Last week, when people were marveling at the long lines at polling stations, and taking comfort from them (large numbers of Americans politically involved), I remembered an article I read many years ago in a British magazine. The author argued that the habitually lackluster turnout in American elections, rather than a disgrace, was a sign of the nation’s health. It is in corrupt, disastrously mismanaged countries, he noted, where the population (if allowed) flocks to the polls out of desperation.
And I thought: We’ve become one of those countries.
Today I think, even more sadly: We’re that unique country that comes out in droves for corruption and mismanagement.
There is a story that Sergei Rachmaninoff, after presenting the score for his Vespers, was asked by the choirmaster how he expected the singers to hit such difficult notes. The great composer replied, “I have faith in my countrymen.”
Yesterday afternoon I watched Part I of the excellent Netflix documentary Sinatra: All or Nothing at All. I knew that he had been the heartthrob of the bobby soxers, but seeing the old footage made me realize that he had been a precursor of the Beatles, the group that would eventually, temporarily, make him irrelevant.
I also knew that he had gone from a fresh-faced crooner to a master of phrasing, but I had always assumed the transformation had been seamless if necessarily - for the precise emotion in all those saloon songs - painful (thank you, Ava Gardner). But the documentary showed the hard times in between when, amazing to imagine now, no one wanted anything to do with him. This dark period created the man we think of today when we hear the name Sinatra, the man a freelancer by the name of Don Gillmor captured in the lede of a travel story about Chicago I published in the Sun-Sentinel:
“Few cities make me feel like Frank Sinatra. Not the literal Sinatra, hoarse and bloated, eating eggs, as Kitty Kelley described, from the naked stomach of a prostitute – most cities make me feel that way. But the mythical, Songs-for-Swinging-Lovers Sinatra, jacket slung over one shoulder, fedora cocked to the side, a man unburdened.”
Hania had a flat tire yesterday on I-95, just south of Woolbright Road. In the hour that she stood on the shoulder waiting for AAA – a friend had been killed by a distracted driver on an LA freeway while sitting in his car – one car stopped. It was filled with Central Americans who, in minimal English, eagerly offered to help her.
A friend who works in a university theater department recently lost his job when the school took money that was slated for his department and gave it to the athletic department so it could buy new “state-of-the-art” cleats for the football players. (It is not a big football school, despite the fact that it’s in the Midwest.) What makes this development all the sadder is that my friend grew up in Poland, a country whose citizens, during the Cold War, often looked to the United States as a place of sanity and justice. It was why my friend, and so many of his compatriots, immigrated here.