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Notes from Hollyweird

Mackenzie Phillips seems to be confused as to the definition of the word “consensual.”  When she came out with her book, “High on Arrival,” a month or two ago, she said that she had had a consensual sexual relationship with her father, which began when she was 19 and lasted for several years.

It began on her wedding night.  She’d taken a lot of drugs and was passed out. She woke up to someone, who was not the groom, having sex with her.  It was her father.

In her book, she writes that the affair continued after that, with her consent, until she became pregnant and didn’t know who the father was.  She terminated the pregnancy, but never slept with her father again.

Now, she says it was not exactly consensual.

“As I was writing the book, I thought, this word, it kept sitting wrong with me, but I used it for lack of a better word, and since then I’ve been schooled by thousands of incest survivors all across the world that there really is no such thing as consensual incest due to the inherent power a parent has over a child,” she told Joy Behar in a recent TV interview.

Sorry, Mackenzie, I respectfully disagree.  You were 19 when the affair began.  It was years before you ended it.  Sure, it was an affair between a manipulative older man and a less experienced younger girl.  Sure, it was lousy parenting on John Phillips’ part (although I remain a fan of his music.  Sorry, feminists.)  But it was consensual because you were an adult and you gave your consent.

You weren’t victimized nearly as bad as a lot of those incest survivors who sent you e-mails.

I believe it was Oprah who said (and I’m paraphrasing here –like I said, I’m not even sure of the source) “O.K., now we know why we’re all messed up – what are we going to do about it?

Smile, God Damn It

First, let me just point out that I have lived in the Czech Republic for 11 years and I am very happy here.  My wife is Czech, my kids are Czech, I am surrounded by Czechs.  They are a people with many fine qualities.

Many of them are very intelligent and creative.  Karel and Josef Capek, Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Antonin Dvorak, Milos Forman.

They are superb athletes.  Considering a total population of only about 10 million, they are way overrepresented on the world stage in tennis, the decathlon and all winter sports.  They are, I don’t think too many people would argue with me, a good looking people.  Especially the women.  I’m not too sure how that works out, but it’s true.

They are a very family oriented people, and are kind to small children, dogs and the elderly.  They are big nature lovers.

But they don’t smile.  When you get on the Metro, or the tram, you see rows of faces locked into an impassive, or even bitter, pose.  If you smile too broadly, they will look at you suspiciously.  I have been shooshed for whistling on the metro.

A friend of mine, last week, was furious.  He had just walked, with two little puppies on their way to the vet to get their 1^st shots.  It was a distance of about 10 blocks, along well traveled sidewalks.  Nobody smiled.

“What kind of fucking shit people don’t smile at puppies!?,”  he was saying for the next 24 hours to anybody who would listen.  I had to agreee with him.  I have seen Czechs not smiling while at amusement parks, concerts, even circuses.

Last weekend, I went with my family to Harrachov, a Czech ski resort in the northwestern part of the country.  Saturday evening I went out for a walk to smoke a quiet joint (we had a non-smoking cottage) and I found myself walking past a large window of a hotel dining room.  I looked in and saw large groups of people, laughing and smiling.  At first, I thought “Aha!  Here are the happy Czechs, invigorated by the fresh air and exercise, enjoying some good food and wine and good conversation with friends, with smiles all around.”

Then I realized they were probably Germans.

The Luntz Memo

Republicans are evil.  What is frightening is that they no longer are even trying to hide it.

For many years now, those on the left have suspected that the Republicans follow a script, “talking points” as they say, so that they and the pundits who are on their side (Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, Pipes, Douthat, Malkin, Coulter, Will and Noonan, among others) can all say the same thing, and it begins to sound like conventional wisdom.

It could be a legitimate political strategy.  A less generous view is that it’s propaganda.  An even less generous view is that it’s mind control.  In any event, nothing commercial advertisers don’t do all the time, sometimes with only a slightly elevated level of honesty.

Anyway, they’re no longer even being discrete about it.

Recently, Republican strategist Frank Luntz wrote a memo on the subject of how to kill Obama’s financial regulatory bill.  He said that all loyal Republicans should use the following words, and phrases:  accountability, transparency and oversight, lobbyist loopholes (note the alliteration), enforcement of current laws, bureaucrats, wasteful Washington spending, never again, government failures and incompetence, let’s help small businesses, big bank bailout bill, bloated bureaucracy, fine print, unintended consequences, special interests, hard working taxpayers, another Washington agency, unlimited regulatory powers, devil is in the details, red tape.

Never mind that Republicans tend to be the party with no accountability, transparency or oversight, the party that is far cozier with lobbyists, and the party of which most people with more than two brain cells to rub together would say “never again!”  Never mind that they mentioned bureaucrats twice.  Everybody hates bureaucrats although, really, it’s just a pejorative term for anyone who works in an office.  Never mind that Republicans have spent billion, even trillions wastefully which is what got us into this mess.

Above all, never mind that no bill has actually been introduced yet.  They will use these words to fight it with complete disregard to what is in it.

And they might win.

What I Like About The Winter Olympics

The winter olympics is about to begin and it will have special importance for me this year as my kids have started to develop an interest in winter sports.

Winter sports are big here in the Czech Republic.  Whether it is the winter olympics, or some world championship thingie, or the NHL, Czechs are always contenders in Hockey.  They took gold in 1998, and they feel it’s about time for another one.

Sam is on a hockey team.  They haven’t played any games yet and some of the players are just learning how to skate but, overall, I am pretty impressed when I watch their practices.  I’m impressed that 7 year olds can take falls like that and get up not crying (usually – there’s often one or two tearful episodes per practice.  I’m impressed that 7 year olds can skate that fast, can handle a stick and pass and shoot, can defend the goal fearlessly and with an understanding of angles and geometry that they probably won’t be able to explain, verbally, even when they’re in high school.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the Czech Republics success in hockey is their junior program.  I doubt that Sam will grow up to be an NHL player – that’s just not in the genes – but I think it’s possible that some of the kids he’s playing with now just might.

We took Sam and Isabel skiing this weekend.  Well, I didn’t ski, have never mastered the art.  We took Isabel to a class and, after a bit of initial sullenness and shyness with the instructor (a scruffy hippie type but since that describes half of daddy’s friends, she’s used to it) she was slaloming down the hill on her own.  I was quite amazed, as she’s only 3.  Sam is 7, and he was right up there on the slopes with the real skiiers.

So, I’m sure we’ll be watching all of the downhill events with special interest.

My favorite sport in the winter olympics is the acrobatic skiing.  With football, or basketball, or hockey, it’s a competition between two teams and one of them will win, even if both of them suck.  As an idle amateur, I often don’t know the difference between a well played game and a comedy of errors.  With curling and the biathlon it’s fun to watch just because they are so weird and you wonder “How did this ever become a sport in the 1^st place?,” but still, the best person on the day will win and I don’t know if it was the best of a bad lot or a world beating performance until the announcer tells me.  With many sports it’s just about who went fastest or jumped farthest and, even though they are doing something I couldn’t do, it’s not new and amazing.

Acrobat skiing, however, and I put gymnastics, platform diving and figure skating into this same category, you get to watch human beings doing things that human beings normally cannot do.  The people in these sports are not only great athletes, I see them as almost superhuman.

That, for me, is something worth watching.

A List of Poems

These are poems I’d like to write

The way the water and the light

Have their synchronicities

In powers and in properties

In the ways that they behave

Both as particles and waves

I’d like to write a poem about

When people came down from the trees

And how the world, without a doubt

Just like now had land and seas

Lakes and rivers, waterfalls

The Sun and the moon and stars at night

They had to make sense of it all

Magic, Religion, Science and Art

In the beginning were all the same

They all began when chattering apes

Began to give things names

I’d like to write a poem about

The history of mankind

An epic piece of massive length

Enough to make you blind

There is love, and death and betrayal

There are battles, very gory

And it covers quite a time span

It’s a truly gripping story

I’d like to write a poem about

Earth and Water and Fire and Air

The earth, of course, where flowers grow

And water that sings to us as it flows

And fire that turns the red meat brown

And the air that’s blowing all around

I’d like to write a poem, and I promise you,

Someday I will

That doesn’t end, but just goes on and on and on until…