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The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

It’s hard not to be shaken to the core by the horrific attacks at today’s marathon. The deaths, the mutilation, scores of injuries, and fear.  The assault on what can only be described as an iconic (yes, I know the word is over-used) event, emblematic of the spirit of Boston.

I have never lived more than a few blocks from the marathon route.  As a young child living near B.C. in Boston, I walked up to Commonwealth Avenue to watch Johnny Kelley and the “foreigners,” at that time from Scandanavia.  As an adult living in Newton, I’ve had to walk only a scant mile to the route.  The spirit is always uplifting. Families and friends applaud for their loved ones, for those running for charities, for wheelchair racers. Everyone cheers for strugglers and stragglers, for their heroism in even tempting to complete the race. Never, in our wildest dreams, could we have envisioned this.

Marathon Day is a bond that ties. And now this. Tonight we have more questions than answers. Who is responsible for perpetrating this assault? How much security is enough? Have we all relaxed too much in the last decade? Were devices really left in  unsealed barrels?  If large public events in major cities with lots of planning and high security are vulnerable,  what happens when terrorists turn to soft targets like shopping malls or  the small towns surrounding Hopkinton, Topeka or Peoria? In coming days we will debate why backpacks are allowed along the route without being searched. But, on non-Marathon days, for how long and how broadly do we want random searches of personal belongings?  How much of our open society are we willing to give up, and how much are we willing to pay for even more protection?

Yesterday, my husband and I were driving home from New York and decided to go through Newtown, Connecticut.  Struck by how absolutely ordinary looking is the town where the tragic elementary school shootings took place in December, we talked about how evil can strike absolutely anywhere.  Newtown looked like parts of Framingham, Natick, Needham or Canton.  Twenty-four hours later, the message had been driven home.  The New York Times issued a report (since taken down) that, in addition to the chaos in Boston, there was an unexploded device discovered in Newton.

Certainly, the Boston Marathon will never be the same.  Our sense of safety, which may always have been illusory, is shattered. We grieve for those who have lost lives and limbs. And we grieve for Boston, our hometown, which, from this day on, will join the ranks of other places remembered for their tragedies as well as for their charms and histories of accomplishment.

I welcome your comments in the section below.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

We left the Calderwood Pavillion in the South End tonight thinking that Ryan Landry’s “M” could be by far the worse play we’ve ever seen, at the Huntington or anywhere else.

My husband and I, who  love theater and have attended productions of all kinds and quality in cities near and far, have been loyal subscribers to the Huntington Theatre for more than 30 years, appreciating it as a more pleasurable alternative to the over-the-top American Repertory Theater back in the day. Our friends, who are also regular and discriminating theater goers, had no doubt. This was  the worst play they had ever seen.  And one of Boston’s most illustrious arts critics, emerging from the theater at the same time, was in total agreement.  Even if you have tickets, don’t waste your time.

A spoof on Fritz Lang’s classic noir movie M,  playwright Landy is said to have found his calling  in New York’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and his home in the world of the “indisputably bizarre.” Moving beyond the mashup adaptions of his earlier productions, he wanted here to “take the road never travelled.” He should have stayed home. His attempted satirization of many  cinematic devices that have become conventional, and use of eye popping, cartoon-like staging, quickly become a bore.  In Landry’s hands, turning the noir masterpiece  M into a romantic comedy does not create skillful parody, but self-indulgent exhibitionism.

The preoccupation of the play is the relationships between and among the roles of the playwright, the director, the actors and the audience.  Pirandello, creator of Six Characters in Search of an Author, must have been rolling over in his grave. I understand why there was no intermission to the 90-minute play. If  given a break,  most of the audience would have tried to escape.

A few audience members were overheard speculating that the playwright must be a local and a friend of either the artistic or the administrative director of the Huntington. Otherwise why would they have put on this performance?  Ryan Landry has been a writer, director and performer for decades.  I wonder if he has ever had to be a member of an audience suffering through an experience like this.

Yesterday’s painful  blown save by Joel Hanrahan in the ninth inning  was a joyful walk in the park compared to this evening just a few blocks away, at theater in the South End.

I welcome your comments in the section below.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Newark’s charismatic mayor, Cory Booker, took the stage Sunday at Salem State University’s Speaker Series.  A man on the move politically (he’s planning a run for retiring Frank Lautenberg’s U.S. Senate seat in 2014), he’s on the move physically.  Using a hand-held mike and roaming the stage at the Lynn Auditorium, Booker held forth for close to an hour in a talk entitled “How to Change the World.”  His audience’s enthusiasm seemed to indicate that, if the changes he said he’s making in Newark, of all places, are real he might  indeed do it for the world.

He certainly knows how to work an audience.  Part preacher, part stand-up comedian, he painted colorful pictures of his family: a father born into poverty to a single mom in North Carolina, whose community took in the father to help raise and educate him. His mother, a political activist, remains a formidable influence on Cory.

Looking back at the history of America, of blacks in America and of his family, Booker said it is people working together as community, “ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things” who “refuse to be erased by history,” that help America to live up to its promise.   Booker’s passion for social justice extends to all, including women, immigrants, people of color, and gays and is a theme that underlines much of what he focuses on.

He said his parents “gave me the audacity to think,” echoing a certain President’s The Audacity of Hope.  Booker’s parents met in D.C, worked on voter registration and civil rights, and found jobs in the mainstream, working for I.B.M.  After a job promotion, they moved to a northern New Jersey suburb, worked on issues like fair housing and raised Cory and his brother.  His parents never let him forget that his middle class, suburban upbringing was due to the efforts of others  along the way.  His father, he said, always chided him, “Don’t walk around the house like you hit a triple. You were born on third base.”

And so, after Stanford, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and Yale Law School, he moved into a housing project on Martin Luther King Boulevard in Newark, where he lived for eight years and got elected to the City Council, defeating a four-term incumbent.  Frustrated by the Council’s failure to address crime in the projects, he gained significant media attention by going on a 10-day hunger strike and getting more police assigned to public housing.  His parents always told him not to try to fit in but to stand out.  And that’s what he certainly has done.

He upended the Newark power structure in 2006 by upsetting the entrenched mayor and was overwhelmingly reelected in 2010. His campaign was the subject of the documentary “Street Fight.” Booker  reformed the city budget (twice cutting his own pay.)  He prides himself in his data-driven approach to public policy making.  Under him, crime has gone down by 40 percent, development has exploded and expanded the tax base, jobs have been created, dumpster sites have become parks, population is growing, a prisoner re-entry program has cut down on recidivism.

A frequent participant in the Sunday morning Washington talk shows, Booker was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in 2011. His rise to the national stage is impressive though some New Jersey critics have faulted him for allowing time spent there to divert his attention from Newark.

Cory Booker as speaker is very effective. If anything, his packaged presentation is too perfect. He seems more natural fielding audience questions  and more authentic talking one-on-one afterward.     It has been suggested that given the gridlock in Congress, Booker’s talents would be wasted in the U.S. Senate and better used as governor of New Jersey. But given Chris Christie’s current favorability rating, such a race could be a political dead end.

Wherever he ends up, at 44 years old, Booker seems destined to be on the the scene in some influential way for a long time to come.

I welcome your comments in the section below.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Political correctness run amuck: President Obama felt compelled to apologize to California Attorney General Kamela Harris for calling her “by far the best looking attorney general in the country.” Frankly, the only person who might legitimately feel slighted is Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a “good looking” woman in her own right. But those who are criticizing the President for being sexist should think again.

First, the alleged sexist remark came at a social event for Democratic donors, not in an office setting where such a comment could be taken as a power play intended paradoxically to diminish the status of a woman. Second, the President had just called Harris brilliant, dedicated and tough. No way was he defining her just by her physical attractiveness. Third, the complimentary “good looking” phrase is one the President uses frequently irrespective of gender. Video clips have surfaced of the President calling male military brass, government executives and even Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s son “good looking.”

L.A. Times Robin Abcarian called the President’s comment “more wolfish than sexist.” Oh, please. This is ridiculous. Which is not to say the President hasn’t rightly been called to task in the past, as when he called an ABC reporter “sweetie.” I’d hit him with my pocketbook for that one.

Obama’s real problems with women have been written about, starting with a piece by reporter Mark Leibovich of the New York Times. Ron Suskind, in his book Confidence Men, went even further, quoting Christina Romer, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, as saying she “felt like a piece of meat” in the White House culture in 2009. But this Kamela Harris comment has little, if anything, to do with those more serious charges. Memo to critics of this incident: get a life!

Meanwhile, if the President wants to call me one of the nation’s best looking editorialists and journalists, be my guest!

I welcome your comments in the section below.

Grassroot video tour of the exterior of the Middlesex Community College building in Lowell. Posted on Youtube by Xenosproduction.

The entry below is being cross-posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

The Red Sox opening day victory……what could be better?  I posted the team’s first-place standing on my refrigerator, thinking it might all be downhill from there.  But I felt great. Never mind that the dreaded Yankees are broken old men.  The Wall St. Journal’s estimable sports writer Jason Gay called them ”aging and atrophied …. creaky and getting creakier, supposedly destined for mediocrity, joint inflammation, bifocals, gray hair in the ears, fanny packs, 5:30 p.m. dinners, golf magazines and Norah Jones CDs, and possibly fourth or fifth place in the AL East.”   This week’s New Yorker cover showed the team all on walkers.  I tell you it doesn’t matter!  We beat the evil empire!  It made my spring.

And then, on the second day of the season, they did it again!  So that Boston Herald headline went on my refrigerator door as well.  Best two-day opening performance since 1919.  Dan Shaughnessy this morning raised the question of the day: “at this rate, will the Red Sox ever lose?”  The only down side of all this optimism is if Sox fans too quickly lose their memories of  their 2011-2012 humiliation and return to the post 2004 ”Yankees suck” hubris that makes sitting in the stands at Fenway and other parks with Boston fans  a more obnoxious experience than sitting in Yankee Stadium or even the Phillies Citizens Bank Park.  Still, this is not a time to worry about that.

It’s too soon to worry that they’re launching too fast. I always get scared if they’re in first place by AllStar time, fearing a swoon or flameout at the end. I’m not even going to dwell on the high price of Fenway for a young family or gripe about the phony sellout streak as emblematic of a deceptive ownership.  Or acknowledge that Terry Francona’s Indians are also 2-and-0.

This is a time to enjoy the success of newbie Jackie Bradley, Jr. and the pluckiness and grit of  Jonny Gomes’ scoring from second on an infield hit in game 1.  There’s lots else to celebrate, at least for now, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

I welcome your comments in the section below.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Yesterday North Korea announced it’s restarting its nuclear reactor so it can build its nuclear weapons arsenal.  This follows North Korea’s increasingly bellicose posturing over the last couple of months, including a nuclear bomb test in February.   The United States and South Korea have been carrying out military exercises in the region.  North Korea is the only country in the world with which Japan doesn’t have diplomatic relations. Things are understandably tense in Japan, a close neighbor of North Korea and the target of some 150 North Korean missiles pointed in Japan’s direction. The United States has close to a dozen bases in Japan.  This is a complicated situation, requiring experience, wisdom and finesse.

I’m so relieved to hear that Caroline Kennedy is likely to be appointed ambassador to Japan.  After all, it’s easy to be an ambassador……to St. Lucia, the Bahamas, Canada (just ask former Governor Paul Cellucci.)  Naming prominent people as ambassadors shows the United States really cares, or so the argument goes. Caroline Kennedy is prominent.  Past ambassadors to Japan were largely prominent people. Edwin Reischauer, to name one.

Oh, but wait. He was a Japan scholar and spoke Japanese.  Clyde Prestowitz, writing in Foreign Policy, reminds us that,after Reischauer came Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, House Speaker Tom Foley, and former Vice President Walter Mondale.  They were all prominent too. None of them spoke Japanese, but all had been heavily involved in foreign policy matters.  The bare fact is that Caroline Kennedy, notwithstanding her other talents, just doesn’t have that expertise.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama promised to change the tradition of rewarding big donors with ambassadorships.  His record is about that of George W. Bush and has been roundly criticized in the press here and abroad. He recently named Chicago tycoon and former Citibank executive Louis Susman to be ambassador to the United Kingdom (a tradition honored by President Franklin Roosevelt’s naming business tycoon Joseph Kennedy to the same post.)  Many other donors,  especially those who bundle multiple contributions, have been similarly rewarded, including our own Alan Solomont (Spain) and Barry White (Norway.)  Neither Spain nor Norway is the sensitive posting that Japan is.

Caroline Kennedy’s early support of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid has earned her the President’s eternal gratitude.  But, really Mr. President. Ambassador to Japan?

I welcome your comments in the section below.

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Sometimes it’s easy to categorize U.S. Senate candidates Ed Markey and Stephen Lynch.  Congressman Markey is the unreconstructed liberal, right?  His values on gun control, abortion, climate change, gay rights, and virtually everything else are unequivocally left of center.  And Steve Lynch is the conservative in the race – especially when it comes to social issues, most particularly abortion. He is pro-life and supported the Stupak amendment so that insurers wouldn’t be required to cover abortion. But, since he entered this campaign, Lynch changed his tone and wouldn’t try to overturn Roe v. Wade.  He has supported funding Planned Parenthood because he doesn’t want to drive abortions underground. Still, although in much of the country he’d be called liberal, here he is a proud self- described pragmatic moderate and in this race clearly the more ideologically conservative of the two.

When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, however, it becomes more complicated. Ironically, Lynch’s reasons for opposing the ACA put him to the left of Markey.  Lynch didn’t like that the ACA delivered 31 million new customers to the insurers but gave the industry anti-trust exemption, ensuring prices wouldn’t go down.  More importantly, the ACA doesn’t include a public option, which would have created competition with private insurers and lowered costs.  He’s right, but the reality was that the public option -originally considered – couldn’t get enough votes. The ACA turned out to be the only option on the floor, and those who voted yes did so because it, notwithstanding its limitations, for the first time expanded access to health coverage and eliminated denial for preexisting conditions. Markey calls it his proudest vote.

There are parallels with the so-called Wall Street bailout, where Lynch voted against sending taxpayer dollars to the big guys, and Markey voted for it because of the impact that more banking failures would have on the larger economy.

So on both of these critical votes it is Markey who was the pragmatic legislator and Lynch the  populist ideologue.

Both have defensible positions on sequestration, but ironically seemed to have switched approaches.  Markey opposed it because of the cuts it would necessitate and the impact on the state’s information economy, risking a further economic downturn.  Lynch voted for it to prevent our defaulting on our debt.  If we had defaulted, it would have raised our borrowing costs and dug the hole we’re in even deeper.  He agreed with the idea that the sequester gave lawmakers 18 months (under the so-called Super Committee) to rationalize our budget in a way that addressed the deficit. Markey didn’t want to risk it.

The point to the compare-and-contrast is that we really don’t have a bad guy and a good guy here. Issue by issue, I tend to align more with Ed Markey , appreciate his standup role on a host of big issues, and his willingness to buck his president and party on matters of principle (example, his vote against DOMA).    Full disclosure: I’ve known and liked him for more than 30 years, and my husband has donated to him.

But every time I hear Lynch speak (usually at the New England Council) I am struck by how thoughtful he is.  He doesn’t vote reflexively and seems to arrive at his positions carefully. (As he says himself, “I don’t work for Nancy Pelosi, and I won’t work for Harry Reid.”)   Both of these individuals have grown enormously in their years in office.  The two are thoughtful, hard-working decent legislators. Either one is senatorial, something that can’t be said of any of the Republicans, at least not at this stage of their careers.

I welcome your comments in the section below.