Elegy for Kodak: An American Icon Goes Bankrupt
First they took our Kodachrome away... now Kodak is going, too. (Source: WebProNews)
It was bound to happen sooner or later. After years of declining revenues and tumbling stock prices, Eastman Kodak has finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The venerable company that introduced the world to the snapshot has reached the end of the roll.
Bankruptcy doesn’t always mean certain death, of course. Paramount Studios, Pepsi, Macy’s, MGM and plenty of other American institutions have filed in the past and are still with us today in one form or another. But unless it can be rescued and resurrected by a benevolent corporate behemoth, Kodak will soon join the growing roster of vanished American brands: PanAm and TWA, Look Magazine, Pontiac and Oldsmobile (not to mention Studebaker, Edsel, DeSoto, Plymouth and Pierce-Arrow), Rheingold beer, Ipana toothpaste, Postum, Uneeda Biscuits and hundreds of other once-familiar names — now alive only in the memories of aging consumers like me (and possibly you).
If you’re over forty, you probably remember stepping into a tourist shop while on vacation, pointing to the shelves of little yellow-orange boxes behind the counter, and grabbing three or four overpriced rolls of Kodachrome or Kodacolor film for your SLR camera. (It was Kodachrome for slides, Kodacolor for prints.) Professional photographers used to stake their reputations on Kodachrome, especially the low-speed Kodachrome 25, which was revered for the depth and richness of its colors.
Kodak entered the American soul like only a select handful of beloved brands. The “Kodak moment” is part of our vocabulary. One of the company’s nostalgic commercials from the early 1960s still lingers in the memories of those of us old enough to have seen it. Viewed today, this tender masterpiece still guarantees at least few furtive sniffles.
Kodak founder George Eastman (l.) with his friend, a movie cameraman named Edison.
Film was the essence of Kodak’s business and its biggest profit center, but of course the company also made the cameras to go with the film. Kodak founder George Eastman invented both film-on-a-roll (1885) and the portable camera (1888); in fact, his ingeniously simple Brownie camera, introduced in 1900, finally brought photography out of the studio and into the homes of millions. In his unassuming way, the man who chose the name Kodak (because he thought the letter K “seems a strong, incisive sort of letter”) had started a revolution.
I still honor the memory of my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic given to me by my parents when I turned sixteen. That little black-and-silvery gizmo accompanied me to New York, the Grand Canyon, California, Mexico City, college and beyond, culminating in a grand two-month post-collegiate European adventure. My Kodak Instamatic looked upon Stonehenge, the Eiffel Tower, the Matterhorn and the ruins of Pompeii. It took perfectly square pictures of dubious resolution, but it was cute and handy and always ready to tag along. I still have it, tucked away in a box somewhere in my vast and disorderly personal archives, current whereabouts unknown. Wherever it is, it won’t leave my possession until I’m lowered into the ground. Maybe they should bury it with me.
The Instamatic was a model of brilliant simplicity: you popped a plastic film cartridge into the back (no unwieldy spools or sprockets), shut the compartment, pointed and clicked. If you were taking pictures indoors or at night, you mounted a little disposable flash cube atop the camera; it rotated as you snapped away and was good for four shots.
Kodak had come up with an unbeatable business model: inexpensive, well-marketed, user-friendly devices — coupled with the need to refill those devices regularly with the company’s own products. (In marketing parlance, this is the razor blade model: sell a good razor, and your customers will keep buying your blades.) Kodak was sitting pretty, and its future seemed as solid as a Mack Truck.
So how could a giant like Kodak go belly-up? How could a company that held a 90 percent share of the American film market in the 1970s find itself at the door of doom today? Was it a simple matter of film losing out to the digital juggernaut, or were there other issues involved?
Yes, Kodak grew complacent as a result of its near-monopoly on camera film. Even before the digital revolution, the company started losing market share to foreign upstarts like Fuji and Agfa. Kodak assumed that its customers would never desert the sacred brand.
And get ready for a shock: the digital camera was actually invented by a Kodak employee, Steven Sasson, back in 1975. That’s right: a company that made its living from film created the very technology that would render most of its product line obsolete. You have to shake your head in disbelief at such a revelation… and at the same time, you have to love a company that would place innovation above its own fortunes in the great hierarchy of priorities.
Down, down, down, from a high of 95 in 1997 to 36 cents at bankruptcy.
But there’s more to the story of Kodak’s collapse. The company enjoyed a brief resurgence as a maker of popular digital cameras that could be docked to a portable instant printer. Just seven years ago, in fact, Kodak ranked number one in camera sales. But there were two emerging problems that didn’t bode well for the company’s future: low profit margins, and a burgeoning smartphone industry that was devouring camera sales. Kodak’s response proved fatal.
Like too many chieftains of faltering companies, Kodak CEO Antonio Perez took the easy route of slashing costs instead of boosting revenues. He shut down the remaining film factories, cut 27,000 jobs and outsourced most of the manufacturing to Asia. Reduced to a shell of its former self, Kodak had lost its soul. It could no longer compete with either the cell phone makers or the robust Japanese camera companies. Checkmate.
Kodak mysteriously kept Perez in the driver’s seat for ten years, right up to the bitter end. Maybe the board believed in his slasher ethic. Or maybe the crippled company had simply lost the will to live. Now Kodak will try to sell its 1100 patents so it can raise enough cash to pay employee pensions. The company created by visionary George Eastman over 120 years ago is pretty much a closed photo album.
Companies are like species, subject to the same ruthless Darwinian laws: compete, find a niche, dominate it, keep adapting and never rest on your laurels. Kodak dominated its niche for over a century — a pretty grand run for any company — but ultimately failed to adapt and was trodden under with the weak and infirm.
Could a better-managed Kodak have survived the transition from film to digital? Maybe, but the challenges of that transition would have taxed and tormented even the most brilliant managers. Film, the very heart of Kodak’s business, had been wiped out by an invasion of pixels — an invasion launched from within the company’s own walls. You can adapt to a gradual change in climate, but Kodak was essentially hit by an asteroid.
So now we’re left with the memories in our photo albums — if any of us still look at photo albums. Under normal conditions, memories are little more than fleeting flashes of light from the past. For over a century, Kodak helped millions of us capture those memories for perpetual viewing and enjoyment. That’s quite a legacy. I like companies that change our lives for the better. More of them should be like Kodak.
Romnevitability
He was never the flavor of the month, but now Mitt Romney has a virtual lock on the nomination. Should moderates be happy? (Source: Time magazine)
The Romney machine is rolling now. After barely surviving that eight-vote squeaker in Iowa, the Mittster rebounded by throttling the competition in New Hampshire. The man with the granite jaw won the Granite State with a convincing 40 percent of the vote — equal to second- and third-place finishers Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman combined.
Sure, Ron Paul won the independent vote, while Huntsman snagged the “anti-Tea Party” vote. But the Romney campaign gained an aura of inevitability with the whopping 17-point margin of victory last night. It would take an act of God or a gaffe of Herman Cain proportions to keep him from wrapping up the GOP nomination now. And Romney just isn’t the gaffe-prone type.
He’s not perfect, of course — despite all the evidence to the contrary. The Republican front-runner can flip-flop like a Clinton if it’s to his advantage. He can be testy with his inquisitors in the press and even the public. With all his millions, you’d think he could afford a more convincing dye job. But these aren’t exactly fatal flaws.
In fact, Romney could probably benefit from revealing his fallible human side now and then. His appearance of flawlessness is probably his greatest liability. He seems artificial, bloodless, programmed — our first cybercandidate.
Just as a shark is essentially an eating machine, Romney comes across as a winning machine. His smile, though engaging enough when he decides to flash it, seems automatic and unconvincing. The man lives to clinch. That’s how he’s constructed: to clinch deals, money, victories, success.
Romney is almost a caricature of the lean-and-mean alpha male. One can’t imagine such a straight arrow relaxing in front of the TV for a W. C. Fields movie marathon, or reading Dickens for pleasure. Can you picture him as a college student, stretched out on the rug with his friends, growing giddy from a silly conversation or a whiff of weed? I can’t, either. No, it hardly seems possible that Mitt lived through the 1960s with the rest of us Boomers. But here he is anyway.
So why (you might ask) am I bashing the most moderate and least ideology-bound candidate on the Republican roster? Shouldn’t I be grateful that one of the kooks from the rabid right didn’t grab the golden ring?
Good questions, both of them. To answer the second question first — yes, it would have been more worrisome to see a fringe candidate start piling up the victories. At least we know the Tea Party won’t be choosing the next president. But that leads me back to the first question: shouldn’t we be relieved that the Republicans will soon be entrusting their party’s fortunes to a moderate?
In Romney’s case, we should probably put boldface quotes around the word “moderate.“ (There, I just did.) Mitt gives the appearance of being a moderate, but that’s only because he’s an utter pragmatist. He focuses on what works, which isn’t necessarily a fault — especially at a time when nothing seems to work. But mere pragmatism overlooks the more important issue of what’s right. A good moderate should operate upon a solid foundation of principles — the most important of which is to strive for a fair and appropriate balance between the rights of the successful and the needs of everyone else.
The times call for a leader who can empathize with a middle class whose fortunes have dwindled and whose optimism has been crushed. Is Mitt Romney that leader? Can a man who made a fortune deconstructing and remodeling companies for profit identify with the individual Joes and Janes who worked for those companies?
The Tea Partiers, for all their arrogance and borderline lunacy, at least recognized that Americans are growing furious with the unsavory alliance between government and big money. Will Romney, whose “SuperPAC” raised gargantuan quantities of campaign cash, be the man to break that alliance if he makes it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?
Don’t bet on it.
What’s sad is that President Obama — elected over three years ago as a savior of the people — won’t break that alliance, either. Regardless of who wins the 2012 presidential race, we’re destined to be stuck with government-as-usual — at least until 2017. Lobbyists, Wall Street, big corporations and career politicians can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. Third party, anyone?
As I write this, the good people of Iowa are casting the first votes for the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. The candidates are in the starting gate, bucking nervously… the gun fires, the gate opens and the race begins in earnest. They’re off!
A few will stumble out of the gate, and one or more could drop out. Nobody seems to be a clear favorite, which explains why I’m blogging this event live from the confines of my den. It should be a tight and suspense-filled horse race.
But does it matter who wins? After all, Iowa is a strange venue for the start of the race. Overwhelmingly rural and white, it’s not exactly a microcosm of the twenty-first century republic. The flat green expanses of Iowa have given us American Gothic, plenty of corn and hogs, a good (if overrated) creative writing program — and of course Herbert Hoover, one of those virtuous and intelligent men (like both Adamses, Ulysses Grant, William Howard Taft, Jimmy Carter and the current occupant of the White House) who proved to be less-than-stellar presidents.
So what do the Iowans know about choosing a president? They know they’re first, and that’s enough to command our attention.
Now the votes are being tallied. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are in a virtual dead heat with a quarter of the votes counted. Gingrich, as expected, has faltered badly — at least partly as a result of direct assaults on his candidacy in the form of mudslinging campaign ads. His 13 percent of the vote won’t cut it. Rick Perry, who never recovered from his debating gaffes, is languishing with about 10 percent. Michele Bachmann is even further behind, fading fast into single digits… I think we can color her finished as of tonight. Poor Jon Huntsman, the aberrantly normal Marilyn Munster of this grotesque crew, is barely on the map with one percent of the vote. (He didn’t campaign actively in Iowa… but it doesn’t say a lot for the wisdom of Iowa’s Republican voters that they’d refuse to vote for him on that score alone.)
The big news here is Santorum — a low-key outlier during the overheated debating season, a man few pundits took seriously. And here he is, running neck-and-neck with the well-funded, well-groomed (in both senses of the phrase) Romney. The folks in the Romney camp must be shocked. Even if their man pulls out a victory before the night is over, he’ll look vulnerable. Weak. Beatable.
Despite his pedigree, poise and electability, Romney has had a hard time winning the affections of his party’s faithful. He looks a little too much like one of those mature male models you see in men’s clothing catalogs — ruggedly handsome but ultimately bland and forgettable. An empty suit. His convictions, such as they are, seem to shift with the seasons. He’s not a card-carrying conservative — a blight on his image in our politically polarized era. Sometimes I have to wonder what Romney actually thinks about, other than winning elections. I wonder what he feels. If he unbuttoned his shirt, would we see a panel of flashing lights and grinding gears? As Gertrude Stein might quip, “There’s no there there.”
In his favor, we can say that he’s reasonable, smart and devoid of fanaticism. In short, not the kind of candidate today’s GOP can love.
What if the Iowans actually choose Santorum? The former senator from Pennsylvania is an amiable and earnest fellow, disarmingly modest in deportment (though Churchill might tell us, as he once said of a rival politician, that “he has much to be modest about”).
But don’t let that boyish image fool you. Santorum is a fanatical social conservative who could out-pope the Pope when it comes to issues like abortion and birth control. A Santorum presidency (I can hardly believe I’m typing those words) would turn the United States into a would-be theocracy. (“Would be” because Santorum would still have to contend with Congress and the Supreme Court.) Iowans seem to identify with Santorum’s conservative social agenda. They like him. Even if he finished a close second to Romney, Santorum will have been revived in Iowa. He’ll be a viable contender… at least until the New Hampshire primary.
Half the votes have been counted. Still too close to call at the head of the pack. But the other horses are falling into place. CNN has projected Ron Paul to finsh third — a close third, but still (embarrassingly) behind Santorum.
The crusty old libertarian, outspoken to a fault (a flaw that many find curiously refreshing in a political candidate) had to have been harmed by the recent revelations of borderline racism and sexism in his comments and publications. Give the man credit, though: he promoted his beliefs vigorously and honestly. May we all be blessed with such abundant energy and conviction at his age.
Paul is conceding Iowa on TV now. Upbeat, plucky and as unrepentantly libertarian as ever, the 76-year-old doctor seems energized and even triumphant as he speaks to his loyal followers. His antiwar sentiments draw cheers, as does his defense of the Constitution and Austrian economics. “On to the next stop,” he promises, as his disciples shout his name. See you in New Hampshire, Dr. Paul.
Gingrich is conceding now. The disappointed fourth-place finisher, still smarting from the negative campaign ads that undermined his Iowa race, praises Santorum for running a clean campaign. “I wish I could say the same for the other candidates,” he adds. Positioning himself as a Reagan conservative who helped shape the conservative revolution during the 1980s and ’90s, he derides Romney as an establishment candidate who won’t change a thing in Washington. He’s probably right, even though he tossed a grenade in our direction by dismissing Romney as a mushy moderate. You can tell that Gingrich wants to bring Romney down, that he’s resolved to be the pit bull to Romney’s unwelcome mailman. Feisty and articulate as ever, Gingrich is down but not out.
Michele Bachmann, upbeat as ever despite her sad showing in her native state (a mere five percent of the vote), concedes now with one of those “the system has worked” messages. If Gingrich is the anti-Romney, Bachmann portrays herself as the anti-Obama. “His liberal reign will end, and the American people and its economy will be free,” she tells us. She reels off a defiant litany of conservative rallying points designed to elicit huzzahs and amens from her base. Despite the drubbing, she still insists that she’s the “true” conservative who can bring down Obama’s regime. She finishes by thanking her “marvelous” husband of 33 years, as well as her children, foster children and the rest of her family. She hasn’t surrendered.
It’s Rick Perry’s turn to surrender now. With ten percent of the vote, he’s mired in fifth place — behind Gingrich and ahead of Bachmann. As he thanks his supporters, he rambles in his engagingly folksy and sometimes incoherent manner. Running for president wasn’t his purpose in life, he insists… he’s been doing it because “America is in trouble.” We agree. But he points to Texas as an example of how we can “take America forward.” Questionable. He lavishes praise on the American servicemen he’s come to know, and you can see that he means it. Unlike Bachmann, he seems uncertain about his future prospects in the 2012 race.
Meanwhile, Santorum and Romney are still locked in a virtual tie for first — separated by just 37 votes as of 11 p.m. Central time. To judge by the map of Iowa, almost uniformly shaded county-for-county in the Santorum camp, you’d think the upstart Pennsylvanian would be mopping the floor with the former Massachusetts governor. But look more closely and you’ll see that Romney is running ahead in the urban areas; the windswept, churchgoing hinterland is Santorum’s domain.
Santorum is addressing his followers now, though he hasn’t been declared the winner or the loser. He gives thanks to his wife, God and the people of Iowa (in that order). He speaks movingly of his grandfather, an immgrant from Mussolini’s Italy, who worked in the mines of western Pennsylvania until he was 72 and used his big, gnarled hands to give his family freedom. Give the Rickster credit: he’s a natural, sincere, good-humored and engaging speaker. He extols hard work and individual effort, yet he’s critical of the economic purists who would ignore the plight of those who have been hit hard by the recession. He lambastes the president, of course, and he thanks God for the ordinary folks who still cling to their Bible. They’re his people, and they deserve a candidate who represents them. I’m just not sure if the majority of Americans are his people.
Romney’s at bat now. Trailing by a microscopic five votes as he begins, the candidate from Central Casting salutes rivals Santorum and Paul for their strong showings, then launches into a well-modulated tirade against Obama and his “failed presidency.” He announces that it’s time for someone with private-sector experience to lead us out of our economic morass, and he’s determined to make America the most attractive place in the world for “job-creators.” Number one on his hit list: Obamacare (which of course was patterned after Romneycare).
As if to shun his wishy-washy middle-of-the-road reputation, he unabashedly proclaims America a “merit society.” No leveling, no redistribution of wealth. (Romney’s gargantuan bank account is safe for now.) All in all, a competent boiler-plate speech, as one would expect from a competent boiler-plate candidate. Now it’s on to New Hampshire. Romney looks stoked; those gears are whirring.
And now it’s time for The New Moderate to call it a night. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a photo finish. Nobody knows who will wind up in the winner’s circle, even with 99 percent of the precincts counted. At this point it hardly matters who finishes first. Romney and Santorum have both proven themselves as contenders.
Santorum has won the moral victory regardless of the outcome. (Santorum! Who’d have thunk it?) He’s gained stature tonight. He has heart, he has a refreshingly guileless air about him (even if he lacks presidential gravitas), and he sings to the traditional religious conservative base.
The only problem is that New Hampshire isn’t an especially religious state. Former GOP nominee John McCain has just announced that he’ll endorse Romney. The Massachusetts tycoon is already well-established in the “Live Free or Die” state. He’s more likely to win the votes of moderates, and the conservatives certainly won’t leap into the Obama camp during the general election. Advantage: Romney. But keep your eye on that plucky kid from Pennsylvania.
Postscript: Romney pulled ahead at the last minute and won, as expected — by a grand total of eight votes. It was the narrowest margin of victory in the history of state caucuses and primaries. (Obama won Guam by seven votes, but that’s a considerably larger percentage of the voters on that minuscule Pacific isle.)
Post-Postscript: It seems that the Rickster may have pulled off a victory (albeit an extremely slim one) after all. The latest count is Santorum by 34 votes. Officials have essentially thrown up their hands, confessing that the true winner might never be known. I say we call it a draw and move on.
A Moderately Merry Christmas
On a chilly but snowless Christmas Eve here in my corner of Philadelphia, you’ll find me stretched out on the living room sofa, laptop in its proper place, Christmas tree straight ahead, glimmering in the soft light and still nearly perpendicular to the floor. My seven-year-old son is nestled snug in his bed, while visions of Lego blocks dance in his head.
When I was my son’s age, Christmas Eve ranked even higher than Halloween as the most enchanted night of the year. The melding of ancient Nativity lore, European carols, pagan winter magic and that great white-bearded bringer of gifts produced a euphoric inward glow that I remember fondly to this day.
The magic has mostly faded, though I’ve had a chance to recover some of it as the upper-middle-aged father of a spirited young boy. Still, I have to wonder how long our Christmases will seem even remotely magical as we slip into an uncertain, unsettling and increasingly dark era in our history.
Granted, the news isn’t all bad. The troops are home from Iraq… 2011 has produced a rare bumper crop of dead dictators and terrorists… Arabs and even Americans have been taking to the streets to demand political, social and economic justice. We love our iPhones and iPads; we Google and Tweet and Like with merry abandon. House Speaker Boehner even broke ranks with the Tea Party to push Obama’s two-month payroll tax break through Congress.
But most of us are still bleeding money. More than a decade after the fabled dotcom crash of 2000, the Nasdaq is treading water at half its former peak. American companies aren’t hiring nearly enough Americans. When they do, they’re increasingly hiring through temp agencies and spawning a new underclass of white-collar migrant workers. Meanwhile, upstart internet behemoths continue to reduce traditional retailers to rubble. Bookstores, magazines and newspapers teeter on the brink of extinction. A few big companies own our most prominent surviving media… numerous big companies own our representatives in Congress.
The rich are getting richer at the expense of the disappearing middle class, and legions of struggling patriots touchingly defend their right to do so. Trickle-down economics has failed us, yet Obama is too timid and stymied to try a trickle-up approach: create federal jobs in the manner of FDR, put money into the pockets of cash-strapped Americans in exchange for honest work, and give them the wherewithal to become active consumers again. But of course we’re not allowed to meddle with the holy free market. That would be sacrilege.
Lest you suspect that my sympathies are drifting leftward, I should reaffirm my belief that business and government have been partners in crime. The public sector reeks with corruption and entrenched privilege every bit as much as the boardrooms of Wall Street.
Sorry if my Christmas sermon is making me look like a 24-karat cynic; I’m actually only a 14-karat cynic. I still don’t believe most Americans are corrupt or evil, even at the top (though I might make an exception for Grover Norquist). Like most living organisms, they simply want to survive, inflate their status, mate happily and create a safe environment for the propagation of their genes. But nature isn’t especially fair, and neither is our plutocracy.
At Christmas, probably more than at any other time of year, I have to wonder who’s really in charge of such an amoral universe. The natural world is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Most of us still cling to belief in a loving God, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Why would a God who cares about us as individuals allow a single one of us to die a lingering and miserable death, let alone go prematurely bald? Why would such a God allow good people to go quietly mad while scoundrels and reality-show stars thrive?
The fundamentalists are as certain as always that a just and mighty God rules over all of creation; they base their evidence on the ancient scriptures that tell them so. Atheists, of course, are every bit as certain as the fundamentalists, and they derive just as much comfort from their certainty.
The rest of us have to make do with an increasingly shaky and battle-scarred faith. We’ve wrestled with God, with the Bible, with the purported divinity of Jesus… and after all that wrestling, we’re still not sure if the Gospels are gospel. Have we been royally hoodwinked for the past two thousand years? Have we been placing our faith in fallible narratives embellished by devoted and eternally optimistic disciples? Was that heralded baby in the manger a mere mortal — or something more mysterious and infinitely greater?
People like us will never know, but we can always hope. To all you skeptical Christians out there, I wish you a moderately merry Christmas!
Pottersville Revisited
A few nights ago, as I was watching It’s a Wonderful Life for about the twenty-third time (I’m still not sure if partial viewings count toward the total), I paid special attention to the part where George Bailey finds himself in Pottersville. This nightmarish sequence, lovingly arranged by George’s guardian angel, has burned itself into our collective memory. Today it seems more relevant than ever.
Where exactly was Pottersville? It occupied precisely the same space as George’s hometown, Bedford Falls. It even looked vaguely like Bedford Falls. But instead of a wholesome little burg filled with characters Norman Rockwell might have painted, the town had morphed into a dark and seedy sinkhole of vice, cruelty, fear and alienation. Why? Because George Bailey — the earnest, ever-striving, ever-frustrated hero — had never been born. And his absence allowed the resident plutocrat, Mr. Potter, to spread his tentacles over every last enterprise in town.
Most of us have come to regard this eternal Christmas classic as a study in good versus evil, of community spirit versus capitalistic greed. It’s a tale about the virtuous “little guy” bravely fighting corrupt private interests, in unambiguous black and white.
And yet… it turns out that director Frank Capra was a staunch Republican who routinely voted against FDR. Jimmy Stewart, almost indistinguishable in real life from George Bailey except for his spectacular Hollywood career, was a veteran Republican, too. And let’s not forget that George Bailey himself was an active practitioner of private enterprise. So maybe It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t quite the anti-capitalist screed some of us have come to believe it is.
Here’s what I think Capra is telling us: there are good capitalists and evil capitalists… capitalists who enrich the community and capitalists who enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense. When the latter breed of capitalist is allowed to triumph, the result is Pottersville — in short, economic and spiritual devastation for the “99 percent.”
Moral of the story: The good capitalists — the George Baileys of the world — are indispensable bulwarks against the unrestrained greed and ruthlessness of the big-money interests. In short, the George Baileys have to prevail or we’re toast.
Am I sounding a call to arms for America’s moderates? You bet I am. Capitalism and its rewards have been shifting inexorably away from Main Street toward Wall Street. The Mr. Potters have seen to that. Now it’s time to fight back… to revive Main Street and cage the wild beast that is Wall Street. Moderates have to play a pivotal role in the struggle of the 99 percent against the 1 percent, or we could be in for some epochal ugliness in the years ahead.
As I write this, in the closing month of A.D. 2011, the great American middle class has been ravaged by chronic corporate downsizing and outsourcing. The “job creators” refuse to create jobs even as they sit on overstuffed cushions of cash, and their unapologetic greed is generating rancorous rumblings among the masses. The fortunate few live like Bourbon aristocrats while the rest of us watch our nest eggs crack and ooze ominously. College tuitions have soared so high that only rich kids can emerge from their four-year adventures without decades of debt dangling over their futures. And of course the poor are suffering as much as ever, with this one important difference: they have considerably more company now. That fellow living out of his car down the street used to be a contender.
To make matters worse, Wall Street and its media mouthpieces have hypnotized millions of ordinary folks into believing that unfettered corporatocracy is good for them. (Never underestimate the power of patriotism, religion, freedom and taxation to convince Middle Americans that they should cheer for the elite.)
The Republican front-runners for the 2012 presidential nomination have been a succession of clowns and robots, growing progressively nuttier in their pronouncements before their campaigns implode. But they keep coming at us. The thought that one of them might actually stumble across the finish line should be enough to wake all moderates from their slumber.
Now that Herman Cain’s quirky campaign has self-destructed, the laurel wreath of GOP leadership has descended upon the oversized head of Newton Leroy (yep, you can look it up) Gingrich. Almost a caricature of the arrogant ruling-class apologist, Gingrich has gained notice — not all of it positive – by mocking jobless “Occupy Wall Street” protesters and calling for child labor in poor communities. The ultimate Beltway insider, Newt has made a fortune playing for both sides of the K Street-Congress power axis. Yet he’s imaginative enough to position himself as a maverick in his race for the White House. (Remember, the Tea Party is supposed to be a grass-roots movement of ornery outsiders, and Newt plays the role like a pro.)
As a radical moderate, I believe that a Gingrich presidency would be unhealthful for most living things. The man still faces long odds, of course, and chances are that his wayward tongue will eventually trip him up. He’s compelling as a speaker and pontificator, but he’s not easy to like: cocky, bullheaded and unsympathetic — especially with his legacy of having divorced his first wife while she was bedridden with cancer. He surprised a lot of us when he stood up for illegal immigrants who have led blameless lives in this country… but a cynic would dismiss his high-minded overture as a calculated appeal to moderates, whose votes he’ll have to lasso if he wants to capture the presidency. He’ll have to convince those moderates that he’s not the reincarnation of Mr. Potter.
But I’m convinced he is. And it all boils down to this: the George Baileys among us need to rouse ourselves to action and defeat the Mr. Potters before they defeat us. We need to regulate the excesses of Wall Street, force corporations to put ordinary employees on their boards, and — most important of all — break the sinister and mutually lucrative alliance between lobbyists and our elected representatives. We’ll break it by Constitutional amendment if possible, by civil unrest if necessary. But break it we will, even if it means evicting every incumbent from the halls of Congress. The current arrangement cannot stand if we’re to continue describing our nation as a democratic republic. I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of spending the rest of my life in Pottersville.
Who’s Afraid of Grover Norquist?
How did a stubble-faced lobbyist with minimal name recognition beyond the Beltway become the godfather of the American Right, the scourge of RINOs, the maker and destroyer of political careers? Why did Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming call Grover Norquist the most powerful man in America? Who IS this guy, and why is everyone afraid of him?
When you see him interviewed on television (he appeared on 60 Minutes this past weekend), Grover Glenn Norquist doesn’t inspire terror. If anything, he might remind you of a more self-possessed George Costanza, the hapless but eternally resolute second banana from Seinfeld. Plump-faced and effusive… same feline grin, eyes narrowed as if to purr… same air of nervy self-satisfaction while savoring a borderline-illicit triumph. He even sounds like Costanza, minus the New York accent. And no writer of fiction since Dickens could have conjured up a more fitting name for a wonkish power broker. Grover Norquist… he’s just too good to be true.
Norquist has never held public office. A child of relative privilege — son of a Polaroid VP and the bearer of two degrees from Harvard – Norquist insinuated his way into the Reagan administration back in the money-mad 1980s. The Gipper entrusted him with the birthing, care and feeding of a new organization – Americans for Tax Reform. This fledgling activist group was supposed to embody Reagan’s small-government philosophy, but under Norquist’s stewardship it grew into a monster… a take-no-prisoners anti-tax lobbying group with tentacles that gradually spread across the political landscape of the republic. The stranglehold persists to this day, to the extent that any Republican candidate with a whiff of moderation about him can forget about winning a GOP primary. Norquist sees to that.
What does he believe in? Quoth the redoubtable Mr. Norquist: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” We get the picture. In more wonk-friendly terms, Norquist wants to shrink the federal government to a mere eight percent of GDP — approximately where it was during the McKinley administration, before income tax, Social Security, welfare, Medicare and other Democratic aberrations ruined everything for the fiscal tightwads in our midst.
As you might suspect, Grover Norquist is a devout libertarian, a man so fiercely opposed to government spending that he managed to cajole or coerce 279 (count ‘em!) current members of the House and Senate (that is, nearly all the sitting Republicans) into signing his notorious “pledge.” What sort of pledge? Simply this: I will never agree to raise taxes at any time, for any reason whatsoever.
Every one of the current GOP presidential candidates has signed the pledge — with the notable exception of Jon Huntsman. (And we wonder why poor Huntsman, the appealingly “normal” Marilyn Munster of this grotesque crew, ranks dead last with Republican voters.) Every Republican on the farcical debt-reduction “super committee” was a confirmed Norquista. No surprise there, given their flat refusal to raise taxes on the rich or close loopholes during an earthshaking deficit crisis. After all, what’s the future of the country compared to an oath administered by a powerful lobbyist? For these stooges, the question was a no-brainer.
It’s as if half our lawmakers are walking around, zombielike, with a secret red ”N” tattooed somewhere on their persons and an electronic chip implanted in their brains. Or maybe they’ve been replicated by pods from outer space, their renovated souls menacing, alien and strangely numb. This isn’t Eisenhower’s GOP. It’s not even Reagan’s GOP. The party of Lincoln now belongs to Norquist.
Of course, Norquist himself would pooh-pooh the notion that he’s in charge. He’s merely the facilitator, he’d insist. In his 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft, Norquist denied wielding personal power over the representatives who signed the pledge. No, “the tax issue is a powerful issue,” he countered, dismissing his reputation as a power-mad dictator. In the Gospel According to Grover, the representatives are responsible solely to the constituents who elected them. If they vote to raise taxes, they’re breaking their oath to the voters. And if they break that oath, Norquist simply uses his group’s vast financial resources to ensure that they never return to office.
During his interview with Norquist, Steve Kroft distilled this system into two pithy sentences: “If they sign the pledge and break it, they’re toast. And if they don’t sign the pledge, they’re toast.” Replied Norquist: “Ah, but if they sign it and keep it, they win the primary, they win the general [election], and they get to govern. And I make all this possible.” (Contented grin.)
Right now, at least 37 Republican lawmakers are expressing “buyer’s remorse” over their pledge. After all, some of them signed it back in the 1990s, an era of optimism and prosperity that, in retrospect, looks more and more like a lost Golden Age. In fact, a recent Gallup poll revealed that only 26 percent of Republican voters are in favor of freezing taxes under all circumstances. But try telling it to Grover.
For Norquist, Republican consistency on the tax issue is the same as establishing and maintaining a commercial brand. He compared GOP politicians who raise taxes to rats’ heads found in Coke bottles. One of those self-confessed “rats’ heads,” the aforementioned Senator Simpson, describes the Norquist philosophy as “no taxes under any circumstances even if your country goes to hell.” A Republican and a proud pledge holdout, Simpson fears no retribution. (O Norquist, where is thy sting?) More of his fellow Republicans should follow the old man’s example. Instead, the remorseful ones have been begging Norquist to release them from their pledge.
How piteous… how undignified… how disgraceful when you think about it… and how totally characteristic of American politics in our broken-down era. The fringe has succeeded in terrorizing the mainstream. Members of Congress are cowering before the shadow of a freak-show ringmaster, a mere lobbyist. Yes, Norquist has the financial support to drive them out of office by running well-funded tax purists against them. But what’s a single lobbyist against thirty-seven elected representatives who want to reverse course on taxes during a crisis?
If they had any backbone among them, those thirty-seven sensitive souls would unite. They’d persuade more of their colleagues to join them. Then they’d confront Norquist en masse, make him sweat… and heave the S.O.B. out of Washington.
But chances are they won’t, and then Norquist will enjoy the last laugh. He’ll smile that feline smile and cackle contentedly to himself as he crosses their names off the list of the living. He’ll start to look a little less like George Costanza and a little more like Seinfeld’s diabolically demented neighbor down the hall. Yes, Newman will be running the United States government.
The New Moderate Attempts to Digest the Penn State Scandal
One of the most illustrious ”brands” in American college football abruptly imploded last week, taking with it a university president and a fabled coach who will never again enjoy the cheers of multitudes. That much is sad enough. We’ve also heard that the lives of at least nine boys (or former boys) have been ransacked and polluted, possibly beyond repair. If the accounts are true, the man who perpetrated the assaults is a fiend of the lowest order. (You don’t hear the word “fiend” bandied about much these days; I think we should use it more often.)
In the days since the awful story broke like a gargantuan ten-year-old egg spewing its putrid contents across the national consciousness, I’ve had some time to think about the lessons to be drawn from it. Of course, nobody loves a writer who promises paragraph after paragraph of moral edification. Instead of writing a treatise, I’ve distilled my thoughts into a dozen brief reflections on the scandal that stopped America in its tracks.
1. A lifetime of greatness can be nullified by a single mistake. Joe Paterno spent more than 60 years building his legacy at Penn State, 46 of them as the beloved head coach of a legendary football program. I’ve always found it tragic that a lifetime of effort can be undone by a single lapse, and the case of “JoePa” is no exception. By all accounts a decent and down-to-earth man who transformed countless lives for the better, Paterno was adhering to university dictates when he informed his boss about the alleged sexual assault by former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Yes, he should have delved into the details, confronted Sandusky in person and made sure he would never harm a child again. That would have been the ideal response… and who among us can say why he let the opportunity slip away? Instead, JoePa’s buck-passing cost him his job and his aura of greatness — a sad, inglorious finale to an otherwise glorious career.
2. Did Paterno really deserve to be fired? Wouldn’t a slap on the wrist have sufficed? At the very least, shouldn’t he have been entitled to a hearing? At first I thought the university went overboard when it abruptly sacked him (over the phone, no less). Paterno didn’t witness a crime, after all. He heard about it second-hand from a graduate assistant (more about him later). How could he have called the police on the basis of hearsay? But Paterno may have known more than we’ve been led to believe, and the university felt that a thorough housecleaning was in order. The final solution was quick, deadly and probably the most effective way for Penn State to cleanse its image as quickly as possible. The brand had to be protected, even though that brand was built by the man they fired.
3. I can understand why Penn State students rioted. Penn State is more than a football school these days… over the past half century PSU has steadily climbed in the national rankings for academic quality. But football — and the gobs of money it generated — had a lot to do with that newfound academic lustre. Penn State students honestly believed that a deity with an Italian surname was living in their midst. When the university canned him so ignominiously, it was as if their own father had been carted off by the cops. Skeptics would suggest that college students shouldn’t live and breathe football, but try telling that to the faithful in Happy Valley.
4. Left-leaning critics had a field day bashing Penn State. Twitter was full of snide references to those ghastly Penn State students who rioted in the wake of Paterno’s dismissal. “Just the level of intelligence you’d expect from students admitted to Penn State,” one of them sniffed. To those rarefied souls, Penn State represents everything they revile: rowdy, drunken, muscleheaded warriors whose crude energy mysteriously propels them to success in the business world. For blue-staters, PSU is a classic red-state university. I wonder when well-educated progressives will realize that their snootiness has driven a third of America into the clutches of right-wing populists like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.
5. Powerful conservative institutions generally deny wrongdoing. Like the Vatican, Wall Street and (to a somewhat lesser degree) Congress, the Penn State football program was a powerful entity intent on perpetuating that power at all costs. Tightly run, male-dominated organizations like these tend to become more and more conservative and inflexible over time. Success breeds defensiveness and even blindness to wrongdoing. All threats to the system must be deflected; no internal flaws can be acknowledged. Such organizations exist in a state of perpetual denial, and Penn State’s football program was true to form.
6. Nearly all the offenders in contemporary sex scandals (and even financial scandals) are men. Most of them are oversexed males drunk with power and testosterone. Clinton, Schwarzenegger, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner… what they all have in common is a personal tool that won’t stay put. The few women who make tabloid headlines tend to be Hollywood nymphets or the occasional schoolteacher who entertains a horny adolescent. What is it about men today? Laggards in school… stupid in public conduct… pathologically reckless on Wall Street… I’m almost ashamed to admit I belong to their tribe. Scientists say the Y chromosome is gradually deteriorating over time, but the descent seems to be steeper and quicker than anyone would have expected. Whatever happened to character, honor, courage and other archaic male mantras from the Age of Chivalry?
7. Mike McQueary needs to be held accountable. He’s the former graduate assistant who allegedly witnessed Sandusky raping a ten-year-old boy in a Penn State shower and did nothing to stop the assault. I can understand a failure of nerve when walking in on a horror being perpetrated by one’s superior… he was probably dumbstruck. But all he had to do was clear his throat to make his presence known, say a few words to break up the assault (a naked middle-aged Sandusky in the shower couldn’t have posed much of a threat to the 6’2″ former quarterback), then yank the poor boy out of there and call the cops. Sandusky’s reign of terror would have ended in 2002 instead of 2011. Instead, a skittish McQueary bolted out of the shower room and waited until the next day to tell Coach Paterno. JoePa was fired; McQueary is simply on leave. Of course, it’s easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback… but a real quarterback would have acted more decisively.
8. What can we do about pedophiles? I don’t mean pedophiles who have committed crimes; that’s easy: we prosecute them and take them off the street. I mean people who are sexually attracted to children and find themselves tempted to consummate their wayward passion. Most of them probably have little or no control over their orientation. So do we force them to undergo therapy? (And would therapy make any difference?) Do we isolate them from society? Castrate them? Load them with drugs? Give them computer-animated kiddie porn to defuse their urges as harmlessly as possible? Whatever the means, we have to work on controling pedophilia before the pedophiles can act.
9. Pedophiles are spoiling it for men who simply enjoy being with kids. Children (most of them, anyway) are charming little people, and their companionship can be a tonic for world-weary souls. Helping young people grow and laugh and flourish also happens to be one of life’s most rewarding pursuits. Now, with pedophilia in the headlines, any man who consorts with kids for any reason is likely to be viewed with suspicion. And that’s a tragedy, because children need positive male role models outside the home. Do we ban all one-on-one contact between kids and their leaders? I’m afraid it might come to that, for everyone’s peace of mind.
Suspect Jerry Sandusky: did he love boys a little too much?
10. It helps to have friends in high places. Just ask Sandusky, who’s out on the street proclaiming his innocence (aside from a little “horseplay.”) The judge who let him go free on $100,000 bail was a volunteer with Sandusky’s Second Mile youth program.
11. The worst of it: Penn State simply told Sandusky to take his act elsewhere. When Joe Paterno’s higher-ups at Penn State heard the report of Sandusky’s brutal misconduct in the shower, did they call the police? Of course not. Did they at least notify the parents of the boys in Second Mile that their leader was up to no good? Try again. They ordered him to stop bringing boys to campus! In other words, they essentially advised him that he was free to indulge his unholy urges anywhere else. What were they thinking? Was their loyalty to Paterno’s onetime heir-apparent so steadfast that they simply winked at his extracurricular activities? Were they afraid that an arrest would tarnish the brand? More afraid of a little bad publicity than they were fearful for the safety of Jerry’s boys? This is the same “see no evil” policy that prompted so many Roman Catholic bishops to ship their wayward priests to other parishes… as if a change of scene might cure them. It doesn’t. It simply enables them to find new victims in new settings.
12. Money has become WAY too important in college football. I know, I know… if the schools can make all those megabucks from lucrative TV contracts and the like, what right do we have to stop them? It’s probably too late to stuff this musclebound genie back into its bottle, but I’d still like to see colleges (and Congress, for that matter) distance themselves from Big Money. The heavenly scent of dollars in the air has driven college football to some boneheaded decisions. Examples: Boise State just joined the Big East conference, while the core of the old conference (Syracuse, Pitt, West Virginia) jumped ship for other destinations. The “Big Ten” conference now numbers 12 schools, while the “Big 12″ actually has ten. Rutgers, the birthplace of college football and my own alma mater, recently renamed its playing field High Point Solutions Stadium. (Is everything for sale?) Money has cheapened college football and swelled its head at the same time. What does all this have to do with the mess at Penn State? Simply that the stakes have become prohibitively high, and nobody is willing to risk all that glorious loot to save a bunch of innocent children from hell on earth.
Jon Huntsman and the Munsters
The Munsters: lovable in their vintage sitcom, but a little too much like the current crop of GOP presidential candidates. Guess which one is Huntsman?
Funny how the mind works: I was making preparations for Halloween earlier this week and ended up thinking about GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. Let me try to explain the connection, because I assure you there is a connection.
I was filling a tray of goodies for the local trick-or-treaters when I started reminiscing about The Munsters. No surprise there. Everyone of a certain age remembers that short-lived ’60s sitcom about the endearingly ghoulish family who lived in the decaying mansion at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. There was Herman Munster, the goofball Frankenstein monster lookalike, and his vampirish better half, Lily. Her father, known simply as Grandpa, was a plump Transylvanian count who sounded something like former New York Mayor Ed Koch. The couple’s young son, Eddie, had vaguely pointy ears and a hairline that suggested latent werewolf tendencies.
Then there was Marilyn, a poor relation who happened to be a comely but otherwise conventional blonde of college age. The other Munsters pitied Marilyn. They confided to one another that such an ungainly lass would never land a boyfriend, but they treated her with the delicate respect that well-meaning souls generally reserve for the severely handicapped.
You can safely conclude that Marilyn was the least popular member of the cast. In fact, when the original Marilyn quit midway through the first season and another young blonde actress took her place, hardly anyone noticed. Everyone was so smitten by the more grotesque Munsters that poor Marilyn barely registered on the radar.
Now can you see why I started thinking about Jon Huntsman? It should be obvious: he’s Marilyn Munster. No disrespect to his manly credentials. No disrespect at all, in fact. It’s just that the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls looks increasingly like a collection of monstrosities from the old Universal Studios back lot. Rick Perry, the hirsute Texan who denies evolution and makes George W. Bush look like a Fulbright Scholar. Herman Cain, the singing pizza tycoon with the gimmicky 9-9-9 plan and the badly handled sexual harassment rap. Slick Mitt Romney, the shape-shifting pod-person who never met a prinicple that couldn’t be modified for higher poll ratings. Then we have Ron Paul, the gnomish ideologue, the libertarian Yoda of the bunch. Newt Gingrich, about two-thirds as brilliant as he’d like us to believe, and even more ruthless. Rick Santorum, another fellow who gives us Ricks a bad name. And of course Michele Bachmann, who’s just too scary to contemplate. Excuse me while I pull the nearest blanket over my head.
Huntsman: Is he too normal to win Republican support in today's grotesque political climate?
Then we have good Jon Huntsman. A rational conservative with moderate tendencies… armed with a mindbogglingly impressive resume that includes experience as governor, corporate executive, ambassador and (can you believe it?) rock musician. Not a hyperpartisan. Worked for four presidents (three Republicans and Obama). Speaks Chinese. Not averse to science and evolution. Telegenic, sharp and articulate, with an engaging (if sometimes peculiar) sense of humor. A little too pro-business for my liking… but unquestionably a first-rate man, and exactly the kind of candidate the Republicans should be nominating.
So where do we find Jon Huntsman ranking in the current GOP polls? Dead last, of course, with between one and two percent support. With all those Munsters hogging the screen at the Republican debates, Hunstman looks too sensible, too bland, too Marilyn. He’s obviously out of his element… and, given the comically grotesque qualities of the other GOP candidates, you’d think that would be a good thing. But it’s not. How can he possibly compete with that Munsterish crew?
The Republican faithful are clamoring for someone who will let out a few war whoops and stir up the base. Huntsman is simply too rational, too intelligent, too normal, too genteel to rouse today’s foaming-at-the-mouth conservatives. Yep, he’s Marilyn Munster all right.
Just as Marilyn couldn’t vie for attention with the more outlandish members of her clan, Huntsman can’t seem to make himself heard over the squawking extremists, kooks and slickers who currently dominate the Republican field. And maybe that’s for the best.
After all, a presidential race between Obama and Huntsman would present thinking Americans (and especially moderates) with a real dilemma: the decent, intelligent, benevolent but hopelessly stymied incumbent versus the decent, intelligent, benevolent but relatively untested challenger from Utah. Both are devoted family men, members in good standing of the establishment, unlikely to galvanize us with outside-the-box remedies for our current ills. It would be a choice between two worthy but fundamentally conventional men. As I said, a real dilemma for thinking voters.
But run any of the other Republican hopefuls against Obama, and I’d shudder at the possibility that one of them could take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (They’d fit in better at 1313 Mockingbird Lane along with Herman, Lily, Grandpa and Eddie.) I’d look past Obama’s rudderless leadership, his dithering, his lack of clout in Congress, his unkept promises, his emotional remoteness, his peculiar amalgam of liberal sensibilities and excessive coziness with Wall Street. Then I’d think about the alternative — a bona fide Munster in the White House — and wouldn’t hesitate for a second to press the button next to the name of our beleaguered president.
Qaddafi, Gaddafi, Gadhafi: No Matter How You Spell It, He’s D-E-A-D
What can you say about a 69-year-old dictator whose own people felt the need to murder him? That he was vain and deluded? That he was pompous and vengeful? That he was lucky to have lasted 42 years as king of his hill? That he was, in the end, merely human and made of mortal flesh? The answer is “all of the above, and more.”
What more can we say about the deposed and summarily dispatched Libyan potentate Moammar al-Qaddafi/Gaddafi/Gadhafi/Khadafy, that man of multiple transliterations and personalities… that matchless Mad Dog of the Middle East (to use Ronald Reagan’s memorable phrase)?
Well, it seems he had a major crush on Condoleezza Rice. Found among the personal possessions at his imperial compound in Tripoli was an album filled with photos of the demurely fetching former Secretary of State. “I support my darling black African woman,” Qaddafi once gushed during a TV interview. “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders… Leezza, Leezza, Leezza… I love her very much.”
He proved to be an ardent suitor. During Rice’s state visit to Libya, Qaddafi presented her with a diamond ring and a locket containing his photograph, then treated her to a special viewing of his Condi Rice photo album. Ever the cool professional, Rice described the experience as ”not standard diplomatic practice.”
What else can I tell you about the late Colonel Qaddafi that you might not already know? With a little help from Wikipedia and a few other sources, I’ve assembled the following fascinating facts:
- He was born in a tent on the Sahara sands — the Arab equivalent of a log cabin. One grandfather was a martyr in the struggle against Italian occupation; one grandmother was alleged to be (would you believe?) Jewish. Of course we never heard about the Jewish granny directly from Qaddafi, most likely because he was a devout anti-Semite.
- He attended his nation’s military academy at Benghazi — a ticket to social mobility for a desert Arab – and had attained the rank of lieutenant when he headed the bloodless military coup that overthew Libya’s King Idris in 1969. He was all of 27 at the time. Qaddafi immediately won a promotion to colonel, a rank he wore with pride throughout his years in power.
- After taking power, Qaddafi scrapped the old Christian calendar. He renamed July Hannibal after the ancient North African general who challenged Rome. August became the month of Nasser, in tribute to Egypt’s chieftain.
- He despised the native (and non-Arab) Berber population of Libya, which his scrambled mind somehow came to associate with foreign imperialism. After taking power, he made it illegal for Berbers to give their children traditional Berber names and outlawed the teaching of their language in schools. He moved them en masse from their native villages into specially constructed public housing.
- He counted among his friends and allies some of the vilest despots of his time: Uganda’s Idi Amin, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Liberia’s Charles Taylor — even Serbian genocidist Slobodan Milosevic. If they were sufficiently evil, chances are they were FOM (Friends of Moammar). Imagine these international Goodfellas stepping out together for a night of bowling followed by a chummy killing spree. Whoever said it’s lonely at the top?
- He was a sartorial peacock who favored outlandish gowns and uniforms along with the ever-present sunglasses. He never traveled without his so-called Amazonian Guard, a crack coterie of Hollywood-glamorous female virgin bodyguards trained in the martial arts. (I’m not making this up.) But his favorite traveling companion was his Ukrainian nurse, a healthy-looking blonde who professes nothing but fond memories of her old boss. Their relationship was said to be strictly professional. As for the Amazonians, who knows?
- He started out as a proponent of Pan-Arabism, with his eyes on a united Arabia that would span the desert lands from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. When that dream fizzled, he set his sights on a future United States of Africa. (Give the man credit; he thought big.) In fact, just a few years ago he was crowned “King of Kings” by a consortium of more than 200 African tribal chieftains.
- He was afraid to fly over water and stayed resolutely on the ground floor when he traveled. Members of his inner circle noted that he wouldn’t climb more than 35 steps.
- He was known for making strange and sometimes incomprehensible public statements, once referring to HIV as “a peace virus, not an aggressive virus.”
- He declared a jihad against Switzerland last year, calling it an “infidel state” and urging the U.N. to partition it among France, Germany and Italy. (One of his sons had been arrested there and briefly detained after a hotel scuffle in Geneva.)
- He survived at least seven attempts on his life until his luck ran out while he hid in a drain pipe outside his hometown of Sirte. Despite all the gruesome video footage played repeatedly and almost zestfully by CNN and other networks, nobody captured the moment of his death. Word has it that he was shot with his own golden gun after being roughed up and pinned against a truck. His reported last words: “Don’t shoot!”
Don't call him Mr. Congeniality: Portrait of a defunct dictator
But what about Qaddafi’s politics? Where did the late ”Dean of Arab Leaders” stand on the left-right spectrum… and did he even have a coherent political philosophy?
Like the man himself, Qaddafi’s political views defied conventional description. He was an ardent socialist who vastly improved his people’s healthcare, housing and sanitation through direct government intervention. Libyans enjoyed the best standard of living in all of Africa during his rule. At the same time, he personally siphoned the lion’s share of Libya’s oil wealth and kept it for his family — along with a tiny elite of close friends and associates. The state controlled the economy, and he controlled the state. In short, you might call Libya’s economic system a socialist kleptocracy — a strange melding of far left and far right, with nothing in between.
Make that an Islamist socialist kleptocracy. Unlike the secular Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi imposed a heavy (and mandatory) dose of Islamic faith and morality upon his people. Alcohol, gambling, homosexuality, adultery and casual public displays of affection were strictly verboten. He also believed in exporting Islam and defending it against all threats, real and imagined. He became infamous for his role in state-sponsored terrorism, from the dastardly Lockerbie bombing to gun-running for the IRA. He reveled in the prospect of an Islamic Europe.
Only after 9/11 did he soften his militant bravado, probably to avoid retaliation by the U.S. and its allies. (Smart man.) Then, as the Arab Spring swept across the deserts of North Africa, he turned against his own people. Refusing to surrender power, the aging dictator fought a bitter and ultimately futile civil war against the forces of democracy and change. These cockroaches!, he fumed as his people marched against him. Surely they must be on hallucinogenic drugs supplied by foreigners!
The old fox managed to evade his pursuers until they finally trapped him in that drainpipe near his birthplace. His last moments on this earth must have been a hellish blur of terror and stress hormones. Paradise seemed beyond his reach; he died stripped of all dignity, like a prize hog at the slaughterhouse. Allah-hu akbar!, his killers shouted when the deed was done. God is great!
It would be pleasant to think that the new Libya will emerge as a shining model of representative democracy, but I’m not ready to place any bets just yet. The manner of Qaddafi’s forced exit merely succeeded in turning my stomach.
