Grandpa Munster, poor Thornton Wilder, Oliver Stone, &c.

February 27, 2002 8:55 a.m.

kay, lemme lead off with something hilarious — or at least, what I regard as hilarious. Al Goldstein is standing trial here in New York. (Goldstein is the famous pornographer, publisher of Screw. He is accused of harassing an employee. I know, seems inconceivable.) One of Goldstein’s character witnesses is Al Lewis, 91 years young. Lewis is the actor best known for playing Grandpa on The Munsters. (Wasn’t Marilyn beautiful? One of my earliest interests — along with Judy from Lost in Space.)

The prosecutor asks Grandpa whether he knows of anyone else who can vouch for Goldstein. Says Grandpa, “Gilbert Gottfried [the nutty, wacked-out comedian] and that woman from the Koch administration. She used to be Miss America.”

The prosecutor suggests: “Bella Abzug?” Laughter in the courtroom.

Okay, if I have to explain this, it’s probably not very funny, but here goes: The woman Grandpa was trying to think of was Bess Myerson, 1945’s Miss America and a sometime escort of Mayor Koch (and sometime shoplifter too, sadly. Someone should do a deep, probing piece on successful beauties and shoplifting. Dr. Dalrymple, call your office — or call my office, for that matter). Bella Abzug was the Stalinist (really) New York politico, and whatever her virtues might have been, she was not Miss America.

Ah, the scene, the images. Funniest thing I have heard of in many months. Maybe longer.

Okay, here’s something that’s not funny: Toles, the cartoonist published in The New Republic. I don’t mind that he’s a ferocious left-winger — okay, I mind just a little bit — but I do mind, more, that he’s . . . um, underinformed, might be the politest way of putting it.

In this week’s issue, he has a cartoon chastising Bush for condemning Iran and going lighter on China. Fair enough. But here’s what he has Bush doing: saying, “Evil! Caught in the act of buying nuclear technology [this is directed at Iran]! And doubly evil for corrupting my strategic partner China by buying it from them!”

Problem is, it was Clinton and Gore who referred to China as America’s “strategic partner.” Bush and the Republicans spent the entire 2000 campaign decrying and mocking this term, saying that China was this country’s “strategic competitor,” if anything. And this cartoonist puts the Clinton/Gore term in Bush’s mouth, where it is nonsensical.

I know, I know, it’s “just a cartoon”— but the best cartoons score for the truth they convey.

Here in New York, there’s a new production of Our Town — ahhh — but this is an Our Town with a twist, baby, nothing fuddy-duddy. This is not your father’s Our Town. The role of the Stage Manager, you see, is taken by a ninth-grade girl. The director, Jack Cummings III, explains, “I do not believe that audiences would welcome — the way they did [before] — an older white male lecturing to them on the ways of the world with a nod and a wink.”

In her review, the New York Times’s Anita Gates quickly opines: “That may be true for some audiences, but an older black man or an older black woman could have made that point while maintaining the weight of hard-earned wisdom.”

So, you see, you can have a ninth-grade (white) girl, an older black man, or an older black woman, but for God’s sakes you must not have what the playwright intended, an older white “male,”as Cummings III puts it. (Why don’t they ever say “man”or “men”? Why is it always out of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom? “We now see the white male, assuming his role as the Stage Manager.”)

I have a feeling I would have liked Cummingses I and II better.

While I’m on the New York Times: They published an article on Monday that reads like a parody drawn by a talented and mischievous right-winger. The byline is Michael Janofsky’s, and the article is on Salt Lake City after the Olympics. The theme: For a brief, shining moment, Salt Lake was a real place, with interesting and “diverse” people — with life! But now it will revert to its dark, unspeakable, Mormon-ruled self — a City of the Dead.

Let me quote a little (or a lot). You have to read it to believe it:

For nearly three weeks, downtown streets here, normally deserted after 6 p.m., were crowded well into the night. Store signs spoke in a rainbow of languages. Public squares were filled with exhibitions and entertainment.

The Winter Olympics . . . transformed Salt Lake City, bringing it a rich diversity of culture and languages to lift it into the league of cosmopolitan centers. Downtown felt more like New York or Paris than Salt Lake’s poky old self. . . .

But . . . what happens now? What happens with the show moving on, visitors leaving and traditional issues, like Utah’s $200 million budget deficit, nudging their way back into view and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which agreed to a muted role during the Olympics [did it?], moving back to the forefront of daily life?

During seven years of planning, state and local leaders looked longingly into their Olympic future, half promising, half hoping that Salt Lake’s 17 days with destiny would change forever the profile of a city known best as the Mormon capital of the world and of a state known widely for its staggering conservatism [staggering conservatism? How does conservatism stagger?] and homogeneity [uh-oh], owing to the influence of the church [hiss].

Yet it remains far from clear to what degree, if any, those enduring aspirations might be achieved. . . .

Only time will reveal which snapshot of the last few weeks might foretell the future of the city and state. Taking the bright side, Ms. Martinez [a local sociology professor, of course] suggested looking at Utah like “a dull, awkward child” suddenly energized and polished by the possibilities of life. . . .

As for residents of the state, she was less certain the Olympics would alter their politics. Noting that so many visitors had a good time in a safe and festive atmosphere, she said the locals might take that as a positive reflection of themselves.

People here, she said, “want to be accepted, it goes so deep. I’m sure they are feeling, ‘Wow, aren’t we proud?’ and maybe now they have a sense that other people might like them, after all.”

If only Salt Lakers had been reeducated during those 17 days . . . But no: They may actually believe that they’re all right, which means that the Olympic experience would have been wasted on them!

Look, look: I work for a conservative opinion journal. I like opinion journalism; I practice it. But the New York Times, our paper of record, is not supposed to be an opinion outlet, at least in its news pages. And this article simply reeks of class condescension and what Pat Robertson once spoke of as “religious bigotry.” It was, indeed, practically parodic. And it says so very much: even more than the Washington Post’s infamous lead, about how evangelicals are “poor, uneducated, and easily led.”

By the way, speaking of ol’ Pat (not Buchanan, the other one), doesn’t the Rev. Robertson make a pretty good analyst of the ways, means, and motives of radical Islam? I mean, give that man a chairmanship of a Middle Eastern Studies department!

It was inevitable — as inevitable as anything is: Oliver Stone, the great and gifted hard-Left propagandist, is making a movie about Fidel Castro (or at least one that purports to be about him). He has falsified everything else in recent history; might as well add to the glow around the tyrannical head of Castro.

Stone has been down in Havana with the dictator, supping, drinking, communing with him. Granma, the Pravda of Cuba, is excited, reporting proudly on Stone’s plans. Accounts have it that the director is “working closely” with Alfredo Guevara, a Castro crony and onetime head of the country’s State Cinema Institute.

Funny thing is, Oliver Stone is a free man, operating freely in the United States. And yet he is willing to make a movie about a Communist dictator in conjunction with the boss of the country’s Official Cinema.

Why don’t free people have an appreciation of their freedom, and a corresponding indignation at the denial of other people’s freedom?

I imagine that Oliver Stone is not a card-carrying Communist. But, to echo an old question, in exactly what way would he behave differently if he were? (Perhaps he’d be more discreet.)

The best rebuke I have ever seen to Oliver Stone was written by Tom Wicker, the liberal columnist. Wicker condemned him magnificently for his lies in JFK, a movie that mistaught untold numbers of young people, who unfortunately tend to get their “history” from the entertainment world. (“No, Daddy, right-wing elements in the U.S. government killed Kennedy!”) No one cares what a labeled conservative like me says about Oliver Stone; but Wicker, they might listen to.

Okay, let’s go lighter: The other day, the subject of John Wayne Bobbitt, the man who got his thingamajig cut off by his wife, Lorena, came up (don’t ask). My brilliant colleague Mike Potemra commented, “Poor John Wayne [the actor]: He hasn’t had a very good run of namesakes — John Wayne Bobbitt, John Wayne Gacy [the mass murderer] . . .”

In a recent column, I mentioned foosball, reaching for an example of a game. A reader wrote sternly: “Mr. Nordlinger: Foosball is not a game. It is a way of life.”

Duly noted, and sorry.

Also in a recent column, I suggested that “pro-choice” was the most triumphant lexical feat in American politics (“prohibitionists,” to denote those who support current anti-drug laws, isn’t bad either). A reader wrote to say that — American politics aside — there has been no greater lexical feat than Karl Marx’s term for a free economy: “capitalism.”

Yes, that is the all-time champeen. Case closed.

There has been a lot of mail on my “nauseous”/“nauseated” question. The conservatives are saying: Stick to your guns; honor that difference; don’t let the moderns obliterate it.

Yes, but they obliterate a lot, don’t they? I guess I gave up on “healthy”/“healthful” long ago. But would you like to know one I still cling to? “Jealousy”and “envy.” Look, what’s the point of having two words if you’re going to make them synonymous? That’s just redundancy.

Long ago, “jealousy” meant the fear that something would be taken away from you — that something you have (already) would be snatched from you. “Envy” meant the desire for someone else’s possession (like “covetousness,” I guess): You want an object, or a quality or whatever, that your neighbor has.

But no one does that anymore. A guy might say, “I’m jealous of his success.” No, you’re not: You’re envious. You’re jealous if he and your girlfriend start making eyes at each other.

But who cares? Something else I cling to — no one does — is the difference between “in behalf” and “on behalf.” Everyone wants to say “on behalf,” all the time. When I write “in behalf,” people actually try to correct it! (I’ve been corrected incorrectly pretty much all my life — don’t you hate it when that happens?) (Remember that routine on Saturday Night Live?)

Long ago, “in behalf” meant in support of someone: I’m here to speak in behalf of Joe Smith (whose candidacy I support). “On behalf” meant in the stead of: I’m here to speak on behalf of Joe Smith (who’s sick and couldn’t make it today: Here’s what he would’ve said).

But that’s very fuddy-duddy.

You know another one I’ve given up on? “Due to” and “owing to.” The due-to-ers have simply won, worn me down.

Old dictionaries and usage books confirm that “nauseous” once meant sickening and that “nauseated” was what you were when you were sickened — feeling queasy. Now the queasy can just say “nauseous” — without fear of snickers, except from moss-bound pedants. (Don’t look at me.)

Informs a reader, “You might be interested to learn that last night ‘The House of Terror,’ a museum remembering the victims of Communism and Nazism, was opened in Budapest.

“The museum is located in a building with a most instructive history. The building served as the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazi Party (the Arrowcross Party), which ran a Quisling government from late 1944 to early 1945. Upon the expulsion of German troops from Hungary it was quickly turned into the headquarters of the Communist secret service (called AVO, later AVH). Its cellars were used for torture, and saw several thousands of freedom-loving people killed. The co-location of Communists and Nazis is no coincidence, for hundreds of low- and middle-ranking Nazis reinvented themselves as devout Communists in Hungary after 1945. For these reasons, this building is an especially apt illustration of how close these two totalitarian ideologies have been.

“It was heartening to see that more than 100,000 people — a crowd not seen in Budapest since the burial of Hungary’s first post-Communist prime minister in 1993 — turned up for the opening ceremony. These people seem to illustrate the growing recognition in Hungary that the sins of Communism should not be forgotten, no matter how strongly the post-Communist Left claims them irrelevant. It required more than a decade and a new, untainted generation for Germany to start facing and fully rejecting its Nazi past after 1945. It is very much possible that we are seeing the same phenomenon in Hungary.

“It will be no surprise to you that the post-Communist Left is crying foul. Its leader has already declared that if the Left comes back to power this April, it will rename the museum the ‘House of Reconciliation.’

“I hope that you find these developments interesting.”

Oh, I do: very.

Finally, readers may remember that I quoted an astrophysicist who said, “When I’m on an airplane, and want a quiet ride, I tell the person sitting next to me — if he asks — that I’m an astrophysicist. If I feel like talking, I say I’m an astronomer.”

Another reader writes in to say, “I once heard a pastor say that if he wanted a quiet flight, he would introduce himself as an evangelist. I suppose that would work!”