The Zeitgeist with Howard Barbanel

 

Santorum’s Sweater Vests Leave Republicans in the Cold

(This article appeared originally in the March 9, 2012 issue of The South Shore Standard)

When Adolf Hitler came to power and prominence in Germany, the mega movie star Charlie Chaplin was not amused. You may recall that Mr. Chaplin sported a signature short moustache between his nose and upper lip. Hitler wore the same mode of facial hair. Because Hitler was, to put it mildly, an unpleasant personality, it made it impossible for Mr. Chaplin to continue with his own moustache. This lead to a fabulous cinematic skewering of the aforementioned Mr. Hitler in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Nowhere near as serious as moustaches or Hitler, I’ve recently had to come to terms with the popularization of my default wintertime sartorial style by one of the Republican candidates for President of the United States in the person of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum – namely the sweater vest. Living in the Northeast, from November thru March I’ve been wearing sweater vests in a wide variety of colors for well over 20 years now. While it is a conservative way to dress, thanks to the peripatetic Mr. Santorum, said attire has now become synonymous with a level of conservatism that is far beyond my comfort zone and is forcing me to reconsider how to best stay warm while not being branded intolerant.

Senator Santorum appeals to voters on the far right fringes of the Republican Party – the GOP equivalent of the far left wing social engineers among the Democrats. What both these groups have in common is a desire to remake the country in their own image because most of us, in their view, are incapable of making the right choices for ourselves.

Social issues have become prominent in 2012 electioneering despite all the really serious and important challenges facing our country. Who cares about the future fiscal health of our economy when we can discuss contraception? What does it matter if Iran acquires nuclear weapons when we can hotly debate just how religious someone is?  Why do we need to worry about the cost of filling up our cars when we can hold forth on abortion? Why talk about unemployment when we can debate whether being a Mormon makes you a Christian or not?

Mr. Santorum’s sweater vests are a metaphor that conveys a prissiness on personal status issues that remind people of their great-grandfathers. And not just Democrats. There is a vast body of Republicans out there who don’t want a Democratic “Nanny State” and equally at the same time don’t want a “Fuddy-Duddy State” either. One of the privileges of adulthood is the freedom to make one’s own life choices. A lot of folks just don’t want the government in their bedrooms, their boardrooms, their doctors offices or houses of worship regardless whether the supposed benign intent emanates from the right or the left.

No end of political commentators hold forth on how many Republicans don’t think Mitt Romney is “conservative enough” to get the GOP nomination and that voters are still looking for some imagined “great right hope.”

If the GOP is to have any kind of a hope or prayer to unseat President Obama the party needs to drop social issues like a hot potato. To win in November (and to have a reasonable shot at capturing the Senate and retaining the House), Republican candidates have to remember the Clinton-era mantra of “it’s the economy, stupid.” Democrats are delighted to see the rightward jockeying for the rail going on in the GOP.

The irony of Mitt Romney is that the only way he can become president is if he can pull off another “Massachusetts Miracle,”  the GOP needs to make a case to independent voters (who are a plurality in many states) and to disaffected Democrats that they can fix the nation’s problems, not engage in a Kulturkampf over personal status issues. The pejorative label of “moderate” hurled at Romney by Mr. Santorum and others are precisely the practical qualities needed to attract swing voters and pragmatically lead the country out of economic mire and congressional gridlock. Extreme ideological positions won’t get a Republican elected dog-catcher in a nationwide race.

This is why exit polls in nearly primary after primary show that voters believe that Mr. Romney is the candidate best positioned to run well against the President and possibly beat him. When the issues of “conservative purity” come up, then Mr. Santorum usually prevails. The funny thing about purity is that one can be very alone in one’s purity. There’s nothing pure about running for president, possibly winning and then having to run the country in real life.

After the Super Tuesday primaries this week, the delegate count is as follows: Romney 415, Santorum, 176, Gingrich 105 and Ron Paul at 47. The number of delegates needed for nomination are 1144. Santorum stays in the race because as Bob Dylan wrote, “when you ain’t got nothin’, you’ve got nothin’ to lose.” Santorum was a second-tier lobbyist before he began his Quixotic presidential quest. Doing credibly well will position him for Gingrich-like book deals, speaking tours and maybe a gig on Fox News like Mike Huckabee. He can’t seriously think he’s getting the nomination. As for Newt, he’s taken a whole lot of money from billionaires, so he has to keep trotting down he track to show he’s not a one-trick pony. He’s also imbued with his own sense of destiny. For Ron Paul? It’s all about the national soapbox.

Most Republican voters want reasonableness, competence and a viable opponent to the President which is why Romney keeps winning the majority of the races. Santorum’s sweater vests don’t give most people that warm and fuzzy feeling, it just reminds them of having to eat their vegetables and do their homework, which is why he can’t win.

Daydream Believer, 1945-2012

(This appeared originally in the March 2, 2012 issue of The South Shore Standard)

When was the last time you believed in daydreams (let alone indulged in them), white knights on steeds or waking up at six in the morning with a homecoming queen beside you?

All that was made possible by an impish British invasion sometimes lead singer named Davy Jones for a manufactured pop group called The Monkees. Mr. Jones passed away on Wednesday, February 29^th and with his untimely demise (he was only 66), so too is yet another window pane shattered in the rapidly vanishing chimera of my generation’s youth.

“We’re just tryin’ to be friendly, come and watch us sing and play, we’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say,” so composed Bobby Hart and Tommy Boyce for The Monkees TV show theme song. How long has it been since we sang and played? Remember being thought of as “the young generation?” I’m 53, born towards the end of the Baby Boom generation and The Monkees bracketed two periods of my youth – as a young boy in the mid to late 60s and then as a young man in my twenties when The Monkees had a full blown pop resurrection in the 80s thanks to MTV and Nickelodeon. Even the 80s now are decades long since gone, let alone the 60s, and the mists of nostalgia are thinning out and being inhaled less and less.

It can be argued that The Monkees were the first pop group propelled by music videos – as their whole show was basically silly antics bracketed by music. From 1966 to 1968 the group had several top ten hits including I’m a Believer, Last Train to Clarksville, Pleasant Valley Sunday, [I’m Not Your] Steppin’ Stone, A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You, Valleri and more. In excess of 65 million Monkees albums and singles have been sold worldwide. The songs were written by such rock luminaries as Carole King, Neil Diamond and the aforementioned Boyce and Hart.

Other big groups of the time were The Beatles (Jones was chosen for The Monkees group and TV show to capitalize on the whole British mop-top thing going on), The Stones, The Who, The Moody Blues, The Zombies and even Herman’s Hermits. The Monkees were unique not only in their genesis on television and their use of TV to drive sales of their records but also in that they were a hybrid band of Americans and Mr. Jones, the Englishman. Jones was an enormous teen idol in his day. In fact, Yahoo Music in 2008 voted Jones “number one teen idol of all time” and Fox News in 2009 put him in the number two spot. Jones was way bigger than Justin Bieber is today and the object of many a then 12 year-old girl’s fantasies.

“Daydream Believer” was Jones’s biggest hit as Monkees front man. American Micky Dolenz would take the lead for many other of the group’s chart-busters. Although the original Monkees TV series would only last for two years between 1966-1968 it would live on for decades in syndication. Many of their big hits would be covered by bands right through the millennium and break the charts yet again.

When John Lennon was killed, we knew there’d never be a Beatles reunion (notwithstanding Paul McCartney’s recent and welcome ubiquity). Many other groups from the 60s and 70s have seen lead singers leave this earth (i.e. Jerry Garcia), assuring that the group sound they created will be seen and heard live no more. The loss of Mr. Jones transcends his place in music or pop culture. It’s really about the inevitable and inexorable passage of time that wreaks its vengeance on us by prodding us along on the bread line of life so that we’re no longer on the cusp or even the middle of things, but being edged out to the periphery. American culture is a youth culture. On television and the movies it sometimes seems that everything and everybody is permanently frozen at 28 years old and it’s just the rest of us on the couch who break 50, 60 and 70.

My father, a WWII navy veteran, just turned 85. His world is vanishing by the thousands each month as those who share his collective cultural touchstones and memories become fewer and fewer. The loss of Davy Jones is like a warning shot across the bow of the Baby Boomers that the world we once so thoroughly dominated in every respect is only given to us on loan – we can only lease a part of any given century or epoch and we will be compelled to yield the floor to those coming up after us.

In October 1968 The Monkees released “Porpoise Song,” from their movie Head

The lyrics (by Carole King and Gerry Goffin) go like this:

My, my the clock in the sky is pounding away
There's so much to say
A face, a voice, an overdub has no choice
And it cannot rejoice

Wanting to be, to hear and to see
Crying to the sky

But the porpoise is laughing good-bye, good-bye
good-bye, good-bye, good-bye…

The Fight for Second Place

(This originally appeared in the February 24th issue of The South Shore Standard)

The only people in New York who probably are not excited by the impending arrival of spring are New York Mets fans. Typically, as the sap starts coursing through the branches of trees with longer, warmer days and as early season flowers start poking their way through the earth in search of sunshine, a baseball fan’s juices start flowing with the herald of “Pitchers and Catchers” reporting to spring training. For Mets fans there has only been dread at the specter of yet another season of manifest mediocrity.

We’ve all been party to the stories of the ongoing litigation between the team owners and the trustee for the Madoff Ponzi scheme for gazillions of dollars, the tottering and precarious financial state of the team itself, being kept solvent with loans from Major League Baseball; the drastic payroll cuts that have whittled the Mets down to nearly Billy Beane/Oakland A’s Moneyball territory in a town where the bling and swagger from The Bronx and their fans makes it impossible to accept all the bad news with complete equanimity. It’s hard not to fall prey to “salary envy” when the Steinbrenners spend as though they had the only Amex Plum card in the world.

To all those who find American League baseball repugnant (particularly as personified by those Yankees), I submit that the 2012 season may not be as bleak and full of despair as the augers of doom would have you believe. There is a sunrise on the near horizon for those willing to “say Hallelujah” and have a little faith, at least until July.

The first “station of the cross” towards Met fan redemption is the clear eyed acknowledgement that the Mets are absolutely, positively not going to win the NL East pennant and that the Philadelphia Phillies  will be the major force in the National League they were the past few seasons (especially with the addition of their new closer, former BoSox pitcher Jonathan Papelbon to their already nearly impregnable stable of hurlers). Giving up the ghost of pennant glory even before Grapefruit League play commences is the first step towards achieving inner peace.

The next move is not looking back and wringing one’s hands over the departure of Jose Reyes. Even if he stays healthy (a prospect which is highly unlikely, not to wish him any ill) the Mets couldn’t afford him. Met fans need to think of themselves as Paul Ryan Republicans, wielding a sharp meat cleaver to baseball salary fat and deficit spending so as to balance the budget. Winning at any price didn’t work for the Mets from 2006 to 2008 when former General Manager Omar Minaya had carte blanche with Madoff money. Winning is a state of mind, not just a state of finance, regardless of what the Yankees do.

Third, the Mets have a very good manager in Terry Collins. Plagued by stars hobbled with injuries for much of last year, he nevertheless managed to keep the team hovering around .500 until around Labor Day. He guided the team to a run of winning 50 of 88 games after a poor start in April and early May. He put the kibosh on the seemingly endless bad karma and prima donna nonsense that permeated the dugout and locker room for much of the last decade.

With the anticipated return of ace pitcher Johan Santana (who will not be the Santana of yore, accept it) we could see maybe 23 starts from him and 12 to 14 wins if he stays healthy. If R.A. Dickey has a season like he did in 2010, if Dillon Gee can put on a performance through the season as he did in the first part of last year, if Jonathon Niese keeps getting better and if Mike Pelfrey can get out of his own way and his own head, the Mets have a reasonable shot at stopping many of the National League sluggers. On the infield, David Wright is still a profound defensive asset at third base, Ruben Tejada at short is no Reyes but he’s no slouch either. He’s young, nimble and full of energy and moxie. With perhaps a combination of Lucas Duda and Daniel Murphy at second base, this should not be a huge defensive gap. Assuming Ike Davis is back on first, when he’s on his game, few balls get past him.

At the plate, with the Mets both lowering and moving in the fences at CitiField, perhaps David Wright will hit like he did back at Shea and start producing homers. Ike Davis was belting it out to the Shea Bridge and the third deck at CitiField even with the old dimensions. If the batting order goes something like this – Tejada as leadoff man (he had a .360 on-base percentage last year – the kind of Moneyball number that makes things happen) could be effective if followed in the two spot by Murphy (who was hot on the bat through much of last season) to put runners on base for Wright batting third followed by Ike Davis in the cleanup spot with Duda batting fifth. Against the Yankees this lineup might not mean much, but against the Nationals, the Pirates, the Braves, the Mariners, Dodgers and Padres it could work. A Gary Carter memorial patch on the uniforms combined with the team’s 50^th Anniversary could also do a lot for morale.

All this adds up to a credible Met run at second place in the NL East if they can win in excess of 82 games. It adds up to a possible Mets season at or above .500 in a year of zero expectations. It adds up to what could be a very entertaining year watching the best Triple-A team in the Majors – a lot of young, emerging talented guys playing for the sheer fun of it for a manager who knows how to keep kids motivated. “You Gotta Believe,” or you can’t be a Mets fan.