On Negative Campaigns

They work in practice; it's the theory that's suspect.

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The Good Old Days

"A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to real money." Evertt Dirksen

An Excerpt From The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich (get the complete story for free)

“Don’t hang around with entertainers, huh? Just Coloreds with their dingis hangin’ out, right? I seen you around those Bojangles types. I could hold you as a material witness.”

“Oh, c’mon. You’re not going to do anything, how's that goin’ to look, me beating you out here and all. And I took the train.”

“La Guardia and the commissioner ain’t gonna like this, not at all. Hope this isn’t a murder, Rada.”

“Murder? Who said anything about murder?” Rada took a last drag on his smoke and ground it out on the concrete. The swirls of surf pulsating in his ears came into consciousness. It gushed.

He stared off at the sea, wondered about how she died, and about the Negro up the beach. Then there was a quick glance at Detective Impolitari. Rada shrugged. “ . . . .You could always pin it on the Colored boy, I suppose.” . . .

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THE DOWN AND DIRTY WAY TO CONQUER WRITERS BLOCK

I’m not a prolific writer. In fact, I’m rather slow. It’s a bit difficult to dash off five or seven thousand words a day when you write historical fiction. Worse, sometimes I encounter writers block – but I know how to conquer that.

“People don’t want to write, they only want to have written,” Dorothy Parker famously remarked. Most of us writers, at one time or another, have subscribed to that sentiment, particularly in those dry periods when we find it almost impossible to come up with anything solid to write about.

What goes on in these fallow periods? Why doesn’t the creativity we know is there flow like the headwaters of the Amazon?

Over the years writers have asked me this question in my psychotherapy practice, and I’ve certainly thought about it in my own fiction writing.

Somerset Maugham had a unique approach to writers block that I’ve incorporated in my own work, and my work with clients. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, Maugham faced a blank page on his typewriter and pecked away his name: ‘I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham, I am Somerset Maugham . . .’ – until something came to him. His extraordinary Freudian-laced short story ‘Rain’ came to him in just such a way.

Okay, okay, I’m getting to it. What was Maugham really doing? Well, the trick was just sitting down at the typewriter. So when clients ask me how they can overcome their own writers block, I say 'sit down at the computer and write just two sentences. Just two.' It turns out it’s like that potato chip advert, ‘bet you can’t eat just one.’ In this case two.

Really it’s a matter of overcoming inertia. If you do sit down at the computer, once you start writing, it’s a bit difficult to actually stop at just two sentences. The trick to fooling the unconscious is to sit at the computer and begin, any beginning really.

It’s a rather simple ploy, but it works! I wrote a complete first draft of The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich by using this method. Two sentences became twenty, and then two hundred and then – hey, almost a complete draft.You might want to give it a try.

Take heart, it could be worse. James Baldwin called the place he wrote in Paris (in Paris, yet!) the torture chamber – but that’s another story.
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THE PLOT AGAINST MARLENE DIETRICH - NOW ON KINDLE

Just click on the title above to go to the Amazon page for The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich (now 99¢ through July). Hope you enjoy it. Also, check out The Principal of Rivington Street also on Amazon and other e-readers.

YOU CAN CLICK HERE FOR -- THE PRINCIPAL OF RIVINGTON STREET ON AMAZON

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MARLENE DIETRICH'S SECRET LIFE

In the time of good and evil, Marlene Dietrich was a heroine. When she finally left Germany for Hollywood in 1931, she not only turned her back on the Nazis, but actively began to fight them.

The glamorous, androgynous Dietrich of The Blue Angel took Hollywood by storm and became the seductress of tinsel town, even besting the great Garbo. Her scandalous nightclub scene in Morroco – where she kissed a woman patron on the mouth – left co-star Gary Cooper clapping, and Hollywood aghast. It made her a celebrity and superstar; in today’s terms Lada Gaga and Madonna all rolled into one.

Behind the veneer of glitz and glamour, Dietrich was fiercely political, and a patriot – an American patriot. From the mid 1930s, Dietrich worked tirelessly to save German actors and artists, particularly Jewish artists, from the Nazi death camps that awaited them.

Dietrich had strong political convictions and she spoke her mind; she flaunted those convictions. On more than one occasion, Dietrich was approached by Nazi representatives in an effort to get her to return to Germany; she turned them down flat, and even tweaked their nose by becoming an American citizen in 1939.

From research for my fictional story, The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich, I was struck by how dedicated she was in saving as many as she could. At first she was able to send money to German banks to help refugees get to Switzerland and then on to the Untied States. Later when this was no longer possible, Dietrich took risks beyond the call of duty. There were to be many émigrés who landed in Hollywood because of her efforts, and her work was ongoing, dangerous and expensive. Some of the refugees, like director Billy Wilder, even took up temporary residence in the Dietrich home in California.

Why is Dietrich’s wartime activity so important? Well, because those of the greatest generation included women and men on the home front, too. And Marlene Dietrich risked it all to help America win the war. Her mother and some family members were still in Germany, and she was put on Hitler’s list of enemies. The Nazis constantly bombarded the airwaves with attacks on her. All though the extent is still unclear, she most likely worked with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) during the war and entertained our troops close to the battle lines, knowing if she were caught execution was likely.

One memory that stays with me was a time in 1964, stationed in Germany, when the film Judgment at Nurenberg was released. Her role as Mrs. Berholt, a Nazi sympathizer, was difficult for her, and director Stanley Kramer had to convince her to play the part. I was amazed at the time that many of her fellow Germans viewed her as a traitor – as though the horrors of Hitler and his henchmen had easily been forgotten.

Years later, German attitudes toward Marlene changed. In 1997, the central Marlene-Dietrich-Platz was unveiled in Berlin to honor her. The commemoration reads “Marlene Dietrich world star of film and song. Dedication to freedom and democracy, to Berlin and Germany.”

She ought to be remembered by us all, with gratitude.

CLICK HERE FOR -- THE PLOT AGAINST MARLENE DIETRICH ON AMAZON

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The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich -- now on Kindle for just 99¢

Just click on the title above to go to the Amazon page for The Plot Against Marlene Dietrich. Hope you enjoy it

. Also, check out The Principal of Rivington Street also on Amazon. Tweet

MORNING ROUNDTABLE - GOOD DAY

Dirksen redux: A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to less than one percent of the deficit.

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COLLATERAL BENEFITS?

Interesting to ponder: Could the historical sweep of freedom in the Arab world and Middle East reach northwest Pakistan? So far these people's revolutions are completely antithetical to Al Queda's uber-violent philosophy. Could it be that some of the Brothers will see the light? Okay, it's a bit of a stretch, but I wonder if one of these guys would give him up, and I might as well throw in al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar -- as long as I'm fantasizing. Just a thought.

, , , and so it goes.

CHANNELING DWIGHT

Why is president Obama so silent on public employee unions? Who is he, Eisenhower?

THE LIONS TREMBLE IN THEIR DENS AT ITS APPROACH

While the Egyptian revolution was mostly peaceful, Bahrain is quite different. The leaders appear to have adopted the Tiananmen model. China brought troops in from the countryside who had very little in common with the student protesters in the capital making the massacre that much easier for some of the old hard-liners in the politburo.

In Bahrain with its Shia majority pitted against the Sunni dominated elites, the same violent approach will work -- for a time. It's unclear what democracy means to the people that revolt in the streets of the Arab world, but it is a movement that may be delayed, not denied. The hope is the people in the streets will take a cue from the Egyptian populace and find ways other than a blinding, frustrating violence to achieve their ends. Egypt, thus far, has shown it's eminently doable.

The question, too, is where does the United States stand? With the 5th fleet birthed in Bahrain, the security interest rears its head in ways it did not in Egypt. Again we must choose wisely and promptly; true revolutions can be slowed, not stopped.

MORNING ROUNDTABLE - GOOD DAY

Dirksen redux: A billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up to less than one percent of the deficit.

. . . and so it goes.

GENERAL CONFUSION

The army is now in charge in Egypt. The same military that has a vested interest in the status quo. After all, their businesses, military owned businesses, comprise about 10% of the Egyptian economy. Never mind that they don't want to give that up. There's another reason that democracy may give them pause.

Little noticed here, but the same day the Egyptian people freed themselves from Mubarack's military dictatorship, the Turkish prosecutor asked a court to jail 180 current and former military officers on charges they plotted a coup against the democratic Islamist government. The trial is a victory for the government in tackling a military that once held sway over Turkish political life.

The fate of the Turkish military isn't lost on the Egyptian command, and they may not want to go gently into this free night as have their Turkish confreres. Democracy is tough slogging .

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VIVA La REVOLUĊION!

They may have a republic, if they can keep it.

. . . On to Tehran.


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REVOLUTIONIZING THE ARAB WORLD

We are so transfixed by the protestors in Egypt essentially because (at least so far) they are a nonviolent movement. Those young students take their philosophical underpinnings from the likes of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and the velvet revolutions of Europe.

This is a philosophical focus we must encourage; it is a movement we must forcefully endorse. If we don't, this anti Queda, non Islamist movement will devolve into something nasty and it will further diminish our influence in the region.

If the protestors in Cairo can prevail, that will go a long way toward validating democratic ideals. And those ideals may spread beyond the Arab world all the way to Tehran. Our choice is between the ossified and the ascendant. We ought to choose wisely and promptly.

OOPS!

At least Nixon had the sense to go.

SO LONG HOSNI (click here for el Ahram)

The Egyptian army will take control of the country and Hosni Mubarack will step down today in favor of Omar Suleiman, or more likely the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. And now we wait . . .

A TILTING WE SHOULD GO

In the 1971 South Asian crisis, Henry Kissinger famously 'tilted' toward Pakistan. The tilt was not an all out endosement, and Nixon's antipathy toward Indira Gandhi played a part, but the tilt wasn't a bad idea.

Today we have to play a similar card in Egypt. The cliches aside, i.e. 'getting ahead of the curve,' we need a policy that makes sense. Tilting toward the protestors in Tahrir Square is a must if we don't want the antipathy of the street. We need to be seen as supporting them. At the same time, support - tepid though it should be- for an ally of some thirty years will comfort our other allies in the region.

Yes, there are risks, Mubarack and his cronies literally know where the bodies are buried -- but we must to be seen as supporting those democracy hungry protesters in the cities of Egypt. And signaling that tilt is the way we need to go.

STIRRINGS FROM THE IRANIAN OPPOSITION

Finally the corpus resurrected? It will be interesting to see how the Iranian thugocracy reacts to the call for demonstrations by a weak opposition. (click the headline to go to the Times article)

WHAT IS UNITED STATES POLICY TOWARD EGYPT?

What day is it?