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For me the news yesterday wasn't just Michael Jackson's apparent death-by-Demerol, but the fact that he died the same day as another American icon, Farrah Fawcett.
Both represented a cultural shift that took place following the open-conflict, counter-culture divide of the 1960s; two shooting stars that are very different trajectories. Jackson morphed from gifted child-singer into an appealing adult entertainer during the very decade that Farrah burst on the scene in a flash of young glamour – beautiful, but not self-absorbed.
In a way they are both bright spots in a dim landscape. The '70s, to my memory, didn't have a whole lot going for it. Music that had been so transcendent the decade before came to approach something like self-parody. Politics became unclear. Watergate and recession sapped our energy and people looked to diversion. Platform soles, and bad hair dominated a landscape of rebels without a clue. Jackson Browne memorialized the time in his song "After the Deluge," lamenting how the once idealistic young people began to surrender to "the glitter and the rouge."
Michael Jackson would eventually go down that road, but in the '70s still seemed to hang on to some promise of authenticity.
Michael Jackson's fans will hate this, but I think he peaked in 1982 with "Thriller." The young man self-assuredly reclining on that album cover seemed headed to some place that was a lot better than where he ended up. That year Farrah was just a gorgeous former TV star from a campy show about sexy secret agents, and Michael Jackson could've taken his life anywhere.
None of us realized how damaged he was.
Farrah Fawcett, though, wasn't finished. She demonstrated an acting ability that shocked many. Her performances in "The Burning Bed," "Extremities," and "The Apostle," are all first rate -- all deep and hard against type. She still seemed dingy on late night talk shows, but the work demonstrated a devotion to craft that had been hidden in the years that she rose to fame. Michael Jackson, during that time continued to produce slick, well produced pop music, but all of it seemed derivative somehow of that place he had already arrived at.
Subsequent Albums, Neverland Ranch, child molestation accusations, the hideous plastic surgery, the marriages to Lisa Marie Presley and Debbie Rowe, his bizarre public parenting lapses -- they all seemed to be part of a downward spiral from a great height that ended on Thursday.
Farrah's life was no textbook of sanity either. Her only son, jailed on drug charges, missed coming to her deathbed. The young man's father, Ryan O'Neal, belatedly offered his hand in marriage after leaving her years before. She died, though, with a dignity the rest of us can only dream of attaining. Facing a death sentence from cancer, she did a final star turn in her own documentary and showed the world what a valiant fight looks like. She ended, I think, on higher ground.
Fame and talent are only two variables in a complex equation that determined the arc of a life.
Watching the stream of Twitter messages from Iran (it seems inappropriate to call them "tweets") is like seeing a great river rush past reflecting tremendous movement and action on the opposing bank. The messages themselves are individually not illuminating, but collectively glisten like points of light to form a moving mosaic of life on the distant shore. It is at once mesmerizing and heartbreaking, hopeful and terrifying. We are joined in such a direct way that we can even sense the false voices that creep in to try and misdirect us. Posers and meddlers are instantly recognized as frauds, exposed by keen ears who know falsehood when they hear it. I said "hear" not "read"; we are joined that closely. The words are windows that bring us directly to a shared experience. The keen ears also know what they are missing from those of us entrusted with the job of gathering and disseminating information.
TV, of course, is at its best when sharing such an experience as the one in Iran, but our tools are sometimes clumsy, our diligence sometimes wanting and our methods now seem antiquated. The segmented nature of our work is unsatisfying for the fully engaged among us. Also, we're targets of the gatekeepers; the people who wish to limit what is reported and control what is known. The Iranians expel foreign reporters, and news editors judge the overseas story irrelevant to a home audience, and both find themselves guarding a perimeter that has already been breached. With Twitter people on both sides of the information stream have set up their own coverage of the story forcing traditional media to try and catch up, but we have been passive and it shows.
That is not so say we've been replaced, but that the people who were always in charge are now aware of our shortcomings and demanding more. Today one voice complained about the repeating of the Twitter info on news channels: "Enough vetting and re-tweeting, how about some real reporting?" Another voice unhappy with the story mix suggested someone go to the newsroom and "kick some (butt) to get them to do their jobs."
We hear you boss.
Palestinians are not the cartoon terrorists they are too often portrayed to be. To travel the streets of Ramallah or Bethlehem is to walk among essentially friendly and, surprisingly, Western people who will overwhelm you with their hospitality and their ocean of grievances. They drive cars, hustle for jobs, watch TV, rent DVDs, play soccer and talk politics. From a short distance they are indistinguishable from their "cousins," the Israeli sabras, also born to the land.
A recent authoritative opinion poll taken in Gaza and the West Bank offers some perspective on the political currents running through the Palestinian "street." Politicians and experts speak FOR them and AT them, but too few people ever take the time to ASK them what THEY think. It is as if someone is afraid to allow them a human face.
In all, 1,270 Palestinians were interviewed in 127 randomly selected locations face-to-face between May 21 and May 23. The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports they are as troubled and divided as their Israeli counterparts.
More than half those interviewed – 55 percent -- say they are worried that other Palestinians will injure them, or members of their family. That concern is most acute (65 percent) in the Gaza strip, where Hamas has been in open conflict with supporters of the Fatah Party.
The leader of Fatah, President Mahmoud Abbas, has gained in popularity and now outpolls Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh 49 percent to 44 percent. A majority of Palestinians (just over 50 percent) agree even after the bloody Gaza War that all agreements between the PLO and Israel previously signed must be adhered to.
The numbers indicate, though, that Abbas is considered to be a weak and ineffective leader. Of those polled, 54 percent are unhappy with his leadership even though they prefer him to Haniyeh.
The numbers for Hamas deteriorate even more when Palestinians are asked who they prefer in a head-to-head contest between Haniyeh and Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah official jailed by the Israelis for organizing attacks on Israeli settlers and troops. Barghouti polls 64 percent against 36 percent for Hamas' Haniyeh. There are many in the region that believe Barghouti is the leader who could effectively unite the Palestinians and drive out Hamas.
When I was last in Ramallah I questioned residents about why they supported Hamas. Some of the answers had to do with municipal corruption, trash pick-ups, and police response time. Not everything was about the Israelis, just as in American politics not everything is about the Iraq war or the abortion issue.
The Palestinians have as many varied concerns as the rest of us. It is just that one looms larger than the rest.
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Caught between hard-right Hamas and the stonewall intransigence of the Israeli settler movement, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas traveled to the White House looking for something to take back to his cornered and angry constituents. His people, the West Bank Palestinians who back the Fatah party he leads, live facing live Israeli gun tubes, concrete walls that bi-sect the beautiful landscape, and a network of small cities cut into what is left of their homeland. The Israeli cranes, bulldozers and construction crews work day after day on communities well outside Israel's internationally recognized borders on property conquered in armed conflict with opponents long departed. The new Israeli government under right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to stop further expansion of these towns so peace talks can begin again.
It is worth remembering that Abbas and his security forces have been at war with elements of Hamas, just as the Israelis have been. Helping him cope with Arab extremists is in Israeli's interest, but Israel has extremists of it's own. There are people living in the settlements who look on the Arab villages of the West Bank as roadblocks to full-fledged conquest of all the territory between the Jordan River and Mediterranean. They bristle at the very term "Palestine," preferring the biblical "Judea and Samaria." They will tell you God gave them the land. The only reason they haven't taken all of it from the Arabs is that the same God has apparently denied them sufficient numbers of willing souls to accomplish their goal.
Israeli society has a divide running through it that mirrors the Fatah-Hamas split. In the cafes lining the seaside beaches of Tel Aviv and Hertzelia you will find secular Israelis who grimace and practically spit in the sand at the very mention of those living beyond Israel's borders but under her protection. Their legitimate fear of the Arab extremist killers and concern for the continued existence of Jewish culture trumps their hatred, but the hatred is real and it is intense.
This is the same vast gulf the world glimpsed when a right-wing extremist gunned down Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin during a peace rally 1995. Three years later his widow sat with me under a portrait of her dead husband and denounced as "parasites" the settlers and ultra-nationalists who envision perpetual war with the Arabs as part of some grand vision. The process of reconciliation among the inhabitants of the land, Arab and Jew, begins in fits and starts only to be derailed each time by a cycle of random murder and collective punishment. Today, the fractured country remains one where the extremists on both side dominate the landscape.
One settler demonstrating against a proposed freeze in new West Bank construction lashed out at the U.S. on Thursday focusing her anger at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"We're going to go on having large families." She vowed, "like we do and our children get married and they're going to have, God willing, many children and we are not asking Mrs. Hillary Clinton how many children to have. And each child is going to have their own home and we see it as a racist statement to say that the Jews can't have children or that Jews can't build their houses or the Jews can't add a room onto their house because they want to have a larger house. That wouldn't go if she would say that in New Jersey or New York."
The problem is that, in her case, we're not talking about New Jersey or New York but a settlement called Beit El in Palestinian territory, a town for which there is no legal basis supported reluctantly by the Israeli government as a perpetual gesture to the hard-right. The woman speaking of Secretary Clinton doesn't live in Israel, but she is among those who have hijacked its foreign policy. In his book about the settler movement, Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg accurately summarized the situation in the very title: "The Accidental Empire."
Ironically, the reproductive pattern the settler cites is precisely the battle Jews in the Holy Land are currently losing. In a matter of years Jews will become a minority in the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. In a matter of decades, Jews could become a minority within the actual borders of Israel itself. The election of President Obama had one Israeli columnist wondering in print about the day when an Arab will become Prime Minister of the Jewish state. In the settlements people will look you in the eye and tell you they will surrender democracy itself long before they agree to follow a non-Jew as leader of Israel.
The sudden understanding of the narrowing window for a two-state solution is precisely the impetus that set former President Bush in motion the final year of his second term to try and force a settlement. It is the same understanding that motivates President Obama. Yes, the Palestinians must renounce terror and it's proponents and that will likely require more internal violence, but there is no percentage now in agreeing to any other demand as long as they see Israel moving slowly down the path toward oblivion. Having already waited 60 years in misery the end seems closer than the beginning. Many believe the tide is turning and more and more Palestinians are demanding, not a break with Israel, but full inclusion in a democratic state.
Israel's hard and heart-breaking work will be to go back and revisit how the accidental empire came to be, identify who is responsible for it, and rectify the mistake. The settlements are poison pills for a rational solution. Israel may agree to trade land to keep some of the contiguous communities intact, but to create a viable Palestinian State they will have to offer more than anyone expects and they will have to do it fairly soon. They may even have to fight a war among themselves to settle the question.
There is something sadly pathetic about the latest group of would-be terrorists to parade before news cameras in cuffs and criminal-slouch. I saw one of them at his first court appearance in White Plains Thursday gamely trying to raise his right hand to take the oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth" even supplying the ending vow "so help me God," before the clerk could offer it. He's been through "the system" before and even though he had trouble understanding the finer points of American justice, this dim-witted dupe seemed to have a good feel for the pace and rhythm of the proceeding.
We'll call them the "Riverdale Four," for the neighborhood chosen for the federal sting operation/terrorist attack. Fake bombs manufactured and delivered by the federal government for an imaginary attack on synagogues and Jews living in the Bronx. Even as we report the details, though, we have to keep reminding the audience and ourselves that it wasn't real. The "terrorists" in the end had to be practically handed the weapons to execute their plot. Reading the federal criminal complaint we learn they had trouble even buying a handgun on their own. You have to wonder if it would've been easier to just to have them locked up for a gun buy or a drug delivery to earn cash, or anything short of a full-blown placement of imaginary weapons of mass destruction built by our own federal government. Was it worth the trouble and expense to mount this elaborate sting not to mention the trauma to people living in the imaginary target zone?
The good news, of course, is that four repeat criminals are off the street but cops in Newburgh might have managed that feat on their own without the full power of the federal government coming into play. Perhaps it's also a good sign that the resources of the Joint Terrorist Task Force with their armored vehicles and automatic weapons are, perhaps, not needed to thwart more reality-based plots against our safety. Maybe that's a sign. There is no indication that the capture of the men from Newburgh who have been under constant federal surveillance for almost a year, leads to anywhere but to the jailhouse fantasies of embittered habitual criminals. There are no "higher ups," or any connection to real-life terrorist organizations we are actually at war with. The arrest of the Riverdale Four is an apparent and very expensive dead-end. I have an idea.
The feds say they have "6 to 10 hours" of high quality videotape of these four geniuses hatching their plot with the help of the "co-operating witness." The witness is the same person who alerted the FBI to the jihad talk among some people attending a Newburgh mosque. Perhaps he can become the Jeff Probst of a new reality TV series "Jihad Wannabes," Thursday nights at 9.
