On a fine spring day in 2008, surprising words cropped up on my computer. I had logged onto Google to pick up some biographical information about the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Ambassador Stephen Lewis, of Toronto, as part of my writing work. I typed the letter “S,” then paused to recall whether he spelled his name as Steven or Stephen, when, helpfully, a drop-down menu offered recent “S” searches, including “Sax,” “Saxing,” “Saxing boys and girls,” and “Saxing Brintnte sprs.”
“But no one in the family plays saxophone,” I chuckled to myself. “They must have meant ‘trombone’ or ‘trumpet.’ “
Then I thought: “I wonder if one of the boys is thinking about switching instruments.”
Then — because five of our nine children were adopted at older ages from orphanages abroad, including the 13-year-old boy from Bulgaria and the 11- , 13- and 14- year old boys from Ethiopia — I thought: “They can’t spell.”
I returned to the Google search bar and hit a few random letters. Every letter-key I touched produced a little spurt and cascade of misspelled dirty words and phrases. I went back to the beginning of the alphabet and did this in alphabetical order. You had your male body parts, your female body parts, and — in the “Cs” and “Fs” — a few correctly-spelled popular four-letter words. I cheered up momentarily in the “Vs” with the appearance of the word, “Virginia.” “All right, so sometimes they actually do use my computer to do their homework!” I thought with relief, glancing down the list for hints of Jamestown, the Royal Colony and Thomas Jefferson.
But then I recalled, not for the first time: “They can’t spell.”
At Amazon.com, new products were presented for my approval, based on my “recent searches.” Just for me, they were saving a video version of the Kama Sutra. “Wow, that’s some good spelling!” I thought. “I thought it was spelled Karma Sutra.”
Perhaps my two “bio” sons, Seth and Lee, then 23 and 20, had looked into erotica, but they’d come of age in an epoch closer to the lifetimes of Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers. When they were young teenagers, computers were old, slow and black-and-white, more toaster or window fan than science fiction portal into every crevice of the known universe. When they were young, sexy and forbidden images were reproduced in magazines and also arrived in the mail in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or the Victoria’s Secret catalog. To conceal testosterone-fueled research from his mother, a 20th-century boy shoved his magazines deep under his bed, in the moldering twilight company of old socks, chewed gum and misplaced homework. No electronic trail lingered. Twenty-first century boys are unlucky in this way.
By sundown on the day I discovered the new research interest, “saxing,” I had purchased and downloaded a software product called NetNanny. Any attempt to visit a website featuring a female other than Cinderella, Indira Gandhi, Julia Child or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was blocked by the sudden appearance, in profile, of a British housekeeper in a white apron, starched collar and little peaked hat. In her hand she held up, victoriously, a computer mouse that she’d evidently just cheerfully yet violently yanked out of the back of somebody’s hard-drive.
I was really smug about Net Nanny for two months.
The four younger boys were stymied by NetNanny for a day and a half. A clever friend of theirs secretly taught them how to turn off my computer, turn it back on, and quickly create a “guest” account other than mine. My computer “guest” was named “Franny,” in honor of our stocky middle-aged rat terrier. On Franny’s account, there was no Net Nanny and there was no Mom but there were, however, plenty of fleshy, top-heavy, rouged and evidently outgoing young women.
I may not be of the Internet generation, but even I know that a rat terrier would have no interest in a computer guest account. Wordlessly I retaliated with stricter software than NetNanny. The new protective software was called Safe Eyes. Safe Eyes stopped young teenage boys from accessing any website other than one entitled www.FunWithFractions.com.
So the boys down-shifted to other media.
One day a $767 bill arrived from our cell phone carrier. Close scrutiny revealed that the excess charges arose from the boys’ cell phone numbers: hard-core sex scenes had been downloaded from the Internet onto the tiny screens.
“I didn’t know they had Internet access on their phones,” I protested to Customer Service (not wanting to mention, “I didn’t know you could even get two female breasts on such tiny screens.”) What I did say was: “They told me they needed cell phones so they could call when soccer practice was over!” Hadn’t each portrayed himself as at risk of abandonment, alone and fearful on a darkening and vast soccer field as night closed in, long after the parents of boys with cell phones had come and gone? Customer Service waived the charges because the boys were not supposed to have Internet access on their mobile phones.
So that portal was closed. But the boys journeyed on.
A cable TV bill arrived from Comcast, charging us for a pay-per-view purchase of an X-rated movie about pole-dancing.
Pole-dancing is not, I recently learned, the festive springtime event of European folk culture in which young girls hold ribbons and weave in and out around a central post, wrapping it in a rainbow of pretty colors while adult males in short pants and knee socks whistle into wooden flutes. That is “Maypole dancing.” Pole-dancing is another thing entirely. I am learning so much!
When I checked the date on the Comcast bill, I realized I’d had a middle-school son home sick on that very day. At the precise hour of the movie screening, he’d been “napping” on the basement sofa, in front of the big-screen rec-room TV, upon which non-Maypole dancing was being anthropologically examined.
Furious with the $20 fee, I pounded down the stairs, found this son, and held out the bill to him. “This was the day you were home sick. That was your movie and it cost us $20! What are you going to do about it?”
“Oh, OK,” he said mildly. He slipped into his bedroom, removed his wallet from a drawer, took out a twenty and handed it to me.
Mollified, I couldn’t think of anything to say other than: “Hey, thanks!”
Back upstairs in the kitchen I had misgivings, which I shared with my husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney. “I’m not positive,” I said, “but I think that I just sold our 14-year-old son pornography.”
“That’s not good,” said Donny.
To which I replied: “I feel like his pimp.”
Of course we tried “Parental Controls” on the television.
“Parental Controls” should have the subtitle: “Ask Your Kids to Show You How to Install These Things.” The only Parental Controls we ever successfully set up on a television blocked nothing the children ever wanted to view, but resulted in our being unable to ever watch the “Jim Lehrer Newshour” on that set.
Thus, it should not have been an enormous surprise when, on a Saturday afternoon in August, another cable TV bill arrived, this one charging $120 for unsanctioned pay-per-view purchases, through the cable box in the basement, of XXX-rated movies involving, variously, lingerie, lesbians, Las Vegas and — no doubt — the Kama Sutra and perhaps even Virginia.
This time I was really mad. We’d had the excruciating and one-sided discussions about relationships, true intimacy and respect for women. I’d held these conversations (or “monologues”) with our daughters and I’d held them with our sons, because my husband (defender of the criminally charged) is incapable of allowing such delicate topics to cross his pure lips. I explained how demeaning it is to women to be perceived as sex objects; I touched upon the importance of respect in the approach to intimacy and marital happiness. The night I sat on the edge of 13-year-old Sol’s bed to broach the subject, he fell straight backwards onto his pillow as if he’d been shot, and then reached out and pulled the bedspread up and over his face, refusing to reappear.
On the afternoon that the pay-per-view bill arrived, the four younger boys and friends were lounging around the kitchen table eating cold cereal and popsicles.
“I need to talk to the Samuel boys RIGHT NOW,” I announced, the bill shaking in my grip as if I’d just grabbed a live duck out of the air.
The boys’ friends evacuated.
Twelve-year-old Helen peeked in, wondering if she were needed.
“I said the Samuel BOYS!” I roared. Helen fled.
I smashed the fluttering bill flat onto the table. “One hundred twenty dollars!” I shouted. “Who is going to pay for this?”
Daniel and Yosef, who’d lived in America for less than a year, instantly lost all English-speaking ability.
Sol put up both hands in self-defense and shook his head no. He glanced around with a shocked and concerned expression, as if startled to find himself in such low company.
Jesse, the Bulgarian 13-year-old who was somehow constantly in hot water, sighed and coolly raised one finger as if signaling a waiter to bring the check. “It was me,” he said.
“Really?” I asked, stunned at the rapidity of the confession. “All the movies? You?”
He sighed again. “Yep.”
“Jesse, that is a ton of money.”
He tsked sadly in regret at his own behavior and said, “I know.” He shook his head, as if to say, What am I going to do with myself?
“Go get your allowance book,” I snapped. He handed over the account register while his three brothers watched expressionlessly. “This will take you till … December to pay back,” I said. “You’ve got no spending money till then.”
“OK, Mom.”
“Can we go?” asked Sol, eager to put distance between himself and this distasteful subject.
“Go.” I waved the others away.
In a minute, Sol was back. For the second time in a three-month period, he was removing a $20 bill from his wallet and handing it to me.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“To help Jesse.”
“Really?” I asked, startled. I was touched.
“Here, Mom,” said Daniel, having regained a few words of English. “Help Jesse.” He gave me a ten.
Yosef then produced $40. “Yosef, sweetie! You don’t have to do this.”
He shrugged modestly as I kissed him.
“Jess, sheesh! You’ve got nice brothers,” I said. “You’ll be able to pay off the rest of the bill easily.”
With a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes from these fraternal kindnesses, I made my way to the front room, where Donny reclined in his overstuffed chair reading his law books. “You will not believe what just happened. We have incredibly sweet boys!” I told him about the money they’d donated to Jesse’s case without anyone asking for it.
Donny glanced up from “The Eleventh Circuit Criminal Handbook,” said, “They watched the movies, too,” and returned to his reading.
Why? Why am I such an idiot? I’ve been raising children for decades, and this insight would never have occurred to me.
The next day I found Jesse eating a bowl of Froot Loops alone in the kitchen. “Jess,” I said, “those movies … Did any of the other boys watch them with you?”
“Mom! Are you kidding me? I didn’t watch any of them! Did you see the times those movies were ordered?? Five in the morning! They watch them before school. I don’t get up that early!”
It was true. My sons from Ethiopia, who’d once worked as goatherds, were up at dawn every day.
I sputtered to reply. “Well … why did you say it was you?”
“Did you see their faces? They were terrified,” he said, and returned to his Froot Loops.
When I relayed this news to Donny, he laughed and said, “They must have been thinking, ‘Jesse’s always in trouble. Jesse can take the heat.’”
I’m a sucker for sibling solidarity. To celebrate Jesse’s having paid off his bill and the spirit of fraternity that helped him do it, I took the kids to a movie. I took the six youngest males and females to the Disney-Pixar animated movie, “Wall-E.” “Thanks, Mom!” “That was really fun, Mom!” everyone said when we got home from our big night out. The two girls headed upstairs to their bedrooms, and the four boys ran for the basement stairs.
Excerpted from No Biking in the House Without a Helmet by Melissa Fay Greene. Copyright © 2011 by Melissa Fay Greene. Published May 2011 by Sarah Crichton Books / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
a young woman in the front row resolutely raised her hand at the finish of my half-hour talk, when questions were invited. She wore long brown hair with bangs and looked like a bread-baking sort of person, someone who might wear Earth shoes, live in Vermont and home-school her children. She didn’t look threatening. We were in Gainesville, Fla., in the air-conditioned conference room of the ultra-modern downtown library on a humid Monday night. I was on a book tour.
That day I had appeared at a ladies’ brunch and several radio shows, and at noon I sat beside the anchorwoman of the local TV news. Three stories fell into the Noon News “local interest” category: (1) “Buy a New Mailbox Day” sponsored by the local postmaster, who furnished film footage of rusty and decrepit mailboxes likely to cause injury. “They do look dangerous,” enthused the anchorwoman, in a voice-over. (2) The Beanie Baby craze among schoolchildren; and (3) my appearance in town. A clockwise-rotating logo was created in a musical lead-in to the news program, consisting of a photo of a mailbox, a group portrait of Beanie Babies and the cover of the paperback version of “The Temple Bombing.” All circling. Clockwise. To music.
Still, I felt up to the challenge that night and gave the library audience some of my best material. I talked about the mayhem and violence convulsing the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision outlawing school desegregation. “It was as if Newton’s laws had been overturned,” I said, describing the shock and disbelief gripping much of the white South. I talked about what many of its denizens believed: That the Jews were behind the civil rights movement, in order to weaken America and pave the way for a Jewish takeover of the world. And I talked about this mind-set as the forerunner to modern American terrorism.
“Perhaps altogether half-a-million white Southerners enlisted in some form of the white resistance to the school desegregation decision,” I said, “joining Ku Klux Klans, white citizens councils and states rights parties. At their most civilized, they held potluck suppers, listened to speakers and subscribed to newsletters like ‘The Thunderbolt: The White Man’s Viewpoint’; at their least civilized, they opened their meetings with Nazi salutes, harassed African-Americans and planted bombs.” In essence, my message to the audience was for normal citizens like ourselves, those once called “the silent majority,” not to fall silent, not to be intimidated, but to stand together and publicly defy the lunacy and violence. “It’s an old, old story,” Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, wrote at the time, “when the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, no one is safe.”
Questions? The young woman in the front row. “I’ve been studying the Federalist Papers,” she began, and my heart sank, knowing the sort of thing that was coming next. “You’re talking about nothing but hatred,” she said. “You’re full of hatred. We believe in brotherhood. But you’re going around the city demonizing Christians.” I had heard variations on this theme a lot from Americans who were revisiting the U.S. Constitution and finding modern interpretations of it sorely flawed. Some saw themselves, the white Christians, as “Constitutional citizens,” the rest of the population as a lower form of “Amendment citizens.” On radio talk shows — at least the ones I had been booked on during my 40-city tour — “mongrelization” and “miscegenation” seemed to be on the mind of a great many callers.
“I know something about what you believe in,” I interrupted, “and ‘brotherhood’ isn’t even on the list.’” About the “demonizing Christians” charge to which she returned again and again, I was perplexed, since such a large part of my story is the collaboration of Christian and Jew, black and white in Atlanta to lower the volume on the era’s racist rhetoric and to outlaw the violence. But later I thought, “She identifies with the characters in my book and in my talk who speak of ‘niggers’ and assemble bombs — and she’s calling them ‘Christian.’”
There was more the next day. “Jews aren’t white, you know,” said a caller to a radio show. “If you like niggers so much, why don’t you marry one?” came in a letter. No dialogue here, no real conversation, only declarations. Their listening to me was not about admitting new data into a closed-off system, but about planning strategically the best moment to interrupt. And it all seemed exceedingly strange, since I’d hit the book trail with a book brimming — to my mind — not only with the “wolves of hate” but with heroes of justice.
I came home to Atlanta between cities, called the New York publicist and begged, “no more call-in shows.”
“They want callers like these,” I said. “When they say they screen the callers, they mean they’re screening FOR these callers: ‘Ms. Greene? Lunatic on Line 3.’”
“You’ve only got a few more to do,” she replied.
“It’s like a moderator inviting an audience to throw things at the speaker. ‘And what do you think about … hey! DUCK!!!’”
“Just a few more,” said the publicist.
A newspaper arrived in the mail from Kansas: “WHITE MAN, WAKE UP!” said the headline. “Fight Crime, Deport Niggers.” “White Man Under Seige.” It offered some convenient mail-order opportunities: “Swastika stickers are effective and low-cost!” read an ad. “Ideal for ‘lone wolf’ activists who prefer to remain anonymous … Fight back! Order today!” Elsewhere, in bold print, the words: “‘Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnate.’ — William Shakespeare, 16th-17th century British dramatist.”
“You see there?” I told my teenage daughter, who’d unfortunately brought in the mail that day. “This is the level of intelligence at work here. They hear Shakespeare and think, ‘Shakespeare, Shakespeare, the name rings a bell. Oh, here it is right here: ‘British dramatist.’”
In California, I appeared one night on an African-American call-in television show. I went happily. I’d been warmly received by black audiences and black programs in Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Dayton, Birmingham and Washington. I felt on safe ground, on friendly turf. The host was informed and cordial. Then the calls began. A few were lovely — “Thanks for writing that book, Miss Greene. Where can I get a copy of it?”
A few inquired more sharply. “Yes, that’s all well and good,” said one, “but why did the ADL [the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith] get Arsenio Hall fired? Minister Farrakhan appeared on his show and then the Jews who run Hollywood fired him.”
“I’m sure there are people out there who know the answer to this but I’m not one of them,” I replied meekly.
“The ADL,” said another caller, “got the Nation of Islam fired from their job policing a housing project in Chicago.” The Jews run the country, was the gist of a few more calls; they manipulate the nation’s wealth to keep blacks impoverished. “The Jews aren’t white, you know,” said one. Where had I just heard that? Oh yeah, from the other side. “Thanks for coming,” said the host with warm feeling. “Before you run, here’s one more question: What about Jewish slave owners?”
I went back to my hotel room and collapsed, feeling shot at from both sides out there. Here, at the tail end of the bloody 20th century (why folks are planning to feel nostalgic at the passing of this century I’m sure I don’t know), how many tens of thousands of us huddle inside our racial and ethnic enclaves, taking in only the worst of the available misinformation about one another?
Another gig the next day: the Commonwealth Club, in San Francisco. Before my talk, a member of the audience introduced herself to me as an ADL attorney. I drew in close. “Tell me,” I whispered, “did we get Arsenio Hall fired?”
“Nope,” she replied, “his ratings were down.”
“Did we get the NOI fired from a housing project in Chicago?”
“I don’t know whether we did or not but they should not have been receiving HUD money,” the ADL woman said sharply.
“OK, OK,” I said, “one for two then. If I’m going to be on the front lines like this, I just need to know.”
Home now, done with travels, both humbled and frightened, I huddle in my own little mid-town, poplar-shaded enclave. It feels more than ever like a cocoon; only this one includes neighbors of all faiths and colors. Two blocks away, the elementary school my kids attend is about 60-to-40 white/black, with a sprinkling of Asian and Hispanic students. Not bad for the Deep South. The integrated faculty and parent body work harmoniously together. The children grow up — as much as possible in our race-obsessed society — tolerant, appreciative, culturally multilingual. Is this a well-kept secret? Do most folks believe this doesn’t work?
I still believe in integration. Are these fighting words? Let the hate mail come.
ATLANTA –
We passed through a series of checkpoints, a party-going summer-night crowd. Soldiers with walkie-talkies rummaged through our purses and camera-bags and studied our drivers’ license photos — not only, one felt, against enemies currently at large in the land, but retroactively, against historic enemies, including the ones whose murderous acts we’d come to mourn, the ones no soldiers and checkpoints had been set up to waylay.
The sun-glazed crowd in summer cotton, linen, and gold moved toward a white tent raised over a parking lot and greeted friends with the tactfully placed kisses of the socially skilled. The creme-de-la-creme of Atlanta Jewry had planned, funded, staged, and now attended this event to memorialize the 11 Israeli athletes killed by a Palestinian terrorist group at the 1972 Olympics in Munich and to welcome and honor their 14 grown children.
Also finding places on folding chairs under the tent were several members of the International Olympic Committee (though not President Juan Antonio Samaranch), members of the Georgia Congressional delegation, the 1996 Israeli Olympic team, and Gretel Bergman, the one-time European record-holding high-jumper from Germany, excluded from the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin because she was Jewish.
Beneath the words in memoriam murmured by rabbis and lay leaders, there was this complaint, this accusation — that the IOC projected a sanitized version of Olympic history by refusing to acknowledge publicly the terrible toll Israel alone had paid among the countries of the world: witnessing the slaughter of its Olympic delegation. This dark moment was not invoked during the Opening Ceremonies of the 1996 Centennial Olympics in Atlanta, though Samaranch had led the slain athletes’ families to believe “something” would be done here. The service under the tent at the Atlanta Jewish Federation on Sunday night, within view of glittering downtown, was intended to repair, on a communal level, the neglect experienced on the international level.
But first, new business: “Let us rise and observe a moment of silence,” said Rabbi Arnold Goodman, “to mourn the murder of Alice Stubbs Hawthorne and the wounding of over a hundred people.” And as the crowd stood to grieve the deaths of the community leader and the death by heart attack of Turkish journalist Mehlih Uzonyol, they grieved as well for the shattered Olympics.
Within the promise and the joke of the Georgia Olympics, the “cracker Olympics,” the “Bubba-lympics,” was the hope that we could welcome the world “down-home.” We would entertain the arriving millions in their turbans and dashikis and keffiyahs on our front porches, tell them “hey y’all,” serve them grits, serenade them with banjos, and bed them down at night under the stars, to the sounds of crickets and cows and the scent of honeysuckle. We offered the world a peaceful visit to the country, and hoped Southern hospitality and Coca-Cola would make it happen.
But these are complicated times. The grits and the crickets and the fresh peaches are here in Atlanta, but so are metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs, aerial police photography, surveillance cameras on telephone poles, and an ubiquitous military presence. All that was not even enough to prevent a terrorist attack. The sorrow of the past and the sorrow of the present mingled bitterly as we sat and faced the Israelis and heard their story.
In brief, it was this: at 4:30 in the morning of September 5, 1972, Israeli athletes and coaches were ambushed in their apartments in the Munich Olympic Village by members of Black September. Yoseph Gutfreund, the wrestling coach, tried to bar the door but was overwhelmed by eight attackers. Coaches Amizur Shapira, Andre Spitzer, and Kehat Shor and wrestling judge Yaacov Shpringer were tied up. Weight lifter Yoseph Romano was murdered. Wrestling
coach Moshe Weinberg entered the apartment, resisted, and was also killed.
West German authorities offered themselves in exchange for the Israeli hostages. Black September demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Prime Minister Golda Meir held to Israel’s policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorists. West German Chancellor Willy Brandt asked all competing countries to lower their flags to half-mast in recognition of the two athletes murdered; when 10 Arab nations objected, he withdrew the request.
At 10:20 p.m. nine Israeli hostages and eight terrorists were taken by bus to two helicopters and a 727 jet demanded by the terrorists to take them to Cairo. Ambushed by West German sharpshooters at the airport, the terrorists fought back for over an hour while the Israelis sat bound and blindfolded in the helicopters. Then a terrorist threw a grenade into one of the helicopters, killing five Israelis. Another terrorist stormed the other helicopter and shot the surviving four. When the gunfire ended, one policeman and five terrorists also were dead. The Olympic Games continued the following day.
“Even after 24 years we remember the massacre as if it happened yesterday,” said Oshrat Romano, a lovely slender young woman with long unruly hair, speaking in accented English. She addressed her father. “We all shudder that all of you were murdered on the altar of Olympic brotherhood.” She spoke of standing in the stadium at this year’s Opening Ceremony, waiting for the words that would somehow validate her unending sense of loss. “On this hundredth anniversary of the Olympic games, we felt the spirit of our fathers. We your children stood and remembered you, and felt your pride in us.” When their memory was not invoked by Samaranch, she said, weeping, it was as if the presence of the fathers dissipated.
“I was three weeks old when my father was killed,” said handsome Guri Weinberg. “I have walked through my life haunted ceaselessly by this terrible thing,” and he, too, began to cry. The others stood and lit memorial candles for Gutfreund, Romano, Shapira, Shor, Spitzer, Shpringer, and Weinberg; and then they lit candles for David Berger, Zeev Friedman, Eliezer Halfin, and Mark Slavin, who died young and unmarried, without children. Anouk Spitzer lit an eternal flame within a sculpture commissioned by the Atlanta Jewish community, which combined the Olympic rings with the inscribed names of the dead.
Mayor Bill Campbell spoke. “I’m here to say Kaddish [the mourner's prayer] with you tonight,” he said, “because no man is an island. In the words of Elie Wiesel, ‘What would the future of man be if we were devoid of memory?’ It is only the oppressor that benefits from silence,” said the mayor. “It is evil that thrives on silence, not good. No people can have a future without a past, not the Jewish people, not the African-American people. On behalf of the people of Atlanta, I want to thank you for kindling our memories.”
The question is, will the IOC thank the Jewish community for kindling these memories? Will President Samaranch find the opportunity at Closing Ceremonies to remember the Munich 11? To remember the two dead in Atlanta? Will the names of Alice Hawthorne and Mehlih Uzonyol be spoken and their memories carried forward in Olympic history, or is there only room in the collective memory for leaps and high jumps and laps and split-seconds? How can we have a full sense of human progress if milestones, however tragic, are not marked?
“This year, father,” spoke dark-eyed Oshrat Romano, “we witnessed Palestinian athletes marching under their own flag. We will combat terror together with them and not surrender to it.”
Memory first. Then progress.
Read Melissa Fay Greene’s first Olympics report.
Quote of the day
Having it both ways
“We can have both in America. We can have both right here in California. We don’t need to pit one against another. We can have both. We can have both — an Administration that wants to have both. If you don’t want to have both, you’re not going to have both.”
– Bob Dole, in Northern California, on having a strong economy and a safe environment at the same time. (From “Dole Finds Environment A Problem And an Issue,” in Tuesday’s New York Times).
