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Unhinged

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The Book of the Week is “Unhinged, An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House” by Omarosa Manigault Newman, published in 2018.

Born in 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio, Omarosa grew up with hardships and deprivation, but with a large extended family. After she became a reality-show celebrity, a writer spied on her eulogizing at her brother’s funeral, and claimed to have exclusively interviewed her in a tabloid story. Omarosa sued because she never consented to an interview, and didn’t even know that a story would be written about her.

In November 2015, Donald Trump appeared as himself on Saturday Night Live, saying that when he was president, everything would be perfect. Of course. Once Trump won the election in November 2016, he lost his sense of humor, and all bets were off regarding his ability to laugh at himself.

Omarosa got caught up in Trump’s cult of personality. She failed to see his character flaws. She wrote of a cancelled March 2016 Chicago rally: “We blamed everything and everyone, except for Donald Trump. No one talked about what we could do to change him or his message. The divide in our nation was simply too big to bridge, even if the candidate wanted to (he didn’t). He relished the conflict.”

One of numerous reasons he won the 2016 election, however, was that he was generous to a handful of people in “protected groups” such as Omarosa, so he could claim he was non-discriminatory in his political practices. He showcased and bragged about this handful whenever possible, but he smeared those protected-groups as a whole, behind their backs.

In her one year working for president Trump, Omarosa was the intermediary communications officer between the U.S. government and organizations of people of color. Most of her time, however, was spent defending her boss and / or enabling him in his whitewashing of history. She did arrange a few meetings between him and the groups, but her biggest achievement was successfully reinstating Pell grants during the summer term (in addition to fall and spring terms) for financially-challenged students.

As have other Trump memoirists, Omarosa described a world in which the political, media and entertainment industries are so full of themselves and so self-absorbed, they think that whenever a big event is televised, the whole world is watching them and their commentary on themselves for at least a day. But the bulk of the idiot-box ratings and Web traffic are derived from their own viewership and workforces! It’s now a selfie-cycle, not a news cycle. But they do tease some viewers all the time on political goings-on. Fortunately, they can’t tease all viewers all the time.

Anyway, read the book to learn a boatload more about Omarosa’s employment experiences in the White House, outside it, and a bit about the rest of her life-history.

EPILOGUE

For now, here is what Trump is singing to his claques, flacks and sycophants in the legal arena.

YOU’RE SCARED OF ME

sung to the tune of “You’re Sixteen” with apologies to Ringo Starr.

You’re all part of my scheme,
my own legal team.
You’re nodding and winking in line.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re all making me king.
A wonderful thing.
Our enemies are in decline.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

If you support me, we’re all set.
This is great. I’m glad we met.
I’ll pardon you.
I’m at the top.
Ooh, I’m so powerful, I cannot stop.

You’re fulfilling my dreams,
but now I need arms.
I’ve got the law on my side.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

If you support me, we’re all set.
This is great. I’m glad we met.
I’ll pardon you.
I’m at the top.
Ooh, I’m so powerful, I cannot stop.

You’re fulfilling my dreams,
but now I need arms.
I’ve got the law on my side.
You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re scared of me, you’re dutiful, and you’re mine.

You’re scared of me, so dutiful, and you’re mine.

All mine, all mine, all mine…

Will

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The Book of the Week is “Will” by Will Smith with Mark Manson, published in 2021.

Born in September 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Will described in detail what he learned from the people in his life, from the cradle onward. His life has not always involved the wealth and privilege conveyed in his hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand.”

Smith related anecdotes in which, like his father– he displayed poor impulse control. Smith’s father could be a mean drunk, while he himself sublimated the traumas he experienced from his family’s dysfunctionality through constant goal-oriented activity.

If Smith took even a short break from his fantasy life, and later, his working life, he would be forced to acknowledge other people’s emotions and possibly even face his own shortcomings. So he laser-focused on competing to be the best at whatever he was doing, in completing a mission.

The lowest point in Smith’s existence came in the early 1990’s, when he was saddled with crushing debt load. To make matters worse, his association with gang members posed a life-threatening situation. Law enforcement had caught up with them. Smith got in trouble when a friend protected him with a knockout punch to his attacker: “But as I sat in that jail cell, facing aggravated assault, criminal conspiracy, simple assault, and reckless endangerment charges for a punch I hadn’t even thrown…” He obviously grew from experience, but didn’t elaborate further.

Smith earned bragging rights for making movies that allegedly made more money than any other Hollywood actor’s movies, including Tom Cruise’s; he spent a longer amount of time than anyone else in promoting his movies in foreign countries, and performing in free concerts for his fans.

Read the book to learn many more details about: Smith’s childhood, the people who guided his careers, his wrongheaded notions that led to love-life failures, and some of his misbehaviors and extraordinary achievements.

Shanghai Acrobat

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The Book of the Week is “Shanghai Acrobat, The True Story of Courage and Perseverance from Revolutionary China” by Jingjing Xue, translated by Bo Ai, published in 2021.

Born in 1947 in Zhejiang Province in China, the author was sent to live at an orphanage when he was two years old. He never did find out exactly why, as his biological parents were alive. Anyway, the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe recruited him when he was nine years old. Other members of the group were as old as fourteen. He happened to possess the right temperament to endure its rigorous training (that included corporal punishment) and get good at balancing on his hands in various precarious positions.

There were daily academic lessons, too, and a lot of political ideology thrown in. The instructors constantly emphasized the teachings of Mao Tse Tung, and bragged about what a prosperous, wonderful country they lived in. Mao took the calculated risk of allowing performers and athletes to travel outside China where they might learn about other peoples’ lifestyles and defect– so that he could show off his own people’s greatness.

By the late 1950’s, the author was traveling and performing with the Troupe. In 1960, they went to cities controlled by the Soviets, and ironically, to African countries (such as Sudan, Ethiopia, Guinea and Morocco) whose native peoples were starting to throw off their colonialist yokes.

In the early 1960s, owing a ginormous monetary debt to the Soviets and not wanting to pay it, China decided the Soviets were wrong to stomp on the memory of the great leader Stalin (who had died in 1953 and whose crimes were revealed a few years later); Mao theatrically broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviets.

In 1967, Mao capriciously imposed his new twisted logic (a different set of ideas from that of his previous campaign)– the belief that the lowest economic class (the workers, the peasant-tenants) needed to fight the higher economic classes (the bosses and landlords)– because capitalistic activities were anathema. There were a few occasions in which the author was yelled at for saying the wrong things to some non-Chinese people, even though he thought his comments would jive with Mao’s teachings.

As part of the new campaign (called the Cultural Revolution, begun in 1965) to rid China of the dissidents of the moment– performing acrobatics was out of fashion. The radicals loyal to Mao policed the Troupe, finally disbanded it, and psychologically and physically tortured the director in public self-criticism meetings. The author’s acrobatic career was (temporarily, though he didn’t know it at the time) over. He was sent to the countryside for “reeducation.”

With 20/20 hindsight, the author wrote, “To those of us who had been through the Cultural Revolution, the Watergate political scandal was nothing. We couldn’t understand how the American people could force Nixon to resign for ‘peanuts.’ ” It is unclear what kind of propaganda the author and his contemporaries were fed to come to that conclusion.

For, they might have known nothing of Nixon’s real war crimes. But even if Nixon had been innocent of war crimes, he and his underlings still committed election crimes, and worst of all, violated his numerous enemies’ civil rights– evil actions that were considered against the law in the United States. The last fifty years have seen a bit more moderation in China’s political leadership. And radicalism in the United States.

Human nature is such that there has been some convergence (!) between China’s and the United States’ ideologies in:

surveillance of citizens
incarceration of citizens
economics
education, and
other areas of life.

It’s all in the propaganda fed to the people.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s life and times, and his fate.

Vincent Price

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The Book of the Week is “Vincent Price, His Movies, His Plays, His Life” by Vincent Price, published in 1978.

Born in May 1911 in Saint Louis, Price was the youngest of four children. He broke into the movies in the 1930’s, when Hollywood made three to four hundred movies annually. In 1956, he appeared, along with Charlton Heston in the most expensive movie ever made at that time: The Ten Commandments. Filming it took eight years; some of it on-location in Egypt, where the Red Sea was parted with then-state-of-the art special effects.

The author claimed that there was fierce competition for roles in the horror genre of the 1950’s, but he had acted in more than a hundred films by 1971. He worked with Boris Karloff, who was able to portray a sympathetic, human-like, but at the same time, scary character. When Karloff played Frankenstein’s monster– who committed evil acts– he wore an excessive quantity of makeup, and screws in his neck, but with a lisp in his speech. There must be villains as well as heroes in entertainment stories, in order to drive the plot.

In many films, Price had to put up with absurdity: “So here we both were, co-starring with a talking fly, and trying to speak our lines while staring at a spider’s web” in The Fly in 1958. By the 1960’s, he was guest-starring on TV as the villain “Egghead” in Batman; in the Brady Bunch, Muppet Show and Hollywood Squares.

In 1961, Price, for no pay, served on the White House Fine Arts Committee to help redecorate the U.S. president’s residence. Beginning in September 1962, upon amassing a valuable art collection, he also became an art consultant to Sears Roebuck & Co. Its stores sold works of truly famous artists (Rembrandt, Goya, Van Gogh, Whistler, and Andrew Wyeth) for the payment plan of $5 down and $10 a month thereafter. Price wrote cookbooks, too.

Read the book to learn additional information about Price’s life and times.

Somebody Down Here… / How Football… BONUS POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Somebody Down Here Likes Me Too” by Rocky Graziano with Ralph Corsel, originally published in 1981.

Born in January 1921, Graziano grew up in Little Italy and the East Village in Manhattan. However, when he wed in 1943, he moved in with his wife’s well-to-do family on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn; of which he nostalgically remarked, “They got Coney Island and Nathan’s hot dogs and Sheepshead Bay with all that good seafood, and they got Ebbetts’ Field and the Dodgers and a few bums like Leo Durocher…”

Nonetheless, his poverty-stricken childhood experiences and abusive father soured him on life at an early age. He continually ran afoul of the law, but his mother, who loved him unconditionally, kept bailing him out. For such boys in his generation (rejected by the military because he was an ex-con), the only way to escape his bad environment was to succeed in the “rackets” or make it big in show business or become a professional boxer. Read the book to learn how he turned his life around when he put his mind to do two of the three.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “How Football Explains America, by Sal Paolantonio, published in 2008.

Incidentally, Vince Lombardi sought to recruit wayward boys such as Graziano for the high school football team he coached in New Jersey in the late 1930’s. He used the Englewood police department as his talent source.

Another interesting bit of information from the author in describing how professional football evolved into its current state: safety rules had to be imposed so the sport could turn its barbaric reputation around. For, in 1905, there occurred “…battered faces, broken ribs, bloody skulls, and at least 18 recorded on-field fatalities.”

Read the book to learn many other ways football and American culture became intertwined.

The Good, the Bad and Me

The Book of the Week is “The Good, the Bad, and Me, In My Anecdotage” by Eli Wallach, published in 2005.

Wallach was an actor of stage and screen. In many ways, he lived in a bygone era. Born in December 1915, he grew up in a Jewish family among mostly Italians, in a few different working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Horse-drawn wagons sold fruit, milk and ice. The horses’ manure was sold as fertilizer. The Italians put on puppet shows, and had parades honoring Jesus and the saints, with floats, refreshments, and a band playing the national anthem. A marching band would play at funerals.

The value of money was quite high in the early twentieth century. If pennies were run over by the streetcar, they could be filed down to take on the structure of nickels, which could be used in pay phones. In 1932, Wallach began to attend the University of Texas as an out-of-state student for $30 a year. He roomed at a boardinghouse for $40 a month, including meals. His second year there, however, the school raised its tuition to $100 a year. Even so, the dean helped students find work so they could afford their educations.

In 1936, Wallach got free tuition at City College of New York when he took classes toward his master’s degree in teaching, at his older brother’s behest. He got a scholarship to Neighborhood Playhouse, an acting school, also in Manhattan. There, famous instructors taught Method acting. In the 1940’s, open-air double-decker buses that graced Greenwich Village, charged five cents. Wallach shared a one-room furnished apartment on lower Fifth Avenue for which he paid $35 a month. Maid service was included.

However, in 1956, the author hired a press agent for himself and actress-wife for $125 a week. That was a steep price. Ed Sullivan reported in his column that Wallach and his wife had lost their yacht in a sea storm– a line planted by the agent in the New York Daily News. The agent was let go.

Growing up, Wallach never met any black people. He heard about them in Harlem, but had never been there. While in college in Texas, he worked as an usher at a theater in Austin. He escorted blacks to their seats, which were relegated to the (nosebleed section) balcony only.

During Wallach’s fabulous career, in 1961, he acted in an absurdist play written by Eugene Ionesco, called Rhinoceros. It was about how herd mentality turned people into rhinoceroses when they conformed to State authority.

When Wallach acted in a film in Italy in the late 1950’s, he found that some people disagreed with him on how to portray their characters. He wrote, “It had always seemed to me that calling it the Method was incorrect; each country, each society, each theater, and each actor devises his own method.” Such is true of life at large.

Read the book to learn more about Wallach’s life.

Ingrid Bergman, My Story

The Book of the Week is “Ingrid Bergman, My Story” by Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, published in 1972.

Born in 1915 in Sweden, Bergman lived with extended relatives after her mother and father passed away, when she was three and thirteen, respectively. The father’s successful painting and photography-supply businesses were taken over by the family. When she was fifteen, a couple of friends in high places– and of course, passion and hard work– allowed her to get accepted to the Royal Dramatic School. Nevertheless, she quit to become a movie actress in Sweden.

David Selznick in America heard about her talent, and his wife set her wise as to Hollywood’s ways. Her advisors therefore negotiated a one-film contract rather than a seven-year contract. Bergman was the opposite of a prima donna on the set. Selznick was impressed and had his public relations people hold her up as a paragon of virtue and modesty. However, she refused to be typecast, insisting on playing all different kinds of roles.

Bergman wrote, “Another Hollywood thing I hated was the power of those two women, Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnists. Their power shocked me, and I thought it very wrong that the film industry had allowed them to build up to such an extent that they could ruin people’s careers and lives.” Sadly, there is nothing new under the sun in that regard. Gossip in American society has been used more often for evil than for good, especially in politics.

Anyway, in autumn 1946, Bergman got slammed for saying she wasn’t going to return Washington, D.C. because the theater there in which she was performing, banned blacks. Perhaps she was not a racist, but her immaturity in her personal relationships caused her first husband and first-born daughter endless anguish.

Read the book to learn of Bergman’s dream role, whether she got to play it, other roles she played, and about her families.

Pink Boots and A Machete

The Book of the Week is “Pink Boots and A Machete, My Journey From NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer” by Mireya Mayor, published in 2011.

Mayor was born in February 1973 in Miami. While in her early twenties, she discovered her calling– primatologist / zoologist. An inspirational college professor helped her apply for a government grant to study a monkey in Guyana.

Thereafter, she braved infinite life-threatening dangers and primitive and uncomfortable conditions (like poor sanitation, and an extremely limited and at times– disgusting diet, and unbearable heat, to name three) on dozens of expeditions for weeks or months in obscure places to observe various animals in their natural habitats.

In the Congo, there were killer bees. In the jungle in Guyana, there were itinerant miners who were robbers and rapists; piranhas, malarial mosquitoes, tarantulas, vampire bats, ticks, leeches, etc. The author had to sleep in a hammock to avoid poisonous snakes on the ground.

In June 1997 in Madagascar, “Every visit to a village required a rum-soaked meeting with tribal elders that lasted through the night, occasionally for days.” While seeking a specific species of lemur in an animal reserve (that was not exactly a tourist attraction), she was bitten by a small scorpion and swarmed by wasps. Hundreds of cockroaches nestled in her pants legs overnight, shocking her when she went to put them on.

On another occasion in Guyana, she and her crew collected flora and fauna specimens from a mountain on which they camped (on the edge of a cliff, basically) in a “… flimsy sheet of nylon attached to the rock face by a single, six-inch steel pin.”

In Namibia, she was one of eight people who lifted the six-foot, six hundred pound neck of a tranquilized giraffe. The whole animal weighed approximately eighteen hundred pounds. The goal was to herd giraffes into a trailer to help them mate and reproduce.

On another occasion in Madagascar, when a mudslide from a monsoon prevented their hired truck from going any farther, she, another scientist and expensive porters (strong men) had to hike hours and hours with heavy gear, dozens of bags, crates and a generator to a campsite.

Mayor related that on another occasion in the Congo, “I woke up in an unusually good mood, considering it was 5am and I still had the worm [in the foot], the filarial bites, and the infected tick bite… Repeated hot soaks and antibiotic treatments finally banished it [the tick bite].”

Read the book to learn of the new species Mayor co-discovered, how she fared on a reality show, the kinds of issues she dealt with for being female in a male-dominated field, and much more.

The Autobiography… / Kingfish

The subject of the First Book of the Week wrote:

“In fact there is no unemployed. We got one hundred and twenty million people working overtime just repeating rumors.”

“If we ever pass out as a great nation, we ought to put on our tombstone ‘America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership.’ “

“We are used to having everybody named as Presidential candidates, but the country hasn’t quite got to the professional comedian stage.”

The above quotes were published in September 1931, June 1931, and January 1928.

The First Book of the Week is “The Autobiography of Will Rogers” published in 1949. The author’s original writings were presented as is, unedited, with his atrocious spelling and (folksy) grammatical errors.

Born in November 1879 in Oklahoma, Rogers was the youngest of seven children. He was a quick-tempered rebellious child, but super-talented with a rodeo lasso.

At seventeen, Rogers quit the military school in Missouri to which he was sent by his father to find a ranching job. He traveled to Western states to enter roping and riding contests, and provided entertainment at state fairs in the Midwest.

He and his friends posed as musicians (but were really shills) in a sixty-man band who interrupted the shows to rope steers.

Rogers traveled the world via boat, seeking international ranching gigs. He eventually found that Rio de Janeiro was better for that than London. South Africa wasn’t bad, either. In Australia, he joined the Wirth Brothers circus in Sydney.

Along around WWI, Rogers began doing stand-up comedy for Ziegfeld Follies, and the Midnight Frolic. His Henry Ford jokes were getting old before the new shows were launched every four months. His wife suggested that he joke about what he read in the papers.

So from then on, the amusing content of Rogers’ newspaper columns came from Congress. In a December 1934 column, he commented that young people lack life experience. That is why they can’t help but look toward their futures. Older folks look back because their pasts are always with them. “But we are both standing on the same ground, and their feet is there as firmly as ours.”

Read the book to learn of Rogers’ movie-acting and public-speaking careers, too, and much more about his life.

The Second Book of the Week is “Kingfish, The Reign of Huey P. Long” by Richard D. White, Jr., published in 2006.

Not to be confused with Huey Newton (or Huey Lewis), Huey Long was a composite of every successful power-hungry American politician who ever lived, if success is measured by the amount of power he acquired, given the offices he held.

Born in August 1893 in Louisiana, Long grew up one of nine children in a farming and ranching family. He was an avid reader and control freak. Expelled from high school his senior year, he got a series of sales jobs before trying law school for the second time in the autumn of 1914. He failed most of the classes but passed the oral bar exam for Louisiana in 1915.

While struggling to make a living at practicing law, Long knew he was a born politician. So on his second attempt, he won the governorship of Louisiana for the Democratic party in early 1928. His then-techniques were innovative– mudslinging and delivering speeches on the radio to Shreveport, and driving trucks containing bullhorns that blared at rallies all around the state, where he met every voter and put up campaign posters everywhere he possibly could.

Long tailored his campaign promises to specific audiences such as drinkers, Catholics, businessmen, sugar-cane growers, etc. “Because each newspaper gave one-sided coverage to its own candidate and ignored the other two, citizens needed to buy different papers to keep up with the campaigns.”

Long acquired massive power because he was a master at manipulating legal loopholes and eliminating enemies. He collected lackeys through sweetheart contracts and patronage galore; not to mention through bribery, influence peddling, racketeering, and corruption. His underlings did his will because they themselves were desperate for money and/or power.

Long actually did some good until 1931. He built highways and a new state Capitol, repaired streets and sewers in New Orleans and refinanced its port. He made Louisiana State University a world-class school.

Long also dealt with the political issues of education, gambling and natural gas. He manipulated the system so that he was elected U.S. Senator in September 1930 but finished his Louisiana governorship before taking that office in January 1932.

Other outrageous acts for which he initially went unpunished included extensive election fraud. “In one New Orleans precinct, votes were tallied before the polls closed, while in another, voting began before they opened. Huey ordered state workers to contribute to the pro-Long campaign and if they didn’t, they lost their jobs. His machine spent huge sums to pay the one-dollar poll taxes for impoverished farmers.” But no empire lasts forever.

Read the book to learn of the steps Long took to counteract the results of his deficit spending (hint– he dictated tax hikes), of how he became an absolute ruler like no other in the history of Louisiana, and what became of him in 1935, among other details of this cautionary tale.