting is topnotch, as it usually is in BBC productions. You can pick it up Wednesday nights at 10 on BBC-America, but at this point you will be hopelessly confused if you try to catch up, and you would be better off waiting for the DVD.

Besides, the DVD will spare you all those terrible commercials.

Wanted: Leadership by Example

Our political leaders keep encouraging young people to study math and science, as indeed they should, because the national prosperity depends largely on the ability of its engineers and scientists to convert ideas into the products that keep the economic engine humming.

The business news of the week was the decision of Steve Jobs to relinquish the presidency of Apple, the company he founded. No one has done more to keep the engine humming than Steve Jobs. Some analysts have suggested that his name will in time be enshrined with those of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, and they are right. Even if you are not a Macophile like me, you must be in awe of his ability to conjure up one game-changing product after another.

But the cheerleading of the politicians rings hollow because they exhort by words, not by example. “Do as I say, not as I do,” is the message from the President, who might with more conviction have urged students to become community organizers. For that matter, if students followed the career paths of most of our presidents, they would all be entering law school.

That’s not fair, you may say; we need engineers but we also need politicians, and the two pursuits require different skill sets. Not necessarily. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, majored in physics and has a doctorate in quantum chemistry. Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister of China, is a geologist who studied rare earths in graduate school. Germany and China are the most vibrant economies on their respective continents, while we have mostly lawyers running our government. (George W. Bush held an MBA, which is even worse.)

Maybe Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, or Andy Grove would have made a lousy president. Maybe none of them would even want the job. But just once, I would like to hear the President say to the nation’s young people, “I would like to see more of you studying science and engineering, just as I did.”

A Visit to Leningrad

Twenty years ago today a failed coup d’etat marked the collapse of the Soviet Union. On that very day – my wife’s birthday, as it turned out – Jill and I boarded a plane at Logan, bound for Heathrow, thence to board a cruise ship for Leningrad. Little did we dream when we left that we would be witnesses to history.

When we embarked our ship at Tilbury, a note was waiting for us. Here is what it said:

Dear Passenger,

Welcome aboard the Royal Princess.

I wanted to take this opportunity to assure you that the Company is closely monitoring the political situation in Russia with the U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office. It appears likely that we will be required to revise our itinerary unless the situation rapidly improves. For your information, our revised itinerary substitutes Oslo for Leningrad.

Captain D.H. Brown


It was a grave disappointment to everyone on board. Oslo would be nice, but it wasn’t Leningrad. The next day, as we rounded the Jutland peninsula, we kept watching TV news bulletins, hoping for a miracle.

And it happened. On August 24, we found the following note in our cabin:


Dear Passenger

I am pleased to inform you that the situation in the Soviet Union has stabilized to the point where the Royal Princess can proceed with her call at Leningrad.

As of August 23, 1991, both the U.S. State Department and the United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office issued new travel advisories, which indicate that the situation in the Soviet Union is rapidly returning to normal. If you do choose to go ashore, please exercise caution and avoid any areas of crowds or unrest.

Captain David H. Brown


On Sunday morning, August 25, we walked down the gangway and into Leningrad. We would be in the city for two days, giving us time for four tours. Dour-faced Russian policemen took our passports and gave us temporary papers, and then we boarded a tour bus.

“Welcome to Russia,” said the pert Intourist guide. “We are given these booklets, which contain the approved answers to your questions. I am going to throw it away and give you my own answers."

And she did. At the end of the afternoon tour, as we entered the naval base where our ship was docked, the bus stopped at the gate, a man climbed aboard, spoke briefly with the guide, and exited.

“That was KGB,” the guide said. “He says that no one should take pictures in the docking area. But I say you can take all the pictures you want.”

This feeling of giddiness (“Look at us, we’re free!!”) was palpable throughout our visit, which included tours of the Summer Palace, the Winter Palace (the Hermitage), a ride on the subway, and a visit to a department store. We chatted with some young boys who were peddling leather belts. (See my blog entitled Sasha.)

A fitting finale to the drama occurred as we sailed out of the channel to the Baltic at sunset. We passed the huge Soviet Naval base at Kronstadt, and Royal Princess tooted a salute because, our Captain explained, the Kronstadt Commander was invited to join the attempted coup a week ago and said "Nyet." Good call.

Two weeks after we left Leningrad, the City was renamed St. Petersburg.

Shared Sacrifice (except Congress)

”We should be doing, not what’s right for the party or for the next election, but what’s right for the American people.” So says President Obama. So say Congressmen of both parties today, stalwarts by the names of Schumer and Boehner and McConnell and Reid.

What a flock of phonies! They are all posturing for the cameras, hoping that a few voters will believe they are sincerely fretting about our national debt. The debt, as if you didn’t know, stands at more than 14 trillion dollars. How big is 14 trillion? If you counted one dollar every second, you would still be counting when the only living things on earth were fish. But 14 trillion isn’t enough money, so they are looking for ways of authorizing a higher limit.

Pundits laugh at the bailout of Greece, because everyone knows that Greece doesn’t have a chance of repaying the new loans. Does anyone think the U.S. will ever be able to pay back 14 or 15 trillion dollars? Only when a Big Mac costs $1000.

Speaking of Congress, do you think we really need 435 representatives and 100 senators? That’s 535 highly paid public servants, each with a staff (which does all the heavy lifting), travel allowance, expense account, medical insurance, pension, and God knows what else. One wouldn’t mind if these were the cream of the crop, men and women of obvious intelligence and talent, the kind of people who could run companies in the private sector. But for most of them, politics is their only hope of making a living. If the size of the House of Representatives were cut from 435 members to, say, 200, would we notice? I don’t think so.

It is fashionable for politicians to talk of “shared sacrifice” these days. The poster boys for sacrifice-sharing are hedge-fund managers and people who fly on private jets. But have you heard one syllable about Congressional sacrifice? It would only be a token, of course, but what a token! A member of Congress is entitled to a full pension at age 62 if he or she has five years (!) of service. Who’ll be the first to file a bill dealing with Congressional Pork? Barney Frank? Chuck Schumer?

(Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has always refused to participate in the Congressional pension system, calling it “immoral.”)

The Separate States of Europe

What have we learned from the recent collapse of Greece’s economy? That the economic integration of Europe was doomed from the beginning. To think otherwise is to ignore centuries of history, centuries of turmoil, almost always because of economic frictions among countries of widely divergent national tendencies. It doesn’t help that the 700-plus people who live in Europe speak about two dozen different languages.

Greece, in area and population, is roughly the size of Illinois. Let’s suppose that Illinois people spoke their own language, a language that the folks in Indiana and Wisconsin and Michigan couldn’t understand. Would you say that the Illinois economy might have a problem?

Let us thank God for the British, who erased the Dutch language from New Amsterdam and the French from Louisiana and the Spanish from California. (I know, I know, they’re coming back.) Today, Illinois and the other 49 states share a common language. We take that for granted, but it’s a huge advantage.

Then there’s the matter of culture. Yes, there are cultural differences between Maine and Texas and California, but they are nothing compared with the cultural divides across Europe. Once Jill and I were on a tour bus in Portugal, and we were discussing an incident that morning, when someone robbed some fellow tour passengers on a trolley in Lisbon.

“It happens often in Southern Europe,” our tour guide said, “but hardly ever in Northern Europe.”

He was right. We had never encountered such incidents in Oslo, or Helsinki, or Stockholm or Copenhagen. I thought of that the other day when I watched the mobs of protesters laying waste to downtown Athens, while the police ducked under the flying bottles and backed away from the advancing hooligans. Could that scene have been replicated in Oslo?

Greece is bankrupt because, unlike Illinois, it doesn’t have an industrial base. It exports olives and olive oil. It has a shipping base. It attracts tourists, or used to until the tourists saw law and order, Athens-style, on CNN.

The Euro-zone countries, seeing no alternative, have loaned Greece enough money to cover their current expenses – money that Greece will never be able to repay. And so it goes. The dominoes are lined up, and investors are looking anxiously at Spain.

Europe is a continent, nothing more. Poles consider themselves Poles, and Italians consider themselves Italians. Europe has no national anthem, no ruling parliament or monarch. It has a wobbly currency, but the British must be breathing a sigh of relief that they voted to keep the pound and not embrace the euro.

With all our economic woes, the U.S. looks very healthy compared with Europe.

Two Cheers

In the field of investor relations (mine for a number of years), the key to success can be summed up in two words: manage expectations. Of course, everybody in the game – securities analysts, company executives, financial journalists – knows this, so a calibration goes on, and then a counter-calibration, and so on. Among today’s high-tech companies, it seems to me that Apple is the master. Everyone knows by now that Apple sets expectations low, so they inflate their estimates, yet Apple manages to beat most of the optimistic estimates. That takes real talent.

President Obama has caught on to the trick. So before last night’s speech on the Afghanistan troop draw-down, he allowed (some might say encouraged) the pundits to set expectations low – 5000 troops now, another 5000 next year, a rate his military chiefs were promoting.

Surprise! President Obama exceeded expectations by announcing a draw-down of 10,000 this year, 25,000 next. He thus cheered the rising tide of war-weary voters by appearing to side with them, even though by the end of 2012 there will be 68,000 American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, compared with 32,000 when he took office, after a campaign in which he trounced the ghost of George Bush by promising disengagement from foreign adventures.

Meanwhile, some members of Congress are demanding that President Obama honor the War Powers Act by asking Congress to authorize our actions in or over Libya. No, said President Obama and his lawyers; the War Powers Act doesn’t apply because the United States isn’t involved in hostilities (try telling that to the bombing victims in Tripoli), and the President as Commander-in-Chief has the power to act without Congressional permission. Does that sound faintly like “I’m the Decider”?

The reactions today were mostly favorable (save for the usual hawks), proving once again that managing expectations is the key to success, whether in investor relations or in politics. The most impressive commentary came from Robert Gates, in a PBS interview. Gates supported the President’s call, but he did it so thoughtfully, so intelligently, that I found myself again in awe of this man who has served as Defense Secretary under both Presidents Bush and Obama, in one of the trickiest situations in our military’s history. His soft-spoken manner, his knowledge of his subjects, his deft handling of the most challenging questions made me wonder why somebody hasn’t mentioned his name as a possible presidential candidate. We could do a lot worse – and probably will.

The War That Never Ends

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Jill and I used to ask ourselves why anyone would want the job, given the mess the country was in. Turns out we were right; the job is not one you would wish on your worst enemy. The economy is in shambles, and our relations overseas deteriorate with every passing day (or with every drone attack).

What’s a right-minded President to do? If he were strong enough, he might say, “enough, already,” and pull our military out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen (yes, we’re in Yemen). His liberal base would cheer, but the hawks would howl. General Petraeus, whose approval ratings are sky-high, would appear on the Sunday talk shows to lament our lack of will. So it will not happen. Barack Obama is not strong enough, or confident enough, to do what he knows is right.

Here’s the math: We are spending $10 billion a month in Afghanistan. That’s about $230,000 a minute. It’s money we don’t have, money we have to borrow. But to do that, we have to raise the debt limit, already $14 trillion. How big a number is 14 trillion? There are about 31.5 million seconds in a year, so 14 trillion seconds ago puts you back at the dawn of time (31,746 BC).

Yet those who favor a “robust” foreign policy will not quit. Senators Chambliss and McCain, among others, are pushing back against any attempt to disengage. (Can you imagine what our foreign policy would be like under a President McCain?) And their point of view resonates with many, for fighting is popular among a certain segment of the population, just as brawling is the attraction for many who attend professional hockey games.

More than half a century after World War II and the Korean War, we still have thousands of troops in Germany, Japan, and Korea. Our military footprint is on every continent, and it is expanding. And it is expanding under a President who campaigned and was elected as the anti-Bush. Meanwhile, China, on track to become the world’s largest economy, keeps its troops at home. What’s wrong with this picture?

But there is hope. Republican Congressman Walter Jones of North Carolina has broken with his party in cosponsoring an amendment to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan – an amendment that drew the support of 26 Republicans, including three freshmen elected with Tea Party Support. Then there is Ron Paul, the presidential
wannabe who sensibly favors trimming our overseas military commitments.

After 10 years in Afghanistan, it is time to cut our losses and withdraw. Failure to do so is lunacy.

In the musical Miss Saigon, the Engineer (Jonathan Pryce in the original) sings about the seeds of the Vietnam War:

“Then it all changed with Dien Bien Phu. The Frogs went home. Who came? Guess Who?”

If there is ever a Miss Kabul, the lyrics might go like this:

“Then it all changed with Helmond Province. The Russians went home. Who came? Guess who?”

Where Have All the Ballads Gone?

The other day, while driving, I kept punching the SEEK button on my radio, looking for a station that played pop ballads. No luck. Just yelling, against a heavy-metal beat, plus talk, plus one classical music station.
Where have all the ballads gone? Where is Jerry Vale, now that we need him?

Musical tastes have changed dramatically, and not for the better, say I. The long, flowing melody lines, the cleverly drawn lyrics are out of style. They say that such things move in cycles, that ballads will come back into favor. Until that day, I will rely on my CD collection and on the iPod jack in my Hyundai to keep me entertained.

What kind of music am I talking about? Here is a representative list of some of the great ballads of yore.

All the Things You Are (Kern, Hammerstein)

A treasure, for its harmony and its lyrics. Every quality singer seems to have “covered” it.

If I Loved You (Rodgers, Hammerstein)

Should be heard as part of the famous bench scene from Carousel.

I Got Lost in His Arms (Berlin)

Berlin’s magic: Keep it simple. Almost every word in this gem is one-syllable long.

Moonlight Becomes You (Van Heusen, Burke)

A beautiful, underrated ballad, by two old pros. The “although” near the end is sheer artistry.

Dear Friend (Bock, Harnick)

From She Loves Me, this one is justly celebrated as lyric-writing of the finest order. Get this:

Couples go past me
I see how they look
So discretely sympathethic when they see
The rose and the book.
I make believe nothing is wrong
How long can I pretend?
Please make it right
Don’t break my heart
Don’t let it end
Dear friend.

And I Was Beautiful (Herman)

Not in quantity, certainly, but in style composer/lyricist Jerry Herman most approaches Berlin. This one, from Dear World, was well sung by Angela Lansbury. (“….and then he walked away, and took my smile with him.”)

This Heart of Mine (Warren, Freed)

Harry Warren it is said, is the most successful composer no one has ever heard of. He wrote a zillion singable tunes that were often undercut by pedestrian lyrics by Al Dubin and Mack Gordon. (Check the weak last line of “The More I See You.”) But this one, given an over-the-top treatment in the film The Ziegfeld Follies, is one of Warren’s best.

There are so many others, hundreds of them, now pushed off the airwaves by rock and rap. If you’re over 50, you probably have your own list of favorites. I know we’re not part of the demographic advertisers are looking for, but we do spend money. And fellows, we’re not listening to your radio stations these days.

When Rapture is Not Enough

Front-page headline in today’s Financial Times: “Obama’s Speech in Westminster Affirms the Special Relationship, but Fails to Raise the Roof.”

Now, as we all know, Barack Obama is the very best orator we Americans have. If he can’t raise the roof, who can?

Benjamin Netanyahu can. Here’s yesterday’s New York Times, reporting on the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress: “Mr. Netanyahu received so many standing ovations that at times it seemed that the lawmakers were listening to his speech standing up.” It was, according to the Financial Times, “a rapturously received address.”

Talk about raising the roof! Mr. Netanyahu obviously is even a better speechifier that Mr. Obama, whose State of the Union address was received politely, at times even enthusiastically, but the adverb “rapturously” does not spring to mind.

How does Israel’s Prime Minister elicit the kind of rapture that no American politician, no business leader, no religious leader, not even the “American Idol” winner, can hope for? In fact, it is a good bet that Mr. Netanyahu himself would not encounter such an adoring audience in Israel. But Washington and Mr. Netanyahu were made for each other. The Times lets us in on his secret: “The lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to receive backing from one of the country’s most powerful constituencies, American Jews.”

So politicians will trade rapture for dollars; there is nothing new about that. We will survive the sight of members of Congress pandering to the Israeli lobby, or to any lobby that has enough power and money.

The real loser in all this is Israel. The take-away from this week’s events is that the U.S. has such a special relationship with Israel (much deeper that our special relationship with Britain, for instance) that we can no longer act as a credibly honest broker between Israel and Palestine. The peace talks, insofar as America is concerned, are dead. That much must be obvious to the entire Arab world, as it was to George Mitchell, who threw in the towel recently. Israel’s success in Washington comes at a price, and the price is increasing isolation on the world stage. A rapturous U.S. Congress is not enough.