Non-Treppenwitze and Good Medicine

I've been posting reasons to get out of bed in the morning. Looking for ways in this time of plague to start the day right. Ways not to be swept under by depression, resentment, anger and discouragement. In my case, I manage this largely by seeking out good music and by focusing on the happy fact that Bounce, one of my canine daughters, has made it very hard for me to sleep comfortably because she has once again found a way to take her half of the bed in the middle. I know, I know. I've complained about this before, and well-meaning friends have suggested I get her to sleep in her doggy-bed on the floor next to me. I've tried that, but she keeps climbing in with me after I've gone to sleep, and the part of me seeking comfort struggles with the part of me overjoyed with the sign of affection - and affection wins out.

Here, in addition to Alexander Malofeev and all the other child prodigies on the piano, and Tony DeSare and Grandpa Elliott, all the Facebook videos of dogs leaving shelters and finding welcoming homes and all the other great reasons for facing the day with some sort of optimism, are two more reasons that have come to my attention in the past couple of days. One is evidence that, in addition to Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and other decent politicians getting on in years, there are smart up-and-coming democrats in the fight, as well. And the other is evidence that the country has some great people fighting the Corona virus medically and not just manipulating the crisis for political purposes.

I had a wonderful conversation the other day on my patio (masked and properly distanced, of course) with one of my favorite nieces (note: all of my nieces are my favorite nieces) in which Pete Buttigieg's name came up. She's a lefty-lefty and is down on politicians generally, and has serious reservations about Pete for being a tad too ambitious and for pulling the democratic party toward the moderates. I hope I'm not misrepresenting her views. That's at least how I understood her take on him. I'm not as lefty-lefty as she is. I'm just lefty, by comparison, and I'm not down on all politicians and am more willing than she is to grant that in order to get things done (or in order to get ahead politically) sometimes you have to make compromises.

But, to make my point about why I'm such a fan of this guy (besides the obvious fact that I love how, from all appearances, he is a great example of a gay man living happily with a same-sex spouse, I mean), let me give two examples of how he came up with virtually perfect responses to attempts by Fox News to trip him up:

1. His response to an attempt to paint Kamala Harris in a bad light for apparently flipping on the question of Medicare-for-all.  

2. His defense of a woman's right to decide what to do with her body without government interference.

I especially want to repeat that second response here, because I fail so often to think quickly on my feet and I stand in awe when I come across "non-Treppenwitz" responses, i.e., perfect rejoinders, given on the spot, at the right time, and not rejoinders that pop into your head only after you've left the encounter and are "going down the stairs." (The French actually originated the notion - in French, it's "l'esprit de l'escalier".)

Chris Wallace tries to hang around Pete's neck the very delicate question of whether a woman should have an abortion in the third trimester:

CW: So just to be clear... you're saying that you would be OK with a woman well into the third trimester deciding to abort her pregnancy...

PB: Look, these hypotheticals are usually set up in order to provoke a strong emotional response...

CW: It's not hypothetical; there are 6000 women a year who get abortions in the third trimester.

PB: That's right, representing less than 1% of cases...  So let's put ourselves in the shoes of a women in that situation. If it's that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition, you've been expecting to carry it to term. We're talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name. Women who have purchased a crib. Families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother that forces them to make an impossible unthinkable choice. And the bottom line is, as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.

The second positive example of Americans to be proud of in this age of Covid-19 involves two of my favorite medical people. One is Dr. Mike, the doctor who became a social media sensation 1) because he's such a hunk, and 2) because he's the doctor most of us would love to have for our own general physician, and the perfect counterweight to those other bozos in the media like Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. The other is the man who should be running the American response to the corona virus instead of the orange shitstain. That man became a hero to me during the 1980s AIDS crisis: Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Here is a video of Dr. Mike interviewing Dr. Fauci. Great questions, great answers.

Makes you feel a whole lot more hopeful about things, knowing that we're not all as dumb as our shoes.

Boys in the Band - a film review

The Boys in the Band, Mart Crowley's theatrical portrayal of gay men in the late 60s, will forever be remembered as a major event in the early days of the gay liberation movement in the United States, and well beyond its borders, as well.  Crowley succeeded in capturing for all the world to see how he himself, like so many of his fellow urban gay men, turned their own internalized homophobia into rage and cruelty against each other. How well he succeeded in doing this is evidenced by the widespread rejection of the play by members of the gay community itself who saw it as airing dirty laundry, as trite stereotyping, or as a useless exercise in pessimism. Who needs this? they asked. What we want are stories in which we succeed and live lives with a happy ending.

I include myself among those critics. I hated the play when I first saw it in the film version Mart Crowley also wrote and produced, in 1970, fifty years ago already. I was still in the early years of a decades long project of coming out and desperately wanted to see something other than bitchy queens  on the screen trashing each other to pieces. I wasn't able to credit what a beautiful job it did of capturing the absolute need for a gay liberation movement to create a world in which people no longer found it necessary or tempting to direct self-loathing at one's closest friends, simply because you knew they couldn't fight back.

When I became aware that Boys in the Band had had first a fifty-year revival on stage two years ago and now a film remake produced by Netflix, again, my first reaction was negative. "Why would anybody dredge up that horror show?" Fortunately, because I saw that it had a first-rate cast of out gay actors playing the roles, people like Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Matt Bomer, I couldn't resist. 

I'm very glad I did. The play and film are essentially the same, with few changes (it's a bit shorter, and is now a one-act, more effectively concentrating the tension buildup) but the experience, at least for me, was totally new and different.

That has to do, no doubt, with the fact that the pain being expressed on stage is a pain I no longer experience personally. I have been openly gay for many years now, live without fear of rejection and am well-received by friends and neighbors as a man in a same-sex marriage. I am now free to see the play as a historical document, not as a social commentary on the agony of living in a homophobic world.

I'm well aware that my position is privileged, however, and that the long slog toward gay liberation is far from complete. Many will still smart who see the film as it reminds them of how far they may have yet to go to rid themselves of internalized self-loathing. But for most Americans browsing the large number of things to watch on Netflix, this 2020 update will provide a great bit of entertainment. The acting is first rate, as I suspected it would be. It helps, no doubt, that the ensemble had two years in which to perfect their lines on stage and were able to make the film essentially off-book. There are good interviews with the troop in which they speak of their experience, including ways in which the film differs from the stage version and all sorts of other trivia which, I think, enhances the viewing experience. Check out a couple of these interviews (I'd suggest you see the film first), especially here, but also here.     

It's especially useful to those of us worried today that we're experiencing hardships we might not overcome. Not that progress is inevitable, by any means. But there is something about being able to go back in time and recognize that we stand on the shoulders of those who worked through some dark days and take comfort in knowing things can, and with effort, do get better.

A Perfect Crime - film review

I had a good friend, an economist, who said to me once, many decades ago, “I can’t believe somebody with your broad range of interests has no interest in economics!  How could you not? It’s what makes the world go around!”

I responded defensively. “Well, there are lots of things I think I should show more interest in - global warming, the abuse of political power, abused and starving children…”

Watching the German documentary, A Perfect Crime, (German title: Rohwedder) the other day, my mind went back to that conversation. Yuusuke, my friend’s name was, managed to guilt me into admitting I had a huge gap in my general knowledge. I had never taken a single course in economics, and although I’ve tried to fill in gaps here and there over the years, I have never been able to approach economics issues with the interest they probably deserve. I’ve treated the conflict between wealth generation and wealth distribution as a political issue. It would not hurt if I could view it through the lenses economists view the world, as well.

I raise this question not just to personalize this viewing event (although I admit, I like to use this blog as a way of sorting out in my own head how to process my own history and experiences), but to justify my endorsement of this film series. Anything which can be seen from multiple perspectives is bound to be of greater interest than would a single tale, simply told.

The context for Rohwedder (I’m going to use the German title) is the incorporation of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, referred to by most outside of Germany as “East Germany,” into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the German Federal Republic, before reunification referred to by most as “West Germany.” More specifically, it was a comparatively simple issue to combine the two Berlins and to “add” the five East German states: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia to the eleven states of West Germany and call it reunification. “Reunification” is a much better word than “incorporation,” because it implies an agreement by two equal powers to join forces. “Incorporation” would only reveal what many, including most East Germans at the time, were calling a kind of colonization. A takeover. Not as bad as incorporating Algeria into metropolitan France, because the two Germanys were, after all, one nation until as recently as 1945 when the Allied Forces pulled them apart. But a takeover all the same. The Germans bypass the issue by referring to it as neither "reunification" nor "incorporation," but as "die Wende" - best translated as "the turnaround."

And that meant, in effect, you had a winner and a loser in the Cold War, and the winner was going to call the shots from here on in. The German soul dreamed of reunification, and the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, saw himself as the man who would make that dream come true. There would be tears of joy, sincerely felt, running down the cheeks of anybody with a German soul. But Helmut Kohl had a practical job to do. He had to take the basket-case the planned economy of the East had become and get it to work as a market economy. That meant making industry competitive and that meant removing the non-productive props that had made full employment possible. There would have to be widespread restructuring of East German corporations, and widespread lay-offs if East German companies were ever to become profitable. The only real question was should this be done fast and efficiently, with lots of pain now. Or slowly, and more cautiously, spreading the pain out. It was going to be painful either way.

Kohl preferred to rip the band-aid off quickly, and as the victor in the two-state confrontation, he got his way. The East had already set up an organization known as the Treuhand Institute (Treuhandanstalt) to do the job. Kohl appointed Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, a leading West German member of the Social Democratic Party, who was recognized as a capable manager, to head “die Treuhand” and get the job done.

From all reports, it was working, but when the layoffs began to be felt, Rohwedder quickly became arguably the most hated man in Germany - in East Germany, at least. And on April 1, 1991, somebody fired three bullets through a window at Rohwedder’s home in Düsseldorf, killing him and wounding his wife.

Rohwedder/A Perfect Crime is a four-hour documentary on the killing, produced by Netflix Germany. It begins with the leading theory, that this crime was committed by the anti-capitalist group RAF, the Red Army Faction, but complicates the story by raising two other possibilities: One of these is that the killing was done by renegade members of the Stasi, the hated East German secret police, in order to prevent further investigation into their activities. The other is that it was done by some sort of deep-state organization in the west who believed by demonizing either of these groups - the RAF or the Stasi - they could generate public support for speeding up the privatization process. Not that it needed support; within the first three years, 90% of the former East German industry was already in the hands of either West German corporations or former Communist managers who had become overnight capitalists and seized the chance to grab the treasures of the nation for themselves, much as has happened in the former Soviet Union.

That 90% figure taken out of context is deceptive, however. Rebuilding the infrastructure of the East has cost the West an estimated two trillion euros and most East Germans today believe reunification has served them well. The Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that 90% of Germans in both east and west are happy with the changes, and it's worth noting that the number of positive reports in the East is even higher than it is in the West.

There are several lenses through which to view the documentary. You can watch it as “third way” social democrats - I include myself in that number - do, as a failure to pick through and save at least some of the ideals of the former DDR while avoiding a takeover by Western vulture capitalism. You can watch it as a cynic or a conspiracy theorist might, and wonder at the colossal failure of the Düsseldorf police to provide adequate protection for somebody as vulnerable as Rohwedder was. Or you can view it as a historian or economics theorist might, and ponder the multiple ways of making a market economy out of a controlled economy, each with their own real-life costs.

It may take more than one watching to digest the testimony of those involved, policemen and others, in bringing in new information - DNA results, for example. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself drawn into such questions as “can there actually be a third generation of the Red Army Faction - have these 60s types not all burned themselves out by now?” and “is it true that the RAF just doesn’t have the military expertise to pull off a stunt like this assassination - but the Stasi does?” and “could somebody actually shoot and kill the head of Treuhand by shooting him dead from the bushes across the street and then escape in a boat up the Rhein?”

Whether you see yourself as a student of politics, a historian, an economist, you’ll have to admit Netflix has gotten pretty good at producing great streaming series.