A SORT OF HOMILY ABOUT HALEY

My son and his wife have become parents for the first time, and I would dearly love to offer them some nuggets of wisdom on the subject, but we are of different generations, as different as Bach from the Beatles, and I foresee that advice might be misconstrued. I suppose that a safe alternative is to relate a few pertinent and perhaps pedagogic memories of my own upbringing, such as it was.


Though it may sound unkind of me to mention it so early in their parenthood, there may well come a time, now hard to believe, when Haley sheds her halo and appears to be in need of cognitive readjustment, which I gather from the media has become an increasingly popular alternative to the good, all-too-solid discipline of my youth. Certainly, I can't remember the last time I visited Home Depot and spotted rods for the purpose mentioned in Proverbs 84:18. Lucky for Haley that she lives and is loved in Buffalo Grove in 2008 and not on New York's Lower East Side during the Great Depression.


Slapping and spanking a naughty kid was regarded as meritorious back there and then, when, to borrow a Christian metaphor, the Holy Grail of child development was to follow tradition come what may, as in "Fiddler on the Roof." Responsible Jewish parents slapped and spanked at the drop of an obscenity or of a grade on a report card, modus operandi which they never doubted that they had the moral, legal and, above all, the biblical authority to employ. However. despite circumcision, boys were considered lucky, because God no longer told fathers to do what Abraham almost did to poor Isaac, who never even did anything really reprehensible, such as swiping a nickel ride on the Grand Street trolley and then, worse, being caught by the conductor. What if the conductor, probably an anti-Semite, had reported the kid to the cops at the police station on Clinton Street? Once arrested, he would be locked up with real-life counterparts of Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids. He would spend the rest of his days at Sing Sing or Alcatraz unless he participated in a successful breakout with George Raft, after which there would be a shootout for the affections of dubious dames like Ann Sheridan or Barbara Stanwyck.


Also entitled to slap kids, but never spank them, were my teachers at long-gone P.S. 147 on East Broadway and the Bialystoker Hebrew School on Willet Street. The Bialystoker Synagogue, which housed its Hebrew school up flights of stairs higher than Mount Sinai, is still extant and now also a landmark. But, on the other hand, gone and never to be forgotten, if only by me, is Gus's pool parlor down the block, where local prostitutes could avail themselves of a side entrance to avoid the cops. The ladies were so attractive in their snug and colorful dresses from maybe S. Klein's on Union Square that we kids hoped they were still in business and free from VD when we were of age to employ their services and could afford them. Toward that end, we hoped also that President Roosevelt wasn't kidding us when he said that prosperity was just around the corner and would last as long as we voted the straight Democratic ticket.


Especially forthcoming with physical as well as verbal punishment at my Hebrew school was Mr. Rubin, our bar mitzvah teacher. Over the long years, he has come to look to me like the modern-day actor Christopher Walken when he plays the sort of villain who, when apprehended, will end up in a mental hospital rather than a prison. Somehow, Mr. Rubin's unusually long black skullcap added to his menace, and he has always reminded me of executioners in horror movies with Boris Karloff. I don't like to think about what he wore at home, but in class, in addition to the skullcap, he always wore a shirt that may once have been white, a gray tie with stains that had held their own against Carbona, and a black suit that could have used a cleaning and pressing if not a replacement from Orchard Street, where the shops stretched from Hester Street to East Houston and may have been the country's original strip mall.


In fairness to Mr. Rubin, I must add that he wielded a wooden ruler rather than an axe, and that his instruction enabled me and all my classmates, even the dumbest of us, to perform acceptably at our bar mitzvahs, which ceremony would mark our assumption of the responsibilities of an adult Jewish male. As for the privileges, they would mostly have to wait till we married a nice Jewish girl of whom our parents approved after enough snooping to qualify them for the FBI. We were told repeatedly that when it came to brides, a good heart was more desirable than good looks, but we were too young and foolish to appreciate such profundities.


Though official and binding in the eyes of God, a shoddy bar mitzvah would have disgraced not only our parents but also our ancestors all the way back to Canaan if not the Garden of Eden. Up in paradise, Kings David and Solomon, to whom every Jew is related, would have been forced to abdicate their thrones and maybe shed a few of the concubines that also served as status symbols. In many a household more pious than my own, such a scandal would have resulted in at least an hour of verbal punishment back home. The good news was that the amount of physical punishment to fit such a heinous crime was considered to be work, and that was forbidden on the Sabbath. But, an even worse punishment, parents could have withheld the weekly dime to attend that afternoon's double feature at a local theater, probably the Loew's Apollo, where the kindly ticket seller let you in for the children's price of a dime until your voice changed or you needed a shave. On the day of my friend Phil's bar mitzvah I accompanied this lucky kid to not a double but a triple feature, at the Palestine Theater on Clinton Street. One of the movies featured a rerun of Tod Slaughter in the perennial local favorite "The Mad Barber of Fleet Street," and it made us postpone for weeks our next visit to Mrs. Fiedler, the unisex barber on Stanton Street who also told their fortunes to women and was rumored to perform abortions when her advice led to misfortunes.


These homey folkways and others were practiced during the Great Depression. Were children better behaved then than now? Speaking for myself, the only thing I ever stole, in addition to the heart of my wife, which turned out as good as her looks, was second base during a punch ball game in the school yard across the street from P.S.147. Sure enough, God punished me when I next tried to steal third base and was tagged out by, of all people, Herman Zimmerman, whom I had recently given quite a big bite of my hot dog from Katz's deli.


I could offer a few valuable thoughts about friendship and people like Herman Zimmerman, but I will save them for when a schoolmate steals a bite of Haley's hot dog, assuming that she is not a vegetarian like her father.

CLIENT 9 REVISITED

CLIENT 9 REVISITED

by

Hy Brett

In our virtuous society, chances are that the media pundits who are still throwing stones at New York's former governor, Eliot Spitzer, aka Client 9 of a prostitution service, are themselves without sexual sin. Their virtue is to the great credit of themselves, their parents and spiritual advisers, and they make us proud to live in America and not in a country like France. There, the media was not upset in the least by the funeral of former President François Mitterrand, which was attended by his wife, mistress, and children by both women. From a distance, it must have been hard to distinguish the two chic women, attired in similar mourning from possibly La Maison Dior.


Hopefully, after Time, Nature's own therapist, has healed their traumas of disappointment in yet another leader whose public image was, inevitably, too good to be true, critics will acknowledge that though Mr. Spitzer had lusted not wisely but too well and too extravagantly, his choice of extramarital sexual activity in, of all places sacred and profane, the nation's capital, indicated, nevertheless, as commendable a dedication to America's highest value, the free market system, as that of any of his gloating foes on Wall Street.


Unlike with films and rap songs, there is no official or consensual ranking of America's core values, those ties that bind the nation together through wars, recessions and the administrations of subprime presidents, not that we've ever had any. But what may well serve the purpose in the case of Media et al v. Spitzer are the rulings of the nation's highest court. According to a New York Times Magazine cover story on March 16, conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court differ on many issues. This came as no revelation, because, let us be frank, justices are nominated by presidents whose views the justices, being men and women of honor, are obliged to respect and transfigure into the holy writ of our secular religion, Democracy. But what was surprising in the Times article was the information that, despite the varying agendas of their sponsors in the White House, the nine justices agree almost unanimously in their support of the business community and its values and objectives. Wrote Jeffrey Rosen: "[Business cases before the court] involve billions of dollars, have huge consequences for the economy and can have a greater effect on people's daily lives than the often symbolic battles of the culture wars." Mr. Rosen specifically included among the symbolic battles such bellicose and presumably secondary, noncommercial issues as abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty. Space permitting, he could have added immigration, gun control, narcotics, wiretapping and privacy, torture, freedom of the press, the rights of women and minorities, the separation of church and state.


"Power is the great aphrodisiac," said super-senior statesman Dr. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the keenest observer of our backstage politics since French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who toured the country in the 1830s and was particularly impressed by how our leaders evade impediments that had found their way into the Constitution. Like Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and other public servants before him and, for all we know, currently in office, Mr. Spitzer, the powerful governor of the Empire State, could have stooped to adultery with one or more married women, thus exposing them and their spouses and innocent children, some still in nursery school, to the sort of shame that has engulfed his own wife and daughters, hitherto able to hold their heads high at the most prestigious of gatherings in town, the sort graced by overachiever Donald Trump and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Or, as happens in both the public and private sectors, he could have, with or without a Christmas bonus, bedded the attractive women of varying ages and figures on his efficient and dedicated staff. Or, during college commencements, en route to a backward state to inspire graduates to the sort of civic virtue he was promoting so vocally at home, he could have solicited a female or male partner in an airport terminal, a place where strangers meet and then pass in the night, but not before the sort of brief encounters that are inappropriate in their hometowns.


Instead, he did, if the truth be known, what all too many a true-blue, red-blooded American guy might do were he affluent and, for whatever reason, dissatisfied with the sexual offerings at home, whether that home be in the city or the suburbs, where country clubs offer a broad selection of indoor physical activities besides Tai Chi. He resorted to the well-known magic of the free market place, and specifically to a firm with the respectable name of The Emperor's Club VIP. Naturally, doing business in Washington within the shadow of a White House totally devoted to faith and family, it would have been unseemly for such an enterprise to call itself The President's Club VIP, and their good taste is to be commended and worthy of consideration by the FBI.


And there in Washington, at a hotel named, prophetically, for the vessel that bore daring adventurers across treacherous seas to an uncertain future, Mr. Spitzer was willing to pay top dollar for his carnal pleasure, just as he and neighbors on Fifth Avenue often pay even greater sums for more acceptable modes of physical, emotional or aesthetic gratification. Be it a box at the Metropolitan Opera or a sky box at a Super Bowl. Or a table at an event where one can hear an inspiring, six-figure speech by a retired statesman who is still milking his beneficiaries and always will. Or a political fundraiser where, of course, expecting neither contracts nor favors, a good citizen can shake the eager palm of a would-be president and hear vows of ever-lower taxes for his particular bracket, from which manna will trickle down and make the economy bloom like another Garden of Eden but without clever serpents who would tempt visitors to read leftist literature composed on Apple computers.


Mr. Spitzer is reported to have spent $4300 for his tryst on St. Valentine's eve with the prostitute first identified as Kristen and later revealed as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a name to inspire Rupert Murdoch to create an imprint called Boudoir Books and order it to reissue the almost 600 romance novels of Barbara Cartland. Let it be said in Mr. Spitzer's favor, if there is anyone to listen, that for a lesser sum he could have availed himself of the reluctant services of a Balkan or Asiatic teenager who had been kidnapped and smuggled into the country. Instead, he saw fit to hold fast to the standards of his socioeconomic class and to engage a middle-class young woman from New Jersey, the Garden State, and the home of the Institute of Advanced Studies. She was twenty-two, of an age to choose her career and lifestyle, and to buy a gourmet vodka advertised in Vanity Fair, and to help decide the fate of the nation and Iraq by voting in November for either Senator John McCain or the Democratic candidate, if one is ever selected.


As in many a mishap both personal and national, there may well be a silver lining in the Spitzer scandal. President Bush does not believe that the country is facing a recession, but just in case he is wrong for the first time in office, he has signed into law a growth package that includes a tax rebate that would encourage consumer spending and spur job creation. Though she is, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the bracket of maximum discretionary spenders, the sort of shopper who might drop into Barney's on Madison Avenue for a designer T-shirt on sale for $99.95 and emerge also with a Balmain top costing $7,090, Ms. Dupré, being single and childless, could have expected a mere $300 toward her patriotic desire and responsibililty to stimulate the economy. But one need not be a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers to appreciate that, thanks to her professional income from Mr. Spitzer and perhaps also Clients 1 through 8, and 10 through…., she is already making a most significant contribution to the president's program, potentially the economic counterpart to his surge in Iraq. Needless to say, Mr. Spitzer's role in her present and future expenditures cannot totally expunge his misconduct, but if and when the economy improves, it will behoove his critics to consider a reassessment of his image.