In a review of Show Me A Story:  Why Picture Books Matter (WSJ 5/12/12), Meghan Cox Gurdon quotes from some of the interviewees who are subjects in Leonard Marcus’ anthology of famous illustrators.  Maurice Sendak, probably the most admired children’s book author since Dr. Seuss had this to say about the grotesque (Gurdon’s word) aunts and uncles who visited his family when he was a child,  “God knows most of the people who came there were pigs.”  He then goes on to explain that the day of his own Bar-Mitzvah was also the day his father collapsed with the news that other members of his family had been killed in the holocaust:  “I remember my father falling down, and me in my little suit all ready to go, and the rage that was stirred in me by these dead Jews who constantly infiltrated our lives and made us miserable.”  We’re reading the words of an adult recapturing the emotion not of a 5 year old Little Lord Fauntleroy, but of a 13 year old adolescent son of hard-working immigrants.  It’s hard not to remember that he was the same age as another teenager who penned her own emotional reaction to far more serious deprivation in the posthumously published Diary of Anne Frank.

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     Two obituaries are prominently featured in the Times today (May 1).  The first is for Ben Zion Netanyahu who is headlined as a “hawkish scholar,” an oxymoron that conjures up first fights in the library stacks; the second is for Fred Hakim, a Times Square hot dog vendor whose selection to share the page seems motivated less by the significance of the deceased than by an attempt to offset the importance of his page-mate’s accomplishments.  Both articles feature pictures of a smiling father entwined with a smiling son.  Can you see the editors deciding on their choices?  “Let’s commemorate the man who penned a 1,300 page history of the Spanish Inquisition, was editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, the Encyclopedia Judaica and The World History of the Jewish People, the father of the current prime minister of Israel (whom we don’t like) and to balance that, let’s highlight the guy who sold hot dogs and knishes in a seedy 7 seat luncheonette on Times Square.  Or maybe the editors saw equivalencies between the two men -  after all, Hakim was a gym teacher at the Murray Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan and Netanyahu taught at Cornell, another New York school.  Or perhaps it was a case of free association -  say the names Ben Zion and Netanyahu quickly 3 times, click your heels and what comes to mind  is Hebrew National - a famous hot dog and a perfect segue.

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If you haven’t seen Footnote yet, you should;  it’s a movie that lends itself to the type of discussion and explication that’s usually reserved for significant literary works.  If you haven’t seen it and intend to, please don’t read this article - you should come to your own conclusions before reading mine.  Half the fun of this movie is trying to solve a puzzle for which there are many clues and allusions;  your conclusion depends upon how you interpret those and it’s fitting in a movie that has the Talmud at its core, that there will always be another point of view.

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     Here are a few of the topics that have been covered or reviewed in the New York Times during the past week:  mothers of autistic children finding it difficult to date;  brides resorting to gastric feeding tubes in order to lose weight before the wedding;  mothers being too harsh on each other’s parenting techniques;  mothers monopolizing the role of parenting, rendering fathers irrelevant;  breast-feeding mothers relinquishing their sexuality to their maternal desires.  It certainly seems that as women have risen to occupy the highest echelons of professional accomplishment, we are increasingly being force-fed a diet of whining and junk food for the mind.  It used to be that these subjects were relegated to women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal or Ms, much as celebrity news was once confined to movie magazines or pulps like People, Us and their spinoffs.  Today, even the Wall Street Journal has its equivalent of Page Six, not to mention its real estate porn page featuring the week’s most exorbitant sale.

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     In an article referencing the anomie of young people like Henry Wachtel, the teenager who beat his mother to death last week, Ginia Bellafante suggests that it’s impossible “to view Mr. Wachtel’s tragedy apart from the life that the film suggests - one in which parents are absent, opportunities seem meager and the resulting freedoms feel joyless in the wake of so much anxiety about a precarious future.”  (NYTimes 4/15/12  The film is “Our Time,” a cinema verite short in which Henry Wachtel had a leading role.  It appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year and deals with middle class teens in New York who are not part of the affluent life style and high achievement of kids prominently in view in this city of 1 percenters.  As I read this article, I thought back to previous generations of teenagers - immigrants who came to this country without the language or the means to survive - who not only survived but excelled;  teenagers who got drafted into the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - some never to return, some to return as physical or mental basket cases, many of whom overcame their crippling disabilities to resume their lives or bravely create new ones.  I thought of the words “so much anxiety” to describe kids who have a roof over their heads, a means of support, educational opportunities, no draft in sight and in Henry’s case, a mother who lived with and cared for him.

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     There’s nothing revelatory about the fact that contemporary Judaism keeps drifting towards the notion that this is primarily a religion about social justice with its tikkun olam banner now more significant than the Magen David.  In fact, for a growing number of Jews, Judaism is really the opportunity to celebrate liberalism with Jewish food and ceremony - in that order.  Passover, which begins next week, is viewed as an ecumenical occasion to talk about slavery and disenfranchisement throughout the world, from the gravest examples to the most petty.  There’s a seat at the seder for everyone who has a gripe and a Haggadah to match it.

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     Twenty-five years ago, the Reverend Al Sharpton jumped headfirst into the public spotlight to defend a black teenager who accused six white men of repeatedly raping her and smearing her body with dog feces and racial slurs.  Even after a grand jury found that Tawana Brawley had concocted an elaborate hoax to deflect punishment by her murderous step-father, Sharpton refused to concede that the truth made any difference.  What was important to him then was race-mongering and getting the maximum media play from his histrionic agit-prop.  Now, a generation later, he has found another opportunity to foment racial unrest in the case of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was killed in Florida by a mixed race Hispanic man serving as a neighborhood watchman.

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In its most flagrant example of Orwellian language inversion, the Times of Feb. 24th refers to the murder of two American soldiers as “self-inflicted wounds.”  Not that the soldiers themselves chose to court their own killings, but that the military’s decision to burn discarded copies of the Koran was “shockingly insensitive.”  Of course the Times knows better than any of us that religious insensitivity is only one of many infractions that merit murder in the Muslim world.  Four Muslim men were publicly decapitated this week for the shocking crime of carrying satellite phones;  young girls have been murdered for the shocking crime of going to school and females of all ages have been killed for the shocking crime of being raped.  The Times might recall that American journalist Daniel Pearl was beheaded for the shocking crime of being a Jew and Dutchman Theo Van Gogh was murdered for the shocking crime of making a film criticizing the Muslim treatment of women.  On 9/11, almost 3,000 Americans were killed for the shocking crime of being citizens of The Great Satan. What the Times should have editorialized is that it was shockingly dangerous for the army to burn the Korans, knowing that they were vulnerable to the retaliation of primitive, savage people mired in the fanatical religious mindset of the dark ages.

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Pity the NYC Police Department.  Entrusted with safeguarding the welfare of almost 9 million people daily as the first guard of defense against terrorism, their only hope is to be smarter than the enemy and intercept him before he strikes again.  After the horror of 9/11, and after all the other Muslim generated terrorist acts in the U.S. and abroad, this is a very tall order and one which our police department, under the command of Commissioner Kelly, deserves great praise for having accomplished.  Undoubtedly they have gotten assistance from the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security and from various community watchdogs but since we have not had a repeat of 9/11 since then, we should all be eminently grateful for the success of their training and the bravery of New York City’s police corps.

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Mabul (The Flood) is an award winning Israeli film that has just opened this year’s Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

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     Name a 21rst century movie about a famous, outstanding British woman suffering from Alzheimer’s with a devoted husband played by the noted British actor Jim Broadbent.  “Iris” you say correctly, referring to the 2001 film about the author Iris Murdoch - but wait, here’s another that fits exactly the same description.  “The Iron Lady,” starring Meryl Streep as a demented Margaret Thatcher and Jim Broadbent as her loyal spouse has so much wrong with it that perhaps its reprisal of another scenario is the least of its sins.  Nevertheless, it bears mention since the decision to cast a bio-pic about England’s first woman prime-minister in the context of her doddering senility is not only wrong-headed but derivative to boot.

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     I’ve often thought that reviewers should attend screenings in which the credits are withheld until after they have critiqued the film;  perhaps there would be more honest responses if people didn’t know what big names were attached.  Both the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal gave rave reviews to “Young Adult,” a confused film written by Diablo Cody and directed by Ivan Reitman, the winning duo of “Juno,” a very good previous movie which deserved all its accolades.  In “Young Adult,” we start with a former prom queen, played by a far too beautiful Charlize Theron, who is clearly on her way down, fueling her descent with generous amounts of alcohol and self-deception.  A childless, bitter divorcee at 37, she impulsively decides to return to Mercury, the small town where she once was the big fish, to recapture a gloried past, personified by her high school boyfriend, now married and a new father.  Along the way, she meets the man who once occupied the school locker next to hers, now a crippled victim of a misguided hate crime who serves as her drinking buddy and her voice of clarity and conscience.

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     I’ve never understood why students and adults today carry backpacks that can hold enough for a weekend camping trip whereas my septuagenarian generation carried briefcases that had 1/4 the volume.  When we boarded subways and buses, our bookbags were either held discreetly at our sides or in our arms - either way, we were in control of them.  If you’ve been on public transportation during any rush hour, you know how many times you’ve been banged on the head or the body by someone’s backpack torpedoing thru a crowded vehicle, its owner totally oblivious to its collateral damage.  A simple rule insisting that people flip their backpacks into frontpacks before boarding any transportation would greatly reduce the hazard of bruising and its resultant animosity.  If people could see where their oversized packs were aimed, and if they were forced to make eye-contact with their targets, we’d undoubtedly increase the safety and civility quotient of our city.  I know that some of you are saying it would be difficult to make people comply, but we quickly learned to pick up our dog poop and to stop blowing our smoke into public faces and spaces - it’s now time for reforming backpack attacks.

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     Let it not go unrecorded that the New York Times did respect the mourning period for Evelyn Lauder before launching a front page non-story about how the Lauder Family shelters its enormous wealth.  Even the Times had enough dignity to think twice after raking in all that money from paid obituary notices and full page ads in memory of the woman who put breast cancer front and center on the philanthropic map.  No, the Lauders haven’t done anything illegal or corrupt;  yes, they have taken advantage of the all the ways our government provides for people to get deductions and manage their businesses and estates, much the same as the Sulzberger, Soros, Kennedy and Clinton families undoubtedly have.  Though the Times may not have hacked in to anyone’s cell phone to get this information, the front page huge and brooding headshot of Ronald Lauder in front of his 135 million dollar Klimt comes from the same management directives as any Murdoch tabloid:  make the subject look powerful, ominous and suspiciously evil…..

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     I asked Google for information about athletes who have fathered many children by different women and was bowled over when numerous pages of results appeared.  To summarize the first few websites, here is a partial list of the top offenders:     Calvin Murphy - 14 illegitimate children by 9 women;   Travis Henry - 9 kids by 9 women;   Antonio Cromaartie - 9 kids by 8 women;   Jason Caffey - 8 kids by 7 women;   Shawn Kemp - 7 kids by 6 women;   Derrick Thomas - 7 kids by 5 women.   There are more than 70 other names with less dramatic numbers - fewer than 5 illegitimate children per athlete, but by any yardstick of measurement, these are staggering statistics for people who are heroes to a vast majority of American boys and men.  Their reputation as deadbeat dads doesn’t hurt their careers or their fan base, yet the role models they project to youth are surely as dangerous as tobacco to the 70% of African-American women who are single mothers.

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     The Occupy Wall Street Performance is a perfect example of what happens when people in charge deign to make tough decisions promptly and put their collective fingers to the wind instead.  At the outset, Mayor Bloomberg wholeheartedly supported the encampment under the rubric of freedom of speech and assembly.  Despite the fact that the squatters at Zuccotti Park had hijacked private property, the mayor insisted that their right to protest trumped all other considerations.  As the weeks wore on and the mayor realized that his refusal to exercise his authority had succeeded in growing the numbers of Woodstockers, he devised a plan to get the squatters out under the guise of health and sanitation.  Overnight, that plan was sacked as the mayor caved once again, letting the squatters clean up after themselves, rather than risk their ire at being even temporarily displaced.  For weeks on end, the neighborhood was swamped with crowds of onlookers, sympathizers, hangers-on, the homeless and special interest groups exploiting the situation for their own agendas.  Local stores and businesses were sorely affected - one restauranteur had to lay off 20% of his staff because foot traffic was diminished by the barricades lining Wall Street.  Eventually, even the mayor began to acknowledge that other people in the city had rights that needed to be protected as well.  The matter was taken up by Community Board 1.

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     Homeless people are routinely swept off the streets  for disobeying city laws against loitering.  If they borrowed some signs from the squatters of Zucotti Park and claimed to be protesting some inequality, they might earn the same leniency from our mayor to live on the street for an indefinite period of time.  Just hold a sign and you’ll be fine seems to be his criterion.  Mayor Mike claims that the  Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are simply expressing their freedom of speech and so long as their conduct remains within the law, they are free to do so without interference from authority.  This is the same big-hearted mayor who wouldn’t invite religious leaders to the 9/11 Memorial in order to enforce the separation of church and state, and the same man whose fine analytical mind concluded that anyone opposed to the Ground Zero Mosque was a bigot who dis-respected our constitutional freedom of worship.  The Occupy Wall Street-ers have inhabited a privately owned park for a lmost a month, during which time they have appropriated its use solely for themselves.  They have trashed it along with the bathrooms of neighboring restaurants and stores whose business has been sorely impacted by this invasion of hundred of free loaders enjoying the balmy weather and this year’s version of Woodstock.  The cost of maintaining extra police on duty round the clock is borne by all NYC taxpayers;  the inconvenience of living near these noisy squatters is borne unfairly and exclusively by the residents of Tribeca and the Financial District.

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     For a brief moment after 9/11, America, jolted by the shock of the assault, seemed to suddenly reclaim the values that had previously sparked its greatness.  Our celebrity-infested media discarded its usual triviality in deference to the heroic valor of men in uniform.  Firemen and policemen were restored to a place of honor in our society when all New Yorkers showered them with boundless gratitude and appropriate awe, while the rest of the nation joined in solidarity.  There seemed to be hope for a significant culture change for the better, with a citizenry reminded of the challenges of war and the incredible regard for bravery in action.

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     It isn’t hard to find Jews who will identify with their enemies under the rubric of their allegiance to liberal thought.  Recently, there was the holocaust survivor granny who had sailed on the first flotilla and re-enrolled for this year’s aborted cruise.  She was concerned about the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza (high on the international list of politically correct causes), yet unconcerned about the fate of Jewish victims of Hamas missiles and terror attacks (high on the list of politically incorrect causes).  Jewish celebrities and entertainers will cancel their performances in Israel, yet perform for Arab leaders who believe in stoning women and homosexuals and killing Jews.  Jewish academicians, writers and artists will call for boycotts of Israel while ignoring the mass slaughter by Muslims of Africans and Asians and their acts of terrorism throughout the world.

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     Throughout the news this weekend, there were accounts of rape, violence, homicide bombing and the terrors of war committed by Muslims in their own countries as well as others.  On Sunday, June 26th, an article in IsraelNationalNews.com reported that in Norway in 2010, there were 86 documented cases of assault-rape - they were all perpetrated by Muslim men on Norwegian women.  The Sunday Times reported the following news:  Car Bomb Leaves at Least 20 Dead At Hospital in Eastern Afghanistan;  Iraqi Feud Brings Government to Standstill;  It is not clear that the Taliban want to negotiate or who even represents the organization….the administration now recognizes that a final American withdrawal depends on a political settlement with the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic movement equated closely with the murderous ideology of Al Qaeda;  The Department of Defense has identified 1,620 American service members who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations.

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     It seems that Anthony Weiner goofed by not hiring a top professional p.r. firm that specializes in damage control for the walking stupid.  He may still end up doing that but it’s a pricey proposition and if he wants to go the cheaper route, I have ten suggestions:

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     Now that Oprah’s talk show has finally stopped molding America’s character, perhaps we can admit that it has left some serious casualties in its wake.  Foremost among them was her endorsement of the circus of public apologies - the secular ritual that replaced the private Catholic confessional and spawned a generation of Americans vying with each other to gain absolution by admittance to the culture of rehab.  The most recent exponent, 46 year old Anthony Weiner, first tried the familiar tactics of dodging, lying and attacking the press before dramatically changing course and hoping that America would respond better to a tearful admission of weakness with the suggestion that he might be someone requiring “clinical” assistance in the near future.  In Oprah’s world, wrongdoers gain our sympathy by owning up to their peccadilloes and humbly seeking outside help to straighten out their inside problems.

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     Enough has already been written about the outrageous behavior of the NYC cop and the movie-star governator - there’s little left to say except that one claims to be innocent of the charges and we’ll soon know whether a jury concurs.  Less has been said about the women - a housemaid and a young woman with an obvious alcohol problem.  The latter was so drunk on the night in question that the taxi driver had to call for police assistance to get her out of his cab in which she had already vomited.  Friends who were questioned admitted that she was known to be a heavy drinker - who knows whether police had been called to help her in the past?  I haven’t read anything pejorative about her repeated loss of responsibility for herself and how disturbing it is to be accusing someone of a very serious crime while admitting that you were too drunk to remember significant details of that night.  If she was raped, her drunkenness doesn’t diminish the heinousness of that assault.  But what if she wasn’t actually raped?  And what if a man who thought he was having consensual sex with a flirtatious, boozy, half-dressed woman spends many years in jail because of her blurred memory of what happened?  The policeman deserves to be fired for several violations of the Department code of behavior but that is separate from the question of his guilt as a rapist.  The law protects the identity of this young woman so that her reputation remains intact while the accused is splashed across newspaper headlines, t.v. news and the internet before his guilt has been established.

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     The paradigm of psychology rests on the notion that introspection will lead to a better understanding of what our problems truly are so that we can improve our skills in coping with them.  It further insists that since we are unable to control other people’s thoughts and conduct, the most pragmatic way to deal with relationships is to alter our own to a healthier advantage.  Though the field may have begun in Europe, it found its most fertile expression in America where it paired auspiciously with our myth of self-invention and re-invention as often as necessary.  There’s nothing wrong with introspection until such navel-gazing blinds us to what’s happening not under our noses but in the surrounding larger world.  Writ large, this explains why American liberal thinking, obsessed with scrutinizing the flaws of our own economic and political systems, can find sufficient blame in our malfeasance to obscure the larger issues of other ideologies growing steadily, menacingly and independently of our sins.

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     Like millions of Sixty Minutes fans, I tuned in to watch the interview with Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent who was prepared to speak out about her rape by the crowd of Muslim men celebrating their Egyptian Spring.  In the midst of a spirited crowd, Ms. Logan was separated from the rest of her crew, including a bodyguard, and soon feared death as up to a hundred men turned violent, ripped off her clothes, tore at her limbs, tried to tear her scalp from her skull and manually invaded her body cavities for almost a half hour until she was finally rescued by an Egyptian police officer.  When she was asked by correspondent Scott Pelley what she remembered immediately prior to the crowd of cheering men morphing into a horde of vicious wolves, she said quietly - word had spread that she was a Jew and possibly an Israeli.  Ms. Logan, in fact, is neither but that small rumor was enough of a spark to ignite a firestorm in a previously non-violent group.  Interestingly, Pelley had no follow-up questions about this inordinate hatred for Jews, people with whom Egypt has shared a peace treaty dating back to 1979.  Nor did Ms. Logan draw any associations between her experience as a reporter in the middle-east with that of Daniel Pearl whose actual Judaism led to his televised decapitation by his Muslim captors.

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     For those of us who didn’t realize it before, the 21,000 Chasidim in the community of Kiryas Joel are a serious threat to our economy, at least by the standards of the New York Times which featured a front page article, accompanied by a color photo of their children on April 21rst.  These rascals in training are the main reason that the community qualifies for government assistance:  the birth rate averages six children to a family which means that even families which earn more than the poverty cutoff may be entitled to food stamps and other benefits.  Sam Roberts, the reporter, notes that there are plenty of cars and bikes and carriages in the community and nobody looks bedraggled, so without actually stating that these people are cheating the public, he wink-winks his readers as to what’s really going on.  We all know that those guys with yarmulkes are genetically gifted at extracting money in dubious ways -  just look at the swarm of little boys with their little right hands in grab-ready position.  Just look at the infants in their bassinets on page 22 - you can almost see the legal tender floating through their tender little dreams.

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     The featured obituaries in the NYTimes of April 7th review the lives of three Jewish men, ages 85, 86 and 90 who all were born and raised in Brooklyn and all went on to great achievement in their respective fields.  Baruch Blumberg (85), became a Nobel laureate in the field of biochemistry but was also a medical anthropologist.  He discovered the virus that causes hepatitis B and helped to develop the vaccine against it.  He was a graduate of Far Rockaway High School which has the distinction of schooling two other Jewish Nobel prize-winning alumni - Richard Feynman and Burton Richter.  W.H. Prusoff (Bill, 90) was a pharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine who, along with a partner, developed the first anti- AIDS drug.  Prior to that, he synthesized a drug to treat infant keratitis, a major cause of blindness.  For his work on these and other drugs, Dr. Prusoff is referred to as the father of anti-viral chemotherapy.  His parents were immigrants who ran a small grocery store so Bill undoubtedly went through the Brooklyn public school system until he went to college.  Stanley Bleifeld (86), a sculptor whose works are found in American museums as well as the Navy Memorial in Washington, was similarly a product of the Brooklyn school system.  He grew up to be a man who sculpted military men and the great baseball players who are immortalized in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

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     When it comes to provocateurs who are anti-American, the bastions of liberalism march in lockstep to defend whatever freedom is at stake.  Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance?  Freedom of speech.  Nazi march through a community of survivors?  Same and warum nicht?  Building a mosque at Ground Zero?  Freedom of religion.  Defacing Christian or Jewish symbols in artwork?  Art trumps religion so long as it’s not Danish cartoons or a South Park show lampooning Mohammed.  Publishing the Pentagon Papers or Wiki-Leaks?  Freedom of the press.  Strangely, when the provocation comes from the right in the person of Terry Jones, now labeled the Koran-burning pastor, the civil liberties guardians are silent.  Where is Michael Bloomberg to declaim that if we don’t continue in our tradition of free expression, the terrorists will have won?  Where are the cadre of celebrities usually trotted out to protest censorship of any kind?  We know how many times Americans have burned flags and draft cards and used patriotic symbols as objects of degradation - all part of our unrivalled liberty.  What, besides kowardice, makes the Koran eligible for exception from the rule?

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     The 21rst century in urban America has been a decade in which we have seen daily life grow more problematic for most people.  In addition to the macro problems of security against terrorism, economic distress, unemployment, downturn in the housing market, overcrowding in public schools, rising cost of college tuition and health care, there have been numerous “smaller” problems, only in the sense that they don’t affect as large a swath of the population.  These include the rapid growth in the rate of autism and learning disabilities, ADHD in the adult population, bullying and obesity as problems serious enough for presidential attention, sexting, harassment and other cyber/abuses achieving levels of criminality and the proliferation of support groups to include almost all imaginable deviations or afflictions.  Though this last item may not be a problem in itself, it reflects how many types of behavior are now classified as meriting help.  In other words, our lives have been framed in terms of dysfunction and distress.  Selfish people are narcissists; promiscuous people are sex addicts;  moody people are bi-polar and sadness has become depression.  These are not easy times to be alive.

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     Aside from the monumental crush of people tragically killed or missing in Japan, there were some other off-putting numbers to consider in this week’s news.  Let’s start with the man who killed a NYC cop while he was being apprehended in a domestic violence episode.  George Villanueva has a record of 30 prior arrests, has been reported 20 times for domestic violence, has been imprisoned 3 times for burglary.  What more is necessary to keep a man with this profile out of circulation?

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     “More hospitals and medical businesses in many states are adopting strict policies that make HIV/AIDS a reason to turn away job applicants, saying they want to increase worker productivity, reduce health costs and encourage healthier living….There is no reliable data on how many businesses have adopted such policies.  But people tracking the issue say there are enough examples to suggest the policies are becoming more mainstream, and in some states courts have upheld the legality of refusing to employ HIV/AIDS sufferers.”   This is adapted from a front page article in Friday’s Times by A.G. Sulzberger

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      Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has more diacritical marks over his last name than the length of it can handle, an apt metaphor for what’s wrong with his latest film.  As mere mortals, filmgoers have a quota for how much tragedy they can absorb before zoning out and wishing they were watching Schindler’s List instead of Biutiful.  Just as the suffering of a few people affects us more deeply than seeing statistics of wholesale slaughter, the piling on of terminal cancer, mental illness, child abuse and abandonment, environmental pollution, slave labor, exploitation and corruption, immigrant alienation, adulterous betrayals, the decadence of the west and the accidental murder of two dozen people effectively suffocate us so that we don’t feel any of it after the first hour.  Lest you think I’ve exaggerated, I’ve left out the bedwetting, adult incontinence, chemotherapy, excrutiating pain, alcoholism and drug addiction that are also interwoven in this overstuffed tapestry of man’s fate.

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The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal featured a front page article written by Amy Chua, a Yale Law professor who is plugging her forthcoming book which I won’t plug for her.  The article that is excerpted from her book is titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and the editor’s subtitle is “Can a regimen of no playdates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?”  Actually, that question is inappropriate because it’s not Ms. Chua’s intention to create happy kids - her focus is on raising  successful, high achieving kids and by objective standards of accomplishment (performing at Carnegie Hall), she seems to have succeeded. This begs the question of whether genetically bright and musically gifted children were programmed for success with or without Ms. Chua’s draconian methods of parenting.  Many other talented musicians have sprung from households where the provisos did not include the rigid restrictions Ms. Chua imposed and many other high-achieving students have succeeded without the Asian philosophy of child-rearing. The notion that endless practice is essential for high performance has been exhibited by people as far removed from Amy Chua as the parents of:  Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, Tonya Harding, Yitzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman and countless others.

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      In Mike Leigh’s newest slice of British life, the filmmaker does more than present us with a close scrutiny of ordinary people, some of whom live lives of quiet desperation.  He stacks the deck with so many heavy-handed signifiers that the film takes on the aura of smug sanctimony. The long-married couple who stand as the fulcrum for the other characters are Tom and Gerry and yes, they are cartoons.  We know they’re really good people because she has long grey hair and buck teeth; he is bearded and spectacled and both are clothed in comfortable post-hippie garments and shoes.  She is a social worker/counselor and he is a geologist but their avocation of gardening and growing their own food speaks to their worth - they’re the salt of the earth. Unlike their animated predecessors, Tom and Gerry never fight;  they are always loving and affectionate towards each other and to the other people in the film.

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    I can’t recall another New York City mayor who matches Michael Bloomberg for arrogance and disregard of the rules of the game.  The list of his self-serving reversals started with his switching political parties from liberal democrat to ersatz Republican, then back to Independent.  His changes of heart continued with his arm-twisting the City Council to extend a third term for him to be able to lead our city through our national economic crisis without regard for the two previous referendums in which New Yorkers clearly voted for term limits and his adamant support of that.  At first, Bloomberg welcomed the advent of a local trial for Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the same downtown part of the city so devastated by  KSM’s handiwork, claiming that this would show the superiority of our legal system.  After several other politicians changed their minds with the realization that this would be a security nightmare costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars, the mayor too jumped ship, arguing that this was too expensive and disruptive to contemplate.  Bloomberg seized the opportunity to grandstand his support for the Ground Zero Mosque before the Landmarks Preservation Commission had an opportunity to evaluate the project for themselves.  Of course since the members are appointed by the mayor, there may not have been a good chance of an independent ruling but one should at least give committees the benefit of the doubt.  That was precluded once Bloomberg, posed before the Statue of Liberty, proclaimed with maximum fanfare that building the mosque precisely at its Ground Zero location was essential for the preservation of the values American hold true.  He added that contrary popular opinion could only be interpreted as religious bigotry against Muslims.  As expected, the Landmarks Commission found no redeeming landmark status in 45 Park Place, the Italian Renaissance Palazzo built in the 1850’s and bought by Muslims to serve as the Cordoba Mosque.

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