Fallen Heroes, Lasting Work

Deaths of celebrities, it is said, come in threes.  That was certainly the case this past month for me, as three famous people who made an impact in my life, as well as the lives of others, passed away.  Not prematurely, thankfully.  All of them lived very full lives and left behind legacies that, although complicated in certain ways, will have a lasting positive impact on many people, especially in the arts.

I'll begin my discussion of those legacies with the member of the group who, for me, has perhaps the most complicated legacy:  Stan Lee, the co-creator of the Marvel comic-book universe.  The complicated part is, in fact, summed up in that word "co-creator."

Lee was a tremendous story-teller and promoter, who worked for many years in the comics business when comic books were considered a medium strictly for kids, and one no self-respecting adult would confess to having as a source of pride, let alone as a source of employment.  In fact, Lee admitted that there was a time when he was ashamed of the industry that ultimately made him both rich and famous.  Bur those riches and fame began to accumulate in the 1960s, a time when Lee sensed (correctly) that cultural boundaries were shifting, especially the ones that defined "high" and "low" culture.  He felt that there might be room in the comics for stories that dealt with topical issues and with the struggles of heroes who, while having super powers thrust upon them in a variety of ways, were still very human, with very human flaws and disappointments.

And so those superheroes became, over the course of the '60s and the decades that followed, household names to millions of comic-book readers, and, ultimately, mass-cultural phenomena when the technology of film making made it possible to show the adventures of these heroes in films and on TV.  And Lee's talent for story-telling made all of that possible.  As well as his talent for promotion.  He was not just Stan Lee, editor and writer.  He was Stan Lee of "Stan's Soapbox" in every Marvel book, using the space to promote current issues--and I'm not just talking about the ones with superheroes.  He was willing to jump into politics, which helped him to expand the Marvel market from grade schools to college campuses and beyond.  This is without a doubt the best-known, and best-written example, and one cited frequently in the many obituaries of Lee.

He also used his Soapbox to promote "the Bullpen," the small army of creative talent whose contributions to Marvel were no less memorable than Lee's.  This was especially true of the artists, who created the "look" that defined a highly visual medium and continues to do so down to the present.  And this, sadly, is where the legacy becomes complicated.  As Lee became more of a celebrity and, in the process, more of an executive, he became less of a colleague and more of a boss, one who was not there for his creative team when some of its members badly needed him.  This was most egregiously the case with Jack "King" Kirby, the artist who did more to define the Marvel "look" than anyone else.  When Kirby's heirs attempted to claim the copyright (and related royalties) to much of Kirby's work for Marvel, Lee supported Marvel's assertions that Kirby was an "employee" of Marvel and therefore didn't own the rights to his art.  He did this despite an earlier statement in a deposition to the opposite effect.

Ironically, then, Lee, like many of his co-creations, was a flawed hero, one who, in the case of Kirby and by extension other Marvel artists, through his co-creators under the proverbial bus at a point when they could have used his help in a significant way.  Does it make his live not worth celebrating?  Frankly, I'm not in a position to say that.  If I do, I'm effectively denying not only the value of his writing, but the value of the art by the artists he injured as well.  Together, they created books that helped children like me, children who had trouble fitting in to the world around them, feel that, one day, the world might be a place in which "fitting in" was possible.  They gave me the patience, and the confidence, that one did not have to be "like everyone else" in order to matter.  Today, no matter how badly the Lee-Kirby relationship ended, I, along with millions of others, have the two of them to thank for that.

Less complicated, perhaps, are the legacies of Douglas Rain and William Goldman.  Rain had established a solid career as a Shakespearean actor in Canada when Stanley Kubrick made a last-minute decision to cast him in the rule of HAL, the computer that wasn't programmed to keep a secret and then was given one to keep, leading him quite logically to try killing off all of the astronauts on the spaceship he was designed to operate.  While he may have been a last-minute choice, he was an absolutely inspired one.  Rain managed to combine the tonal neutrality one would expect from a machine with the quiet intensity of an entity experiencing intense conflict.  Even lines as simple as "I'm sorry, Dave.  I'm afraid I can't do that" were charged with a sinister effect that was as effortless as it was effective.  Rain's accomplishment has informed my efforts to develop a career in acting, by reminding me that acting is an art that must seem effortless to work, and that, when it does, there truly are no small parts.

As for Goldman, his work as a screenwriter and as a novelist speaks for itself.  Alas, when it came to the stage, he did not enjoy the same level of success he attained in those other arenas.  He wrote two shows for Broadway with his brother, James, who would go on to write the libretto for the Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies," and neither of those shows was, to put it mildly, a hit.  But Goldman found Broadway success in a very different way, by writing "The Season," a show-by-show analysis of the 1967-68 season on the Great White Way that used each show to analyze a different aspect of American theater.  Despite being 50 years old this year, "The Season" does not feel dated in the least; if anything, Goldman was especially prescient in foreseeing (in the last chapter, "What Kind Of Day Has It Been?") the demise of the impresario model of producing in favor of corporate/not-for-profit producing.  Thus, from Goldman's experience, I learned the value of mining one's failures in order to find a different kind of success.

I miss all three men very much, especially Lee and Rain, whom I will now never meet.  I got to see Goldman speak in my student days, during which he talked about his experiences at Oberlin (my alma mater as well), and we had a very brief exchange as a result.  I'm grateful for that memory.  But I'm even more grateful for the work all three men left behind, and the value that work will continue to have long after I'm gone.  I would be thrilled if anything I managed to do before I die managed to be a fraction as valuable as what Lee, Rain, and Goldman accomplished.

But I would be even more thrilled if we as a nation can get past the current wretched moment, and build a world worthy of what they accomplished.

It's Time For Democrats To Be Democrats; Or, More Unpacking Of The Midterms

I'm coming back to the midterms for this week's post, simply because there's a lot to unpack from the results, as well as the fact that we're still in the process of unpacking them.

I want to start with the bad Senate news for Democrats:  specifically, the losses in Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.  As things stand at the moment, the next Senate will have at least 51 Republicans and 47 Democrats.  The fact that it will be under Republican control in any case can be largely laid at the feet of the three incumbent Democrats who lost their seats:  Joe Donnelly, Heidi Heitkamp, and Claire McCaskill.  McCaskill made a post-election appearance on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program, in which she laid the blame for her defeat, and that of other Democrats, on the increasingly popular view that expertise (legislative, in her case) is on the decline as a quality people look for in deciding how to vote.

I don't disagree with her on that point entirely.  After all, a declining respect for the value of experience plays a large role in getting self-interested imbeciles like T**** in office, where they don't belong, but where their "outsider" status allows them to "shake things up" (usually, for the worse).  But I don't think the voters of Missouri "fired" her because she was inexperienced.  Rather, they did so because they tried to pretend that they wouldn't be Democrats if they were elected.  This was most notoriously tried by Heitkamp, who boasted in ads about how frequently she voted with T****, before she decided to roll the dice and bring out Resistance voters by voting against Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination.  But McCaskill wasn't much better; in a dead heat in the polls, unlike Heitkamp, she decided to run a series of commercials in which she proudly boasted that she wasn't one of those "crazy Democrats."  Presumable, this meant that she wouldn't stand for the things that Democrats now routinely stand for, despite the fact that those "things" poll very well.  Donnelly's campaigning was basically the same.

I can understand why, in purple-to-red states, moderating one's tone matters.  But it's possible to moderate your tone without moderating your substance.  If you do that as well, you end up with a political universe in which you have, for all practical purposes, two Republican Parties (as the late David Brinkley once pointed out).  Or, to use Harry Truman's formulation of this approach, given a difference between a Republican and a Republican, people will pick the Republican every time--by which he meant the real Republican, not the ashamed-to-be-a-Democrat.

Of course, at this point, this is little more than 20-20 hindsight for Democrats in Indiana, North Dakota, and Missouri.  But it is food for thought for the next election, which will be upon us sooner than you think.  Moderation as a political philosophy may be the media's favorite flavor of politics, even when they can't tell us what it tastes like.  But there's a lot to suggest in last week's results that it may not be a flavor that people want to buy, in any case.   After all, in Texas, Beto O'Rourke created a Senate race that none of the "experts" thought could possibly exist, and he did it in part by not shying away from progressive policy stances.  On the other hand, in Tennessee, Phil Breseden ran a more typical, Blue Dog, all-things-to-all-people campaign--and, despite being a popular former Governor, spectacularly lost to a bat-sh*t crazy Republican candidate who will help push the Senate event further to the right.

My point:  Maybe it's OK for Democrats to be Democrats going forward from here.  The key is to do what O'Rourke (no known relation, BTW) did in Texas to come within 3 percentage points of unseating Cruz, the Republican even other Republicans love to hate.  Go out to the people.  Get to know their concerns.  And explain what you have in your policy bag to help them.  Our bag has better ideas than the other sides' has.  Trust that.  And go help others to do the same.

Maybe it helps--or should help--that people are gradually coming around to our ideas.  On guns, for example.  And, even in California, the birthplace of the so-called "tax revolt," a referendum to repeal a new gas tax to fund infrastructure projects failed by ten percentage points.

Maybe the fact that they're coming around to our ideas is the reason why the only thing the Republican Party now stands for is dark money, gerrymandering, and straight-up voter suppression.  As of this writing, all three of those things have carried them across the finish line in the gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia.  Will they continue to do so in 2020?

As always, that's up to you.  Keep doing what you did this time.  Encourage others to do the same.  And, as Barack Obama, a real President suggested, be the change you want to see.

Light In The T**** Darkness

On Tuesday night of last week, I slept more soundly than I have slept in the past two years.

That's not an exaggeration.  Two years of the T**** nightmare has put more stress on me, my family, our business, and just about everyone we know than anything else that we can remember.  The knowledge that there will be at least some relief from that stress can't possibly be understated.

I had hoped, as I had in the 2016 election, for a Democratic "blowout," by which I specifically mean not the type of "blowout" we had in that election, where the Democrats were completely blown out of power.  Truthfully, I would not describe this election as a "blowout" for either side.  As of the time I'm writing this, it appears that the Republican hold on the Senate may grow at least a little bit.  The majority of states will still be under GOP control, to varying degrees (including, sadly, here in Maryland, where an amazing number of voters decided that mediocrity in the Governor's Mansion was just fine with them).  And, at least for the short term, T**** himself isn't going anywhere.

But, if you want a gauge by which to measure how much Tuesday's results, as well as the results that continue to trickle in from several states, have disrupted the D.C. status quo, T****'s behavior is an excellent one to use.

He fired his Attorney General, and replaced him with a loyalist of dubious constitutional standing, one he feels will protect him from Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian influence in his election.  He has publicly berated members of the media for daring to criticize him, suggesting that doing so is somehow unpatriotic, and even going so far as to revoke the press credentials of CNN's White House correspondent (something I don't recall being done even by Richard Nixon).  He has openly challenged the legitimacy of close elections in which votes are still being counted (and, in the case yet again of Florida, recounted), even to the point of suggesting that the counting should be frozen in favor of Republican candidates.  This latter suggestion is an unbelievable insult to men and women serving overseas, who are allowed an extra ten days to have their ballots received and counted.

And, in perhaps the ultimate insult to those men and women from a Commander-in-Chief, he failed to make a public appearance at a Paris military cemetery to commemorate the centennial of the armistice that ended World War I.  His excuse?  It was raining.  Lightly.  All of the other heads of state who had come for the ceremony somehow managed to suck it up and show up.  The only exception was the man more worried about his combover than about those who sacrificed to make his abominable Presidency possible.

As someone who lost an uncle in World War II, and with three other relatives who served in uniform (my father, my father-in-law, and my cousin), I have no words for this.  The public insult, the dereliction of duty, the unfathomable narcissism of this, can't truly be captured in any words.  And yet, it gets even worse:  Vladimir Putin was there, and for their public greeting of each other, T****'s face lit up as though he was a little boy on Christmas morning.  One is force to wonder whether T**** missed the cemetery ceremony to huddle with his Russian master and get fresh instructions.

All of this only magnifies my sense of relief that Tuesday's results ensure a House of Representatives that will, without any doubt, serve as a check not only on T****'s behavior, but also the actions of Cabinet officials and departments, and other agencies under the executive branch's control.  I have noticed that there has already been some degree of debate about whether or not the new House should focus on investigation or legislation.  Personally, I see no reason not to do both:  the need for the former speaks for itself, and the latter process, even if (as is likely) stymied by the Senate and/or T****, will at least help to set a Democratic agenda for 2020.

My other takeaways from last week's elections:

• I remember thinking, after the GOP wave election of 1994, that the outcome was sort of the second wave of the Reagan Revolution.  The comfort level people developed during the 1980s in voting Republican reached a stage in the 1990s where people were willing to take a chance on congressional candidates bearing the same essential message.  The New Deal era was, as of that point, over, and the Reagan Era, with a Democratic President whose authority was compromised by his personal life, was on the ascent.  We now have record numbers of women and people of color in the next majority of the People's House.  Does this foreshadow the beginning of an Obama Era?  Time will tell.  Even the losses produced rising stars like Amy McGrath and Beto O'Rourke (no relation, to my knowledge) who, hopefully, will stay in the process and run again soon.
• Meanwhile, in not only Florida but also Georgia, the election results are being challenged by Democrats as a consequence of actions by the Republican candidates, both of which reflect conflicts of interests on their part.  In the case of the Georgia gubernatorial election, the Republican running was also (until a few days ago) the secretary of state overseeing the election process and disqualifying large numbers of voters, while in Florida, the sitting governor is attempting to interfere with the recount of the elections for the Senate seat (for which he was running), and for the man to replace him in the Governor's mansion.  Two more reasons to think of the GOP less as a political party, and more as a crime syndicate.
• Even if the Senate remains in Republican hands by a vote or two, it looks as if that outcome is largely due to the embarrassing process of putting a probable sexual assailant and perjurer on the Supreme Court.  At this rate, Mitch McCONnell may want to consider expanding the size of the Court simply so he'll always have a nominating process to use in skewering election results.  That's assuming he'll be around for a while, and that might be less than a guaranteed proposition--and not just because he's up for re-election in 2020.  Take a look.
• The gains that were made by the Democrats at the state level, combined with the pressure that can be applied by the new Democratic House, offers some hope that the systematic abuse of the redistricting and voting processes by Republicans in the past decade can at least begin to be dismantled.

But none of this will matter unless all of you stop treating Democratic waves as something that should only happen once every decade.  They need to happen every single election year.  Think about how different things would be regarding income inequality, climate change, immigration, the composition of our court system, if Obama (and Hillary Clinton, for that matter) had benefited from a steady succession of Democratic waves.  Never mind them, even; we all would have benefited.

Don't make voting a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Make it a habit.  It's the only way to ensure that Americans continue to make democracy a habit.  And the only way we're going to end the T****/GOP nightmare once and for all.

The Real "Caravans"

At 6:00 p.m., at the end of a very long work week, my wife was dead tired, and well into months of pain from a leg injury.  She ought to have sought treatment for the injury a long time ago, but has feared the possibility of a diagnosis and treatment that would prevent her from seeing law clients for weeks, if not longer.  On this particular day, she had hoped to spend some time catching up on work that was deferred by months of client appointments that seemed to have no end and whose beginning can probably be traced back to, say, roughly two years ago.

It wasn't meant to be, however.  The day of catch-up work had, instead, become a day of walk-in appointments.  Walk-ins are an experience she has gotten used to over the past 20-plus years and, until (again) about roughly two years ago, it had never been a significant source of stress.  Since then, it has grown to the point at which a heavy client day no longer consisted of six scheduled appointments, but something closer to six scheduled appointments and six walk-ins.

But, on this day, the walk-ins had come and gone, and it was 6:00.  She thought she could go home.  She turned off the downstairs lights in our office, dragged her injured leg back upstairs, and began to shut down the electronics in her office.  And that was when she heard it.

The sound of the outside office door, opening, and someone entering the lightless first floor.  It was yet another walk-in, determined to see her no matter what.

She very politely explained to him that she was getting ready to leave for the day, and that he would have to arrange to see her at another time.

He didn't move.

What else could she do?  She met with him, of course.

I said that all of this happened at the end of a long work week.

Did I mention that it happened at the end of a long work week that was, in fact, the end of a long calendar week?  And that the next work week would begin the very next day, on a Sunday?

Now, I am not describing all of this at this level of detail simply because it involves my wife, who (full disclosure) is also my partner in our law practice.  I am doing so because her practice area is immigration.  All of her clients are immigrants, in varying stages of documented status, from aspiring to expired.  All of her experiences, minus the part about the injured leg, are utterly common to virtually all American immigration lawyers in the first two years of the T**** nightmare.  And all of these clients, regardless of the status of their documentation, are painfully, needlessly scared to death.

To begin with, the overwhelming majority of undocumented immigrants in this country are not the so called "caravans" from Central America that T**** uses to whip up fear among his dwindling base of supporters.  (Actually, if you are willing to check more reliable sources of information that T****, the size of the current caravan is dwindling as well.)  They are individuals who entered the country in a documented status--a visitor, a student, an investor, a manager, a short-term worker, and yes, as a fiance(e).  These categories differ substantially from the ones used by those fleeing various forms of persecution and upheaval, as is the case with those coming from the south.

The people in these categories overstay their visas not because of any intention to do so, but due to an immigration system that is broken and expensive, and which we steadfastly refuse to reform, despite the general acknowledgement that it needs such reform.  Contrary to the venom spewing on a daily basis from what passes for T****'s mouth, these individuals are not "bad hombres."  They are people more concerned with trying to live their lives, for the sakes of themselves and their families, than with having any kind of criminal or political impact on the U.S..

Yet, because T**** found it personally and politically convenient to spread fear about the undocumented, they are now living in the shadows, afraid to come out and attempt to adjust their status in the U.S., afraid due to the threat of prosecution that is not warranted by the lives these people have led, or the expense that such prosecutions entail.  Even worse, immigrants who have "played by the rules," the ones we supposedly want to reward for doing so, are now being subjected to denials and delays in the processing of their papers that all but guarantees that it will be years before their status is finally resolved--and many years more before any of them will be able to naturalize and vote (and don't think for a moment that this latter aspect is an accident; voter suppression is a chameleon that can take many forms).

This is why the T**** nightmare is also the immigrants' nightmare.  It is also the nightmare of their esteemed counsels, always overworked and underpaid in any case, but never more so than now, and never more aware that one single, human mistake on their part might be the end of a person's life, or the lives of families.  As I noted previously, that produces pressure that has the potential to lead to self-destruction.  That fact alone, plus the awareness of doing battle on a daily basis with the most corrupt Administration in the history of the Republic, is why the members of the immigration bar are, in my 25 years of experience practicing law, the most unified and cooperative attorneys I have every had the privilege of meeting.

And the victories they win are not just victories for their clients; they are also victories for all of us, and the system that protects us even in the midst of the current darkness.  Ask our less-than-esteemed Attorney General if he would disagree with you.

So, then, those are the only two caravans that should concern you.  The caravan of the unjustly persecuted, and the caravan of those who defend them.  They are not your enemies.  That would be the current miserable occupant of the Oval Office.  Send him a warning on November 6.  And, at the same time, send both of the two caravans a message of well-deserved hope.

P.S.:  My wife got home safely.  She's seeing a doctor on Monday.  Thanks for asking.