Johnny Oates loses battle to brain tumor
RICHMOND, Va. (AP)
Johnny Oates used his brain tumor as a daily reminder to live each day to its utmost, taking nothing for granted. The aggressive tumor was discovered in October 2001, and knowing his time was probably short helped Oates climb out of bed most days, even if just to see squirrels frolic or feel the sunshine warming his face.
An inspiration throughout his three-year battle, he was a man at peace when he died Friday at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center at about 2 a.m. with his wife and brother at his side, his son said.
"He was very comfortable. He went very peacefully," Andrew Oates said before paying tribute to the grace with which his father fought.
"I have learned more from him in the last three years than I did in the first 25," Andrew Oates, 28, said. "I think he's accomplished more in the last three years and touched more people in the last three years."
For Oates, who was 58, glioblastoma multiforme became a gift because it put his focus on the loved ones that mattered most in his life.
"When you look at it, it's a blessing," he said of the disease in a March 2003 interview with The Associated Press at his home near Richmond.
"Really there's only one day of the week that has any importance, and that's today," he said then. "You can't do anything about yesterday and you can't do anything about tomorrow. It's just today."
Oates spent many of those days sitting on the deck behind his home, his face to the sun, eyes closed and a peaceful smile on his face.
"I love the feel of the sun on my face," he often said.
Oates was best known for managing the Texas Rangers to their first three postseason appearances, in 1996, '98 and '99. He resigned early in the 2001 season after the team lost 17 of its first 28 games despite the offseason addition of $252 million free agent shortstop Alex Rodriguez.
His mark with the Rangers, however, is indelible. When Oates was inducted into the Rangers Hall of Fame in August 2003, manager Buck Showalter dedicated the manager's office with a plaque honoring Oates.
"That will always be Johnny's office. We're just renting it and passing through," Showalter, who played for Oates, said Friday. "The definition of man and manager, Johnny's picture will be next to it."
Oates shared the American League Manager of the Year award with New York's Joe Torre in 1996, and managed the Baltimore Orioles from 1991-94.
He was considering a return to managing in 2001 when doctors diagnosed him with the aggressive brain tumor. They told him he'd likely die within months without surgery, as soon as in 14 months if he had the procedure.
Oates survived more than three years, achieving goals such as attending the wedding of his daughter and the birth of a grandchild.
Showalter was among the friends who called regularly.
His death was the answer to new prayers brought on by declining health, Showalter said, causing Oates to be hospitalized for the last two weeks of his life with complications his son didn't wish to detail.
"Gloria said one of their prayers was that he would be in heaven before Christmas," Showalter said. "I bet there will be a heck of a baseball game up there tomorrow ... no, the day after tomorrow. It will take John time to get organized."
Oates had a regular season record of 797-746 and got his only postseason victory in 10 tries when the Rangers made their playoff debut, winning 6-2 at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 1, 1996. Texas lost the next three games and was swept by the Yankees in 1998 and again the next year.
But along the way, Oates touched the lives of many, from young unproven relief pitcher Jeff Zimmerman to Showalter, who played for Oates at the Class AA level after Oates' 11-year playing career ended.
"He is a man of integrity, a man of belief," Zimmerman said in 2003, recalling how Oates gave him a chance to help the Rangers in the spring of 1999 and later welled up telling Zimmerman he made the all-star team.
"I just don't know how to put into words how much he did for me."
In a statement, Orioles owner Peter Angelos said, "Johnny Oates was a true gentleman. He faced his disease the way he lived his life, with class and dignity."
Oates and his wife began each morning studying the Bible in the sunroom of their home on Lake Chesdin, about 30 miles from Richmond, and were active in their church. Oates also attended local baseball games and enjoyed watching on televison, free to doze off when he grew weary.
"I don't miss baseball one single bit. I enjoy talking about it, but I know I can't do it anymore. I like to watch it on TV," he said.
"I miss the people. I don't miss the stress that went with it, all the decision-making. But now I enjoy being here. I enjoy being lazy."
Oates, a left-handed hitting catcher, played for five teams in his major league career, starting with the Orioles in 1970. He laughed years later recalling how his skills compared with those of current catchers.
For his career, Oates hit .250 with 14 homers and 126 runs batted in.
"I still don't know how I got to the big leagues because I wasn't that good," he said in 2003. "I was a slap hitter. I kept my mouth shut. I did. I kept my mouth shut. I couldn't throw. I couldn't throw a lick."
Visitation will be Monday from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Colonial Heights, with the funeral Tuesday at the church at 11 a.m. Burial will be at Sunset Memorial Park in Chester.
Friday, December 24, 2004
From timesonline:
Give me seasonal schmaltz
By Gerard Baker
Christmas captures the defining characteristic of Americans - their lack of cynicism and scepticism
AMERICANS ARE enjoying all the usual rituals of the Christmas season; the last-minute frenzy of present buying; the long wait in queues at airports and stations; and above all the inevitable controversy about the ever more absurd attempts to take Christ out of Christmas.
Every year some villain steps forward to take the Politically Correct Scrooge Award for sheer seasonal silliness. This year the traditionalists’ favourite target is, conveniently, a company called Target. A giant retailer in the continental hypermarket mould that sells everything from 86in television screens to bottles of tap water, Target has decreed that none of its products this year should carry the word “Christmas”. So instead of Christmas lights, Christmas trees and Christmas decorations, Target’s customers can spend their hard-earned dollars on holiday lights, seasonal trees and festive decorations.
I am not sure if this ruling applies to model Nativity scenes. But I suspect that as long as they are relabelled Historic Middle Eastern Family Creative Toys they might just get in under the wire.
It is always fun to watch the contortions that people will go through to find new ways to avoid offending people. At a school not far from me, the children will be celebrating the last day of school in the usual way — with a midwinter peace assembly. This is the same school, by the way, that banned children from wearing martial costumes for its Hallowe’en parade. The headmaster began the day by confiscating these instruments of hate and before long had a pile of plastic guns, swords, light sabres and helmets blocking the light inside his office, and a huddle of crying children and bewildered parents outside.
I have heard some people refer to this time of year, perhaps half in jest, as “Chriskwanukkah”, an unlovely portmanteau of Christmas, Chanukkah and Kwanzaa, the African-American winter festival. But aside from being unpronounceable, this is self-evidently offensive to Druids and other observers of the pagan solstice and will presumably be dropped next year.
These attempts to be inoffensive and inclusive have started to become quite offensive and exclusionary.
I have lived in America long enough to know that I should never grasp the hand of colleagues or friends and wish them the joy and peace of the newborn king in case they turn out to be practising Zoroastrians. But it has got to the point where I worry now about upsetting fellow Christians if I proffer them a limp handshake and that flaccid salute to mushy multiculturalism: “Happy Holidays”.
And yet the truth is I rather like this annual Christmas controversy. For one thing it helps to debunk one of the more absurd myths about America that the rest of the world clings to — that it is firmly in the grip of some theocracy in which schoolchildren learn creationism by rote and White House officials slaughter the fatted calf before drawing up their foreign policy plans.
In fact, separation of Church and State is much more rigid here than is ever imagined in the wildest dreams of European anticlericals. My own children were able, if I may say so, to execute quite brilliantly their annual Christmas pageant at their Catholic school this week only because not one secular penny of taxpayers’ money supports it. My guess would be that your average Englishman or German is much freer to indulge in public displays of openly religious sentiment at this time of year than anyone in California or Florida.
But, above all, the annual fuss about taking Christ out of Christmas misses the central point about the holiday season in America. This time of year captures, perhaps better than any other, the defining characteristic of Americans in the modern world — their lack of cynicism and scepticism, their enduring hope and faith in themselves, their country and even the world around them.
In Britain and most of Europe, Christmas has become that special occasion for wallowing in cynicism. We love to complain about the shopping, the train delays and the weather. Popular culture disdains the spirit of the season, and plays up instead the secularist, sceptical, mocking, lost innocence tone of British life.
With a few ghastly exceptions from Sir Cliff, popular music in Britain at this time of year is blunt and unsentimental, even when charitable. But Americans indulge their sentimentality, pander to their idealism, reaffirm their belief in the spiritual contingency of human nature and their popular culture reflects that.
Nothing is too schmaltzy or saccharine. Even Hollywood for a brief moment casts aside its usual predilections and expresses a wide-eyed child-like thrill at the coming of Christmas. Radio stations become an endless loop of Christmas songs — not the typical “So Here it is Merry Christmas” British classic — but shameless repeats of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Harry Belafonte.
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism, will doubtless get a look in somewhere in the British TV schedules, but in America it will own its usual spot, slap in the middle of NBC’s prime time on Christmas night and I guarantee that there will not be a dry eye in the country when once again George Bailey hears the bell ringing for Clarence, the angel who gets his wings.
At other times, I can’t quite take all this American idealism and sentimentality. It is just a bit too much at odds with a complex world. As the country’s critics never tire of observing, it can lead to a little too much certainty and self-belief and a deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error.
But, at this time of year, a bit of simple faith, a bit of uncynical joy and a bit of human hope induced by that unfathomable miracle that happened a couple of thousand years ago, is right on the mark.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
Give me seasonal schmaltz
By Gerard Baker
Christmas captures the defining characteristic of Americans - their lack of cynicism and scepticism
AMERICANS ARE enjoying all the usual rituals of the Christmas season; the last-minute frenzy of present buying; the long wait in queues at airports and stations; and above all the inevitable controversy about the ever more absurd attempts to take Christ out of Christmas.
Every year some villain steps forward to take the Politically Correct Scrooge Award for sheer seasonal silliness. This year the traditionalists’ favourite target is, conveniently, a company called Target. A giant retailer in the continental hypermarket mould that sells everything from 86in television screens to bottles of tap water, Target has decreed that none of its products this year should carry the word “Christmas”. So instead of Christmas lights, Christmas trees and Christmas decorations, Target’s customers can spend their hard-earned dollars on holiday lights, seasonal trees and festive decorations.
I am not sure if this ruling applies to model Nativity scenes. But I suspect that as long as they are relabelled Historic Middle Eastern Family Creative Toys they might just get in under the wire.
It is always fun to watch the contortions that people will go through to find new ways to avoid offending people. At a school not far from me, the children will be celebrating the last day of school in the usual way — with a midwinter peace assembly. This is the same school, by the way, that banned children from wearing martial costumes for its Hallowe’en parade. The headmaster began the day by confiscating these instruments of hate and before long had a pile of plastic guns, swords, light sabres and helmets blocking the light inside his office, and a huddle of crying children and bewildered parents outside.
I have heard some people refer to this time of year, perhaps half in jest, as “Chriskwanukkah”, an unlovely portmanteau of Christmas, Chanukkah and Kwanzaa, the African-American winter festival. But aside from being unpronounceable, this is self-evidently offensive to Druids and other observers of the pagan solstice and will presumably be dropped next year.
These attempts to be inoffensive and inclusive have started to become quite offensive and exclusionary.
I have lived in America long enough to know that I should never grasp the hand of colleagues or friends and wish them the joy and peace of the newborn king in case they turn out to be practising Zoroastrians. But it has got to the point where I worry now about upsetting fellow Christians if I proffer them a limp handshake and that flaccid salute to mushy multiculturalism: “Happy Holidays”.
And yet the truth is I rather like this annual Christmas controversy. For one thing it helps to debunk one of the more absurd myths about America that the rest of the world clings to — that it is firmly in the grip of some theocracy in which schoolchildren learn creationism by rote and White House officials slaughter the fatted calf before drawing up their foreign policy plans.
In fact, separation of Church and State is much more rigid here than is ever imagined in the wildest dreams of European anticlericals. My own children were able, if I may say so, to execute quite brilliantly their annual Christmas pageant at their Catholic school this week only because not one secular penny of taxpayers’ money supports it. My guess would be that your average Englishman or German is much freer to indulge in public displays of openly religious sentiment at this time of year than anyone in California or Florida.
But, above all, the annual fuss about taking Christ out of Christmas misses the central point about the holiday season in America. This time of year captures, perhaps better than any other, the defining characteristic of Americans in the modern world — their lack of cynicism and scepticism, their enduring hope and faith in themselves, their country and even the world around them.
In Britain and most of Europe, Christmas has become that special occasion for wallowing in cynicism. We love to complain about the shopping, the train delays and the weather. Popular culture disdains the spirit of the season, and plays up instead the secularist, sceptical, mocking, lost innocence tone of British life.
With a few ghastly exceptions from Sir Cliff, popular music in Britain at this time of year is blunt and unsentimental, even when charitable. But Americans indulge their sentimentality, pander to their idealism, reaffirm their belief in the spiritual contingency of human nature and their popular culture reflects that.
Nothing is too schmaltzy or saccharine. Even Hollywood for a brief moment casts aside its usual predilections and expresses a wide-eyed child-like thrill at the coming of Christmas. Radio stations become an endless loop of Christmas songs — not the typical “So Here it is Merry Christmas” British classic — but shameless repeats of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Harry Belafonte.
It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism, will doubtless get a look in somewhere in the British TV schedules, but in America it will own its usual spot, slap in the middle of NBC’s prime time on Christmas night and I guarantee that there will not be a dry eye in the country when once again George Bailey hears the bell ringing for Clarence, the angel who gets his wings.
At other times, I can’t quite take all this American idealism and sentimentality. It is just a bit too much at odds with a complex world. As the country’s critics never tire of observing, it can lead to a little too much certainty and self-belief and a deficit of doubt and acknowledgement of error.
But, at this time of year, a bit of simple faith, a bit of uncynical joy and a bit of human hope induced by that unfathomable miracle that happened a couple of thousand years ago, is right on the mark.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
From washingtonpost.com:
A Motown 'Silent Night' That Echoes Down the Years
By Neely Tucker
In the winter of 1989, I lost my mind and moved from the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Detroit, an inexplicable adventure that led me to discover sub-zero temperatures, some of the best musicians in the Western Hemisphere and my nominee for the best Christmas songs ever recorded.
A bold claim, I know. But this is a Christmas story about a time and place largely gone now, and I remember them both with great affection, and if I am swayed by season and nostalgia, then I just don't care. Because the first time I heard the Temptations' once-in-a-lifetime take of "Silent Night" -- the most Detroit, Motownized, gospelized Christmas song that it is possible to squeeze into six minutes -- was late one night in a Motor City bar where old Motown session musicians could sometimes be found.
It was a freezing, gloomy winter, and I was living alone in a rough, unfinished loft in a rough, unfinished part of town. The loft was above a pizzeria and down the alley from the morgue. There were mornings I walked down the alley, my footprints the only ones in the crunching snow, and they would be loading or unloading a heavy black bag from a hearse. It put the day in a certain perspective.
I worked at a newspaper for my pay, and in the evenings I ran a tab at a jazz dive called BoMacs, about three blocks from the morgue. They had terrific live music, greasy fish sandwiches and a generous pour. They were scarce with the lights and heavy with the heat in the winter and I liked it. You could sit at the bar and if you didn't start none there wouldn't be none.
It had to be closing time just before Christmas when, perhaps after the last set, someone turned on the recording of a deep voice reciting the start of " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" over some twiddly organ-sounding thing. I rolled my eyes and started to drain the last of my drink when someone cranked up the volume. The song took a sharp turn. The drums kicked in with a downbeat intro, a da dum da dum, and then an electrifying preacher's voice said:
In my mind . . .
The guy next to me, I recall, said: "There go Dennis."
The drums and bass and a male chorus swooped in: tenor, baritone, bass. Together they took an irresistible four-note walk up the scale, whoo-ooh-ooh-OOH, and then the gritty preacher's voice said:
I want you to be free . . .
And then they came back down the same doo-wop staircase, OOH-ooh-ooh-ooh.
For all of our friends, I want you to listen to me . . .
The bass was so deep and the music so loud the stool beneath me seemed to vibrate. I was transfixed, there in the dim light and cigarette haze.
We wish you a meeeeeerrrrrrryyy Christmas . . .
All the voices came together and then out of nowhere an unearthly falsetto voice appeared in the darkness of the bar. It was gliding, swooning, sailing over the rest of the voices. It was the first time I had any idea of what they were singing.
Siiiilllleeennntttt Niiiiiggghhhtttt. . . . HooOOOllly NiiIIIIggghtttttt . . .
The guy next to me said: "That's Eddie there."
Somebody else: "Nah, man, that ain't Eddie. That's the brother what replaced him, what's his name."
"You don't mean David."
"Hell no I don't mean David. David was original Temps. I mean, what's his name. That other brother."
I was half listening to this conversation -- it would turn out the name they were looking for was Glenn Leonard -- and half listening to the song fill the place. Some people were at the tables, talking, finishing their drinks, the lights coming up now. It was late and time to go home. And yet I sat there.
Go on and rest your mind . . . and slllllleeeeepppp . . .
Melvin Franklin, he of the basso profundo voice, took a turn on the second verse, and what was most striking about the song unfolding was that this group known for Motown romance and the dance step known as the Temps Walk was doing a song of the Christian faith seriously.
The original five members of the Temptations had grown up in the Deep South and in the church, by which I mean the Protestant black church -- Baptist, really, of the type where it is pronounced "Babdist" -- and it was always one of the group's hallmarks that the gospel influence of their youth had infused the voices of their adult years.
But this was something else entirely. This was gospel emotion over a Motown beat with the lyrics of a classic European hymn. "Silent Night" was written nearly 200 years ago by a Austrian priest and a composer. The first time it was played was on Christmas Eve, 1818, in Oberndorf. By 1900 it had become a sacred classic, narrating the birth of the Christ child, God's son on Earth.
Alllllllll issssss callllmmmm, allllLLLLllll iisss brrriiiIIIght.
I had grown up down south in the Babdist church, too -- my mother played piano and organ in the church for 40 years -- and I had heard and sung that song since I was a tot. It was church. You didn't play with it.
And yet, I was sitting on a bar stool in urban Detroit these many years later, the streets outside were deserted and some of the deadliest in America, and there was the gritty voice of Dennis Edwards, the guy who did the lead on "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," and he was straight out preaching over the song's sacred verses.
As I sit around by the fireplace
Watching the gleaming tree
If I had one wish in this world
It would be that all men would be free.
"It was like magic," recalls Gil Askey, the veteran Motown composer, in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "If you've ever been in the Holiness Church, and seen those sisters scream when they're filled with the Spirit, you will know how I felt, or shall I say how the Temptations felt. They didn't want to stop, just grooved on out."
I don't know if the folks at BoMacs played that song from the radio or from a tape in the back. But it ended soon enough and the end-of-the-night clatter resumed. I drank up, paid up and left. I walked home to my loft and I felt both exhilarated and empty. Thrilled at how the song seemed to still hum in my bones. Empty because it was over and the night was long and there was no one to talk to. When something reaches out and touches your soul in the dark, it's not something you turn on the TV and forget.
The Temps' version of "Silent Night" is now nearly 25 years old. You can hear it on any pop radio station this time of year. Their "Christmas Collection" CD, which features the song, is No. 1 on Billboard's chart for older R&B albums this week.
Mark Anthony Neal, professor of popular black culture at Duke University and the editor of "That's the Joint!," rated the song in a recent article as one of his Top 10 Soul Christmas songs. "It's maybe half the original Temptations members on that record, it's one of the last things Dennis Edwards did with them, and I think you just have to call it the last really great Temps song," he says.
Leonard Pitts Jr., a music critic for 18 years, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, wrote the liner notes for the Temps compilation CD. There's no doubt, he says, that "Silent Night" is a transcendent moment.
"The arrangement is extraordinary. But spiritually, emotionally, it catches something above the hubbub, the lights, the shopping and Santa Claus, to what Christmas is actually all about," Pitts says. "It took the song back to its Christian origins and didn't do it in lip-service fashion. . . . If the hair on your arms isn't standing up by the second verse, you need to check your pulse."
So this is the part in the story when I tell you how the song was recorded at Motown in Detroit, at the tiny "Hitsville USA" studios on West Grand Boulevard on a snowy winter night back in the day, with the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Aretha's daddy) doing the arrangements, and I would love to, except for the fact that it isn't true.
The best Christmas song ever put to disc was recorded off Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in a couple of hours on a sunny day in the summer of 1980, according to Otis Williams, the only surviving original Temptations member.
"Gil Askey had the arrangements there when we went over to his house, so we sat down and worked out the melody line and vocals," says Williams, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. "Then we went to the studio. I think it took a couple of hours."
Dennis Edwards, who replaced the legendary David Ruffin as the group's lead vocalist (but who was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the others), earlier this week was shivering at his home in St. Louis, where the wind chill was 8 below. He bursts into a laugh when asked about his preachifying.
"It came from my background, being a preacher's son," he says. His father "had a little storefront church, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, at 964 East Canfield in Detroit. Started out with about four members. I had grown up in that church, so sure, I knew 'Silent Night.' But this arrangement was so different. They played back the tape to us and there was an empty spot at the front. They said, 'Do something right in there.' So it just came out, like I was back at church. There was nothing written, nothing scripted. . . . Each year, I have to go back and listen to it again before we do Christmas concerts so I can remember what it was I said."
The passing of the years has lent the song, and the place where I first heard it, a bittersweet history.
The bar, BoMacs, is long gone, as are many of the older Motown session musicians I sometimes saw there.
Four of the five original Temptations are dead. Paul Williams, a suicide victim, has been dead for 31 years. David Ruffin died of an overdose in 1991. Eddie Kendricks died of lung cancer the next year.
Melvin Franklin, the sweet man whose deep voice is so prominent on "Silent Night," died after a series of seizures in 1995. In the wildly popular 1998 television miniseries about the group, it is his death that is the emotional coda to the film and the group's history. Sitting there, watching Smokey Robinson sing "Really Gonna Miss You" at Melvin's funeral, I confess I had a knot in my throat.
Perhaps that is why, as I walked home on a recent, frosty evening, when the radio on my headphones turned to "Silent Night," my step slowed and I paused, there in the cold. I closed my eyes waiting for the stoplight to change and remembered the winter in Detroit and the frost on the window glass and the first time I heard that song.
Lost among the footsteps and pinched faces of a million strangers headed home in the falling darkness, I wished that it wasn't all over. I wished that I could turn the corner and walk back into that bar in Detroit for one more round, one more song, before they closed the place and left us walking, streetlight to streetlight, through the long and empty night to come.
A Motown 'Silent Night' That Echoes Down the Years
By Neely Tucker
In the winter of 1989, I lost my mind and moved from the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Detroit, an inexplicable adventure that led me to discover sub-zero temperatures, some of the best musicians in the Western Hemisphere and my nominee for the best Christmas songs ever recorded.
A bold claim, I know. But this is a Christmas story about a time and place largely gone now, and I remember them both with great affection, and if I am swayed by season and nostalgia, then I just don't care. Because the first time I heard the Temptations' once-in-a-lifetime take of "Silent Night" -- the most Detroit, Motownized, gospelized Christmas song that it is possible to squeeze into six minutes -- was late one night in a Motor City bar where old Motown session musicians could sometimes be found.
It was a freezing, gloomy winter, and I was living alone in a rough, unfinished loft in a rough, unfinished part of town. The loft was above a pizzeria and down the alley from the morgue. There were mornings I walked down the alley, my footprints the only ones in the crunching snow, and they would be loading or unloading a heavy black bag from a hearse. It put the day in a certain perspective.
I worked at a newspaper for my pay, and in the evenings I ran a tab at a jazz dive called BoMacs, about three blocks from the morgue. They had terrific live music, greasy fish sandwiches and a generous pour. They were scarce with the lights and heavy with the heat in the winter and I liked it. You could sit at the bar and if you didn't start none there wouldn't be none.
It had to be closing time just before Christmas when, perhaps after the last set, someone turned on the recording of a deep voice reciting the start of " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" over some twiddly organ-sounding thing. I rolled my eyes and started to drain the last of my drink when someone cranked up the volume. The song took a sharp turn. The drums kicked in with a downbeat intro, a da dum da dum, and then an electrifying preacher's voice said:
In my mind . . .
The guy next to me, I recall, said: "There go Dennis."
The drums and bass and a male chorus swooped in: tenor, baritone, bass. Together they took an irresistible four-note walk up the scale, whoo-ooh-ooh-OOH, and then the gritty preacher's voice said:
I want you to be free . . .
And then they came back down the same doo-wop staircase, OOH-ooh-ooh-ooh.
For all of our friends, I want you to listen to me . . .
The bass was so deep and the music so loud the stool beneath me seemed to vibrate. I was transfixed, there in the dim light and cigarette haze.
We wish you a meeeeeerrrrrrryyy Christmas . . .
All the voices came together and then out of nowhere an unearthly falsetto voice appeared in the darkness of the bar. It was gliding, swooning, sailing over the rest of the voices. It was the first time I had any idea of what they were singing.
Siiiilllleeennntttt Niiiiiggghhhtttt. . . . HooOOOllly NiiIIIIggghtttttt . . .
The guy next to me said: "That's Eddie there."
Somebody else: "Nah, man, that ain't Eddie. That's the brother what replaced him, what's his name."
"You don't mean David."
"Hell no I don't mean David. David was original Temps. I mean, what's his name. That other brother."
I was half listening to this conversation -- it would turn out the name they were looking for was Glenn Leonard -- and half listening to the song fill the place. Some people were at the tables, talking, finishing their drinks, the lights coming up now. It was late and time to go home. And yet I sat there.
Go on and rest your mind . . . and slllllleeeeepppp . . .
Melvin Franklin, he of the basso profundo voice, took a turn on the second verse, and what was most striking about the song unfolding was that this group known for Motown romance and the dance step known as the Temps Walk was doing a song of the Christian faith seriously.
The original five members of the Temptations had grown up in the Deep South and in the church, by which I mean the Protestant black church -- Baptist, really, of the type where it is pronounced "Babdist" -- and it was always one of the group's hallmarks that the gospel influence of their youth had infused the voices of their adult years.
But this was something else entirely. This was gospel emotion over a Motown beat with the lyrics of a classic European hymn. "Silent Night" was written nearly 200 years ago by a Austrian priest and a composer. The first time it was played was on Christmas Eve, 1818, in Oberndorf. By 1900 it had become a sacred classic, narrating the birth of the Christ child, God's son on Earth.
Alllllllll issssss callllmmmm, allllLLLLllll iisss brrriiiIIIght.
I had grown up down south in the Babdist church, too -- my mother played piano and organ in the church for 40 years -- and I had heard and sung that song since I was a tot. It was church. You didn't play with it.
And yet, I was sitting on a bar stool in urban Detroit these many years later, the streets outside were deserted and some of the deadliest in America, and there was the gritty voice of Dennis Edwards, the guy who did the lead on "Papa Was a Rolling Stone," and he was straight out preaching over the song's sacred verses.
As I sit around by the fireplace
Watching the gleaming tree
If I had one wish in this world
It would be that all men would be free.
"It was like magic," recalls Gil Askey, the veteran Motown composer, in an e-mail from his home in Australia. "If you've ever been in the Holiness Church, and seen those sisters scream when they're filled with the Spirit, you will know how I felt, or shall I say how the Temptations felt. They didn't want to stop, just grooved on out."
I don't know if the folks at BoMacs played that song from the radio or from a tape in the back. But it ended soon enough and the end-of-the-night clatter resumed. I drank up, paid up and left. I walked home to my loft and I felt both exhilarated and empty. Thrilled at how the song seemed to still hum in my bones. Empty because it was over and the night was long and there was no one to talk to. When something reaches out and touches your soul in the dark, it's not something you turn on the TV and forget.
The Temps' version of "Silent Night" is now nearly 25 years old. You can hear it on any pop radio station this time of year. Their "Christmas Collection" CD, which features the song, is No. 1 on Billboard's chart for older R&B albums this week.
Mark Anthony Neal, professor of popular black culture at Duke University and the editor of "That's the Joint!," rated the song in a recent article as one of his Top 10 Soul Christmas songs. "It's maybe half the original Temptations members on that record, it's one of the last things Dennis Edwards did with them, and I think you just have to call it the last really great Temps song," he says.
Leonard Pitts Jr., a music critic for 18 years, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, wrote the liner notes for the Temps compilation CD. There's no doubt, he says, that "Silent Night" is a transcendent moment.
"The arrangement is extraordinary. But spiritually, emotionally, it catches something above the hubbub, the lights, the shopping and Santa Claus, to what Christmas is actually all about," Pitts says. "It took the song back to its Christian origins and didn't do it in lip-service fashion. . . . If the hair on your arms isn't standing up by the second verse, you need to check your pulse."
So this is the part in the story when I tell you how the song was recorded at Motown in Detroit, at the tiny "Hitsville USA" studios on West Grand Boulevard on a snowy winter night back in the day, with the Rev. C.L. Franklin (Aretha's daddy) doing the arrangements, and I would love to, except for the fact that it isn't true.
The best Christmas song ever put to disc was recorded off Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles in a couple of hours on a sunny day in the summer of 1980, according to Otis Williams, the only surviving original Temptations member.
"Gil Askey had the arrangements there when we went over to his house, so we sat down and worked out the melody line and vocals," says Williams, speaking from his home in Los Angeles. "Then we went to the studio. I think it took a couple of hours."
Dennis Edwards, who replaced the legendary David Ruffin as the group's lead vocalist (but who was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the others), earlier this week was shivering at his home in St. Louis, where the wind chill was 8 below. He bursts into a laugh when asked about his preachifying.
"It came from my background, being a preacher's son," he says. His father "had a little storefront church, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ, at 964 East Canfield in Detroit. Started out with about four members. I had grown up in that church, so sure, I knew 'Silent Night.' But this arrangement was so different. They played back the tape to us and there was an empty spot at the front. They said, 'Do something right in there.' So it just came out, like I was back at church. There was nothing written, nothing scripted. . . . Each year, I have to go back and listen to it again before we do Christmas concerts so I can remember what it was I said."
The passing of the years has lent the song, and the place where I first heard it, a bittersweet history.
The bar, BoMacs, is long gone, as are many of the older Motown session musicians I sometimes saw there.
Four of the five original Temptations are dead. Paul Williams, a suicide victim, has been dead for 31 years. David Ruffin died of an overdose in 1991. Eddie Kendricks died of lung cancer the next year.
Melvin Franklin, the sweet man whose deep voice is so prominent on "Silent Night," died after a series of seizures in 1995. In the wildly popular 1998 television miniseries about the group, it is his death that is the emotional coda to the film and the group's history. Sitting there, watching Smokey Robinson sing "Really Gonna Miss You" at Melvin's funeral, I confess I had a knot in my throat.
Perhaps that is why, as I walked home on a recent, frosty evening, when the radio on my headphones turned to "Silent Night," my step slowed and I paused, there in the cold. I closed my eyes waiting for the stoplight to change and remembered the winter in Detroit and the frost on the window glass and the first time I heard that song.
Lost among the footsteps and pinched faces of a million strangers headed home in the falling darkness, I wished that it wasn't all over. I wished that I could turn the corner and walk back into that bar in Detroit for one more round, one more song, before they closed the place and left us walking, streetlight to streetlight, through the long and empty night to come.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
From FrontPageMagazine.com:
The Kinky Report
By Don Feder
Alfred C. Kinsey is the Left’s secular saint – a revered figure who, they are convinced, came into a benighted world and (armed with reams of scientific research) heroically banished ignorance and sexual repression, and ushered in a new age of liberation, enlightenment, and pleasure.
In reality, the zoologist turned sex researcher was a sick pervert – more at home in a trench coat than a lab smock – who doctored evidence, abetted child molestation, and helped to launch a revolution that has resulted in untold human suffering.
But try telling that to one who worships at the altar of good sex. It’s less hazardous to disparage the pope to an Opus Dei Catholic, or burn the flag at an American Legion convention, than to question the nobility of Kinsey with a doctrinaire liberal.
In his December 12th column ("The Plot Against Sex in America"), Frank Rich – commissar of culture at The New York Times -- practically drooled through the page.
Over 50 years ago, Saint Alfred drove the snakes of Victorian sexual morality out of America’s bedrooms. But now, thanks to the Religious Right, they’re slithering back, Rich frantically warns us. "As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of ‘moral values’ voters, we’re back where we came in."
Among other forms of repression just too awful for words, the Times columnist cites the advance of abstinence education, commercial TV stations in Los Angeles refusing to air "a public service spot created by Los Angeles county’s own public health agency to counteract the rising tide of syphilis," and "right-wing groups that have targeted" the cinematic celebration of Rich’s idol – "Kinsey."
Neo-puritans have mounted a full-scale assault on the movie "Kinsey" (including "false accusations" that the good doctor was a pedophile) as part of their "larger goal of pushing sex of all non-biblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis," Rich sputters.
By the way, that PSA whose rejection Rich finds so ominous featured a red cartoon character, called "Phil the Sore." Phil follows two men home and, after their exchange of bodily fluids, calls in his kin, carrying boxes labeled "brain damage," "rash" and "blindness," with the implication that these can result from what the prophylactic-brigade calls "unprotected sex." Even for TV stations in LA, this was just too dumb. Only public health officials – and Rich – believe a cartoon character will keep certain citizens from have high-risk sex.
"Kinsey" stars Liam Neeson, an actor who himself is venerated for his roles in films like "Schindler’s List." While it hints at Kinsey’s eccentricities (seducing his male assistants, urging his wife to have sex with his colleagues), the movie barely scratches the surface of the degeneracy of the father of the sexual revolution.
According to Kinsey biographer James H. Jones, whose book Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, the celebrated sexologist was an exhibitionist and a masochist who enjoyed torturing himself by placing various objects in his urethra, among other deviant behavior.
He also filmed his wife masturbating and having sex with other men and himself having intercourse with various subordinates, some of whom were coerced into the relationships.
As for Kinsey’s much-vaunted research, to call it junk science would be generous. Kinsey presented his tomes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (published in 1948 and weighing in at 804 pages) and Sexual Behavior In the Human Female (1953) as models of scientific method and based on rigorous research. They were anything but.
Among other findings, Kinsey concluded that 85 percent of American men had intercourse before marriage, 30-45 percent had extramarital relations, 70 percent had sex with prostitutes, as many as 37 percent had engaged in homosexual acts, and 10 percent were exclusively homosexual. From the latter comes the myth, endlessly repeated by the gay lobby, that one in 10 Americans is a homosexual. (The figure is actually closer to 1 to 2 percent.)
Incredibly, this was not a portrait of a mid-town Manhattan singles bar today, but of Middle America circa 1948!
Kinsey’s method was to science what rape is to romance. The University of Indiana academician set out to validate certain conclusions, and rigged the evidence to prove his case.
For instance, when he couldn’t get enough married women to talk about their sex lives, he redefined "married woman" as living with a man for more than a year. Prostitutes were also included in his study of female sexuality – a fact Kinsey failed to disclose in his book.
Similarly, Kinsey’s study of American males included disproportionate numbers of prisoners – especially sex offenders. Again, according to Jones, convicts constituted as much as 25 percent of Kinsey’s subjects.
Jones writes: "In fact, he had devoted much of his time to interviewing members of the underclass, including drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and the like." The sexual revolution was launched with research based on data drawn from the dregs of society.
Charges of pedophilia arise for Kinsey’s research into the sex lives of children. There were as many as 2,000 "subjects," some as young as six months old.
The doctor was convinced that children were "sexual beings," who could experience orgasms almost from birth by stimulating their sexual organs. "It is difficult to understand why a child, except for cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched [otherwise known as being molested-DF], or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts," Kinsey wrote in The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
Still, in his book on the human male, Kinsey noted that child subjects of these experiments would often "scream" and "will fight away from the [adult] partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive definite pleasure from the situation."
Much of Kinsey’s research here came from pedophiles. The scientist carried on voluminous correspondence with these dedicated researchers, and encouraged them to keep meticulous notes on their "experiments" with children.
Not to worry, Kinsey was sure the victims enjoyed it. Again, Jones discloses, "From Kinsey’s perspective, child molestation, like other sexual taboos, violated morals, but the actual harm it inflicted was all in people’s minds. If society did not make a big deal of it, the children would not be harmed." The North American Man Boy Love Association owes an enormous debt to Alfred C. Kinsey.
Jones notes that Kinsey was a man with a mission. "The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work with a missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality…He was determined to use [or abuse - DF] science to strip human sexuality of guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to soften the rules of restraint… Kinsey was a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex offender laws of the United States."
In other words, Dr. Kinsey wanted an America that resembled Dr. Kinsey. We’ve come a long way in that direction (thanks in part to his work – which provided the pseudo-scientific justification for the sexual revolution). In America, thanks to Kinsey's research:
* Some 65 million have contracted one or more sexually transmitted diseases, most incurable.
* More than half a million people have died from AIDS and an additional million have the HIV virus.
* When Kinsey published his first opus, there were two venereal diseases documented in the United States: syphilis and gonorrhea. Today, the Centers for Disease Control tracks more than 30.
* There are an estimated 4.2 million pornographic websites. They constitute 12 percent of all Internet sites. Every day, there are 68 million internet searches for pornography.
* It is conservatively estimated at each year 20,000 to 50,000 women are brought into the United States (mostly from Latin America, Asia, and the former USSR) to serve as indentured servants in the sex trade.
* Between 1960 and 1999, out-of-wedlock births to teenage mothers increased more than 430 percent. In some inner-cities, almost 80 percent of all births are to unmarried women.
* The age-old institution of marriage is crumbling before our eyes, with the high court of Massachusetts mandating homosexual marriage. In the face of this attempt to radically remake society’s fundamental institution, a majority of members of the United States Senate voted against bringing to the floor a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage.
Obviously, Kinsey – who died in 1956 – did not achieve all of this on his own. The work he started was carried on by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Sex Information and Education Council of the US (SIECUS), the ACLU, the federal judiciary (especially activist members of the Supreme Court), Mary Calderone, Hugh Hefner, Howard Stern, Dr. Alex ("The Joy of Sex") Comfort, Larry Flynt, Jerry Springer, Dr. Ruth, Joycelyn Elders, Bill (its-only-sex) Clinton, and a cast of thousands.
But Kinsey was the catalyst, which is why the left gets hysterical whenever its icon is exposed.
Like their mentor, liberals want to frame the debate as the sexually repressed versus the sexually healthy, or puritanical versus open-and-honest.
In reality, on one side of the great divide stand those who believe that sex has a moral content. On the other, are those whose goal is to completely separate sex from morality – activists whose ideal is sex at its most primitive and animalistic. Kinsey’s admirers would reduce the most profound and value-laden of human activities to an irresistible urge. In the deepest sense, they are sexual determinists whose motto should be: I am, therefore I rut.
Speaking of the man he portrays in "Kinsey," Liam Neeson insists, "These [Kinsey and his team] are people who stand for something, something that is good to remind audiences of." The Nazis who conducted medical experiments in the death camps also stood for something.
The Liam-brained actor continues, "They had a code of ethics that you perhaps don’t find anymore." Except, of course, in a sex-offenders registry.
The Kinky Report
By Don Feder
Alfred C. Kinsey is the Left’s secular saint – a revered figure who, they are convinced, came into a benighted world and (armed with reams of scientific research) heroically banished ignorance and sexual repression, and ushered in a new age of liberation, enlightenment, and pleasure.
In reality, the zoologist turned sex researcher was a sick pervert – more at home in a trench coat than a lab smock – who doctored evidence, abetted child molestation, and helped to launch a revolution that has resulted in untold human suffering.
But try telling that to one who worships at the altar of good sex. It’s less hazardous to disparage the pope to an Opus Dei Catholic, or burn the flag at an American Legion convention, than to question the nobility of Kinsey with a doctrinaire liberal.
In his December 12th column ("The Plot Against Sex in America"), Frank Rich – commissar of culture at The New York Times -- practically drooled through the page.
Over 50 years ago, Saint Alfred drove the snakes of Victorian sexual morality out of America’s bedrooms. But now, thanks to the Religious Right, they’re slithering back, Rich frantically warns us. "As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of ‘moral values’ voters, we’re back where we came in."
Among other forms of repression just too awful for words, the Times columnist cites the advance of abstinence education, commercial TV stations in Los Angeles refusing to air "a public service spot created by Los Angeles county’s own public health agency to counteract the rising tide of syphilis," and "right-wing groups that have targeted" the cinematic celebration of Rich’s idol – "Kinsey."
Neo-puritans have mounted a full-scale assault on the movie "Kinsey" (including "false accusations" that the good doctor was a pedophile) as part of their "larger goal of pushing sex of all non-biblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis," Rich sputters.
By the way, that PSA whose rejection Rich finds so ominous featured a red cartoon character, called "Phil the Sore." Phil follows two men home and, after their exchange of bodily fluids, calls in his kin, carrying boxes labeled "brain damage," "rash" and "blindness," with the implication that these can result from what the prophylactic-brigade calls "unprotected sex." Even for TV stations in LA, this was just too dumb. Only public health officials – and Rich – believe a cartoon character will keep certain citizens from have high-risk sex.
"Kinsey" stars Liam Neeson, an actor who himself is venerated for his roles in films like "Schindler’s List." While it hints at Kinsey’s eccentricities (seducing his male assistants, urging his wife to have sex with his colleagues), the movie barely scratches the surface of the degeneracy of the father of the sexual revolution.
According to Kinsey biographer James H. Jones, whose book Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998, the celebrated sexologist was an exhibitionist and a masochist who enjoyed torturing himself by placing various objects in his urethra, among other deviant behavior.
He also filmed his wife masturbating and having sex with other men and himself having intercourse with various subordinates, some of whom were coerced into the relationships.
As for Kinsey’s much-vaunted research, to call it junk science would be generous. Kinsey presented his tomes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (published in 1948 and weighing in at 804 pages) and Sexual Behavior In the Human Female (1953) as models of scientific method and based on rigorous research. They were anything but.
Among other findings, Kinsey concluded that 85 percent of American men had intercourse before marriage, 30-45 percent had extramarital relations, 70 percent had sex with prostitutes, as many as 37 percent had engaged in homosexual acts, and 10 percent were exclusively homosexual. From the latter comes the myth, endlessly repeated by the gay lobby, that one in 10 Americans is a homosexual. (The figure is actually closer to 1 to 2 percent.)
Incredibly, this was not a portrait of a mid-town Manhattan singles bar today, but of Middle America circa 1948!
Kinsey’s method was to science what rape is to romance. The University of Indiana academician set out to validate certain conclusions, and rigged the evidence to prove his case.
For instance, when he couldn’t get enough married women to talk about their sex lives, he redefined "married woman" as living with a man for more than a year. Prostitutes were also included in his study of female sexuality – a fact Kinsey failed to disclose in his book.
Similarly, Kinsey’s study of American males included disproportionate numbers of prisoners – especially sex offenders. Again, according to Jones, convicts constituted as much as 25 percent of Kinsey’s subjects.
Jones writes: "In fact, he had devoted much of his time to interviewing members of the underclass, including drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and the like." The sexual revolution was launched with research based on data drawn from the dregs of society.
Charges of pedophilia arise for Kinsey’s research into the sex lives of children. There were as many as 2,000 "subjects," some as young as six months old.
The doctor was convinced that children were "sexual beings," who could experience orgasms almost from birth by stimulating their sexual organs. "It is difficult to understand why a child, except for cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched [otherwise known as being molested-DF], or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts," Kinsey wrote in The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female.
Still, in his book on the human male, Kinsey noted that child subjects of these experiments would often "scream" and "will fight away from the [adult] partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive definite pleasure from the situation."
Much of Kinsey’s research here came from pedophiles. The scientist carried on voluminous correspondence with these dedicated researchers, and encouraged them to keep meticulous notes on their "experiments" with children.
Not to worry, Kinsey was sure the victims enjoyed it. Again, Jones discloses, "From Kinsey’s perspective, child molestation, like other sexual taboos, violated morals, but the actual harm it inflicted was all in people’s minds. If society did not make a big deal of it, the children would not be harmed." The North American Man Boy Love Association owes an enormous debt to Alfred C. Kinsey.
Jones notes that Kinsey was a man with a mission. "The man I came to know bore no resemblance to the canonical Kinsey. Anything but disinterested, he approached his work with a missionary fervor. Kinsey loathed Victorian morality…He was determined to use [or abuse - DF] science to strip human sexuality of guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality, to soften the rules of restraint… Kinsey was a crypto-reformer who spent his every waking hour attempting to change the sexual mores and sex offender laws of the United States."
In other words, Dr. Kinsey wanted an America that resembled Dr. Kinsey. We’ve come a long way in that direction (thanks in part to his work – which provided the pseudo-scientific justification for the sexual revolution). In America, thanks to Kinsey's research:
* Some 65 million have contracted one or more sexually transmitted diseases, most incurable.
* More than half a million people have died from AIDS and an additional million have the HIV virus.
* When Kinsey published his first opus, there were two venereal diseases documented in the United States: syphilis and gonorrhea. Today, the Centers for Disease Control tracks more than 30.
* There are an estimated 4.2 million pornographic websites. They constitute 12 percent of all Internet sites. Every day, there are 68 million internet searches for pornography.
* It is conservatively estimated at each year 20,000 to 50,000 women are brought into the United States (mostly from Latin America, Asia, and the former USSR) to serve as indentured servants in the sex trade.
* Between 1960 and 1999, out-of-wedlock births to teenage mothers increased more than 430 percent. In some inner-cities, almost 80 percent of all births are to unmarried women.
* The age-old institution of marriage is crumbling before our eyes, with the high court of Massachusetts mandating homosexual marriage. In the face of this attempt to radically remake society’s fundamental institution, a majority of members of the United States Senate voted against bringing to the floor a constitutional amendment protecting traditional marriage.
Obviously, Kinsey – who died in 1956 – did not achieve all of this on his own. The work he started was carried on by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Sex Information and Education Council of the US (SIECUS), the ACLU, the federal judiciary (especially activist members of the Supreme Court), Mary Calderone, Hugh Hefner, Howard Stern, Dr. Alex ("The Joy of Sex") Comfort, Larry Flynt, Jerry Springer, Dr. Ruth, Joycelyn Elders, Bill (its-only-sex) Clinton, and a cast of thousands.
But Kinsey was the catalyst, which is why the left gets hysterical whenever its icon is exposed.
Like their mentor, liberals want to frame the debate as the sexually repressed versus the sexually healthy, or puritanical versus open-and-honest.
In reality, on one side of the great divide stand those who believe that sex has a moral content. On the other, are those whose goal is to completely separate sex from morality – activists whose ideal is sex at its most primitive and animalistic. Kinsey’s admirers would reduce the most profound and value-laden of human activities to an irresistible urge. In the deepest sense, they are sexual determinists whose motto should be: I am, therefore I rut.
Speaking of the man he portrays in "Kinsey," Liam Neeson insists, "These [Kinsey and his team] are people who stand for something, something that is good to remind audiences of." The Nazis who conducted medical experiments in the death camps also stood for something.
The Liam-brained actor continues, "They had a code of ethics that you perhaps don’t find anymore." Except, of course, in a sex-offenders registry.
Monday, December 20, 2004
From timesonline.co.uk:
Rummy's last stand against the forces of military reason
By Andrew Sullivan
December 19, 2004
Defence secretaries in wartime get their fair share of criticism. And when you are as prominent and as outspoken as Donald Rumsfeld, you certainly know how to take it. But even he must have been reeling a little last week.
This was, after all, supposed to be a golden moment for the Bush administration’s most public wartime face. Rumsfeld is one of relatively few cabinet members held onto by the president. His colleagues in devising the war in Iraq — George Tenet, the former CIA director, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the former head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, and General Tommy Franks — were rewarded last week with presidential Medals of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in America. The post-election offensive in Falluja went about as well as could be expected. Elections in Iraq are on schedule for late January.
But hubris has a long and deep relationship with the Bush administration — “Mission accomplished”, anyone? Rummy knows this better than most. When he was in Kuwait last week and was confronted by a peeved military grunt asking when he and his fellows would get the armour they need to protect them from roadside bombs, Rummy turned dismissive.
“You go to war with the army you have,” he harrumphed. In the fuller context he was more engaged. But his initial response to criticism was classic Rumsfeld: blame someone else.
It was the final harrumph for some. Senator John McCain told the press that he had “no confidence” in the defence secretary. Chuck Hagel, another powerful Republican senator who is also on the armed services committee, put the boot in: “That soldier, and those men and women there, deserved a far better answer from their secretary of defence than a flippant comment.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Iraq war, was steaming: “I was very, very disappointed. No, let me put it stronger. I was angry by the words of the secretary of defence when he laid it all on the army, as if he . . . didn’t have anything to do with the army and the army was over there . . . screwing up.”
Then, on cue, Bill Kristol, another Rumsfeld critic and perhaps the leading neoconservative in Washington, wrote a piece in The Washington Post that had smoke rising from the newsprint. Since I could not put it better, let me quote Kristol:
“Perhaps Rumsfeld simply had a bad day. But then, what about his statement earlier last week when asked about troop levels? ‘The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that’s really out of my control.’ Really? Well, ‘the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General (John) Abizaid wanted’. Leave aside the fact that the issue is not ‘the number of troops we had for the invasion’ but rather the number of troops we have had for post-war stabilisation. Leave aside the fact that General Tommy Franks had projected that he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task — and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him that tens of thousands of international troops would be available . . .
“In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week — after a fashion: ‘Everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that’s fine’. Except he fails to take responsibility.”
Ouch. But so true. I have long been a fan (and friendly acquaintance) of Rumsfeld. Any defence secretary who does not provoke friction with the military is not doing his job. Rumsfeld has faced enormous challenges these past four years. But when fresh from electoral victory a key administration official is all but lambasted from his own ideological ranks, something is awry.
The case against him is a relatively simple one. Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon with an admirable agenda of forcing the military to become leaner, to maximise the use of technology and to move away from the large numbers and heavy armaments of the past. But his wars showed that the old methods were still valid.
Yes, Rumsfeld proved that a small force with lightning speed and technological skill could topple a dictatorship in Iraq with unprecedented economy of manpower. But it became abundantly clear almost immediately thereafter that the force needed to keep the peace, to police a country of tens of millions, to seal borders, to gain intelligence and to suppress rioting, looting and disorder would have to be far larger. Bremer conceded this.
In retrospect it seems blindingly obvious. At the time it seemed blindingly obvious. But for the post-invasion strategy to work, Rumsfeld would have had to admit that he was wrong and needed to adjust. Getting Rumsfeld to admit that he is wrong is a little like expecting George Bush to become pregnant. So they hung on. Until their stubbornness led to chaos, insurgency and the unravelling of the liberating dream.
Worse than stubbornness has been Rummy’s refusal to take responsibility. When looting broke out, he said: “Stuff happens.” No it doesn’t. When you don’t have a plan to contain post-liberation chaos, looting breaks out.
Rumsfeld did not go to war with the army he had. He went to war with the army and the allies that he and his commander-in-chief chose. He had months to plan for the war and could have postponed it. He is responsible for the errors of foresight and the lack of equipment that have left soldiers vulnerable to injury.
One reason why last week saw a veritable outburst of anger is that he has never taken responsibility for any of this. And still he refuses to ask for more troops over all. He wants the war on the cheap.
Some actually want to win. What we saw last week was the final, long-pent-up frustration of those who have always been for liberating Afghanistan and Iraq, but who see a clear mismatch between America’s goals and its means. They are not lefties or softies. They largely kept their peace before the election, believing that John Kerry would be an even worse option. But they recognise in Rumsfeld an obstacle to victory rather than an asset.
Will Bush hear them? This would mean admitting that he has made mistakes himself. So far he has shown scant ability to do this. There is a reason, after all, why he and Rumsfeld get along. When you think you are perfect, all critics are enemies. Until, of course, they are proven horribly right.
Rummy's last stand against the forces of military reason
By Andrew Sullivan
December 19, 2004
Defence secretaries in wartime get their fair share of criticism. And when you are as prominent and as outspoken as Donald Rumsfeld, you certainly know how to take it. But even he must have been reeling a little last week.
This was, after all, supposed to be a golden moment for the Bush administration’s most public wartime face. Rumsfeld is one of relatively few cabinet members held onto by the president. His colleagues in devising the war in Iraq — George Tenet, the former CIA director, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the former head of the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, and General Tommy Franks — were rewarded last week with presidential Medals of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in America. The post-election offensive in Falluja went about as well as could be expected. Elections in Iraq are on schedule for late January.
But hubris has a long and deep relationship with the Bush administration — “Mission accomplished”, anyone? Rummy knows this better than most. When he was in Kuwait last week and was confronted by a peeved military grunt asking when he and his fellows would get the armour they need to protect them from roadside bombs, Rummy turned dismissive.
“You go to war with the army you have,” he harrumphed. In the fuller context he was more engaged. But his initial response to criticism was classic Rumsfeld: blame someone else.
It was the final harrumph for some. Senator John McCain told the press that he had “no confidence” in the defence secretary. Chuck Hagel, another powerful Republican senator who is also on the armed services committee, put the boot in: “That soldier, and those men and women there, deserved a far better answer from their secretary of defence than a flippant comment.”
General Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Iraq war, was steaming: “I was very, very disappointed. No, let me put it stronger. I was angry by the words of the secretary of defence when he laid it all on the army, as if he . . . didn’t have anything to do with the army and the army was over there . . . screwing up.”
Then, on cue, Bill Kristol, another Rumsfeld critic and perhaps the leading neoconservative in Washington, wrote a piece in The Washington Post that had smoke rising from the newsprint. Since I could not put it better, let me quote Kristol:
“Perhaps Rumsfeld simply had a bad day. But then, what about his statement earlier last week when asked about troop levels? ‘The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that’s really out of my control.’ Really? Well, ‘the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General (John) Abizaid wanted’. Leave aside the fact that the issue is not ‘the number of troops we had for the invasion’ but rather the number of troops we have had for post-war stabilisation. Leave aside the fact that General Tommy Franks had projected that he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task — and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him that tens of thousands of international troops would be available . . .
“In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week — after a fashion: ‘Everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that’s fine’. Except he fails to take responsibility.”
Ouch. But so true. I have long been a fan (and friendly acquaintance) of Rumsfeld. Any defence secretary who does not provoke friction with the military is not doing his job. Rumsfeld has faced enormous challenges these past four years. But when fresh from electoral victory a key administration official is all but lambasted from his own ideological ranks, something is awry.
The case against him is a relatively simple one. Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon with an admirable agenda of forcing the military to become leaner, to maximise the use of technology and to move away from the large numbers and heavy armaments of the past. But his wars showed that the old methods were still valid.
Yes, Rumsfeld proved that a small force with lightning speed and technological skill could topple a dictatorship in Iraq with unprecedented economy of manpower. But it became abundantly clear almost immediately thereafter that the force needed to keep the peace, to police a country of tens of millions, to seal borders, to gain intelligence and to suppress rioting, looting and disorder would have to be far larger. Bremer conceded this.
In retrospect it seems blindingly obvious. At the time it seemed blindingly obvious. But for the post-invasion strategy to work, Rumsfeld would have had to admit that he was wrong and needed to adjust. Getting Rumsfeld to admit that he is wrong is a little like expecting George Bush to become pregnant. So they hung on. Until their stubbornness led to chaos, insurgency and the unravelling of the liberating dream.
Worse than stubbornness has been Rummy’s refusal to take responsibility. When looting broke out, he said: “Stuff happens.” No it doesn’t. When you don’t have a plan to contain post-liberation chaos, looting breaks out.
Rumsfeld did not go to war with the army he had. He went to war with the army and the allies that he and his commander-in-chief chose. He had months to plan for the war and could have postponed it. He is responsible for the errors of foresight and the lack of equipment that have left soldiers vulnerable to injury.
One reason why last week saw a veritable outburst of anger is that he has never taken responsibility for any of this. And still he refuses to ask for more troops over all. He wants the war on the cheap.
Some actually want to win. What we saw last week was the final, long-pent-up frustration of those who have always been for liberating Afghanistan and Iraq, but who see a clear mismatch between America’s goals and its means. They are not lefties or softies. They largely kept their peace before the election, believing that John Kerry would be an even worse option. But they recognise in Rumsfeld an obstacle to victory rather than an asset.
Will Bush hear them? This would mean admitting that he has made mistakes himself. So far he has shown scant ability to do this. There is a reason, after all, why he and Rumsfeld get along. When you think you are perfect, all critics are enemies. Until, of course, they are proven horribly right.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
From washingtonpost.com:
'We Back You'
Separating the Warriors From the War
By Rick Atkinson
One morning in 1966, when I was an eighth-grader at Gen. George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., we were mustered onto the playground in a formation of huge block letters that spelled: WE BACK YOU. A helicopter appeared over- head, and a photographer leaned from the cockpit. The subsequent photograph, published in a newspaper, was meant to inspirit the troops in Vietnam.
As the sons and daughters of professional Army officers, our impulse was to close ranks and stand where we were told to stand. For us the affirmation was not political, it was personal. We tried not to confuse the warriors with the war.
Yet over the years as the war dragged on, the dead stacked up and the country splintered, that distinction became harder to sustain. The suspicion that our soldiers were risking their lives in a bad, lost cause soon became so searing that many of us insisted the war was righteous and winnable. To admit otherwise felt like a betrayal of those we loved; it also implied that we had been duped. We closed ranks with the policy as well as with the troops. We conflated the warriors and the war. So did the country, in ways that became toxic.
Today the equivalent of "We back you" slogans can be found on military posts across the country, expressed in yellow ribbons and lapel pins and yard signs supporting the troops in Iraq. In a relatively small, volunteer Army, the agony of 1,300 dead and 10,000 wounded sears some communities more than others, and none more than the extended family that is the professional military.
Many feel a profound disquiet: at the hard truth that the central provocations for invading Iraq proved spurious; at the stress fractures appearing within the Army and Marine Corps -- great armies are hard to build and easy to break; at the dearth of meaningful allied support in a robust coalition of the capable rather than a thin amalgam of the willing; and at the risk of another rift opening between the military and our larger republic.
Soldiers and their families also know, viscerally, that war is corrupting, even a justifiable or inevitable war. Eventually combat does bad things to good soldiers. Not that it makes them capable of atrocity -- the overwhelming majority today are too balanced, too professional, too well led for that, although the rash of soldiers and Marines court-martialed or under investigation for various depredations in Iraq is unnerving. But war is corrosive of decency and nobility; it tarnishes the spirit. Perhaps the best example is Wilfred Owen, the great English poet who commanded a platoon in World War I. Shortly before his death near the end of that war, Owen described sorting through incoming mail to his soldiers who had just been killed. "My senses are charred," he wrote. "I don't take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters."
Since before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, military communities in both the active and reserve forces have closed ranks. For them, their core affirmation is again personal, not political, although they instinctively and legally follow the military hierarchy and the commander in chief. The senior officers among them, by tradition and training, offer their best advice on tactics and strategy, then hew to the decisions of their superiors.
But as this war grinds on, as these dead stack up, soldiers and their families are faced with the appalling suspicion that their troops are risking their lives in a cause that is uncertain at best and illegitimate at worst.
While some voice private doubts, others insist -- often with increasing stridency -- that the war is justified, that the insurgency can be crushed and that naysaying undermines both national will and troop morale. I admire their steadfast faith, even as I recognize the dilemma. To disbelieve seems too much like betrayal. Skepticism and dissent appear inimical to service and sacrifice.
Keeping the warriors and the war untangled is extraordinarily difficult, intellectually and emotionally. All that most of us can do is to mean precisely what we say: We back you.
Rick Atkinson, a former staff writer for The Post, is the author of "An Army at Dawn" and "In the Company of Soldiers."
'We Back You'
Separating the Warriors From the War
By Rick Atkinson
One morning in 1966, when I was an eighth-grader at Gen. George S. Patton Jr. Junior High School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., we were mustered onto the playground in a formation of huge block letters that spelled: WE BACK YOU. A helicopter appeared over- head, and a photographer leaned from the cockpit. The subsequent photograph, published in a newspaper, was meant to inspirit the troops in Vietnam.
As the sons and daughters of professional Army officers, our impulse was to close ranks and stand where we were told to stand. For us the affirmation was not political, it was personal. We tried not to confuse the warriors with the war.
Yet over the years as the war dragged on, the dead stacked up and the country splintered, that distinction became harder to sustain. The suspicion that our soldiers were risking their lives in a bad, lost cause soon became so searing that many of us insisted the war was righteous and winnable. To admit otherwise felt like a betrayal of those we loved; it also implied that we had been duped. We closed ranks with the policy as well as with the troops. We conflated the warriors and the war. So did the country, in ways that became toxic.
Today the equivalent of "We back you" slogans can be found on military posts across the country, expressed in yellow ribbons and lapel pins and yard signs supporting the troops in Iraq. In a relatively small, volunteer Army, the agony of 1,300 dead and 10,000 wounded sears some communities more than others, and none more than the extended family that is the professional military.
Many feel a profound disquiet: at the hard truth that the central provocations for invading Iraq proved spurious; at the stress fractures appearing within the Army and Marine Corps -- great armies are hard to build and easy to break; at the dearth of meaningful allied support in a robust coalition of the capable rather than a thin amalgam of the willing; and at the risk of another rift opening between the military and our larger republic.
Soldiers and their families also know, viscerally, that war is corrupting, even a justifiable or inevitable war. Eventually combat does bad things to good soldiers. Not that it makes them capable of atrocity -- the overwhelming majority today are too balanced, too professional, too well led for that, although the rash of soldiers and Marines court-martialed or under investigation for various depredations in Iraq is unnerving. But war is corrosive of decency and nobility; it tarnishes the spirit. Perhaps the best example is Wilfred Owen, the great English poet who commanded a platoon in World War I. Shortly before his death near the end of that war, Owen described sorting through incoming mail to his soldiers who had just been killed. "My senses are charred," he wrote. "I don't take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters."
Since before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, military communities in both the active and reserve forces have closed ranks. For them, their core affirmation is again personal, not political, although they instinctively and legally follow the military hierarchy and the commander in chief. The senior officers among them, by tradition and training, offer their best advice on tactics and strategy, then hew to the decisions of their superiors.
But as this war grinds on, as these dead stack up, soldiers and their families are faced with the appalling suspicion that their troops are risking their lives in a cause that is uncertain at best and illegitimate at worst.
While some voice private doubts, others insist -- often with increasing stridency -- that the war is justified, that the insurgency can be crushed and that naysaying undermines both national will and troop morale. I admire their steadfast faith, even as I recognize the dilemma. To disbelieve seems too much like betrayal. Skepticism and dissent appear inimical to service and sacrifice.
Keeping the warriors and the war untangled is extraordinarily difficult, intellectually and emotionally. All that most of us can do is to mean precisely what we say: We back you.
Rick Atkinson, a former staff writer for The Post, is the author of "An Army at Dawn" and "In the Company of Soldiers."
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