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A Christmas lament: Arrivederci to all that was great and is lost

26 Dec

I belong to something called the Societa Romana Di Mutuo Soccorso, which is based in Trenton, N.J., the tired, failing city of my birth.

The name in English means the Roman Society for Mutual Aid. Until a few years ago, the group’s meeting minutes were recorded and read in Italian. That changed, along with everything else in Trenton. Today, the society’s name is misspelled all over the Internet, a sad state of affairs for a once noble organization.Roman Hall

The Roman Society is a fraternal group whose members have ancestral roots in Rome and its surrounding provinces. Founded by 13 men in 1896, its primary purpose was to provide sick and survivor benefits. The society’s motto is the applicable but mildly unoriginal, “One for all and all for one,” which sounds less cliché in Italian: “Uno per tutti e tutti per uno.”

Dues originally were 50 cents a month. More than a century later, they are $25 a year. This is quite a deal, especially if you attend the Christmas party, which is free.

When you walk into the party, as I did a few weeks ago, there is red and white wine on the tables, along with fresh Italian bread. The first course is always Italian wedding soup. Then a salad. Next is the big favorite: two kinds of pasta, served home style. One has a red sauce, the other a white. Everyone eats both. For entrees there is a choice of roast chicken, veal Parmesan or fish.

The tradition was that one week earlier there would be a party for the children and grandchildren of members. This also was free. The food was simple – hot dogs – but there was a magician, a very impressive Santa and a respectable gift for every child, like a basketball, a nice truck or a doll.

In the summer, there is a free picnic, a feast of near excess that goes far beyond the humble burger.

When I first became a member at my father’s urging, it was a mystery to me how $25 a year could cover all this. Then I learned that the sustaining element of the Societa Romana was something called the Roman Hall. It was what made the society great and of consequence.

The hall dates to 1938. Back then the nation had yet to whip the Great Depression, but the society and it 300 members had more than $14,000 in the bank. For such a time and for such an organization, this was an incredible sum. Seeing an opportunity, two members, Dr. Albert Moriconi and Sylvester Stella, decided the money should be used to allow Italians to do what Italians do best: cook.

And so the society, with its own money and its own labor, built the Roman Hall, a meeting place, restaurant and banquet facility. It was built in the Chambersburg section, a Trenton neighborhood filled with supportive Italians. The building is there still. It’s the Italians that have gone.

For many years the Roman Hall did well. Renovations and expansions were common. As a child I remember hearing people say with delight and anticipation, “We’re going to the Roman Hall tonight!” My family moved out of Trenton when I was young so I don’t have early memories of the place. When I grew up, however, I had the urge to return and erase this blank spot.

I visited shortly after the release of the film, “The Godfather.” I was home from college and living in a Philadelphia suburb with my parents.  My goal was a good meal but more importantly I wanted to experience some of the dripping Italianness I had seen in the Coppola film.

While I didn’t bump into any mobsters, the food and service were first-rate. The building – large, with many rooms — was brilliant white on the outside with black trim. The exterior was somewhat boxy but attempted a Romanesque style. The interior was heavy on columns, statues, gilded mirrors and chandeliers.

After I joined the society, it felt cool to be a member of an organization that owned something like the Roman Hall. I’d take my friends there for dinner, use my discount card and say only half in jest that I was a part owner.

Of course, I’d walk around like I was.

One of the reasons I joined the society was because my father said the hall paid dividends to members who held shares, that with each year you gained more shares, and that when a father died his member son would get his shares.

It seemed like a good investment.

But best of all were the Christmas parties.

They were lively, even though most attendees were very old. There wasn’t much going on except for talk, but this talk generated such energy. Much of it was about old times in the old neighborhood, Chambersburg. I would attend with my father, now 93, and mother, my wife and son, and sometimes my sisters’ families.

Often, there were people at our table we didn’t know. Still, after names and old addresses were exchanged, near ancient connections were always found.

“I knew your great-aunt,” a white-haired woman might say. “She lived down the street from the bakery, near the grocery store. Your grandmother was Cecelia. I knew her. She made great biscotti.”

One man asked where my family originally came from.

“My father’s father is from Perugia, in Umbria,” I said.

“You’re a Mountain Lion,” he responded. “A Mountain Lion.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your family is from the area around Monte Leone – the Lion Mountain. That makes you a Mountain Lion. You’re very stubborn and very strong. You will not let life defeat you.”

Pieces of information like that made the parties fun and deepened my identity; made me feel more complete.

Still, underlying all this frenetic chitchatting was an understated sadness. Chambersburg, home to the Italian culture, with modest but well-kept townhouses, great restaurants and bakeries, had somehow evaporated. People moved away as they prospered and became real Americans. Bankers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, publishers, commercial pilots. There was no longer a need to huddle together for protection. The immigrants and children of immigrants now could make it on their own.

As they did, something of inestimable value was lost.

What had been Italian transformed into something Hispanic.

Still, some refused to give up. They stayed.

“I was mugged for the fourth time last week,” a frail, wiry woman told me without a trace of fear in her voice. “They took my purse.”

Part of the problem with crime is the lack of good jobs in Trenton. It was once an industrial town with a broad manufacturing base. The dominant presence was the John A. Roebling mill that produced wire rope. The city was so proud of itself that on a bridge across the Delaware River it erected a huge sign proclaiming: TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES.

I cannot recall ever seeing such a pronounced, public boast by a city. I certainly cannot recall one that remained so public so long after it ceased to be true.

In Jersey, an amusing pastime is to update, add to, or parody the slogan with something like: WHAT TRENTON USES, THE WORLD REFUSES.

But when Trenton thrived, the money earned by Trentonians helped support local businesses, including restaurants like the Roman Hall. Its three banquet rooms – for groups of 55, 160 and 300 – were places where Italians and non-Italians celebrated joyful events.  Like many restaurants in Chambersburg, the Roman Hall had a reputation outside the city. It fed the likes of George H. W. Bush, Larry Holmes, Derek Jeter and an assortment of famous governors and senators. We lost out on Sinatra, who went down the road to Creco’s, perhaps the best of the Chambersburg restaurants.

I’m not sure what’s there now, but it’s not Creco’s.

When people stopped coming to the Roman Hall, the society tried different approaches to keep it going. None worked. Members debated over what to do. Some couldn’t stomach the idea of a sale. Others said it should have been done years ago. As the talk continued, things got worse. In 2009 a buyer was sought and found and the Roman Hall, as the Roman Hall, was no more.

It was replaced by something more fitting for the times: a Hispanic nightclub called the Infinity Lounge. The society holds the mortgage, so the detachment is not yet one hundred percent complete. I’m unsure if that is a consolation or a concern.Infinity Lounge

As might be expected, the Infinity Lounge has its critics. At a city council meeting there were complaints of loud music, public urination, unruly crowds and sex acts. On an Internet site, one person complained of vacant storefronts being plastered with posters for the Infinity and other “ghetto nightclubs.”

At the council meeting, Antonio Martinez, a lawyer for the club owner, defended the Infinity saying the neighborhood had been a “ghost town” and now life had been restored. He added that the Roman Hall never had a chance, that it existed only because it was being propped up.

“That restaurant survived because it was funded by the society of Roman Hall … otherwise it would have closed years ago,” he said.

He didn’t realize it was the hall that was supposed to prop up the society.

For the last three years or so, the society’s Christmas party was held at a place in suburban Trenton called Cedar Gardens.  The name is grander than the building, which resembles a down-at-the-heels relic from the 60s. The food was not bad, but the much-loved red and white pasta was no longer homemade fettuccine. It was penne and rigatoni from a box.

Another casualty was the children’s party.

Decisions on the fate of the Roman Hall were made at the hall during monthly meetings of the society. Before the working sessions there was always free pasta and beer. Throughout my membership I only went to one or two meetings. The hall is about an hour’s drive from my house and I couldn’t get there in time after work. Also, I guess the interest was never very strong. The society was really run by an old guard with ties to Trenton. As a Pennsylvanian, I felt like an outsider.

In addition, I somehow thought the Roman Hall would always be there.

Now that it’s over, now that the Roman Hall has lost its flesh and has been reduced to stories and memories, I wish I had been more involved. Maybe I could have found a real estate speculator to invest in the area. Much of dilapidated Philadelphia is coming back, with a strong interest in forgotten neighborhoods.

Why not Trenton?

I actually like the row houses in the blocks surrounding the Roman Hall. If they were fixed up, if the restaurants came back, the neighborhood would be ideal for employees of the one vibrant industry left in Trenton, state government.

In recent decades, the forces of decline have taken hold of so much that was enviable and worthwhile. Sure, we moved out of the city on our own, but – naively — we didn’t know that would destroy it.

Could it be that we deserved all the good things then and don’t deserve them now? Could it be that we wanted them then and really don’t want them now?

Either way, it troubles me how we casually watched it all go away. There was no fight. Was there even a way to win?

In science there is a concept called entropy, a gradual tendency toward disorder. A college professor told me time was the path on which entropy travels. Living today, in an eclipse, one can easily believe that. Little gets better. Instead, it unravels and decays.

Entropy.

But if science shows us anything, it shows us nature favor the cyclical. This leaves the possibility that the macro entropy of our cities, our economy and our culture will halt and reverse. Rebirth and growth might lie ahead.

With respect to the cities, the trend has already started. Young people like the urban culture, even with its grit and danger. They are moving back. Our cities may one day be great again, reverting back to the creative founts of thought, energy and commerce that would never be squandered or abused.

I can see it.

It just a shame that it won’t happen in time for next year’s Christmas party at the Societa Romana Di Mutuo Soccorso.

 –By Lanny Morgnanesi

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Grand Dad was a Communist

8 Dec

Comrades Some Republicans say President Obama is a Communist. He’s not much of a Communist.

For real Communism consider Earl Browder, an ultimate Red Stater who took orders from Stalin and was covertly followed by both the FBI and the KGB. On the Communist party ticket, he ran twice for president against FDR. He made the cover of Time magazine. At the time, Browder’s popularity had been fueled by turmoil of the Great Depression.

While people may have understood and even respected him during those years, times did change. In changing times, his surviving family members mostly had to live uncomfortably with this unusual legacy, or else hide from it.

Granddaughter Laura Browder decided to write about it. But first she had to learn about it.

A professor of American studies at the University of Richmond, Browder had authored a book on the radical 1930s but always maintained her family’s privacy. Until recently, she hadn’t venture too deeply into the past of Earl Browder, a man she knew as a quiet visitor on Thanksgivings. Now she is probing his life and parting decades of silence.

“I was struck by the impossibility of finding definitive answers to the mysteries of the past and the desperate importance of trying anyway,” she wrote in a Nov. 23 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

At Syracuse University, she found a trove of archival material that Earl Browder, then broke, had sold. Among his papers were family letters and photos, including a picture of Laura’s father as a child, posing in shorts while holding a real sickle and a real hammer.

Her father told her he had no recollection of the photo.

I wish Laura Browder luck with her project and hope it brings her family closer while promoting an understanding of things we don’t understand.

Her piece in the Chronicle made me ponder the idea of Communism in general, how its advocates went from philosophy to revolution, to inspired hope, to authoritarian brutality, to controlling half the world, to creating great fear and insecurity in the U.S., to finally becoming an utter failure and an almost laughable concept.

Oddly, it remains vital enough to be used as a political smear.

During the later part of the Cold War, the American preoccupation with Communism made me want to observe it. So I took a job in China, working as a low-level editor in the English language section of the government’s top news agency, Xinhua. On the plane over I spoke to a party man returning home.

His English was good. So was his suit. He was sharp and intelligent. Dapper and cool. He said he preferred a system where the government looked out for its people.

“You don’t seem the type that needs looking after,” I said.

“That’s true,” he answered. “I can take care of myself. I can survive under any system. But I have a brother. Without Communism he would be lost.”

I guess it’s a comforting idea to think one can never be lost.

My very first real reaction to upclose Communism was equally comforting. I walked into my office on the first day and an elderly Chinese woman handed me a fat envelope filled with cash. She said it was my pay for the month.

“But I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

“You will.”

“Suppose I run away?”

“You won’t.”

Another good thing about Communism back in the mid-80s was you didn’t pay rent, or you paid very little. For the Chinese, almost all they earned was disposable income. I knew a young guy who blew his entire month’s salary on payday and managed to make it to the end of the month.

Under old Communism – as opposed to the new, market-based variety —  the Chinese didn’t worry about finding a job. One was assigned. That was good, unless the job was in some wasteland 2,000 miles from home and it was something you didn’t want to do. A woman I knew studied the Portuguese language in college and upon graduation was sent to Brazil to be a foreign correspondent. She knew nothing of journalism.

Things were easiest for those friendly with party bosses, even the minor ones. Conversely, offending a party boss could destroy your life, especially if the boss was a bad Communist. Where I worked, we knew who the bad and good Communists were. The bad Communists used their positions to get ahead and destroy their enemies. The good Communists volunteered to work holidays and cleaned the office (there were no janitors). The so-so Communists loved them.

In those days, powerful Communists used influence to get two-room apartments (a quantum leap from one room) and to score beer during summer shortages. Today they use influence to take over companies and become multi-millionaires.

Irony has yet to strike American Communists. Without power, influence or temptation they can remain pure. In the video below, Glenn Beck interviews an avuncular old man who probably resembles Laura Browder’s grandfather. For 40 years he has been the head of the American Communist Party, an organization about as visible as bad breath. He almost gets the best of Beck. Then the Communist, in an inadvertent knock against private property, takes a sip of Glenn Beck’s water. Watch Beck react.

 –By Lanny Morgnanesi

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Cloaking a bright holiday in darkness

28 Nov

The little catch phrase I use as the top of this blog is, “Speaking, because it is allowed.”

The phrase carries some irony for me because I believe society discourages uncomfortable speech and attempts to silence it.

There are two basic kinds of offensive talk. The first is false; the second true.

Regarding the first: Lies hurt, and large numbers take great offense when someone slurs a race or a people. For me, I prefer it when everyone fully expresses themselves. It reveals their hearts.

Regarding the second: The truth often hurts more than the lies, especially if it reveals us as monsters.

One such truth is the genocide by Americans of Native Americans.

Last week a University of Texas journalism professor named Robert Jensen published an opinion piece about Thanksgiving. In the Daily Texan, his university’s newspaper, he associated the holiday with this genocide and implicated our founding fathers.

Reacting quickly, UT president Larry R. Faulkner wrote the Houston Chronicle a letter in which he calls Jensen “a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy.” He was “disgusted” by Jensen’s article, he added.

In his article, Jensen quotes several U.S. presidents in a grand show of ill will toward Native Americans. He has Theodore Roosevelt saying, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”

Jensen later asks: “How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis?”

I hope all good and informed American know that perhaps 30 million buffalo were slaughtered by white hunting parties (some sitting in trains) in an attempt to deny food to the Plains Indians. I find that as haunting as gas chambers.

This is our heritage, uncomfortable as it is.

Professor Jensen deserves credit for bringing forth what usually is unspoken.

I suggest we all follow his example in these times when it can be done. If we do, we may develop the courage to continue when and if society tries to ensure that it can’t.

–By Lanny Morgnanesi

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A Super disappointment for journalism — or a new beginning?

25 Nov

He was unhappy at his newspaper so he quit. Superman did. Clark Kent no longer works at the Daily Planet.

Instead, he may blog.

According to the comics, Superman now believes that news has become entertainment and reporters are nothing more than stenographers. So he moved on.

Connie Schultz, writing for Parade Magazine, warned Superman to be careful of the Social Media trap that awaits him. She called it the “new Kryptonite” and worried that the great and noble Man of Steel could end up tweeting X-ray pictures of sexy woman to gain followers.

Superman’s decision was a jolt to traditional journalism. In my mind, a second jolt came when it was revealed that seven members of Navy SEAL Team 6 leaked classified information. They didn’t leak to a newspaper. They leaked to a video game maker.

While newspapers are only a wisp of what they once were, people still get the information they need. They just get it in different ways. And it’s everywhere, in unlimited quantities and styles.

Traditional journalists won’t admit it, but journalism is flourishing. Because of technology and the accessible, enticing new methods of communication, more people may be practicing journalism that ever before. Talented, intelligent reporters who would never have gone to journalism school or applied to a newspaper have become experts and opinion leaders through blogs and social media. Some make good money; many don’t.

In spite of the poor success rate, media and media-related startups abound. What works is a mystery, but uncertainty hasn’t stopped people from bringing forth an endless variety of information concoctions.

In the September / October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review there is a package of stories labeled: “The future of media (this minute, at least).” Numerous topics are discussed. Prominently mentioned are the web sites and apps that aid reporters in their work. They represent small miracles.

I got dizzy reading about the likes of:

Cir.ca

News.me

Paper.li

Storyful

Storify

Upworthy

#waywireSync.in

Timeline JS

Many Eyes

visual.ly

Sync.in

Etherpad

Evernote

Vyclone

Is that enough for you?

It’s too much for me, but I’m certain there are people using all of these and more.

Rumor has it that in the next Superman comic Clark Kent will use Vyclone to cover a cyclone. He’ll get help from Lois via Evernote while hoping Jimmy can come up with something good and graphic using visual.ly.

As this team operates from some cheap little apartment, Perry White, the once great and powerful editor, will stomp around his vast but unfilled newsroom screaming and cursing – his strongest editorial qualities – and wondering how he can compete with all that.

–By Lanny Morgnanesi

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They only stone you if you confess

14 Nov

One of the worst qualities of the human species is its dastardly view of competing tribes.

For some reason, there is comfort in thinking that those outside the circle are monstrous barbarians capable of and responsible for numerous and unspeakable atrocities.

Get in close with these devils, however, and you generally find they are just like you; decent, with families and a respect for routine, calmness and peace.

To see things clearly, it helps to remember there are monstrous barbarians among all groups, but they are misfits who do not represent the norm.

A foreigner reading history may learn about the epidemic of lynching in America, but if he visited my town he would find no one there was involved in such things, or even capable of them.

Would he be surprised?

Recently I read an article that a group in Egypt is clamoring for sharia law. In random thought I wondered how many who advocate this form of Islamic governance really want to cut off someone’s hand for stealing bread. Most Americans, I’m sure, will think everyone who wants sharia supports cutting off the hands of thieves, as well as death by stoning for women who have committed adultery.

Perhaps I am both ignorant and naïve, but I would guess they don’t.

My guess is sharia brings comfort, predictability and harmony to the lives of devout Muslims; just as the 10 Commandments and Biblical law do for reverent Christians. I do know that in secular countries, Muslims use sharia on their own to settle family and business matters – without hurting anyone.

From what I now understand, sharia – like our own laws – is open to interpretation. In other words, there are ways around stoning and dismemberment.

And even if there is to be stoning and dismemberment, they cannot be administered on a whim.  There are rules and conditions.

For example, a Muslim woman can only be stoned for adultery if she either confesses or there are four male witnesses who saw the act being committed.

Is either likely?

The hand of a thief cannot be cut off if public property was taken, or if he stole because he was hungry or under duress. The stolen items cannot belong to his or her family, must be over a minimum value, and cannot have been taken from a public place. Also there must be reliable witnesses.

In short, there are fudge factors here.

I believe in secular law. Still, I’d like to understand how Islamic culture works among civilized people. I don’t understand sharia but am open to learning more.

Aside from the rare man willing to kill or maim his wife on any given day – and we have plenty of them in the U.S. – I don’t think Muslims routinely seek blood for justice.

Does anyone agree?

–By Lanny Morgnanesi

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Economic growth: Is it an Aqueduct or an iPhone?

27 Oct

In the neighborhood where I grew up, everyone had one bathroom and one garage. I’m pretty sure those who moved away now have at least two bathrooms and garages.

That’s growth.

As a nation, the U.S. is very much worried about growth. We’re worried because we don’t have enough of it. Still, knowing I could live with a single bathroom and garage makes me wonder if growth really is necessary.

According to the latest reports, the U.S. economy grew at a 2 percent annual pace from July to September. This is good news, the reports said, because from April to June growth had only been 1.3 percent.

While I’m unsure about the inner workings of growth, I think it safe to say that growth involves increased economic activity and – ideally – increased profits.

Back in my old neighborhood, a new bathroom might have been added to some of the homes. If the family used additional income to hire a contractor, this would register as economic growth. It might even if the family borrowed the money.

There would be no economic growth, I think, if the family had no additional income and spent its vacation money that year on wood, drywall, plumbing and fixtures and installed the bathroom themselves.

If this type of activity were the only “growth” in America, stockholders would see little or no year-over-year improvement.  Stock prices would fall.

Yet people overall might be happy, especially those with new bathrooms.

In its Oct. 22 edition, Bloomberg Businessweek cites some interesting new studies on economic growth. It mentions that economic historians have determined there was virtually no growth in Britain from the 13th to the 18th centuries. In other words, no growth was the status quo, even through the Renaissance and the age of exploration.

Growth apparently didn’t come to England until the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, with the advent of steam engines and railroads.

In the U.S., growth had been around 1 percent until the 20th century, when it was boosted by the effects of (surprisingly) indoor running water, the internal combustion engine and electricity.

Economist Robert Gordon, in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, said growth has been downhill since 1950.

If the trend continues, Gordon says, by 2100 annual growth will have fallen to 0.2 percent.

Judging by the standards of 300 years, he doesn’t see this as anything unusual.

While some cultures require growth, others do not.

I recently attended a conference on water. Several speakers told of good-intentioned projects designed to help villages where the tradition was for women to do daily “water walks.” That means traveling five to 10 miles a day on foot to fetch water that was carried back in containers balanced on their heads.

Wanting to help, outsiders installed wells and irrigations systems. Too often, the speakers said, the villagers would return to the water walks after parts failed or things broke down through lack of care and maintenance.

The outsider sought growth and improvement. The villagers seemed content with the way things were.

For myself, I’m partial to cultures that say, “Our population is growing. We need water. Let’s build an aqueduct and bring it in from the Alps.”

But I don’t see the necessity for an increasing number of bathrooms and garages, or for a new iPhone every six months. If employment is at proper levels, I don’t know why strong, efficient companies like IBM, Google and others are required to show consistent year after year growth.

Can you image a world where prices don’t change much; where you buy something and use it for decades; where basic needs are met and life is not a struggle to maintain and acquire things unessential to happiness?

I enjoy progress, and this seems like it to me.

Growth actually may be a trick, the result of debt. With $16 trillion of debt, Americans has experienced great growth. As we eliminate debt, life and growth are bound to change.

The future could return us to historical norms, and maybe we all will be able take a deep breath and begin to relax.

By Lanny Morgnanesi

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The End of Jobs

6 Oct

Imagine there were no jobs.

         Virtually none. There would still be someone running General Motors, but not a soul would be building cars.Nearly everything in America would be done with robotics, programming or overseas labor. This includes the service sector, law, medicine, education and government. Algorithms, for example, would take the places of judges, lawyers and the town council.

Cops, of course, would be cyborgs.

You get the idea.

Now the question.

If no one worked, could everyone still get paid?

Part of our economic problem today is unemployment. People who don’t work have no money and don’t consume, which leads to higher unemployment, recession and general nastiness. In some cases, businesses increase productivity and profits from layoffs. But with fewer and fewer employees overall, demand ultimately is bound to fall for all products and services.

There’s a story from the 1950s about Walter Reuther, then head of the United Auto Workers. He was taking a tour of a modern, highly mechanized Ford plant that used robots to build cars. Ford execs were on the tour and one said to Reuther, “How are you going to collect union dues from those guys?”

Reuther answered, “How are you going to get them to buy cars?”

You can’t, but you can still sell cars if you pay the people the robots replaced. Pay them for doing nothing. Give them the ultimate is a short workweek.

There was a time when the workweek was long. Not 40 hours or five days. It was at least six days, maybe seven. People put in 70 hours or more. This was necessary to produce the things we needed. With the advent of industrialization, people were able to work less – and still pretty much get the same pay.

Remarkable!

When the U.S. was a bold nation in the 50s, living well through science and experiencing the atomic age and the space age, there was this idea that greater efficiency in the work place would allow people to work less and have more leisure time. They were using the paradigm that reduced work from 70 hours to 40 hours.

Now, in a more realistic age, we know that doesn’t happen.

When you don’t need workers, you don’t reduce their hours. You fire them.

It seems ridiculous that people believed businesses and corporations would actually pass profit from productivity back to workers and let them go home early.

So what happens when there are no workers?

Maybe the paradigm shifts again.

If no workers means no consumption, and no consumption means no profit, then people might actually have to be paid for doing no work. It would be a cost of doing business. It would keep business running.

What I’ve described here is mainly a mental exercise that is much more exercise than mental. Can an economist out there, someone who studies such things, tell me whether this would work?

One final note:

In 1780, John Adams wrote something complex that later was boiled down to: “I’m a soldier so my son can be a farmer and his son can be a poet.”

He was expressing the utopian progression of civilization from barbarism to domesticity to enlightenment.

The no-job economy will either take us back to the first stage or ahead to the last. I’m not sure who will decide which.

Maybe an algorithm.

All right, now let’s hear from those economists.

—  By Lanny Morgnanesi

 

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Who is apt to throw a bomb?

16 Sep

 

 

 

“Real anarchists don’t throw bombs,” the political science professor said while lecturing a class at a Lancaster County (Pa.) college. “There’s a large group of them living on farms not far from here. They’ve never thrown a bomb. Do you know who they are?”

The class didn’t.

“They’re the Amish.”

The professor went on to explain about organized groups who prefer to live without government.

It was an interesting exercise, separating violence and radicalism from a term that normally suggests only terror.

I thought about this lecture, given during a time of great unrest in the U.S., after reading a piece by Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (I’d link to it but you have to subscribe.) Romano, a former journalist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Ursinus College. He called his piece, “Getting to the Root of ‘Radical’ ”

In part, he takes a look at some of the clever definitions historic figures have given to political labels.

Here’s FDR:

“A Radical is a man with both feet planted — in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest  — at the command  — of his head.”

And Woodrow Wilson:

“By ‘radical,’ I understand one who goes too far; by ‘conservative,’ one who does not go far enough; by ‘reactionary,’ one who won’t go at all.”

Poet Robert Frost, according to Romano, said:

“I never dared be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.”

Pretty good.

OK. So how should we categorize the thousand who have taken to the streets of Middle Eastern cities in anti-Western protests?

How about young, unemployed, angry, outraged, frustrated? I’m not sure there is any real politics involved. The non-political radical may be the most dangerous of all. Unlike the Amish, they will throw bombs.

–– Lanny Morgnanesi

 

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The day Elvis died — my story

18 Aug

 

Elvis Presley died 35 years ago on Aug. 16, 1977. It’s a day I’ll never forget.

I’d like to tell the story of that day. It involved a nearly naked lady who said she knew Elvis and pleaded with me to help her.

I rose early that morning, my first as a reporter for a suburban Philadelphia newspaper. As I shaved, I listened to the radio.  A contemporary rock station was playing an old Elvis song, which was odd, since he was pretty much a forgotten relic by then. Then there was another Presley tune, and another.

Within moments I learned from the DJ that the King had died. I thought that sad, since he had been so great and influenced so many, but I moved on. Bigger things awaited me. I was a journalist now.

No sooner had I settle into my desk than the phone rang. Pretty cool, I thought. Someone knows I’m here.

“Are you a reporter?” a woman on the line asked.

Not a good first call. From that one sentence I could tell she was drunk and high.

“Yes, I’m a reporter,” I said. “How can I help you?”

She threw a bunch of nonsense at me then said, “Please make them stop. I don’t want any of their money. I don’t want anything. Please make them stop and leave me alone.”

She sounded truly upset.

“Don’t want any of whose money?” I asked.

“Elvis’. I don’t want anything. Can you tell them that?

I was on the verge of hanging up.

“Tell who?” I asked.

“I don’t know. His lawyers. They keep threatening me,” she said.

This was all quite ridiculous but I kept talking because I had nothing else to do that morning and maybe there was a local angle to Elvis’ death. That would play well in the next day’s paper.

“Why would they threaten you?”

“They think I’m coming after their money because I had Elvis’ child. But I’m not. I don’t want the money.”

That busted the wacko meter.

“Look,” I said. “I have to go.”

She raised the level of her lethargic monotone.

“No, don’t go. You’re the only one who can help. Come visit me and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

There was more pleading, and I took her address. I told my boss what I was doing and where I was going. He laughed and looked at me with a combination of pity and loathing.

The woman’s working-class neighborhood was only a few minutes away. It had small houses but everything was neat and well-kept. Then I came upon a lawn that hadn’t been mowed for months. There were two cars up on blocks and several of the home’s shutters were hanging off the windows.

Unsurprisingly, this was the home of my caller.

I knocked on the door.

The woman who opened it looked like a zombie, with vacant eyes and blotchy skin and messy long hair. Her body, however, was magnificent. I knew that because I could see it.  All of it. She was wearing a nightgown as sheer as cellophane.

“Come in,” she said.

The immediate question to myself was: Do I stay or go?

My racing mind told me there was trouble ahead but also that this probably would never happen again for as long as I lived.

I would stay.

She pulled me in, sat me down, encircled me with vine-like arms and began kissing me with her putrid mouth.

After some difficulty, I pulled her off.

“I came here for a story,” I said, knowing there most definitely was not one. “Let’s hear your story.”

“Would you like a drink?” she said.

It was 10 a.m.

“No. Just tell me your story. Tell me about Elvis.”

And she proceeded to tell about where and how they met; the liking he took to her; how he came onto her strongly and how she yielded simply because he was Elvis.

“Do you have photos of you and him together?”

“Not really,” she said, walking over to a cabinet. “Just these, from about that time.”

They were photos of her, younger and very beautiful. She looked just like Priscilla.

“What happened since then?” I asked.

“This,” she said, turning the back of her neck to me and pulling up her hair to reveal a large surgical X. “I had an accident and an operation.”

I should have pursued this but didn’t.

“So you say you had a son with Elvis. Do you have his picture?

She did, a number of them.

In each and every one he looked just like a teen Elvis. Remarkable. It was starting to seem as if there might be some truth to all this.

As we continued to speak about the threatening calls, an uncomfortable noise came from the bedroom.

We were not alone.

Then he emerged. Zombie Number 2.

Beer can in hand, having probably digested a few Quaaludes (very popular at the time), a boy who could have been 18 or 15 shuffled out slowly like Frankenstein’s monster. His face was swollen, marked and bruised.

He never lifted his feet; he just slid them along. He looked straight ahead and not off to the side at us. But when he reached the spot where we were, he paused and ratcheted his head toward me.

“Are you the reporter?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Well . . . I just want you to know  . . . that I’m not f—- her.”

Then he screamed and nearly cried, “But her old man thought I was and he beat the shit out of my face with a flashlight.”

Silence took over the room.

Then the boy said to me quietly, “You know . . . there’s something going on here.”

“Yes, I know,” I said.

Then, with utter contempt and a snarl he said, “You don’t know.”

Silence again.

It was broken by a knock on the door. I had been on an edgy alert the whole time but this sent me into an adrenaline-laced panic. My assumption was the woman’s husband had returned, armed this time with more than a flashlight.

I packed up my notepad and chose the window out of which I would jump.

The knocking continued. It was ignored by both boy and woman, as if it wasn’t there.

Finally, the door opened and a weak female voice was heard.

“Jimmy? Jimmy? Are you there?”

Jimmy’s mother stepped into the house. She was as frightened as I.

“Jimmy, it’s time to go. We are going now. Let’s go.”

He stayed put but she grabbed his arm and tugged and tugged and got him out the door.

I was right behind.

Back in the newsroom, I set my stuff down and planned to tell the story to my editor. Before I could, the phone rang.

“Is this Lanny, the reporter?”

“Yes,” surprised that my name was known.

“You don’t know me,” the male voice said. “I’ll admit this is kind of a strange call, but you may be the only person who can help me.”

Two in one day!

“How?” I asked.

“Listen, I’m not crazy or weird. I’m an actor in New York who is just trying to make a living. Things were going OK then all of a sudden there is this talk up here about me being Elvis’ son. Do you know anything about that?”

The weird had become bizarre.

“I might. But not much.”

Pause . . .

“Do you know my mother?” he asked.

“I think I just left her house.”

“What did she look like?”

I figured I would lie, but for some reason quickly changed my mind and asked, “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes,” he said.

So I told him, and not gently.

“Well, she was very high and she was very drunk.”

“That’s my mother,” he said.

We spoke a little longer and I took his number. I said I would call if I learned anything new.

At that point I stopped reporting and dropped the whole story. I was curious, but this wasn’t journalism. I had real work to do. I went over and told the tale to my editor, who gathered a crowd and made me tell it again. I must have told it five or six times that day, and many times after.

Of course, I never wrote a word of it for the paper, and the mystery of what really happened was never solved. I did call the police and told them what I had witnessed. They told me they knew about her. That’s how it was in those days. People knew, but not much was done.

About a week later I was leaving the newsroom to go out on a story. Normally I would leave by the rear entrance, but this day I went out the front, near the reception area. As I did, a visitor called my name.

“Lanny. Is that you?”

She was wearing clothes this time and was completely sober.

I was assaulted again by those vine-like arms and she tried to kiss me. I pulled away.

“You are gay. Aren’t you?” she said.

When I returned from my story I asked the person at the reception desk, “What was that woman doing here?”

“She placed a classified ad.”

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.”

It read:

“To the lawyers, representatives and family of Elvis Presley. I make no claims whatsoever to the estate of the deceased performer.”

***

EPILOGUE

Everything written here is true and exactly as it occurred. Had I intended this to be a fabrication I would have devised a better ending. The only untruth is the lie that this was my first day on the job. Actually, I had been a reporter for two years and possessed a master’s in journalism. I should have known better than to waste time on that crank call.

But had I acted wiser and more professionally, I would not have had this story to tell.

On the 35 anniversary of his death, may he rest in peace, Elvis Aaron Presley, and may all his children, however many there are, find happiness and success.

— Lanny Morgnanesi

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Imagine America with a Queen

29 Jul

I don’t think too many Britons say nasty things about their Queen.

They don’t object to her politics because she really doesn’t have any. They may get mad at all the money – their money – she spends on palaces and servants, but they get over that.

What she represents is them, the collective whole, and they seem to appreciate it, rally round it, and draw strength from it.

A keen memory of mine is from a dinner toast at a British embassy. It consisted of two words that meant 10,000. It was simple and so reverent:

“The Queen.”

The leader and figurehead of the United States, by contrast, is called names and blamed for all kinds of bad things. His motives are questioned, as if he refuses out of spite to use clear and easy solution to big and complicated problems. It is frequently suggested that he is out to destroy America — on purpose.

Not so with a queen.

I was never much for monarchy. In fact, a favorite movie line of mine comes from Monty Python after, I think, a noble personage advises a lowly peasant, “I’m your king,” and gets the answer, “Well I didn’t vote for you.”

But seeing Queen Elizabeth at the Olympics, sitting there as an honored representation of all Great Britain, inspired envy.

From afar, and perhaps in fact, the British seem to have a cultural homogeneity that the U.S. does not. While Britain is markedly divided by class and is mixed racially (from immigration), there is something holding all together.

You only have to listen to the way the Brits sing their anthem “Jerusalem” to know this. They did so at the Olympics and it moved even me, a non-Brit. The final, powerful verse is:

 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green and pleasant Land

 

Americans love being Americans, but we are a country of individualists. We can be distrustful of each other. Our tendency is to work on our own to improve our lives, not to work collectively for a new Jerusalem. In Britain and much of Europe, there is a collective desire to see that all have health care, that all can afford higher education, that all can get around on trains, subways and buses.

We don’t have that in the states. We do have the Interstate Highway system, but only because the military needed evacuation routes in case of nuclear war.

The American continent does have a distant legacy of working as a tribe. But the ways of the Native American people never had an impact on the rugged, go-it-alone settlers.

Hardworking, innovative Americans have performed technological and economic miracles working alone. It was this kind of culture that allowed us to break from the English, better them and pretty much rule the world.

Still, I feel as if we lack something as a people. When I see the Queen of England, who I didn’t vote for, I have this wish that we could get behind our leaders in a forceful way that lifts our spirits and moves us ahead quicker. Of course, such a system would require that leaders be pure of heart and dedicated to the American cause and not their own.

This would be the hardest thing to accomplish, even if we gave them all palaces.

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