That elected officials will lie, dissemble and reverse course to avoid a proper public accounting is no remarkable thing.  Politicians, bless their hearts, are very much akin to those fabled pigeons in B.F. Skinner’s boxes.  If they peck diligently at the little metal bar, they expect to receive — every two or four or six years — another food pellet, or failing that, a painful electrical charge.

It’s no wonder that such constricted and vulnerable creatures gravitate toward reptilian moments.  Other than to let the lower brain hold sway, how can an elected officials be sure to acquire the certain and scheduled pleasure and avoid the certain and scheduled pain?

Often, the lies are nuanced and careful, lodged as they are in relative safety of vague generalities and uncertain facts.  An equivocation works best when there isn’t a long, contradictory reality trailing behind.  But every now and then, someone lets go of something so bald, so shameless that it’s just plain amusing, if not a little inspiring.

Read more →

A month back I ventured a brief post on this site in which I expressed my astonishment at the spectacle of a multi-millionaire presidential candidate assuring Americans that he had paid no less than 13 percent taxes.  It generated some commentary back and forth.  But as a startling addendum, we must now consider Mr. Romney’s comments at a private fundraising event at which he didn’t know he was being surreptitiously videtaped, with the tape now leaked to Mother Jones magazine and hitting the internet on several sites:

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.  All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That, that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”

Read more →

Can we stand back and pause a short minute to take in the spectacle of a man who wants to be President of The United States, who wants us to seriously regard him as a paragon of the American civic ideal, declaiming proudly and in public that he has paid his taxes at a third of the rate normally associated with gentlemen of his economic benefit.

Stunning.

Am I supposed to congratulate this man?  Thank him for his good citizenship?  Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations?

Thirteen percent.  The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college.  If not, it was my first couple years as a newspaper reporter.  Since then, the paychecks have been just fine, thanks, and I don’t see any reason not to pay at the rate appropriate to my earnings, given that I’m writing the check to the same government that provided the economic environment that allowed for such incomes.

I can’t get over the absurdity of this moment, honestly:  Hey, I never paid less than thirteen percent.  I swear.  And no, you can’t examine my tax returns in any more detail.  But I promise you all, my fellow American citizens, I never once slipped to single digits.  I’m just not that kind of guy.

God.

This republic is just about over, isn’t it?

To remember him as we met him, twenty years ago, is to know everything that was lost, everything that never happened to a boy who could surprise you with his charm and wit and heart.

At fifteen, he was selling drugs on the corners of Fayette Street, but that doesn’t begin to explain who he was.  For the boys of Franklin Square — too many of them at any rate — slinging was little more than an adolescent adventure, an inevitable rite of passage.  And whatever sinister vision you might conjure of a street corner drug trafficker, try to remember that a fifteen-year-old slinger is, well, fifteen years old.

He was funny.  He could step back from himself and mock his own stances — “hard work,” he would say when I would catch him on a drug corner, “hard work being a black man in America.”  And then he would catch my eye and laugh knowingly at his presumption.  His imitations of white-authority voices — social workers, police officers, juvenile masters, teachers, reporters — were never less than pinpoint, playful savagery.  The price of being a white man on Fayette Street and getting to know DeAndre McCullough was to have your from-the-other-America pontifications pulled and scalpeled apart by a manchild with an uncanny ear for hypocrisy and cant.

He could be generous, and loyal. I remember him rushing out before Christmas to spend his corner money on gifts for his brother, nieces and nephews — knowing that his mother wasn’t going to get it done that year. I remember the moments of quiet affection he demonstrated when his mother was at her lowest ebb, telling her gently that she was better than this, that she could rise again. And, too, I remember his stoic, certain forgiveness of his father, who moved wraith-like around those same corners, lost in an addiction he could never defeat.

“I really feel like he’s at peace now,” DeAndre said after Gary’s funeral, explaining that his father was too gentle for the corners, too delicate a soul to be out there along Fayette Street. His father was never going to be what he was. Not ever again.  DeAndre said this with no malice, in a voice that was as loving as any words I ever heard him speak.

Read more →

So I am standing today with my son outside the cathedral in Pisa, Italy staring at the famous tower and watching it do what it does best in the world.  And my son, who understands hard-science, practical stuff better than I ever will, takes in the spectacle and says, more or less, “Woah, that is truly a mess.  Amazing.”

And he smiles, glad to have seen such an oddity.

Me?  I’m supposed to be the pessimist.  I’m the guy who is reputedly drawn to a constant parsing of human failure.   The Leaning Tower should be pretty much in my philsophical wheelhouse, right?

Instead, I’m standing there thinking of the taller belltower in Firenze, or the Great Fire Monument in London, or the Shot Tower in Baltimore, or the Space Needle in Seattle, or the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings in New York.  I’m thinking to myself, “It’s a Homeric fucking triumph that every other one doesn’t just tilt on over.  It’s a victory for all of humanity that this one Italian edifice is world famous for doing what other structures just don’t seem to do.

Maybe there’s cause for hope.  I dunno.  This bears some more thought, anyway.

*          *          *

And while we sit here in Tuscany, shoveling fresh cinghiale carpaccio and mozzarella into our gullets, then washing same down with chianti classico, and finishing with bacio gelati, we are informed by text messages from all over New Orleans that the Hubig’s bakery, home of the sacred pies of that same name, is burning.  A five-alarm blaze.

As a family, we are of course overwhelmed by a guilt-sensation not unlike that of longtime lovers caught en flagrante with fresher, more exotic paramours.   My wife’s immediate hyperbole:  First Katrina, then BP.  Now this.

I assume the Louisiana National Guard has been called out to provide an armed cordon sanitare around Angelo Brocato’s and Sucre.  Damn.

As someone whose Mardi Gras costume a year ago was Savory Simon (!), the Hubig’s mascot, with my one-year-old daughter accessorized as a pillow-cased Sweet Potato pie, I sincerely hope, in all seriousness, that the bakery carries full fire and casualty insurance.  And, indeed, that the policy is with a company that provides a more honorable response than those seen after the flood seven years ago.

Hubig’s is just one of those small, but resonant touchstones.  Sad day in the Bywater, truly.  I know a lot of people in New Orleans,  along with many others elsewhere, are feeling down.

*             *             *

On a day in the Pompeii ruins, on the last summer vacation with my son before he heads to college, the eighteen-year-old scion saved the Pompeiian bordello, with its pornographic imagery carved above the stalls, for last.   It was a seasoned touch on his part, something to let me know he has grown up and that the family dynamic is ever-changing.

He also went into town one morning and bought a bottle of wine.

Like it ain’t no thing.

*           *            *

Pies at Ancien Pizzeria de Michele in Napoli.

Been eating this stuff my whole life.  Except I haven’t.

Marinara or Margherita.  Those are the choices.  And it is enough for a lifetime.

And by the way, Napoli is my Italian default.  Tuscany is beautiful and gracious, but if I have to make my way in this country for any length of time, my inevitable retreat and redoubt will be decidedly Neapolitan.  Lots of trash, rock ‘n’ roll graffitti, loud, raucous street life, old ladies leaning out second-floor windows, shirtless kids kicking soccer balls and breaking soda bottles.  Crime stories on the front page.  Complaints about ordinary corruption.  And they know what to do with seafood.  Outside of a news stand near the port, two guys in muscle shirts tried to sell me a hot iPad.

In short, Naples — bless her — is the Baltimore of the Mediterranean.