By Jeffrey Page

In the 20 months of the Obama Administration, the president and his allies in the House and Senate have been called every name in the book. The right’s sliming of President Obama has been constant, significant and, oh yes, breathtakingly false. Never forget the Bush factotum who declared that Sept. 11 occurred on Obama’s watch and that he is somehow responsible for the tragedy.

I’ve heard the president called a Marxist and I’ve heard him called a fascist – occasionally in the same sentence. He has been condemned as a socialist. He has been dismissed as a presidential pretender because he was not born in the United States, which of course is precisely where he was born. (Slight digression: If anyone in the idiotic birther movement raised a peep about John McCain’s birth in the Panama Canal Zone, would he please step forward? And if anyone in the movement said anything about Mitt Romney’s father George – born in Mexico – when he sought the Republican nomination in 1968, could he raise his hand?)

The latest lie about President Obama is that he is a Muslim. The most intelligent response to this was as follows: “I wait for the day – perhaps when my young grandchildren are adults? – that when an official of the United States government is ‘believed to be’ or ‘accused of being’ Muslim, the response will be: ‘And?’”

The problem for Democrats is that this retort didn’t come from Obama or Pelosi or Reid or anyone else with a national constituency, but in a letter to the editor of The Times from someone named Susan Klee of Berkeley.

The left needs an army of Susan Klees, intelligent, fearless and articulate, but also angry and with runaway mouths. People on the left have been polite, well mannered, and cordial for far too long – and the right has cleaned their clocks. It’s time to fight back in a way that’s as forceful as the Republicans have managed ever since Barack Obama was elected.

Actually this form of defense and counterattack should have been instituted the afternoon of Obama’s inauguration. But the left was too busy being civil and accommodating and looking for bipartisanship. Ever try to find bipartisanship with a water moccasin? It was just four days before Obama took the oath of office that Limbaugh actually expressed his hope that Obama would fail – and got a free ride. Any outrage with Limbaugh’s bizarre view of citizenship and Americanism and love of country faded quickly.

Sure he’s obnoxious, and the left needs a couple of people just like him – people who are loud, relentless, and who have an audience that stretches beyond the Upper West Side. It needs its own Ann Coulter, its own Limbaugh, its own Sarah Palin. And it needs its own Newt Gingrich, someone who is always there, always available, always ready to comment. In 1994, Gingrich’s constant presence got the right the unobtainable – control of Congress for the first time in years. And it got the speakership for Gingrich.

Now it looks like the right may seize Congress again.

Hey, it’s 2 in the morning, time to take off the gloves, and ask the right wing to step outside and around back to the parking lot.

Would be nice if Obama led the way.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Here I am – desperate, hopeless and despairing – my eyes fixed on the calendar. Sept. 1, the worst day of the year and the start of the worst month. Never mind the equinox; Sept. 1 means summer is over. And the end of summer means the end of happy days and liberty. And it means back to school.

It’s been decades since I had to go back, but the pain has stayed with me. Soon I’ll see kids waiting for the school bus with backpacks full of books and lunch and pencils and notebooks, crayons and gym suits and rulers and note pads, and I will be glum for them. I’ll be glum even for the ones who’ve been looking forward to the start of another year in school. There are such people.

When I was in grammar school, I couldn’t have defined desperation, hopelessness and despair, but as Sept. 1 arrived, I always found myself desperate, hopeless and despairing. I dreaded being locked in a classroom at P.S. 33 in Queens for another year with Mrs. Terwilliger or Miss Lang.

But it wasn’t only the start of school that made me unhappy. Sept. 1. was also the end of magical summer.

As June turned into the sweet July days I could forget my dad’s anger as he read my abysmal report card in a menacing silence. I could forget the look of eternal disappointment on my mother’s face as she whispered to me – as she did every June – that things would be better in the fall, when I could start fresh. But I never started fresh. It never got better, neither my grades nor what they used to call my deportment.

Ma persevered – yet I always let her down. For that I felt terrible, but not for long. It was summer out there and it was calling me.
 
Summer was punch ball seven days a week. Or stick ball. Or marbles. Or getting money and buying a hot dog at the deli. Summer was staying up late. Summer was disconnecting a neighbor’s lawn sprinkler and slurping water on blistering days. Summer was bikes. Summer was skates. Summer was the bells of the ice cream truck. Summer was going to a Dodgers game with my father once he got past the report card’s summary line that seemed to define me and which made him furious: Could do better.

Summer was hanging out with Joel Greenspan, my best friend. We had a joint scrapbook in which we pasted pictures of airplanes. We were airplane crazy. Summer was spending time with Robert Kaufman, the doctor’s son who was born in Switzerland and who once called me a beast after I made fun of the goofy way he threw a Spalding. A beast, he called me. Can you imagine that?

Summer, most of all, was freedom: I could talk when I chose. I never had to raise my hand. I could have a lunch that was not like the watered down vegetable soup and jelly sandwich they served at school. In summer I didn’t need a hall pass. Summer meant I didn’t have to dive under my desk, close my eyes and clamp my hands over my ears because the Russians wanted to kill me.

Summer was rapture. It was ecstasy. It was perfect. And, as happens every summer, I think again of Dylan Thomas’s line: “ … in the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways….”

Such a joy was heedlessness.

Even in the rain, summer was a time for running. Or for finding an open basement door in those garden apartments in Queens and waiting out the storm. But I don’t remember too much rain. Summer was sun and breeze. We could trade baseball cards all year round, but in summer we played our beloved game with our mitts and our bats – and with our mothers’ caution not to let the hardball hit us in the head.

But always there were hints of the doom to come. The worst was the first back-to-school ads in the paper. A few, then many.

July was slow and easy. But August came and flew past. Soon it would be over, this wonderful time. Soon it would be Sept. 1 and the rest of dreaded September, and then it would be 10 endless months before the next summer vacation.

After Sept. 1 would come the terror of chilly gray Sunday nights. Sunday night – the worst time of the week even to this day when I have no homework to forget to do. On Sunday night, I would look at the clock and be astonished that it was already 8:30 and that those math examples had not been done. That science assignment had not been done. That reading about Lincoln or Plymouth Rock or Armistice Day or President Eisenhower had not been done, and I knew there would be hell to pay the next morning.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

So let’s get this straight. You go on the air, use the basest ethnic slur 11 times in five minutes, apologize the next day, and a week later tell Larry King you’re going to quit your radio show so you can take back your stolen First Amendment rights? Are you serious?

Yours was no First Amendment issue. No one took away your rights. You just ran your cruel mouth, and decent people have exercised their right to tune you out just as advertisers can use their own rights to run commercials on shows that don’t offend the audience.

The history. Jade, a black woman, called you to ask how to deal with friends of her and her husband – he’s white – when they ask her for information on what black people are thinking. As though she were a racial spokeswoman.

No big deal was the essence of your response – which I guess is easy to say if you’re white and no one asks you to answer for the cretinous behavior of people of your own race, such as Al Capone, Adolf Hitler, Timothy McVeigh.

No big deal is typical of your two-minute psychotherapy sessions with callers; you often dismiss their feelings, put them on the defensive or change the subject. So when Jade asked about the use of the specific racist insult that everyone knows and only barbarians use, you dodged and generalized and then said, “Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO. Listen to a black comic and all you hear is [slur slur slur].”

So what you were saying is that you can utter your racist slander of black people on the airwaves because some black men use that expression to one another? That’s what you said, and Jade picked up on it immediately. A black comedian’s use of the slur of slurs doesn’t make it right or acceptable, she said. To which you condescended: “My dear, my dear.”

You said that complaints about racism in America at a time when we have a black president are “hilarious.” Hilarious? What on earth were you talking about? You went on that it was white America that elected Barak Obama, but Jade begged to differ, saying it was young America. To which you petulantly responded, “Chip on your shoulder. Can’t do much about that.”

So it’s all right to use this slur? Jade asked.

“It depends on how it’s said,” you answered. Wait a minute. Did you just suggest that sometimes it’s all right? You sure did. And then you elaborated, going back to those unnamed black men. “Black guys talking to each other seem to think it’s OK,” you said. Of course Jade wasn’t talking about black guys; she was talking about your use of the defamation.

The next day, you apologized on the air, and for a minute seemed to possess a touch of grace, a trace of kindness, and a hint of compassion that was missing during your tirade with Jade. “I didn’t intend to hurt people but I did,” you said. “I talk every day about doing the right thing, and yesterday I did the wrong thing.” You sounded sincere.

But then, six days later you appeared on the Larry King show, and all of a sudden, you were the victim. You said you were quitting your radio show at the end of the year when your contract lapses. And it was everybody else’s fault.

“The reason is, I want to regain my First Amendment rights,” you said. “I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry ….”

Is anyone buying this line?

You never lost your rights. Congress made no law to shut you up. But when you insult your listeners by trumpeting – [Slur, slur, slur] – decent people have a habit of walking.  The Bill of Rights protects your right to free speech, but it doesn’t force the rest of us to listen to you. And when we walk, sponsors have a way of looking for other places to spend their advertising dollars.

You don’t want people to get angry with you? Then enter a silent order. Because giving yourself permission to utter that particular slur because some black guys do it makes people very angry. Black, white, doesn’t matter.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Americans don’t like to wait. We perceive a problem, discuss it for, oh say, 10 minutes, come up with what seems like a satisfactory solution – as facile as it might be – take action, and sit back with a knowing, self-satisfied  smile. Occasionally this works.

But we tend to get a little testy when something resists a quick fix. Take these wars of ours in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’re the result of 9/11, and a decade later we’re still at it. Was it Rumsfeld the Genius who said we would be wrong to call them a quagmire? They’re a quagmire, and we’ve lost more than 5,000 of our young people in it.

Nowadays we are very concerned by the presence of millions of illegal aliens – or undocumented immigrants in the kingdom of political correctness – and there have been many proposals put forth on how to deal with this. These include a fence to rival the Great Wall of China, armed troops, armed civilian militias, and that demagogue’s delight of a state law in Arizona.

The newest idea is to repeal Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This is the part that grants automatic U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including, therefore, the children of those who are here illegally. The 14th Amendment is a testament to the fairness and humanity of the United States because it was a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott in 1857, in which the justices ruled that black men and women could never become U.S. citizens, even those born here.

Now, 142 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina is out front in the discussion about repealing the compassion, goodwill and humanity of the 14th’s citizenship clause as a way of dealing with Mexicans illegally crossing the border. It’s not drastic. It’s Graham, imitating Homer Simpson: “Doh! Nothing else worked.”

Well, if we’re going to spay the 14th Amendment because we’re unable to come up with a reasoned way of dealing with undocumented immigrants, we ought to consider changing other parts of the Constitution that we find bothersome. Thanks to Lindsey Graham, this seems to be the easy way to deal with annoying situations. Find it, fix it, forget it.

Let us modify the First Amendment to satisfy the opponents of the proposed mosque two blocks from Ground Zero by making it read: “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion except Islam.” There, wasn’t that easy?

For the benefit of Americans who get nervous by the sight of political demonstrators, we could change the assembly clause in the First Amendment to read: “Congress shall make no law regarding the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances as long as those assembling and/or petitioning are quiet, respectful, middle class, middle aged, do not shake their fists and generally are non-threatening.”

For those who oppose the possession of firearms, let us repeal the Second Amendment altogether. It’s only 27 words; who would miss it?

Then there’s that pesky Fifth Amendment. Let it now read: “No person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself unless everybody knows he’s guilty as sin, in which case, he’d better talk.” The altered Fifth could be paired with an altered Eighth Amendment, which could read: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted unless we know the S.O.B. is guilty, in which case no trial is necessary. Just take him out and hang him.”

For the anti-tax folks, we’ll repeal the 16th Amendment, the one that empowers Congress to lay and collect taxes on income, and order a National Day of Prayer – pray or die – every year to ask God to rain down all the money we need to maintain civil society in the 21st Century, but without taxes.

There are people – come on, you know who you are – who’d like to do something about the 19th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote. Hey, if the framers wanted women to vote, they would have said so, right? So, maybe late one night when the nation is fast asleep, Congress could start the machinery to, uh, do something about the 19th.

Wasn’t that easy?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

For years I’ve been concerned about the debasement of our society as a result of the transfer of certain words from the do-not-say list to common, everyday nouns and verbs.

Note: This is not a call for government to send in the speech cops or the thought police. Nor is it about private speech between and among individuals. Rather it’s about my dismay that we’ve reached a point where you hear little boys and girls using “it sucks” as a statement of disapproval as in “The Mets? They suck.” You’d think parents would understand that “sucks,” used in this sense, derives from half a word used to describe someone who performs fellatio. And what parent wouldn’t jump at the chance to change their child’s vocabulary if it meant avoiding having to explain fellatio to a 5-year old?

The casual use of “sucks” is all around us. Not long ago I heard a commercial on radio for a book entitled “Your Marketing Sucks,” in which some guy promises to improve your business operation if you’d only read his book.

The casual use of “cojones” has been building for years. This Spanish vulgarism for testicles often is used to connote courage as in the English vulgarism “balls.” The formal word for “testicles” is the far less colorful sounding “testículos.” But “cojones” recently lost some of its ability to startle when, during an interview on Fox, Sarah Palin let fly with “Jan Brewer has the cojones that our president does not.” Brewer, the governor of Arizona, is a woman but this subtlety was lost on Palin.

In fact, she never missed a beat, never slowed down to consider her coarseness, never realized how ridiculous she sounded in her anatomically erroneous discussion of a woman’s cojones.

(And why should she? After all, it was Palin who assured the nation in 2008 that Alaska’s proximity to Siberia made her sufficiently qualified in foreign relations to be vice president.)

The irony – or hypocrisy – was too rich to ignore. Fox viewers might have been left scratching their heads and wondering what happened to Palin’s own “cojones.” Didn’t she quit as governor of Alaska as an ethics investigation was about to get underway?

The public crassness continues in the current issue of The New Yorker, which contains a full-page ad for the new Showtime series “The Big C.” The show is about a woman’s confronting her cancer. The kicker in the ad: “Grabbing life by the balls.”

In 2004, the Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney, was angered by Senator Patrick Leahy’s hard questioning of him about the Halliburton Corporation. “Go f–k yourself,” Cheney advised Leahy. It was on the floor of the Senate, which used to be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The recently released movie “Dinner for Schmucks” is rated PG-13. The parental advisory at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb.com) notes, “A man’s ex-girlfriend sneaks into his house. She is in a revealing outfit. She then proceeds to have sex with another man by making sexual remarks (so her boyfriend can hear.)”

The advisory also notes the script’s use of “f–k,” “s–t,” “bitch,” “ass,” and “hell” and adds that “God’s and Jesus’ names are abused many times as well.”

Just think, some genius at the Motion Picture Association of America gets paid to decide that “f–k,” “s–t,” “bitch,” “ass,” and “hell” are OK for children over 13.”

But nowhere do the producers explain that “schmuck,” while commonly used to refer to a dimwit, is the Yiddish word for “penis.” If “Dinner for Schmucks” is acceptable now, can “Dinner for Dickheads” be far behind?

Speaking of movie titles, remember “Meet the Fockers” of a few years back? My sense was that you were supposed to read the advertisements for the movie and be sufficiently titillated to make the connection between Fockers and f–kers. I checked IMDb.com and sure enough, there it was: “The surname Focker plays on the F word.” This movie also was rated PG-13.

Any number of times on New York radio, I have heard raging talk show hosts refer to the people they disliked as “a-holes” and “scumbags.”

So there you are, driving the family to a ball game with the radio tuned to some talker. And all of a sudden your kid asks, “Mom, what’s a scumbag?” Go ahead, rehearse a response.

Am I making too big a deal of this or have we been witness to and, by our inaction, participants in the degrading of our lives?

What’s your take on this?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

 
By Jeffrey Page

When the details of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law were revealed, some people called for a boycott of the state. The counterargument was that this could cost people their jobs. Of course that might never happen but would I want it on my conscience if it did?

However the Arizona Atrocity is no minor irritant. When it comes to Arizona, we’re dealing with the enactment of the first American Apartheid statute, one that can get you arrested for passing a red light and then being scrutinized as someone who just might be in the country illegally. Or arrested for failing to have proof of legal residency on you at the time you pass that red light. As far as I know, there’s nothing in the law that requires certain other born-elsewhere Arizonans – John McCain, Jon Kyl, Jan Brewer – to carry proofs of their legal residency with them at all times.

So, boycott Arizona? Sure. Deal me in. But it should be known that this isn’t much of a sacrifice. I had no plans to go to Phoenix.

Then there’s Target.

Do I continue to shop at Target stores now that the CEO, Gregg Steinhafel, has contributed $150,000 in corporate funds to support the candidacy of a man named Tom Emmer, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor in Minnesota and who stands for many things I find repellent? Or do I boycott Target? By the way, such corporate contributions are legal for the first time in about 65 years, courtesy of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case.

All right, who is Tom Emmer, and why should I care about what happens on Election Day in Minnesota? After all, it’s 1,200 miles from my house to Minneapolis.

This is the extent of Emmer’s thinking about marriage: “I believe marriage is the union between one man and one woman.” Twelve words to deny basic rights to a segment of the Minnesota population. At his campaign web site, Emmer makes no mention of where marriage is discussed in the Constitution and how it became a political issue. He doesn’t explain why anyone would care about his definition of marriage.

But never mind Emmer. Let’s concentrate on Gregg Steinhafel. Some of the gay employees in Target’s 1,700 stores became alarmed with his sending that check to aid one of those not-now-not-ever candidates and then trying to wriggle out of the public spotlight.

Target has 350,000 employees. What’s the American gay population? About 5 percent of the total? So let’s agree that Steinhafel has about 17,500 gay and lesbian people on his payroll. He heard their shouts and the best he could come up with was: “Target’s support of the [Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender] community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company.”

Unwavering? When you remove the plain brown wrapper, the truth lies there like a rotting walleye, the Minnesota state fish. Steinhafel divides where division is not possible. You can’t lean back on prettily written corporate personnel policy – Target supports domestic partner benefits and some other programs important to gay people – while forking over $150K to someone who would withhold a basic human right to 17,500 of your employees.

So follow the money. I frequently buy socks, shirts and veggie burgers at Target. The money I spend there goes into the corporate treasury. The treasury is tapped to allow Steinhafal to donate money to Tom Emmer so Emmer can wage war on human rights for 5 percent of the population. Does that sound unwavering to you?

The result is that it’s some of my money going to help Emmer.

Spend my money at a Target store, such as the one in Middletown? No. There are other places to buy socks and veggie burgers.

Either I stand with the struggle for full rights for all people or I turn my back. There’s no compromise.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

It’s been a handful of decades since I had contact with Vic Ziegel but as I leafed through some papers over the weekend I came across his obituary and was transported back to my earliest days in a newspaper’s city room.

Vic – young in my recollection; 72 when he died – was my boss for a time at The New York Post, where he was an editor on the night sports desk in the years before Murdoch. He was the one who taught me the most important lesson in journalism: Get it right. The facts you present must be correct. The names of the people must be spelled correctly. The quotes you attribute to them must be correct. The words you choose to tell your story have to be correct. And when you have doubts, look it up, check it out, ask someone you trust. But never embarrass the paper and yourself through laziness.

A little background. I began work as a copyboy at The Post about a month after President Kennedy was murdered. I filled paste pots, sharpened pencils, restocked the carbon paper, took coffee and sandwich orders, and ran the reporters’ stories to the editors. Then I either took the stories back to the reporter for more work or out to the composing room where the stories would be set in type. Then I’d do it all over again.

It was boring as hell. When the chance came to be a temporary editorial assistant on the night sports desk while the regular guy was out, I leapt.

When Vic Ziegel was satisfied that I understood the rules, he gave me a chance to do something more productive for the day’s edition of The Post than take coffee orders.

One night he had me take dictation on the phone from a guy named Jerry DeNonno, who was the Post’s thoroughbred racing handicapper. Jerry’s job was to pick winners. My job was to make sure his picks got into print.

Vic said I would type the names of Jerry’s three best picks in each race at Aqueduct, and God help me if I got anything wrong because Jerry had a reputation to uphold. Get it right, I thought.

Jerry called in, was transferred to me, asked who I was, and sounded quite concerned about having a newcomer take his pari-mutuel wisdom. He went slowly. We went through the entire Aqueduct card. And then he told me to read it all back to him – race by race, horse by horse, spelling out the more unusual names. When I finished, he insisted I read it back to him again.

It was bad for Jerry when his picks ran out of the money, Vic told me, but it would be far worse – for me – if Jerry’s readers bet the wrong ponies because some dumb clerk screwed up the listing of his choices.

Later, Vic told me I would be taking dictation from Milton Gross, one of The Post’s most popular sports columnists. Milt, too, was not happy with someone he’d never spoken with before. But he dictated and I typed. Once, when I yawned, he asked petulantly if he was boring me. He was serious. In the length of a yawn – two seconds more or less? – I might miss one or two of his 800 words. When I had the column down, I had to read it back, word for word while noting every punctuation mark, every new paragraph.

Vic also assigned me to write some headlines. Nothing big, like the banner across the back page, but what were known as No. 1 Heads, which went on stories of one or two short paragraphs.

Something like: Cubs Top Cards, 3-1.

Vic assured me that people actually read these little out-of-town items, and that if I accidentally made the score 4-1 or 2-1, I’d be back sharpening pencils. For years I kept a small spiral notebook of those headlines.

Soon, the guy I replaced was back and I returned to paste pots and dull pencils. I stayed a year, asked for a tryout as a reporter, and was told to get a job out of town and then reapply.

As it happened I never went back to The Post and never again encountered Vic Ziegel. But you never forget the people who take a chance on you and point the way.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

America loves its celebrities. So in all likelihood, the late Larry Rivers will be remembered as a celebrated painter, film maker and pop art pioneer, and Roman Polanski will be recalled as a renowned movie director. By rights, they ought to go down in history as child abusers.

Thirty years ago, Rivers came up with the idea of making a film featuring his two young daughters. OK so far, right?

Except he filmed the girls nude, starting at age 11, because the focus of the movie was the development of their breasts. Still OK? Or maybe you’re getting a little slimed out.

Dani Shapiro, writing in The New York Times, noted that Rivers zoomed his lens to get close-ups of the girls’ breasts and genitalia. The vomitorium is to your right.

After Rivers’ death in 2002, the films became the property of the Larry Rivers Foundation, which has sold most of its holdings to New York University. NYU has said it doesn’t want the films. Rivers’ daughters do, and have moved to get possession of them, presumably to make sure they never again see the light of day and to maintain a modicum of personal modesty and dignity. Who’s going to take issue with that?

But The Times also reported a foundation spokesman saying a decision on whether to give the films to Rivers’ daughters had not yet been taken.

Shapiro noted that in the narration of the film, Rivers acknowledges his children were disinclined to be so photographed, leading one to believe that Daddy presumably used his Daddy power to make the movie.

Is anyone really going to argue that what Rivers did was art simply by virtue of the fact that he was an artist? Or impose the handy cliché that it’s unfair to judge until you’ve seen the movie? Or regurgitate the line about one of the purposes of art is to unsettle the everyday order of the universe, and thus anyone who complains about such “art” is a philistine?

More recent is the Swiss disposition in the case of Everyone In The Civilized World vs. Roman Polanski. Polanski is the celebrated director of such movies as “Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Tess,” and “Repulsion” who pleaded guilty to raping a girl in 1977 when she was 13 and he was 43.

Fearful that the judge would come down with a sentence harsher than expected, Polanski fled to France and has been in exile ever since. Last year, he was arrested in Switzerland and held for extradition to the United States. But Switzerland has declined the American request. So Polanski pretty much beat the rap.

Though his friends bemoan his inability to return to America, Polanski’s life in exile hasn’t exactly been one of drudgery, privation or hard times. In 2003 he won the Academy Award for directing “The Pianist,” which also was nominated for best picture. In 1981, he was nominated for the Oscar for best director for “Tess.” He won scads of other awards during his years outside the U.S.

Still, his friends insisted, it just wasn’t right for a great artist like Roman Polanski to be forced to stay out of America. All because of something that happened so long ago, some say. Oh, by the way, what was it that happened 33 years ago? Polanski drugged the kid with a Quaalude and gave her some nice champagne to wash it down. She told a grand jury at the time that she asked to be taken home, which Polanski did after having vaginal and oral sex with her and urging her not to tell her mother or boyfriend about what happened. Once again; she was 13 years old.

So until his fawning claque gets active again, Polanski must avoid the United States and any country with which it had an extradition treaty.

But hey, Switzerland’s not so bad. Allow me to paraphrase Harry Lime in “The Third Man,” itself a great movie by Orson Wells: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Roman.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

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By Jeffrey Page

After watching the self-inflicted downfall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, I’m thinking about firing off a letter to the Army about an incident at Fort Dix years ago. I want a do-over.

The general and some of his top aides cracked wise to a reporter for Rolling Stone about their civilian commanders. And generals are supposed to be smart. The response was quicker than most things President Obama does. Within days, McChrystal was fired and now fades away with retirement pay of $150,000 a year. (May I digress? Have you heard New Jersey Governor Chris Christie or any other critics of public pensions railing about McChrystal’s retirement benefits, or do they save their anger just for teacher pensions?)

Now, when I was in basic training at Fort Dix, I responded – in a manner considered disrespectful – to a sergeant who had imposed an absurd punishment for an infraction that couldn’t be avoided. For that I was hauled before the company commander and offered my choice of punishment.

While McChrystal gets his $150K, I was told I could request a court martial for disobeying an order and probably wind up in the stockade. Or I could accept what was known as non-judicial punishment, which meant my pay could be cut and I’d probably draw extra guard duty and/or KP. Or, the captain of Tango Company, Second Training Regiment said, I could come in after training and sweep and mop his office three nights running, and we would call it a day. He didn’t offer to pension me out and send me home.

I started to complain and the captain said, “Shut up, Page, and just go get the broom.”

“But the man’s a dope,” I managed. He cut me off. Such disrespect could not be tolerated if unit cohesion was to be maintained, he said. Which sounds like a principle someone ought to have taught General McChrystal.

He and his aides insulted the president of the Unites States in the most sophomoric manner and he gets his pension and a ticket home. I insulted a staff sergeant by failing to do 10 pushups for “refusal to come to parade rest as commanded” and lost most of three nights sleep. (Note: The men of Tango Company had been standing on a small mountain of construction rubble waiting their turn to enter the mess hall for breakfast. Standing at parade rest was not possible.)

The depth of McChrystal’s disrespect for his civilian commanders was staggering. One of his staffers was quoted in the Rolling Stone article as saying of an early meeting of President Obama and General McChrystal: “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The boss was pretty disappointed.”

Rolling Stone also reported on McChrystal’s preparing to deliver a speech and jokingly saying that if asked about Vice President Biden – with whom he had differences on counterterrorism – he could respond: “Are you asking about Vice President Joe Biden? Who’s that?”

An aide had a better idea and offered it up: “Biden? Did you say Bite Me?”

What was that business about unit cohesion?

There’s more. Biden’s counterterrorism plan would lead to “Chaosistan” in Afghanistan, McChrystal said. One of his men dismissed Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones – himself a retired general – as “a clown,” while another revealed McChrystal’s view of Obama’s man in South Asia, Richard Holbrooke: “The boss says he’s like a wounded animal. Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired. So that makes him dangerous.”

McChrystal’s contempt for Obama created a situation designed for hypocrites. He was a general who was “pretty disappointed” with his commander, but apparently not so disappointed that he thought about resigning his commission and putting in his retirement papers. And so he continued to send his soldiers into harm’s way in Afghanistan to satisfy a commander he believed was not fully engaged.

How do you explain that to the spouses and parents of your troops who are killed or gravely wounded in battle?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

mis-speak, verb, to speak or say incorrectly

lie, verb, 1 to make a statement that one knows is false especially with intent to deceive 2 to give a false impression

“On a few occasions I have misspoken about my [military] service, and I regret that and I take full responsibility. But I will not allow anyone to take a few misplaced words and impugn my record of service to our country,” said Richard Blumenthal.

Actually, what’s being impugned is his service to the facts.

Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, called a news conference last week to inform the voters that he’s not a liar. This may prove difficult because if you seek to be taken seriously, you can misspeak on an issue once. More than that is unacceptable. The people are not idiots.

Perhaps not since Bill Clinton – “It all depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” he told a grand jury in responding to a question about sex – have we seen such an amusing example of blundering obfuscation as Blumenthal’s wormy explanation of how he came to say he was a member of the Marine Corps serving in Vietnam when he was no such thing. In fact, he was in the Marine Corps Reserves and never was deployed to Vietnam.

Blumenthal acknowledges that he claimed service in Vietnam “on a few occasions.” He might consider this a case of misspeaking, which raises the question: How do you make such a mistake about your personal history? And if you do err, how do you do it more than once?

In Norwalk in 2008, Blumenthal said, “We have learned something important since the days I served in Vietnam.”

The New York Times found a 2007 story in the Milford (Conn.) Mirror about a Memorial Day observance. The Mirror quoted Blumenthal saying: “In Vietnam, we had to endure taunts and insults, and no one said, ‘Welcome home.’ I say welcome home.”

And in Shelton last year, The Connecticut Post quoted him saying: “When we returned from Vietnam I remember the taunts, the verbal and even physical abuse we encountered.” By the way, could Blumenthal or anyone else who claims this trashing of returning Vietnam veterans by people in America please produce contemporaneous news accounts of the incidents? It would be nice to put that fable to rest once and for all.

It’s fair to say that if you tell people that Stamford is the capital of Connecticut, you misspeak. But if you tell them something about yourself that is 180 degrees from the truth, you do not misspeak.

You lie.

If I were Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, I would do the polite thing and send Blumenthal a note of deepest and sincerest appreciation for the generous early Christmas present he so graciously has given the GOP.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com