By Jeffrey Page

I may be the only person who actually bet on George McGovern in 1972 – $5 down the drain – so you can believe me when I say I’m familiar with hope, naïveté and disappointment. I’m sitting here looking over the Times on the morning after the elections. I’m looking for assurance. It’s there, but in extremely small measure.

–With a little luck, we’ve seen the last of Carl Paladino. In New York we don’t abide Paladino’s threatening to have a reporter killed for raising troublesome questions. And we don’t tolerate his sending emails showing African tribesmen dancing outside a grass hut with the caption “Obama Inaugural Rehearsal.” We don’t accept Paladino’s pornographic emails. Nor do we accept his referring to former Governor George Pataki as “a degenerate idiot.” Maybe Carl Paladino will do New York a favor and just disappear.

–How did anyone in Connecticut decide whom to support for Chris Dodd’s Senate seat? On one hand was Linda McMahon whose claim to fame is her association with World Wrestling Entertainment, which has as much to do with wrestling as Carl Paladino has to do with good taste. WWE is about sex and violence. McMahon’s opponent was Richard Blumenthal, the state attorney general, whose war record is exemplary but for one fact: It doesn’t exist. Not just once or twice but on several occasions Blumenthal claimed to have served in Vietnam and even suggested that he got a hostile reception when he returned. In fact he never set foot in Vietnam. This is called lying, right? Never mind finding the lesser of two evils; I couldn’t have voted for either one.

–In losing a bid for Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell actually conned 123,000 people into voting for her. Unbelievable. She’s the Tea Party darling who couldn’t name a Supreme Court decision she opposes – “I know there are a lot,” she said – and promised to list one on her web site. I still can’t find it. Her site described her as someone who “strongly believes in protecting the sanctity of life at all stages,” which is pretty nervy talk for someone who not only opposes sex outside marriage but masturbation as well.

–As of this morning, Tea Partier Joe Miller is a loser, but his race for senator from Alaska may take a while to decide. He challenged the Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski, got Sarah Palin’s endorsement, beat Murkowski in the primary, and then was shocked when Murkowski announced she would wage a write-in campaign against him. Right now she’s up by 7 percentage points. Why do I care? Because it was Miller and his little band of hired thugs who held a reporter incommunicado for 25 minutes for asking questions Miller didn’t want to address. That’s cause for disqualification.

–Running for governor of Minnesota, Tom Emmer came in second by just 1 percentage point. With luck, that 1 percent will stand during the likely recount. Emmer is the candidate who dismissed a portion of the people of Minnesota by reducing his position on gay marriage to 12 words: “I believe marriage is the union between one man and one woman.” That’s like being asked about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and responding “I don’t buy it; next question.”

–Happily, Cuomo vanquished the loathsome Paladino. Maurice Hinchey is going back to the House; would that John Hall were going back with him. Meg Whitman learned that even spending $140 million of your own money doesn’t get you elected if the voters perceive you to be a hypocrite. She railed against illegal immigrants but paid one to clean her house for nine years and the claimed she, uh, didn’t know.

–Good news was overwhelmed by the fact that plenty of Sarah Palin acolytes were elected around the country. Palin? 2012? Can’t happen. Bet you $5.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

You’re a reporter in Alaska. You trail a candidate for the U.S. Senate into a public building for a public event. You ask a tough question. The candidate demurs. You follow him into the corridor and ask it again. Then he has you arrested by his private goons.

Not since the grim days of Richard Nixon has the nation been subjected a more obvious trashing of the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. But something dark is happening in America and there has been surprisingly little outrage about a reporter’s being held by a swarm of non-cops. What should have been a noisy cause célèbre seems to have been quickly forgotten.

A touch of background. Alaska gave us Sarah Palin. It also gave us the defeat of a sitting Republican Senator, Lisa Murkowski, by the Tea Party favorite, Joe Miller. Murkowski, who ran a close second to Miller in the GOP primary, is waging a write-in campaign. Some polls indicate she stands a chance of upending Miller. The third candidate is the Democrat, Scott McAdams, who, despite the closeness of the Murkowski-Miller race, is not considered a factor.

So, with Murkowski breathing down his neck, Miller wasn’t eager to take tough questions from a reporter.

Miller was making a campaign stop at a public school in Anchorage on Oct. 17 when he was confronted by Tony Hopfinger, the editor of the Alaska Dispatch web site and no lapdog reporter. Hopfinger tried to ask Miller about his alleged improper use of government computers in Fairbanks North Star Borough for political purposes two years ago.

Hopfinger asked again and was told, not by Miller but by his security detail, that if he didn’t shut up he would be arrested for trespassing – at a public event in a public building. Sure enough he asked again, and sure enough Miller’s privately hired thugs placed him in handcuffs and escorted him away from the candidate. Hopfinger was taken to an adjoining hallway where he was held incommunicado for 25 minutes. The security people, two of whom were reported to be active duty Army personnel on free time, said they were going to call the police. When the cops showed up, they ordered the handcuffs removed.

It’s amusing in a morbid kind of way to think about the right wing’s disgust with government and how often it notes Jefferson’s fear of big government. But conservatives never summon up other Jeffersonian traditions, such as the need for an unfettered press.

Jefferson famously said: “… were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

He less famously said: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

It’s one thing to refuse to answer reporters’ questions, as cowardly as that is. It’s quite another to have an annoying reporter dragged away in true Stalinist tradition. If anyone is waiting for Miller, Palin, Christine O’Donnell or any of the other Tea Party darlings to even hint that Miller’s goon squad went too far, they should bring provisions. They’re going to have a long wait.

Meanwhile, the question remains: If Miller tolerates this assault on the First Amendment as a candidate, what will he tolerate if he’s elected to the Senate?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Two political observations.

–A friend of mine from New Jersey sent me a one-page document that I suspect has made its way through the Internet. It starts with the provocative assertion “Let’s put the seniors in jail and the criminals in nursing homes.”

It’s silly of course, but I think it illustrates the anger, frustration and political disillusion some Tea Partiers – not to mention just about every other American voter as well – are experiencing this year. It should serve as a warning to the left and right alike that if the tea people increase their numbers over the next few election cycles so that they actually have some clout in the House and Senate, the United States might never be the same. Can you see it? A constitutional convention to consider whether that pesky First Amendment is still needed. It only takes two-thirds of Congress or two-thirds of the state legislatures to call for such a convention.

If the homes of convicts and old people were switched, my Jersey friend says, jailed seniors would have access to showers, hobbies, and walks. But prisoners living in nursing homes with names like Happy Vistas would get one shower a week.

Old folks in jail would receive all the telephone calls they wish, but convicts serving their time in a nursing home would live in tiny rooms for which they’d have to pay something like $5,000 a month.

You get the point.

–Various people who claim to speak for the Tea Party movement say that they are not partisans, that they do not target individual politicians but the actions of individuals. They claim they are somehow above politics, but the fact is that they use the political system expertly and to their best advantage.

And they know where not to go. I’m still waiting for some Tea Partiers from the plains to demand that crop subsidies be eliminated as a means of reducing federal spending.

Their often proclaimed loathing of politicians is a sham. So is their conservatism. We have seen the attack on the moderate Republican Mike Castle in Delaware by the antimasturbatory Christine O’Donnell, but have not heard of their embrace of any conservative Democrats. The typical Tea Partiers are older white men. While their philosophical guides yammer on the radio about the need to cut back the Social Security program, I’ve yet to see a single sign at a Tea Party rally calling for such reductions.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

Not since the last time a defendant in a rape case said the woman’s sexy outfit meant she was “asking for it” have we encountered a more grotesque defense and sentencing than that of an ex-cop charged with drunken driving and killing a woman with his SUV.

A judge in Brooklyn ruled last week that because the woman, leaving a wedding reception in Mill Basin 13 months ago also was drunk, she contributed to her being struck by Andrew Kelly, the drunk off-duty NYPD officer. Kelly refused to take a breath test until seven hours after the incident and only then under orders. And just months later, as part of a deal, he pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and driving while intoxicated, and admitted that he had been drunk at the time he plowed into Vionique Valnord-Kassime. He also resigned from the police department.

Ms. Valnord-Kassime is dead and state Supreme Court Justice Allan Marrus sent Kelly to jail for 90 days and put him on probation for five years. You read that right.

The judge, prosecutor and the attorney representing Andrew Kelly seemed able to find a way to pin the rap of Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s death on Ms. Valnord-Kassime herself.

The assistant district attorney said, “She had been at a wedding. She had been drinking.”

Kelly’s lawyer said, “It appears that she was drunk and she wandered into traffic.”

Acknowledging that his sentence might strike some people as on the lenient side, the learned Judge Marrus was quoted by The New York Times noting that “the alcohol consumption of the victim [and] the fact that she walked out onto a rainy street to hail a cab against the advice of friends” could have been contributory factors to her being hit.

What Marrus did was to find Ms. Valnord-Kassime guilty of a crime that does not exist – WWI, or walking while intoxicated.

Translation: It was all her fault.

Anybody want to tell me about justice?

Only Sanford Rubenstein, the lawyer representing Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s family, observed that she was the sole victim in this case, no matter that she herself had had too much to drink.

Ninety days? Ninety days for driving drunk and killing someone is more like an annoying inconvenience than a serious penalty, and the question must be asked. What would the sentence have been had Andrew Kelly not been a cop at the time of Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s death? If Andrew Kelly were just another working stiff trying to make it in this economy, would he have been sent away for three months?

We’re supposed to respect the law and the people who enforce it and those who run our courts. And we are supposed to understand the random danger of drunken driving. But Marrus’s sentencing of the disgraced Andrew Kelly was an absurdity that flies in the face of common sense and sends a terrible message that maybe killing someone while you’re blind drunk isn’t such a terrible thing after all.

At the time of the sentencing, Ms. Valnord-Kassime’s father, the Rev. Varius Valnord, the pastor of the Haitian Church of God in Brooklyn, came face to face with Andrew Kelly in the courthouse. Kelly apologized. The Rev. Valnord accepted. But 90 days?

Clearly, Rev. Valnord is a forgiving man of God though he intends to bring a wrongful death action against Kelly and the city. Forgiveness is a wonderful – and personal – step. But one thing must be understood. The case against Andrew Kelly was not brought in the name of the Valnord and Kassime families. It was brought in the name of all 14 million people of the state of New York. We all need protection from drunken drivers.

The rest of us must demand representation in cases such as this since the next time someone is run down by a drunken driver – cop or civilian – the victim could be your kid, your sweetheart, your friend.

Because one thing about drunken drivers. They’re not very discriminating; they’ll kill anybody in their path.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Tuesday is the 12th anniversary of an American crucifixion. It was on Oct. 12 in 1998 when two young men in southeastern Wyoming got hold of a third man outside a bar in Laramie, beat him to a bloody pulp, and then took him out to a ranch where they tied him to a fence and left him in cold weather for about 18 hours. Finally someone spotted him and called for help.

It took Matthew Shepard four days to die. At the time, it was reported that the reason for the attack was that Shepard, a gay 22-year old student at the University of Wyoming, had made a pass at one of the men.

In some insane code, Shepard had to pay for this with his life. Of course, if everybody who ever made a pass – gay or straight – was treated like this, there would be no vacant spaces along the fences of America. After they tied Shepard up, their honor ostensibly upheld, his two assailants drove back to Laramie, where they attacked two Hispanic men.

For killing Matthew Shepard, Russell A. Henderson, 21, and Aaron J. McKinney, 22, were sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of Shepard’s fate when I read about the equally unspeakable death of Tyler Clementi in New Jersey. In Clementi’s case, there was no direct physical assault. Instead, prosecutors say, two other students at Rutgers University set the wheels in motion for Tyler’s suicide.

No one has been convicted of anything. Indeed, no one’s even been indicted yet. So for now, responsible news organizations must stick with “allegedly” and “police said” and “prosecutors charged.” But what can never be called into question is the fact that Tyler Clementi was gay-bashed to death without anyone laying a finger on him.

Someone tore away any defenses that Clementi may have set up for himself by secretly webcasting his gay sexual encounter with another Rutgers student and putting it up on the Internet for all the world to see. A few days later, Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge.

Authorities charged Clementi’s roommate, Dhuran Ravi, and another student, Molly Wei, with invasion of Clementi’s privacy. That alone could get them five years in prison. Additional charges are possible. For example, if prosecutors pursue the case as a bias crime, the maximum penalty could go to 10 years.

As usual in cases like these, people are left with the question that seems as though it never will be satisfactorily answered. What is the fear that drives men such as Henderson and McKinney to do what they did to Matthew Shepard? That some gay guy is going to make off with them? That’s absurd in general; all they have to do is say no. It’s especially ridiculous in Shepard’s case since he was all of 5 feet 2, not exactly a physical threat. The other question is whether they might have had doubts about their heterosexuality and had to come to grips with that as a result of an encounter with a gay man.

Through their lawyers, Ravi and Wei have said that they did not hold Clementi’s homosexuality against him. Then, what could possibly have been their motivation for allegedly posting Tyler Clementi’s tryst on the Internet? They didn’t address that.

The death of Tyler Clementi informs us that the outrages are far from over. Anyone who was aware of Matthew Shepard’s death in 1998 likely hoped that such an atrocity could not happen again. But it did and we are left with yet another question: How many more young men must pay with their lives for the crime of being who they are?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

With regard to Christine O’Donnell, the press has come up short in asking the hard questions.

Bill Maher says there is tape of O’Donnell, the holier-than-thou-and-everyone-else Tea Party candidate for the Senate from Delaware, saying she would never tell a lie. Never is too far in the future to let pass without elaboration.

What if Hitler rang the doorbell and O’Donnell had Anne Frank hiding upstairs. “No, I would not lie,” O’Donnell was quoted by Maher. “God would find a way.”

But of course in Anne Frank’s case, God did not find a way.

Still, couldn’t some lady or gentleman of the fourth estate have asked O’Donnell how God would have protected Anne? Because when the Nazis finally came for her she was unceremoniously shipped off to Bergen-Belsen where she died. She was 15.

I don’t think it’s unfair to infer that someone who would refuse to lie in order to save a human life most likely would refuse to steal to save a life as well. Could O’Donnell identify even in the slightest with Jean Valjean who stole bread in order to survive in “Les Misérables?” Or would she dismiss him as a common thief who deserves everything he gets from the merciless Javert? But no one asked such questions.

In another matter, no one put the words “I dabbled into witchcraft”—complete with that strange preposition – into Christine O’Donnell’s merciless mouth. The words came gushing out on their own in one of her many appearances on Maher’s television show “Politically Incorrect.” Granted, the witchcraft discussion was in 1999, and nowadays she reminds us that this dabbling occurred when she was in high school. Macbeth listened to some witches and you know what it got him.

“One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s little blood there and stuff like that,” O’Donnell said. “We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar.” That would be the altar with the little bit of blood and stuff like that, right? Unless you have O’Donnell’s phone number, you won’t know whose blood it was, or how it got there because no one in the press has asked her about that.

She said all that fun on the satanic altar after the movie was one of her “first dates” with a witch. But no one asked her how many more such bloody dates she has had with witches, or when the last one was.

She did, however, ask a cheering crowd: “How many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school?” Actually I hung out with Judy Levine but, despite the fact she always dressed in black, I don’t think Judy was questionable. She wasn’t a witch; she was a beat generation writer. When we were reading “The Catcher in the Rye” and thinking ourselves pretty cool for doing so, Judy was reading “On the Road.”

Now, masturbation is to be avoided, according to the story of Onan and Judah in Genesis 38:3-10. And I know that everybody has violated the word at one time or other – maybe many more times or other. O’Donnell has said that masturbation is a form of adultery.

“It’s not enough to be abstinent with other people; you also have to be abstinent alone. The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery so you can’t masturbate without lust,” O’Donnell said, and I’m really not sure she knows what she’s talking about.

Isn’t anyone in the press going to ask O’Donnell if she ever had fun with herself under the covers late at night and, if she did, if she considers herself to have committed adultery with – who? Her right hand?

If masturbation is lust that must be avoided, surely extramarital sex is lust that must be avoided as well. I wish that some reporter had asked O’Donnell straight out what she does in those moments alone when a strong libidinous craving overtakes her poor defenseless self and there is no husband to relieve it. She is, after all, 41 years old and single.

Is she suggesting that she has spent the decades suppressing her sudden private needs?

Do you buy that? I don’t. But we won’t know much until someone asks her. And no one seems inclined to do that. Why do you suppose that is? One possibility: Publishers sell newspapers when they can put some certifiable character on Page 1, and publishers these days want to sell all the papers they can.

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com.

By Jeffrey Page

Regular Zest of Orange readers may recall the ongoing debate I’ve had with myself, and with you, over the issue of capital punishment. I noted last year that I was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty but that I have my limits.

I recall and honor the words of Clarence Darrow in his famous summation in the Leopold-Loeb murder trial of 1924: “You may stand them up on the trap-door of the scaffold, and choke them to death, but that act will be infinitely more cold-blooded whether justified or not, than any act that these boys have committed or can commit.”

But then came Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, and after that came Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and that field in Shanksville, Pa., and I wasn’t sure of much. I still believe that the use of capital punishment relegates society to the same circle of hell as the criminal, and I wonder if I will be relegated to the same circle as McVeigh and Mohammed.

In the names of the children McVeigh murdered in the day-care center in Oklahoma and in the names of the kids aboard the four airplanes brought down by Mohammed on Sept. 11, whatever compassion I once might have held for their killers is gone.

And now comes Steven Hayes, proving to be another test of what once was my rock-solid conviction on the death sentence. He’s on trial in New Haven. This is what the authorities say he did.

–Hayes and an accomplice – he will be tried later – broke into the home of William Petit and Jennifer Hawke-Petit in Chesire, Conn. three years ago. Hayes tied Petit up in the basement after slugging him several times with a baseball bat. He forced Hawke-Petit to drive to the bank and bring back $15,000 while he imprisoned her husband and the couple’s two daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17. But he wasn’t finished.

–When Hawke-Petit returned, Hayes raped her. Then he beat her. This is not an allegation; it’s an admission from Hayes’s lawyer in his opening statement to the jury. But he wasn’t finished.

–Hayes murdered Hawke-Petit by strangling. Again, this is something that has gone past the point of allegation. Hayes admitted the killing. But he wasn’t finished.

–Authorities say Hayes and the accomplice, Joshua Komisarjevsky tied Michaela the 11-year old, and Hayley the 17-year old, to their beds. Then they set the house on fire, and the girls died of smoke inhalation.

Steven Hayes’s trial began on Monday in New Haven. In that opening statement, after acknowledging his client’s rape and murder of Hawke-Petit, Hayes’s lawyer wanted the jury to understand that when Hayes was arrested, he told the police that things had gotten out of control.

Gotten out of control? How were things supposed to have gone?
Such people as Steven Hayes make it difficult to despise capital punishment.

When I wrote last year about my opposition to the death penalty becoming shaky, one reader cautioned me that by killing a mass murderer, I might create a martyr. A valid point, but doesn’t society stand a chance of being called an instrument of brutality and torture every time it sentences someone to life imprisonment without parole?

Another reader noted that veering just one step from the straight and narrow path of death penalty opposition makes one a death penalty supporter. I guess that’s true. But indulge me for a moment and let me pose this: If Hitler or Pol Pot were on trial for their crimes, and if there was a conviction and a sentence of death, ought they be spared because we might create a martyr or might let our emotions rule our lives?

What is the extent of compassion ordinary people are supposed to have for someone like Steven Hayes, whose home invasion “went out of control” resulting in the murders of a woman and her two children? Are we supposed to wonder about Steven Hayes’s childhood and whether his father was a scoundrel who abandoned the family or whether his mother used drugs?

Jeffrey can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

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