Behind The Sherlock Mania: The Detective's Creator In Both Fact & Fiction

(With a slew of movies and British and American television series, Sherlock Holmes has never been bigger since he went over Reichenbach Falls to his apparent death in an 1893 story.  Here are two book reviews, published in April 2008, about Holmes' creator.) 

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE (TOP) AND GEORGE EDALGI

Like many a lad, I drank in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories like so many bottles of soda pop without knowing anything about their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It didn’t really matter because Holmes and the world of 221B Baker Street seemed so lifelike that many readers believed that he really existed.

In the years since, I have come across occasional references to Conan Doyle in connection with his fascination with spiritualism, but only got the full measure of the man in two seemingly different but rather similar books – The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a biography by Andrew Lycett, and Arthur and George, a novel by Julian Barnes.

Both similarly portray Conan Doyle as a likeable medical doctor of middling competence who became a prolific, enormously popular and wealthy writer, historian, fantasist and propagandist for Britannia and his myriad pet causes who in the waning years of Victorian England dove into the deep end of the spiritualism pool head first. Once in those charlatan-filled waters, Conan Doyle did not cast aside the deductive logic of his own medical training that his famous detective used to such great effect as to apply it (with little success) to the fuzzy pseudo-religious belief that the dead can be contacted by mediums who are able to inform them about the afterlife.

Long story short: Conan Doyle was as prim as any proper Victorian gentleman, but he was a bit of a kook.

Conan Doyle repeatedly crossed wands with Harry Houdini, and the great American magician, escapologist and spiritualism debunker played him like a cheap violin. A séance spirit guide called Pheneas seems to have dominated the last years of Conan Doyle's life to little effect, although second wife Jean apparently was able to channel her desire for a luxurious vacation home through Pheneas, which Conan Doyle promptly had built at considerable expense.

* * * * *

Through no intention of Lycett, I concluded after laboring through his 527-page biography that there indeed is little for which Conan Doyle should be remembered other than his marvelous detectives stories, including my faves, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Adventure of the Speckled Band and A Scandal in Bohemia.

Lycett's biography is not merely exhaustive; it's exhausting. He catalogues Conan Doyle's athletic exploits (mostly mediocre), business deals (mostly flops), and speaking tours and trips abroad (mostly boring).

More interesting is his relationship with his mother, the beloved "Mam," with whom he never cut the apron strings, and with his two families.

There was his tubercular first wife Louise and their children. Conan Doyle was devoted to her in a chivalric sort of way but cold as a cucumber to children Mary and Kingsley, and almost certainly was sleeping with Jean, the second wife, before Louise's death. He was slightly more paternal to their issue, sons Denis and Adrian and daughter Billy, but as is all too typical of the offspring of famous fathers for whom their work comes first, all were a bit blarmy in the bean.

* * * * *

On the other hand, Barnes’s Arthur and George is a fast read at 386 pages and an engaging one at that.

This historic novel concerns Conan Doyle's most compelling real-life case, which Lycett covers in a mere handful of pages while revealing what Conan Doyle had for breakfast during that period, the gentleman’s clubs where he lunched and the worthies with whom he supped in the evening.

Arthur is, of course, Conan Doyle, while George is George Edalji, a half-Indian lawyer who was framed and convicted in 1903 of mutilating farm animals in the rural West Midlands.

Conan Doyle, always the one for taking up causes, became interested in the case and met the young Edalji in prison, where he naively clung to the belief that racism played no role in his fate and justice would prevail sooner or later.

It turned out to be later and then only partial vindication as Conan Doyle proved Edalji's innocence but failed to win him restitution. Meanwhile, several years passed before the young man’s law license was restored.

* * * * *

Lycett concludes that it was off putting that a man like Conan Doyle with such a commanding physical presence should have become a wraith before his death at age 71 in 1930.

But, he writes:

"It was also fitting, since, from his start in Edinburgh, that city of contrasts, Arthur's life had been about crossing boundaries and trying to reconcile opposites.

"At the time the obituaries were respectful. But there was a sense that his day had passed. As the bright young things of the jazz age struggled with economic depression, they were not greatly interested in a man who had become obsessed with another world."

A sad epitaph for such a great storyteller, but then Conan Doyle never knew when to quit. Just like his Sherlock Holmes.

LBJ's Achievements & Vietnam: Let's Revisit That In A Few Decades, Okay?

LBJ and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

As the carriers of Lyndon Baines Johnson's torch prepare to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his landmark Great Society legislation, they are asking us -- or people like myself of a certain age, anyway -- to do the impossible: Reconcile the Vietnam War, an atrocity that wasted nearly 60,000 American lives and millions more Vietnamese lives that he never understood and from which he never backed down, and achievements like the Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Head Start, and the Clean Air Act.

The torch carriers, including daughters Luci Baines Johnson and Linda Bird Johnson Robb, are not asking Americans to put aside memories of the war as the LBJ Presidential Library prepares for a year of celebrations, but rather judge their father for more than the quagmire that sank his presidency, ushering in the nightmare era of Richard Nixon, and has indelibly tarnished his legacy.  

To which I say, let's revisit that in another few decades when the history of the era will be easier to rewrite.

That is when I and other Baby Boomers will be gone and the wounds of Vietnam have begun to heal, while nevertheless celebrating in the here and now the extraordinary domestic agenda that LBJ pushed through in the five years after the Kennedy assassination -- an agenda that has withstood the test of time, as well.

Still, it is the 36th president's polarizing image -- a tragic consequence of which was the echo chamber in which only LBJ's sycophantic aides were listened to as the war became an unmitigated disaster -- that has resonated most loudly down through the decades since his premature death at age 64 in 1973 of a broken heart, as some people will have it.

Beyond Johnson's daughters and surviving inner circle, some historians believe that acknowledging his achievements is long overdue.

"I absolutely think the time has come,"Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Johnson biographer, told The New York Times.  "When he left office, the trials and tribulations of the war were so emotional that it was hard to see everything else he had done beyond Vietnam. The country fundamentally changes as a result of L.B.J.’s presidency." 

Indeed, it is easy to forget that Johnson was a true populist who believe that it was government's responsibility to reach out to and help Americans, a concept that today's Republican Party has thrown under the bus and even many Democrats seem to shy away from.

All of this begs a couple of questions:

First, while the Civil Rights Act empowered African-Americans, weren't they disproportionately the victims of Vietnam?  Absolutely, and in that regard the war was a deadly discriminator.

Second, if Kennedy had lived, would he have become as unpopular as Johnson because of Vietnam and his own more modest domestic achievements would have gone unrecognized? 

Yes, but this assumes that Kennedy would have expanded the war as LBJ did, and on this note the record is mixed.  Some historians believe that he would have and others do not, noting the great reluctance with which he supported the modest buildup of then infinitesimal American presence, which followed his Bay of Pigs disaster.

Meteorological Indignities & The Winter Of Our (Well, My) Discontent

It was the final meteorological indignity in a winter full of meteorological indignities.

Not the fact that there have been only a few hours of temperatures above freezing since New Year's Day.  (The afternoon of January 31; ah, I remember it well.) 

Not the half-assed job the highway department has done in keeping the road past the mountain retreat open. (Multiple plowings after a minor snowfall on a Sunday, an overtime day, and neglect after a 10-inch snowfall on a weekday.) 

Not that the snow pack is so deep and hard from repeated snows.  Jack and Nicky can't walk on it because it's so damned slippery, and have taken to having to do their business in the driveway.  (You can see from the photo that they're not exactly miniature poodles.) 

Not the weather forecasters getting it wrong pretty consistently. (Mark Twain was right.) 

Not coming upon photos of the lagoon where we would hang out in the dead of winter in the Florida Keys.  (In the buff.  In the 1970s.)

Not that 5,000 or so miles from Sochi, driving on ice hereabouts is like an Olympic event. (The interstate yet again closed by jackknifed tractor trailers, ho hum.) 

Not that we'll end up burning three tons of coal before spring is sprung. (While the solar roof panels won't generate electricity because they're snow covered.) 

Not having to wear a long-sleeved turtleneck and socks to bed some nights.  (I haven't worn pajamas since I was a teenager.)

No, the final indignity was the nor'easter.

As in a foot of wind-driven snow on the front end yesterday morning and another eight inches on the back end last night, including an extraordinary four inches in one hour.  Can you say five-foot drifts?

But hey, the power stayed on and we're pretty cozy.  Just hoping we can make our way out this evening for a Valentine's Day dinner and back home for the kickoff of the second season of "House of Cards."

Have Republicans Secretly Given Up On Taking Back The White House?

As anyone with even rudimentary math skills can figure out, the Republican Party's chances of retaking the White House, at least by honest means, continue to diminish.  

Two recent developments -- the refusal of Senate Republicans to approve a modest extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed and the House Republican leadership's announcement that it won't play ball on immigration reform this year -- are slaps in the face of the middle class and Hispanics, two voting blocs that are fleeing the ever shrinking GOP in droves but it must curry favor with to win national elections. 

Then there is the party's jihad against the Affordable Care Act, which warts and all (and then have been plenty) is beginning to fulfill its promise of providing access to affordable health care for millions more Americans while lowering costs.  In other words, with every passing month, more people benefit and the party's high-decibel propaganda becomes a little more hollow.

Even given the Republican Party's march ever deeper into the national electoral wilderness, even given its steady metamorphosis into an overwhelmingly white party that worships the rich and disparages the poor, the elderly and the infirm, even given its refusal to stop fighting the culture wars (same-sex marriage, abortion, and so on) that fewer and fewer voters care about, even given its predilection for faux attention-diverting scandals like Benghazi, Solyndra and the New Black Panthers, a thought occurs to me:

Although no one will dare say so publicly, the leaders of the Tea Party lunatic fringe that has become the tail that wags the party dog don't care if the Oval Office remains out of the Republican grasp.  Pushing a conservative agenda in Congress and on the state level is enough.  This was all but confirmed in a New York Times article about Tea Party-backed PACs raising tons of money while PACs like moderate stalwart Karl Rove's Crossroads are treading water.  There was nary a peep about winning back the biggest prize of all.  Toppling moderate stalwarts like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky was more important.

White House be damned.

* * * * *

One other factor makes my theory more plausible, or perhaps I should say less insane.

Having been burned badly with Mitt Romney, who was nominated in 2012 to face off against President Obama despite his questionable conservative bona fides, it is unlikely that the party will nominate anyone in 2016 who has even a faint whiff of moderation about him.  (Yo diehards: Romney still would have lost the election if he had won the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia.) 

This no-fly list includes New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who despite my assertions here, may be mortally wounded by revelations that he took political bullying and New Jersey's pay-to-play political culture to new heights.

(Meanwhile, for a list of lessons not learned in 2012 and since, check out "What Could Possibly Go Wrong?," my take on the Romney-Ryan collapse.) 

Beyond Little Ricky Santorum, whose claim to fame is that he was the last conservative clown standing in the Republican presidential primary clown car in 2012, the list of the party's presidential wannabes is a Who's Who of national unelectables.  Heck, even Ronald Reagan would be unable to get the nomination if he were alive today.

* * * * *

Back to that math thing: The problem within the problem for the Republican Party is that because of its continuing refusal to compromise on anything on the national level while alienating vast swaths of voters, the Democrats begin the 2016 presidential race with 246 electoral votes. They are California (55), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), New Hampshire (4), Illinois (20), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Maine (4), Minnesota (10), Michigan (16), New York (29), New Jersey (14), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhode Island (4), Vermont (3), Wisconsin (10) and Washington (12).

Sure, you can quibble about a couple of these states, but the fact remains that the Democrats' traditional political base remains as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar and only 24 more electoral votes are needed to win it all.

Further complicating matters for Republicans is that political parties used to run on their accomplishments, but the GOP is unable to point to a single accomplishment since the eight year Bush-Cheney sinkhole.  That is unless you consider attacks on the president, some of them thinly veiled racism, hindering efforts to jumpstart a still struggling economy and shutting down government to be accomplishments.

* * * * *

I rest my case.

Uh, not so fast there.  Back to that "at least by honest means" thing: With ample assists from fabulously wealthy fascist oligarchs like the Koch Brothers, manipulating the rules of the game through laws to allow states to proportionally award their electoral votes to the popular vote winner in each congressional district, and a Supreme Court that has become a de facto arm of the Republican Party, anything is possible in 2016.

Still, for the time being, expect another Democratic landslide -- and the possibility that key Republicans don't give an elephant's ass if that is the case.

Remembering McNamara's Catharsis: A Mortal Man Cast Into A Giant's Role

The dust-up over Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Bush-Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates recalls to mind two other secretaries who were as controversial as Gates was circumspect.  Herewith excerpts from a July 2009 post.

With the death yesterday of Robert S. McNamara, the JFK-LBJ era defense secretary and Vietnam War architect, my thoughts segue quickly to another vilified defense secretary and another unnecessary war. I speak, of course, of Donald Rumsfeld and Iraq.

The similarities between the two men are stunning, but there is a big difference that sets them apart.

Like Rumsfeld, McNamara was a control freak who thought he had all the answers, pushed policies that lacked the crucial element of common sense, surrounded himself with sycophantic acolytes, did not take kindly to dissenting generals, was a technocrat who worshipfully embraced sophisticated weaponry, projected an unshakable faith that he was doing the right thing, communicated poorly in public forums . . . and turned out to know jack about how to run a war.

And like Rumsfeld, was forced out or quit depending upon whom you talk to.

But in a major departure from Rumsfeld's modus operandi -- at least to date, from what we know of his forthcoming and unapologetic memoir and in all likelihood for all time -- McNamara had a catharsis some 15 years before he laid on his death bed.

That catharsis took the form of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, a candid reflection that exploded on the haunted members of my generation -- whether they be Vietnam era veterans like myself or antiwar activists -- like a long forgotten Claymore mine.

McNamara has never explained the circumstances of his catharsis, that point at which he realized his manifold failures as defense secretary and the immense suffering, death and deprivation that he and LBJ were responsible for. One can only assume that it did not come to him in the middle of the night a la Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, but rather in a drawn out metamorphosis befitting a man of his intellect and analytical skills.

McNamara never actually apologized for his role in the Vietnam debacle, but clearly was haunted by it, and his mantra became "We were wrong, terribly wrong."

Rumsfeld, of course, has not apologized and it is difficult to foresee that he will ever do so. But is he too haunted by Iraq?

Nearly 16,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam when McNamara left the Pentagon in 1968; by the time the United States finally withdrew in 1975, the number stood at over 58,000.

Nearly 3,000 Americans had been killed in Iraq when Rumsfeld bailed; the number now stands at over 4,000. And continues to grow.

* * * * *

Apropos to the Bush torture regime and the time in which we live, a question is being asked anew: Was McNamara a war criminal?

McNamara never answered the question directly, but did have this to say in Erroll Morris's The Fog of War documentary in the context of his work as a young officer evaluating the effectiveness of Army Air Force missions over Japan for General Curtis LeMay, many of which were firebombings that wrought enormous death and destruction:

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.-Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history -- kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time -- and today -- has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, 'the rules of war.' Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?
"LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"

McNamara was onto something, while I cop to historical context and draw on my knowledge of World War II, Vietnam and Iraq, in trying to answer the question without resorting to the Welcome to the Platinum Tier of Hell indictments ricocheting around the blogosphere.

The War in the Pacific had to be fought. Oh, and paybacks are a bitch. The sadism that the Japanese inflicted on Americans and their allies, as well as disregard for the lives of their own infantrymen, fliers and subjugates invited the Yankee payback.

The history of the Vietnam War is less forgiving on whether the conduct of McNamara, as well as LBJ, was criminal.

That history did not begin with the defeat of the colonial French army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but rather all the way back in 1947 when a young Ho Chi Minh all but begged the U.S. to support him in a nationalist independence movement and was blown off. U.S. troops began to trickle into Vietnam under false pretexts and the Johnson administration shifted from rationale to rationale and strategy to strategy before Richard Nixon finally conceded defeat in 1975.

Furthermore, and as McNamara admitted in In Retrospect, he knew that the war was futile, if not wrong.

In all three wars, "mortal men [were] cast into giants' roles," to use historian Max Hasting's term. Can it be that McNamara was not a war criminal as an advisor to LeMay but was regarding Vietnam?

Yes, despite his candor about the former and contrition about the latter. Can it be that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are war criminals as regards Iraq? Definitely.

Why Christie's Unconvincing Victimhood Won't Matter Where It Counts

CHRIS CHRISTIE AND BRIDGET ANNE KELLY

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is not the first bully to make a name for himself in politics, but then our memories are awfully short.  After all, we already have forgotten revelations during the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney's star turn as a gay-bashing high school bully.  And face it, Dick and Liz Cheney are so passé.

I happen to think that Christie is a narcissistic egomaniac, but will emerge relatively unscathed from the Scandal of the Moment.  This despite the probability that once the emails between deputy chief of staff Bridget Anne Kelly and other staffers, which were heavily redacted before being released in conjunction with Christie's Mea Culpa Tour last week, are released in full, they will show the governor was well aware of if didn't actually help engineer one of the more breathtakingly vindictive political paybacks in memory: Plunging the George Washington Bridge approach at Fort Lee, New Jersey -- one of the nation's busiest bridges and the key car-and-truck link between New Jersey and New York City -- into four days of gridlock.

So why do I think that Christie will, in Jersey street parlance, get a slide despite his unconvincing efforts to portray himself as the victim (his variation on Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" defense was a real howler), the likelihood of criminal charges being filed against some of his aides, and the drip-drip-drip of revelations about Christie's numerous other forays into retributive justice, as one pundit called it?

Because 2016, when Christie will make a run for the Republican presidential nomination, is as distant as Alpha Centauri, or for that matter Romney's 1965 exploits, in our 24/7 news cycle world.  Besides which, bullying -- as exemplified by right-wing demagogues like Rush Limbaugh -- has become so much background noise in our toxic, hyper-partisan environment.  Bullying is the new normal, as it were, and it will matter little that the pugilistic governor didn't come clean all at once, which is likely the case, than allow the cover-up become bigger than the crime, because the media will soon move on to fresh outrages.

Finally, the Republican Party desperately needs Christie.

I continue to believe that while Teahadists are powerful beyond their numbers, they have painted the party into an ideological corner that pretty much guarantees increasing national irrelevance.  A Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz has zero chance of beating Hillary Clinton.  GOP donors, primarily those on Wall Street who lack the fascist tendencies of the Koch Brothers, will shower Christie with money, and maybe -- just maybe -- the lessons not learned from Romney's 2012 thrashing will sink in.

While the stars might have to be aligned just so for Christie to get the Republican nomination, only he is capable of giving Clinton a run for her money.  This is because many of the policies and points of view the governor espouses are in sync with voters in general, if not right-wing Republicans, including those all-important Independent women.  These include gun control, immigration reform, Medicaid expansion, gay rights and, yes, good old fashioned compromising.

A FOOTNOTE

Why do so many Republican officials today use their power to hurt people?

Surprisingly, I have yet to read of anyone making a connection between the GW Bridge gridlock in early September and the shutdown of the federal government from October 1-16, although much talked about and anticipated as Christie's elves carried out their dirty work, which among other things slowed emergency responses and may or may not have resulted in a death, as well as making tens of thousands of people late for work and school.

And as sleazy as New Jersey politics are historically -- the Sopranos . . . er, Garden State is perhaps the most corrupt; yes, even more corrupt than Louisiana -- political paybacks usually take the form of envelopes stuffed with cash, not outright thuggery.

It's sick.

Bones, Hypocrisy & More: Musings On The Year Of The Banana Peel

I have lived a long and healthy life save only for a fairly minor stroke some 13 years ago and the obligatory middle-aged guy hernia repair, but recently had a run of bad luck that left a big hole in the year just passed.

It began back in May when I was walking our brother-sister chocolate Labradors, who weigh about 100 pounds each, on a country road near our mountain retreat.  They spotted a neighbor whom they adore and tore off to say howdy.  Although I was holding their leather leashes loosely (try saying that three times fast) and I'm a big dude, their rocket-like acceleration lifted me off my feet, spun me around, and I crashed into an embankment, fracturing my left humerus. (That's the arm bone right below the shoulder.)

The good news is that it was a clean break that an orthopedist recommended be allowed to self heal with the temporary use of an arm sling followed by an exercise regimen, as well as his admonition to look out for "banana peels," situations that might get me in trouble before I had fully regained arm strength and balance.

The bad news is that a banana peel in the form of an area rug with an upturned corner presented itself in late July.  I took the bait and kicked the corner over, going ass over tea kettle and shattering my left femur (that's the hip bone). 

I came home after two weeks in a rehab hospital and began in-home occupational and physical therapy.  Then in early October, not more than six hours after being discharged from in-home PT and having discarded a walker and become accustomed to the assistance of a cane, a second banana peel presented itself in the form of an uneven and poorly lit driveway surface.  I became tangled up in the cane getting out of a car and went down, refracturing the femur, this time so badly that I initially needed to use a wheelchair to get around.

After three additional weeks in a rehab hospital, I again underwent in-home OT and PT, eventually discarded the wheelchair and then a walker, and am greeting 2014 with my old friend the cane once again in hand, which has prompted pal and inveterate wag Joe Gandelman to comment that, after all, I was "always raising cane, so what's the big deal?"

* * * * *

Beyond the obvious -- Look out for banana peels, stoopid! -- I take away a couple three lessons from my experience.

There is nothing quite like having a sense of one's own mortality to put things in perspective, as my fellow blogger Ron Beasley does here with brevity but eloquence.

I was damned fortunate.  The injuries could have been worse, I might have liked painkillers and become addicted to them, and could have been among Our Great Country's 45 million uninsured.  

(Despite my shame at being one of Mitt Romney's 44 Percenters, in my case a veteran who is sponging off the system despite having loyally contributed to it for 50 fricking years, Medicare has covered almost all of my medical expenses, and what it hasn't -- one measly ambulance ride and wheelchair rental -- has been covered by a reasonably priced AARP supplemental policy.)

And I was reminded of how wonderful my friends are.  Beyond the Love Of My Life, who has worked me harder than my excellent therapists on their off days and been endlessly supportive in the face of my mood swings, friends who have had not dissimilar boo-boos have kept reinforcing that I had to work through the pain, dammit!

* * * * *

Albert Einstein's genius extended well beyond theoretical physics, of course, and his observations about temporal matters are legendary.  My favorite: "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."

That truth was slammed home in December when in the space of 72 hours two gravely ill sisters of a dear friend passed away, the older sister, we are sure, waiting until her younger sibling was on her deathbed in order to be able to join her.  Then a friend of My Love's family for eight decades also left the material world, reminding us in his last Christmas missive with his typical wisdom that "While email is quicker, cards last longer."

We will be grieving for some time.

* * * * *

Not that anyone has noticed, but my blogging output in 2013 dropped to a fraction of what it has been in the past, and I won't be setting the world on fire this year, either.  

Beyond that banana peel thing, the reason is simple: Having done the writing gig for many years, the feeling of "been there, wrote about that" has become overpowering.  Besides which, how many times can you call Republicans feckless nitwits?  Or write that Our Once Great Country has gone to hell in a hand basket.

There also is my creeping disenchantment with Barack Obama despite his signal accomplishments, including being reelected in the first place, as well as the Affordable Care Act, advancement of gay rights, courageous if vain fight for meaningful gun control, and vowing to talk to our enemies instead of merely wagging our johnsons at them. 

Having told myself and written endlessly that expectations were way too high after Obama's historic 2008 victory, my expectations still were way too high, which makes the disappointments of the last five years -- the president's tepid renouncement of the Bush Torture Regime and endorsement of the NSA's civil liberties gangbang being chief among them -- even more unacceptable. 

* * * * *

Most Telling Statistic of 2013: Some 70 percent of the laws enacted in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre weakened gun control.

* * * * *

Who would have thunk that someone as deeply cynical as I am about the Roman Catholic Church ("the world's largest criminal enterprise," as I have put it), would be applauding the Holy Father, whose scathing putdown of the greedy capitalists who are responsible for so much of what ails our society, is spot on. 

Not that Rush Limbaugh and Paul Ryan, let alone the vile banksters for whom ripping off the Have Nots has become the norm, should be shaking in their Louis Vittons over Pope Francis's radical manifesto. Still, their ways will eventually catch up with them, even if it is as belatedly as when St. Peter tells them to take a hike.

But the big story of 2013 was not so much the cage match over the Affordable Care Act than the underlying reason it is so bloody necessary: Our profoundly dysfunctional health-care system, notably the out-of-control pricing that make getting sick twice to three times as costly than in other industrialized nations where care and mortality statistics are much better than ours.

There were two notable journalistic efforts during 2013 to hammer home that reality -- Steven Brill's "Bitter Pill," which took up an entire dead tree edition of Time magazine in March, and a year-long series by Elisabeth Rosenthal in The New York Times, which she summarizes in "Health Care's Road to Ruin."

Both also are reminders of the importance of investigative journalism, something many newspapers and magazines have abandoned because it is not profitable. And tends to piss off advertisers.

* * * * *

Could it be that Barack Obama will be the last so-called common man to serve as president?  While that would be an immense downer, it would come as no surprise given how the super rich, their skids greased by Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings favoring the plutocracy, have pretty much taken over national politics.

* * * * *

That sound you hear is the world's tiniest violin, which I am playing in eulogizing the end of the error . . . er, era of George W. Bush's 2002 Every Child Kicked in the Behind education initiative.

As is beyond apparent, teaching kids to do well on standardized tests, the underlying premise of the initiative, was bound to be a disaster, plunging American students even further behind those in most developed countries in math, science and reading.  The Obama administration is now pushing something called Core Curriculum learning, which . . . hold onto your smart phones, kiddies, stresses teaching children how to learn.

* * * * *

Finally, I have some advice for capitalists, politicians and mere mortals in the New Year who remain opposed to government-supported and subsidized health care: Go find a banana peel and step on it. 

Madiba I: A Tribute To Nelson Mandela, One Of The Greatest Men Of Our Time

While there is no question that Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Alfred Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King  were among the great men of the 20th century, greatness can be a relative thing and often is in the eyes of the beholder. By those lights, my nominee for one of the greatest men of the modern era is Nelson Mandela.

Mandela, who left this mortal coil on Thursday at age 95, had been in failing health for some time and was repeatedly hospitalized with a recurring lung ailment that stemmed, in all likelihood, from tuberculosis contracted during his 27-year imprisonment, much of it spent on Robben Island, the notorious apartheid-era prison.  He had been largely absent from public life since 2004, a decade after he was elected South Africa's first black president and led the deeply divided nation into an era of truth and reconciliation that sought to give citizens of all races equal voice, and had not been seen in public since the World Cup soccer final in Johannesburg in July 2010. 

As a friend said, "it was time to let him go," yet he had stubbornly hung on.

* * * * *

Roosevelt and Churchill, of course, oversaw the global effort to overthrow fascism, although the peace they fashioned was deeply flawed.  Einstein's imprecations regarding the nuclear menace were borne out, while Gandhi led India to independence, employing the non-violent civil disobedience that King and later Mandela embraced.

Yet it is Mandela's story that resonates most deeply for me, in part because he was the last survivor among those leading lights, and because I directed the coverage of his release from prison, the end of apartheid and the wrenching early years of his presidency for a big-city newspaper that recognized the enormity of these historic events and dedicated substantial resources to bringing them to its readers.  A consequence of my hands-on involvement was that I understood early on that it would be South Africa's black majority, deeply fractured because of tribal and political differences, that would be the greatest impediment to realizing Mandela's vision.  Time and events have proven me right.  

* * * * *

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was a Xhosa born to the Thembu royal family.  He was given "Madiba" as a clan name, circumcised as a 16-year-old in a Bantu rite of passage marking his manhood, but refused a traditional tribal marriage.  He attended a Methodist boarding school and then elite Fort Hare, a black college that was the incubator for no fewer than four other African presidents, and eventually made his way to Johannesburg where he was taken under the wing of Walter Sisulu, father figure of the African National Congress.

Not unlike Ho Chi Minh and Vietnamese liberation, Mandela embraced the teachings of Karl Marx and aspects of white Communism, but believed the struggle in his homeland was, first and foremost, by and for black Africans.

While imprisoned on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, he grew vegetables and cultivated his image with equal care.  

It is not widely known that he also quietly reached out to the apartheid regime in anticipation of his eventual release, and met secretly with Niel Barnard, the head of its intelligence service.  Two other men were delegated by the ANC in exile to talk with Barnard --  Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, Mandela's successors as president.  Unlike the great man himself, they have made themselves the centers of personality and have been hostile to the notion that diversity of opinion and tolerance of dissent must be at the heart of the young South African democracy. 

Biographer Ricard Stengel has written that "Prison taught Mandela how to deal with limits and how to govern his emotions; at the same time it taught him what was limitless, which was, broadly, the potential of humanity to do the right thing. Be constructive, Mandela advises, be pragmatic, be generous; look for the good in others. Mandela cultivated the mix of bluntness and courtesy Afrikaners (the ruling white minority group) respected.  He managed to disarm the apartheid president, P. W. Botha, a harsh man, 'with a robust handshake and a wide smile.' "

It is therefore not surprising that Mandela brilliantly handled the transition between his release from prison in 1990 and majority rule in 1994, while averting racial bloodshed.  Although in the end it was Mandela's extraordinary magnanimity that carried the day, less remarked on is that despite South Africa’s loathsome anti-black heritage, there were solid institutions to underpin the transition to democracy, including a parliament and electoral system, independent courts and a free press. 

In 1993, Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk, the last apartheid era president, an honor that rankles to this day, but then the Peace Prize has been irrelevant for me since 1993 when Henry Kissinger, a war criminal, shared the prize with Le Duc Tho, the Vietnamese revolutionary and diplomat, who had the class to decline it. 

Mandela's legacy is not complete without acknowledging that Africa is becoming more democratic in his wake.

When the Berlin Wall fell in late 1989, a few months before Mandela's release from prison, only three of sub-Saharan Africa's 48 countries were democratic. Now, 21 are seen as as functioning democracies, with another six regarded as semi-democratic. 

* * * * *

For much of Mandela's life, personal happiness proved to be elusive.

He left his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase, after she became a Jehovah’s Witness and accused him of being an adulterer who abandoned his children and beat her, a charge he denied.  His second marriage to Winnie Madikizela was fraught because of her proclivity for corrupt and scandalous conduct. One of their sons was estranged from him and killed in a car crash in 1969.  Another was an alcoholic who died of AIDS in 2005.

He finally wed Graça Machel, the widow of the Mozambican president and former ANC ally Samora Machel, who survives him, as do three daughters from his first two marriages, 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.  An ugly battle over control of his legacy, image and estate broke out as his health deteriorated, with two of his daughters suing to get access to a trust fund that he set up for his descendants. 

President Obama decided against a personal visit during his 2013 Africa tour, instead delivering his respects in a private meeting with Mandela’s family. "I . . . reaffirmed the profound impact that his legacy has had in building a free South Africa, and in inspiring people around the world — including me," he said afterwards.  "That’s a legacy that we must all honor in our own lives."

South African politicians were not so solicitous.  They invaded Mandela's privacy and exploited his frailty in order to be seen in his hallowed company, while squabbles have flared up over the TV rights to his funeral. 

"Everyone wants a piece of the Madiba magic,” said William Gumede, who has written extensively about a man who became a global symbol of forgiveness and the struggle for justice and equality. "This is just a preview of what will come when he goes."

PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN WINTERS COOK

Madiba II: 'I Will Always See Mandela In The Faces Of My Everyday Heroes'

By SUSAN WINTERS COOK

EASTERN CAPE, South Africa -- It’s a death in the family. A family of millions who call him” Tata”, Our Father.

There is no person here in South Africa not affected by Mandela’s passing, even those who opposed him. He is the reason we are where we are today. Not that he achieved South Africa’s transition on his own, many South Africans on all levels were an important part of that achievement, from his closest comrades and prison inmates to the village women who defied apartheid laws in daily life. But Mandela was the caretaker of that spirit. He absorbed the responsibility and the pain that came with it. The course that South Africa took could not have happened without him.

We may never be able to find just the right word to define what it was that made him the one to lead the way.

I say, we. I am a permanent resident, an American African - living here for 16 years, knowing South Africa for seven years before that. Drawn to this country for reasons including the spirit of Madiba - his clan name - found on all levels. That his roots, that nurtured him are a two hour drive away and I live immersed in the same rural Xhosa experience with people of equally elegant spirit. 

If given the opportunity to live in a country headed by such a man, that embraced such lofty goals of transformation from a desperate dark past, who would say no to that? The wind, bearing the majestic music seemed to come out of nowhere, and hope was the color of the sky no matter what the sun decided to do.

There has been a lot of rain recently. Madiba’s shoes remain empty. Is it because there never will be anyone who can measure up to him, or are we are simply still waiting? Patience has been my greatest challenge here. It’s as foreign to an American as the language that sounds like a typewriter on drugs. Patience is a sign of optimism even when it is the result of oppression. It assumes - it believes - it knows - that sooner or later, the awaited, the object of our prayers, will happen.

February 1990

Bishops Court, the residence of Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Cape Town

I expect a fist pumping shouting Castro-style revolutionary. Instead, after less than 24 hours of freedom, he sits in a carved wood chair with the colors of the ANC behind him and radiates good cheer as he speaks quietly, politely, but firmly about his intentions for radical change. When a reporter stands to ask a question and gives his name, Mr. Mandela says, “Ah yes, Mr. Jolidon, how are you today?” He has read their stories, he remembers their names. And,  if this were not a press conference, he would inquire about their families as well.

Because that's the African thing to do.

He wears a fine blue-grey suit and is poised to take leadership of the most powerful country on the continent, and become a world statesman. His posture is upright. His fingers do not fidget. He is not bowed and he is not bitter. He has learned wisdom. He has known patience.

When the press conference ends and Madiba gets up to leave, the reporters do something I have never seen before or since. They stand up and applaud him. I watch him walk away with Winnie at his side, chatting, and wonder, what would they be talking about?

It is only later that I understand beneath the fine suit was the barefoot boy who enjoyed stick fighting and tended cattle in the hills of knee high grass and bright red soil on the other side of the country, the part the apartheid regime rejected and deemed only good enough for the “natives.”  Later on, when he was sent to school,  Mandela had found the transition to wearing boots and eating with cutlery awkward, like his awkwardness with girls.  His contemplation of the times he avoided conflict in the interest of a greater good, he reports years later, with convincing humility. 

He was not a boy who had dreams of greatness as it has been defined by his public life. He embraced his lineage of African royalty and knew he had to fulfill expectations that came with that. That was different from becoming the first black and democratically elected president of South Africa; it was a moral responsibility to his community and his family and his ancestors. Neither apartheid nor power could destroy that commitment.

Those hills and villages of round mud houses with grass roofs remain today, and there are barefoot boys still tending cattle there, almost like a museum of his culture. When that has been paved and exploited for tourism, the thorn tree kraals replaced by garages, one wonders where the secrets behind his greatness will reside. 

Madiba’s culture is one in which there are no lines drawn within families; children know aunts and uncles as another set of parents, cousins are brothers and sisters.

“I didn't know who my parents were for a long time, we all sat down at the same bowl together every night,” explained a man of traditional Xhosa roots.

After his release from prison, Madiba chose to return to his childhood home of Qunu, where he had spent the happiest days of his youth. He held family events at the house he built on the Mandela homestead. He asked to be buried there.

During his earlier years as president, when he stayed at Qunu, he would escape security and go to the village high school where he would disrupt classes and sit down with the students and tell them what life in their village was like when he was a boy. He encouraged them to value education. They loved him, running to him, cheering, “Madiba! Madiba!” when they saw him approaching. 

Despite his wealth and comfortable circumstances he continued to insist on porridge and amaas (the traditional African drink of soured milk) in the morning.

The South Africa I know  remains a land of contrasts, like the deep thunderous purple sky with the glistening golden grass challenging it on the horizon. It’s vast beaches guarded by craggy mountains and flat endless desert with sky like a huge bowl and sunsets that color in every direction. It's donkey carts sharing the road with BMWs, women walking modern city streets with large bundles balanced on their heads, it's a construction crew that communicates in three languages. This is a country that, by having 11 official languages, chooses elegance over practicality, showing equal deference to each culture living within the borders. 

The sun shines while it rains. Rainbows are the result.

Modern Africans claim to be moving away from those tribal customs that were the glue to isolated traditional villages, that the  practice of barefoot boys tending cattle is something to be eradicated. Perhaps for good reason, when many of those boys tend cattle in lieu of continuing their education. Yet, because the wealth of a man is still determined by the number of cows he owns, there will always be the need for them to be tended.

The payment of lobola, or bride price, is treating women as property and some believe it should also be abolished, yet it remains custom all the way to the top, Mandela paid a large lobola for his wife Graca Machel. Professional negotiators for lobola make large sums for their services. In the past lobola was settled by family members from both sides.

The tradition of multiple wives still prevails in some cultures, President Jacob Zuma, a Zulu, has four wives. Polygamy is accepted by the law if a man can show it is part of his culture.

Young Xhosa men still flock to the bush to be ceremonially circumsized in order to be called a man. More are dying from the experience these days because the circumcision schools have been corrupted by practitioners who do not follow proper procedure.

Many of the new suits who have migrated to the automated square houses behind razor wire walls in the cities load their families into their BMWs and every Christmas they return to the villages and the grannies who raised them, where they renew connection to their traditional roots. Families gather in thorny kraals and slaughter goats as messages to the ancestors, who protect them from hardship as long as they behave. A person who has had bad things happen is assumed to have offended the ancestors. Some still consult traditional healers whose skills include combating evil spirits that create havoc in peoples’ lives, and ensuring the next born will be a son, or one will win the lottery. Others go to witch doctors, because they believe someone, a witch, has cast an evil spell upon them.

The best educated still send their sons back for traditional initiation rituals.

South Africa today is not what any of us who watched for the freedom train expected. It's painful watching the pillaging by government and corporate officials, along with the corruption, or at least tragic inadequacy, of police. I ache when I experience the incompetence, some of it deliberate, of government employees, or the arrogance of teachers and nurses who have lost their reason for doing what they do.  I pray Madiba does not know about these things. He had his own brush with this disappointment when he had to cancel the annual childrens’ party he held at his Qunu home every Christmas. It became a mob scene after a few years and the worst offenders were the adults grabbing the gifts that had been intended for the children.

Yet I still see Madiba’s spirit  in the faces of my everyday heroes because that's where he started; the elderly African great-grandmother who recently could not tell me for sure, how many children she has raised, including those she raises now, like counting the number of dishes she has washed.  It’s the courageous young woman who exposes her HIV status to the world in order to help others avoid contracting it. It’s the man who visits his son in prison every week, hoping his continued love can help him to reject a life of crime. It’s in the everyday people who still live lives of unforgivable hardship who continue to maintain  dignity, and amazing generosity.

Madiba’s legacy is peace. Before 1990, peace had become an empty political slogan. When Mandela walked out of prison, shook hands with his jailer and embarked on a course of reconciliation, peace became a reality. The world watched in tearful, hopeful need to believe.

It can be done. Peace happens.

Ubuntu is the African concept of  humanity to others.  It  means "I am what I am because of who we all are."

We are, because he was.

We can be, because he is ancestor to our family.

We can be great, not as a nation, but as a people. Madiba opened that door. He shone the light in that direction, he walked ahead and turned on the sun, over there, like the brilliant light that shoots through the billowing clouds at the end of the day.

It's not Madiba’s shoes that need to be filled, it's his footprints in the red African dust that await the right pair of African feet to continue their journey.

They can be any color because we are a nation of rainbows, even when it rains.

Thank you, Madiba.

Hamba kamnandi.  Walk forward well.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Winters Cook is a photojournalist and humanitarian who has lived in the Eastern Cape region of South Africa since 1997. She previously was a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Daily News, where I was her editor when she made several trips to South Africa to chronicle the enormous changes in that country after Nelson Mandela's release from prison.

Cook's profile of a regional African National Congress leader's struggle to survive transitional political violence won the prestigious 1994 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. From 1997 to 2003, Cook produced an AIDS education periodical for the province, has produced documentaries for the provincial premier and a documentary about a Cape Town squatter community building its own housing.

Cook is the author of Nozuko' Story: The Story of an African Family.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SUSAN WINTERS COOK