CANINES FOR DEMOCRACY

by Elizabeth Sobieski & Peter Brav

Our fellow citizens who are pinning their hopes for democracy on Taylor and her Swifties might do well to spend more time energizing American dog lovers, the one group that just might be the difference maker. 

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that as of 2021, there are 83.9 million households in the country, and Forbes Magazine reports that as of 2024, 65.1 million of them have at least one dog in the house. Rough mathematics suggests that of the 161.42 million people registered to vote in 2022, approximately 125 million of them have a dog in their lives to love and laugh with. 

Almost all of our nation’s 46 presidents in office from George Washington on have been joined by a beloved pup in the White House. There is no better or more faithful companion for an understandably stressed president and household than the family canine. 

Ronald Reagan had Rex; George H.W. Bush had Millie; Bill Clinton had Buddy; George W. Bush had Spotty, Barney and Miss Beazley; Barack Obama had Bo and Sunny; and Joe Biden his adoptees Champ, Major and Commander, even as the latter two proved hard on his security personnel. 

Not so the guy who lost in 2020 but still thinks he won. 

It’s not like he’s a bad dog owner, walking away cavalierly from excrement masses or enrolled in a dog-fighting club. The guy who lost in 2020 but still thinks he won has simply never had anything to do with dogs---other than disparaging them in so many interviews, tweets and pointed comments that we could not possibly list them all here. 

He’s no dog’s best friend and he just might be dog’s worst enemy. 

This should come as no surprise. This is a man who doesn’t read, who sees the world in black and white, who doesn’t want to learn or listen, who makes fun of physically handicapped reporters. A man who never seems to laugh because that would require approving and being entertained by someone or something other than himself. A man who never served in the military but claimed to know more than his heavily decorated generals and went out of his way to belittle captured war heroes. 

A man who has spent no time around dogs opining constantly on the nature of dogs. Makes perfect sense. Or not. 

Since even the smartest of the canines have not yet been trained how to vote and save the nation, it may be helpful to remind those 125 million dog-loving owners how that guy really feels about them. So here goes. 

On Imminent Unemployment 

“Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” - 2018 on The Apprentice’s Omarosa Manigault after her tell-all Unhinged hit bookshelves 

“Fired like a dog!" – 2013 on Bill Maher, 2015 on Glenn Beck, 2016 on Chuck Todd, 2016 on David Gregory, 2016 on Conservative pundit Erick Erickson 

“Thrown off ABC like a dog." – 2015 on Conservative Republican columnist and pundit George Will 

“Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone.” – 2018 on his sometime advisor Steve Bannon  

According to Indeed’s Career Guide, the ten common traits of a good worker are dedication, confidence, reliability, teamwork, independence, leadership, communication, self-awareness, critical thinking, and integrity. Anyone who has spent any time with dogs knows how high the typical canine scores here. 

And we’re not just talking about the police K-9 German Shepherd, seeing-eye Golden Retriever, anxiety-reducing King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, drug and bomb sniffing Labrador Retriever, military Belgian Malinois or sheep herding Border Collie.

Dogs get the job done, well and on time, with little reward other than love and cookies. 

If that guy who lost had any understanding of how well dogs tick off the employer wish list, he would know hired like a dog is an infinitely more apt description. 

Why so many of the 130 million full-time workers in this country support the guy who lost in 2020 and still thinks he won continues to mystify. Real wages adjusted for inflation have been largely stagnant for most folks since 1980 and inequality has soared. Millions live below the poverty line and millions more work multiple jobs, struggle with student loans and housing costs, save little for retirement, see less economic mobility, and endure lifetimes of job insecurity. They still get up and give it their best shot every morning. 

If that guy who lost had any empathy for what most humans are going through, he’d know tired like a dog is an infinitely more apt description. 

That guy who lost in 2020 arbitrarily condescends in the face of his own decidedly mixed results. Never has he admitted to losing money like a dog or going bankrupt like a dog. Not a single statement that students got no education out of his university like dogs or that bondholders got nothing but scraps out of a Chapter 11 reorganization like dogs or that he busted his casino, burned his steaks and grounded his shuttle airline like a dog. 

On Less Than Clutch Performance 

“Choked like a dog.” – 2016 on Mitt Romney losing to Barack Obama and 2017 on former Attorney General Sally Yates and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during Senate testimony 

Any of the millions of Americans who have participated in the popular growing sport of Dog Agility or watched American Kennel Club events on ESPN knows that dogs don’t choke. They brilliantly take instruction, ignore distractions and, much more often than not, live in the moment and make the moment theirs. Simply put, dogs perform under pressure. Their human handlers are another story. They panic, miss turns, forget routes, give wrong cues. Any dog lover knows he or she can only hope to measure up to his canine companion in the agility ring or anywhere else. 

On Women’s Appearances 

"A dog who wrongfully comments on me." - 2015 on Arianna Huffington 

"I'm watching television and I see her barking like a dog." - 2016 on Hillary Clinton 

“Only Rosie O’Donnell.” - 2016 response to Megyn Kelly’s query as to why he called women he didn’t like “dogs” and “disgusting animals” 

So much has been said and written about middle school insults and names hurled over the years by the guy who lost that we need not get into it here. Myriad unkind utterances against the opposition and anyone who hasn’t shown the requisite fealty. A special hostile place towards intelligent women who don’t work for him or sleep with him. As for a desirable woman, there is cat nomenclature to grab, although he shows no more knowledge of and affinity for felines than he has for canines. In that infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape, he said of entertainment journalist Nancy O’Dell, “I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there.” 

Our concern of course is for the dogs. When we think of canine beauty, we are not just thinking of those pampered pedigrees who make it to Best in Show competitions over the years. We are thinking of all canines. Such beautiful animals, soulful and smiling, whose owners know they are fortunate to look into their best friend eyes and find nothing but a lifetime of love and devotion. 

On Truth Telling and Moral Virtue

"Lies like a dog." – 2016 on Ted Cruz 

“Cheated on him like a dog & will do it again.” – 2012 on Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart 

The guy who lost popularized the term fake news and then proceeded to disseminate it daily. During his four years in office, the Washington Post compiled a list of 30,573 false or misleading claims he made, not including the Big Lie that he won in 2020. 

He has no insight into the universal openness and integrity of the family dog. Dogs don’t lie and dogs don’t cheat (unless you include getting hold of a sibling’s unattended food). Dogs have no secret agendas. No need for world domination, just a quick and easy to ascertain role in the family, usually based on size, sometimes on seniority. They are honest and open about their needs. Food, love and playtime. 

For the right audience, that guy will even pretend to like dogs. But don’t believe him. Your dog won’t.

On Death

“He died like a dog.  He died like a coward.” - 2019 on the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi 

“Even if you’re sick as a dog and you say ‘darling I can’t make it…even if you vote and then pass away it’s worth it.” – 2024 on encouraging Iowans to make it to the polls 

All dog owners know that the day they welcome their new pups into the house is a wonderful one. The day they say goodbye is a true tragedy, the downside of falling so hard for our canine companions. Dogs die more gracefully than most human beings, unburdened by regrets and anger. Dogs die the way they live. Loyal and loving to the last. 

The guy who lost in 2020 cannot comprehend the grace of a dog’s life and the tragedy of a dog’s death. 

Ivana, the first wife of the guy who lost, had a poodle named Chappy who would consistently bark at her husband, perhaps sensing his lack of kindness towards all creatures great and small. Ivana wrote in her 2017 memoir of her former husband's hostility towards dogs and couldn’t understand how he could not love a dog that acts like he's won the lottery for life just because he sees you walk through the door? 

Ivana suffered a tragic and accidental fall down the grand, curving staircase of her Manhattan townhouse in 2022. Her former husband arranged to have her buried not far from the first tee at his namesake Bedminster, New Jersey golf course. 

Kind of like a …… 

You get the picture. 

****** 

So just what will become of your beloved canines if the guy who lost in 2020 but thinks he won is elected in 2024? If you dog lovers, and you fans of Taylor and her two Miniature Pinschers Bug and Baby, don’t make your way to the polls in packs? 

If you love this country, and you love your dog, please feel free to like and share with as many photos of your own precious little guy or gal as you wish. And most of all, vote in November with your nose and your bark, the way your favorite companion would if given the chance to do so. 

PETER BRAV is the author of the quintessential dog memoir
ZAPPY I’M NOT. ZAPPY I'M NOT

THE H WORDS

I slept last night in a good hotel, I went shopping today for jewels, the wind rushed around in the dirty town, and the children let out from the schools, I was standing on a noisy corner, waiting for the walking green, across the street he stood, and he played real good, on his clarinet for free.

FOR FREE - Joni Mitchell 1970

Humility is lasting, hubris not so much. We should remember that. Humility is kindness, hubris not so much. We should remember that too. When we listen to our music, watch our sports heroes and, most of all, when we make decisions on who best can lead us forward.

In 1970’s FOR FREE, one of the great singer-songwriters of all time on a city stroll recognizes her own good fortune while admiring just one of the millions of good people, talented people, hard-working people, out there struggling. That’s what humility does, makes one grateful for all the good things that have come along and less inclined to pat oneself on the back for all one’s hard work and unmatched brilliance. Hubris not so much.

We often seem to be going the opposite way, usually via our phones and big screens. We reward and applaud loud and bold, so much so that it feeds upon itself.

Nobody stopped to hear him, though he played so sweet and high, they knew he had never been on their TV, so they passed his music by.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can turn down the volume on anyone and everyone telling us how great they are, decide for ourselves where the talent and goodness lie. To paraphrase Joni, it will most likely be found for free, where big money is nowhere around, now more than ever in the 53 years since her album Ladies of the Canyon was released.

MY PERFECT BAÑO

Welcome one and all,
To my truly perfect baño,
Americans, Russians, North Koreans,
The occasional Mexicano,

Cheap crystal, cheap marble,
Lots of cheap brass,
And boxes and boxes of secrets
When you need to wipe your ass,

Cheap shower curtain,
Cheap vanity, cheap plastic can,
My cheap secret lair
Where the end of Trump began,

Forty Bankers Boxes,
A few more on sale at Staples,
So now you know the real reason
For the flight of Marla Maples,

Fifty years since Watergate,
Fifty more and history will thank me,
For Water Closet Gate it is,
And Water Closet Gate it shall always be.

69

The future of mankind depends on so many things. I worry about that. Yet I cannot help but wonder if allowing an NBA player to wear the number 69 might be a good place to start fixing. No one has ever donned a 69 jersey for a game in the seventy-seven years the pro hoop league’s been around. They say they’ve got a bad sexual reputation, those two digits linked together, although most people who have tried it have hastened back to the Kama Sutra for new ideas. Frankly no one cares, or should care, not any longer, not when the West Coast is burning and the East Coast is drowning and so many people seem so unhappy. That’s right, no one should care, not about that. (Personally it’s worry enough that I’m turning 69 next year and can’t afford to give up any of these years.)

No pro hoopster seemed to want to don the forbidden digits those first fifty plus years although concern for a bad sexual reputation was probably not on player minds. The league did just fine without the numbers and the numbers did just fine without the league. There were allowances along the way of course. When the scoreboard clock showed one team leading 72 to 69 or some variation, usually in every 3rd quarter, the scoreboard didn’t go blank until the next basket out of respect or fear. When the championship Los Angeles Lakers finished the 1972 season with a then record 69 wins, the league didn’t have them forfeit that last win to the Seattle Supersonics, again out of respect or fear. 1972 Lakers

In 1999 along came Dennis Rodman in his heyday, all earrings and tattoos and Carmen Electra and long before Kim Jong Un, and he wanted 69 for his new Dallas Mavericks identity. Owner Mark Cuban supported him too and had a custom jersey made up in anticipation. Rodman Jersey The late NBA Commissioner David Stern was having none of it. Ergo the ban.

Why has 96 gotten a pass by the league? Ron Artest a/k/a Metta World Peace wore it proudly in 2008 with the Houston Rockets and no one blinked. Now Playing Ron Artest No. 96 Innocuous, unthreatening, respectable? Suggestive of middle-aged couples in a position far more familiar to them, disappointed with the kids, disdaining the meddling mother-in-law or the brutish boss, finding relief back to back with different sections of the New York Times? And while we’re at it, how have 10, or the randier 100, and component digits 1 and 0 survived the purge of possible penetrations? If we try, we might just eliminate computer coding and all that goes with it.

I worry about 1969 too. Bryan Adams wrote and performed Summer of ’69 and Don Henley did the same in The Boys of Summer about coming of age that year. Summer of '69 It was my favorite year too, really. I was fourteen years old and hopeful about my own future and that of my country notwithstanding everything going on around me. There were riots on American streets and just so many bombs dropping on villages thousands of miles away. A man died in the chaos of a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway in California. Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, riots ensued and the battle for gay rights was forever joined. African Americans took over the Cornell student union demanding educational rights, respect and social justice. Nixon took office. A lottery of bad luck was instituted for the Vietnam War draft. Charles Manson and his crazies ran murderously loose in California. The Supreme Court again tried to figure out what was obscene and who might look and where. But against this backdrop, three things happened that I will always remember. In July, human beings walked on the moon, a reminder of what hard work, planning, commitment, and individual courage can achieve. In August, human beings gathered in upstate Bethel, New York for nothing but three days of peace and music, a reminder of how good music and good feelings can make one hopeful. And in October, the formerly hapless and lovable loser New York Mets rewarded their longtime believers for their faith and won the World Series, a reminder that good things can happen when the stars align. Even in a year with a possible bad sexual connotation.

Sure, there’s a time and a place for everything. That’s why we have ratings, for movies and music and the like. They make sense. That’s why we have restrictions, for buying cigarettes, driving a car, drinking alcohol. They make sense too. But it’s the slipperiest of slopes. Go too far and you’re letting the very few control information and lifestyle for the many. That’s never worked out well and has been the weapon of choice for every despot in human history. They say democracy dies in darkness. I suppose truth does best in daylight. Not banned, not burned, and not reshelved to a place it can’t be found. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, one who can’t handle the truth, or the search for it, becomes quite adept at banning it, or with a wink, reshelving.

Blacks were banned from undergraduate degrees until 1947 and women banned for the most part until 1969 at Princeton University because so-called intelligent white men thought it would ruin things. African Americans at Princeton Coeducation at Princeton Blacks and women have been educated there since and the world is infinitely better off for them. Marijuana was banned for most of my lifetime because so-called principled folks of good conscience thought it would ruin things. Lately hypocrisy’s been slightly curtailed, prisons slightly uncrowded and private prison companies slightly less profitable, and those former principles have resurfaced in big profits and tax dollars.

It is actually banning, and its all too close relative burning, that have a way of doing the ruining. One day in 2021 you’re watching 22 year-old Amanda Gorman at the presidential inauguration bring a hopeful nation to tears of joy with her uplifting poem The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country (“somehow, we've weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished”) and a scant two years later you’re watching a presidential hopeful bring a tearful nation to incredulity with his support for one woman’s banning attempts directed at Gorman’s book of the same title and others in her child’s Florida school. Gorman Reshelved

Millions of people seem to want no (or almost no) government with a sweet spot reserved in their hearts for a government that is funded only to wage war and regulate bodies, bedrooms and books. That form of government, be it large and Federal or super local in the form of the local school system, given free rein will almost always rein too far. So let’s work on fixing the world instead. Standing up or lying down. Together. Let’s start with Dennis Rodman’s jersey. Come on, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, show some balls here, not too many of course. Bring Dennis Rodman out of retirement to set the right example. We’re more mature than you think we are and will only giggle for part of the first quarter before settling down.

Editor’s Note - June 24, 2023: Just learned from my travels that former NBA player (Philadelphia 76ers) and coach (Milwaukee Bucks) Larry Costello in 1953 played in all but twenty seconds of the then longest college basketball game ever at 69 minutes. His teammate Ed Fleming agreed to switch his uniform number to 70 so that Costello could wear 69, a number retired shortly before his 2001 death by alma mater Niagara University in upstate New York. That seems like a more valid reason for retiring the number since basketball lifer Costello is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Costello 69 Jersey Retired

Memorial Day 2023

My father never went back to Europe, didn't travel much. He got his fill with the 69th Infantry, 271st Division. I wish we had talked more about it while he was alive; we never did and I don't think he could. I wish all the stores closed on Memorial Day and we had an hour of national silence. I wish we would stop fighting everyone and each other. I wish.

Dear Former Knicks Season Ticket Holder

April 30, 2023

Dear Former Knicks Season Ticket Holder,

Just a note of thanks on behalf of the entire New York Knickerbockers organization. I have just been informed that you and a friend shared Knicks season tickets in Section 102 for 12 seasons before failing to renew this past fall. At that time, you stated to anyone who would listen that “this is pretty much a guarantee that the Knicks will move beyond the first round and might even win the whole thing.”       

My understanding is that you originally signed up in 2010, confident that one of my many ex-GMs, in this case Donnie Walsh, would be able to bring Lebron James to town. While “The Decision” left Lebron free to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in the NBA championship game for the next four years, winning in 2012 and 2013, you were still able to witness competitive ball under our two able Mike coaches, D’Antoni and Woodson. You were there for a few playoff games and Jeremy Lin’s month-long period of Linsanity (which I abruptly ended by not paying him that next summer).

It wasn’t until the 2014 season that we were able to become truly laughable under coaches Derek Fisher, Jeff Hornacek, Kurt Rambis, and David Fizdale. And when I say laughable, I don’t only refer to our losing records year after year. I’m also thinking about how I brought in Phil Jackson for three years to insist on running his triangle offense that would only work if he could lure Jordan and Pippen out of retirement and then proceed to blame everyone else including fans like you for what went wrong. Phil Jackson Interview Phil Jackson Timeline

You were treated to awful season after awful season that had you looking forward to the hopefulness of preseason team introductions Knicks Preseason Intro and the calories of some free food at the last (often losing) game of the season. Hey, remember that epic last place finish in 2014-2015 with 65 losses when I treated you to unlimited sushi and knishes at Fan Appreciation Night? Knicks Free Food Night You were able to see me go at it with Knicks legend Charles Oakley and a few taunting fans----how many owners are that passionate and what a treat it must be for fans like you to be there live to see it? 

So yes, now we are winning, and we are winning without you. It seems only two things can derail this train now. The Miami Heat in Round 2…..or you and your buddy electing to rejoin us in Section 102 next season. I’m pretty sure that might be just the incentive I need to trade Brunson and Hart, send Leon Rose back to Philly, get into a boxing match with Julius Randle in a stairwell, and throw Clyde Frazier and Earl Monroe out during our next anniversary of the 1973 championship team. On second thought, it might be safer to just ban you like any other attorney who makes my list. James Dolan Fox Interview

Regards,

James L. Dolan, Chairman
Madison Square Garden Sports Corp.

THE TAX MAN ROCKS

With April 15 this year falling on a Saturday and Monday April 17 being D.C.’s celebration of Emancipation Day, there would have been three extra days to line up at the post office to get those tax returns stamped. It used to be a party, one I never invited myself to, but with more than 90% of returns filed online, that party is over.

We can sit here and debate who should pay how much, where it should go, why it’s more complicated after every attempt at simplification….but I’ll let the politicians do that because it seems to be at the heart of what they actually do debate year after year.

Instead it’s much more fun to use the extra three days to check out just five of the many outpourings from songwriters thinking about the public till and its proverbial collector, the dreaded Tax Man. So, so good, they should have been exempt.

SUNNY AFTERNOON - The Kinks (1966) Sunny Afternoon

The tax man’s taken all my dough and left in my stately home, lazing on a sunny afternoon, and I can’t sail my yacht, he’s taken everything I’ve got, all I’ve got’s this sunny afternoon

TAXMAN - The Beatles (1966) Taxman

Don't ask me what I want it for (ah, ah, Mr. Wilson), if you don't want to pay some more (ah, ah, Mr. Heath), 'cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

FORTUNATE SON - Credence Clearwater Revival (1969) Fortunate Son

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, Lord, don’t they help themselves, no? But when the taxman come to the door, Lord, the house lookin’ like a rummage sale

TAX FREE - Joni Mitchell (1985) Tax Free

Preacher preaching love like vengeance, preaching love like hate, calling for large donations, promising estates, rolling lawns and angel bands behind the pearly gates, you know he will have his in this life but yours will have to wait, he's immaculately tax free

TAXMAN, MR. THIEF - Cheap Trick (1977) Taxman, Mr. Thief

You work hard, you make money, there ain't no one in the world who can stop you, you work hard, you went hungry, now the taxman is out to get you, you worked hard and slaved and slaved for years, break your back sweat a lot, well, it's just not fair

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM

Many of you are aware that James L. Dolan, CEO of both Madison Square Garden Sports Corp. and Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corp., has gone to great lengths to ban from MSG facilities and events any lawyers and law firms and their employees currently in litigation with the company. Lawyers Are Back in MSG MSG Boss Erupts as His Ban of Lawyers Draws Scrutiny We were able to obtain this confidential list of some new names being added to the ban.

CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM

Memo To: Madison Square Garden Sports/Entertainment Staff
From: JD
Date: January 29, 2023
Re: Continuing Attorney Ban (Loser Lawyer Lockout)

This memorandum is circulated for the purpose of adding the following attorneys to our Loser Lawyer Lockout, the biometric program of vision recognition for screening of customers at all Company facilities and events, including but not limited to, MSG, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theatre, Hulu Theater, Knicks and Rangers games, comedy shows, concerts. These lawyers are currently involved in active litigation against the Company and may not be admitted.

1. Harvey Schpilkis, Esq.: Represents Lou Massone Jr. who has brought wrongful death action on behalf of the Estate of Lou Massone Sr. Claim made that the elder Massone, a Knicks season ticket holder from 1958 to 1993, suffered a fatal heart attack on June 2, 1993 in his second row seat at Game 5 of the Eastern Division Finals after four layup attempts at go-ahead basket by Charles Smith were denied by Horace Grant, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in final seconds. Case is still pending as judge weighs whether fifth shot attempt may still be possible.

2. Debra Baker, Esq.: Represents Boyd Robinson III who claims that listening to the song Under Pressure at all 87 of Billy Joel’s monthly residency concerts at The Garden has been the proximate cause of his schizophrenia.

3. Stanley Blackmon, Esq.: Represents Harvey Weinstein in connection with claim that my band JD & The Straight Shot’s song I Should Have Known (“and what of the others, in some way all my brothers, sitting on the very top, could not hear the call to stop, behind locked doors the eyes of men who take what don't belong to them”) misrepresents that we were friends.

4. Loni Zaidi, Esq.: Has filed Celebrity Discrimination Lawsuit on behalf of Carmen Electra, as well as all Real Housewives of Various Locales, not invited to sit in the six seats of Knicks Celebrity Row during a time when Entourage’s Jerry Turtle Ferrara and rapper Flavor Flav received multiple invitations.

5. Lana Fellows, Esq.: Represents plaintiff Knicks 1st and 2nd round draft picks Tom Riker (1972), Gene Short (1975), DeWayne Scales (1980), Greg Butler (1988), Jerrod Mustaf (1990), Charlie Ward (1994), Fredric Weis (1999), Mike Sweetney, Maciej Lampe and Slavko Vranes (2003), Renaldo Balkman (2006), Jordan Hill (2009), Andy Rautins (2010), Kostas Papanikolaou (2012), and Cleanthony Early (2014) claiming that Knicks drafting them many rounds higher than was rational resulted in undue pressure and career oblivion.

6. Tyler Richmond, Esq.: Has filed class action suit on behalf of season ticket holders between 1999 and 2003 in connection with trade of John Wallace for Chris Dudley, subsequently signed to 4-year $28 million contract. Claim that contract signing (which worked out to be $825,000 per made free throw by Dudley, recognized as one of the worst percentage foul shooters in NBA history) constituted breach of contract to provide entertainment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

7. Beverly Newsome, Esq.: Represents claimant in personal injury suit against Company’s Radio City Music Hall and Rockettes claiming that one of the dancers inadvertently kicked off her prosthetic right leg injuring two young children attending 2017 Holiday Concert.

8. Eldridge C. Eldridge, Esq.: Represents me in suit against myself in connection with my song Fix the Knicks (“fix the Knicks and make them shine, get 'em to win like it's '69, hitting all their free throws and no more shooting bricks, time to get it right and fix the Knicks, doing my best and that's my problem, I check with my friend called Isiah Thomas, pay no mind to those nasty critics, they haven't done a thing to fix the Knicks”). Estate of Aretha Franklin is additional plaintiff as my band was her opening act in 2011 at the Jones Beach Theater. Claim is for irreparable career damage and pain and suffering.

9. Peter Brav, Esq.: A non-practicing attorney who allegedly wrote this and has recently attempted to circumvent the Loser Lawyer Lockout and enter The World’s Most Famous Arena utilizing the same brown paper bag he wore for the Knicks franchise-record 14th consecutive loss on January 8, 2015 during the franchise-record 17-win and 65-loss season.

WELL ENDOWED

April 5, 2022

Dear Mr. Smith,

I am writing to congratulate you on behalf of Harvard University for acceptance of your undergraduate application to enroll this coming year. As you know, Harvard University has been known for our high standards in the application process and our dedication to academic excellence. We were very impressed by both your academic record and future promise. Please fill out the enclosed acceptance form and return it to us no later than the 1st day of May.

You should look forward to four years of academic study and individual growth, as well as an eternity of monetary solicitations. Almost immediately upon graduation we intend to barrage you with daily envelopes and emails in our institutional pursuit of an ever-greater endowment. Whether your years after graduation are filled with bullion or balloons bursting, we will come after you and all other graduates with equal determination. Of course, not everyone will find his or her name on a building or rear end bussed at a Manhattan cocktail party by busy deans on break. Rest assured though that your money will always be good here.

Please make a mental note now that if you graduate with more than one hundred thousand dollars in outstanding student loan debt, you should not worry if you don’t hear from us right away as no solicitations will be made in the first month after graduation.

Yours sincerely,

John Doe, Admissions Department

A Stroll Down Close-Minded Lane

When the administration proposed a new system of residential colleges with their own dining halls, Prospect denounced the idea as a potential threat to the system of eating clubs. The magazine charged that, like affirmative action, the plan was "intended to create racial harmony."

—1985 issue of Prospect magazine published by Concerned Alumni of Princeton

Oh no, not that, not racial harmony. Next thing you know, men and women will be seeing eye to eye. If they let that crazy notion out of Princeton into the world, people spending weekends in different temples and across borders might get along too.

Take a look back at From Alito's Past, a Window on Conservatives at Princeton, David D. Kirkpatrick’s New York Times story from November 2005 when Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. was being considered for the Supreme Court. November 27, 2005 from David D. Kirkpatrick Seventeen years later it reads like a comic book super-villain origin story with some names we’ve become too familiar with. Zealous missionaries panicked about the possibility of infecting their beloved Christian Ivy League pillar with virulent strains of other gods and, heaven forbid, actual breathing, independent, education-seeking…women.

There is today’s conservative pundit Dinesh D'Souza in a 1984 Prospect piece upset about a Puerto Rican first-year student whose mother sought to remove her from the school after learning that she was having sex with a male student and receiving sex education from the school.

There is a 1985 Prospect editorial concerned about letting black students out of the one dormitory they were concentrated in and allowing them to join the exclusive eating clubs dotting Prospect Street near the university. "Doubtless, there will be many who regard this as mere stalling, and prejudice by another name. If realistic approaches to problems must be called dirty names because we do not like them, well, there is no remedy for it."

And there is Justice Alito in a 1985 government application listing his membership in Concerned Alumni as a reference point for his conservative bona fides although he subsequently sought at the time of his Supreme Court consideration to downplay his membership and condemn the organization’s missions. 2017 Mudd Manuscript Library Blog Post

You likely don’t have to look much past the Kirkpatrick article (and the subsequent 2017 blog post of Princeton University students linked immediately above) to understand how the small group of what we would today call influencers who believe that this country should be Christian and led by white men were honing their non-liberal arts as undergraduates in an otherwise bucolic location in Central New Jersey.

FLAGGING SPIRIT

My daughter came home today worrying about a giant American flag draped over the stone entrance to our driveway, held in place by two bricks. Who would put it there? she wondered worriedly. I was off to remove it, folding it neatly and placing it atop the stone for whoever did put it there to retrieve. I walked back to the house, wondering, having a dialogue with myself.

I love this country and its flag. But I was worried too. For far too long the flag has been waved not out of joy and gratitude but as an admonition---to get on board or leave. I worry that we have paid too much attention to symbols and anthems and not enough to people and whether this nation is doing as good a job as it could for caring about them. All of them. America is an ideal, of freedom for all and shared purpose and prosperity. It can be guided by its Constitution, inspired by its Anthem and united by its Flag but its people, all its people, are paramount.

I was thirteen when Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in a human rights protest on the podium at the ’68 Mexico City Olympics. It was a time of oppression of African Americans in America and throughout the world, apartheid in South Africa and record daily death totals in Southeast Asia. Smith and Carlos had trained their whole lives for that medal moment of gold and bronze but they felt the need to speak powerfully without words about human rights and the need for change.

America was born out of dissent and protest.

In 2003 the drumbeat for the invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction and regime change was deafening. The Senate vote for approval was 77, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, to 23. When the lead singer of the Dixie Chicks told a London crowd she was ashamed President George W. Bush was also from Texas, blacklisting and death threats ensued. When France declined to support the Iraq invasion, Bush labeled the French position as anti-American, resulting in anti-French sentiment sweeping our nation and the absurd menu revision in many restaurants of French fries to Freedom fries.

In 2016 Colin Kaepernick first sat and later knelt during pre-game singing of the Star Spangled Banner, stating that “America oppresses black people and people of color”. Although then President Barack Obama called it his constitutional right, President Donald J. Trump later stated “you have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn't be playing, you shouldn't be there, maybe you shouldn't be in the country.” The outrage at the kneeling prevented people from focusing on the point Kaepernick was trying to make about racism and brutality, about human rights, about kindness.

I’ve been around long enough to witness how many flag-wavers are ignorant of what makes a nation strong, just and lasting and how many Bible-thumpers are spiritually void. They routinely conflate nation and religion in any event and use the flag and the Bible as weapons and not inspirations.

Not too long ago we moved to a somewhat rural New Jersey community. Beautiful amber waves of grain are everywhere but I’ve noticed many more Trump 2020 and Trump 2024 pennants than I am used to. And I can’t pick up the news, local or national, without reading about someone threatening someone, often in the name of patriotism of the malevolent and not benevolent sort. That’s where my paranoia came in. I imagined the flag was placed there by one of them, whoever they are, eager to see who would keep it in place and who would remove it. In my overly vivid imagination, they were making a list and checking it twice, the kind of list Joseph McCarthy, not Santa, would keep.

I came home to learn my usually shy and not demonstrative wife had put up the flag, to celebrate the Fourth of July.

Why not? she wondered.

Why not indeed? I thought as I unfolded the flag, kissed it gently and draped it proudly back across the entrance stone.

BEWARE OF ANGRY MEN WITH GOATS: The Joy of Losing Baseball and More

It’s baseball season again, the Yankees and Mets are playing great, the Chicago Cubs not so much. But hope springs eternal for every true baseball fan, especially in Chicago. Revisit my novel THE OTHER SIDE OF LOSING or read it for the first time. It’s that time of the year, that time of life.

THE OTHER SIDE OF LOSING

Former President Nixon - A Key to Knicks 1970 Championship?

With the New York Knickerbockers not making it into June again, true Knicks fans have some time to reflect. For me, it’s coming upon a scorecard recalling this 13 year-old’s train trip to MSG late November 1968 to see the hated Celtics. This was less than a month before the December 19, 1968 trade of Walt Bellamy and Howard Komives for Dave DeBusschere which would ultimately lead to a Knicks NBA championship in 1970. And now from Wikipedia I learn that “Komives was involved in a personal feud with Cazzie Russell that negatively affected the rest of the team. Russell was an ardent supporter of Richard Nixon in the 1968 Presidential election, while Komives worked for the Hubert Humphrey campaign which led to the trade.” Who knew? DeBusschere’s gritty and outstanding play, Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s promotion to point guard and Willis Reed’s becoming a force at center might just might make Cazzie Russell the MVP—notwithstanding Clyde’s 36 points, 19 assists and 7 rebounds in Game 7 against the Lakers on May 7, 1970 on his way to the Hall of Fame. Here’s to Cazzie Russell and his rather poor taste in presidential politics—-it’s not all about the x’s and o’s! And if not Cazzie, let’s give some credit to Richard Milhous himself.

LVIV

My late and beloved mother Adele Brav traveled 2 hours on a train with my grandmother on August 31, 1939 to Lviv, then part of Poland and known as Lvov or Lvow. A shopping trip the day before 4th grade. That was the end of her formal education as war broke out the next day. The Soviets had trouble occupying the city back then and gave way to the Nazis in 1941. Ultimately Lviv became part of Ukraine in 1944 in the post-war settlement(s).

UCSB Oral History Project (2003)

ONE FINE EVENING

“The past comes upon you like smoke on the air, you can smell it and find yourself gone,
To a place that you lived without worry or care, isn’t that where we all once came from?”

— Mary Chapin Carpenter from The Age of Miracles (2010)

This was back in the day, way back, a half century ago, a memory that seems at once both distant and fresh. It is the kind of memory that teases, a snapshot with faded colors and creased edges, making you feel for just a moment that you can somehow really get back there before the mortgage payments, the back pain and the sleepwalking trips to the bathroom. Before all the mistakes you and everyone else you know are going to make. Before time slips away because that is all time has ever done.

Before you learn that everything will be alright anyway but only if you let it be.

This was a Tuesday evening high school basketball game in March of 1972, a day after I turned 17 years old. It was the Nassau County semi-finals, played at Hofstra in front of more than four thousand, mostly partisan teenagers like me, the largest crowd in New York State schoolboy history. This was Arnold Stone and his underdog Lawrence Golden Tornadoes taking on William “Beaver” Smith and the prior year’s champion South Side Cyclones of Rockville Centre.

I was in 11th grade at Lawrence and had no idea what a golden tornado was or that Georgia Tech football had the nickname for a couple of decades in the early 20th century. Tornadoes. Cyclones. Didn’t give these stormy names a second thought because climate change was just another name for spring break. I knew we were the blue and gold and that was about it. There was of course that Golden Tornado restaurant on the corner of Branch Boulevard and Peninsula Boulevard across the street from Public School No. 6. A lunch hour fried egg sub sandwich with the hash brown potatoes thrown right in. An always welcoming owner named Joe whose alleged penchant for bookmaking reportedly earned some time out from behind the counter. The best pinball machine with real three-dimensional silver metal balls and genuine tilt pronouncements. Most of all, the time to eat and play with friends willing to just stand by the side of the glass and wait their turn.

They’re all gone now, the restaurant, the public elementary school, and yes, Arnold and Beaver.

I had tried out for the team the previous summer of 1971 but needed more inches, more pounds and more talent. The coach was Fred Seger, a basketball and baseball star at Nebraska in the 1950s, ahead of his time in terms of physical conditioning. An intimidating man to anyone who had some growing and growing up to do. When I found out I could walk off as easily as I had walked on, with no one noticing either, I turned to writing about the season for the school paper. This had allowed me to witness an exhibition debacle the prior fall against Suffolk County Brentwood’s Mitch Kupchak of LA Lakers fame that made me glad I was sitting safely above court level with a pen and pad. But somehow, the boys from the Five Towns were here just a few months later playing to the hopes of their mere mortal classmates, some carrying signs that read THE ONLY WAY TO BEAT A BEAVER IS WITH A STONE.

This was years before ESPN, years before its Top Plays, years before Michael Jordan and sneaker deals offered adolescents still in algebra class. Before ticket prices climbed out of reach and before someone had the not great idea to insert radio commercials between baseball pitches. Before one of my favorite movies, Hoosiers, and two of my least favorites, Space Jam and Space Jam: A New Legacy. Long before videogame NBA 2K kept too many people inside. No smartphones, no Snapchatting, no Twitter or TikTok pics. All eyes fixed on a basketball court and a scoreboard.

You can Google South Side 70 Lawrence 68 for the next month and all you will find are real estate listings, temperature readings and restaurant prices. A black and white photo shows the center jump, Arnold wearing number 33 and Beaver 34, bodies fully extended and rising, fingertips stretched towards the heavens, the basketball balanced atop their meeting left hands. Today the commentators would describe this brilliant battle as a shame someone had to lose. The game is gone, long gone, no matter how many jump shots Stone made that day in a valiant effort to take down the champion. Tony Kornheiser for Newsday---yes, that Tony Kornheiser, a few years out of nearby Hewlett High School and a few decades ahead of Monday Night Football and Pardon the Interruption---would take up most of a full sports page to pen a piece entitled South Side Wins a Tough One – But Stone Is a Winner in Losers’ Locker Room.

Beaver Smith would have a fabulous 4-year career at St. John’s, mostly for coaching legend Lou Carnesecca, be drafted in the 5th round by the Knicks in 1976, and play in Europe. Arnold would never quite live up to his own athletic promise in a few years of college ball at Skagit Valley College, Nassau Community College and Jacksonville University. By all accounts both would live rich lives of family and friendships, surely enjoying their past success and attention but never resting or relying on it. Beaver passed away in 2018 and Arnold just last year, both in their 60s, both long before their time.

Next month, on the 7th of March, it will be fifty years since that game. The favorite won, the underdog lost. That’s more often than not how it goes. I have always identified with underdogs. I rooted for the Mets, not the Yankees. My father was born into abject poverty and my mother was imprisoned in Europe as a child. I wrote a novel, The Other Side of Losing, celebrating the baseball fans of Chicago who spent a century waiting for a World Series championship, not realizing it was the friendships made along the way that made them winners long before the fickle bouncing balls finally behaved.

The history of competitive sports organization shows an early concern for not tipping the balance from participation towards partisanship too dramatically. The same can be said for society at large. We make too much of teams, of tribes, of races, religions. Of winners. We are all underdogs, all winners and all losers, all in this together, in this beautiful but all too brief game of life.

We have social media now and we see the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, the anniversaries, the passings. I shake my head and wonder how all those days disappeared so quickly. I don’t really recognize the face in the mirror looking back at me. Every heartburn might be heart failure, tanning freckles the dawn of melanoma, headaches and bellyaches all the possible arrival of that dreaded thing our parents whispered about as the C-word. My friends and I still spend too much time worrying and wondering why the world at large seems as broken as it was when we came into it.  I’ve said goodbye to both parents and to many good friends and family members. And to Beaver and Arnold, two men to whom I owe one very fine evening, that kind of moment that helps add to a good life. After all, if time is going to remain undefeated, it still feels damn good to get your shots up, wherever you are.

Scary Seventies

Seeing pitcher Ian Anderson star for the Braves this past month reminded me of the first Ian Anderson. I was a huge Jethro Tull fan ---Benefit, Aqualung (with Cross-Eyed Mary, Locomotive Breath, Hymn 43 and the first known recorded mention of snot running down his nose), Thick As A Brick. Never once did I wonder why he was standing on one leg to play the flute---no reason---or why he took up salmon farming at the expense of songwriting. But he has a new tune now and, judging from the cover photo, scarier in his 70s than he ever was in the 70s.

ONCE UPON A DINER

Impressive how the Internet can send one off on so many time-consuming trips; at my age, they are most often down the proverbial Memory Lane.

Today Newsday emailed me that “LI’s oldest diner closes, another victim of COVID—-The spot has served its last order of eggs over easy with rye toast and well-done home fries” https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/sunnys-riverhead-diner-grill-1.50368840?utm_term=sub&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sunday%20Top%20Reads

I grew up on Long Island and have had more than my share of eggs over, rye toast and well-done home fries. I made it out to Riverhead only once and missed out on Sunny’s Riverhead Diner & Grill. Opened in 1932, it went through a few ownership changes, before this last group bought it and the land below in 2017. I feel for those folks, the owners, the employees and the regulars like the Riverhead woman in the article who explained why she became a regular. “They see me walk in and they pour my coffee. Look, I can make breakfast at home — I’m a pretty good cook. But I like connecting with my community, and that’s why I go to Sunny’s. Every town needs a diner."

She is so right. Every town needs a diner. I may have had a slightly different take on being a regular many years ago—http://www.themonarchreview.org/irregular-peter-brav/—-but the point isn’t how regular or irregular you are, it’s community and we began losing it long before this pandemic we will survive. Every town needs a diner, maybe two or three. A diner is community, sometimes 24-hour community for the starving and one with a single cup of coffee, the gregarious and the lonely, the sleepy and the insomniacs.

I remember the Sherwood Diner on Rockaway Turnpike where I grew up. It’s still there thankfully just as it was for my parents one night a week, my father every Sunday morning with his one true friend Lenny and for me at one in the morning after another night of doing what young people do in the preceding three or four hours. Eggs are more reliable than most things in life.

I remember the Rosebud Diner in downtown Ithaca. It’s closed now but it was just 77 cents in ‘77 for two eggs, toast, home fries, and coffee. We were there every Friday and Saturday night because Ithaca had a regrettable curfew for bars. We were young, not that tired and hungry. I ordered the same thing every night, dry toast, no butter, and usually had the same waitress who always heard rye toast, buttered. It didn’t matter, I simply got used to rye toast. And I remember Hal’s Deli downtown too. Yes, not technically a diner, but it had that same feel. I remember owner Sandy greeting us as if she were everyone’s mother. She is much more memorable for me than most of my professors. Motherly, with great sandwiches in 1977, and still going strong until 2017. You can’t teach that. https://www.14850.com/05233837-hals-closing-photos/

And I remember that diner at the northeast corner of First Avenue and 79th Street too. I went there most mornings in the early ‘80s on my way to the Lexington Avenue subway. Every single time I went in, I saw the same quite elderly two ladies at the first table to the right. There was never anything on that table but bottomless cups of coffee and an ashtray full of their chain-smoking remains. On one occasion, the owner lamented to me at the register that “those two are in their nineties, all they do is smoke cigarettes and drink coffee all morning long and they’re going to live forever.” He had a gleam in his eye and I knew then that he would have been crushed if they weren’t around to occupy that table. I’m sure if I walk in there this morning, they will still be there, sipping away, smoking without knowledge of laws that may have changed in the interim, in my mind’s eye anyway. Community’s like that.

Read this in MORTAL MAG—-https://mortalmag.com/2021/10/27/once-upon-a-diner/

New York Past

The New York Post used to have five reasons for its continued existence. One, it had great headline writers; important articles and thoughtful opinions, of course, not so much. Two, it was founded by Fading Founding Father Alexander Hamilton who with the props provided by Lin-Manuel Miranda no longer needs the credit on his resume. Three, it had a wondrous New York sports section made obsolete by ESPN circa 1979. Four, its Page Six so successfully dove as low as possible for celebrity news and gossip but is sadly now rendered yesterday’s non-news by TMZ and the entire internet. Lastly, it employed folks and I believe it still does.

Five reasons now down to one, FOR.

Five million now up to five million and one, AGAINST.

That new one is the fact that they have located the only person on earth, the “auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, Robert Barron”, who has managed to label John Lennon’s Imagine as “one of the worst pop songs of all time”. Listening to the song presented at the Tokyo Summer Olympics opening ceremony, he finds the “melody and arrangement are ­indeed beautiful, the lyrics are an invitation to moral and political chaos”.

Barron presents a religious screed of course and he is so entitled to that. He’s entitled also to warn us that we can never have heaven on earth, that we can only have heaven in heaven, where it belongs. And he can complain that there can’t be a “brotherhood of man” without “a common Father” while he’s at it. It’s called preaching I think, he’s probably quite good at it, and everyone’s entitled to preach to anyone who wants to hang in there and listen. And he’s entitled to guffaws and the suppression of guffaws listening to the lyrics, as Barron describes he did; it is a free world after all.

So the point is, this is on the bad old Post, not Barron. Preachers gonna preach, small church, the whole world if they can manage that. It was the Post after all that added the headline JOHN LENNON’S ‘IMAGINE’, BLARED AT THE OLYMPICS, IS A TOTALITARIAN’S ANTHEM. https://nypost.com/2021/07/25/imagine-blared-at-the-olympics-is-a-totalitarians-anthem/

That’s what the Post does, headlines, when they’re not busy inspiring one former president in 1989 to wrongfully attempt to lynch the Central Park Five, invading anyone and everyone’s privacy for any reason, falling in lockstep with the rest of the Fox News empire, and generally doing their daily part to make bipartisanship, compromise, reasoned discussion, and, yeah, peace on earth a little less likely.

And now, with a preacher’s words, they’ve brought Imagine into it. Please refrain. Imagine is an honest and concise review of a few thousand years of what has brought us to this point, weaved into a dream, a beautiful dream for humanity, simple as that. Call it long-term planning, a model, a vision. Just please don’t call it “an invitation to moral and political chaos” or headline it as “a totalitarian’s anthem".

Some might add, you’re better than that, New York Post, but I will have to disagree.

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

In the later years of his long life, before his memory blurred, my father would routinely celebrate July 4th of 1949 aloud. That was the day, he would remind me in a gleeful uncharacteristically raised voice, he met the love of his life. Pressed for details, he would recall a Brooklyn boy, just three years removed from braving his way with the Fighting 69th Infantry from France through Germany to the Elbe River meetup with the Russian Army. Sneaking into a Macy’s Store Workers Union Independence Day dance at the Hotel New Yorker that evening, he met my mother to be. Mom was a shy Polish immigrant the same three years out of Europe, from years of displacement in a Siberian forced labor camp all the way to joyous employment in Ladies Sportswear at the Herald Square flagship store. The Flatbush boy and the Polish girl would begin 65 years of codependence, very proud Americans leaning on each other always to gamely try to soothe vivid memories of hunger, fear and death.

                They needed each other and so do we, all of us.

                This is the 245th birthday of our nation, celebrated from sea to shining sea in an extended weekend of beaches, grilling, music, parades, and fireworks. It is a day we recall those courageous, brilliant and usually squabbling forebears who managed to come together for one purpose, departing English rule, crafting a forever memorable document in the Declaration of Independence to set their course. All of it is, and always will be, worth celebrating daily.

                Yet at the beginning of this third decade of a century dominated by global terrorism, never ending foreign wars, climate crises, political polarization and literal and figurative wall construction, an actual insurrection at our nation’s capital, record levels of global inequality and international debt, falsehoods, and racial and religious hatred, perhaps it is also time to celebrate interdependence, and a declaration to that effect. We just cannot make it alone, not America first in the world, and not financial and ruling elites who seek refuge and status behind well-guarded gates and on islands and other planets. We need each other and the pandemic should have made that more obvious than ever before. We need schools, medicine, clean water, clean air, good jobs, safe roads, healthy food, safety nets, smart policy, and we need them throughout this nation and the world, and we need them now. Interdependence. It worked for my folks. The person leaning your way today will be someone you can lean on tomorrow. Depend on it.