Sense and Sensibility

Streisand’s latest is her best

Barbra

Hold on to your iPods, music lovers, Barbra Streisand has released a gem of an album.

In the 1960s, when Streisand went from a gawky Brooklyn teenager to one of the top recording artists of the decade, her albums were released fast and furious and nearly every one was a bell-ringer. Something happened to Streisand in the 1960s. Call it disco. Call it Jon Peters. Call it Stoney End. But early devotees called it a catastrophe. Only the most devoted of fans would admit to owning a copy of “Wet,” or “The Main Event,” to say nothing of “Butterfly” or “Superman.” And while Streisand made a feint toward returning to her roots with “The Broadway Album,” the fact is that she was only on Broadway twice (”I Can Get It For You Wholesale” and “Funny Girl”) and the album, though better than most of its kind (thanks to Streisand’s still-sterling soprano) suffered from the same more-is-more vocal histrionics that had come to define Streisand’s work.

Leave it to Diana Krall to tame the Streisand beast. “Love is the Answer,” produced by the jazz artist, is an absolutely gorgeous Streisand album that reminds listeners of how and why she set the recording world ablaze in the 1960s. While her Broadway albums were anthems, her new album is a hymn. It is a real return to her roots [Dash] the intimate cabaret bars like the Village Vanguard, in which she set jaws to drop with her rendition of “A Sleepin’ Bee.”

“Love is the Answer” is her 63rd Album, 51 of which went gold. It is deeply enhanced by some magical arrangements of chestnuts like “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and an inspired “Make Someone Happy.” The opening song, “Here’s to Life,” is reason to buy the album while the wistful, intimate “Some Other Time,” is sung with just the right tinge of regret. The understated delivery, accompaniment of Krall’s trio, is just what the overstated Streisand needed.

You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby

Did we need Joan of Arc so badly?

In the hours after an Army officer spent his lunatic rage on 13 hapless souls at Fort Hood, Texas, authorities swiftly canonized Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley, a 34-year-old mother of two, who, they said, raced after the maniacal Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, pistol in hand, popping him with bullets until both fell.

“She had the training; she knew what to do,” Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at Fort Hood, told reporters. “And she had the courage to do it —-by doing it she saved countless people’s lives….She is absolutely a hero.”

And it all sounded so cinematic [Dash] and so familiar. A pint-size Annie Oakley, armed with a service revolver and heap of red-blooded Texan pluck, took out the rampaging Arab marauder with quick wits and American know-how. And just to make the yarn juicier, hubby was on his second tour in Iraq, fighting for our freedom.

Except, of course, that it didn’t fall out that way.

If heroism is measured by neutralizing the assassin before he neutralizes you, then that moniker goes to Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, who, it turns out, fired the shots that took down Maj. Hasan. Sgt. Todd, who is black, confirmed to the New York Times the account of a witness who said it was Todd who immobilized Hasan. It is unclear whether Sgt. Munley even got off a shot.

That did not stop the defense secretary from rushing to Munley’s bedside, or television channels everywhere angling for an exclusive with her (Oprah, naturally, got it). Everybody wanted to make Sgt. Munley into Sarah Conner, the uber-buffed Mama Bear Linda Hamilton played in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.”

War is hell, of course, and its narrative is a sanguinary muddle. That a white woman got credit for a black man’s exploits only aggravates this country’s repellant racial legacy. To her credit, Sgt. Munley never warmed to the accolades, telling Oprah that the medics “are the ones who saved everybody’s life.”

True enough, but, with apologies to Tina Turner, we do need another hero now, just as we needed one in 2003, when the U.S. Army turned Pfc. Jessica Lynch into a distaff Rambo, or turned the impossibly beautiful Pat Tillman into Saint Sebastian. It didn’t help when both of those heroic stories turned out to be bogus, just another fable to make war by.

Every culture wants a hero and for centuries, those heroes have been men. What’s intriguing about the new millennium is that both Lynch and Munley are women and have, in many ways, upended our definitions of heroine-ship.

For most of history, female heroes have been either vixens, vamps or doormats. Whatever heroism they achieved, they procured through cunning, seduction or accident of birth. Iphigenia gets sacrificed to the gods. Judith seduced Holofernes and then decapitated him. Penelope cleverly wove her way into fidelity. Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth I would merely have been heralded for their fertility but for who they married [Dash] or didn’t. Of all of history’s heroines, only Joan of Arc comes closest to having what academics call “agency.”

Today, of course, we have the opportunity to have women come out, guns-a-blarin’ and slice down bloodthirsty madmen willing to go down in apocalyptic fury. That, one supposes, is progress, although it equally makes possible thugs like Private Lynndie England, now serving time for her vile abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (England’s court martial took place, ironically, at Ford Hood.)

In 2002, Time magazine named three women its “Persons of the Year.” They were: Sherron Watkins, the Enron vice president who enlightened chairman Ken Lay about the company’s spurious accounting system; Coleen Rowley, the FBI staff attorney who warned the department about 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, and Cynthia Cooper, who blew the whistle on WorldCom’s flim-flam-flooey bookkeeping.

This is the kind of heroism that demands moxie and intelligence —-the kind, as Gail Collins points out in “When Everything Changed,” that women were prevented from exercising for centuries. Back when the Kennedy Administration established the country’s first Commission on the Status of Women, one of its members warned that the commission “should not pretend that women as a group are equal to men as a group in qualifying for participation in the world of work and public affairs.”

It is a mark of how far women have come that we have the opportunity for women to be lionized for martial fluency —- or just for having more guts than anyone else in the room.

In the end, it doesn’t matter who stopped Maj. Hasan, but the fact that a woman was given a shot is reason enough to celebrate.

Tracey O’Shaughnessy is the author of “Every Little Thing.” Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Race, Religion and Gender at Fort Hood

Would it have been so terrible if the Fort Hood hero had been a black man?

Would it have added just one race too many in a slaughter already rife with bigotry and lousy with religious bias?

In the hours after an Army officer spent his lunatic rage on 13 hapless souls at Fort Hood, Texas, authorities deified Sgt. Kimberly D. Munley, a 34-year-old  mother of 2, who, they said, raced after the maniacal Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, pistol in hand, popping him with bullets until both fell. “She had the training; she knew what to do,” Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at Fort Hood, told reporters. “And she had the courage to do it — by doing it she saved countless people’s lives….She is absolutely a hero.”

It all sounded so cinematic – and so familiar. A pint-size Annie Oakley, armed with a service revolver and heap of red-blooded Texan pluck, took out the rampaging Arab marauder with quick wits and American know-how. And just to make the yarn juicier, hubby was on his second tour in Iraq, fighting for our freedom.

Except, of course, that it didn’t fall out that way.

If heroism is measured by neutralizing the assassin before he neutralizes you, then that moniker goes to Senior Sgt. Mark Todd, who, it turns out, fired the shots that took down Maj. Hasan. Sgt. Todd is black, and confirmed to the New York Times the account of a witness who said it was Todd who immobilized Hasan. It is unclear whether Sgt. Munley even got off a shot.

That did not stop the defense secretary from rushing to Munley’s bedside, or television channels everywhere angling for an exclusive with her (Oprah, naturally, got it). Everybody wanted to make Sgt. Munley into Sarah Conner, the uber-buffed Mama Bear Linda Hamilton played in “Terminator 2: Judgement Day.”

That a black man got a overlooked as a hero during a national catastrophe is one more in a long history of racial slights that continues to vex. That we were so eager to embrace a pistol-packing mama as a national heroine says something about what we imagine possible from women today.

Among the Fort Hood victims were daughters, mothers, and mothers to be. It is unclear if any of them got off a shot, defended a bystander, or brandished a weapon. They were all, as women have been for too long, victims in a slaughter where heroes were in short supply and where the day belonged, ultimately, to a madman.

Black Friday’s Grotesque Reverie

Gird yourself for the discount gauntlet.

Never mind the Recession and double-digit unemployment, Americans will not forgo rapacious foraging on Black Friday, even under pain of death.

And death came early for the markdown mavens last year. A hapless WalMart clerk, Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death last year in Valley Stream, N.Y., by craven consumers ready to devour the Deal of the Day. If we were the reverent souls we profess to be, we might observe a moment of respectful silence for Damour, whose mortifying death reveals a tad too much about our orgiastic consumer society.

According to evolutionary psychologists, it’s the belief that exorbitant items affect the way people treat us. The auction was as raucous as –well a WalMart on Black Friday. What, one might ask, is the difference between Bernie Madoff’s Jaeger-LeCoultre watches and the $300 laptops for which retail rustlers will sacrifice a body part?

But in a pallid economy overly dependent on retail, it’s “Katie bar the door.”

Retailers are reportedly mollifying their gladiatorial approach to Black Friday, which has become the suburban consumer’s retail equivalent of Paintball. No more will shoppers be whipped up into a lethal frenzy like pit bulls in a South Georgia basement. No more will they seethe at the gates, camped out like odiferous rock fans on cold cement. WalMart’s solution to the gate-swarming potential of its pre-dawn opening is not to close at all.The New York Times reports that the retail giant will be open all Thanksgiving day, a gift for which all of us should be grateful. If you have no one and nothing about whom or which to be grateful, it’s always heartwarming to spend the holiday in the automotive cleaning supply aisle.

The news that shopping might be a kinder, gentler experience came just after Bernard Madoff’s epic tag sale. The U.S. Marshall’s office organized an auction of Madoff’s personal booty, which raised $900,000 for the victims of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Among Madoff spoils: the Monoblocco, an 18-karat Rolex valued between $75,000 and $87,000; Ruth Madoff’s Victorian diamond earrings, which sold for $70,000; five fur coats and three polo shirts monogrammed with “Bull,” the name of one of his yachts. 

In “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior,” Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico argues that we buy high-ticket items to lure high-end friends and mates, and get better treatment than the rest of the barbarians at the gate. As he told Time magazine, “animals achieve much of their survival and reproductive success through self-advertisement, self-marketing and self-promotion.”

Image – in other words —is everything. It gets you a better seat at the opera and better treatment at Le Cirque.

That’s why people who don’t know any better generally believe a $10 bottle of wine is exquisite if it comes with a $100 price tag. It’s why Madoff bought Rolex instead of Timex in spite of the fact that both watches tell time.

 It may be that our voracious bargain hunting is a product of a provident society intent on getting the most bang for its buck.

Or it may be that scooping up a brand name at discount gives us the illusion of pedigree at half the price.

But if the Christmas spirit is really with us we may realize that profligacy breeds penance more commonly than it does good cheer.

This year, we may actually have a chance to try out the outlandish proposition that Christmas is about more than booty.  Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

Does anybody up there know what they’re doing?

If you’re a woman who’d like to do what she can to avoid premature death, you have a right to be feeling a little gyped.Within one week, American women were told to reign in two screening procedures that experts had been assuring them could save their lives —– the mammogram and the Pap smear. Both reversals came in the middle of a ferocious health care debate that has bandied about the term “science-driven medicine,” which sounds so efficient until you realize it means weighing your risk of death against the money it may cost to save you.Mammograms, the “gold standard” of breast cancer preventions, are basically no good for women under 50, a government panel indicated last week. Oh, and by the way, you can quit those monthly breast self-exams. Those are useless, too.

The United States Preventative Service Task Force[---the same group that only seven years ago insisted women over 40 get a mammogram every one to two years -- now says the whole ordeal is an exercise in futility.

After all, we're only talking about one cancer death being prevented for every 1,904 women age 40 to 49 that are screened for a decade. Surely, that hardly merits parading all of those women into a mammography booth. A woman might need a biopsy. Imagine the hysteria that would create.

Yes, you heard right. We have a governmental panel suggesting we cut back on screening because of the "anxiety" it might create among women. Can you imagine a governmental task panel worried about male "anxiety?" "Forget the colonoscopy, tough guy. We wouldn't want to give you the willies." That's condescension masquerading as concern.

But here's the problem with dismissing all those nervous nellies under 50; they're the ones most likely to die of cancer. Breast cancer is the leading cause of death in American women ages 34 to 44, reports Breast Cancer Action. Of the estimated 241,000 women in the United States diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, about 24,000 were women under 45.

Task force members counter that many irregularities are found in younger women's breasts that are benign. That's true. The problem for cancer specialists is that they do not know which ones will sit around and do nothing for 45 years and which ones will kill you. If they could figure that out, a whole bunch of women would be spared the hellish treatment of purging cancer from their system.

Not too many years ago, the medical community was singing the praises of Hormone Replacement Treatment to treat everything from low-sex drive, to depression to urinary incontinence. But by 2002, the National Institutes of Health put the brakes on a large study looking at HRT after discovering that the therapy raises the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent and heart attack by 29 percent. HRT didn't help dementia and increased a woman's chance of stroke.

So what is it today? Fewer mammograms and pap smears. At some point, the medical community needs to consider the lost of confidence it risks when it turns the lives of ordinary Americans inside out [Dash] and then turns them right-side-in again. Nobody enjoys these medical procedures. We undergo them in the hapless belief that somebody wiser than us knows better. When Americans begin to feel jerked around by experts who tell them fish will cure them on Monday, kill them on Wednesday and make no difference on Friday, they’re likely to hit the “mute” button and head straight to McDonald’s.

Listen to an essay on the Faith Middletown Show

To listen to an interview and essay from “Every Little Thing,” follow this link to WNPR’s “The Faith Middleton Show.”

http://www.cpbn.org/program/faith-middleton-show/episode/fms-essayist-tracey-oshaughnessy

Listen to my NPR interview

Listeners of WNPR’s “The Faith Middleton Show” will have a chance to hear one of my essays and Faith’s interview with me on Friday, Nov. 13 at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. Listen on line at www.wnpr.org.

Mickey Mouse’s New Look

Mickey Mouse is going tough guy.

The world’s most recognizable rodent is ready for his digital makeover.

In an ignoble path paved by Tom and Jerry, Mickey is going epic and Disney denizens are praying to the animation gods that Botox-ing the mouse won’t blow up in their face.

The Walt Disney Corporation, in an effort to keep the creaky creature relevant, is re-imagining its iconic character as “cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland,” reports The New York Times.

The ever -ravenous Disney is looking to put a little spice in its mice. When it introduces its new video game, Epic Mickey, the mouse birthed in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Era will get its second act. “Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” Warren Spector, the creative director of the game developer behind Epic Mickey, told the newspaper. However, Spector said, “I wanted him to be able to be naughty – when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish.”

It’s tempting to read all sorts of end-of-empire significance into this: In a crasser culture, even the blandest of celluloid reliability must get his Alan Iverson on, release a rap album and start whaling on Minnie.

But the original Mickey was a lot more clever, volatile and cunning than the benign, and frankly boring character he became. Such is the trajectory of a trademark. His rap sheet must be squeaky clean. Look what happened to the poor Teletubbies for being colorful and a little, well, fey. It’s not a good time to be a kind, compassionate, if flighty children’s character. Even Big Bird has de-camped for the rain forest.

When Mickey Mouse first crawled out of Walt Disney’s pen in 1927, the U.S. was a place of pluck, ingenuity and shrewdness. It was a country that admired energy and risk-taking, where the victor was not necessarily the most principled, but the most wily. Mickey was a part of that culture, a flinty, sneaky trickster who was not above duplicity or a little mischief to get what he wanted.

What changed all that was World War II. America needed rectitude more than cheek. As Andy McSmith writes in The Independent, “in the anxious 1930s, when American was threatened by recession and political radicalism, the highly conservative, communist-hating Walt Disney toned down Mickey’s behavior and created the bland, all-American mouse kid that he has been ever since.”

To be a Mickey Mouse was a bit like being a Charlie Brown without the self-awareness.

For a long time, in politics and in children’s cartoons, being bland but kind was not only adequate but admirable. We liked Ike because he didn’t make waves and his wife didn’t make us feel like frumps. ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson has made an entire career out of reliable affability. So did Harry Reasoner and Walter Cronkite. Today, we’ve got Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer as the Betty and Veronica of Nightly News.

For a long time, Disney succeeded as well as it did because its characters – from Pinocchio to Snow White, to Cinderella, to Bambi – were kind-hearted souls who succeeded in spite of their ordinariness and lack of ambition.

Today’s Disney characters are more like Shrek, the coarse, flatulent ogre whose good soul lurks in the deep tissue folds of sarcasm and invective. In its new version of “101 Dalmations,” a dog named Whizzer pees on an image of Cruella de Ville. The new Bugs Bunny is toothier, just as the new Tom and Jerry are more ferocious than foolish.

Bland affability has no place any more in a country where “Crossfire” and “Hardball,” have replaced “Issues and Answers”and “See It Now.” Everything has to have spice to it, be it politics, cartoon characters or snack food staples. The hardest thing to find in the grocery store these days is a plain cracker, just as the rarest commentator today is a political moderate.

As it goes with Mickey, so goes the nation. The country is a more astringent place than it was in the 1940s. It is a shrewder, more cynical, wily place today where the pure of heart are ill-prepared for the rancor that awaits. In such an acrimonious environment, Mickey Mouse should arm himself to the teeth.

Sweatlodges, Suzanne Somers and Frustrating Cancer Wars

I’m not sure what “whole body cancer” is, but I have a feeling I’d like to avoid it.

Last year, when Thigh Master Pusher Suzanne Somers was told she had it, she flipped. And you would, too, if an oncologist delivered the news as if he had hit the cancer jackpot, as Somers relates in “Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer — And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place”:

“You’ve got cancer. I just looked at your CAT scan and it’s everywhere.Your lungs, your liver, tumors around your heart … I’ve never seen so much cancer.”

The result is her controversial new book, which scoffs at chemotherapy and radiation and suggests alternative methods to eradicate a disease that could reasonably be considered the scourge of the century.

I don’t know what the participants were paying for when they shelled out $9,695 for the New Age “spiritual warrior” experience, but I have a feeling it wasn’t organ failure.

Ray, a New Age mystic with the imprimatur of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” runs an empire that raked in $9.4 million last year running such retreats, The New York Times reported. Americans spend $34 billion annually on alternative therapy like this, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The fact that 10 years and $2.5 billion in research has revealed no benefit in them has not stopped more than one-third of Americans from turning to them. Suzanne Somers may be, as Dr. Otis Brawley, the American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer said, “a quack,” but plenty of Americans don’t believe the medical establishment has done much better.

Forty years ago, President Richard M. Nixon declared a “War on Cancer.” During that time, the National Cancer Institute alone has spent more than $105 billion trying to find a cure. The Susan G. Komen Foundation has spent $1 billion on breast cancer research alone. But, the New York Times reports, the death rate for cancer has only dropped 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. With breast cancer, 20 percent of those with metastatic disease, live for five years [--] the same rate as 40 years ago.

We are not winning the War on Cancer any more than we won the War on Poverty.

But it certainly doesn’t feel that way to the mourners who show up at funerals for 40-year-old mothers. It doesn’t feel that way to those undergoing treatment for cancer who endure a daily nausea that would have many of us praying for death. It doesn’t feel that way to my friend Tom, whose wife is so hobbled by the arthritic effects of anti-cancer drugs that she looks twice her age. It can feel like a degrading, dehumanizing, debilitating charade masquerading as state of the art.

This year, Newsweek reports, cancer will kill more than 1,500 people a day, “equivalent to three jumbo jets crashing and killing everyone aboard 365 days a year.”

I don’t believe the Suzanne Somers of the world, pedaling false hopes and specious remedies. I don’t believe in sweating in a tent with a bunch of strangers eager to return to the womb. I don’t believe them, but I understand them. Theirs is a frustration that can lead one to madness.