America always works.

You can hear it in her poetry:
From Walt Whitman:
“I hear America singing.
The carpenter singing, the mason singing, the boatman singing,
The delicious singing of the mothers
Their strong melodious songs”.
From Langston Hughes:
“I too, sing America,
I am the darker brother,
I laugh and grow stronger,
I too, am America”.
From Marge Piercy:
“The people I love the best jump into work head first,
I want to be with people who submerge in the task,
Who do what has to be done.”
In a limerick:
“There once was a baker named Fred,
Who checked out his checkbook and said,.
My funds are so low
Guess I’ll knead some more dough
That’s the best way I know to make bread”.
As the curtain rises on “The Glass Menagerie”, Tennessee Williams’s narrator says “It was that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind and were having their fingers forced down in the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.” Even then, girls could still earn ten cents a dance and sing “Ain’t we got fun”.
The billionaire George Soros lost some serious money in the Crash of 2008 but said without bitterness, “I was betrayed by my dreams”. He has moved on, which is what I would advise everyone to do now. This week I read about Patricia Kluge who seems to have blown $100,000,000. She too, was betrayed by her dreams. As for Bernie Madoff and his rich clients, the word schadenfreude comes to mind. When I worked in Zurich we said “Das ist schade” when someone had a cold or a headache. Losing millions requires more advanced German.
All pain is instruction and so America is back in school and will emerge smarter about money, the market and mortgages.
I was fired once upon a time in a very cold room in Toronto by a guy wearing a cheap suit. Did the world end? It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I moved on and in three years I was in the best job of my life, living in London in a 5000 sq.ft. flat overlooking Regents Park. I could even approve my own expense account.
Things will work out for America. They always have. Stephen Sondheim penned a great song in “Follies” about the ups and downs of a showgirl. It goes something like this:
“Good times and bad times come and go and I’m still here…went through the Depression, met a big financier…and I’m here”.

Wisdom can walk in any door.

I believe it was Russell who said, “ We all live the same lives”. That’s not Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, but the actor Kurt Russell. Just the same, it has the ring of truth. You can study Plato and Wittgenstein and not learn as much as you would from a few Fortune cookies.
If you remember the film “My Dinner With Andre”, Wally tells Andre that Fortune Cookies know exactly who they are going to. Mine do. Here are two recent ones: “Your senior years will be happy and fulfilling, and “Establish harmony and balance in your life”. For all I know Sarah Palin’s cookies say: “You will make big money spewing nonsense”.
I ponder something the dramatist Franz Werfel once said, “Mildness is wisdom”. This seems to be true everywhere but in present day America where someone mentally disturbed can buy a gun and go on a murder rampage.
You can study books on philosophy but they are only the tech manuals on morality. My insights mostly come from literature. “Either it comes easy or it doesn’t come at all”, “The greatest thing life can give you is youth”, “Her voice was full of money”, “Hit the baseball where they ain’t”. “The habit of careful veracity can be extended to the whole sphere of human activity, producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of fanaticism, with an increasing capacity of sympathy and mutual understanding.” That’s not Kurt, that’s Bert.

The N-word goes down the memory hole

Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s “1984, is charged with rewriting (really falsifying) history to conform to Party doctrine. This is what Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is doing in rewriting “Tom Sawyer” and especially “Huckleberry Finn”. He is replacing the N-word with “slave”, thus taking the text away from Twain and misinforming a whole generation of students. First of all, everyone knows what the N-word stands for and is really too antediluvian to be used by anyone today. But Twain was writing in 1885 before immigration and before any racial sophistication. This guy Gribben also changed the name of the villain in Tom Sawyer from “Injun Joe” to Indian Joe. When Smith found some bit of information that annoyed the Party, his job was to toss it down the “memory hole” for permanent destruction. His girlfriend Julia works for Pornosec, a division of the Ministry of Truth which provides “literature” of a sort for the Proles. Her novels are written by machine , and have only six possible plots which are shuffled around to distract the readers. “We’ll let the readers decide,” Gribben said. Actually I’ve just emailed him with my suggestion for another offensive book: Joseph Conrad’s “Nigger of the Narcissus”.
How about “ African-American of a ship that is overly vain”. Let the readers decide.

Facebook: the world's newest religion.

Half a billion practicing converts and slouching towards a billion rapidly, speaking 75 languages and all in just a few years, no millenniums needed. The Moses, Messiah and Pope of this amazing cultural phenomena is one Mark Zuckerberg, Time magazine’s Person of the Year, not to mention the subject of the Academy Award-nominated movie about him, “The Social Network”. He’s only 26 and already the $6 billion young man. He is creating Marshall McLuhan’s global village without knowing who McLuhan is. Like his predecessors, Marx, Jesus and Freud,he is a system builder. He has a vision of the world and is using his relentless genius to build it. He is the Uber Nerd and like his brilliant fellow nerds is hell-bent on bringing his brave new world to us at warp speed, no matter how socially disruptive his creation might be. And brother, is it going to be disruptive. Goodbye privacy and adios borders. I’m not on Facebook (it’s a generational thing). I can’t knock it except to point out that it’s not informed by literature (he’s never heard of E.M. Forster and he went to Harvard). He’s not interested in politics. He’s probably heard the word Orwellian but doesn’t know the source of it. So the revenue keeps pouring in as the photos keep being uploaded, the updates and links keep growing and the posts keep everyone posted. Is it a dark and tangled forest or is it a way to remind us that we are all one as the Buddha said. One of the main tenets of Buddhism is compassion and Facebook is electronic compassion. As for privacy, you must lose everything to gain everything and in a zen twist, wherever you go, there you are.
Luke says that the Kingdom of God lies within you. It’s as true a statement as there ever was. Maybe Facebook is simply a 21st Century version of the wisdom we’ve known for over 1500 years. But with lots of ads attached to it.

Everybody's selling, but nobody is buying.

For as long as I can remember it was easy to buy and hard to sell. Now it’s the other way around. No one has any money (except the 2% who are rich) or any credit so that the all important word in economics, demand, is at a standstill. On the other hand we now have more selling methods than ever in history. Hundreds of TV channels, thousands of radio stations and millions of internet websites. All of them pitching as hard as the late Bob Feller and suggesting you buy from home in your pyjamas with your credit card. But people don’t have any money in their pockets, let alone their pyjamas. so these messages are falling on deaf ears. Another upsidedowner is from the advertising playbook: the more you tell the more you sell. It used to be true in the golden age of copy and David Ogilvy. Unfortunately we live in an age where most messages are visual, and hence. hard to determine their meaning. If you do click on one of the enticing sites you’ll get a flood of information, or should I say hyperbole. I scroll down page after page of promises only to end up at a bar called “Order Now”…a $437 value only $47 if you place your order in the next 35 nanoseconds. Hope springs eternal, especially in these times, but these offers have the distinct aroma of scams. There used to be real products, real benefits and real companies to deal with but now who knows? As Marcel Proust once said, “To goodness and wisdom we only make promises, we obey pain.” Like foreclosure, unemployment and bankruptcy

Say something witty

Don’t tell jokes under any circumstances. They’re long-winded, boring and usually not very funny. Try to emulate Oscar Wilde: ‘A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”. Or try Noel Coward: “When I was in London I performed for café society, in Las Vegas I performed for Nescafe society”. Take a point of view that is skeptical and worldly. No mother in law jokes, no Lewinski jokes, no Tiger Woods jokes. You’re not there to trade one-liners with Henny Youngman. You’d lose every time. Use the language cleverly: “His limitations are boundless”. I got a fortune cookie today that said wisely: “Humor is an affirmation of dignity.” That’s the trouble with today’s stand up comics: no dignity, therefore no humor. Don’t use four letter words ever. You don’t want to be confused with a fourteen year old. Use the moment. Here’s an example: Red Skelton was one of the funniest men of the 20th Century playing the rube and the clown, but at the funeral of Harry Cohen, the bullying and unloved head of Columbia Pictures he remarked wittily at the large crowd at the service by saying: “Well, as Harry always said, give the public what they want and they’ll come”. Wit can bite and it should. Just look at the poetry of Alexander Pope. You’re exposing folly and pretension. Mort Sahl said he was very worried about the bowling alley they were putting in to the student union at Cal. Worried, why? Because he was afraid it was going to be a new Major. Brevity is the soul of wit. To wit: Noel Coward and a friend were at a reception in Africa when one of the pompous leaders came in followed by a diminutive aide. I wonder who that little fellow is?, asked the friend and Coward said, “Probably his lunch”. Remember Addison DeWitt, the critic in “All about Eve”? When Marilyn Monroe bombs at her audition for a play DeWitt recommends she try television. “Will I have to audition” she says, and he answers acidly, “My dear, television is just one big audition”. Of course television humor is a big business and if you ever get the opportunity to write for a late night show you can make $3500 a week. But you’ll be required to do 20 jokes a day and they won’t be memorable for more than a few minutes. I give the last word to Noel Coward: “Wit is like caviar, it should be served in very small portions, not sloshed about.”

Who's the star of your biopic?

The star of the new film “The King’s Speech” is Colin Firth, playing George VI of England. He doesn’t look anything like the King. He looks better. There’s probably someone on the West End Stage that does resemble George VI but not someone who can open a movie. Helena Bonham Carter plays his wife Queen Elizabeth, who also looks like someone else. Casting is 50% of a production according to Director Peter Bogdanovich and he’s probably right. I just saw “Fair Game” and Sean Penn and Naomi Watts do actually look very similar to the protagonists. But the more important question is: who do we want to play us in our biopic? I would have opted for Gordon MacRae when I was in my 20’s, Marcello Mastroianni when I was in my 40’s and then I’d have to pull a Colin Firth to impersonate me today, when I am a wreck and not screen worthy. Oh well, you can always play your story in your head a lot better than anyone else in the world. There aren’t many roles for the elderly actor. I saw “Ghost Writer” this year and Eli Wallach had a small part. He looked wretched, ill and almost at death’s door. So we can’t go there. Ed McMahon once asked Johnny Carson what he was most afraid of, and Johnny answered, “Abe Vigoda nude”. Frightening!