11 February 2004

Almost 60 years ago, at the end of World War II, an American reporter in London asked George Bernard Shaw what he saw as the future for the victorious Allies – in particular, the United States.

“Three hundred years of the Dark Ages,” Shaw replied.  “After that, things will be fine.”

I wish I could believe him, not that it matters – by the time things improve I’ll have shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the angels at that great big Super Bowl in the sky.  As Texas writer Beth Henry remarked last week on the media website Axis of Logic, “Things have gotten really creepy in the land of the Humvee.”

A confession:  Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m the only person living who’s never seen the Super Bowl.  I’ve never willingly watched a football game at all, so I missed the gross misdeed, the unspeakable act, the crude, tasteless, anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-family “wardrobe malfunction” that gave an estimated 99 million TV viewers, among them helpless women and children, a 1.7-second glimpse of Janet Jackson’s nickel-plated breast.

“Like millions of Americans,” said an enraged Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, “my family and I gathered around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt.”

It took Powell less than 24 hours to order an investigation, but help came too late for many of the victims.  In Virginia, Republican congressman J. Randy Forbes was watching Super Bowl XXXVIII in a hospital room with his “seriously ill 79-year-old father” when Jackson’s teat hit the screen.

“I felt like they robbed us of a very special moment,” said Forbes, describing the crime as “irresponsible and reprehensible.”  Even so, he was luckier than Vivian Mitchell of Modesto, California, who was scheduled to testify at the Scott Peterson murder trial, if it ever begins, but who had a stroke in front of her television on Super Bowl Sunday and died three days later. Mitchell was the only witness Peterson had who claimed to have seen Laci Peterson, pregnant and alive, on the day that Scott supposedly axed her.  And so another innocent life has been lost to tragedy – and for what?

“It’s been a rough week on everybody,” said Justin Timberlake at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards.  With Jackson, Timberlake was the perpetrator of this national outrage, and while he claims, even now, that “what occurred was unintentional,” it plainly wasn’t.  That doesn’t matter either, I suppose!  The guilty parties have both apologized, and that’s all you need to do in this country to be let off the hook.  Just say you’ve “misjudged” or “misspoken” and they’ll lap you up like mother’s milk, forgiving the expression.

It’s hard to know, of course, at this early stage, if the sight of Janet Jackson’s dexter mammary posed an “imminent” threat to public morality and the American way of life, or if it was merely “urgent,” “immediate,” “serious,” “mortal” and “mounting.”  Like George Bush, “I don’t want to get into word contests,” and it may be that the intelligence I received about Super Bowl Sunday was “flawed,” like reports of WMD’s in Iraq. Certainly no nipple has been found, despite the efforts of federal inspectors and the endless replaying of the boo-boo shot on national television.

In fact, if it weren’t for TV I’d never have known that Janet Jackson has breasts, much less that some of the Jackson family’s body parts are apparently real. I’d never have seen the destruction of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, either, engineered by the broadcast networks’ incessant repeats of “The Scream,” which aired a whopping 633 times on CNN in the four days after the Iowa caucuses.

Here the mind begins to boggle.  Without TV I’d be blissfully unaware that Laci Peterson ever existed.  I wouldn’t have heard of Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears or that little girl in Pittsburgh, Brandy McKenith, who last week, at the age of seven, was suspended from school for saying the word “hell.”

To be exact – because American reporters value nothing so much as objectivity in the news — Brandy was expelled from Pittsburgh’s Sunnyside Elementary School for telling a classmate that he was going to hell, after she heard him utter a phrase she considers blasphemous, “I swear to God!”  The Pittsburgh public school system has “zero tolerance for profanity.” They don’t define it but it’s forbidden all the same, so Brandy was sent home with a scarlet “H” on her chest.

“Hell?” said Brandy’s father, Wayne.  “She got suspended for that? `Hell’ is, like, the least of the words in school today.” What’s more, Brandy learned it in church.  The McKeniths aren’t “religious fanatics,” says Wayne, but they have “a healthy respect for the Lord.  Brandy is under the assumption that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell.”

And why wouldn’t she be?  “Let us never be too proud to acknowledge our dependence on Providence and take our cares to God,” said President Bush at a prayer breakfast in Washington last week. TV is how children learn nowadays, and if Brandy’s home alone she’ll have lots of time to watch.

Perfect.

Note: This story is reproduced exactly as published by “Cosmopolitan” in July 1993. Helen Gurley Brown asked me to write about Monaco and when I raised the subject of expenses for the trip she said, “Don’t be silly. You don’t have to go! Just read about them and tell me what’s what.” Luckily — I guess? — I’d been to Monte Carlo many times. The magazine also had some secret editing process that made everything sound as if it came straight from … Cosmo.

The subject on everyone’s mind in Monaco these days is marriage:  Stephanie’s marriage, Caroline’s marriage, Albert’s marriage, even Rainier’s marriage.  Since none of the ruling Grimaldi family is married at the moment, and since the only point in having royalty (even teeny-tiny royalty like Monaco’s) is to see them behaving just like everyone else (only more so, or less so, depending on the state of their public relations) — well, after ten years of bad press, bad luck, and illegitimate babies, you can imagine it’s time for some domestic tranquility.  Someone in Monaco has to get married, and fast, if only to prove that they’re still in the game.

It was a wedding that first put Monaco on the map, don’t forget, in 1956, when Grace Kelly left her role as a Hollywood princess for a new career as Europe’s most visible and dazzling Catholic grande dame.  Her death in an auto accident in 1982 left a void in Monte Carlo that nothing and no one seems able to fill.  Ask anyone:  Grace’s tomb is the major tourist attraction in Monaco after the palace and the casino, which pretty much sums up her role in history and the principality at large.

“She was superior in the same way that Peter Pan was superior,” says Jeffrey Robinson, a friend of Princess Caroline who serves as the Grimaldi family’s official biographer.  Rainier himself speaks of the memory of Princess Grace as “the motivation, true and deep, that keeps us all going.”  Friends remember how “sweet” she was before her marriage, how “lovely” and “enchanting,” and how “royal” she became with the passage of time.  If, today, Rainier and his children are mentioned in the same breath with the Queen of England as the world’s most glamorous figureheads, it is thanks to Grace and to Grace alone.

I’d better clarify that:  it’s really only the children who are glamorous.  Rainier himself is a Mediterranean capitalist, the descendant of pirates, if truth be told, who would rather watch television and eat pizza in his underwear than attend the parties, galas, balls, and fêtes that traditionally make up the Monaco season.  Periodically, since Grace’s death, he has been linked romantically with one or another hard-bitten socialite on the razzle-dazzle circuit (most notably the “Business Princess,” Ira von Fürstenberg), but no one doubts that his first devotion is to the principality — “Monaco, Inc.,” 485.87 acres of porous rock and priceless sunshine and the most valuable real estate on the French Riviera.  Apart from that, the aging Prince hasn’t got a lot of “interests.”

“Let’s face it,” a woman I know is frank in admitting, “if Caroline, Albert and Stephanie were to be killed in a plane crash, which God forbid, nobody would give a damn ever again about Rainier.  His face wouldn’t sell two magazines on its own.”  And don’t let anyone kid you:  selling magazines — selling Monaco– is what it’s all about.  Nothing in the country would function at all without the Prince’s family to promote it, open it, close it, bless it, and be photographed with it.  In 1982, when Grace died, the National Enquirer sent 16 reporters to Monte Carlo to cover her funeral.  Earlier, when Princess Caroline married Phillipe Junot, the Enquirer offered $5,000 to anyone who would sell his ticket to the ball that preceded the wedding.  (No one did.) There are only a handful of people in the world who get this kind of media attention.  The Kennedys, the Windsors, Elizabeth Taylor — and the Grimaldis, whose problems make the lives of the others look like fun-time in comparison.  Basically what you’ve got in the line of succession are a Bad Girl, a Good Widow, and a Nice Boy on a Bobsled.

Taking the Bad Girl first:  Stephanie of Monaco — rock star, swimsuit designer, wannabe actress and full-time brat — is the Problem Child of Europe, a girl the French papers call “princesse rockeuse” not just on account of her up-and-down career as a pop singer.  Karl Lagerfeld once described Stephanie as “a sporty version of Madonna.”  She had made Earl Blackwell’s worst-dressed list by the time she was twenty-one.  She chews her nails and likes to tell jokes — the dirtier the better.

“What did the elephant say to the naked man?”  Stephanie once asked a friend of her mother’s at dinner, and when he grinned and said he didn’t know, she answered brightly, “Do you really eat out of that thing?”  She is deliberately provocative, even outrageous, in her public appearances, and she hopes to come back in some future life reincarnated as a dolphin.

“I hate being a princess,” Stephanie says — but she relies on it, too, just as often, and usually at the top of her voice.  She is one of those unfortunate celebrities whose garbage cans are stolen by journalists and sifted for clues.  She throws out unused plane tickets, spare change, sedatives, and pictures of herself; it’s hard to get at the truth, of course, if you’re picking through hair mousse and globs of pasta.  One of the nicest things I’ve heard anybody say about Stephanie is that “she has a lot of anger.”  She’s made a lot of headlines, too, since surviving the accident that killed Princess Grace.  She was only seventeen in 1982, when her mother’s Rover, with the two of them in it, plunged off the mountain road from La Turbie on its way down to Monaco.  Many believe that Stephanie was actually driving the car, or that she and Grace were having “a raging, slapping fight,” and that one or the other of them drove deliberately over the edge.  There is some horrible chatter indeed on the Riviera about Princess Grace’s final hours.  The tabloids, when they aren’t making a case for Mafia or PLO involvement in Grace’s death, slyly point to suicide.

“The curve they went over is directly above a cemetery,” a reporter in Paris told me in all seriousness.  “Grace would have known that.  We think she wanted to fly off to join the angels.”  Stephanie has “had help” in dealing with the trauma, but it’s the kind of thing, obviously, she won’t ever get over.  A couple of years ago, she had a tattoo removed from an unspecified part of her body, because it bore the name (also unspecified) of one or the other of her former boyfriends.  Now she’s playing at (unwed) motherhood, shacking up — what else can I call it? — with Daniel Ducruet, who regularly makes headlines himself by attacking photographers, personal enemies, rival suitors, total strangers, and beating them to a pulp.

“He’s bad news,” anyone in Monaco can tell you — and they will, provided you swear not to quote them by name.  “Gossip was invented in Monaco,” Prince Rainier has said, but so was the happy dictatorship, “the last oasis of peace and dreams.”  If you want to live in the principality, you have to play by the rules.  There’s no other way.  “And when you live here,” a friend of mine observes, “you really believe that you’re protected.”

As a matter of fact, you are.  There are 450 openly acknowledged policemen in the principality, serving an official population that never quite exceeds 30,000 souls.  Half of these, at any given moment, are probably somewhere else, since an awful lot of them are millionaires, businessmen, rock stars, and socialites.  Of the roughly 5000 people who are actual Monégasques (born there, and engaged in picturesque occupations for the sake of the tourists), most earn their living from one or another component of Prince Rainier’s hugely profitable gambling, real-estate, advertising, and corporate-convention empire.  There is no crime to speak of — no street crime, anyway — and no unemployment.  The principality is an industry in the exact sense.  It’s a theme park, a playground, a triumph of marketing, and a model of design.  It’s also a police state, where you can be thrown out for insulting the Prince and his family when you walk down the street in your diamonds.

“We have video cameras in key locations around the principality,” Rainier admits, “on street corners, in passageways and in public lifts.  It’s proven very dissuasive so we’re extending the system.  Let’s face it, if a fellow sees a camera on a corner he’s not going to do much because he knows the police are watching.”

They’re listening, too.  Every journalist in Monaco learns before long that his phone has been tapped.  Old hands tell stories about operators bursting into conversations between writers and editors, shouting, “That isn’t true!”  and, “How can you say such things about the Princess!”  I went to dinner with a young man who recently opened a business in Monte Carlo, and he prefaced our conversation with the most extraordinary warnings — caveats I thought had gone out with the Cold War.

“Shhhhhhh!” he kept saying, glancing shiftily around the Café de Paris.  “When you talk, talk quietly!”  I was not to identify him by profession or even nationality, because if I did, he told me, he would be “expelled.”  He was serious:  “I will be out of here — like that!”  Prince Rainier has an agreement with the French government that permits him, as an absolute monarch, to exile anyone he pleases not just from Monaco, but, if necessary, from all four départements of the French Riviera.  Magazines and books with a “pessimistic” view of the Grimaldis, furthermore, are banned from the principality.

“You don’t hear a negative word about any of them,” says Irish writer Genevieve Lyons, who spends part of every summer in nearby Antibes.  “People on the Riviera — not just Monaco — all want Caroline or Albert or Rainier at their parties.  They want their patronage, they want to lie in their sun.  And the gossip mill functions so smoothly here that if you did say anything nasty about them they’d hear about it before breakfast.”

So nobody’s saying anything nasty about Princess Stephanie’s new career as a mother.  She and Daniel Ducruet have been giving a lot of interviews lately to say how happy they are with the baby, and how happy Prince Rainier is to have another grandson, and how happy they’re all going to be when she and Daniel finally get married, which they will, only why rush, and besides (this is Daniel talking), “Marriage is a beautiful ceremony which shouldn’t be overshadowed by any sense of obligation.”  (Tell that to the ghost of Princess Grace.)

“It’s so sad, so sad,” says a friend of Grace’s in New York.  People’s eyes tend to widen when you ask about Stephanie, and royalty, in general, smacks its collective brow at the mention of her name.  She is such an easy target for the tabloid press that it’s tempting to overlook her very real accomplishments and her winning sense of humor.  It’s also a fact that her lovers and paramours, as a rule, do not discuss her when she’s finished with them.  They like her.  They are loyal in that sense.

“I think there’s a sort of a myth at work here,” says the doorman of an ultra-hot nightclub inPariswhere Stephanie sometimes appears.  “Every girl in France dreams of being a princess who hangs out with hoodlums.  All of the movies are about that, all the commercials.  That’s their dream.  And Stephanie lives it.”

Caroline, meanwhile, is on to something else, slowly recovering from the terrible sorrow occasioned by the death of her husband, Italian businessman Stefano Casiraghi, in a speedboat accident in 1990.  (Take it from me that everyone in Monte Carlo is described as a businessman sooner or later.  They’re in “real estate,” or “development,” or “import-export,” and it all means money, preferably untraceable.) For most of her life before she married Casiraghi, Caroline played the same kind of circus-princess role that Stephanie acts out now.  She was petulant, unruly, sometimes stupidly defiant and shocking.  Her transformation, as one of her admirers puts it in a shimmering image, “from slut to saint,” is one of the most interesting of our times, and she doesn’t mind at all anymore when she’s compared to Princess Grace.

“I can’t stand to carry the burden of her unrealized ambition,” Caroline griped about her mother in 1978, at the ripe old age of 21.  She said many superior things in the first flush of her independence, when she appeared as the toast of jet-set society and quite brazenly smashed her way into marriage with the much older, cavalier, epicurean Phillipe Junot.  “He works with banks,” Grace remarked (frostily, we can imagine.) Caroline tells a story now — and it’s worth pointing out that she reveres her mother’s memory — of finding Grace one day bent over a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, hunting for suitable sons-in-law among the European nobility.

“Drop him or marry him,” she advised her daughter when it came to Junot, and Caroline married him, “out of naivety,” she supposes, “or maybe in the spirit of rebellion.”  Grace was appalled at Caroline’s choice of men, but she summoned enough of her accustomed generosity to give her one of the all-time glamorous weddings of the 1970s — an unforgettable occasion, to hear the guests tell it, when a great deal of cocaine went up a lot of famous noses.

“Look at my little girl,” Grace cooed as Caroline tied what proved to be the loosest of knots.  “She looks just like a princess!”  (Friends, befuddled, were obliged to answer, “She is, Gracie.  She is a princess.”) By the time the Vatican, late last year, finally got around to granting Caroline an annulment from Junot, everyone agreed that she had paid her debt to society.  Tragedy — sudden death — had sobered her twice.

“Caroline is fantastic,” says Prince Dmitri ofYugoslavia, whose own family has known the Grimaldis for years.  “She’s highly intelligent, highly cultivated.  She’s brilliant.  She can talk about anything:  politics and art and metaphysics.  She really is the kind of person you’d want to have next to you at dinner.”  She is notoriously more exciting, at least in public, than her unmarried brother, Albert, whose gifts lie more in the line of administration and ribbon-cutting.  After Grace’s death, rumors were rife that a grieving Rainier wanted to abdicate, and that Caroline (with or without her father’s consent) would “seize the throne” from Albert.  These stories, denied by the palace as “ridiculous and completely without foundation,” were rather more dramatic than the situation warranted, but there’s truth to the suspicion that Caroline’s fingers will need prying loose if and when her brother takes a wife.  There is nothing false about her devotion to the duties she inherited from Princess Grace, nor was there anything “sham” about her second marriage to Stefano Casiraghi.  She was heartbroken when Stefano died, pulverized with grief, and there was real concern among her friends that she might crack under the strain of her loss.

She hasn’t — she won’t.  She’s taken the time to recover for real, and all of a sudden she’s smiling again, to the intense satisfaction of the tabloids and the lace-tatting Monégasques.  Caroline has had a lot of help in her bereavement from French actor Vincent Lindon, her boyfriend of record, who is “shadowy” in a way that differs substantially from most of the lizards you meet in Monte Carlo.  He is private.  He’s actually shy, and he’s completely devoted to Caroline’s three children by Casiraghi, Andrea, Charlotte, and Pierre.  Lindon is also Jewish, and would presumably need to convert to Catholicism if he wants to marry Caroline — though why the Grimaldis, looking at the record of royalty over the last ten years, would need to be sticklers for protocol is beyond the ken. It has something to do with the laws of succession, obviously:  Monaco enjoys a treaty of independence with its gaping neighbor, France, which stipulates that the Prince’s family has to produce a legitimate heir, otherwise Monaco supposedly reverts to French control.

This is the upshot of “the Albert Problem,” the confusion that exists in the public mind about the man who is frequently described as the most eligible bachelor inEurope.  At 35, Albert of Monaco is handsome, athletic (he’s an Olympic bobsledder), a wee bit nervous, and as nice as the day is long — “the dictionary definition of nice,” says a friend of the family.  “He is nice, nice, nice.”  Albert is the “sweetest” of all the Grimaldis, the most like his mother, with Grace’s tact and her well-known concern for the feelings of other people.  (There is a marvelous story about Princess Grace and Diana Spencer, when they met for the first time on the eve of Diana’s marriage to the Prince of Wales.  Grace found her crying in the ladies’ room at a party and folded her in her arms.  “Don’t worry,” she said.  “It’ll get worse.”) For a number of years after Grace died, Prince Rainier kept insisting he would give up his throne as soon as Albert was “settled and confident.  It will also have to do with when Albert gets married,”Rainier explained.  Albert knows that the heat is on in this regard, but so far he’s refused to succumb to the pressure.  He’ll take a wife when he’s ready, he says.  Or not.

“Have you talked to any of his girlfriends?”  a friend of Grace’s asked me when I called.  “Is he a homosexual?”  She thinks he isn’t.  She thinks that people just think he is.  “Every time I’ve seen him, God knows,” she says, “he’s surrounded by bimbos.”  There is a fierce protectiveness toward Albert on the part of all his family and friends, and while everybody wants to tell you what a nice guy he is, he remains a blurry figure, not as thrilling, somehow, as you think he might be.  He’s cautious, undeveloped, out of focus.

“He wants to make you feel comfortable,” says an American woman who dated Albert inMonte Carlo.  She is very pretty, a leggy blonde, like most of his former sweethearts.

“When I went out with him,” she confides, “at nightclubs, or on his yacht, wherever, there were lots of — well, it’s not that I think I’m lower-class, but …  there were lots of rich people.  I was never made to feel that I was less than they were.”  She was also never encouraged to think that she might become the next Princess of Monaco:  “I didn’t think that anything `serious’ was going to come out of it.  He didn’t try to kid me, and I respect him for that.  I feel that he will always be a good friend of mine.  He will always be there for me if I need him.”  The girl explains that she “lost it” with Albert only once, when she complained that he was hard to reach (in the actual sense).

“I never see you,” she cried.  “You’re always busy!”  And Albert replied with perfect sincerity, “But you see me more than anyone else I’m dating.”

“And you know what?”  says his friend.  “I believed him.  I’d probably seen him all of twice that month.  But this is the thing:  he never pretended with me.”  She gently rejects the suggestion that Albert might be gay.  She’s a professional dancer, and she knows from homosexuals:  she “would have noticed.”  Albert himself has publicly denied the rumors about his sexuality, but he’s smart enough to realize that no denial he can make would satisfy the press or his eager legion of gay male fans.  His photograph appears in the newspapers with astonishing regularity as he frolics in boats and on sunlit beaches with a wide assortment of bare-breasted girls.  He’s been seen on the slopes, so to speak, in the company of Brooke Shields, Donna Rice, Catherine Oxenberg, and, most recently, Claudia Schiffer, but again, so far as anyone knows, there’s “nobody serious” in the picture.

“And why should there be?”  asks a friend of Albert’s in New York? Albert is only 35, a little older than Rainier was when he met Grace Kelly.  I asked his pal to tell me “what makes Albert tick,” and the answer came without a beat:  “Girls.  Girls and sports and good friends.”

Is Albert gay? I blurted out (hang the consequences!).

“I’m not going to give you any details,” his friend replied.  “Let’s just say I’ve been out with him at night.”  He added something I couldn’t catch about “bringing them home,” then said:  “Do you think it would be easy for Albert to find a bride? It’s one thing to marry a bimbo, it’s another thing to marry someone like his mother.  She was superb.  She was the best thing that ever happened to the principality.”  There remains the possibility that Albert is just too boring and too nice for the shark-infested waters of Monaco, but this, as so much else, remains to be seen.

Will Albert marry? Will Rainier abdicate? Will Caroline seize the throne? (Let’s leave Daniel and Stephanie out of it.)

“It isn’t a joke!”  cried a well-known film producer with a house in Monte Carlo, when I ventured that none of it mattered a damn.  “I mean” — he was getting a bit misty — “God bless the principality! It’s a jewel! It’s a paradise! And the more the rest of the world deteriorates, the more I realize how lucky we are.  I go to church every day to pray for the health of the Prince and his family.  I really pray that God will keep them safe and sane.  Because that is my security.”

And you know what? I believed him.

*****************

Wait! It didn’t end there!

The Pleasure Principality

Prince Albert of Monaco talks to Peter Kurth about his mother, his mistress and his secret son

FEMININE FORCE: Release the Power Within to Create the Life You Deserve by Georgette Mosbacher

Reviewed by Peter Kurth (New York Observer 1993)

I’ve got to admit I’m of two minds (if “mind” is the word I’m looking for) about Feminine Force: Release the Power Within to Create the Life You Deserve, Georgette Mosbacher’s bubbly foray into the world of self-improvement. On the one hand, I can’t believe I actually finished reading a book as gushy, imperturbable, hastily written and retro-bimbo as this. On the other hand, it’s a relief to spend some time with an author who isn’t complaining, doesn’t hate anyone, wasn’t molested as a child, and never went to treatment for co-dependency, drug addiction, or low self-esteem. I feel Ms. Mosbacher ought to be rewarded for her courage. I feel, indeed, that Georgette Mosbacher deserves the life she has. She’s earned every one of those power lunches, those houses and gowns, those cars, those jewels, those shiny incisors and that big red hair.

“I wasn’t born a redhead,” Ms. Mosbacher explains, in what is by no means the funniest sentence in her book, “but I was born to be a redhead.” Her frankly incredible guide to a happy, healthy, slimmed-down, tidied-up, turned-out, made-over life at the Top of the Heap is good old American uplift with a nipped-and-tucked face. It’s Couéism re-imagined for the Home Shopping Network: “Every day in every way, I am getting” — well, let’s just leave it there. Georgette Mosbacher has been getting and getting and getting for the last 20 years. “As my friend Marietta Tree, a former United Nations Commissioner, says, `What do I have to do not to be called a socialite?’” Ms. Mosbacher asks.

Ms. Tree, of course, has been dead since 1991, but I suspect Ms. Mosbacher has been too busy to notice. At the moment she’s anticipating $20 million in first-year sales for her thriving cosmetics company, Exclusives by Georgette Mosbacher. Her husband, Robert, the Houston honcho and former Secretary of Commerce in the Bush Administration, is worth some money himself.

“He hasn’t come to the point where he’ll clean the house or worry about his socks,” Ms. Mosbacher complains, but she can “live with that.” She’s a “self-made woman” with “guts of steel.” She sees no reason why she “shouldn’t be a CEO, a warm and nurturing wife, and iron perfect shirts.” Her book is filled with steps and suggestions, zingers and tips — first this, then that, and “thirdly” something else. “Fourthly,” she says, “make a commitment to steps one, two, and three.” She regards her “inner voice” as the key to her success, and she recommends you do the same if you want to “achieve your goals.” “Goals,” in fact, is Ms. Mosbacher’s favorite word, after “Georgette.”

“`Georgette,’ my inner voice piped up,’” she writes. “`Things being what they are, what are you going to do to achieve your goals in this town?’” Or: “`Georgette,’ I finally said. `You are not going to play into their hands by wearing black!” She suggests that you talk to yourself in the mirror once or twice a day and that you “identify at least one thing you did that you feel good about. At least one thing,” she repeats, “and hopefully more.”

Now, I wouldn’t want to guess how many people in America are, this very minute, talking to themselves in the mirror and feeling good about their goals. Whenever I try it I think of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver — “You talkin’ to me?” – and a glance out the window, if you need convincing, will prove to you that the method doesn’t work. The world isn’t teeming with well-adjusted persons of either sex, just as the boardrooms of corporate America aren’t filled with Georgette Mosbachers, wafted along to a radiant destiny by means of the Feminine Force.

Ms. Mosbacher never does get around to defining what the “FF” is, by the way, or, rather, she defines it only in vague and sloganized terms, which puts the onus on you if your “goals” don’t pan out.

“The Feminine Force is my way of describing the intangible but indelible powers or energies that all women are born with but that many of us lose somewhere along life’s way,” Ms. Mosbacher writes. “The Feminine Force operates according to its own principles and moves uniquely through each of us.” It’s something you can “practice,” apparently, in your copious spare time. You can use it to “discover your talents” and “get a foot in the door.” You can visualize it, “pamper it,” and cuddle it along. (What you can’t do is expect it to repel a jewel thief, as it did for Ms. Mosbacher one day at the Barbizon Hotel. “God willing,” she writes — this is the funniest sentence in her book — “you’ll never find yourself at the wrong end of a gun.”)

I haven’t got room here to list “Georgette Mosbacher’s 72 Feminine Force Principles,” or her advice on “Getting From Point A to Point B,” “Basic Responsibilities 1 through 4,” or “Ten Proven Techniques for Turning a Moment Into a Lifetime.” Four or five of the sharper affirmations will give you a good idea:

“I am totally responsible for myself.”

“I pack my own parachute.”

“Any goal is a worthy goal.”

“My appearance is talking and I like what it is saying.”

“Network. Network. Network.”

Or, as she might have said more honestly, “Marry up. Marry up. Marry up.” Ms. Mosbacher met her first husband — “an incredibly caring, generous and wealthy man” — at a movie auction in Los Angeles, and tricked him into dating her by posing as a reporter for Time. “When he was through laughing,” she recounts, “he told me he thought I was very gutsy” (instead of having her arrested, which would surely have happened if your Feminine Force had been out of the house that day).

Georgette’s second marriage was to George Barrie, the CEO of Fabergé, who popped her one in a drunken moment and obviously had to go (guts of steel, remember?) Now she’s got Mosbacher, who, at the time she was dating him in Texas, was described by Georgette’s friends as “the second most eligible bachelor in the world” after Prince Rainier of Monaco. This will tell you all you need to know, really, about the Feminine Force and the females behind it.

“Watch out for the theoreticians of anger,” Ms. Mosbacher warns, giving us also this bit of wisdom, worth the cost of a thousand self-help books: “Here’s my beef with Susan Faludi: never once does she even consider the possibility that a lot of women who have had plastic surgery don’t mind the process and actually like the results.” Want to meet an eligible man? Walk your dog on the Upper East Side. Phone a few insurance agents and see whose wife has died. Hang around F. A. O. Schwartz on a Saturday afternoon “when it’s loaded with divorced men and their children.” Whether she’s giving advice on evening dress or market strategy, growth potentials, make-up styles, flirting in the boardroom or sexual harassment, Ms. Mosbacher’s message is always the same. It’s Get That Guy and Rule the World. It’s Lift Your Face and Dye Your Hair. Compromise. Minimize. Talk About Him.

“It’s true,” she finally says in a moment of clarity, “that the sheer ability to endure has been a trait attributed to strong women since the beginning of history.” But, like I said, how can you mind when she’s still got that smile?

After a lot of argy-bargy, as the English say, I’ve managed to transfer this blog from one host to another, the change brought about by the high price of web space on your fancier servers. The switch was supposed to be automatic but nothing is, of course – generally, these days, I’m ready to go back to tin cans and a string. But I’m here, I’m back, and I’m hoping that this strained, hallucinatory, over-hot Anno 2012 will continue to provide me with outburst material for rainy days. I swore off “politics” when Bush Jr. left office, and I’m not easily outraged.  I’m actually sweet, fond of animals and old ladies. Sometimes, still, the news exceeds my generosity, as it did today with this:

Women could delay the menopause indefinitely with ovary transplants

Just what we need, right? More children.

And this, from yesterday:

The family with £50,000 of breast implants and the daughter saying no to silicon

I smell a “reality” series.

And this:

Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation

“The big thieves hang the little ones.” — Czech proverb

And this:

Israel stages Holocaust survivor beauty pageant

So there’s no want of amazement in the commonwealth. I might even look for something uplifting to report from time to time, if the situation warrants.

Right now I’m obsessed with Scandinavian crime fiction – “Nordic Noir” – devouring whole shelves of Wallanders, Inspector Becks, Rejseholdets and Maria Werns. There’s something consoling about all that mayhem when it happens in Denmark or Sweden – a head in the toilet or a severed foot roasting on a spit with the chickens in a Stockholm kebab shop. The filmed versions of these books are almost invariably as good as the originals, too, and thankfully there’s a slew of them. I’ll be busy saying “Tak!”, “Satan!” and “Jag är jävligt trot!” (“I’m really fucking tired!”) until Christmas, at least. Stay tuned.

TITANIC: DOWN WITH THE SHIP (March 1998)

——————————————————————————–

BY PETER KURTH

I sat glued to the Academy Awards on Monday for the first time in years, waiting to see if Hollywood would go all the way at the Titanic orgy by endowing this billion-dollar piece of junk with all 14 of the awards for which it was nominated. It isn’t easy seeing Hollywood congratulate itself for three hours straight, whether you’re watching Titanic in the theater or the Oscars on TV. I watched both for this report and I’m heading for the lifeboats.

Actually, I wanted to review Titanic without having seen it, because I think it would make a better story.  There can never have been a movie — or a ship — so over-publicized as this.  The only thing I didn’t know about Titanic before I saw it was that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet end up having sex in the back seat of a car.

That’s right, a car. Just before Titanic hits the iceberg.  That is to say, way into the movie. Way, way into the movie.

Other than that, I knew everything there was to know about this film through osmosis. I knew that Leonardo dies in the end and that Kate doesn’t. I knew that Kate goes on to become a potter and free spirit in the form of Gloria Stuart. I knew that Leonardo teaches Kate how to lob goobers from the side of the ship. I knew that Kate gives someone the finger in a particularly thrilling scene, even though she’s supposed to be an upper-class girl from 1912. I knew that Titanic had been filmed so cleverly you’d never know how scrawny Leonardo is, even though he spends at least a third of the movie soaked in water.

I knew, of course, that the ship finally sinks. I’d already seen it a thousand times on TV, rising on its bow, cracking in half, and flinging a lot of shrieking people from the poop (or whatever). I’m here to tell you there’s no difference between seeing this movie and not seeing it, except that seeing it allows you to quote some of the worst dialogue of “all time,” as everyone keeps saying about this witless potboiler:

“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets” (Gloria Stuart, as Kate grown up).

“You could just call me a tumbleweed blowin’ in the wind” (Leonardo).

“They’re fascinating. Like in a dream. There’s truth without logic. What’s his name again?” (Kate, gazing at a couple of Picassos she’s hauled on board).

“Swim, Rose! I need you to swim!” (Leonardo to Kate, having survived an aquatic vortex that would have sucked the Statue of Liberty from her pedestal and lapsing into 90′s psychobabble while hundreds die around him).

I could go on, but what’s the point? With regard to history, never mind the laws of the sea, Titanic is the silliest thing since Demi Moore in The Scarlet Letter. The only nice thing I can say about it is that Celine Dion’s nasal wailing number doesn’t start till the final credits roll, so you at least have a chance of escaping that disaster.

                                                              Celine Dion? Get us off this ship!

Mind you, I think the Motion Picture Academy was mean not to nominate Leonardo for an Oscar along with everyone else in Titanic. I don’t blame him for not showing up. In earlier times, of course, when Hollywood had style, Leonardo would have been cast as the soda jerk in an Andy Hardy movie or as Doris Day’s little brother in By the Light of the Silvery Moon. But he’s no worse than anyone else in Titanic, and it’s his picture, after all. Ask any teenager.

There’s no point in complaining that Leonardo, as a struggling artist from Wisconsin at the turn of the century, is unconvincing. He’s not there for verisimilitude, any more than director James Cameron’s much-hyped recreation of HMS Titanic bears much resemblance to an actual ship. You’ve never seen such spacious quarters in steerage, and whenever Kate and Leonardo go out on the deck to spit, squabble or flap their arms while balancing on the prow, there’s not another soul in sight. Two thousand people on board and these idiots have the deck to themselves.

To the Academy’s credit, it nixed Titanic in the acting and screenplay categories — the very things that make most movies worth watching — but if we’re giving Oscars to software, it only makes sense. At one point, Oscar-winners from previous years were lined up on bleachers for a grotesque “Family Portrait.” Most of them looked like shut-ins or escapees from the nursing home, and when Cameron, clutching his umpteenth award, cynically called for “a few seconds of silence” to honor the victims of Titanic, he was the only one who wouldn’t shut up. Everyone else had sunk to the briny deep.

“Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.”

Thus spake Disraeli, British Prime Minister under Queen Victoria and apparently a prophet of modern ennui. The New York Times ran a story recently about proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, invariably described as “the bible of mental health treatment,” which wants to include grief – good, old, normal bereavement — as a new category of depression in the next edition of the book. This has sneaky implications: The DSM is the go-to reference for psychiatrists and, more critically, health insurers, who follow its recommendations when deciding to cover — or not cover – treatment for what ails ya.

In other words, if your complaint has a name and a diagnostic number in the DSM, someone’s more likely to pay for your pills. Adding a “disorder” like grief to the mix widens the margin for mistaken diagnoses and will benefit Big Pharma more than anyone else. “Current efforts to revise the manual,” says the Times, “are shaping up as the most contentious ever.”

Of course grief – acute sorrow from the death of a loved one – has been medicated forever, usually with alcohol, and in some cases, obviously, it can persist indefinitely and morph into mental illness. But up till now, taken alone, grief has been excluded from the DSM as a marketable ailment. It’s one of a host of conditions, ranging from shyness to schizophrenia, that by their absence make depression apparent in a given case. Other possibilities need to be excluded before they hand out the Prozac.

Currently, the DSM requires that patients exhibit at least five symptoms of major depression before a correct diagnosis can be made – trouble sleeping, feelings of worthlessness, “suicidal ideation,” etc. These must persist for at least two weeks and not be caused by external factors. A depressed grief-stricken person, you’d think, would present symptoms above and beyond, or anyway different from … well, grief.

But no: Under the new rules, if your husband dies suddenly and you’re still weeping about it two weeks later, you can put away the sherry and head to the pharmacy for relief.

In fairness to the industry, a lot of psychiatrists are frowning on this. “There is the potential for considerable false-positive diagnoses and unnecessary treatment of grief-stricken persons,” the Times reports, words that would cheer the heart if the experts weren’t so concerned with externals: “Drugs for depression can have side effects, including low sex drive” (as if that were the best reason for avoiding them!). Americans are already the most medicated people on earth – the pathologizing of “negative emotion” has hit epidemic levels in this country.

Take “attenuated psychosis syndrome” (A.P.S.), my current favorite for inclusion in the revised DSM. This is a label to be stuck on people – mainly young people – “who experience delusional thinking and hallucinations and sometimes say things that do not make sense.” As a predictor of insanity it’s almost useless, however, since “seventy percent to 80 percent of young people who report these strange experiences do not ever qualify for a full-blown diagnosis” of psychosis or schizophrenia, per the Times’ report.

The key word here is attenuated — as in, “We’re stretching all this a bit thin.” It’s like “generalized anxiety disorder” (G.A.D.), a fair description of the human condition and the diagnosis you’re likely to get if you turn up in a therapist’s office for anything from fidgets to a busted romance. The purpose of the label is to pay for the treatment. Ditto with “binge eating disorder” (B.E.D.), “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” (P.D.D.), “intermittent explosive disorder” (I.E.D.) or “pervasive developmental disorder — not otherwise specified” (P.D.D.-N.O.S.) – a label I’m jonesing to get for myself, since it contains the seed of all possible explanations. (“See him? He’s got P.D.D.-N.O.S. Such a waste!”)

“The world has changed,” says Dr. James H. Scully, Jr., chief executive of the American Psychiatric Association, whose job it is to approve final revisions to the DSM. “We’ve got electronic media around the clock, and we’ve made drafts of the proposed changes public online, for one thing. So anybody and everybody can comment on them, at any time, without any editors.”

That sounds right – very democratic. Meantime millions of children are medicated for “attention-deficit disorder” – a twenty-fold increase in prescriptions in just thirty years, says the Times – despite the fact that “no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems,” the very things it’s meant to improve.

Did you know that? Treatment for A.D.D. is basically a band-aid. It seems that amphetamines work equally well – in fact, identically — on children without A.D.D., Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs being designed to improve and make bearable the performance of “boring, repetitive tasks.” Their social utility is paramount, far more important than the subtle needs of any one kid. And the message from the experts is perfectly clear: Snap out of it! There is to be no trouble in any of our lives! Dope ‘em up, move ‘em out!

I wrote on this same theme 20 years ago, reviewing Dr. Peter Kramer’s landmark Listening to Prozac for “The New York Observer.” Text below.

*

LISTENING TO PROZAC (New York Observer, June 1993)

Does anyone remember that old “Twilight Zone” episode where the citizens of some future society are all required to look and sound alike? On reaching adulthood, everyone is given a choice of body type A or B, blond or brunette, amounting in either case to a blandly attractive, surgically perfected, absolute sameness of appearance? The plot revolved around a couple of misfits, who thought they might be happier being drab and maladjusted than flawless and not themselves.  But in the end they changed their minds, or were made to change their minds, and in those virtuous days of the 1960s, when Rod Serling was alive and the psychologists hadn’t done much more than IQ us into corners, loss of individuality was regarded as a tragedy, pure and simple.  We were against it, the way we were against Communism, atheism and fluoride in the water.

But not anymore, or not on the evidence of the books that keep pouring out of the psychotherapy industry.  The harder we’re urged these days to follow our bliss and run with the wolves the more determined are the experts, in their oily little hearts, that we stay on the straight and narrow.  No real eccentricity is permitted in the fix-it-all culture; no quirk of character or twist of sentiment is allowed to exist without reference to “pain,” “abuse” and the duty of our citizens to “grow” at all costs.  Growth for the sake of growth is the primary feature of a cancer cell, but never mind.  You are not OK the way you are, and if you don’t believe me, pick up a copy of Listening to Prozac, Dr. Peter Kramer’s riveting account of the history and future of anti-depressant drugs in America.  If and when your brain manages to absorb the dispiriting message of Dr. Kramer’s book, you might recommend it to your friends.  If, on the other hand, your hair stands up from now till Christmas, take heart:  there’s a pill out there with your name on it.

Before I make it entirely clear how disturbed I am about the imminent triumph of chemistry and psychiatry over self-awareness, depth of feeling, creativity, spirituality, subtlety, humility, discernment, intuition, experience, significance and the dignity  of the human race, I ought to say a few kind words about Dr. Kramer and his book.  I mean them sincerely.  Listening to Prozac is a fascinating, well crafted, sometimes ironic and possibly momentous contribution to our understanding of personality and the future of psychopharmacology (a fancy word for drugging the population when it gets upset).  Dr. Kramer is smart as hell, and he writes awfully well for someone named Dr. Kramer.  I have to admit, too, that I prefer the sound of an M.D.’s voice to the earnest kazooing of the psychobabblers.  Listening to Prozac is filled with “aggressive fathers” and “passive mothers,” and there’s a whole chapter devoted to formes frustes, or “low self-esteem.”  But deep down, I think, Dr. Kramer isn’t sold on the lingo.  He calls it “insulting,” and he’s right:  it is.

It’s also next to meaningless.  Pick a problem (any problem) and call it what you want.  Adult children of alcoholics, outer-directed husbands’ love-addicted wives, frenzied sisters’ younger brothers — all of them, nowadays, suffer from what Dr. Kramer describes as a “chronic condition:  heightened awareness of the needs of others, sensitivity to conflict, residual damage to self-esteem.”  Come at this from another angle and you’ve got “co-dependency.”  Fifteen years ago you had Erroneous Zones and the When-I-Say-No-I-Feel-Guilty crowd.

These rock-ordinary human attributes have been with us since the dawn of time; they are “odd indications for medication,” Dr. Kramer thinks, but I don’t.  I honestly believe we’ve been so badly damaged by a parade of shifting, pseudo-caring labels that the only cure for what ails us would be an anti-depressant, the psychologists showing no sign of pulling up stakes anytime soon and moving on, say, to poetry.  Prozac, as everyone knows, popped out of the labs in the late 1980s, and, following some trendy analysis in the newsmagazines (and on Oprah, Geraldo, “60 Minutes,” and so on), it emerged as the fanciest thing on the therapeutic circuit, the equalizing, all-embracing, all-fulfilling drug of choice for the occasionally-to-somewhat-bothered-by-lifers.

Please don’t think I’m being flippant when I say that.  Listening to Prozac isn’t concerned with the treatment of insanity or even of mental illness (where drugs to stabilize the mind and emotions obviously play a needed and charitable role).  Dr. Kramer is a practicing psychiatrist who was moved to examine the “moral” and “ethical” implications of Prozac when he observed its transforming effect, not on schizophrenics or the severely disturbed, but on the most insipidly unhappy people:  the discontented, the oversensitive, the sullen and the dull. Traits of character, the doctor says — but your grandmother knew this already — are ingrained in our nervous systems and genetic codes.  Our weaknesses and vulnerabilities have a life of their own, regardless of their “childhood” origin.  At first “psychological,” they become biological, “autonomous,” chemically rooted and malleable; Prozac wipes them out in a “substantial minority” of cases.  It actually “fixes” the personality, rendering the shy outgoing, the angry calm, the lonely and tongue-tied convivial and (by the sound of it) hot to trot.

Deadbeats, on Prozac, are “socially attractive” for the first time in their lives.  Shirkers at work become positively Japanese in their eagerness to produce.  Wallflowers blossom, losers win.  Nobody comes home without a prize except those unlucky few who, for reasons no one has yet figured out, are driven to the brink of suicide by Prozac’s mucking around with their serotonin levels.  (There is already such a thing as a “Prozac Survivor’s Support Group.”)

Try as he might, Dr. Kramer can’t escape the feeling that something doesn’t “sit right” with self-improvement on a chemical basis.  Could it be, he wonders, that “diminishing pain can dull the soul?”  The studies he provides of “successful” cases all concern people whom society rewards in their Prozaced condition:  teenagers who’ve stopped moping, wives who’ve stopped yelling, men who’ve stopped screwing around.  Dr. Kramer wants to know if the world is ready for “cosmetic psychopharmacology” and “the medicalization of personality.”

“What are the implications,” he asks, “of a drug that makes a person better loved, richer, and less constrained — because her personality conforms better to a societal ideal?”  What sort of road are we on when medicine is used, not to cure, but to control, and simultaneously to revise the concept of illness, taking standard traits of human behavior and stripping them down into “symptoms?”  Will we go quiet into that anti-depressant night, allowing “material technology, medications, to define what is health and what is illness?”

Dr. Kramer is too sharp-witted not to realize that we are standing in the shadow of the Brave New World, but in the end, I’m afraid, he’s squarely on the side of the medicators.  Psychotherapy, too, he tells us, was once lambasted “for inducing adaptation to the dominant culture,” and “asking about the virtue of Prozac [is] like asking whether it was a good thing for Freud to have discovered the unconscious.”  There are those, of course, who think it was not.  Dr. Kramer closes his book with a tribute to Woody Allen and his New Age fantasy, Alice, where an edgy Mia Farrow pops downtown to a Chinese doctor and snorts a mixture of mysterious herbs that allows her to dump her insulting husband and put the make on strangers at the zoo.  These aren’t quite the people I’d pick to recommend a vision of the future, on or off drugs, but they keep the shrinks in business, after all.

A word of advice:  if you read the book, you’ll want the dope.  Don’t say I didn’t tell you.

If only she’d known! Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham in BBC1’s “Great Expectations."

With the Republican primaries now in full wallop it’s time to talk about something serious: Marriage. Specifically, its decline. A friend came by the other day in a welter of gloom, discouraged by six weeks of cohabitation and the true personality of his beloved. The details aren’t important. “Into their inmost bower, handed they went” and discovered they had very different notions of togetherness. She likes to cuddle and he wants to read.

“I’m beginning to think that living alone might be easier,” he said.

“Not just easier, better,” I answered. “Better.” I never pause in my promotion of the single life. If not celibate, I am anti-connubial, seriously non-nuptial, and it seems I’m now in the majority. A new report from the Pew Research Institute indicates a “startling” drop in the U.S. marriage rate – down 5 percent in 2010 and more than 20 percent since 1960. Similar studies in Britain reveal that only 48 percent of eligible adults in the UK are currently yoked for life.

“We don’t know why,” says Pew researcher D’Vera Cohn, whose task it was to break this news to unbelievers. “We can’t really say for sure that it’s the recession or bad economic times. There are other kinds of living arrangements that are socially acceptable now, such as living with someone without being married, living on your own, or even living as a single parent. So people may feel they have options that they didn’t used to have.”

Well, yes, they do. And in Cohn’s depiction, at least, the benefits of marriage are distinctly unromantic.

“Economically speaking, married couples tend to have more income and more wealth,” she explains. “The kind of partnership marriage encourages is one in which you plan for the future, share your assets, build wealth together. There isn’t that evidence yet for people who [just] live together. If people who aren’t married are less able to build wealth, that will affect the overall wealth of the country.”

So if you’re not getting married, I guess, you’re a slacker, a drain on the economy and a threat to GDP. At the least, probably, you aren’t buying in bulk at Costco. There are, of course, “the children” to think of, a mantra guaranteed to stop any debate in America.

“There’s research indicating that children have a higher likelihood of turning out well if they come from a household where their parents are married,” Cohn insists, before backtracking and saying that no, in fact, there isn’t: “Most children turn out well regardless of whether their parents are married or not, so I’m not at all trying to suggest that children will turn out badly if their parents aren’t married.”

What is she trying to suggest?

“There’s a somewhat higher likelihood that these children will face issues,” Cohn concludes, “and some of those may include economic hardship.”

Ah, Americans. Always trying to put a shine on shit. But if the best defense of marriage is more money in the bank we might as well go back to camels and grandmother’s linen. Historically, till the Industrial Revolution, at least, athe institution of marriage rested on the backs of chattel, women and children whose job it was, not to create wealth, but to provide services for the home enterprise, which itself was not expected to turn money but to keep everyone alive. Marriage and its contract were an exchange of labor, in olden times, divorced from profit and, for that matter, romantic love.

Now, all families are owned by banks, subject to market forces and the rules of investment. This is where the gays come in. In a brave essay for Lapham’s Quarterly (December 2011), Justin E. H. Smith argues that the drive to same-sex marriage is, au fond, a triumph of commerce and not a blow for human rights. The modern nuclear family, consisting of Mom, Pop, the kids and no one else, “with only casual or symbolic ties to friends and extended family,” is such a recent invention that some well-behaved homosexuals can hardly be a menace to it.

“In this respect,” Smith writes, “gay marriage is not a reduction to absurdity of an ancient institution, so much as it is an instance of late capitalism’s voracious absorption of everything that might otherwise stand as an obstacle to it. … The rebranding of couples as ‘partners’ is the sad culmination of the modern transformation of couples into work-love units” – i.e., it’s your job to be married, with children, and shopping till you drop. Anyone can do it.

You can read all of Smith’s essay here. And don’t weep for bygone times. By stubbornly remaining single, you’ll be doing your bit for the #Occupy movement.

UPDATE: Look, it’s getting worse! Unhitched In America: Only 1 in 3 Americans Wants to Get Married, in Slate, 3 February 2012

"But it wasn't a dream. It was a place. And you - and you - and you - and you were there!"

I need a dream analyst. Here’s why:

I dreamed I was on a train to Kansas, coming south from Chicago to visit my mother. She had moved from Vermont to somewhere on the plains, but I couldn’t remember the name of the town. The train stopped suddenly and we were ordered into a diner to sample the pie. It would be a long wait, they said, and the pie was “the Best in the West.” I didn’t eat it. I kept wondering why my mother had moved to Kansas and what town she lived in. I saw a pay phone and tried to call her, but the machine repeated, “12 cents, 12 cents, please,” over and over, and I didn’t have correct change. I pulled out my cell phone but the numbers had been moved around and I couldn’t dial it. Then I saw that the train had left. A waitress came up and said, “We’re sending you to live with a Christian family but you need to take a Biblical name.”

“Peter,” I said. “Isn’t that Biblical? It’s already Biblical.”

“Old Testament only,” said the waitress. “Sorry.”

I awoke, as they say, with a start. In another dream last week I was buying a pack of cigarettes and overpaid by thirty dollars. The woman at the counter said I could have the money back if I asked the Baby Jesus.

Help me, please.

I’m used to dreams where I’m trying to get somewhere and can’t.  Usually it’s Paris, sometimes London or New York, and sometimes a town on the ocean that I seem to know intimately but can’t find my way around. Every time I head north I end up south, like Alice through the looking glass. These are standard anxiety dreams, involving lost passports and airline tickets, broken clocks, missed cabs, no money and suitcases that haven’t been packed. I accept them as part of the general conundrum, a way for the unconscious to work its stuff while the mind is busy snoring. I don’t feel frustrated in my daily life and, awake, I’m not too anxious about anything.

But Kansas? I draw the line at dreaming about Kansas. Even asleep it was a stretch to think that my mother might have moved there, a state she insists was originally settled only because a lot of pioneer women mutinied on the wagon train and refused to go a step further. I did have a great-aunt, Roberta – we called her “Aint Bert” — who lived in Wichita and said it was “God’s country.” She was born in Possum Trot, Texas, so you can see her point. And maybe it’s some atavism that has me dreaming about the Lord of the Hogs, the Corn and the Westboro Baptist Church so near to Christmas in New England.

Or maybe it’s the Republican presidential contest, a field so loaded with hucksters, charlatans and cash-soaked knuckleheads as to pop the corks of even American hypocrisy. You can see that I prefer this theory. I’ve stayed away from “politics” so far on this blog because the Web is already crawling with comment and I still haven’t recovered from eight years of Bush.** But I’ve just watched Rick Perry’s “I’m-not-ashamed-to-be-Christian” commercial and won’t be the last to observe that he looks really queer, in a Log Cabin kind of way. I think all these dudes obsessed with homosexuality should be goosed till they cough up their wallets. I don’t see how same-sex marriage and prayer-free schools amount to “liberal attacks” in a nation that forbids state religion, but they can tell you in Kansas, I’m sure. Which is why I woke up. Thank God.

**If you want to play ”Falling Bush” you can still do it here

Thanksgiving’s over, not a minute too soon. A friend in retail pops in to say that she survived Black Friday (and Saturday, and Sunday) at her local Gap-derivative by hiding in closets and shooing customers off the floor when they asked questions: “They can help you at check-out.” “Have you tried customer service?” NPR reports “a promising start” to the gruesome season: “The average holiday shopper spent $398.62 this weekend, up 9.1 percent from $365.34 last year. Total spending reached an estimated $52.4 billion.”

That’s a lot of patriotism. Imagine what could be done with the money if it were raised for something durable, like education or libraries. Roads and bridges? Family planning?

Me, I could never make it in retail. I lack a certain je ne sais quoi — obedience, mainly, and the eagerness required to make customers feel good about buying things they don’t need. I also won’t pretend to look busy when there’s nothing to do — a cardinal sin in the market place. At J. C. Penney’s, years ago – it was my first paying job – they put me on the floor selling shoes. Apart from wearing them all my life I had no training for this. I certainly didn’t know why I had to straighten them every five minutes when they were already lined up like missiles on Moscow. I thought the customer always came first. When weary mothers asked if the cheaper, Penney’s-brand sneakers would last their kids the summer, I told them the truth.

“Oh, no,” I said. I was raised on George Washington and Honest Abe: “You’d do better to buy an expensive pair now, rather than come back in August and pay twice.”

Needless to say, I wasn’t a winning member of the Penney’s team. After a month, they put me in sporting goods selling rifles (!) and then in menswear, where I spent a long evening — my last—measuring suits to be sent to the tailor. Again, no training. I just put the chalk marks where I thought they should go and never went back.

Now The Wall Street Journal warns that we are not to be misled by the jingling tills of Black Friday: “Widespread hype about stores opening on Thanksgiving night merely prodded shoppers to spend sooner, not necessarily buy more overall. Smart-phone coupons and TV and Web advertising have fooled consumers into believing this year’s deals were better than in the past.” Apparently no amount of fooling can get people to remember that all the deals are better in January and that “holiday stress” is optional. This proven willingness to be led by the nose was the spark of the #Occupy movement. Any game can be changed by refusing to play.

Of course it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good. On the bright side, Christmas does stem the tide of those endless TV commercials for car insurance, prescription drugs, cell phone service, online dating and toilet paper (“It’s time to get real about what happens in the bathroom!”). Anything that spares us a minute of “Flo” or Cymbalta® has the thanks of a grateful nation.

This just in! Cheerful Stores Drive Away Stressed Christmas Shoppers, Experts Warn

(First published in “Seven Days.”  We were  asked to write about a Thanksgiving dish.)

They asked me to write about the pumpkin pie and I said I would because I know all about pumpkins.  Pumpkins and I go way back.  You can’t trust them.

When I was nine years old, I won first prize at the Champlain Valley Fair for a pumpkin I grew in my back yard.  It was very beautiful, round and perfect.  Everybody said I had a green thumb.  But nobody told me about crop rotation, so when I tried it again the next year I got only a pathetic stunted thing that looked more like a gourd with warts.  I felt betrayed, yes, violated.  I turned my back on pumpkins for many years.

Then one day when I was getting a divorce — this was some time ago — I was depressed and decided I’d make a pumpkin pie from scratch.  God knows what I was thinking.  I really needed some TLC.  What I hadn’t counted on was the heartlessness of the pumpkin.  Pumpkins are very selfish fruits — they don’t forget.  It took me six hours to steam it, peel it, mash it and so forth, and by the time I was done I had drunk three bottles of wine and couldn’t taste the pie at all.  I called the woman I was still married to and yelled at her over the phone.  She said I was a jerk and hung up.

The moral of this story:  It’s just as good out of a can.  Pumpkins will let you down.