Monk

George McGovern, the United States senator who won the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who was then trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

-- New York Times

I am sorry that I am not more familiar with the liberal leader, but I suppose Nixon sort of overwhelmed the era, and McGovern's relative obscurity, perhaps even tinged with the foulness of ignominy for being such a big 'loser', helps to illustrate the failure of the liberal program for the last four decades along with the dysfunction of American politics that has led us down this plutocratic path.

Senator Arlen Specter died this morning at 82 from his cancer. He was a standout. Even before I was born and became a political spectator, he was already involved in the historic investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy. He was a Republican, but he was a maverick before Sarah Palin and John McCain ruined that term, an independent's independent, well, except for that time he carried water for Clarence Thomas to get on the Supreme Court and called the wrong person a perjuror. No one is perfect.

(News-LJ)

As commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Mr. Armstrong, with one short sentence on July 20, 1969, became a hero to the millions of people watching back on earth.

The words he spoke upon stepping onto the lunar surface — “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” — were beamed live into homes around the world, captivating viewers and immediately and indelibly becoming a symbol of America’s resolve and ingenuity in its race against the Soviet Union for supremacy in space.

It was a singular achievement for humanity and the culmination of a goal that President John F. Kennedy had set eight years earlier with his bold statement: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

-- Marc Santora at The New York Times

Gore Vidal, the elegant, acerbic all-around man of letters who presided with a certain relish over what he declared to be the end of American civilization, died on Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he moved in 2003, after years of living in Ravello, Italy. He was 86.

-- New York Times


“There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

-- Gore Vidal

I didn't really know the man and his work, but for a vague understanding that he was an intellectual warrior for the liberals and progressives. I first developed a fondness when I came across a quote of his during the pornography debates of decades past on whether porn causes men to go out and rape. As best as I can recall his quote, he said, "The only thing that pornography ever provoked is masturbation." It was then that I knew he was on my side, at least for a lot of issues. As with Noam Chomsky, after 9/11, I feel that he went too hard on the anti-American line.

I also recall the connection between him and the late Christopher Hitchens. For a time, Mr. Vidal was looking toward Hitchens as his protege, but I suppose Hitchens developed enough of a reputation on his own and did not really rely on Vidal, which churned up some ill feelings. Though, considering Vidal's prolific novels, it does occur to me that this is one measure in which it could be said that Hitchens fell short. That is, he never wrote a novel. This does not diminish his work and his reputation, I suppose, but it is a significant limitation, and maybe it was this that kept Hitchens a little humble about his accomplishments, not having any "1984s" behind his name, something that could better endear his memory to the masses and the future.

I missed the news that Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Valdimir, died this year. We'll save some paragraphs from a Times report.

_ _ _

Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, died in Switzerland in the first hours of Thursday, Feb. 23. Like his father, Dmitri went — in the words of one of his attendants — “light as a butterfly.” Like his father 35 years ago, and at 77, almost the same age (they were both buried at 78), he succumbed to a pulmonary infection. He had been a professional opera singer, and a racer of fast boats and faster cars. But according to his own father, whom he often referred to as “Nabokov,” he had also been — perhaps above all else in the end — his “best translator,” devoting the last two decades of his life to translating his father’s earlier work from Russian to English and Italian.

[...]

Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”

Yet the more I saw him and spoke with him over the last nine or so years, the more I realized something altogether surprising. It was connected neither to his father’s fame nor to his own glittering life-reel. It was, in fact, what had first caught my attention, so many years ago, in that final page of “Speak, Memory”: “something in a scrambled picture . . . that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” It was, quite simply, the moment of departure. Anyone who’s ever been an exile as a child knows the anguish of parents as they wonder if papers will be accepted, if immigration and customs officers can be appeased, if the borders will be thrown open. The arc of the Nabokovs’ lives had been drawn by loss. First, the loss of a beloved homeland, then of closest kin murdered or left behind enemy lines, and finally the loss of an “untrammeled, rich” Russian tongue. As the three Nabokovs boarded the Champlain in May 1940, they were leaving behind Europe; Nabokov’s gay brother, who would perish of hunger and exhaustion in a Nazi concentration camp; numerous Jewish friends; homes, memories, manuscripts. This was the history that, quite unwittingly, the young Dmitri carried with him as he left for America, holding each of his parents by the hand as they walked toward that yellow funnel deftly concealed in the landscape.

What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.

-- LILA AZAM ZANGANEH at The New York Times

DARE COUNTY, N.C. -- Andy Griffith has died Tuesday at his home in North Carolina, according to reports.

Emergency medical crews responded to the Griffith's home in Dare County Tuesday morning.

Griffith, 86, was well known for his starring role on the television hit named after him, "The Andy Griffith Show," which first aired in 1960.

-- LJ/News

I am a little surprised and disappointed that Griffith’s death has not merited more coverage. I thought it would be highlighted on the front page of the New York Times, the Web page that is, but his death is apparently only getting some local news coverage. His Mayberry show is up there with “Leave It To Beaver” in signifying that romanticized lost America that gray-haired conservatives beweep, the days before racial integration and the sexual revolution, when life was simpler and sane. I suppose the Internet era really makes those days bygone days, a way of life almost as unrecognizable as medieval Europe or ancient Greece, like something out of the late neolithic era. I enjoyed the show when I was a kid. I liked “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Beverly Hillbillies” more, but I liked the show. I suppose it was more educational or instructional in a moral sort of way.

Ah, before I could get this posted, I see that the Times has caught up. Either they are running slow or LJ is really fast, both of which seem rather unlikely. Let’s get some of that high-end publishing:

Andy Griffith, an actor whose folksy Southern manner charmed audiences for more than 50 years on Broadway, in movies, on records and especially on television [...]

But his fame was never as great as it was in the 1960s, when he starred for eight years as Andy Taylor, the sagacious sheriff of the make-believe Southern town of Mayberry, running weekly herd on a collection of eccentrics like his ineffectual deputy, Barney Fife, and the simple-minded gas station attendant Gomer Pyle while, as a widower, patiently raising a young son, Opie.

[...]

The show imagined a reassuring world of fishin’ holes, ice cream socials and rock-hard family values during a decade that grew progressively more tumultuous.

I particularly liked the part where we learn that Mr. Griffith was apparently annoyed when people thought that the man and the character he played on his main show were largely one in the same:

One thing that always bothered Mr. Griffith was people’s assumption that in his depiction of Sheriff Taylor he was pretty much playing himself. He said he not only threw himself into creating a textured persona for the small-town lawman, but also helped write almost every episode — though he didn’t receive writing credit.

“You’re supposed to believe in the character,” Mr. Griffith said. “You’re not supposed to think, ‘Gee, Andy’s acting up a storm.’ ”

He presumably did not like being considered cornpone and ‘backward’. I suppose sometimes a person can become a prisoner of his success. Well, that has to be better than being a prisoner of your failure. Sheriff Taylor may have been simplistic and idealized in a “Leave It To Beaver” kind of way, but it was a sweet, well-intentioned show.

Donna Summer -- the Queen of Disco -- died this morning after a battle with cancer ... TMZ has learned.

We're told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63-years-old.

Summer was a 5-time Grammy winner who shot to superstardom in the '70s with iconic hits like "Last Dance," "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls."

-- ONTD

Oh, this does resonate. During my school dances, when I was in the eighth grade, "Last Dance" was the obligatory closing song. I don't know how many eighth graders found romance, though some of the high-school kids may have had better luck. And I remember, too, how a friend had a crush on a pretty girl who was nicknamed Radio, so that he loved the song "On the Radio", thinking of that phrase in its most literal sense. I can remember us laughing about it in his kitchen now. Ah, Those Yokota days. My family shipped out before I could learn how old Steve made out with her, but it was looking pretty good for him. I wish I could say the same for myself.

Andrew Sullivan went to Christopher Hitchens's memorial service yesterday.

_ _ _

And then his last words. As he lay dying, he asked for a pen and paper and tried to write on it. After a while, he finished, held it up, looked at it and saw that it was an illegible assemblage of scribbled, meaningless hieroglyphics. "What's the use?" he said to Steve Wasserman. Then he dozed a little, and then roused himself and uttered a couple of words that were close to inaudible. Steve asked him to repeat them. There were two:

"Capitalism."

"Downfall."

In his end was his beginning.

-- Andrew Sullivan

_ _ _

It may be recalled that Hitch was a pretty good lefty in his youth. I remember when he was happy to bow down before Noam Chomsky. However, I thought that Brian Lamb got Hitch to renounce socialism on C-SPAN, but maybe I misremember. It was after he became a hawk on the Iraq war, and I could have let that over-color all his politics. Still, it is difficult to imagine him being happy as a true equal. Aristocracy and privilege sat on him well, a giant among men. Maybe he just got dreamy again at the end.

Dick Clark died of a heart attack at 82.

_ _ _

With the boyish good looks of a bound-for-success junior executive and a ubiquitous on-camera presence, Mr. Clark was among the most recognizable faces in the world, even if what he was most famous for — spinning records and jabbering with teenagers — was on the insubstantial side. In addition to “American Bandstand” and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” he hosted innumerable awards shows, comedy specials, series based on TV outtakes and the game show $10,000 Pyramid” (which lasted long enough to see the stakes ratcheted up to $100,000). He also made guest appearances on dramatic and comedy series, usually playing himself.

But he was as much a businessman as a television personality — “I get enormous pleasure and excitement sitting in on conferences with accountants, tax experts and lawyers,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1961 — and he was especially deft at packaging entertainment products for the small screen.

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_ _ _

I was thinking about passing over the news myself, but then I saw this interesting write-up, and it's not like I was unaware of Dick Clark in our popular culture. I was just never really a fan of anything he did. The main story I remember is the fight he had with the Colonel over getting Elvis to appear on "American Bandstand". Clark just couldn't pay enough as far as the Colonel was concerned, and in angry resentment, Clark vowed that his show would never rate an Elvis record.

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of the nation’s best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on “60 Minutes,” died on Saturday. He was 93. [...]

A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for the moment when “you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other,” he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature “The Last Word.”

-- Tim Weiner at The New York Times

The man was still winning emmys at 89. I wouldn't mind having another forty years of reading and blogging.

As for "60 Minutes", like a lot of Americans, it was a staple of my news, until about the middle nineties, when I fell into a moderate depression and could not care much for the affairs of the larger world, not even to watch a news show. Then, when we got wired for the Internet, while my interest reawakened, TV news just seemed too slow and simple compared to the offerings on the Web.

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