A Blog of My Own

Today, a rare “guest column,” written by Jim Dyer after his return from visiting the site where The Battle of the Bulge in World War 2 took place — a battle in which his father was an infantryman.

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“J.J. Bittenbinder is a recognized authority on assault prevention.”

–jjbittenbinder.com

In Chicago, there’s an ex-cop by the name of J.J. Bittenbinder. He lectures on personal safety on the mean streets of the city. One of his talks is about not getting shot if somebody holds a gun on you and wants something you have.

His first rule is “run”.

Before you even think about getting in the car (absolutely do not get in a car) or before you think about struggling (you’ll get shot at close range — count on it), or pulling your own gun (your assailant will take it from you and kill you with it), run. Put distance between yourself and the person who has the gun. Bittenbinder presents a calculus of survival that goes something like this: at close range thugs have about a ten percent chance of hitting one of your vital organs on the first shot. For every X feet (ten? twenty? I don’t really remember) that you put between the thug and you, your thug’s chance of hitting you at all decreases by a factor of ten. If you get in a car with a thug with a gun, you’re about 90 percent certain of being dead within minutes.

Run. Run like crazy. That’s the deal. Do not look back. If you run, you will almost certainly survive.

In Diekirch, Luxembourg is the National Military Museum. In it is some of the detritus of the Battle of the Bulge. Bits left over from one of the most bloody battles in history. Somewhere in this museum, or maybe in the Patton Museum in Ettlebruck, or maybe in both, is a glass fronted case about seven feet tall and two and a half feet or so wide. In it is a mannequin dressed in the typical field gear of the American foot soldier who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He’s got on wool uniform pants, shirt, a wool scarf, or balaclava over his head, a helmet, a wool trenchcoat, leather boots. He wears a web belt with a strap over the shoulder, on which is hung his canteen, ammunition pouches, and I can’t rememember what else.

Not a rig made to run in.

This is the gear my dad wore in the Battle of the Bulge. In the woods of the Ardennes. In the neighborhood of Diekirch. In the worst winter in Europe in a hundred years. Also carrying a bazooka, a rocket launcher about four feet long.

I remember one story my dad told about how after firing a bazooka you run like hell because the flash and the smoke trail tells whoever you’re shooting at exactly where you are. He was in a town, or on a farm, and he had fired his weapon, and he was running along a wooden fence about six feet high, or so, chin strap unbuckled, rifle over his shoulder, bazooka in one hand and the other hand on his helmet, holding it on and he came to the corner where this fence turned, and his head banged into something. He looked up and his head had banged into the helmet of a German soldier. They looked at each other for a split second, turned around and ran like hell. I can see J.J. Bittenbinder nodding his head and saying, “Exactly.”

“Much of the Ardennes is covered in dense forests, with the old mountains averaging around 350-500 m (1,148-1,640 ft) in height”

–Wikipedia

Running as a solution to being shot is not an option in the Ardennes. There’s a trail in Bettendorf, between Diekirch and Echternach maintained in memory of my dad, and the 85,000 American casualties inflicted during the few months of the Battle. Along this trail are stations showing details of what it was like. Foxholes. Tank Tracks. Graffiti carved in the trees. Small bunkers with tin roofing stolen from farmers’ barns. Most impressive, though, at least to me, was the forest itself. ‘Dense’ as Wiki describes it. A tree every four or five feet. Connected by underbrush.

I imagine trying to run in these woods. Getting my canteen, or my web belt, or my rifle, or my bazooka caught on the branches and undergrowth. Tripping over roots. Not going to happen. My dad’s not running in these woods, that’s for sure. I imagine my dad sitting still, not running, and the scratchy wool of his uniform rubbing his neck raw. His wrists. His ankles inside leather boots. Wet leather boots. And later his feet blistering and bleeding from being in water up to his knees for days on end. Freezing water. Until he finally has to face the fact that he’s got trenchfoot. Frozen feet. And he can’t even walk, much less run to keep from getting shot. And being my dad, somebody has to tell him he can’t walk. And tell him his Battle is over. And carry him to where he can get transported out. Maybe he’s glad. Maybe not. Probably he’s glad to be out of there. I would be. For sure.

“Some vehicles, like the M4 18-ton High Speed Tractor, gained popularity back in the 1950s when Revell put out a model of the 155mm M2 “Long Tom” gun with the tractor and a crew of figures, and this neat looking vehicle first became known to modelers.”

–cybermodeller.com

Some time in grade school I went through the plastic model phase, and actually built a model of the M4 with its long gun in tow. I know my dad watched as I put it together. What I now know is that there’s a beautifully restored M4, or one of its close relatives in the National Military Museum in Diekirch. Out front, in reasonable shape is a 155mm artillery piece just like the one I assembled. I was struck by the fact that across the aisle in the main hall of the museum was a very similar artillery tractor left by the German army. The American tractor was sharp. efficient. well built. On the German one, the windshield frame was wood. Rough wood.

I asked the museum docent about the wood windshield frames. He nodded and confirmed that the Germans were pretty much on their last resources at that time. Then he mentioned that he had been called out by a farmer and the police the day before to help investigate a skeleton that had been found on the battlefield. It was a German artillery horse. Horse drawn artillery. Child soldiers commanded by officers hardened on the Russian Front. Brutal. Now, as I write this, I wonder what my dad thought about this model I made of the M4 with its long gun. I can’t even begin to speculate. Dad never said a word.

I tried to engage him about a year before he died. Showed him some pictures, gave him copies of a military history of the battle in the Diekirch region. Tried to talk to him about it. Truthfully, I was looking for closure. I was looking for some explanation of issues and attitudes, hurts real or imagined, a fuller picture of why he was the way he was, why I am the way I am. He never rose to the bait. With few exceptions, like the story I related earlier, he kept his mouth shut.

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”

–Donald Rumsfeld

I know there’s a better quote somewhere to sum up what I learned when Mooneen and I spent two days chasing dad’s combat service this summer. From a better literary mind than Donald Rumsfeld. I can’t think of one at this moment. As I journaled about what we found in Luxembourg, I knew I hadn’t found the explanations, the causes and conditions, the closure I was looking for. I did learn two things:

It’s not the war. It’s the man.

And, It’s not the father. It’s the son.

I learned it’s me.

And part of me is from the region of Diekirch. In Luxembourg.

Okay, stay with me now.

The other night I saw a silent movie on TCM, a terrific comedy called The Patsy from 1928 starring the talented (and unfairly maligned*) Marion Davies. What struck me was not how different everything is 81 years later, but how much is not different. The world portrayed in the movie is recognizably a modern one. People get around in cars. They talk on the phone. The attitudes and motivations of the characters are clear to a 2009 audience. The jokes are funny. Quite a lot of the freshness of the film is due to the performance of Davies; her gestures and gesticulations and body language seem to break through time altogether. No translation, no “making allowances,” is necessary.

One was left feeling that despite all that was different on the surface — the fashions, the decor, the absence of computers, etc. — the world of 1928 was the same, in any way that mattered, as the world of 2009. This surprised me.

Now for something completely different. Let’s take my birth year of 1950, and go back 81 years from that. The year? 1869. The Civil War is barely over. People traverse long distances by stage coach, or train if they’re lucky (the first transcontinental rail line is completed in that year). The Wild West is at its wildest. Nothing is the same as in 1950. It is a completely different world.

The difference between 1869 and 1950 is Mt. Everest compared to the molehill of difference between 1928 and 2009. Yet what separates each pair of years is exactly the same time span — 81 years.

This leads me to think the tremendous changes that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century — widespread automobile use, the birth of air travel, the coming of mass communications like movies and radio — made a much bigger impact on life than anything we’ve seen since, even in this computer age. We complain about change; we don’t know the meaning of the word change. 1890-1920: That’s when everything changed, in a way we’re still living with today. Even though the pace of life is faster today, when it comes to change, we’re pikers.

Everything we have now is a version of something that existed in 1928. Nothing, really, is qualitatively different. Take music downloads. Sure, it’s a whole new delivery system. We might think it’s revolutionary. But essentially, it’s recorded music, just coming at us a new way; it’s today’s version of the 78. Compare that to before Edison, when there was no recorded music. If you wanted to hear music, you had to go hear somebody play music — or make it yourself. The invention of the phonograph around the turn of 20th century — that’s when change happened. We’re still living in that world.

We think time is passing faster and faster. But in reality, time has slowed down. To an absolute crawl.

*Marion Davies was the mistress of William Randolph Hearst, and when Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane came out (a movie loosely based on the life of Hearst), people assumed the Susan Alexander character — an untalented singer who becomes Kane’s mistress, and whom Kane uses his millions to push into the limelight — was based on Davies. But although in real life Hearst used his influence and money to promote Davies’ career, a key difference is that Davies was marvelously talented. Welles himself recognized this difference, admired Davies, and later regretted that his movie had damaged her reputation.

Several forces lately have focused my attention on the challenge of staying true to our passions in an unsupportive world.

How do we stay true to our passions in an unsupportive world? Several forces lately have conspired to focus my attention on this question.

An internet mailing list, of which I am a member, is devoted to the discussion of original cast musical theater recordings. Recently a discussion began concerning the members’ experiences as children and teens. When young, did we find friends who shared our love of the great Broadway musicals, the works of sublime genius created by Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lerner, Loewe, Loesser, Sondheim, Styne, and their ilk? (Small ilk.) Or did we not? This discussion forced me to examine a truth I hadn’t ever quite acknowledged: that I did not have a single friend, growing up, who listened to this music. How did I keep doing it? Why didn’t I succumb to “peer pressure” and change my tastes to conform with theirs? How did I sustain my love for great Broadway music in the complete absence of positive reinforcement?

I would say that the music itself gave me no choice. Once you listen to it, if you are susceptible to its charms, you discover just how much is going on in it, and most other music seems thin gruel from then on. And that’s part of the answer. But not all of it.

Something has to give you the strength to go on being alone, being interested in the things you’re interested in even if no one else is. In some sense you are like a character in The Twilight Zone who discovers he is the sole inhabitant on earth, or like the astronaut at the end of Kubrick’s 2001 who lives out his days in the absence of a fellow creature. Sure, you derive sustenance from the knowledge that someone out there likes the art you like, because someone is putting out recordings and other people are buying them. You just don’t know any of those people. So you have to be comfortable with being lonely. And the more comfortable you get with it, the more you start, in some sense, to prefer your loneliness. You begin to feel that loneliness is the only way for you to survive, because to join the crowd would be for you to relinquish the essence of who you are. We are what we love.

Now, did I lack for friends who appreciated my interest in musical comedy? No, I had those. When a song parody was needed “to the tune of” some Broadway standard that everyone could sing to, they knew I had a talent to amuse. And I felt they respected my peculiar interest in the musical, in the manner that people often respect someone who sticks to his guns against all odds. And that was certainly a whole lot better than being made a pariah for it. But how different it would have been for me, had I found even one or two boys or girls who actually shared my passion, instead of just acknowledging it. Some of the correspondents on the mailing list reported having been lucky enough to find others like them as children and teens, and it made me wonder how different it would have felt to have lived that alternative adolescence — and how much less used to being alone, and comfortable with it, I might have become.

Mind you, this was in the fifties and sixties, when the Broadway musical was much more a part of the mainstream culture than it is now.

Even more amazing than that I didn’t know a single other child or teen who was into the same music I was? It’s that once into adulthood and a creative advertising career that involved the production of music, some of it in a theater-influenced style, I encountered very few people who shared my passion for the music even then. In my three decades of adult life before the internet, I think I accumulated a grand total of four friends with whom I can have a conversation listing the ways in which Stephen Sondheim is a deity walking among us or how Carousel makes us cry from the first notes coming from the pit in act one.

A lifetime of accretion of knowledge on a subject that very few people know or care anything about can make one seem like a sufferer of Asperger syndrome when the knowledge comes pouring out, observes my friend Jim Dyer. On the other hand, when the specialized knowledge is interesting to people, when they can count on you to know the answer to a question they actually want to know the answer to, the line between “Asperger sufferer” and “fascinating expert” is a thin one.

Here are some words about Asperger syndrome found at Wikipedia:

…restricted and repetitive interests and behavior…intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity…a person with AS may engage in a one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener’s feelings or reactions, such as a need for privacy or haste to leave.

So yeah, maybe that’s what I’ve got.

All this is by way of preface to my recommending a new book by Steven Suskin on the great Broadway orchestrators. It’s one of those books on such an obviously important subject that one can’t believe it hasn’t been written yet, but nobody did it before Suskin. The sound of Broadway was at least as much the work of orchestrators like Robert Russell Bennett, Don Walker, Robert Ginzler, Sid Ramin and Irv Kostal as it was the work of composers, and now the orchestrators get their due. Suskin writes in satisfying detail not only about what they did and how they did it, but the stylistic traits that distinguished one orchestrator from another. Throughout the book, Suskin acknowledges, in asides, how very few people will be interested in his subject, and also, how very interested those few who are interested will be. And he’s right. For anyone who loves Broadway, being immersed in the book is like being in paradise. As thorough and complete as it is at 565 pages, when one is reading it one wishes it were twice as long as it is. If you are one of the small number of Americans who are into musicals, and you know who you are, you will find it fascinating, even if you have little or no knowledge of technique. (Suskin wrote the book for the non-technical reader; all you need is ears.)

But this whole isolated, socially-awkward, narrowly-shared passion, Asperger thing…it’s a much bigger subject than Broadway musicals. With me, it was that. With you, it’s something else. Something you’ve always been into that, unless you’re very lucky, practically no one else in your “real life” has ever been. Thank goodness for the internet, where we can find more people who share our interests than we may ever have found without it. But what about all those years before the internet? Somehow, and I don’t mean this lightly, we found a way to survive without surrendering what made us special, found a way to remain who we were. Let’s all give ourselves a pat on the back for that, let’s all give ourselves a hug. And hug, virtually, each other.

Boys must have something in them that prevents them from seeing their mothers as pretty, or, God forbid, sexy. The incest taboo that lives not only in our heads but in our cellular structure works to make sure that Mom is not pretty in our eyes, or ugly either, but just, well, Mom. The rare moment breaks through this wall of denial — the smell of Chanel No. 5 when you are seven and she is about to go out to a Saturday dance, an aroma that awakens a glimmer in you that your mother has an existence outside the role you need her to play exclusively — but by and large we sons are blind to our mothers as women.

My mother, widowed by my father two years ago, died a week ago today, at the age of 88. While we sat shiva in her apartment this past week, my eye kept going to the wedding picture of her that my sister had placed on the credenza in the living room. The photograph put me in a trance. She was beautiful. The picture of the girl-woman in 1940, just shy of her twentieth birthday, conjured up the spirit of the Selma who must have been living inside my mother all these years.

I had always loved my mother, and she seldom had cause to doubt that. But now I was in love with her. I could sense the qualities, physical, mental, and spiritual, that made my father adore her, made him happily dedicate his life to her. It was safe, now, for me to see that. The feeling now pervades my memories of her, and I am not ashamed of it. I am under her spell now in a way I could not be when she was alive. I think that’s the way she wants it.

I turned 59 yesterday.

In the new economy, 59 is the new 84.

The comedian Louis CK shares some truth.

“His actions gave the whole corporation a black eye.”

“Abu Ghraib was a black eye on the U.S. military.”

Etc., etc.

Obviously, for whatever strange reason in our culture, black eyes are a symbol of humiliation. In comedy, going back to the days of silent film (and, who knows, maybe on the stage before that), the black eye is the icon of ignominious and utter defeat. Have a bruise on your jaw, nobody thinks too much about it; move that bruise just an inch or two north, so it’s under your eye, and society assigns it mortifying meaning. A treatise could be written on the irrational reasons this is so, but it is. So I thought if I ever had that marker, I wouldn’t be able to stand it.

And yet I do have one, and I don’t feel humiliated at all!

I woke up groggy to a ringing alarm in a hotel room in Las Vegas on Friday morning. The nightstand was to my left. I propped myself up on my left arm, and reached across myself with my right hand to turn off the alarm. As I did so, my left arm slipped completely off the edge of the mattress, and with it my sole means of support, plunging my head toward its fateful encounter with the corner of the nightstand.

A gash on my cheekbone bled profusely. When I got into the bathroom to look at myself in the mirror, my face was covered in blood, making identifying the exact location of the wound impossible until I washed it all off. My wife put some antibacterial ointment and a bandaid on it (she is prepared for anything), and I put on the hotel bathrobe, grabbed the ice bucket, and went down the hall to fill it. Upon returning to the room I wrapped some ice in a washcloth and put that on the wound for about a half hour.

On Saturday, the worst damage to my face was a circle of swelling on the insulted cheekbone. But this morning, the area under my left eye is all purplish.

I can tell some people are looking at me with more than the usual amount of interest, but I don’t particularly care. And that surprises me. Although my face wears our culture’s agreed-upon symbol of humiliation, I am not humiliated. It’s kind of nice to find that out.

How’s this for reality? Dick Clark is a severely impaired stroke victim — yet he’s on TV on New Year’s Eve!

I think it’s fantastic.

For just a couple hours every year, on just one channel, TV allows just one person who is not perfect onto its bright and shiny airwaves. A person who didn’t recover from his illness to become “good as new.” A person who has a severe speech impediment and looks kind of funny, and whose brain maybe isn’t 100% functional. A person who, by the standards of TV, is, yes, cringe-worthy.

The unspoken message: “I’m here, I’m impaired, get used to it.”

According to the American Heart Association, stroke is our country’s leading cause of serious long-term disability. Every year, 600,000 new victims and 200,000 more who are having a second or third stroke — almost a million Americans in all — get added to the statistic.

So, hurrah, Dick Clark, for insisting you go on, and hurrah, ABC, for letting it happen, so that television can show us what diversity really looks like. Even if it is for only two hours on one network on the last night of the year, it’s a start.

It’s Yom Kippur, the day of atonement (I’m writing this before sundown, by the way, so it’s OK).

Some things I’ll be atoning for:

• Not listening better to my wife.
• Being too quick to anger.
• Not calling my mother often enough.
• Not getting out of the stock market a year ago.

OK, just kidding about that last one, but – say, what did you do in the past year that you should atone for? Post it in the comments section.

In the fall of 2006, I entered a Chicago Tribune essay contest run by columnists Mary Schmich and Eric Zorn. The task was to write about an experience involving losing; the winners of the contest (there would be four winners) would, by virtue of winning, turn that losing experience into a winning one.

I was a winner.

Here’s the essay that nabbed me the honor:

1962, Baltimore. My friend Mark and I were the ones who remained standing in the spelling bee that would determine Mt. Washington Elementary’s representative at the citywide competition.

Back and forth we went in our mutual excellence. Words of all stripes—mere child’s play to us. The longer we went mano a mano, the more I realized I really had a chance to win, the giddier I became. Yet a tiny voice spoke to me, clashing with that of the teacher calling the words. It said that ever since I’d known him, winning had been Mark’s birthright, not mine; it said that he was the perpetual hero of the story, and I the sidekick. I knew that victory for me now required silencing that tiny voice.

My word. A noun. Singular or plural? I couldn’t quite hear. Clarification on this mattered now more than anything. I asked for clarification. The answer: Singular.

I spelled it with an “s” on the end.

Within a second, I knew the terrible thing I’d done. I grew dizzy even before I heard the gasps of the others. What had made my mouth say what my brain knew better than? An impulse from my unconscious that second place was safer? More familiar? That I might win a bee and lose a friend? That there was danger as well as glory in the spotlight?

Mark went on to become a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. I went on to enter this contest.

Now, an addendum. Last week, I received this email press release about Mark:

J. MARK IWRY NAMED ONE OF THE “100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN FINANCE”

List Released in June 2008 Issue of Treasury & Risk Magazine

WASHINGTON, DC – J. Mark Iwry, Principal of The Retirement Security Project, Nonresident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution, Research Professor at Georgetown University, and Of Counsel to Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, was named one of the “100 Most Influential People in Finance” in the June 2008 issue of Treasury & Risk Magazine. He was one of five individuals recognized in the category of Retirement & Benefits for his efforts to “take the case for simpler, broader retirement savings options to the corridors of power.”

On behalf of The Retirement Security Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts in partnership with The Brookings Institution and Georgetown University, Mr. Iwry works to promote effective policy solutions to improve the retirement security of all Americans. He has authored numerous proposals and reforms that are changing the way Americans save, including the automatic IRA proposal he co-authored through the Retirement Security Project, which is pending as a bill in Congress.

Mr. Iwry served at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1995 to 2001 as the principal Executive Branch official directly responsible for tax policy and regulation relating to the Nation’s qualified pension and 401(k) plans, employer-sponsored health plans, and other employee benefits. Under his direction, Treasury launched an integrated strategy to increase saving by defining, approving and promoting 401(k) automatic enrollment and other default arrangements, including the introduction of automatic rollover to curtail pension leakage. He was a principal architect of the Saver’s Credit to expand 401(k) and IRA coverage for middle- and lower-income workers and of the “SIMPLE” 401(k)-type plan, and was centrally involved in developing the sweeping Presidential proposals to expand coverage through “Universal Savings Accounts.”

Mr. Iwry. regularly advises Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, often testifies before Congress and State legislatures, and has advised five Presidential campaigns (2004 and 2008), GAO and other federal agencies, private-sector organizations, and foreign and State government agencies and officials on strategies to expand saving and retirement security. He is active as a lecturer and author, and his views are frequently reported in the major media and trade press. Formerly a partner in the law firm of Covington & Burling, chair of the D.C. Bar Employee Benefits Committee, and member of the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform, Mr.Iwry is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court and is listed in Who’s Who, Best Lawyers in America, etc.