7NT

A friend once started to ask Eleanor Roosevelt what FDR thought about a particular issue. Eleanor cut him off with “The President doesn’t think, dear. The President decides.” Many years later, and much less elegantly, George W. Bush stated “I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.” Blunt, perhaps; juvenile, possibly; but entirely accurate. That is the heart of what makes the job of the United States’ Chief Executive so challenging and harrowing: the constant decision-making, many of them massively impacting (and sometimes ending) the lives of others. One has to be up to the task, 24/7, and then be fully answerable to others: Congress, media, voters and, ultimately, history.

This leads me to the one overwhelming argument I have against a potential Donald Trump presidency: Simply stated, Mr Trump has never made a single professional decision (as opposed to, say family-related matters) in which the outcome of that decision did not affect him personally (with the possible obvious exclusion of beauty-pageant and reality TV judging.) Each and every decision which he has arrived at was, by nature, focused on his own gains, benefits, and financial profit. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but for the fact that is provides no preparation whatsoever for the office for which he’s running.

Without exception (or political affiliation) all the other candidates have enjoyed years of decision-making experience: whether as legislators, governors, physicians, cabinet members, prosecutors or mayors, they have all been faced with numerous determinations in which the outcome did not have a direct affect on them, and they have all been answerable on those decisions to others: patients, presidents, colleagues, city councils, and, above all, voters. Even Carly Fiorina reported to a board of directors at Hewlett-Packard. Surely, some of these decisions had a political tint, but there is a great distance between that and a decision involving immediate personal financial gain. Moreover, Mr Trump has been uniquely answerable to no-one.

This has nothing to do with his temperament, ideology, or positions on race, immigration, women’s rights or ISIS; it is only about being ready for the job. The evident lack of a dispassionate decision-making ability should be cause for alarm to all citizens.

Baseball and Dads

Two well-deserving baseball stars were recently voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Mike Piazza, most notably of the NY Mets, who is one of the best offensive catchers in the history of the game, and the Kid, Ken Griffey, Jr., pretty much everybody’s favorite player over the past twenty years (in fact, “Junior” as he is universally known, has earned more than 99% of the vote, a previously-unattained honor, not granted even to the lofty demi-gods Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, or Jackie Robinson). Naturally Griffey will “go in” the Hall wearing a Seattle Mariners ball-cap, and the only question remains is regarding its orientation: traditional bill-forward, or, perchance, in Junior’s trademark reversed style.

So naturally there was plenty of media coverage and many interviews with the two, both American-born players who were close to the game from childhood, much on account of their fathers. Ken Griffey Sr. being a well known Cincinnati “Big Red Machine” player and later a coach, Vince Piazza a close personal friend of legendary LA Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. I was moved by how both players continually stressed and emphasized their relationship with their fathers, and how it was intertwined with the game, to the extent that I am no longer sure of whether it was the game that brought them closer, or that their closeness to each other enabled their success. Perhaps it’s both.

Baseball is a sport in transition, no longer truly “America’s Pastime”, yet wildly successful financially. On one hand, it was just announced that this year’s player’s salary total will exceed $4 Billion, on the other, the average age of TV baseball game viewers is 57. Greedy, complicated blackout rules and late-night games have driven young people away from Major League Baseball and, consequently, from the sport at large. This is cause for concern. The connections that fathers and sons used to form in and around the pastime are unique from those in other sports, but what used to be an important American rite-of-passage is now slipping away. This bond between a dad, a boy, and a local team is not only a great part of parenting and of growing-up, it is also the foundational cornerstone of the game itself. Our baseball leaders would be wise to see it strengthened, not diminished.

Cinerama

Over the holiday vacation our family went to see the “Roadshow” of Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, “The Hateful Eight”. Taking place in a snowed-in cabin in Wyoming, the movie tells the story of eight individuals brought together by circumstance (and a blizzard) and the ensuing conflict. It’s a good yarn, great dialog, with all the requisite gore one would come to expect from a Tarantino movie. And then came the real treat: In homage to the epic movies of yesteryear (presumably the ones he grew up on) Tarantino decided to film the movie in long-abandoned 65 millimeter film stock, and present it using Ultra Panavision 70 mm projectors and Cinerama lenses (true Cinerama movies only existed for a short while in the early Sixties. They required a massive curved screen, three synchronized projectors to run concurrently, and heaven help you if one of the reels had a slip or a break, the whole blessed thing would get thrown out of whack). To put some historical context on this endeavor, the last movie to be thus filmed and presented was Khartum, in 1966. From a cinematographic perspective, “Hateful Eight” hearkens back to an era when going to see an epic film was a special treat. Think about great classics like Gone with the Wind or The Ten Commandments. In fact, to shoot his movie Tarantino used the original lenses from Ben-Hur. The producers helped about a hundred movie theaters around the country install old 70 mm projectors. Luckily, one was in nearby Durham.

So we walked in, and were handed a fancy program. Then we sat down, and were treated to an overture: a five-minute long orchestral piece summarizing the soundtrack, itself an epic score composed by music legend Ennio Morricone, best known for the timeless theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and all those other great Spaghetti Westerns. Then the movie started. Projected on a massive screen, in an aspect ratio much wider than what movie theaters use nowadays, and with a richness of color, scope and detail that is simply indescribable. For the first time in fifty years, and probably never to be seen this way again, a routine afternoon matinee was transformed into an epic cinematographic fantasy. Kudos to the director and producers for being guardians of this unique event, the “Movie Roadshow”, and for sharing with a new generations a taste of the grandeur that used to be the epic Hollywood film.

Bumper Sticker?

“21 is the new 15.” (After having our older college-age children back home for Winter break.)

Wrong, and Wright

A few months ago I had to go to the DMV in order to receive a new license plate, and was asked by the agent if I was interested in the new “Freedom” design. For a moment I was taken aback; have we given up on our battle with Ohio on who was “First in Flight”, I inquired? No, but as a hedge on the “first-est” game The Old North State suddenly recalled that the “Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence” and the “Halifax Resolves” both predate the US Declaration of Independence, thus giving us Tar Heels the right to bestow upon ourselves the moniker “First in Freedom”. The fact is that pretty much from the day the Mecklenburg Declaration was approved, in 1775, until President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, “Freedom” was an imprecise, fluid, nebulous term to describe life for many of our North Carolinian ancestors, to say the least. It was bad enough that my registration had expired, and I didn’t feel that it would be wise to add a fraudulent statement to my license plate on top of that, so I requested to retain the memory of that bold aviation proclamation, made over a hundred years ago at Kitty Hawk.

I must confess that while I grew up besotted with information about the early years of space exploration and aviation, I did not know much about the Wright Brothers. That was rectified over the holiday season, when my darling wife bought me historian David McCullough’s latest masterpiece, “The Wright Brothers”. It should have been titled “The Wright Brothers and Sister”. Apparently Katharine Wright was a key player in their endeavors, and played and important part in introducing the world to their flying machines, quitting her job as a teacher to assist them. Of course, I was fascinated by those seminal days at the wind-swept beach on the Outer Banks, attempting day after to to achieve a sustained liftoff.

North Carolina boosters and business-developers like to present the Wright Brothers as the state’s first technology entrepreneurs. While that certainly romanticizes the past, I am not sure that it is an accurate characterization (Full disclosure: my first company in North Carolina was a tenet in the “First Flight Venture Center” incubator, in Research Triangle Park; so I, too, had fallen for the hype.) They came here for the wide flat beaches, the wind and, above all, the desolation and distance from the prying eyes of the competition. Unlike most of us NC entrepreneurial upstarts, they brought their own capital, in the form of earnings from their Dayton, Ohio bicycle shop. When they left, nothing stayed behind: they didn’t hire permanent staff, build a factory, or establish a gift shop (although local tourist ventures still operate). Yes, on December 17, 1903, the first powered airplane took to the skies over North Carolina (well, at least twenty feet over it) earning us the “First in Flight” honor, although admittedly we didn’t have all that much to do with it. Luckily for us, in the gentle wash eternally coming off the Canard Biplane’s wings at Kitty Hawk, millions of license plates flutter and shine.

David, King of Israel

Israelis are notoriously mad about NBA basketball. Games are broadcast regularly and many Israelis are loyal fans of specific teams. Recognizing that the NBA is heads and shoulders (both literally and figuratively) above the local league makes it an aspirational touchstone for many. Israel’s greatest singer/songwriter, the late Arik Einstein, famously had a lyric “I see Dr. J tearing down the nets, and Kareem Abdul-Jabar is touching the sky”. Israel’s “national” club team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, is considered by most to be semiofficially representing the country whenever it plays international matches, and those games have massive viewership. It is, frankly, the one sports powerhouse in the country, having won 52 national championships, 42 national cups, and six European championships, a truly unprecedented run for any club team, in any sport.

Maccabi was coached for several years by David Blatt, a Boston-born former guard at Princeton, who also coached Russia’s national team in two Olympics, leading them to the bronze medal in the 2012 London Games. Eighteen months ago Blatt, against all odds, took a tired, beat-up and worn-down Maccabi and led them to their sixth European championship. He decided to not renew his contract and accepted an offer to coach the Cleveland Cavaliers, becoming the first Israeli to coach in the league, a great honor. As Israelis are prone to do, everyone jumped on the bandwagon, and Blatt became a national hero of sorts, certainly Israel’s ambassador to the magical world of American Professional Basketball. Israel is a country with extremely sharp political, social, and religious divides (President Rivlin recently spoke of the “four tribes” which currently make up the nation) and when a consensus figure or issue emerges people flock to it. Naturally, The Cavs instantly became a hugely popular team in Israel, with significant media coverage.

And then LeBron James decided to return to Cleveland.

Suddenly Blatt found himself in the unexpected situation of having two massive talents on the team (Kevin Love joined shortly as well) with egos to match; a scenario which was very different from his Israeli and Russian experiences. Nevertheless, Blatt found a way to effectively navigate this minefield and took the team (which had many key players injured) to the NBA finals, in his first year as head coach. All the while his rocky relationship with superstar LeBron James was under constant media scrutiny, with every facial expression or court-side body language gesture between the two deeply analyzed by Israeli media. I know, I followed it as well…

To the utter shock of most of us, David Blatt was just fired by the Cleveland Cavaliers, 41 games into the season. The fact that on the day of the firing their record was 30-11, and that according to SuperStatistician Nate Silver, Blatt is the winningest coach to ever be fired from the NBA, was not lost on Israelis, who quickly determined that the firing was the handiwork of none other than the esteemable Mr. James himself. All this is merely the preamble, setting the stage for Israel’s reaction to the firing.

Words cannot begin to describe the anger and animosity. LeBron James’ status went overnight from that of a revered star to that of Lex Luthor of the NBA. I have seen several articles in Israeli media (and hundreds of comments) accusing James of racism, Anti-semitism, and anti Israeli sentiments. Blatt is viewed as a political victim, ground up by “the machine”, and even though they are only five inches apart in height, “David vs Goliath” has been a recurring media theme. My favorite was a political cartoon in the liberal “Haaretz” newspaper, which sarcastically depicts James high-fiving his four other “Israel hating” team-mates, in this instance the eclectic team being comprised of Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, the late mufti of Jerusalem (and Nazi supporter) Hajj Amin al-Housainy, Pink Floyd founder (and lead advocate for boycotting Israel) Roger Waters, and Margot Wällstrom, the Swedish Foreign Minister, who recently criticized Israel’s unique methods of defending itself against terrorists. In other words, Israel has had it with LeBron James, who has firmly established himself as a persona non grata in the Jewish homeland.

Most experts believe that Blatt is simply too skilled of a coach to not be picked-up by another team in short order. However, until he does, Israelis will have to get their NBA fix by rooting for Omer Casspi, small forward for the Sacramento Kings, and the first Israeli to be drafted for the NBA. LeBron James he ain’t, but people will still buy him drinks at any bar in Tel Aviv.

Heartless

After being vilified for disclosing my hatred of “The Sound of Music”, I feel obligated to confess to another cranky, ill-tempered antipathy: I refuse to observe St. Valentine’s Day. No, I have nothing against the color pink, I am truly one of the greatest chocoholics around, and I love my wife unconditionally, but much to her annoyance I draw the line at this latter-day CupidFest.

The origins of the day are murky: there are actually seven or eight St. Valentines, although the day is most associated with Valentinius, AKA “St. Valentine of Rome”. Relics exist all over Europe, and some of them are, in my opinion, to morbid to associate with romance. There exists a theory that the holiday was invented by the English Medieval authority on love himself, Geoffrey Chaucer, author of “The Canterbury Tales”. Legend has it that the birds in Europe would mate mud-February, hence the observance. Some think that it is the Church’s attempt at establishing a Christian version of the Roman fertility holiday Lupercalia, which took place on February 15.

February 14, 1349, is a very dark date in Jewish history: it was on St. Valentine’s Day when the infamous “Massacre of Strasbourg” took place. Hundreds of Jews were burned alive, the rest expelled from the city, their property confiscated. It is one of the earliest pogroms in history, an early precursor to the Blood Libel so common later on in central Europe. So it is kind of a tough day for celebrations. When our children attended a Jewish pre-school in Florida the Director used to inspect arriving students to make sure they did not bring any Valentine’s Day cards with them…

In any event, the Jewish people had a head start on Christianity in matters of the heart: Tu B’av (The fifteenth of the month of Av) is the day on the Hebrew calendar when the grape harvest commenced. On this day the young unmarried Israelites would venture out to the vineyards in song and dance, presumably to entice young eligible Jewish bachelors. Occurring mid-Summer, and now observed in Israel as the “Festival of Love”, Tu B’av predates Valentine’s Day by a good eight hundred years, and J-Date by two-and-a-half millennia.

So if you commemorate it, have yourselves a Happy Valentine’s Day. For myself, give me that old-time religion, it’s good enough for me.