I see there is now an annual search for Britain's best Fish and Chip shop. I believe the first ever search for Britain's best Fish and Chip shop was conducted by the TV programme, Braden's Week. I think Esther Rantzen started her career there. This was in the sixties and the prize went to the Dolphin, a chip shop on Showell Green Lane in Sparkhill, Birmingham. The winner of this coveted prize then changed its name to - I kid you not - Mustafa chip. It was owned then, and for many years after, by a Cypriot family who kept the old Dolphin sign above the new Mustafa sign. I saw the children of those Cypriot immigrants grow into adults and become parents themselves. The chip shop is still there, owned by Asian immigrants and their British children and renamed, though the new name escapes me. They have expanded the menu - I must check if they still have the large jar of pickled onions on the counter - and cater to a significantly Asian clientele and the chips are just as good. My dad always brought a bag home after a few pints on a Saturday evening, just in time for Match of the Day. When I am home now I like to get a bag after a few pints and share them with him. No one relishes Mustafa chips like my old man. I was a salt only man for a long time but have shifted to the full salt and vinegar. Must be my need for a little gall with my spud.
So great were the chips from Mustafa that my friends and I created the Mustafarian religion for the worship of deep fat frying. There was little dogma and there were few rules. Even the eating of chips from other establishments was allowed. One of my friends was the closest thing to a Mustafarian apostate - he liked Kentucky Fried Chicken, which could only be had in one of the posher neighbourhoods - and we still allowed him to worship at the Temple of Grease. Perhaps that sums Birmingham up as much as anything - the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise was in a posh neighbourhood. I reckon Mustafa, the Public Library and the Catholic church and school are the only businesses that have not changed significantly in all these years. There was a Polish tailor down the street a bit who closed up shop a few years ago and I remember how sad I felt on my first visit after his departure. His shop was next to the Territorial Army barracks - that is still there, of course. Guns and batter.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
End of 2008. I was reading through obituaries today and realized that many people I thought had died last year in fact died in 2008. If I can’t remember the simple things how am I supposed to remember the big things? Like pomegranate seeds when I go shopping. My daughter loves pomegranate seeds. And olives. And capers. She will inevitably grow into someone who likes her martini shaken and not stirred. Pinter is the biggest loss. From a purely practical view he was finished writing and directing and seemed only to be a happy husband, a singular achievement in itself. It seems he was a less happy father. Not for any of us equally inadequate fathers to judge, of course, but we feel that pain more strongly than for other attachments. There would have been no more plays and no more productions but it is the absence that hurts regardless of productivity. My father and mother are decades past any kind of providing for their children but their inevitable loss looms ever greater as the days pass. That is the great absence for all of us. Paul Newman is gone, though not Hud or Cool Hand Luke – What we have here is a failure to communicate – or the great good he did. I realize that somewhere an architect is mourning the passing of some practitioner of his or her trade while I mourn those of mine. Oddly, I was sitting having coffee with an English director the day before Pinter’s funeral, which he was attending the next day after his long flight home, and we were joined by the granddaughter of Robert Shaw. The toilet of the house where my friend was staying blocked up while I was there and I ended my visit with a plunger in my hand. Los Angeles is a strange place.
One of my last memories of 2008 is of a visit to a bookstore with my daughter. We had been at the pictures as we old fogeys call films, an entertaining piece of fluff that will sit with me for about a nanosecond. To my great joy my daughter had asked before the film if we could go to the bookstore afterwards. The cinema is in an outdoor mall of faux splendor though its very outdooriness puts it above the great gaggle of indoor concrete monsters which generally send me into a mild catatonia in seconds. And it has a decent enough bookstore though they are all giant warehouses these days. My daughter knows the mall and the bookstore and she ran – yes, ran – to the bookstore after the film and scrambled up the escalators and straight to the kids’ department. I found myself leafing through an Esquire magazine reading an interview with Clint Eastwood where he dropped pearls of wisdom about self reliance and how the US has become a place where everybody sues because they fell down or burned their finger or got caught in the rain and I found myself agreeing with him. I looked up to find my daughter – she’s seven – sitting on the floor reading from several books in turn and I realized that I had succeeded in the one thing that I believed I needed to achieve for my daughter. Well, to help my daughter achieve. She can read. I always knew she would walk and, unlike most of the other proud parents who hover as their children take their first tentative steps and glow with unearned pride, I found that whole walking thing tedious. They fall over, you pick them up. They fall over, you pick them up. I admit that her first steps – I remember them well, they were to the accompaniment of India Arie’s “Brown Skin” and I howled with love and enthusiasm – were glorious but I find most of the developmental stages are more of a relief than anything else. You fear they will never sit up, eat solid food, walk, talk and so on and the overarching emotion for me is relief when they do. But reading, oh, that’s something else entirely. Because they have to work at it, it’s not instinctive. Our house, particularly when she was little, was engulfed in books. (We did some “work” on the house and now a lot of the books are out of sight, which is lovely in many ways but I miss them sometimes. I often visit them in the room downstairs). We read to her, we read when in her vicinity, we took her to the bookstore so she could see where books came from and that we took great care in selecting books for her and let her choose her own books from very early on. Reading is the key to the world. I genuinely believed – and believe still – that even if my child comes to ignore me (which she will, but only for a decade or so if I am lucky) or even to dislike me and blame me for whatever ills befall her and refuses to acknowledge anything good I have done for her, I have given her the world. She can now learn anything she needs to learn. Worlds have opened for her and she can disappear from this one and reappear in someone else’s. In Narnia. In Middle Earth. In Tsarist Russia. In deepest Africa. In shallowest California. And so, in this year that brought us one of the great moments in American History, that, almost, sees the end of one of the most disastrous eras in that history; in this uncertain economic time, this era of shrinking, my daughter can read. For her, now, there is the possibility of expansion, of growing, of becoming more. She can read. She has genuine autonomy and she really can know more than her parents. I cannot think of anything that has given me greater joy.
One of my last memories of 2008 is of a visit to a bookstore with my daughter. We had been at the pictures as we old fogeys call films, an entertaining piece of fluff that will sit with me for about a nanosecond. To my great joy my daughter had asked before the film if we could go to the bookstore afterwards. The cinema is in an outdoor mall of faux splendor though its very outdooriness puts it above the great gaggle of indoor concrete monsters which generally send me into a mild catatonia in seconds. And it has a decent enough bookstore though they are all giant warehouses these days. My daughter knows the mall and the bookstore and she ran – yes, ran – to the bookstore after the film and scrambled up the escalators and straight to the kids’ department. I found myself leafing through an Esquire magazine reading an interview with Clint Eastwood where he dropped pearls of wisdom about self reliance and how the US has become a place where everybody sues because they fell down or burned their finger or got caught in the rain and I found myself agreeing with him. I looked up to find my daughter – she’s seven – sitting on the floor reading from several books in turn and I realized that I had succeeded in the one thing that I believed I needed to achieve for my daughter. Well, to help my daughter achieve. She can read. I always knew she would walk and, unlike most of the other proud parents who hover as their children take their first tentative steps and glow with unearned pride, I found that whole walking thing tedious. They fall over, you pick them up. They fall over, you pick them up. I admit that her first steps – I remember them well, they were to the accompaniment of India Arie’s “Brown Skin” and I howled with love and enthusiasm – were glorious but I find most of the developmental stages are more of a relief than anything else. You fear they will never sit up, eat solid food, walk, talk and so on and the overarching emotion for me is relief when they do. But reading, oh, that’s something else entirely. Because they have to work at it, it’s not instinctive. Our house, particularly when she was little, was engulfed in books. (We did some “work” on the house and now a lot of the books are out of sight, which is lovely in many ways but I miss them sometimes. I often visit them in the room downstairs). We read to her, we read when in her vicinity, we took her to the bookstore so she could see where books came from and that we took great care in selecting books for her and let her choose her own books from very early on. Reading is the key to the world. I genuinely believed – and believe still – that even if my child comes to ignore me (which she will, but only for a decade or so if I am lucky) or even to dislike me and blame me for whatever ills befall her and refuses to acknowledge anything good I have done for her, I have given her the world. She can now learn anything she needs to learn. Worlds have opened for her and she can disappear from this one and reappear in someone else’s. In Narnia. In Middle Earth. In Tsarist Russia. In deepest Africa. In shallowest California. And so, in this year that brought us one of the great moments in American History, that, almost, sees the end of one of the most disastrous eras in that history; in this uncertain economic time, this era of shrinking, my daughter can read. For her, now, there is the possibility of expansion, of growing, of becoming more. She can read. She has genuine autonomy and she really can know more than her parents. I cannot think of anything that has given me greater joy.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
I want to write something about Obama’s election and find that I am simultaneously devoid of thought and overwhelmed by its significance. When the radio announcer declared that Obama had won Pennsylvania and, therefore, given the election to Obama, it was a few minutes after five on Tuesday afternoon. I was pulling into the drive through of In ‘N’ Out burger and my daughter and her friend were in the back seat of the car. My daughter and her friend always have the same things. Cheeseburger, just the meat, cheese and bun, one has a lemonade the other a milk shake. Chocolate, appropriately enough. I always have a strawberry shake and refused to change to chocolate even for Obama. Remember, I was in a drive through, one of the least ecologically sound things a person can do. Despite my enthusiastic, emotional, gut churning vote for Obama on Tuesday morning I was still a polluter and a fruit drinker. We waited an hour to vote, mingled with the neighbors, knew that the world was about to change. Yes, despite the fact that the three of us in that car, in that line of cars at the burger joint, were doing exactly what we had done on our previous visits, despite the fact that the sun would go down at its predicted time, that declaration of Obama’s win in Pennsylvania, denying McCain his only path to victory, changed our lives forever. I wept. The burgers came, the fries came, the shakes came and they were as good as ever, those unchangingly excellent products of In ‘N’ Out and the world shifted on its axis.
When the call was made that Obama had won – after the polls closed on the West coast - the TV flashed pictures of Grant Park in Chicago where two hundred thousand people gathered to await Obama’s acceptance speech. In the frame, almost completely filling it, was an African American woman who had collapsed and was doubled over on her knees weeping uncontrollably. It was an entirely appropriate response, the only one possible, perhaps. The sheer weight of history, the unfathomable reality that the United States of America, a country whose Constitution enumerated the value of an African as three fifths of a human being, a country that had beaten and raped and shackled millions upon millions of Africans and their descendants, whose Capitol was built by slaves, whose shining city on a hill was polished by black hands, had elected an African American as its President. Collapse and the mingling of joy and grief, tears for the finest hour and the lost souls, this inevitably and unavoidably adulterated euphoria, these are what I will remember from Tuesday November the fourth two thousand and eight. And my daughter filling in a map of the states with red and blue dots to note the way each state had voted and her falling asleep as Obama came to the microphone. What we forget is that the emancipation of the slaves, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, freed us all. Before he got those two acts through Congress, Lyndon Johnson spoke to the nation about civil rights. The speech was televised and Martin Luther King Jr. and his aides gathered to watch it. Johnson was not a great prepared speaker but his words were strong and forceful and he talked of the marchers and of the song that they sang – We Shall Overcome – and he ended the speech with those words, “We shall overcome”. To hear the American President speak those words to a country mired in the horrors of the civil rights struggle, to say to a vastly white population that they would now have to accept all Americans as their equals under the law by quoting that song was as momentous as Obama’s election, possibly more so. In his seat in the corner of the room where he watched the speech Martin Luther King wept. On this day he would have wept again, a mixture of grief and joy and, perhaps, have thought for at least one shining moment, We Have Overcome.
When the call was made that Obama had won – after the polls closed on the West coast - the TV flashed pictures of Grant Park in Chicago where two hundred thousand people gathered to await Obama’s acceptance speech. In the frame, almost completely filling it, was an African American woman who had collapsed and was doubled over on her knees weeping uncontrollably. It was an entirely appropriate response, the only one possible, perhaps. The sheer weight of history, the unfathomable reality that the United States of America, a country whose Constitution enumerated the value of an African as three fifths of a human being, a country that had beaten and raped and shackled millions upon millions of Africans and their descendants, whose Capitol was built by slaves, whose shining city on a hill was polished by black hands, had elected an African American as its President. Collapse and the mingling of joy and grief, tears for the finest hour and the lost souls, this inevitably and unavoidably adulterated euphoria, these are what I will remember from Tuesday November the fourth two thousand and eight. And my daughter filling in a map of the states with red and blue dots to note the way each state had voted and her falling asleep as Obama came to the microphone. What we forget is that the emancipation of the slaves, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, freed us all. Before he got those two acts through Congress, Lyndon Johnson spoke to the nation about civil rights. The speech was televised and Martin Luther King Jr. and his aides gathered to watch it. Johnson was not a great prepared speaker but his words were strong and forceful and he talked of the marchers and of the song that they sang – We Shall Overcome – and he ended the speech with those words, “We shall overcome”. To hear the American President speak those words to a country mired in the horrors of the civil rights struggle, to say to a vastly white population that they would now have to accept all Americans as their equals under the law by quoting that song was as momentous as Obama’s election, possibly more so. In his seat in the corner of the room where he watched the speech Martin Luther King wept. On this day he would have wept again, a mixture of grief and joy and, perhaps, have thought for at least one shining moment, We Have Overcome.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Monday, August 4, 2008
Fifty
This is the last day on which my daughter’s age is the square root of my age. I have realized this just today, so have only a few hours in which to contemplate it. Tomorrow, August 5th 2008, I turn fifty. The square root of fifty is something with too many digits I suspect. Besides contemplating the ratio of my daughter’s age to mine I suppose I should be contemplating the Great Moments Of My Life. Or the Moments That Changed My Life or Shaped My Life. It’s all quite accidental probably though I do detect a certain pattern, not of deliberate Fate but of certain opportunities taken and certain pitfalls avoided. The opportunities missed and the pitfalls into which I have fallen, let us pass over. I have a habit of going back to seemingly quite small incidents. I was living in London and had been fired from a job (yet again) and went in search of something to pay the rent. I interviewed for a short term position overseeing a painting competition. Of course they asked if I had any experience in fine art or painting (the two, presumably, not necessarily coinciding) and I said I did not. Because I needed a job quickly I took the first offered, working in a wine bar in Covent Garden. The painting people called back, to my astonishment, and offered me the job there. I would have much preferred to spend my time with artists and because I have a knack for convincing people that I am competent, even truly efficient and dedicated, I imagine I would have found myself immersed in the world of London Fine Art. I might even have stayed in that grey and lovely city, though the UK at the time was a place of anger and violence, most of it perpetrated by the government and I was exceedingly unhappy there. So I served the avaricious new Conservatives their Rioja, a word none of them could pronounce, and planned to get out.
My first memory is of visiting my Uncle Bill on his deathbed. I didn’t know it was his deathbed, I was just doing my duty, but he died soon after. Bill and Aunt Alice gave me a child’s knife and fork. Which had blue handles. I like to think that having this as a first memory has shaped my life. I’m sure that’s nonsense, but nonsense is as true as anything else. My big brother mentioned something about the street where I was born while I was home this year. I thought I couldn’t remember anything about the three years we lived on that street but he mentioned a neighbor who used to cut our hair with hand clippers. I had this sudden surge of memory. Hughie Cooney was that neighbor and we used to play in some old abandoned houses at the top of the street, on the Stratford Road. We called them the haunted houses. We used old mattresses as trampolines and played Doctor. Hughie’s kids, Mick and Veronica, were always there. They knocked those houses down and built apartments. Even though they went up about forty years ago I still call them the new flats. Veronica is now terminally ill I learned on this trip. I am still trying to accept that. I think we were bouncing on a pretend trampoline about ten minutes ago.
When I’m home I usually stop in to the church I attended as a kid, where my mom and dad still go. I always have a very strong memory as I pass the priests’ house next door of standing on the semi-circular step in front of that house waiting for the housekeeper to open the door to our ring of the bell. My mom and I that is. I’d told mom and dad that I wanted to be a priest and so we went to see the parish priest, Canon Hirrel, a large, intimidating Englishman – you have to remember everybody where we lived was Irish, maybe an Indian or Pakistani or a West Indian family or two, but mostly Irish – and Hirrel was doubly intimidating, being educated and an Englishman. No one can talk down to others like a pseudo-educated English Catholic priest when dealing with Irish people straight off the boat. I loved the story of My Uncle Pakey, one of those single men who stood at the back of the church, ready for the run out the church door to the pub as soon as communion started, and the Sunday that Canon Hirrel approached him and the group of similarly single and thirsty men at the back. At Hirrel’s insistence the others had moved into the pews but Pakey stood his ground and Hirrel insisted one more time – Mr. Lee, please take a seat. Pakey hitched up his trousers and uttered the immortal phrase – Bollocks to you, Canon – and left the premises. My mother and I were ushered into the presence of the man defeated by my uncle, though I knew nothing then of the incident. He was delighted I felt I had a vocation. He suggested I take the exam for a boarding school in Staffordshire, fifty or so miles from home, where I would be educated while being groomed for the priesthood. As I remember he had gone there. So I did and passed with flying colors (where does that phrase come from, the Navy?). I learned Latin, the Catechism, that people can be inordinately cruel to each other and equally kind. That there is no way to describe the feeling of homesickness a boy has who faces the privations of a down at heel boarding school which delivers far less of an education than it promises and far more punishment and belittlement than most people we know have experienced. Or maybe they have, but at least it was at the hands of their parents whose job it is to kick us while we are down.
Maybe a life should be measured in jobs. One of my first and still most hated was in a car silencer warehouse. After leaving the school of Latin and belittlement, before starting college. I remember my first pay packet was eighteen pounds and forty six pence. I loathed almost everybody there and was loathed in return. When one foreman threatened to fire me I begged him to do so. He didn’t in the end. I have packed razor blades. Changed light bulbs. Cleaned toilets. Picked fruit. Sold tickets. Cleaned dishes. Cooked burgers. Worked for a lobbyist. Moved furniture. Worked in law offices, insurance companies, schools. Been a publicist. Worked in bars. Worked construction. Worked for an animation company. Painted houses. At the razor blade plant the foreman, looking disappointedly at a group of us working a packing machine and failing even in that, said, “I’ve worked this machine, a monkey could do this job”. I said, fearing that I would regret it forever if I did not say it, “Well, you’re proof of that.” Next job was laying cable for cable TV. I liked that job. I worked in administration for a theatre and became great friends with the manager there. We went drinking a lot. One morning he said – that drink last night went straight to my head. I replied – Well, Nature abhors a vacuum. He is still my closest friend. He interviewed me for the job because he thought a man named Lee must be Chinese and it would look good on the affirmative action/racial diversity report. He makes me laugh like no other person on earth. I gave up a perfectly good job changing light bulbs to go into theatre. I’d even unionized the light bulb changers – yes, there were several of us. They make a good wage now and have fabulous benefits. I have never loved anything as much as the theatre. It has given me everything valuable, including two of my wives. And with one of them I have become a father and loved another human being more than I ever thought was possible.
I am building a shed in the back yard. That’s what I will be doing on my fiftieth birthday. With help from a friend or two. It is almost beyond imagining that I live in Los Angeles, that I own a house here, that I am enjoying building a shed. I will look forward to my daughter’s coming home and my wife’s return from work and I will have dinner with them and a friend or two and a glass of wine or two. I have said, now and again, that if I had had my life to choose, I would almost certainly have chosen this one.
My first memory is of visiting my Uncle Bill on his deathbed. I didn’t know it was his deathbed, I was just doing my duty, but he died soon after. Bill and Aunt Alice gave me a child’s knife and fork. Which had blue handles. I like to think that having this as a first memory has shaped my life. I’m sure that’s nonsense, but nonsense is as true as anything else. My big brother mentioned something about the street where I was born while I was home this year. I thought I couldn’t remember anything about the three years we lived on that street but he mentioned a neighbor who used to cut our hair with hand clippers. I had this sudden surge of memory. Hughie Cooney was that neighbor and we used to play in some old abandoned houses at the top of the street, on the Stratford Road. We called them the haunted houses. We used old mattresses as trampolines and played Doctor. Hughie’s kids, Mick and Veronica, were always there. They knocked those houses down and built apartments. Even though they went up about forty years ago I still call them the new flats. Veronica is now terminally ill I learned on this trip. I am still trying to accept that. I think we were bouncing on a pretend trampoline about ten minutes ago.
When I’m home I usually stop in to the church I attended as a kid, where my mom and dad still go. I always have a very strong memory as I pass the priests’ house next door of standing on the semi-circular step in front of that house waiting for the housekeeper to open the door to our ring of the bell. My mom and I that is. I’d told mom and dad that I wanted to be a priest and so we went to see the parish priest, Canon Hirrel, a large, intimidating Englishman – you have to remember everybody where we lived was Irish, maybe an Indian or Pakistani or a West Indian family or two, but mostly Irish – and Hirrel was doubly intimidating, being educated and an Englishman. No one can talk down to others like a pseudo-educated English Catholic priest when dealing with Irish people straight off the boat. I loved the story of My Uncle Pakey, one of those single men who stood at the back of the church, ready for the run out the church door to the pub as soon as communion started, and the Sunday that Canon Hirrel approached him and the group of similarly single and thirsty men at the back. At Hirrel’s insistence the others had moved into the pews but Pakey stood his ground and Hirrel insisted one more time – Mr. Lee, please take a seat. Pakey hitched up his trousers and uttered the immortal phrase – Bollocks to you, Canon – and left the premises. My mother and I were ushered into the presence of the man defeated by my uncle, though I knew nothing then of the incident. He was delighted I felt I had a vocation. He suggested I take the exam for a boarding school in Staffordshire, fifty or so miles from home, where I would be educated while being groomed for the priesthood. As I remember he had gone there. So I did and passed with flying colors (where does that phrase come from, the Navy?). I learned Latin, the Catechism, that people can be inordinately cruel to each other and equally kind. That there is no way to describe the feeling of homesickness a boy has who faces the privations of a down at heel boarding school which delivers far less of an education than it promises and far more punishment and belittlement than most people we know have experienced. Or maybe they have, but at least it was at the hands of their parents whose job it is to kick us while we are down.
Maybe a life should be measured in jobs. One of my first and still most hated was in a car silencer warehouse. After leaving the school of Latin and belittlement, before starting college. I remember my first pay packet was eighteen pounds and forty six pence. I loathed almost everybody there and was loathed in return. When one foreman threatened to fire me I begged him to do so. He didn’t in the end. I have packed razor blades. Changed light bulbs. Cleaned toilets. Picked fruit. Sold tickets. Cleaned dishes. Cooked burgers. Worked for a lobbyist. Moved furniture. Worked in law offices, insurance companies, schools. Been a publicist. Worked in bars. Worked construction. Worked for an animation company. Painted houses. At the razor blade plant the foreman, looking disappointedly at a group of us working a packing machine and failing even in that, said, “I’ve worked this machine, a monkey could do this job”. I said, fearing that I would regret it forever if I did not say it, “Well, you’re proof of that.” Next job was laying cable for cable TV. I liked that job. I worked in administration for a theatre and became great friends with the manager there. We went drinking a lot. One morning he said – that drink last night went straight to my head. I replied – Well, Nature abhors a vacuum. He is still my closest friend. He interviewed me for the job because he thought a man named Lee must be Chinese and it would look good on the affirmative action/racial diversity report. He makes me laugh like no other person on earth. I gave up a perfectly good job changing light bulbs to go into theatre. I’d even unionized the light bulb changers – yes, there were several of us. They make a good wage now and have fabulous benefits. I have never loved anything as much as the theatre. It has given me everything valuable, including two of my wives. And with one of them I have become a father and loved another human being more than I ever thought was possible.
I am building a shed in the back yard. That’s what I will be doing on my fiftieth birthday. With help from a friend or two. It is almost beyond imagining that I live in Los Angeles, that I own a house here, that I am enjoying building a shed. I will look forward to my daughter’s coming home and my wife’s return from work and I will have dinner with them and a friend or two and a glass of wine or two. I have said, now and again, that if I had had my life to choose, I would almost certainly have chosen this one.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Political Gold
Tony Shwarz died today. You have probably never heard of him and yet he has had a profound affect on your life. He created the single most famous political advertisement ever made. It was in 1964 and in the United States Lyndon Johnson was running for President against Barry Goldwater. Johnson was the incumbent by virtue of the death of John Kennedy and Goldwater was that creature that would one day run the US, a radical conservative. The Republican Party, whose banner Goldwater carried, had been something of a mildly socially conservative party with a strongly conservative fiscal policy. From a liberal point of view they had some attractive qualities - such as a reasonable approach to race relations compared to Southern Democrats. Goldwater, however, was something else. A crusading anti-Soviet hawk, he was known to boast of his willingness to wage nuclear war against the US's greatest enemy. Schwarz created what is known as "the Daisy ad". In it, a little girl pulls petals off of a daisy, counting them as she does so. A stentorian man's voice, treated with a slight echo effect, superimposes itself and we realize he is counting down rather than up, in contrast to the little girl. In the background we see the image of a nuclear weapon exploding. This ad, which ran once, is still considered the threshold moment of so-called negative politics. There was such a reaction to it that it was pulled immediately. If you have never seen it , you should, it still carries a hefty wallop. Though it was attacked as beyond the pale, Johnson went on to win the election in 1964 by the largest margin ever.
We are about to enter another general election here in the US and I am waiting with baited breath for the ads. I like to think of myself as someone who is not swayed by such messages, but that's probably because I make my mind up very early and do not waver. Admittedly, had Clinton won the nomination I would be voting Green, but I'm a reliable liberal Democratic voter, so it's Obama. What if I were undecided though? What would influence me? Would Schwarz's ad have made me think Goldwater was a nutcase? I watch that now and think about the "coding" in it, the unspoken nuance, the perceived message. Will I see and hear ads that are coded references to Obama's race? Already there is blatant reference to McCain's unsuitability because of his age. Is that fair? As someone pointed out recently, given the choice between two candidates, one of whom had been a Representative for five terms, a Senator for ten years, Secretary of Stae and Ambassador to Britain, the other a member of the Illinois legislature, whom would you choose? The first describes James Buchanan, one of the worst Presidents ever, the second describes Abraham Lincoln. The opposite might equally be true. What if Obama really is an empty suit? There's a notion - which actually holds true to some degree - that really bright people make bad presidents. Roosevelt, for instance was no intellectual and Woodrow Wilson was. Obama is very, very bright. I hope he's also smart.
I am always wrong in my political predictions but I'm going to risk this anyway - the moment John McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election occurred on Tuesday June 3rd. He gave a very bad - and badly received - speech. The Great Losing Moment was when he began complaining that Barack Obama was calling a McCain Presidency "a third Bush term". McCain complained, "why does he insist on saying this over and over?" Here's something Lyndon Johnson understood and John Kerry didn't - he complained about the "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" ads - never, ever, complain about the opposition's ads or their comments about you. Always respond with a more vicious and more wounding ad or comment. And, so,ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Obama by a landslide.
We are about to enter another general election here in the US and I am waiting with baited breath for the ads. I like to think of myself as someone who is not swayed by such messages, but that's probably because I make my mind up very early and do not waver. Admittedly, had Clinton won the nomination I would be voting Green, but I'm a reliable liberal Democratic voter, so it's Obama. What if I were undecided though? What would influence me? Would Schwarz's ad have made me think Goldwater was a nutcase? I watch that now and think about the "coding" in it, the unspoken nuance, the perceived message. Will I see and hear ads that are coded references to Obama's race? Already there is blatant reference to McCain's unsuitability because of his age. Is that fair? As someone pointed out recently, given the choice between two candidates, one of whom had been a Representative for five terms, a Senator for ten years, Secretary of Stae and Ambassador to Britain, the other a member of the Illinois legislature, whom would you choose? The first describes James Buchanan, one of the worst Presidents ever, the second describes Abraham Lincoln. The opposite might equally be true. What if Obama really is an empty suit? There's a notion - which actually holds true to some degree - that really bright people make bad presidents. Roosevelt, for instance was no intellectual and Woodrow Wilson was. Obama is very, very bright. I hope he's also smart.
I am always wrong in my political predictions but I'm going to risk this anyway - the moment John McCain lost the 2008 Presidential election occurred on Tuesday June 3rd. He gave a very bad - and badly received - speech. The Great Losing Moment was when he began complaining that Barack Obama was calling a McCain Presidency "a third Bush term". McCain complained, "why does he insist on saying this over and over?" Here's something Lyndon Johnson understood and John Kerry didn't - he complained about the "Swift Boat Veterans For Truth" ads - never, ever, complain about the opposition's ads or their comments about you. Always respond with a more vicious and more wounding ad or comment. And, so,ladies and gentlemen, I give you President Obama by a landslide.
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