Preparation For A Miracle

I fully expected August to be a cruel month, politically speaking.  I have to admit, however, that I did not expect to be tough on Republicans.  The media drumbeat in their favor has been going on now for months.  Midterm elections are coming up.  The party out of power has, historically speaking, always done well in the midterms (or almost always).  President Biden has had his early popularity largely destroyed by a series of events not completely within his control, from the Afghanistan exodus to the rising cost of living to the unwillingness of too many people to respect pandemic science for the sake of a highly narcissistic and, quite frankly, unpatriotic interpretation of the word "freedom."  Democrats, seemingly always looking for a way to justify the meme about their being in "disarray," started talking about alternative presidential candidates for 2024.  And, hovering over all of this is the specter of Donald Trump, unwilling to accept defeat, but utterly willing to destroy the Republican Party and perhaps the Republic itself in order to "prove" that he is not what he always will be:  a loser.

And then, August happened.  And, suddenly, the seemingly pre-ordained public narrative flipped, at least to some extent.

Largely led by the price at the pump, the cost of living began to ease up.  The post-Dobbs effect on the generic ballot has almost entirely been in the favor of Democrats, with the rejection of the anti-abortion referendum in the reddest of states, Kansas, illustrating that effect on a granular level.  The Senate may very well remain blue, and even become bluer, while any control the Republicans gain in the House of Representatives will be small enough to stop them from doing much more than wasting time and other resources by conducting investigations against their opponents that are destined to go nowhere.  The pandemic, which has not ended, has become easier to manage as more people are slowly but surely getting vaccinated and normalizing health protocols in their day-to day lives.

But, perhaps most amazingly of all, and despite the pressures to behave to the contrary, the Democrats found the discipline and, perhaps, the courage in the face of the Trump menace to find themselves suddenly in array.  So much so, in fact, that Biden and Congress managed to get together and produce a series of bills, in a remarkable short time span, that address a number of urgent problems facing the nation, almost as Presidents and Congresses used to routinely do.

The first step in decades to regulate the sales of firearms.  Urgently needed health care for veterans.  The repatriation of the computer chip industry.  And, finally, a reconciliation bill that launches a green economy, strengthens the ACA, and stops corporations (for the most part) from living tax-free.  On top of all that, more recently, Biden's honoring of his promise to reduce student loan debt.

But, as Lord Kenneth Clark once pointed out, find words butter no parsnips.  There is a lot that has been left undone.  As passed, the reconciliation bill left out major portions of Biden's Build Back Better agenda:  child care, affordable housing, paid family leave, and free community college.  Moreover, the continued legislative pestilence of the filibuster rule prevented Democrats from making any progress on voting rights, or reinstating reproductive rights.

None of these causes will advance at all if Republicans gain control of at least the House.  But, to be a dreamer, what if they don't?

And, even if they do, isn't it just as well to have an agenda ready to go, so that, when the Republicans' inquisition against Democrats grinds to a halt, you're prepared to provide America with an alternative?  I'm not the only one that thinks so.

Democrats' recent legislative successes suggest that they may have finally learned the virtues of "selling the brownie and not the recipe," i.e., focusing on where you want to take the country, and not the details of how to get there.  If (may it be your will, G-d) the next Congress is completely under Democratic control, I have two major suggestions for fashioning an agenda.

First, and in conjunction with reproductive rights legislation, I would take all of the child-friendly provisions of the failed BBB legislation, including and especially the child tax credit and the provisions for paid leave, and bundle it into a Family and Child Care Act that promotes "family unity and strength."  After that, I would take the BBB's housing and education provisions, again in conjunction with the PRO Act, and bundle them into a Worker's Rights Act that "protects the ability of workers to live decently and better their lives."  I would make these two bills the centerpieces of the nation's domestic agenda, and push the living daylights out of their chances to make it across the finish line. 

Preparation for a miracle?  Perhaps.  But, as this August has already shown, miracles are not beyond the realm of possibility just yet.  And, given the dangers still lurking around the corners, there may be advantages in preparing for one.

... But First, A Word Or Two About Last Weekend

It's not my style to heap praise on a hedge fund manager, especially one who's had brushes with the law as part of his resume.  But there's a small lesson about capitalism that can be learned by way of the management styles of the former and current owners of the New York Mets.

I adopted the Mets as my "other" favorite baseball time when I moved to New York a bit over 43 years ago.  As an Orioles fan, I couldn't stand the Yankees, especially the Yankees' then-owner, George Steinbrenner, and the Mets seemed so perpetually hapless (with the ironic exception of their 1969 World Series defeat of the Orioles) that I felt they were worthy of my support.  It seemed like an easy and sensible way to identify, from a rooting perspective, with my new home town.

As circumstances in my life changed, however, New York did not remain my home town for more than a few years.  But, in that time, a few things had changed:  not only the ownership of the Mets, but their management as well.  The new owners brought in Frank Cashen, a former Orioles general manager, to rebuild a club that had spent three seasons in last place.  And Cashen rebuilt the Mets the way he had helped to build the Orioles:  one prospect, trade, and free-agency signing at the time.  It took him five years to return the team to respectability, and two more after that to get them to a World Series win.  But he, and the team he put together, did it.  And so, even though I had long since left Queens, part of my baseball heart has remained in Flushing, even after Shea Stadium was replaced by Citi Field, a replacement that itself was the outcome of yet another change in ownership.

That change, by which minority owner Fred Wilpon bought out the interest in the Mets of Nelson Doubleday, whose publishing company had acquired a majority stake in the team, enabled Wilpon and Saul Katz to take charge of running it.  That is to say, of running it into the ground, for it soon became clear that Wilpon did not have the financial resources to operate a major-league team in a baseball era of nine-figure payrolls.  Nor did he have the acumen to manage the resources he had, a lack that can best be summed up in two words:  Bernie Madoff.  Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Wilpon lacked the ability to understand that a sandlot-level appreciation of baseball did not translate into the ability to manage a major-league franchise.  Professional baseball is precisely that:  a profession.  It requires people who have operated in it at a professional level to understand how it works.  Wilpon never appreciated that.  He made it clear in many heartbreaking ways that he respected no one's decision-making ability except his own.  Why not?  He was rich.  Why should you question him?

And here's where we start to get a wee bit political.  If you're wealthy, there are basically one of two ways that you can look at that circumstance.  You can go through life taking the L'Oreal approach and tell everyone you're worth it, and watch your wealth fall about as you continue to seal yourself inside a willingness to learn nothing.  Or you can remember that wealth, great or small, is based on a consistent ability to make good business transactions over time.  It may not make you famous, but the financial security is much better.  And the key to developing and maintaining that ability is to pay attention to what is going on around you.  To listen.  To understand what people want.  And then, to find ways to give it to them.

Unfortunately, we now live in a world in which wealth is so concentrated in its ownership that those who have it no longer need to feel a need to listen to anyone except themselves.  This is something that every consumer can see in his, her, or their everyday life.  Fewer goods.  Fewer places to shop.  Fewer companies to work for.  Even in an age in which entertainment/communications options seem to be exploding, the control of those options is limited to a handful of companies.  Result?  Our options consist of retreads of sequels of remakes of stuff you've already encountered in one form or another.  In other words, safe choices.  Safe, that is, for the interest of those at the top who make them.

Given all of this, Cohen, whose Wikipedia page describes him as the 30th richest person in the United States, and also as someone who business practices have led to a criminal rap sheet, does not seem like someone who would be a good example of someone who pays close attention to those who have less money than he has.

But his ownership of the Mets, thus far at least, has told a very different tale.

He has only owned the team for less than two full seasons, but, unlike Wilpon, he has managed to avoid making every mistake in the book.  He has hired professional management with actual, professional baseball experience.  He has listened to the people he hired when they told him to spend more up-front money than he was comfortable with spending at first.  He has even gone so far as to swallow the cost of a player contract inherited from the Wilpon days, when his baseball people told him that it was the best baseball decision to make.  The results in this summer's MLB standings speak for themselves.

And, perhaps most crucially, he has listen to the voices of the fans, fans who have decades of burn marks on their fandom from the Wilpon years.  He asked them what they wanted from him.  They told him they wanted to bring back Old Timers' Day, an occasion the Wilpons had allowed to lapse for 28 years.

When I heard that this was happening, and that it would happen on a weekend when I happened to be with my wife in New York, I was both astonished and pleased by the coincidence.  But I was far more astonished--and disgusted--when I learned about the 28-year lapse.  Twenty-eight years!  This is a sport that celebrates its traditions and the players who built them to the point where it builds them into its marketing.  This is at least true in the case of the better-run teams.  For a long time, as I have said, and despite being in the nation's biggest market, the Mets were not one of those teams.

But I went to the Old Timers' Day event at Citi Field, and stayed for the regular Mets game afterwards (which they won, 3-0).  And, to put it mildly, while using a word that comes up often in the context of the Mets, I was amazed.

There were Mets players, managers, and coaches from every era of the team's 60-year history, even going back to its first seasons at the Polo Grounds.  (The Polo Grounds!  It was almost enough to make me reach for a Knickerbocker beer!)  There were Mets I had seen at Shea during my New York days, and there were Mets I had seen only on television, up until now.  In particular, I got what might be my last in-person chance to see one of my favorite Mets I had seen at games I attended, John Stearns, who has been battling prostate cancer.  As a two-sport athlete (baseball and football), he had a reputation for toughness that his appearance on Saturday only reinforced.

And then, the unexpected announcement that Willie Mays' uniform number 24 would finally be retired, as had been promised to him by Joan Payson, the original principal owner of the franchise, when she acquired him from the San Francisco Giants so that he could finish his career in the city where it started.  Mays did not play long for the Mets, and his acquisition was, as much as anything, a nod to the nostalgia that helped lead to the Mets' creation when the Giants and Dodgers moved west.  But the announcement was the clearest possible demonstration that Cohen's mandate in putting the day's events together must have been "Don't &%@#$! this up!" in the clearest possible manner.

Finally, there was the Old Timers' Game itself, a three-inning affair in which the obvious goal was to have fun, and not to pretend that there was a lot of major-league baseball left in the bodies of the players.  (Then again, there were a few exceptions, like Mookie Wilson, also one of my favorite Mets players.)  It was even preceded by another dose of Mets nostalgia:  a recording of Jane Jarvis, the team's original organist, playing the National Anthem.  As much as the fans in the stands (myself included) enjoyed watching the players play, it was so transparently obvious how much they enjoyed being there.  So much so, in fact, that, when it time to take the team photo, the players requested that Cohen join them in posing for it.

Do you think those players would have done that for Fred Wilpon?  Do you wonder, as I do, that maybe the reason for the nearly three-decade gap between Mets Old Timers' Days has something to do with the resentment those players had for the nickel-and-dime management that Wilpon gave to the team?  Well, you might not have to.  Just listen to Ray Knight.

Listening.  Listening to each other.  Learning from each other.  That's actually what capitalism should be about.  That's absolutely what democracy should be all about.  That's one of the most basic lessons that our national pastime can teach us, as well as allowing us all to enjoy a great game.  Hopefully, all of us can take in that lesson, and put it into practice.

Well done, current and former Mets.  Well done, Steve Cohen.  And a very special final shout-out to Jay Horwitz, the Mets' emeritus public relations person who had a big hand in putting the event together.  He is living proof that, whatever the Mets have lacked from time to time in ownership, they have gone a long way in making up for it with what they've had in media relations.

It was Casey Stengel who said, in 1969 of the World Champion Mets, "Our team has finally caught up with our fans."  Perhaps last Saturday is proof that, after six decades, the Mets' ownership has finally caught up with both.

Okay, it was more than a word or two.  But I stand behind every one of them.

What's Happened In August?

Well, if you've been following the news, you know that quite a bit has happened lately.  I've written before about how August, the month when the world is on holiday, tends to be a month for mischief, with bad actors working behind the scenes to set up a fall full of political misery. This August, as you already know, has been a bit different, and I plan on discussing that fact as well as other recent events over the next couple of days.

I have been writing this blog for nearly 14 years and, in doing so, I've tried to keep a fairly consistent schedule when it comes to both frequency and length in posting.  My standards in both areas have shifted, in part because I've experimented with different approaches to see what readers respond to the most, and in part because of the demands of other areas of my life.  In addition to blogging, as noted on the Twitter account to which TRH connects, I have three occupational lives:  as an attorney, an actor, and a historic preservationist.  Lately, however, I have begun to add one more occupation that I have wanted to try for a long time, and I am very excited about taking the first steps toward doing so.

As a preservationist, my focus has primarily been on historic theaters, especially historic Broadway theaters in New York.  One of the earliest lessons I learned as I began to pursue this area of preservation came from Brendan Gill, the late Broadway critic for The New Yorker.  I wrote him a letter asking for advice about how I could help prevent theaters from being "adaptively reused," which is preservation-speak for taking an old structure and preserving most or sometimes just parts of it while giving it a function for which it was not originally designed.  Sometimes, this is inevitable, but not always.  Despite competition from a wide variety of other related media, the performing arts have always had a demand for space.  And, since that space is often very expensive to construct from scratch, why not take a building that has already been designed for that purpose, and reclaim it for that same purpose?  Especially in the age of the green economy, with the greenest buildings being the one that are already built?

At any rate, in my conversation with Gill, he pointed out to me a simple truth that subsequently--and successfully--guided my efforts to help save Broadway's Biltmore Theater, the home of the original production of "Hair" and now the home of the non-profit Manhattan Theatre Club.  In his view, the best way to keep a theater a theater, as opposed to a delicatessen or a disco (two potential fates for the Biltmore at one point) was simply to ensure the existence of a steady supply of productions.  Simple in one sense, of course, and not so simple in another.  Starting in the 1960s, and continuing well into the 1990s when my preservation efforts started in earnest, Broadway had anything but a steady supply of productions.  The physical and social deterioration of Times Square played a role in that, but there were two other forces that played a larger role:  the rising costs of productions, both in capital and operating expenses, and the changing cultural tastes of the public, especially the under-30 cohort.  Both of these  trends led to the growth of non-profit theater, where costs could be institutionalized and more experimental work could be attempted.  In fact, in the case of the Biltmore, "Hair" was initially launched off-Broadway by Joseph Papp at the Public Theater.  This would become a template for future Broadway shows, as not only off-Broadway in New York but regional and foreign theater companies began to move their productions to New York.  The result has been a perpetual booking jam on Broadway since the mid-1990s, interrupted only recently by the pandemic.  And part of that has come from several other non-profit off-Broadway companies taking over several Broadway theaters, as MTC has done.

Forgive the digression.  Back to me.

At the same time that I was getting into theatre preservation, I was also getting back into acting, first in community theater, and later in professional productions.  In the course of doing so, I became a reader for the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, which solicits, evaluates, and selectively produces works by professional and amateur authors.  A number of the plays I have read over the years, including several that were not selected for production, impressed me greatly, and I began to think about the possibility of being the person that found a way to get these potential shows in front of an audience.  Some of that thinking came out of my own experience as an actor:  aging has severely limited the range of roles for which I am plausible, and even the unions encourage self-producing as a means of breaking out of the unemployment rut.  (There was also a random encounter with a palm reader at a shopping mall one Christmas, but I think I'll save the details of that for any memoirs I might write.)

The upshot of all this?

Well, several things.  Two of the contacts I made during my save-the-Biltmore days, in addition to their regular work, are aspiring playwrights, and I have begun to work with both of them on what I expect will be co-producing efforts to get their shows up and running somewhere.  But I have also taken it upon myself  to form a production company, Flipping The Script Productions, that I am dedicating to the production of works by underproduced segments of the populations (e.g., women, LGBQT authors, Blacks, and people of color).  I have optioned for production a play that I read though the BPF about which I'm very excited, and have found a director who shares my excitement.  We expect to put together a series of readings, perhaps a festival presentation or two, and then, ultimately, a professional production, which hopefully will reach New York at some point.

What does all this mean for TRH, and its readership?

Well, frankly, it means change.  As you can probably tell, I've always lived a life in which I've enjoyed wearing multiple hats at once.  But I have also needed to recognize, from time to time, that in the course of wearing all of those hats, there's an upward limit, at which point one of those hats has to come off.  At least permanently, if not temporarily.

As I have gotten more and more involved in producing, with the expectation that the involvement will continue to grow, I have realized that something has to give in my schedule, or I will have to abandon eating, sleeping, and spending time with my family--in other words, things that I can't and won't sacrifice.

And I have decided that TRH is the thing that has give.  At least, to a degree.

I might have made this decision in any case.  I will be 66 in a matter of a few days.  And, while much of politics in this seventh decade of my life has been a cause for distress and even sleeplessness on my part, it has also had a series of inspirational moments.  From the first presidential campaign of Barack Obama, to the rise of a new generation of digital and street activism, I feel hopeful, if not 100% optimistic, that the American way of government, and life, will not only survive the current crisis, but thrive even after I am gone, for the benefit of my children, grandchildren, and later generations to come.  I am therefore ready to share the proverbial torch, if not completely pass it.  As one of the characters in Stephen Sondheim's adaptation of "Merrily We Roll Along," says:  "You know what true greatness is?  It's knowing when to get off!"  I'm not quite at that point.  But I can definitely see it, on the horizon.

I will continue to post here at least once a month, on politics and other issues.  But the posts will be fewer and shorter (I'm hoping the latter will, if nothing else, be an improvement).  I will be using the time freed up by doing so to work on producing the play I've optioned.  In fact, I expect to be setting up a Web site for my production company soon, and have as part of that Web site a blog that will keep people informed about what's going on with it.  When that happens, I will be sure to post about it here, and invite all of you to follow this new chapter in my life.

I thank all of you who read my posts, and welcome any comments at any time in response to what I write, or any comments about subjects you would like to see me cover.  That has always, and will always, be the case, so long as I am above ground and typing.

And now, onward to the events of the day ...