What will we carry into 2017? -- Dec. 29, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the classic short story “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien writes about the weight of the things foot soldiers carried in Vietnam.  

These necessities and near necessities were as practical as mosquito repellent, as powerful as anti-personnel mines and as personal as memories.

Rereading the title story in the terrific book published more than 25 years ago, I started thinking about the New Year, what I want to carry into it and what I hope we can leave behind.

In the latter category is the 2016 presidential election. Yes, it was a shock, but we need to let it go. Unfortunately, talking heads aren’t alone in prolonging the agony.

President Barack Obama said this week he could have won the general election had he been able to run again. That’s the kind of wishful thinking Democrats should leave behind with 2016 – and not because the statement is untrue.

It’s unknowable, of course, which makes great fodder for late-night dorm sessions but not productive thought for the rest of us. 

Obama is still the “most admired” man in America, Gallup reports, and nobody worked harder on Hillary Clinton’s behalf than he and first lady Michelle Obama did, in large part because Obama’s legacy was on the line.

But the president’s confident assertion that his message of tolerance, openness, diversity and energy would have mobilized voters and defeated Donald Trump was a self-serving punch in the gut to Clinton and her supporters.

Naturally, though, it was Trump, not Clinton, who reacted.

“NO WAY!” would Obama have won, Trump tweeted. He returned to Obama’s remark in later tweets the way a tongue explores a sore tooth.

Obama, in the podcast interview with his old friend David Axelrod, also said Clinton was too cautious during the campaign because she thought she was winning, but she “performed wonderfully under really tough circumstances.” He blamed the news media for a double standard in reporting negative news about Clinton.

Basically, he did everything but say she pitched great for a girl.

It’s time to stop beating up on Clinton, stop second-guessing her campaign decisions and why she never matched her husband on the stump.

I’d also like to see politicians stop blaming the news media when things don’t go their way, but that’s not happening.

What-ifs keep us focused on the past when we need to be clear-eyed about the policies and ethics of the incoming administration. And there’s plenty for Democrats to do to prepare for the next congressional election. In 2018, Democrats have to defend 10 Senate seats in states Trump carried.

Trump won the White House, if not the popular vote, with promises to roll back the clock at least to pre-Obama days, maybe earlier. No wonder he wants the Rockettes at his inauguration. They performed at George W. Bush’s in 2005 and 2009.

One thing I’d like to see left behind with 2016 is Trump’s tweets. Complicated policies can’t be resolved in 140 characters.

But, says Sean Spicer, incoming White House press secretary and communications director, tweeting is “a really exciting part of the job.”

Trump has a combined total of 39 million followers on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and that, “allows him to add an element of a conversation that’s never occurred,” Spicer, a Rhode Island native, told a radio station in his home state.

Will Obama tweet? We’ll see. He plans to write another book, speak out when he sees Trump heading in the wrong direction and help develop the next generation of Democratic leaders.

One notion we can leave behind is that the Obamas will strew rose petals in Trump’s path to the White House. No big surprise there since Obama during the campaign called Trump “unfit to serve” and “woefully unprepared” for the job.

It was unrealistic to expect Obama, who sees Trump eager to dismantle everything Obama has done, to be as gracious as George W. and Laura Bush on their way out.

It’s been a tough year, and there aren’t many things I want to carry into 2017. Here’s one: “When they go low, we go high.”

More slogan than reality in 2016, “when they go low, we go high” is a worthy goal for the New Year.

30

The nutty professor makes the grade -- Sept. 17, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In the first “Back to the Future” movie, time-traveling teen Marty McFly tells his eccentric friend Doc Brown, who’s living in the 1950s, that in 1985 Ronald Reagan is president.

“Ronald Reagan the actor?” Doc Brown asks incredulously. “Then who’s vice president—Jerry Lewis?”

That was a big laugh line 30 years ago. The former actor actually had become president, and everybody knew that funny man Jerry Lewis was unsuited to be vice president.

Those were the blissful days before Donald Trump. We’ll consider his comic possibilities another time.  

Today, many young people don’t even know that Reagan was an actor. Jerry Lewis, though, remains one of the most durable entertainers of the last century. Among his movie hits: “The Nutty Professor,” “The Errand Boy” and “The Bell Boy.”

The guy’s a survivor, literally. He has weathered two heart attacks, prostate cancer, diabetes and other health problems.

At 89, he’s still working, performing on stage and on screen. He plays Nicolas Cage’s dad in an upcoming crime thriller movie, “The Trust,” and recently signed on to appear in a National Lampoon flick, “Dead Serious.” He was the lead in “Max Rose,” a 2013 dramatic film. Critics say his stage show these days verges on the insulting, and they haven’t warmed to the serious Lewis. 

No matter. The Library of Congress announced Monday that it will preserve Lewis’ comedic contributions to American life in perpetuity. It has acquired more than 1,000 items -- films, TV clips and paper documents -- spanning Lewis’ career of more than 70 years.

“This collection will give the world a more complete picture of his life as a performer, director, producer, writer, recording artist, author, educator and philanthropist,” said James Billington, the Librarian of Congress.

The Jerry Lewis Collection includes films of TV and nightclub appearances with and without Dean Martin, home movies, 34-mm prints of his films and movie test footage. It will be in good company. The library has collections of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Bob Hope and Groucho Marx.   

Collections are stored and preserved at the library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. To celebrate, Lewis will perform Oct. 9 at “An Evening with Jerry Lewis,” a ticketed show at the State Theatre in Culpeper.

Lewis still loves to perform. “If I get more than three people in a room, I do a number,” he said in a statement, adding, “Knowing that the Library of Congress was interested in acquiring my life’s work was one of the biggest thrills of my life.” 

Lewis met Dean Martin in the 1940s when both were performing separately in Atlantic City. They formed a duo club act in which Martin sang and Lewis interrupted with silly remarks. They became “the most popular duo in cinema” in the 1950s, according to the “Historical Dictionary of the Eisenhower Era,” which says that before the two went their separate ways in 1956, they had 17 comedy box office hits.  Martin died in 1995.

Everybody doesn’t love Lewis – except for the French, who may be his biggest fans. 

The French government gave “the French people’s favorite clown” the Legion of Honor medal on his 80^th birthday. Lewis went tie-less, wore slippers and hammed it up with “a virtual slapstick routine,” the Associated Press reported.

In this country, though, he alienated about half the population in 1998 when he said that women can’t be funny.  A woman comic sets him back, he said.

“I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies into the world,” he said. He and his first wife had six sons before he divorced her. Lewis later said women could be funny – but not if they were crude.

Lewis and Martin hosted the 1956 Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, and for the next 55 years Lewis volunteered as the event’s national chairman, raising nearly $2 billion. The association announced the telethon’s end in May.    

To us, Lewis may seem silly and dated, but Americans still desperately need a laugh. Even the Founding Fathers recognized the power of laughter.  

“Trouble knocked at the door, but, hearing laughter, hurried away,” Benjamin Franklin said.

Thanks for the laughs, professor.   

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.