A Me Too Far

One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness.
It is sudden. It pounces.

— Teju Cole

Woody Allen's new autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, nearly never was. 

That's because Allen's son, famed investigative reporter and father of the #MeToo Movement Ronan Farrow, strong-armed Hachette, the book's would-be publisher, into dropping it. 

Fortunately, Allen's book was rushed out by a competing house.

Ronan Farrow objected to Hachette publishing Apropos of Nothing due to its savage portrayal of his mother, actress Mia Farrow, who three decades ago alleged that Woody Allen had sexually abused their adopted daughter (the case was twice dismissed by the courts). 

Farrow threatened to sever his own ties with Hachette and egged the publisher's mostly-female staff to walk off their jobs in protest.

I just read Apropos of Nothing—I love memoirs by aging rock stars and Hollywood people—and am glad to have Allen's account of his three marriages, first to Harlene Rosen; then to Louise Lasser; and then to Mia Farrow's and his adopted daughter, Sun-Yi Previn. Allen clearly loves all three of his wives and has done his best by them.

His girlfriend Mia Farrow—herself the victim of an abusive, alcoholic father—is quite another matter. Allen admits he was foolish ever to become involved with such a crackpot, but Mia Farrow was a pretty, cultured, award-winning actress on the hunt for a new husband when they met (Farrow's ex-husband, Andre Previn, had dumped her the year before).

If Woody Allen was guilty of anything, he was guilty of being a schlimazel—a dupe and a patsy, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Which brings me to #MeToo. (Me to #MeToo. Confusing, huh?)

#MeToo is grounded on the idea that no tomcat should be immune from justice. 

I don't agree.

Some men are tomcats who deserve caging. Think of predators like Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly and Larry Nasser.

But some men are tomcats who don't. Think of Romeos like Chico Marx, Louis C. K., Al Franken, Melvil Dewey—the librarian and inventor of the Dewey Decimal System—and, yes, Woody Allen, the sultan of schlimazelhood.

Don't get me wrong. 

#MeToo is among the most urgent political movements of our time. And it isn't just hashtag feminism, as leftist critics say; nor McCarthyism, as right-wing critics say. It's really all about truth, justice and the American way.

But in the hands of angry mobs, #MeToo promotes a radioactive Cancel Culture that suppresses the sort of honest talk you'll find in Apropos of Nothing.

In the hands of angry mobs, #MeToo pounces, weaponizing virtue against schlimazels.

And that's not fair.

Note to readers: As a rule, links embedded in my posts provide my sources and frequently "fun facts" omitted for brevity's sake.

Paranoid

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on.

― William S. Burroughs

Political rancor is fine, when informed; it's uniformed partisanship that makes me cringe.

As we speak, Republicans ad nauseam are socializing this palaver:

No one should be allowed to drive again until there are no fatal accidents for 14 consecutive days. Then we can slowly begin to phase in certain classes of people who can begin driving again, but at half the posted speed limit and while wearing helmets.

This chestnut is rooted in ignorance and denial of the lethal nature of Covid-19. Two statistics and one calculation reveal how vacuous it is:

• 38,800 Americans died in car crashes last year, according to the National Safety Council; but 130,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 since its appearance four months ago.
  
  
• Annualized that's 390,000 dead from Covid-19―10 times the number killed in car crashes.

From the standpoint of body counts, equating infectious people to bad drivers is specious. Covid-19 is 10 times more deadly.

But know-nothing Republicans stand by this myth nonetheless.

Another myth they're peddling: 

Joe Biden molested a junior aide in the 1990s.

Again, a few facts should give any thoughtful person pause:

• Over 200 of his former staffers have told PBS then-Senator Biden never spoke to low-level employees, nor did he harass women. One called the accusations "surreal."
  
  
• The accuser didn't quit her job on the Hill, as she claims, "to pursue an acting career;" she was fired because she couldn't sort the mail. And Antioch University says the accuser never taught there, nor receive the law degree she claims to hold.
  
  
• As recently as January, she still practiced an obsessive hobby: posting pro-Russian propaganda on the Internet.

• The accuser also runs up expensive bills and skips on them; never pays her rent; lets her dogs poop throughout her landlords' houses; once she stole money from an animal-rescue nonprofit; and, worst of all, borrows books and doesn't return them.

The accuser is a whack-job. But Republicans know nothing of her background and insist her accusations are true (while those made by Christine Blasey Ford were, of course, false).

William S. Burroughs was right: paranoids know a little of what's going on. 

But never, it seems, enough.

NOTE: I'm grateful to followers for their many kind notes of encouragement. Goodly has now been read by over 385,000 people.

Plan to be Spontaneous

I opened a fortune cookie Saturday night and was told I should engineer some serendipity.

Easier said than done when the garage needs cleaning and your wife's complaining the women in her compassion class are fusspots.

But nobody said Buddhafication would be easy.

“Guess what?" says mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn. "When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are."

Whatever has happened to you has already happened.

Wait. What? There's more?

Yes. That's only the penultimate McMindfulness nugget. 

Make room for eternity.

Because matter is finite but time is not, according to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, we should embrace wholeheartedly the ineluctable "Eternal Recurrence of the Same."

Eternity is nothing less that the endless and identical repetition of all the physical events in the universe, in all their odious detail.

So not only has whatever has happened to you already happened, it will happen to you again—and again and again and again ad infinitum.

So you'd better not only live your life, but love it, Nietzsche says; avow what he calls amor fati—love of fate.

And, what the hell, plan to be spontaneous, too.

Want to Be Hot?

Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes.

— Oscar Wilde

Blame Trophy Communism: in our everybody-gets-a-trophy culture, self-criticism is hard to come by. Which means a lot of weak work gets off the drawing board.

If you're a Trophy Capitalist, on the other hand, you don't worry: you know the market weeds out weaklings.

But self-criticism should be encouraged, if only to grease the market's skids.

Feeling shame about your work is just part of the game and—as an old boss of mine always said—"If you want the name, you gotta play the game."

This week, I had the pleasure of attending a Zoom meeting led by Andrew Wyeth's granddaughter and chronicler, Victoria. 

I asked her whether the artist ever destroyed work he wasn't happy with. Her answer was immediate: yes, like clockwork, every spring and fall Wyeth built a bonfire in his yard and burned work he wasn't happy with.

He didn't want it in the world.

Unless it stifles good work, self-criticism strengthens it. Don't sweat your missteps, but, please, don't be so naive as to think they deserve a trophy.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain and  difficulty," Teddy Roosevelt said.

You want to be hot? 

Build a bonfire.

Tears over Tarawa

NOTE: Of the 1,500 posts I've published, the following remains far and away the most popular, read by more than 35,000 people. It originally appeared on Memorial Day in 2016.

In the middle of World War II, 2,700 Women Marines (average age 22) served in Headquarters Battalion at Henderson Hall in Arlington, Virginia. 

My mother was one of them.

She told many "war stories" later, mostly comical; and one, in particular, not comical.

The latter was set in late November 1943, when she helped operate a ticker tape machine inside the war room where the top brass worked.

The machine was dedicated to one purpose: transmitting live reports of casualties from the Pacific.

On November 20 of that year, 18,000 Marines began an amphibious attack on a Japanese-held "islet" called Betio.

A mere two miles long by a half-mile wide, Betio is a coral rock 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii and part of a larger atoll named Tarawa—in 1943, the most fortified spot in the Pacific.

As the history books tell, everything went wrong.

As the first assault wave prepared to hit the beach—code-named "Red 1"—high seas slowed the Marines' transfer from the battleships onto the landing boats, so the attack fell behind schedule.

Then, planned air raids were delayed, so the boats had to linger offshore, sustaining terrible artillery fire from the island. 

Slowly, the tide went down—much lower than expected—and grounded the boats on coral reefs. So the Marines abandoned the armored landing crafts and waded toward Red 1 hundreds of yards through chest-deep water and under brutal machine-gun fire from 100 Japanese pillboxes.

Those who made it onto the sand had to crawl inland, to avoid the rain of bullets. 

But hundreds of Marines never made it. They drowned in the surf. Their bodies so clogged the assault path the second wave of reinforcements couldn't be sent until the next day.

In Arlington, the generals in the war room stood watching a sign of the disaster-in-the-making on Red 1: the ticker tape machine.

My mother said it was spitting out the names of casualties faster than anyone had ever witnessed, or thought possible.

She said the normally gruff men were transfixed by the clattering machine. They stood looking helpless, and openly sobbing.