Salon.com > Terry Greene Sterling

McCain brings it home

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:05:00 +0000

Where in the heck is the foot soldier in the Reagan revolution?

Where is the guy who will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell?

It's 9:35 p.m. on Super Tuesday, and John McCain is half an hour late to give his victory speech at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. The crowd of several hundred old and young, decidedly middle-class voters is getting restless. Some have been milling around the ballroom floor for two hours, and they've consumed buckets of chips and salsa; the air is infused with garlic. The press corps seems to have commandeered all the chairs, and some of the oldsters don't know how much longer they can hold out. Others in the crowd seem a little surprised that their guy appears to be winning, and they discuss what they perceive to be his strong points -- straight talk, toughness, victory in Iraq, fiscal conservatism, a reasonable immigration policy, promises to nominate tough judges.

Then, at about 9:36 p.m., Sen. John McCain steps onto the stage, thumbs up, smiling, with his wife, Cindy. The crowd whoops and roars. McCain's red tie matches Cindy's red suit. He thanks his wife for her support, and Cindy tears up. She steps back with the other dignitaries, including Sen. Joe Lieberman, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Roberta McCain, the candidate's nonagenarian mother, as they applaud.

The battle for Latino votes in Arizona

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:12:00 +0000

PHOENIX -- Late on the afternoon of Super Tuesday, one of Arizona's most entrenched and prominent Latino politicians strode into the Greater Phoenix Progressive Christian Church and voted for Hillary Clinton. Few recognized Rep. Ed Pastor, who after voting raced to his car, pulled out a clipboard and stood in the parking lot seeking signatures on petitions to land him on the ballot this fall.

Pastor, who has served in Congress since 1991, has long taken the pulse of Arizona's burgeoning Latino electorate, and earlier in the day had visited heavily Latino districts, where voter turnout was brisk and unprecedented, despite new laws requiring picture IDs.

"Latinos I believe will favor Hillary Clinton because she is familiar to them and they are comfortable with her," Pastor told Salon.

Popular Gov. Janet Napolitano, on the other hand, has endorsed Barack Obama. The Latino community is sharply divided over immigration issues, and Napolitano drew criticism in 2007 when she signed into law a bill sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Confessions of a memoirist

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 21:38:00 +0000

Like many of the people attending a two-week seminar here at Goucher College, I am pursuing my MFA in creative nonfiction at the school because some of the best writers in the East Coast sit on its faculty, and because a number of notable writers come to speak to the students. Writers like Vivian Gornick.

Gornick, 68, is considered by many to be the grande dame of memoir and personal narrative. She wrote for the Village Voice from 1969 to 1977 and covered, among other events, Jane Fonda's controversial Fuck the Army tour of Asia during the Vietnam War.

She has also authored seven books, including "The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative," published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. It is a book widely respected by teachers and students of the memoir genre, in part, because Gornick herself is a respected memoirist. Her chronicle of her relationship to her mother, "Fierce Attachments," made Gornick a literary star when it appeared in 1987. At the time, the New York Times hailed Gornick's memoir as a "fine, unflinchingly honest book." In the past few years, Gornick's critical essays and book reviews have appeared in a number of venues, from the Times to Salon.

The beauty of a hippie chick face-lift

Mon, 19 Aug 2002 19:39:00 +0000

About a year ago, I was blessed with an unexpected small inheritance. After depositing my windfall in the bank, I sat down with an iced Hanson's, blasted Taj Mahal through speakers big as steamer trunks, and mulled over my financial options.

I could invest the money to ensure a more secure retirement. I could sail the seven seas with my husband. I could donate to Doctors Without Borders or Amnesty International or the Sierra Club.

Or I could undergo a coronal brow lift, bilateral upper and lower lid blepharoplasties and a rhytidectomy -- also known as a brow lift, an eye job and a face-lift.

I chose the cosmetic surgery.

But not without a crisis of conscience.

I am an aging hippie chick, and one of our core beliefs is that cosmetic surgery is the domain of wimpy women who feel they must resemble youthful movie stars in order to be accepted in a culture still controlled by white males like Donald Rumsfeld.

Arthur Andersen and the Baptists

Thu, 07 Feb 2002 20:30:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Rep. Bernie Sanders,I-Vt., confronted Joseph Berardino, Arthur Andersen LLP's CEO, with a global hit list of Arthur Andersen's allegedly fraudulent accounting practices: Sunbeam, Waste Management, Asia Pulp and Paper and a bankrupt insurance company in Australia.

Were there more instances of alleged accounting fraud involving Arthur Andersen, Sanders wanted to know?

Berardino managed to do what he'd been doing during most of the hearing, which was not to answer the question.

Berardino did not mention, for instance, Andersen's alleged accounting fraud in the collapse of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, possibly the largest bankruptcy of a religious foundation in the history of the United States.

Instead, Berardino said at one point during the hearing: "We are human beings, and we do not get it right all the time."

Despite Berardino's evasions, Congress is finding out more about Andersen's history. On Feb. 7, congressional Democrats in Washington are expected to call a news conference to link the scandal-ridden Enron debacle to the bankruptcy of a Phoenix-based Southern Baptist religious foundation called the Baptist Foundation of Arizona (BFA).

Secret grief

Fri, 27 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

Seven years before my colleague Deborah Laake slaughtered herself, she wrote a famous Mormon-bashing book, "Secret Ceremonies: A Mormon Woman's Intimate Diary of Marriage and Beyond." After it was published in the spring of 1993, Laake's book was an immediate success, whizzing onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for 15 weeks. (It still sells well in predominantly Mormon towns like Gilbert, Ariz., or Park City, Utah.) When Laake first heard she'd made the bestseller list, she was in a bar in Texas. She jumped atop a table and joyfully relayed her literary accomplishment to the other patrons.

Her book was one of the first to cash in on the ongoing memoir craze and was best known for Laake's mocking, detailed revelation of top-secret Mormon temple ceremonies and, oddly enough, for her lengthy account of years of obsessive-compulsive masturbation, which she blamed indirectly on Mormonism. Laake even became a hit on the talk show circuit, where, beyond fielding questions about masturbation, she tried to explain why her religion very nearly destroyed her.

But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not react happily to "Secret Ceremonies." After its publication, church leaders excommunicated Laake for apostasy.