Hate Thine Enemy

My early childhood memory seems like a piece of Swiss cheese, more holes than substance. One small and vague morsel remains which concerns some sort of a celebration in the basement of my elementary school. It may have been an end of the school year celebration. Whatever, for a few hours we got to play games. Between logic and arithmetic, I now deduce that the war (WWII) was still on and while I would have been too young to remember very many details, it seems to me that one of the games was to throw darts at three balloons tricked up to represent Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. I suppose that every nation at war feels the need to demonize the enemy. It wasn't difficult to demonize Hitler but my recollection of these figures was that they were more ridiculous than scary. That's another common and useful tactic, one I sometimes dabble in myself. Making the enemy ridiculous may be even more effective than making him the personification of evil.

I don't recall a particularly large campaign of this sort in the major wars of my lifetime, but my mother did tell me of how the windows were smashed in my German great-grandfather's food shop during WWI, how sauerkraut was officially renamed liberty cabbage, and how my mother's German lessons were curtailed at the time. When WWII came along, there was much less of that sort of thing in the US, unless you were of Japanese origin. In the Korean and Vietnamese wars, I can't remember either the Korean or Vietnamese people being subjected to scorn, but of course we were fighting both with and against indistinguishable people in their civil wars.

Counter-intuitively, it seems that domestic battles lead to more elevated demonization than do foreign wars, where both sides tend to go about their business with more detachment. When I went to college in the south, the residue of resentment against people from the north seemed stronger ninety years after the Civil War than that felt toward the Germans and the Japanese who had been bitter and deadly enemies just a decade before. I've never been to Ireland and I doubt that I could tell a Protestant from a Catholic there and yet, somehow the Irish could, and the violence and bitterness lingered. For that matter, I also couldn't tell a Lebanese Muslim from a Lebanese Christian but they seem often unable restrain their hostility towards each other. Shiite-Sunni violence is another of those mysteries. When I moved to Rome in the 70's I experienced that kind of battle up close. Violent hoodlums battled on the streets and kept scrawling graffiti all over the city. Their slogans and their colors differed, but otherwise the militants of the right and the militants of the left didn't seem much different.

Back in the USA we have people of all sorts of nationalities, races and religions. There have certainly been battles but we're so mixed up by now that it keeps becoming harder to draw the lines of otherness. And yet, they do sometimes emerge. Many years ago, I was on assignment in Miami for a couple of months. I found a group of congenial people to socialize with, in and around the motel in Coconut Grove where I was staying, and I was thoroughly enjoying my Florida sojourn. One day the news came of the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the motel bar, comments started flowing freely with the booze, such as, “that bastard finally got what was coming to him”. Suddenly, in front of my eyes, Sam, the voluptuous barmaid that I had lusted after, was transformed into a monster. The place seethed with venomous creatures who only the day before had seemed like normal people. I just wanted to be out of there and never see any of those people again. Fortunately, I was repatriated to New York after only a few more sullen and angry days.

Our Civil War has been over for a long time and one might have hoped we would be getting along by now. Maybe it's not as bad as it seems. After all, I do live in Italy, so perhaps I don't get to see a more complete picture, since my view of the country is basically through family, friends, visitors and the media. Nevertheless, a few days ago I was surfing through the news channels in search of some bit of news when I came across the Gang of Five, or something like that, on Fox News. One older conservative fellow played the role of lion tamer in the midst of a circle of wild and vicious creatures who appeared not to have been fed yet. Except for their aggressive demeanor, the men were nondescript, but the women on Fox are always young and good looking, and these were no exception. The foxes almost make one think of airline stewardesses in the early days of commercial flight, all young, pretty, slim and single, back in the days before age discrimination law suits. One of the women on the show had had her fangs polished by working in the Little George Bush Administration, defending the indefensible. I don't know where the other one came from but she was shapely and exotic, and if she hadn't come from the adult entertainment sector, she certainly could have a future there if Fox goes down. All in all, the crew seem more a pack of rabid ferrets than lions or tigers. They were constantly on the attack. They routinely spoke about President Obama in terms more hostile than ever heard in the American media about the likes of Tojo or Mussolini, closer in tone to that used for the late Col. Ghaddafi or the current President of Iran. While the President of the United States received his share of gratuitous insults, the villain du jour was Chief Justice John Roberts, of all people. Yes, the same John Roberts who led the Supreme Court to rule that corporations are people and money is speech, after pledging judicial restraint at his confirmation hearings. John Roberts had not done his God-given duty by striking down Obamacare, the health care plan borrowed from Mitt Romney. He was clearly a traitor, not to be trusted, and the occasion of his defection from plutocrat orthodoxy had made the need to appoint yet more radical members to the court all the more apparent.

These people are paid (very well I suspect) to foment hatred and they are masters at it. Just as an Ian Paisley could rouse his rabble to attack Catholic neighborhoods while raising the level of hatred amongst the Catholics for his dreary flock, the Foxters manage to raise the blood lust, or at least the blood pressure, of their Tea Party faithful while producing feelings of disbelief and disgust in any outsiders who wander into the tent. I'm not especially prone to hating people, though I may succumb too easily to disdain or contempt. Neither working in difficult conditions in Saudi Arabia nor having my NYC office destroyed by the 9/11 terrorist attack ever managed to get me to hate Arabs, just as hearing way too many racist slurs directed at every imaginable minority in my childhood never left much of an impression. I even married one of the hated Catholics. Getting me to hate a beautiful woman is an especially arduous and improbable task but, when it comes to stirring up hate, these people at Fox are not to be underestimated. Watching that show was like another Martin Luther King Assassination Day all over again. Every day on Fox has something of that feel.

I don't know how long it will take the country to get over the increasingly bitter oligarchy/anti-oligarchy struggle. It took more than a century to get over the Civil War, a war which killed more Americans than any other. Slavery had to go. Oligarchy will have to go too, and with it the fascist infrastructure that sustains it. We can hope that it will take less casualties than the abolition of slavery did, but pretending that the problem isn't there, or that it will just go away by itself, is no solution.

The effectiveness of the Gang of Foxes, and the many others in their cage, is disturbing. Hatred is a bad thing but indifference isn't much better. Should King Kong miraculously return to New York and throw the whole Gang of Five through a plate glass window on the 32nd floor of the Fox HQ building, I confess that while I might be curious about all that broken glass, I doubt that I'd give a fig about the collateral damage.

Whores, Johns and Pimps

Who do the whores work for?

• They provide services to the johns.
• They work to procure money for the pimps.
• They work for themselves and , if lucky, get to keep some of the money for themselves.

Their loyalties are to whom? Clearly, they suffer from a compound conflict of interest. In my four decades in Italy, the country that gave a name to nepotism, I've marveled at Italians' inability to grasp the concept of conflict of interest. Otherwise, they never could have elected a Berlusconi, or even permitted him to run for office. There are many otherwise intelligent Italians who cannot grasp this, but it's not always simple territory. Triangulated conflicts of interest are hard to control or regulate and the nature of the conflicts is not always transparent.

We've got lots of whoring going on in Umbria. A few years ago we even had a whore-related murder right here in Acqualoreto. One john was murdered and another (presumed) john was accused, tried, convicted of the murder and then acquitted on appeal. No mention of a pimp! Was this just traditional Italian obliviousness to conflict of interest? We'll never know.

Any whore, once paid, may just run off with the john's credit cards while his pants are off. In a similar vein, a pro quarterback who professes total dedication to his team, may decide to hold out for more money and miss training camp, thus hurting his team's chances. A corporate CEO, appointed and paid to work for the benefit of the company's shareholders, may award himself salary and benefits so high as to damage the financial well-being of that company. These are all inner conflicts on the part of one party in a two party deal, a matter of personal integrity. We all face such conflicts somewhere along the line. The real conflicts of interest begin when a third party gets involved.

Whores may face inner conflicts. They may come to like their johns or their pimps too well, or be too disgusted by them for the good of the business. Johns may be conflicted about whether they're doing something wrong, being taken advantage of by the whores, or taking advantage of them. Pimps instead, are unlikely to suffer such misgivings. The entrepreneurial spirit that we assiduously strive to instill in our best and brightest youth is exemplified in its purest state in the pimping profession. The profit motive is unsullied by ethical concerns, legal considerations, pride in one's reputation, or nostalgic personal feelings about the welfare of clients, workers, or the community at large.

Good whores provide a service that makes the johns happy, and their work may even bring in a respectable income. However, they often end up badly after being maltreated by their pimps. As for the pimps, they seem to make out pretty well. None of us wants to see them prosper, just as we recoil at seeing bank CEOs prosper the way they have in recent years, but maybe that's just because we're neither pimps nor banksters.

The triangular relationship is remarkably similar to the situation with our political representatives. Let's just say that they're all whores. (Now, before politicians start a class action libel suit against me, I want to spell it out for them that I'm speaking metaphorically. I do not accuse them of selling sex.) We the constituents are the johns and our whores are well-paid to provide us services, such as writing laws, which hopefully provide extensive public services while providing us with generous tax cuts, or bringing unneeded defense contractors to our districts. But we, the johns, didn't put them on that prominent spot on the street, or slick up their public image. Their pimps created their media display windows and, while our best whores make all the right noises and try to make us feel good, at the end of the day most of our money ends up in the pockets of the pimps, whether they're called media moguls, bank chairmen, or simply oligarchs.

I wouldn't want to push this analogy too far but the only place I see it breaking down is that, unlike our traditional whores, who are often beaten, sold and abused by their pimps, our political whores seem to be very well taken care of by their pimps. When their usefulness in capitol corridors wanes, they are sent out on K Street as senior citizen whores working for lobbying firms, think tanks, Faux News or Pimp Foundations. Unlike their traditional sisters, their income keeps increasing with age and experience.

A current trend in government is to bring in third parties to provide public services paid for by the government. This is happening in everything from parking meters to schools and, most alarmingly, in the military, where mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan are now as numerous as our official troops. It's called privatization. I suggest that it could better be described as bringing in the pimps. Our troops used to do our dirty work for us. They worked cheap but we honored them with patriotic songs and medals. We still pay the bill but now half of them are working for pimps who see to it that they get paid more and decide on the terms of their service.

Prostitution is said to be the world's oldest profession and it's unlikely to go away. Many social critics have suggested that the whores should be allowed to ply their trade while the pimps should be suppressed. I would add that this approach makes sense to me for our political whores as well. Simple conflicts of interest may be a fact of life but triangular ones usually lead to bad results. They should be avoided or eliminated.

Roots of Spring

After an abysmal winter, the arrival of spring, with its inspiring explosion of color in the countryside, has helped alleviate the depression fostered by too much time reading the news. On top of that, a series of fortuitous coincidences has brought me closer to my roots.

Rummaging back through my old high school yearbook, I find little mention of my activities there. While more ambitious kids were listed as being on the Student Council, the varsity football team, the Spanish or German club, the yearbook staff, or an endless number of other organizations devised to allow each student the opportunity to compile an impressive resumè of extracurricular activities, I was dutifully recorded as having been a door holder, and my future plans were listed as “undecided”. We each had a quotation affixed to our name. Mine read “I wish I might show the world how to enjoy itself”. Whether this was written by a magically prescient classmate, or was simply a comment generated by my precocious tendency to abuse alcohol, I've never been sure. Since my academic performance was little better than my extracurricular curriculum, it's a wonder that I did get admitted to the college of my choice, but then, that college did have something of a reputation as a party school, and perhaps they saw in me some potential. Indeed, while never destined to be student body president, I did get to be social chairman of my fraternity. In that capacity I tried to organize theme parties and was routinely frustrated by the members failing to show up in sufficiently imaginative costumes. It's gone on that way over a lifetime, in which I've encouraged people to cut loose on Fire Island, go to jazz festivals, and visit Umbria. In recent years I've pushed our growing contingent of foreign residents to get together at the Circolo of Acqualoreto every Wednesday for a happy hour. While it's a hit or miss operation, it's proven more successful than some previous efforts, such as my ill-fated attempt to organize a bocce tournament in the village. Only people from Ireland, Australia and Bermuda participated in significant numbers. Actually, they are also active supporters of the Happy Hour. Very few Italians!

Every now and then, there is some unanticipated success. Once upon a time in my first grade class there was a little girl named Barbara Boo Boo Bagg. She was the cutest girl in the class. As she matured, BooBoo became simply Boo and she remained the cutest girl in the school. While I hadn't seen her for four decades, I have spoken with her, and her affable husband Dick, numerous times by phone, always suggesting that they visit Umbria. One year, on her birthday, I even emailed her a digital file of “BooBoo's Birthday” by Thelonious Monk, whose own daughter Barbara was also known as BooBoo. Miracle of miracles- this year Boo and Dick came to see Umbria. I suggested they come to visit us on a Wednesday so that they could come to our Happy Hour, but after a morning of sight-seeing and an afternoon of eating, drinking wine and talking, Boo was too concerned about their navigating the narrow and sinuous roads back to their lodgings on Mt. Subasio in the dark. We had a good turnout that evening and it was a shame that they missed it. At a certain age, I suppose we should all learn such prudence, and I pledge to work at it sometime soon.

At another of our Happy Hours last September, I met a man named Peter Prinssen, who was a guest of some of our Dutch neighbors up the hill in Morruzze. Having noted my Dutch name, Peter wrote to ask if I would be interested in knowing more about my family history. Apparently all this sort of information is now on the internet in Holland. I sent him what I already knew and in short order he got back to me with considerably more detailed information on the De Graaf family, as well as some information about my grandmother's family in Friesland. More may still be coming. The miracle of Google Maps brought me pictures of both places of family origin and renewed curiosity about why they left. Did somebody do something bad? I suppose most emigration is about economic opportunity. Why else would anybody move to to Houston for example, or why from a the tidy village of Goedereede on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee to Paterson, New Jersey? For that matter, my neighbors and I now live in what we regard as an earthly paradise, only because the area was abandoned after WWII by people fleeing the drudgery of work in the fields for new opportunities working in urban factories.

One of our neighbors here, Lin Widmann, has a daughter Christy who lives in Holland. Last week, between them, and with the help of the Circolo, they arranged a choral concert in the church of Acqualoreto. The group, Doulce Memorire, directed by Felix van den Hombergh, is from Haarlem and was starting a concert tour of Umbria, singing works by Dutch composers from medieval times to the present. The voices of the twelve men and twelve women of the chorus were merged, contrasted and woven together brilliantly. Much of the music, at least on first hearing, didn't seem to me memorable in its own right, but served as a vehicle for the beauty of the voices. During a brief interval, four members of the chorus played a series of wind instruments, three flutes and a bassoon, I believe. The counterpoint was delightful. Following that came the highlight of the concert, an absolutely mesmerizing rendition of Joep Franssens' modern piece, “Harmony of the Spheres”. It's a long droning work with rising and falling voices and pulsing sounds generated by the close harmonies. The acoustics of the church worked well with this music and the effect was spectacular.

After the concert, the members of the chorus walked through the village, paused for a drink at the Circolo bar and went on to a supper, provided by the Circolo, at the ex- school. I have fond memories of my Dutch forebears but if truth be told, they were a dour group. Not these! During the long meal, various groups of them would spontaneously break into song. It was a very happy evening for all of us there. The only slightly sad note of the evening was that the very enthusiastic audience was not a bit larger.

Three days later, to celebrate May Day and the fifth anniversary of the Circolo, another choral group of the same size, the Coro Nomantum from Rome, gave a concert in the piazza. The director was pleased by the acoustics of the piazza, but a piazza is neither a church nor an auditorium and a little of the force and the majesty of the sound is lost in singing the traditional music outdoors. They sung works dating from 1200 through the 1500's to Mozart before turning to modern songs such as Paul Simon's Sound of Silence, Twist and Shout and Barbaram. There was a novelty number about cats and birds in which the lead cat was a girl wearing sunglasses which turned bright green when she raised her head to the light as she meowed. Nice effect! The group has fun with the pop songs but their best work was the Mozart. This concert was well attended, especially considering the weather, which had threatened rain all day but fortunately held off. There was free food following the concert, the universal secret to boosting attendance at events which should, but don't always, attract people on their own merits.

Two days later we went to another choral concert, this time in Todi, by the Chorus of the University of Perugia. This was another return to our roots in a sense because two of our daughters sang in this group while at the University and we still knew a few of the participants. Again, the program was varied, with a progression somewhat similar to that of the Nomentum concert. It differed in that it featured a soprano soloist and the chorus consisted of twenty-two women and eleven men. Some numbers were sung by the women alone or the men alone or just by the soloist. They opened with Tourdion by P. Attaignant, a piece which showed off the counterpoint between the sections better than anything else in the concert. An English drinking song sung by the men alone didn't sound robust enough for a drinking song, and I'm not an enthusiast of the music of Donizetti or Bellini. Verdi's Coro dei Schiavi Ebrei was splendid, after which they turned to more recent music by Jobim, Gershwin, and the Beach Boys. Yes, this chorus too, did Barbara Ann, or Barbaram as it sounds to me. They were a little livelier with it than the Romans but their best moments with the modern music came with Siyahamba, an African piece which played the male and female voices off against each other very well, and a brilliant arrangement of Ennio Morriconi's music for the film “C'era una Volta il West” The soprano, Elena Vigorito, soared over the combined voices of the chorus to wonderful effect. The arrangement was by the piano player, Francesco Andreucci, a native of Todi. They sang in the Sala del Consiglio, a magnificent room, which is a joy simply to sit in. This was a free concert in this gorgeous room, well publicized in Todi, a city of possibly 15,000 people. There was a bigger crowd at the concert in the piazza of Acqualoreto, population +/- 150. Nevertheless, the small audience was very appreciative. My wife was ecstatic, and wants to bring them to Acqualoreto for a concert. I will try to make it happen.

The saying goes “you can lead a horse to water but you can't make her drink.” That's the story of my life, except that I deal with people, not horses. Getting them to drink isn't usually so hard. Getting them to eat is even easier. It's getting them to listen, where it really gets to be difficult.

Milestones

Time marches on. The odometer of life's journey keeps clicking off the days and the weeks without our taking much notice, but at the end of the year, when the big number changes, we usually pause for a moment to consider what's been gained and what's been lost since the last New Year. Kids are delighted because being a year older confers more privileges; young adults look to the new year with the optimism that it will bring a new love or a better job or some unimagined opportunity. We older folk look upon the onset of another year with more nostalgia, and as much anxiety as optimism. Will this be the last one, or how many more do we have left? Is the world (the economy, the environment, the government) going to self-destruct? And will we be around to see it? Watching vulture capitalists and lunar colonialists participate in the circular firing squad of the US presidential primary campaign does nothing to alleviate the anxiety.

This January has been particularly loaded with reminders of time's passage. During the month I watched all ten NFL play-off games, several of which were decided by “sudden death overtime”. In reality, all the games were sudden death because all the losing teams were eliminated. Extinct! Next year there will be a Baltimore Ravens team wearing the same black and purple uniforms but it will be a different team, no matter how many current players and coaches return. The team that lost on that missed field goal is gone. We all cling to the the comforting fiction that there will be another chance, maybe next year. That team, along with thirty others, lost its chance.

The day before New Years Eve we went to the funeral of a village fixture, a 94 year-old woman who spent her last years shuffling around the piazza bestowing blessings upon anyone she encountered. The blessings came with questions such as “Do you like Acqualoreto?” although her impaired hearing precluded any possibility of her comprehending the reply. After four decades here, being a foreigner, I was still regularly posed the same question. It felt like she would be doing this forever.

January brought the news that the brightest kid in my high school class had died after a three year battle with Alzheimer's. I had a series of injections of Vitamin B-12 to correct a deficiency, which doctors suspect could risk leading to a similar outcome. When not visiting medical facilities for shots, tests or physical therapy ourselves, we've been visiting friends recovering in hospitals from largely self-induced ailments.

In one case, we've witnessed the decline and death of a long-time friend who was a regular at our Wednesday foreigners' Happy Hours. A witty and creative person with a wonderfully ironic sense of humor, she was also a fine and sensitive writer, a gourmet cook, a voracious reader, a cat lover, and an organizer of Christmas caroling expeditions, book exchanges and even Halloween celebrations. Best of all, she was one of the few regular readers of, and commentators on, this blog. Unfortunately, she also had a self-destructive side worthy of a rock star or a celebrity starlet. Linda abused alcohol with the best (or worst) of them. Our community, which has many ex-smokers but virtually no ex-drinkers, tends to be tolerant, even when occasionally concerned, regarding that particular vice. It was her unrelenting addition to nicotine that drove her friends away, intensified her solitude, and nudged her health into its downward spiral. In one of her last lucid days, she reminded the woman who had spent years caring for her that her organs were to be donated, to which the woman replied, “but Linda, your eyes, heart, liver and lungs don't even work for you any more. Who's going to take them, or what else is left to donate?” The decline apparently spun faster than she anticipated. Though her intentions seemed kind and generous when expressed in numerous conversations with her friends about her plans to donate her material assets as well as her organs to worthy causes, by the time her sister, her one surviving direct relative, arrived from the other side of the world to see her in the hospital, she was unable or unwilling to inform anyone where her instructions could be found in case the doctors' valiant efforts proved futile.

We've been trying to help her non-Italian-speaking sister and brother-in-law deal with logistical and bureaucratic matters for the past couple of weeks. They need all the help they can get and there is some satisfaction in helping people in such very difficult circumstances. But the inescapable thought arises that the Kafkaesque nightmare that they face could have been avoided. We have gained from this sad fiasco, one powerful lesson.

It's later than you think!

Thanks for the lesson Linda, as well as for all the parties, cookies, blog comments and general zaniness you've brightened our lives with. For the organizational example, not so much.

UPS, Uncle Harry and the paramus of Todi

I wasn't the first in my family to go into architecture. My Uncle Harry had gone to drafting school and started working in an architect's office It didn't last long. Architectural work wasn't particularly remunerative even then but it might have afforded him the appearance of a more dignified calling, something which Uncle Harry couldn't care less about. He wanted to be outdoors. Harry was smarter than people gave him credit for. He thought that being confined to a drawing board under artificial light for forty hours a week was a bad deal with the devil, so he quit and got a job driving a truck for the United Parcel Service.

The Great Falls

That was in the days before Paramus NJ became the world's first and worst agglomeration of shopping centers. My mother, like most other suburban housewives in the area, would take a bus five miles to Paterson, with me in tow, to do her shopping. A few days later a UPS truck, often driven by Uncle Harry, would show up at the house with the clothes, furniture or whatever else my mother had purchased. I liked to go to Paterson. Not so much being dragged around the department stores but sometimes my grandfather would take me to see the firehouse he had worked in, showing me the hook and ladder with steering wheels at the front and the back and the shiny brass poles the firemen slid down from their upstairs sleeping quarters when the alarm sounded. Paterson also had the Great Falls, one of America's larger waterfalls, which just last month became a National Park, with Hinchcliff Stadium, the midget auto racing Mecca, just a stone's throw from the Falls. There were also Chinese restaurants where we could get Chow Mein to take home. There was even a street full of colorful gypsies. My parents warned us about them and when we went by car to Paterson, my father got through that one block of River Street as quickly as possible, making sure the car windows were all closed. That sense of urgency added to the gypsies' appeal but I was very much taken by the bright flaring skirts the women wore, so much more interesting than the dreary clothes of all the “normal people” around. The city had, and still has, a lot of interesting buildings, from the churches and institutional buildings reflecting the Dutch origins of many of the citizens, to the wonderful Victorian era brick industrial buildings. I can't say that as a kid I realized how rich that architecture was but I did sense that there was something there more interesting than in our manicured suburbs.

The Post Office

Everything has changed since then. Uncle Harry retired to Florida to spend his last several decades outdoors tending his grapefruit trees year round. The shopping centers of Paramus metastasized, killing off the department stores and smaller shops in Paterson, while turning housewives and their white collar husbands into part-time truck drivers. Even before the SUV (Shopping Utility Vehicle) had evolved, the monster American sedans and station wagons had the payload of about half a small UPS truck. The department stores of Paterson and Newark, as well as the shops of Hackensack, and even upscale Ridgewood, may have gone out of business, but UPS has only grown bigger. My positive feelings about UPS from Uncle Harry's time took a nosedive a few years ago when they kept leaving notes saying they'd unsuccessfully tried to deliver a package and then later that they had left my consignment of cigars with an unnamed neighbor who couldn't be found. This and their lack of pick-up points open on Saturdays led me to the firm conviction that, besides being more expensive, they are far less reliable than the US Postal Service, although Congress is doing its best to change that by eliminating the Postal Service. But back in the day, UPS provided a valuable service, which I'd like to see restored. In keeping with current economic trends, UPS and their competitors now seem to exist to service large corporations and they appear to be thriving.

A Pedestrian Entrance to Todi

Much as Uncle Harry managed to emigrate to a place in the sun, I too have emigrated to sunnier climes in Italy. Paterson, my birthplace, fell victim to suburban sprawl and urban decay. Here in Umbria we're following the same path, albeit at a slower pace. Medieval towns, such as our neighboring Todi, are seeing the shops on their narrow streets go out of business, as new commercial centers crop up on surrounding plains. Convenience is God and every person, not just every family any more, has a car. Despite soaring gasoline prices (about US$8./US gallon by today's calculation), this is not likely to be reversed any time soon. The tourist traffic, which brings in much of the region's income, will probably diminish as the beautiful town centers go dark. People will continue to go to the supermarkets in their cars. It makes sense. But why must all the other “stuff” that we buy have to be sold in big box warehouse stores that deface the landscape? Smaller shops, accessible on foot in splendid surroundings, can display whatever we need, and unlike shopping on line, we can try on the clothes, handle the objects, and discuss the products with a knowledgeable salesperson. Must we all be truck drivers? For my part I'd rather see an Uncle Harry show up at my door with the stuff I'd seen and bought in an attractive and healthy city.

"Masterpieces On The Way" in Ponterio

Todi is much smaller than Paterson but it has a longer history and deeper culture than Paterson could even imagine. I don't remember anything about Paramus, other than the horrible traffic. I expect that future impressions of Ponterio, the town where the sprawling commercial development is taking place at the bottom of the Todi hill, will be similar. Ponterio is unlikely to be a must see in any guide books that will bring people to town. Paramus isn't so much a place as a condition, and sadly, it exists all over the world. I would even suggest to one of those forums that document additions to the lexicon that “paramus” be considered a term for a zone, neither urban or rural, populated by few human residents but covered by commercial and warehouse buildings, accessed by high speed highways transformed into multilane traffic jams and to which pedestrian access is either highly dangerous or completely forbidden.

My real concern is whether Todi will face the same fate as Paterson. I've heard that Paterson has shown modest signs of a revival. I hope so. But wouldn't it be great if our towns and cities could come back without first falling quite so far.

The Hospital is Dead, Long Live the Hospital

With the opening of the new Todi Hospital in Pantalla, eight kilometers to the north, Todi has finally entered the twentieth century. Remember, the one in which each significant bit of human interaction was bracketed by a trip in a car? Members of the medical professions are delighted with the new modern facilities and potential patients in the area, heretofore apprehensive about questions of sterility in the operating rooms of the old non-air-conditioned hospital, will be reassured by the tidy new building.

I may find myself there one day, just as I have been a patient in the old hospital. Thinking back to a painful 16 kilometer race to the emergency room, I can only hope that any future trip to the more distant facility will be under less urgent conditions. At the risk of compromising my journalistic objectivity, I must admit I was fond of the old hospital. Although we knew at least two people who unexpectedly failed to survive routine treatment at the hospital, the food was good and the staff friendly. While there for nearly a week, I was cheered up by the stream of visitors casually dropping by to say hello. Over the years, when we've known that somebody from our village, or a neighboring one, was in the hospital, we've gone in to see them when we happened to be in Todi. Times change and I suppose patients will just have to get used to the TV for company.

Italian hospitals provide free basic medical care and all the tests required but for routine functions, such as getting up to go to the bathroom, or help with eating or washing, patients either have family members with them, or they pay someone to provide such assistance. There's no sign that any new system of assistance will accompany the new out-of-town hospitals. Todi is only the latest of these in Umbria. New hospitals dot the landscape outside of Perugia, Orvieto, Città di Castello and Gualdo Tadino. Even in Rome, the newest hospital is out near the ring road, more easily accessible from the airport than from the city center.

With the possible exceptions of commemorative Presidential Libraries and lavish new sports stadiums, hospitals are the most costly buildings that we build today, mostly due to their technical requirements. It's certainly easier and cheaper to build a new facility on virgin land than to try to renovate an existing and functioning city hospital. For people running the health system, the decision to close the hospitals in Todi and Marsciano and replace them with a new hospital, officially named the Ospedale Media Valle del Tevere, about ten kilometers from each city, may have been a no-brainer, but was anyone involved in the decision who weighed the social costs and other on-going expenses? Clearly, not every doctor, nurse, technician, patient, relative, assistant and visitor lives in the town center, but many do, and most of the rest are scattered around town in a fairly small radius. That translates into an extra twenty kilometer trip each day for every person, in whatever capacity, at the new hospital. In terms Americans can understand, gasoline now costs about $8.50/gallon and is trending upward. Frequent bus service has been provided between town and hospital but those buses have their costs as well. Perhaps the extra transportation costs are low relative to the medical efficiencies involved. But what of Todi, the beautiful medieval hill town that brings people and money to the region in the first place? There is essentially one street in and one street out of the center for cars, with little parking available in the narrow streets. The one traffic lane of the main descending street, Corso Cavour, is shared with nervous pedestrians. Given the risks of being run over, people have ever less reason to walk on the Corso and it shows. Once you walk down the main street about 100 meters from the Piazza del Popolo, its name changes to Via Roma and the percentage of unoccupied shops rises alarmingly. The hospital is at the bottom of the street, at this point called Via Mattioti, just before the Porta Romana in the old peripheral wall of the town. It brought a constant flow of people of people into the area and shops, ranging from tavole calde and snack bars to housewares and clothing shops, thrived there for years. Now the dead zone will metastasize.

Urban blight is not the sort of disease that the health authorities are asked to deal with. Discussions about closing and replacing the hospital went on for more than a decade during which time someone should have realized what closing the hospital would do to the town. Where were the local, provincial and regional governments? To my knowledge there is still no solid plan for the future use of the old hospital. There is however a plan to deal with the lack of parking and access to the town center. My early guess is that the treatment will kill the patient. More about that in a future article.

Orvieto had a similar situation when its new hospital was built out of town. In fairness, construction there took about twenty-five years, after politicians managed to misplace the first batch of money that had been appropriated, the building was trashed by vandals, and the project was restarted, so there was ample time to plan. Furthermore the old hospital was adjacent to the fabulous Duomo and the mix of tourists and patients was beneficial to neither group. The ex-hospital has been transformed into a local center for university students from Rome, as well as from several US universities, bringing increased vitality and commerce to the town center.

I visited the new Todi Hospital to take photographs but hadn't planned to use the facility prior to writing this piece. Then my wife suddenly needed to have an X-ray, for which our doctor prescribed an immediate appointment and we drove straight to the Emergency Room entrance to be processed in. After being advised to drive around to the main entrance and proceed to radiology, we chose to walk, probably a bad choice, since although the hospital has many fine features, internal circulation isn't one of them. After finding an exit and walking around to the front, I left my wife to the radiologists and circled back to move the car to the vast main parking lot. Parking, like lunch, is never free and although there is no user charge at the moment, the extensive parking lots certainly added to the cost of the new facility. However, in this case, inasmuch as no one will ever arrive at this hospital on foot, I would propose that even more money be spent on the parking, enough to plant a few trees or even to provide covered walks to allow sickly visitors to traverse the blazing pavements without recourse to emergency treatment. A portion of the hospital facade is recessed at the ground floor level providing a bit of respite from the weather. Why couldn't this have been extended across the entire facade? They were starting from scratch after all, not making do with an old building.

I wish the new hospital all success. My own future may depend on it. A more immediate wish is that the Todi city fathers awake from their coma and start showing the town and its inhabitants a little more respect.

Better Living Through Electronics

A few years ago a friend sent me the following. I found it moderately amusing at the time.

I Cannot SeeI Cannot PeeI Cannot ChewI Cannot ScrewOh, My God, What Can I Do?My Memory ShrinksMy Hearing StinksNo Sense of SmellI Look Like HellMy Mood is Bad -- Can't You Tell?My Body is DroopingHave Trouble PoopingThe Golden Years Have Come at LastThe Golden Years can Kiss My Ass!

Every year, it's a little less amusing. I've been deluged with offers to have my hearing tested, and several times I've taken them up on it. The tests have verified what members of my family have been saying all along: I don't hear very well. While the tests are free, the proposed solution is not, and after hearing the cost of the device, I've always skipped the free trial. But they keep on calling and writing so this year I said what the hell, let's see how it works. I was given two little metallic slivers that are slung over the back of each ear and wired to a small plug inserted into the ear. These things are custom tuned to amplify only the frequencies that have been lost with time. I must report that they work rather well. They also made me very nervous I could suddenly imagine how a woman might feel wearing clip-on diamond earrings. My life could definitely be improved by hearing better. But then, it could also be improved by a new car or a trip around the world, either of which might be had for a similar price. If I'm to make an investment in hearing of this magnitude, the device needs to be mar more sophisticated. Hearing normal conversation is a big help but what about filtering out the screams of small children. Better still, a device that just shuts down when it registers a commanding or nagging tone, ideally adding white noise to make orders inaudible. Two weeks into my free month, the devices stopped working due to an accumulation of ear wax that my attempts to replace the batteries did nothing to alleviate. This made me even more nervous and I just turned them in ahead of time, but it got me thinking of other electronic devices that could improve my life if only they were available.

• An electronic fence- I know, such devices have been around for some time, but your dog or cat must wear a collar to activate it. I'm thinking in terms of keeping unknown animals, from dogs to rats, porcupines to wild boars, off one's property. We don't necessarily want to keep people out so perhaps three or four points of contact with the ground might be the trigger. That would have the added benefit of limiting the range of crawling babies.
• A baby dissuader- To be attached either electronically or physically to cell phones, TV remotes and computer keyboards, it will emit an electric shock sufficient to inhibit the child from ever touching the protected device again. Extended exposure may keep children from ever becoming adept at the use of electronic gadgetry, but they can become an elite group, conversant with poetry and the spoken tradition. We need more poets.
• A radar buster- While I've always opposed graffiti and other malicious vandalism, with the current spate of radar speed traps documented in an earlier post, the public needs a clean and neat means to defend itself from this epidemic of governmental overreach. If we can fly unmanned bombing sorties in Afghanistan from offices in Las Vegas, I can't imagine why we can't be electronically armed to fry the brains of these insidious devices as we inconspicuously drive by.
• MP3 remote volume adjusters- Anyone who's ridden a bus or subway has been exposed to people with earphones whose “music” leaks out to envelop their surroundings. This device would allow gentler souls among us to lower the volume, while allowing the rest of us to instantly triple the volume. The owner would immediately discard or shut down the offending device or, if already effectively deaf, be throttled by enraged people nearby.
• Electronic cat flap- Standard issue cat flaps are wonderful home improvements but they are deficient in two ways. Once your domesticated cat has been seen entering or leaving through her own little door, clever feral cats will learn to use the same entrance, with disastrous results. Your own sweet cat is free to come and go, with whatever prey, dead or alive, it chooses to drag in. Rat tails under the dining room table are always an embarrassment. The new electronic cat flap must provide identity checks and rat screening, not an easy task, but our airports have managed similar functions.
• Intelligent cell phones (not to be confused with smart phones)- We see drivers wandering to the wrong side of the road, waiting to move when the way is clear, and then plunging into traffic when they should wait. Inevitably, there's the telltale hand pressed to the ear and the mouth moving. This is illegal in Italy but the law, being unenforced, has no effect. Our proposal would see to it that when a cell phone is activated the car's ignition would shut down. Many details need to be resolved to avoid unwanted side effects. We neither want to deprive passengers in a car the use of their cell phones nor do we wish to paralyze bus service. Connecting the shut off device to a sensor in the driver's seat is a possible solution. Still, the effects of engine shutdown at high speed may need further study before this device can be brought to the market.
• Eyeglass finders- Finally, it has come to our attention that eyeglasses have a way of being lost or misplaced more than other objects. Despite appearances, they are rarely stolen or moved by ghosts or evil spirits. A simple alarm device could be implanted in each pair of glass frames which could then activated by a locater button fixed in a known and permanent location in the home.

Time for all you young entrepreneurial electronics wizards out there to get busy. You keep developing ridiculous new phone apps for kids and yuppies, but there are plenty of us aging curmudgeons awaiting your help.

The 2012 CatCartoonNetwork/punditalia Presidential Platform

Four years ago we posted on our punditalia.net website our 2008 Presidential Platform, a list of forty-one moderate proposals as to what an aspiring president should set as goals to make the USA a better country. Barack Obama was elected and four years later, one out of our forty-one suggestions has been partially carried out, when some US troops were redeployed from Iraq to Afghanistan. Meanwhile, strident neo-cons such as Paul Ryan have consistently made headlines by proclaiming the need for radical measures designed to eliminate the middle class and transfer its wealth to the richest 1% of the population. Such demands have been accompanied by threats to shut down the government if all non-military expenditures are not slashed.

While we stand behind our 2008 platform, it's time to stop pussy-footing around and raise the volume as we pare down this year's goals to the essential.

1. Ten years after 9/11, with the objective of finding and eliminating Osama Bin Laden finally realized, it's time to bring all troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. In keeping with the current nostalgia for better times and traditional values, restore income tax rates to those in effect when the last great Republican president (not counting Barack Obama), Dwight D. Eisenhower, left office in 1961. That means a top marginal rate of 91%.
3. Immediately pass a constitutional amendment making clear the obvious, that “persons”, for the purposes of constitutional rights, shall be defined as individual human beings, and that shall mean all human beings who have been born.
4. Have the Justice Department investigate the possibility of charging the five person majority of the Supreme Court with treason, for their scandalous, irresponsible and unconstitutional decision in Citizens United, which opened the doors for US elections to be influenced by non-citizens.
5. Restore the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 as written, thus separating commercial and investment banking.
6. Corporations shall be forbidden from making contributions to candidates or occupants of political office. Penalties shall be mandatory jail terms for the executives in charge of such corporations, and should the amounts exceed a figure to be established by Congress, jail terms shall be extended to the entire Board of Directors.
7. Corporations shall be subjected to a three strikes and you're out provision. With the third violation of the Political Contributions Act, the corporate charter will be revoked and the corporation disbanded.
8. Legislators shall be required to disclose all sources and amounts of campaign (or other) contributions and shall disqualify themselves from presenting, arguing, or voting on any legislation that may provide direct benefit to their contributors. Penalties shall be immediate removal from office and the loss of all accrued benefits. Additional fines and jail time may be applied.
9. Judges, especially those on the Supreme Court, shall disqualify themselves from sitting on cases the outcomes of which shall provide direct benefit to themselves or their immediate family. They shall be forbidden from accepting gifts or payments from anyone who is party to a case coming before them. Violations will bring immediate removal from the court.
10. Penalties for crimes against property, e.g. robbery, theft, embezzlement, fraud, and insider trading shall be roughly proportional to the value of the items illegally taken from the victim. Thus, if a $100 theft from a grocery store yields a 30 day jail term, the embezzlement of $100,000 of pension funds would yield a 30,000 day prison term. We acknowledge the practical difficulties of this concept. Heavy penalties may be necessary to discourage relatively minor property crimes, whereas sentences of 500 or 1000 years of jail time would be relatively meaningless. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Given the high cost of housing criminal offenders and the record number and percentage of Americans who are incarcerated, the policy could be modified so that anyone convicted of a property crime amounting to more than $50,000 could be required to pay the full cost of his or her incarceration. We would urge caution to avoid unintended consequences. Given the record low level of taxation currently in vogue, some states may find it remunerative under this law to find reasons to jail all their bankers.
11. Disband the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Former officials will be offered a bronze parachute, acceptance of which will exempt them from prosecution for most of their misdeeds.
12. Guantanamo will be closed as an off-shore concentration camp for people the US doesn't want to prosecute and converted into a retirement home for former officials of the above-named organizations. Guests will be provided with comfortable accommodation, as befits their station, but there will will be no electronic communication with the world beyond the island, nor will visitors or off-island excursions be permitted.
13. Country of Origin labeling will be required on all products sold in the United States. This is in conflict with WTO rulings, but as stated above, the WTO is to be eliminated.
14. To combat the inexorable tide of the outsourcing of American jobs to Asia, Indian telephone responders will be imported into the US to teach their American counterparts the fundamentals of courtesy and diction.
15. In the current political climate there is a big push for testing school children to assure their job-readiness. In that spirit we advocate literacy tests for presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Had this policy been in place earlier, we might have been spared the disastrous first eight years of the new millennium. It could cull the herd of young elephants currently charging the White House but wider application to the entire Congress might result in overly swift and radical changes to the country.
16. Given the clear need to render the US Military less bellicose and the Justice Department more aggressive, we propose the following Cabinet appointments:
    Secretary of Defense- Dennis Kucinich
    Attorney General- Elliot Spitzer

17. Now that we've seen Barry Bonds standing trial for lying to Congress and a Grand Jury under oath about his personal use of performance enhancing drugs, we believe that The Justice Department should take a similarly tough stance with regard to other members of the citizenry, less famous perhaps, but more closely linked to the health of the nation. A few prominent and well documented examples come readily to mind. Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and George W. Bush all lied to Congress about WMD in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Chief Justice John Roberts stated under oath at his confirmation hearings that he was opposed to judicial activism, yet he has proved to be the most activist Chief Justice in Court history. Members of various intelligence agencies lied to the Congressional Committee investigating 9/11 about what was known to them about the imminent attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. The list is long and while we don't condone professional athletes breaking their rules, we consider government officials violating the Constitution, and banksters devastating the economy, to be more deserving of immediate Congressional oversight and subsequent prosecution.

TV Reality

It's been a few years now since I worked in New York, and the Rome I worked in during the 70's has changed into another place. Living in an isolated Umbrian village of about 150 people, perhaps I'm out of touch with reality, i.e. the important things that go on in the world, although we do get to attend more funerals than most city dwellers do. Fortunately, we have the internet and Skype to keep in touch with people and happenings around the world. We also have satellite TV, which brings us another little window on the world. It's long been fashionable to disdain TV but, especially in the football off-season, I enjoy watching many of the shows, and have for years.

All my life, pundits on the right have complained of the liberal bias of the news media and Hollywood. They were right. After all, Edward R. Murrow was no Fascist sympathizer and one can fairly imagine his disdain for the Neo-Cons, were he around today. Unfortunately, he's not. For a time, I watched a large amount of cable TV news but increasingly, the cable channels seem more out of touch with reality than we are here in Acqualoreto.

Then there are the ”reality shows”. I haven't yet figured out why these shows are so named. Most seem to be elimination tournaments. Pseudo-celebrities pass their time trying to remain on a tropical island with other aspiring ”personalities”; other contestants aspire to work for Donald Trump, or be selected as a spouse, future model, fashion designer or bed partner. In others, people, hooked up to a lie detector, face embarrassing questions in front of their families, or attractive young people are challenged to put repulsive substances in their mouths and swallow. I suppose the common denominator, and plausible link to reality, is the competition of people willing to subject themselves to public humiliation for the prospect of winning money.

There are even too many comedy shows on television, but I'll have to pass on commenting on them since I've discovered that I'm allergic to laugh tracks, so for the most part, I'm left with the TV dramatic series.

Nearly all shows deal with crime, clearly the principal activity in the world. Murder is the favorite crime on TV, sometimes treated with a spectacular brutality, but more often with humor. The light hearted murder shows go back to before television, when crime magnets such as Sherlock Holmes and Mr. and Mrs. North had a merry time solving whodunits in books and movies. Over the years Ellery Queen, Hart to Hart and countless dozens of other TV series have mined this vein. One of my more recent favorites, Midsomer Murders, known in Italy as Inspector Barnaby, would appear to have depopulated all of southern England in its ten year run, but the characters and locales were delightful. My all-time favorite, Germany's Inspector Derrick, ran for twenty-four years, with just one writer, Herbert Reinecker, creating all 281 episodes. The series also furnished fascinating characters and locales around Munich. Horst Tappert, an ex-vaudeville song and dance man who played the Inspector, solved all those murders mostly by stalking the characters his intuition led him to suspect. The program featured little onscreen violence but a great deal of the darker side of human nature. In Italy, Terrence Hill, as Don Matteo, has been playing a parish priest in Gubbio for the past decade. The 144 episodes have, on average, included more than one homicide per show, which would appear to make scenic little Gubbio one of the most violent places on earth, with a murder rate exceeding that of the south of England, Detroit and Chicago combined.

The crime solvers have usually been private detectives or regular police but now and then a mystery writer gets into the act, as with Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) in Murder She Wrote, and currently Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) in Castle. In addition to the FBI and the CIA, other specialized crime fighting units such as the NCIS, which may or may not exist in the real world, also see some action. Clearly, the world's preeminent profession, in the world of TV, is that of forensic medicine. While I do know one young man in that field, I never realized that he and his colleagues played such an important role in the war on crime. I believe it all started with Crossing Jordan, but they've spread to CSIs and NCISs all over the country, and now to Body of Proof. Even Inspector Barnaby and Castle went with the trend and got their own body disassemblers. Most of the corpse analyzer shows are similar, but one, CSI Miami, stands out. Not so much for its acting, writing or characters, but for its color. In my childhood, most color movies were in Technicolor, but if I remember correctly, Roy Rogers movies were shot in something called Trucolor, which featured everything in bright orange, with some contrasting aqua blue. These are the Miami Dolphins colors so it only seems right that a Miami crime show should replicate the old Trucolor hues, especially one starring the carrot-topped David Caruso.

In TV history, Dallas was the first show to take the continuing drama soap opera format to prime time. The format was upgraded by ER, which brought doctors to the forefront and good writers to the work behind the scenes. It also launched George Clooney's career. After years of ratings-boosting service, he faded into the sunset with his on-screen sweetheart Juliana Margulies. When ER finally ran out of juice, other medical shows like Grey's Anatomy and Private Practice followed, but their writers just couldn't seem to find much inspiration left in the clinical area, so those shows have triangulated between medicine, soap opera and soft-core porn. Other shows have taken a similar path but without the medicine. Sex and the City could be amusing; Desperate Housewives and Cougar Town a little less so, but then, there's no shortage of cheerfully lewd shows on SKY.

I've alluded to former complaints about the liberal bias in the media. Since the US lurched heavily to the right in recent decades, both the news shows and the entertainment shows have tried to accommodate the new public tastes. The past decade has brought us torture-as-entertainment shows including 24 and the various versions of NCIS. Although I've whole-heartedly embraced the lighter side of murder, I haven't yet adapted sufficiently to the new ethos to really enjoy 24.

More subtle right-wing inroads have come with Ayn Rand-inspired heroes such as Dr. House. Played brilliantly by Hugh Laurie, the British actor who was famous as the effete Bertie Wooster in the P.G. Wodehouse inspired series, Jeeves and Wooster, Dr. House is an egocentric, lame genius devoid of respect for rules, laws, feelings or etiquette. He perseveres to cure the most exotic illnesses heretofore unknown to man. Superman with a crutch! Despite the unreality of both the health care available and the excesses of the protagonist, the show usually manages to be entertaining.

Successful shows tend to be cloned and Lie To Me tries to build on the success of Dr. House. Another interesting British actor, Tim Roth as Dr Cal Lightman, hobbles around with the gait of a chimpanzee, though no explanation of this deformity is forthcoming, other than the unspoken desire to emulate Dr. House. His superhuman talent is to be able to tell if people are lying or telling the truth by looking at their faces, and this elite skill has earned him a huge cutting edge office and a bevy of doting beauties who put up with his crude ways and his House-like disavowal of law and manners. Among the adoring women is his partner, played by Kelli Williams, fresh from her role as the partner and wife of the creepy Bobby in The Practice. She risks being typecast as the abused partner. I prefer this show to Dr. House, mainly because the women are better looking, but the plots are also more imaginative. Too bad that Dr. Lightman's gorgeous ex-wife, Jennifer Beals, has moved to Chicago to be Police Commissioner on another new series, Chicago Code. The latter show seems to be yet another copycat, emulating Detroit 1-8-7, and it may turn out to be better than the one it copies. Both have a nice gritty feel to them and provide balanced accommodation to the prejudices of the left and right wing segments of the audience; racial equality on one hand and a healthy disregard for the niceties of the law on the other.

After crimefighters and doctors, the next most prominent TV profession would be lawyers. If the doctors and police tend to be the darlings of the right, we liberals tend to favor the lawyer shows. Series like The Defenders, The Practice, Boston Law and more recently, The Guardian and Raising the Bar (Avvocati a New York in Italy) have fairly regularly espoused a liberal democratic set of values. The Guardian, an otherwise interesting show, suffered by having a terminally unsympathetic character in the lead role, while Raising the Bar, which tempered its idealism with a strong infusion of cynicism, was a wonderful antidote to Fox News, and just too good to last. Now that George Clooney has come out of TV exile to sell coffee and Campari in Italy, his former ER love, Julianna Margulies has come back to star in The Good Wife as a lawyer married to a jailed Chicago politician. The shadowy side of the profession is on view here too but, again, the hearts of the protagonists are in the right place, even if other body parts tend to wander.

I love all these shows but my favorite of the genre had to be Judge John Deed. Half a century ago when I applied to law school, I didn't know where it would lead. It didn't lead anywhere, as I switched to architecture at the eleventh hour, but had I joined that oft-maligned profession, I couldn't have imagined a more appealing role model than the Porsche-driving, womanizing judge, played by Martin Shaw, who was always defending the underdogs from the corrupt powers of the establishment. This wonderfully produced, very British show, wasn't around for long, possibly because the suspension of disbelief was challenged by the odd circumstance that in every case that the judge presided over, the establishment villains were represented by his ex-wife, now married to the corrupt Minister of Justice, while the defense attorney for the put-upon victims always turned out to be his on-again, off-again girlfriend Jo Mills, played by the lovely Jenny Seagrove. She was often assisted by the Judge's law student daughter, which provided yet more conflicts of affection.

Many other professions have shown up as series protagonists. We've seen teachers, soldiers, undertakers, bartenders, priests, mafiosi and for six years, Patricia Arquette has appeared as a cuddly mom with supernatural powers in Medium, helping the DA to find serial killers. If the protagonists are interesting and/or appealing, and the writing is good, plausibility is no prerequisite for success.

I realize that salesmen, engineers, teachers and factory workers are also all underrepresented as key players, but what about architects? Not counting those home improvement shows like Extreme Makeover-Home Edition, how many series protagonists have been architects? One! Yes, there was one. Charles Bronson played Paul Kersey in the Death Wish movies and TV series. He stalked and killed dangerous street criminals before Rudy Giuliani even thought of becoming mayor of New York City. Despite the usual correctness of my political leanings, I was always fond of Charles Bronson in those movies, perhaps because of his no-nonsense manner, or maybe it was just the exciting novelty of seeing an architect as protagonist. But that was then and this is now. It's time for Death Wish XX. Street crime no longer is the dominating preoccupation it was in the 70's. The ten year-old fear factor of terrorism is wearing a little thin. Let's see a new crusading architect taking on the real villains of the day, bankrupting the banksters, and entrapping those corrupt mid-western governors. The Justice Department has given up on prosecuting our war criminals and the bought Supreme Court justices, so how about leaving it to a renegade architect on TV. If a medium is the last line of defense against serial killers, why can't an architect combat the oligarchs and their lackeys? So far, the urgent task of going after white collar criminals has been left mostly to Neal Caffery, a semi-reformed con-man, working with the FBI, on White Collar. There's a bit of a con-man in every successful architect, so why not have one join the battle. Just make him charismatic, with a beautiful girlfriend, or vice-versa, and keep the writing taut.