Adrenalin Junkies: The Hunting Party

Spring Break in Bosnia

Oh, Netflix, you are my muse, my magic carpet, my time machine.  This morning, it was "The Hunting Party," which triggered all sorts of neurotransmitters and brought me face to face with Helga.

Helga was, literally, the Prom Queen from age 13, the prettiest, most desirable girl in Bethesda, Maryland, a  blue eyed, blonde, high cheek bones, impeccable skin which flushed appealingly when she got excited, which was often, and at all the best times. The daughter of a NIH scientist, she had an IQ, of 154--she told me that, and I had no reason to doubt her because she was in all my classes and was  always the brightest star. 

She did not leave junior high school a virgin, and was happy about that, the sort of girl who would push you against a wall outside the gym and say, "You know, every boy wants me, but you know who I think about at night? You." And you knew that was a practiced line, but you didn't care. She'd pass you a note in class, "Do you think Mr. S has an erection right now?" Mr. Schneider was the AP English teacher, and reputedly the most brilliant man on earth, or at least, he was the most brilliant man  at the high school, and he was rumored to be having an affair with Helga, a rumor she kept alive by refusing to comment, but looking at him looking at her, I believed it.

And why would she pass that note to me? Because that was Helga: She sent me notes just often enough to keep me dangling, telling me how special I was to her. But why?  She was not interested in most boys my age,  she just wanted every boy to adore her, a latter day Scarlett O'Hara.

When we were 14, Helga met Kurt  at a county-wide student government festival, which ended in a stage revue, where Kurt had a leading role, and he danced across the stage and sang a wonderful song which ended with the line, "I've passed the acid test," a line which, in Kurt's case, proved  to be prophetic. 

Watching Helga watch Kurt, I told her, "You'll marry that guy." 

Kurt , Reuters War Correspondent 

Helga laughed and said, "Kurt will be my last husband." Now this was a time and place where girls were supposed to be virgins on their wedding day and divorce was a scandal. Helga didn't care much about scandal. She wore her skirts short and her sweaters tight and she was going places with her high IQ and high test scores and great grades and Bethesda was just a stop along the way to her future glamorous life.

Stock in Kurt's chances for becoming even Helga's last husband dipped when he decided he'd had so much fun playing football on the county championship team from Rockville that he signed a blood pack with his football buddies and they all went off to Jamestown College in North Dakota, so they could play football together for  four more years.  Kids in Helga's world, at our posh high school,  slit their wrists if they didn't get into the Ivy League, and certainly nobody from our world would go off to some off brand school in North Dakota.  So Kurt was toast. He had peaked in high school and was going nowhere.

Didn't work out that way: Kurt got himself a Rhodes scholarship in 1969--Clinton was at Oxford then--which had to be at least as much a glittering prize as  a Yale degree and Helga graduated from Wellsley and flew to England and married him.  (He became not her last, but her first husband.) But then, Helga's college roommate visited Oxford and Kurt put her on the back of a motorcycle and disappeared off to Europe with her and Helga went back to America and went to law school and I did not hear from her for years. She stopped writing me notes.

Living Life on the Edge: The Short, Happy Life

But if Helga disappeared, Kurt did not.

This posting  is actually not about Helga. It's about Kurt,  and "The Hunting Party" which is about people who choose to live life on the edge, with the adrenalin rush a daily drug, an addiction. Anthony Lloyd wrote about this, and about Kurt,  in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, and Chris Hedges did the same in War Is a Force That Gives Life Meaning.

Much later, when I had moved back to  Washington, I heard Kurt every morning on NPR, while I drove to work.  He was covering wars for Reuters in Bosnia, Chechnya, Sarajevo, Kosovo.  Richard Holbrook, the State Department roving ambassador, said whenever he arrived at a hot spot, he would seek out Kurt before he went for his official briefing, because Kurt always knew what was really going on and would tell him without the spin.

Kurt was still on the world stage, passing the acid test every day, and you could hear the mortar rounds in the background. I was driving to my office back in Bethesda, to the hospital, to moonlighting jobs, in the work-a-day world. 

In 2000, at age 53, Kurt went to cover the civil war in Sierra Leone and was shot to death in an ambush on some nameless dirt road. 

 I talked to Helga at a high school reunion that year and she said, "Well, he was addicted. It had to happen sometime."  

Then she asked me, "So, how did you manage to turn yourself into a nerd?"

Kurt chose the short exciting life, a different life from what his parents wanted for him, no doubt.  but your parents want what's good for you, not necessarily what's best for you.

Some children, like Jane Goodall, manage to take the path less traveled without getting killed.  Others, like Kurt,  flame out and crash and burn. Icarus  flying too close to the sun. 

Makes you think about the path you chose for yourself. If you did the conventional thing, did you miss out? Did you trade safe for what would have been best for you? 

Sitting in the Cardiac Care unit one night, when I wasn't on call, my good friend Patricia, one of the nurses on that unit, asked me why I hung around the CCU or the ER some nights, when I was off call, and could have been home or out at a bar. 
I had to admit I didn't know why.
 "You're bored," she said, with her typical insight.  "You want to be where the action is. You are an adrenalin junkie."

"Oh," I said. "I've known an  adrenalin junkie. You have no idea."
"I know one when I see one."
"Nobody's shooting at me," I said. 

She shook her head. "I know you. You can't sleep if your beeper is too quiet."
"Nope, I'm just ordinary," I told her. 
 I walked off the CCU ward and across the street to my apartment,  wondering how I had managed to turn myself into a nerd.

As for "The Hunting Party," it was ravaged by the critics because it did not cleave to any recognizable genre, neither action thriller, political satire nor polemic ( a la "Brockavitch" or "The Verdict.") This is one of those cases of the author being way more sophisticated than the audience. In fact, the point is, this story depicts the world as it really is, amoral, indifferent, savage. It's the nihilism the reviewers for Rotten Tomatoes and the Metacritic could not abide. Simon and Duck, the main hunters, look at the world as it really is and see monsters who visit their horrors on remote villages and nobody cares, except those who are directly affected.  For my money, it's a film worth seeing and thinking about. 

Secret Lives

Yesterday, I saw a dozen friends from the Coastal New England Baseball league at the Hampton Falls First Baptist church. They were sitting together in a pew in the back, looking none too happy.
We were there for a funeral.

2014 Champions; Our secret weapon in the 2nd row

When the email went out last week saying one of our long time players had died, a lot of people assumed it was me. I'm the oldest player in the league, by several years. "Dickie sort of died out of turn," someone said. 
"Well, he never did like following rules," another replied. 

I hadn't been to a Baptist church since I moved to New England. Of course, below the Mason Dixon line Baptist churches are like squirrels and deer--you see them everywhere.

I was reminded multiple times, during the service, that my soul was going straight to Hell because I had not been reborn in Christ. The Good News is, if only I decide to find Jesus, I can get right past St. Peter and waltz through the pearly gates.

What really astonished me is that in the four years I'd known Dickie, he never once mentioned God or Christ or anything religious. We talked baseball, mostly. He felt about baseball the way some people think of fly fishing--sort of a religion. He snorted at softball as a desecration of the sport. (Personally, I disagreed. I can't play softball because I'm no longer a good enough athlete. In softball, you have to provide all the power. In baseball, if you hit a 70 MPH fast ball, it's going out under its own power.) 

The minister told a story about a training session they did with Dickie at the church about how to be an effective evangelist. You were supposed to ask enough questions of your quarry to determine whether or not you had a receptive audience and then get to the save-your-soul part gently. But Dickie, not being one to follow any script, just sailed into the "Brother, your soul is in peril," the first time they went out into the field to save souls.

Dickie never mentioned anything about my soul to me. Maybe he could see it was hopeless.

Each of his four children spoke. The youngest was adopted from the Phillipines and she told how Dickie had flown out, only to be grounded by a volcano and he told her it would take more than a volcano to stop him from getting her home. She said he had given her a life she never could have had without him and their family. She had just had a child and she said the sort of love she felt for a child was something she could never have imagined and she now understood what Dickie felt for her. 

His son described playing baseball with his father. His father batted ahead of him in the line up and hit a home run. The catcher, looked over his shoulder and told the umpire, "Can you believe that old guy could hit one out of the park?"  The ump replied, "Well, then, you'd better watch out, 'cause his son is next up.'"  The son said, "And three strikes later, I knew I still had some work to do catching up to my father."

Much had been made about Dickie being proud of being left handed. "Everyone," he said, "Is born right handed. Some of us over come it."  But, he was disappointed, several speakers said, because none of his children was left handed. Then his older daughter got up and held up her left hand for everyone to see. It was really not a hand, but a stump, a birth deformity.  "Actually," she said, "He did have a left handed child, but I didn't count." She told the story of being in the Shriner's Hospital as an eight year old, having a horrible time, not wanting any of the hand prostheses offered. Dickie, sitting next to her bed, held up his hands and said, "I wish I could give you one of mine." And she replied, "Why would I want some giant hand?"

After the service, Dickie's baseball friends gathered in the church lobby and I said, "I never realized Dickie ever had a life outside baseball."
Everyone laughed and said they had been thinking  the same thing.
"They kept bringing up people from his church, from his family, from his engineering job, from his hockey team--who even knew he played hockey? And that project for disabled kids in Kenya? Did he ever say a word about going to Kenya?"

"I kept thinking what people would say at my funeral," someone said. 
"That you never could hit a curve." 
"No, really, you guys would be surprised to hear from the guys in my law firm. And my kids. And the Republican club."
"You a Republican? That, somehow, does not surprise me. You never could hit lefties."

Someone asked me if I had any secret lives they did not know about.  
Everyone should have secret lives, I thought. 
I'll have to work on that.

Beginnings

Nothing is more thrilling than the beginning. 

That line, "You had me at..." usually refers to the opening lines with which an approach was made.

If we remember nothing more of a story, we remember the beginning:
"Mother died today. Or, perhaps yesterday."  

Now, add to the pantheon of great opening lines the opening of Red Tails in Love:
"If it is possible to fall in love with a thing, I believe I fell in love with the Bird Register the day I first opened it. The emotions were familiar: the same feeling of excitement, of undeserved luck, the mildly deluded sensation that a new kind of happiness was just around the corner, the certainty that life was about to divide forever into a before and after."

The Boathouse, Central Park

What Marie Winn is talking about in this gorgeous opening is, of course, not just falling in love with a book housed in the Boat House of Central Park, New York, she is talking about falling in love with Central Park and its creatures. But she is talking about more: She is talking about the very experience of "falling in love." 

Okay, Spring, "love," everybody knows about all that. But, actually, I don't think so. I don't think everyone has fallen in love. I would bet it's not all that common, Cole Porter notwithstanding.

Females, in particular are wary. All those birds on the nature shows, looking at those fantastic male displays and shrugging them off. Doesn't just apply to birds.

Central Park, though. I get that. And that is a place even I can believe love blooms.

Bethesda Fountain, Central Park

My favorite spot, among many favorites, was the Bethesda fountain.  I had grown up in a place called Bethesda, so when I heard there was a Bethesda fountain, I walked right there. The place was mobbed with happy people.  Bethesda, in the Bible, was a place of healing waters, and that seemed true in Central Park.

Ah, Spring. Even the old, the jaded, turn eyes skyward and against their better judgment, feel dry roots stirring with Spring rain, as Eliot would say. 
Maybe just one more renewal.
 Who knows how many more chances we will ever have?

It's Coming

At 7 PM it is now still light out, with Daylight Savings Time.
There was no ice on the beach rocks at low tide yesterday at Plaice Cove. 
Wednesday it will be 50 degrees F.
I can now see black patches through the white glaze on my driveway.
Indoor baseball practices are heating up.
And HistoryPorn posted this photo from Manchester, NH, where these gentlemen were attempting to suit up for a little league game but not all the uniforms had arrived, circa 1954.
The captain of the team (standing) was not amused. 
Lord, I love New Hampshire in the Spring.

The Fallows Effect

Having considered the legistors who represent my town in the New Hampshire legislature, having endured 8 years of listening to George W. Bush, and now Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, I have begun to despair about the existence of intelligent life on planet America.

But lately, at the instigation of a good friend, I remembered the Fallows.

I first met James Fallows and his wife, Deb, in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980's. A doctor friend invited me and my wife to his home in Cleveland Park. I happened to have just read a book called, "More Like Us" by James Fallows and had been quite taken with it. The basic premise was the contrarian idea that the United States should stop trying to be like Japan, which in those years seemed to be rocketing past the US in every way, destined to become an economic power which would surpass both the US and China, not to mention Europe. Fallows, who had spent some years in Japan said, "Actually, no. We ought to do what we do well and let the Japanese do what they do and we'll meet that challenge quite well." ( Only a few years later, the Japanese economy collapsed and has not yet quite recovered.) 

We were ushered into the living room of this vast house--the doctor's wife was an heiress of the Coca Cola fortune-- and there we were introduced to Deb and Jim Fallows.

Of course, when I discovered I was talking to the author of my new favorite book, I could hardly contain my frothing enthusiasm. (My wife told me on the drive home--"You sounded like a groupie. They will probably never invite us back. Okay, so it was a good book. If you read more books, you might have a little more perspective.")
But Mr. Fallows apparently forgave me, and continued, off and on, a cordial correspondence relationship.

Recently, I asked him about the risks and benefits of Americans trying to live in China, and he was, typically gracious about replying. 

Of course, had I been more resourceful, I would have had my answer over the internet: It  never have occurred to me to search the Fallows out on youtube, until my more resourceful friend steered me there.  There,  I was able to watch Deb talking about the difficulty for an American learning Chinese. She has a PhD in linguistics, but typically, she was most humble about her own difficulties with the language and the culture. I could have watched her for hours.

Deb mentioned how rarely the Chinese say "Please" in conversation, as in "Please pass the salt," as opposed to "Pass the salt." They consider "please" too formal and find it distances people. If it's a friend, you just say, "Pass the salt."  I have noticed a variant of this in New England, where people are just so polite it has the effect of creating a wall of formality. When we learn about others, we learn about ourselves.

 I stumbled upon Jim's  interview with Bill Maher, and was transfixed as he talked about his new book about the U.S. military. He mentioned  American servicemen who come home to people who say, "Thank you for your service" and how many servicemen told him, "If you really want to thank us, trying being a citizen and do something to prevent morons from sending us to fight wars with no mission, wars  we cannot possibly win. Go vote."

He went on to say both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were, by any reasonable measure, defeats for the United States, for the same reason Vietnam had to result in defeat: We cannot win wars of occupation and Empire. We do not want to establish a raj anywhere. Americans want to do business with other countries, not subjugate them. 

So, there you have it: Two manifestly intelligent, American human beings who can actually talk about what we ought to be doing in the world, i.e., the difficult things (learning another language and culture, engaging the world rather than bombing it) people who think clearly about what our own government is doing, and who are willing to disagree with President Obama and call him out for a major failing, when necessary.

The fact is, we should have killed Osama Bin Laden and got out of Afghanistan as quickly thereafter as humanly possible. Instead, we have sacrificed the lives of our youth, not to mention our treasury, pursuing the elusive goal of "nation building" in a part of the world where we need more anthropologists not more soldiers.

We will never win the hearts and minds of certain peoples. We have not made ourselves safer by spending money on bombs which explode rather than bridges (of all sorts, physical and cultural) which endure.

The best Americans we have are working to bridge those divides and to think with merciless clarity about how we use our military.

There are people out there who could help us, but none of them appear interested in running for office. Can you imagine if Paul Krugman, Jim Fallows and even Bill Maher were given the keys to the kingdom, for just a year?

The Fierce Urgency of Now: What To Do With the Rest of Your Life

There have been so many expressions connected to the pressure exerted by time on experience--"So many men, so little time, " or "So many books, so little time."--the notion that there is all that experience out there and not enough time to experience it all, but none of this has much purchase when you are young. 

Then the  time comes when the kids are out of the house, parents dead, career on track, and you are faced with simple arithmetic:  I have only "x" number of years left. What am I going to do with the slice of the pie which remains?


Aunt Violet, of Downton Abbey, addressed  this with her arresting remark, "Well, I've been reminded recently that one is only given so many chances in life and if you miss them, they may not necessarily be repeated."
She says this when Mrs. Crawley asks about the Russian prince with whom Aunt Violet is considering embarking on a dalliance, if not a full blown affair.


For some people this consciousness of the sands running out drives them to travel. "There's a whole big planet out there and I've seen only a small part."  For others, it's the desire to leave their life behind, and to find a perfect village in Tuscany, an apartment in Paris or Lisbon, or Prague, where each morning dawns with unhurried pleasures, every meal a cause for celebration and every night a new wine (or pastry) to enjoy.



Each choice however, is a road taken, and walking down that road means others will remain unexplored. 

The problem with life is we are always, in some sense, ingenues pushing into uncharted seas. Even a seventy year old has never been seventy before, has no instruction manual for that phase of life.  

I just got an email from a man with whom I went to high school. He had been a dutiful student, gone home right after school and studied and got into Harvard, like a good worker ant, a nerd. He longed for certain girls, but never went for them, and now he rues missing those chances.  I had been more of a grasshopper in high school, did just enough school work but was not  focused on academic success as on sports, girls and adventure. Now he is fixated on our upcoming high school reunion, about which I'm ambivalent. High school was a long time ago. But he is insistent, almost frantic about getting people to return.  I suspect he is trying to go back and pick up the pieces, as if he can finally redeem those lost years, reconnect to those people he missed out on and live the life now he missed then.  He doesn't seem to have learned what Aunt Violet knows--if you miss the opportunity, there is no second chance. 

No road maps in life. We go forth boldly where we have never gone before. 

Emily Nussbaum on Jon Stewart and Joan Rivers

Writing in this week's remarkable 90th anniversary edition of the New Yorker, it is perhaps appropriate two of the most remarkable pieces are written by the television critic, Emily Nussbaum. In the age of the internet, Facebook, cable TV, Netflix, television has re-emerged as a dominant force in culture and values.

Commenting on Jon Stewart's decision to leave, she suggests the place he occupied:  "'The The Daily Show'  became a gathering place for the disenchanted--a place that let viewers know they weren't crazy." And she is certainly right about that. 

Thinking back to those dark days of George W. Bush's presidency, it is important to remember how the drumbeat to war obliterated rational discourse, save for "The Daily Show."  She notes: "Stewart was a valuable corrective: he revived the notion that satire might be an expression of anger or sadness, the product of high standards, not a nihilistic game for know-it-alls." 

Stewart's  brand, Nussbaum neatly summarizes, was "decency."
Of course, that was also his weakness: when he did his Washington rally against gridlock, there was the frustration of seeing what ailed Washington portrayed as a "case of bad manners and not deep-seated ideological differences about government and its place in the world." 

His critical innovation was the exploitation of "search technology."  His staff found clips of various politicians and assembled them into "brutal montages--to expose lies that might have gone unremarked."

In the end, "that kind of digging, of disrespecting authority, was a model for reinventing journalism, not comedy," Nussbaum says. The Phantom is not sure it was all that, or that the "Daily Show" changed much in straight journalism. The executive producer of the "News Hour" once told the Phantom the New Hour staff loved "The Daily Show."  The Phantom was too polite to ask, "Then why don't you learn from it? Why do you treat Michele Bachmann as someone with a point of view which deserves a respectful hearing, when she says the woman in the parking lot told Bachmann her daughter got autism from a vaccination?"

Nussbaum is more adroit when she analyzes Joan Rivers. 
"Rivers had been the purveyor of a harsh Realpolitik, one based on her experience: looks mattered. If you got cut off from access to men and money--and from men as the route to money--you were dead in the water." 
Nussbaum encapsulates her insult comedy persona as an act based on "self-loathing, in the tradition of older female comics," but that loathing extended to other women who fell behind in the game. A River's line: Kate Winslet, nominated for an Academy Award, had sunk the Titanic with her fat arms. "She was the body cop who circled the flaws on every other powerful woman--she announced who was fat, who had no chin."

And that, Nussbaum finds deeply disquieting.

"But don't you think men really like intelligence?" Johnny Carson asked Rivers.
"No man has put his hand up a woman's dress looking for a library card," Rivers retorts.

Rivers, Nussbaum says, was a "fiery pragmatist...Men Are Stupid...They Like Big Boobs."

But, for the Phantom, the problem with Rivers is, she really did not know men. Or at least, she knew only one kind of man, only one culture, and not the newly emerged counter culture. 

"A girl can't call. Girl, you have to wait for the phone to ring, right?"

Actually, wrong.

Speaking from what may be a limited and atypical  experience, the Phantom has to object.  He will concede, from his callow youth, the Phantom had to see something physically attractive in a woman--her blue eyes maybe, the way her hair caught the light maybe, something--but other flaws (hips a big too broad of beam or arms too ample) were nothing more than distinctive attributes, if she had the far more important characteristics of nerve, energy and simply being funny.

Rivers misses the key insight from that Louis C.K. scene in which Louis C.K. rebuffs the advances of an overweight waitress.  "You know, the reason you aren't interested?" the waitress observes, cooly:  "I'm fat. But, more important, you are fat.  You know what? Good looking guys, guys with movie star good looks, come in here all the time and those are the guys who flirt with me. It's the fat slobs who won't even look me in the eye.  It's the losers who won't give me a tumble."

For Rivers, small breasts were a curse which thwarted any ambition of landing the big fish. But, as Lewis Black observed: "You know, most female breasts are really beautiful." They can be small, like Goldie Hawn's or big; it really doesn't matter. So why all this concern about big breasts?  As Black says, "They have surgery to make perfectly beautiful small breasts into beautiful big breasts. I don't get it."

The Phantom is  totally with C.K. and Blackon this.  The Phantom cannot say he even notices a woman's breasts.  What strikes him, early on at least, is the total package, the gestalt, how the woman carries it off. Some women are all bubbly Goldie Hawn; others are ice princess Grace Kelly, who only listen and respond minimally, while they observe you mercilessly. Both can be very attractive. But, trying to describe what turned you on about a woman, you never mentioned any of the things Joan Rivers mentioned. She really did not know what drew men to women. 

Eventually, a woman has to make her move, just as surely as a man does. The girl who waits to be called is really, at core,  pretty uninteresting.  That sort of female passivity lost its allure when Scarlet O'Hara grabbed Ashley in the library and told him how she felt and what she wanted.  To look at college campuses today, one would think the new paradigm is it is the woman who should kiss the man, not the other way round, at least if you want to be politically correct. 

Then again, college campuses may be the anomaly. The fact remains, the girl whose only option is to look so pretty the phone will ring is a very 1950's idea.

Somehow, Joan Rivers missed that.