“I thought you wuh dead!”

Symbolically I had, indeed, died to the business of celebrity and fame. It frightened me. Sickened me, actually. Made me commit a kind of career suicide. Because my career blip had fallen off Katharine Hepburn’s radar screen, I had become dead to her.

I’m sure, though, if I had ever called again, it would be her, Hepburn and not her secretary, picking up the phone in the East Side Manhattan brownstone she owned. This particular clip from “Glass Menagerie” says it all.

“Then go to the moon, you selfish dreamah!!!”

That is Hepburn rocketing the whole, profoundly ignorant, lifeless world to an equally banal and distantly barren planet. The faint echo placed upon Miss H’s cry of “dreamah” is particularly resonant now, insofar as the symbolic son that Kate was exhorting was, in real life, the playwright Tennessee Williams whom I also knew. About whom I will write in a future Big Hollywood post.

I came to know both Ms. Hepburn and Tennessee because of “Glass Menagerie.” My friendship with Tennessee lasted much longer than the volatile one I’d briefly shared with Hepburn.

Why?

Both Tennessee and I were destined to wander for brief while among the walking wounded.

Volatile is actually an insufficient adjective for Katherine Hepburn. She didn’t live so much as burn. Flame like an exploding planet: the very definition of a Star! She was fire itself. When she didn’t feel the fire within her? She would go and lie down till a good nap brought the fire back.

As in this photo, one couldn’t always anticipate in which direction that inner gaze would take us: exclamations of ecstasy or anger? Therein lies the secret of great acting: don’t let the audience know what is coming next. Never telegraph where you are going.

She was inevitably one of the sexiest women I’ve ever met.

Why inevitably?

Once she shared the liberation of her thoughts, the limitless directions her mind could go in? All seemed possible around her. Quite inspiring on all levels. This photo captures exactly the pose she was in when I first laid eyes on her at the Warwick Hotel. She was gazing out the window but not at Manhattan.

Some corner of her magnificent history on earth was floating by her inner eye. Our following meeting was on April 5th, 1973.

“I hear you have a birthday, today!”

Yes, I said.

“Do you know who else was born on April 5th?”

No, I said.

“Spensah!!”

Well, I thought, gee, gosh … and by gum … what can I possibly say to that? When you are in the presence of self-evident greatness remembering greatness, your heart doesn’t just sink. It seems to disappear, along with your courage, not to mention the once eloquent mobility of your tongue.

It was the Irish thing that fascinated Hepburn. Her love for Irish men was unashamedly brazen. John Ford to Tracy to O’Toole. As I said, and in her value system, Hepburn thought I was dead!

Since acting only became a part of my life as a writer and musician as well, I think she might cut me a bit of slack now. Then again, acting and becoming an indelibly memorable star and performer seemed her singular and most eternal obsession. Stardom seemed a goal in the Hepburn soul before her specter had even arrived on earth.

To paraphrase what has been said about Bette Davis in The Letter: “Katharine Hepburn rips it open!”

The ghost of Laurette Taylor will hang over any actress’s performance as “The Glass Menagerie’s” Amanda Wingfield. Audience members who had seen Taylor’s Amanda have spoken with awe about the reality of it, how there seemed to be no acting involved. Because the memory of Taylor and her own particular personality has so dominated the history of the role, Hepburn, who is not absent minded or dizzy about anything in life as Taylor’s Amanda Wingfield was, seemed to many critics “miscast.” What should have brought Hepburn at least an Emmy Award Nomination brought her nothing but neglect. Hepburn, however, knew the risk she was taking and, being a born Shakespearean “Kate,” she took it.

One thing about the theater. If you are there watching greatness, you own that experience among a select few by comparison to the gigantic audiences of film and television. Sadly, the recording of Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” carries nothing of the power I experienced when I saw him perform it live in London. No one can take that memory away from me. Not even a film that flattened almost everything he did or said as Othello.

The same is true of my life-altering adoration of Paul Scofield’s Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” Those who did see that miracle own the spiritual privilege of a billionaire. Likewise, simply sitting with the great Hepburn over lunch or between breaks in rehearsal? A young man is never quite the same after such an experience. Nor does he want to be.

I had been “Hepburned!”

The fire of that woman, as I recall it, still brings tears to my eyes. In the end, the only playwright I consider worthy of Hepburn’s soul is Shakespeare. When asked by Barbra Streisand why Hepburn seemed so insulted by the singer’s question, “Have you ever done Shakespeare before?”

I replied, “That would be like asking you, Ms. Streisand, if you sing.”

As the great literary critic, Harold Bloom declared, “Shakespeare invented us!” Hepburn was everything Shakespeare was looking for in a human being, male or female. Shakespeare didn’t invent her. God did. Shakespeare might have had to play hurry and catch up with Hepburn.

Highly recent testimony to Chicago’s immortally blackened reputation, however, is here.

God bless Ann Coulter!!

Furthermore, after having channel-hopped two of the United States’ greatest film noir classics – 1954’s “On The Waterfront” and 1957’s “Sweet Smell of Success” – there is something misleadingly American about the disease still infecting the United States.

Both Chicago’s Unionized Obama Nation and New York’s Bloomberg Occupation on Wall Street?

To coin a relevant movie title, they are “The Swampy Smell of a Waterfront Success!” A “triumph” born of the string-pulling games played by pecking orders in power. A Grand Revival of Political Malevolence in the American Bloodstream is erupting out of the possibly inner-party, Republican opposition to Herman Cain. It not only smells of racism, according to Donald Trump’s accusations, but also of a political desperation that will eventually solidify Cain’s integrity and endurance.

Newt Gingrich is the only one among Cain’s Republican opponents who came to the black candidate’s defense. Meanwhile some of Cain’s other major opponents, Rick Perry and Friends, were blaming Mitt Romney for the dirty tricks being pulled against the increasingly formidable Cain.

This Michael Ramirez cartoon leaves little left to be said about Progressive Racism.

“All Herman Cains, please step to the Right!”

The hypocrisy involved is as breathtaking as the Biden/Pelosi/Pro-abortion/Progressive Catholicism.

Who is running the show over their at the Democratic National Committee? And how often does Pope Benedict XVI have to lecture a former Speaker of the House about abortion?

Fifteen years ago, the minute I announced in Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety that I would leave America because of the Clinton administration’s unconstitutional assault on television’s freedom of speech, I envisioned the likes of Michael Bloomberg coming to my hometown of New York. Although I didn’t expect the next big villain after Clinton to be a black Chicago politician with an Ivy League
degree.

The racial insanities contained in that name alone are mind-boggling! A separate sink for conservative blacks in Washington’s politically correct outhouses?! If anything captures the truth about an American Communist toilet, it is Ramirez’ cartoon.

Veiled by the Democrat Party’s “Liberalism,” the Marxist heart of the DNC erupted when William Clinton described himself in his biography as not just a Baptist but a “Progressive” Baptist.

Senator William J. Fulbright was the most “Progressive” of “Progressive” Democrats, and Bill Clinton was nursed at Fulbright’s “well-connected” breast. Clinton’s Rhodes scholarship was cinched by the creator of the Fulbright Scholarship.

I was a Fulbright Scholar and soundly punished in a singularly “Progressive” manner for having publicly voiced my faith in God. A Fulbright Scholar doesn’t return to London from Catholic Italy, praising the power and works of God without being called insane and duly served up electro-shock treatments.

Ironically, the Leftist world might have been better off not giving me such an “electric” deferment from military service, or I could very well have died in Vietnam. There would be no Michael Moriarty of “Law and Order” setting the records straight at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood.

Not only was Sen. Fulbright a Marxist but a flaming racist as well.

Fulbright is a small glimpse of how far back racist Marxism has existed in the heavily “Southern” Democrat Party out of Arkansas. Scratch a Clinton deeply enough and you will find a racist Bill Fulbright.

An authentic but profoundly gifted Far Lefty, Joseph Papp, creator of the New York Shakespeare Festival, was a judge on the Fulbright committee which selected the 1963 Fulbright “Scholars.” Fulbright’s choice of Papp was hardly an accident. Papp’s tragedy was that he could not, try as he may and did, integrate Marxist polemics into William Shakespeare’s Judeo-Christian genius.

I recall my first falling out with Papp when he insisted that I, as The Chorus in Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” recite the opening incantation with a rabble-rousing, noisy crowd of Brechtian back-ups behind me, shouting and basically behaving like extras in a Larry Cohen horror film. I so declined the offer of “help” with my sacredly solo speech that I left the production during rehearsals.

Papp called me back, promising to take out his Marxist improvements of Shakespeare.

Years before that, however, he had advised me, “Don’t take the Fulbright Scholarship! Stay here in New York and build your acting career!”

I doubt if my life would have been altered one bit had I not gone to London. The Left in London was still the same as “Marxists in New York” – now there’s a song for you – but with a more high-toned and seemingly civilized delivery to hide behind.

The last Brit Marxist I’ve spoken with now disguises himself as an “Anarchic Syndicalist!” Now there’s a Communist AKA for you!!

My title for this editorial, Quintessentially American Evil, boils down to the singularly brilliant Community Organization for all of American corruption: the Soviet, decades-long campaign to turn American politicians, gangsters, dizzy-headed youth and shamelessly ambitious American families like the Clintons into “useful idiots.”

Some Brits, including a few in the BBC, have woken up to Soviet “creepiness” faster than Americans.

“Stalin’s useful idiots” have geometrically exploded since the Soviet monster’s death, despite the BBC’s best efforts.

The Obama Nation is hopefully the smelliest but also the last and most undeniably rotten fruit on The Expanding Tree of Useful Idiots.

America would never be able to survive anything worse than this. Four more years of such bipartisan corruption, and a United States without Cain as President will, like my character did in Report To The Commissioner, have hung itself. Cain, unlike the Yaphet Kotto character, is not ashamed of traditionally American Law and Order!

That I played my own character of Bo Lockley as a bit of a lost puppy from the beginning was why the film and I received such bad notices from the likes of far Left critic Pauline Kael.

The useful idiots of Hollywood film and Leftist criticism wanted the Report’s hero played throughout as a completely healthy, lovable puppy who offs himself because of American Evil, American Corruption, American Lies, American Insanity. That way America is the villain! Nothing could be further from the truth than that!

Only now has America approached the insanity of such seemingly irreversible evil as found in “Report To The Commissioner.” Even now, however, the healthiest of us, like Cain, won’t quit on authentic America.

Only Cain is strong enough to renew hope in the likes of “Report’s” Bo Lockley. I, thank God, am not Bo Lockley!

I am now a wizened, 70 year old Ben Stone of “Law and Order.” I prosecute in a courtroom called Big Hollyood.

You gotta problem?

Only an exceptional actress could ever pull that off.

Unadulterated goodness is, I feel, the hardest and most challenging thing for any actor or actress to play. No one really believes you can be that sainted, least of all yourself.

Having worked with a few of the female greats, Katherine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, and met a few others such as Bette Davis, I found the unadulterated health and blistering sanity of Rosamund Pike’s Miriam in “Barney’s Version” most astounding.

Everyone in the audience just has to fall in love with her during our first glimpse of this vision of her Miriam’s low key, Canadian nobility.

We actually drop off a cliff in the same way alcoholic, eternally Boychick Barney does. She is, of course, strikingly beautiful but eloquently frank and irresistibly unselfconscious. How does Barney win her and keep her for as long as he does? That is the major flaw in the script.
Barney is not who he appears to be, based, as I’ve learned, on the original novel’s author, the renowned Canadian writer Mordecai Richler. Barney has received none of the world’s weighty homage as Richler has. Barney is a successful producer of lightweight television fare. Rosamund Pike’s Miriam was not only not born yesterday but is insightfully generous in her first encounter with Barney and every appearance following that.

Perhaps Mr. Richler’s startling humility may well have inspired Barney’s disturbingly flawed humanity. It is perhaps the novelist’s self-image by comparison to his perfect wife, the very woman Pike says she based her performance on. However, we find it hard to believe not Pike and her performance but the screenplay’s story-telling.

However, Pike’s commitment to the script itself and the powerful simplicity of her performance carries you along through the arduous and nakedly revealing saga of Barney Panofsky and his oddly matched, third and longest marriage. You believe she actually feels fated to marry, live with and endure Boychick Barney.

Ultimately “Barney’s Version” is a wonderfully challenging journey for anyone to experience and, in the end, quite remarkable for the feelings it evokes. Paul Giamatti plays Barney Panofsky with the same abandon he performed America’s firey John Adams with. His refusal to pander for audience sympathy takes us on a much richer adventure than I, for one, was prepared for.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a film quite like it. Why?

Rarely is a whole man shown to us in almost any story-telling format, whether novel, theater or film. Our knowledge of Barney in the end is almost embarrassingly complete. We are a bit shocked that we could come to know another human being that well in so short a time. Thanks to Richler’s selfless honesty and Giamatti’s courage, we do.

With the oft-repeated question, “What is she doing with a guy like that?” hammering at us so frequently, we constantly doubt the credibility of this intensely realistic, beautifully performed and impressively directed film.

By a very odd and left-field way of comparison, the musical “Nine,” based on Federico Fellini’s very autobiographical “8 1/2,” carries no suspension of disbelief, not only because of its form and style as a musical, but the errant ways and seeming insanities of not a decent but a great film director. His foibles are almost de rigeur. What else could you expect from genius?

But Barney as a genius?!

Barney’s greatest achievement in life was finding and marrying Miriam. That is, in turn, Mordecai Richler’s selfless homage to his own wife.

That timeless gift to Mrs. Richler almost absolves whatever drunken excesses the author might have wandered into as a Barney, rendering them and the film a surprisingly Catholic confession with the audience as priest.

Of course we forgive him. He’s not only Barney. He’s Mordecai Richler!

The Politico-inspired loud-mouthing about Herman Cain’s apparent indiscretion – or perhaps his avuncular bonhomie toward a malevolently ambitious female – the accusations hurled at the presidential candidate have backfired!

It highlights the beauty of freedom of speech.

Yes, we in America also have the freedom to lie and to maliciously exaggerate. However, the court of public opinion in American democracy will decide whether or not accusations are justified or merely the product of greedy but increasingly frightened political ambitions.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the first-such target of left-wing, railroading, character-assassinating, Beltway connivances. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

In fact, American freedom of speech may have handed our next President, Herman Cain, the American liberty which Marxist ideologues will forever be choking on. They, the American progressive useful idiots, have patronized their own dwindling constituency, “liberated” them into the Occupy Wall Street self-indulgences, leaving these spoiled, perennial sophomores doing real sexual damage to one another.

It’s Woodstock Redux without the star-studded performances.

The image I see is an orgy of lemmings, willing victims traipsing behind their Pied Piper, President Obama, right off the cliff of common sense. Whether it is economic common sense or sexual common sense, the American left prove themselves the “useful idiots” of a very alive Communist New World Order.

The greatest of useful idiots has been William Clinton. He himself faced the repercussions of his own White House taste of Woodstock
Redux with Monica Lewinsky. No, those two weren’t lying on the grass of a farm in New York, but the attitude that couple had was obviously Woodstock in the White House.

Oh, no question Clinton and his repeatedly embarrassed wife have been heavily paid off by a Democrat Party that gave them the White House for eight years. However, now that a more hard-line Barack Obama has usurped the Democrat Party’s throne, we see what “useful idiots” the Clintons have been all along.

When an African-American Conservative, Herman Cain, is within reach of the White House, the Democrats are forced to reach into the bottom of their barrel for political dirty tricks. The American Democrat Party is, in and of itself, an orgy of lemmings.

How would I know?

I used to be a Democrat–a New York Democrat, of all things. No greater “useful idiot” exists now than Manhattan’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg who continues to allow OWS Lemmings into Zuccotti Park until, of course, his “useful idiocy” becomes self-evident to the entire world.

The informed call it “enabling an addiction.” What is this orgy of lemmings addicted to? Both the economic and sexual delusions which the American left has fed them. The delusions: a bottomless supply of money and bottomless sexual freedom.

Who are most susceptible to believing these fantasies?

The idealistic young, the Woodstock hippies, and the Zuccotti lemmings. American youth are increasingly wed to the growing popularity of anarchy as the political philosophy of a so-called Inevitable Future.

A former friend of mine, one of England’s intellectual elite, claims he is an “Anarchic Syndicalist!” How multi-layered of him! How in touch with the times of both London and New York! Meanwhile, the leaders of World Communism, who are not Anarchic Syndicalists, see the Anarchizing of America as a major first step to communizing the entire human race. A tyrant cannot “clench his fist” nor “put his foot down” in a democracy until a nation is in a state of “anarchy”!

Meanwhile, Cain is here to “bring American home again!” That he is a black American conservative is precisely the heart of God’s Plan.

That Jon Stewart and other leftist comedians should be piling ridicule on the back of Herman Cain is the obligatory trek up a symbolic Mt. Calvary. Many “Progressives” and Perryistas are already planning humiliating wakes for the presidential candidate’s hopes.

There is, however, “Resurrection.” The assaults on Cain have only solidified his support and possibly added many admirers from the independent corners of America.

All know that every President in history has faced trying times in their own, private White Houses. Cain’s composure and grace throughout these challenging days in his campaign will be solid evidence for his strength and endurance.

I personally believe he can’t be stopped, not after his appearance at the National Press Club. Cain is, in my opinion, an American black conservative with a much finer, more natural singing voice than the black American Communist Paul Robeson. There is nothing the least bit pretentious about his undeniable talents.

The black conservative movement in the United States, with the likes of Cain, Allen West and Thomas Sowell, is a trinity of power that will not only lead America out of her very white, self-indulgent, Woodstock/Zuccotti Park enable-ings – greatly inspired by the African-American President, Barack Obama – but will create a life-adoring, rainbow family of indomitably American, individually free, world leaders.

Because of eloquently conservative black Americans, the Third World is much less an easy target for World Communism.

Our black Ronald Reagan is here and will be hitting home runs to end the Marxist New World Order vs. American Common Sense World Series. Such a universally important World Series will never be played again. Karl Marx will at last be seen for the intellectual disease he and his tyrannical admirers have virulently spread throughout the free world.

God sent us the antibody for Communism’s Third World: Cain. It is, indeed, Cain vs. Marx. President Cain will gently but firmly, clearly but eloquently, charmingly but inevitably send Marx home–home to the very godless hell from which Marx came.

I never really understood nor appreciated Davis’s greatness as an actress until I watched her performance recently in ‘Dark Victory.’

For those who’ve never seen it, ‘Dark Victory’ centers entirely around the Davis character Judith Traherne and the manner in which she copes with her certain and imminent death from a brain tumor.

To me, Davis had been a very eccentric woman more than a great artist — one who, with turned-down lips, had an eternal chip on her shoulder. At any moment, Davis might snap your head off in the most histrionic manner possible before anyone who simply happened to be present, making you feel smaller, more useless and pathetic than last year’s want ad.

I crossed paths with Davis for a very brief instant on stage in New York when she was the one to hand me my Tony Award for a performance in John Hopkins’ play, ‘Find Your Way Home.’

Perhaps that “chip” she seemed to carry was, in some way, a central part of her character. I really don’t know nor can I say that for certain about her, never having had the intimidating privilege of working with Davis. That, however, could not diminish the enormously powerful size of her acting. Like Katharine Hepburn, with whom I did work, she was larger than any corner of a so-called ordinary life.

What brought me around to being not just impressed – Davis, like Hepburn, has always been impressive – but moved by her in the film ‘Dark Victory?’

I learned, I believe, the terms Davis set for herself in life.

I have a profoundly strong hunch that Davis had a great deal to do with the shaping of that role in ‘Victory,’ both its meaning and its very dialogue. The power of that script for me came from the two main but starkly contrasting ways her character chose to deal with the unremitting and imminent presence of death in her life.

It wasn’t so much the classic denial of death for her but a raging temper tantrum at everything around herself — fury at most of humanity’s good fortune and rage over her own bad luck. No one could perform that half of the drama better than Davis!

Not even Hepburn.

The other alternative, of course, and one I hadn’t thought Davis capable of, was a profound joy and gratitude for every additional second of life she could beg, borrow or steal for herself. It was then I knew how great she had been as an artist.

It was the ecstasy with which she hurled herself into what was left of her life, sustaining its bliss until the very end — a joy in life rarely seen in a Davis film role. The moment when her character begins to go blind was beautifully written, with her initially unaware of what was happening at all, while we in the audience and Geraldine Fitzgerald are agonizingly confronted with the truth of the situation. Dramatic irony at its most powerful, this realization was one of the most powerfully bittersweet moments that I have ever seen in the theater or movies or can so swiftly and emotionally recall.

Why “sweet” as well as “bitter”? Her character’s tribute to what she thinks of as only the setting sun still leaves me savoring such moments in life through tears.

One always startling fact of great performances by both Davis and Hepburn is the oceanic momentum both could drive an entire movie with. If anything defines a great actor or actress, it is that momentum he or she establishes which can carry many audiences through the inevitably more boring parts of a drama or comedy.

One female performance that has recently reminded me of the Hepburn/Davis powerhouse size is Dianne Wiest’s “Actress” in ‘Bullets Over Broadway.’ For me, Wiest’s Helen Sinclair seemed to be a diva-sized replica of the great Stella Adler, whom I did know and love. Nothing in Wiest’s Helen Sinclair was over the top. As Stella Adler herself taught her students, “When Checkov’s Masha of Three Sisters looks at the sky and speaks of such a huge part of the Universe, it is not ‘The sky.’ It is ‘THE SKAAAAAAHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!’”

Since ‘Dark Victory’ is, indeed, a Davis tour de force, there are no boring moments. The very end of the film is a particularly Davis brand of ‘Victory.’

This is, in Shakespearean vernacular, “not for all markets.”

The now-legendary Davis pride and self-respect are boiling over in her ‘Dark Victory’ decision to let her husband run off to New York City on business when she’s certain of being close to death. In retrospect, I, as George Brent’s role of husband, would have been furious at such a selfish and vainglorious decision to die so bereft of his love and comfort.

That, however, was, at least in the eyes of Davis’s fans, a quintessentially Davis thing to do.

As I said, you took and take the likes of Hepburn, Davis, Adler and Wiest on their terms and not your own. If you can’t, find yourself a minor talent and bore us to death.

As Davis once replied to the bitter comments of a fellow actor on a television film, one starring a much younger but very well-known actress, “Her name’s above the title! She needs all the help she can get!”

Few citizens anywhere would have a living room large enough to hang this very bloody-looking billboard in. Secondly, few of us are “Connoisseurs.” Thirdly, is it really worth “The Connoisseur’s” time to try and understand this painting? A true art connoisseur instantly said the object of discernment is Rockwell’s impressive version of a Jackson Pollock. “No. 00,” perhaps.

I, for now, can only come up with “A Satellite Photo of Some Third Millennium, Urban Nightmare,” or, “The Fundamental Transformation of the United States of America.”

This painting within a painting, given the Progressive Obsessions of art critics, might eventually be worth more at a Sotheby Auction than the painting itself. “The painting within the painting?! Wrap it up and throw the rest in the wastebasket! I’m a rich man who hates Norman Rockwell but loves Jackson Pollock!!” In other words, such a destructive buyer would be some mega-rich Progressive. He’s possibly George Soros or the now exponentially enriched Jeffrey Immelt.

With both Sarah Palin and Herman Cain being, for me at any rate, the political equivalent of Norman Rockwell, I believe this visual version of the Progressive New World Order, hanging so impressively on the museum wall, looks out, beyond The Connoisseur, at the conservative writers and readers of Big Hollywood, and reminds us of how prophetic Norman Rockwell can be.

The painting within the painting could be called “Post OWS” or “The Progressives’ Zuccotti Park” or “A Bird’s Eye View of the Obama Nation.” Suggestions for other titles in the comment section would be most welcome. “The Connoisseur” is an unsurpassable description of the entire painting.

If, as I believe, this revealing glimpse of Norman Rockwell’s prophetic insight doesn’t hold you spellbound as it has myself, then you are not a Norman Rockwell fan.

While composing this editorial I mistakenly typed Norman Mailer instead of Norman Rockwell! Now there is more than a Freudian slip of my computer fingers. Mailer vs. Rockwell?!

If, indeed, The Connoisseur is staring at an aerial portrait of The Progressive New World Order, Post OWS, Zuccotti Park or The Obama Nation Itself, we have Norman Mailer looking at this bloody mess from a hotel window in Chicago during the 1968 Democrat Convention.

I spent a very unpleasant evening at a dinner table with Norman Mailer. The author was convinced that I should play the role of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in whatever project that he was dreaming of. I was still a blind Liberal then, so I threw my napkin at Norman Mailer with surprising accuracy.

He held the napkin up and then said, rather poetically, “That hurt.”

I said, before my next drink of wine, “I intended it to.”

I, now utterly sober for eight years, would avoid any further contact with Norman Mailer, living or otherwise; and I still wouldn’t want to get even near a script with Giuliani in it, let alone play the role.

I lived under Mayor Giuliani as a New Yorker. He’s one of the reasons I left that once-greatest-city-in-the-world. His lawyer’s defense of legalized abortion and “strict construction” is only the beginning of why I don’t trust anything about him.

What has all this to do with Norman Rockwell, The Connoisseur and Bringing America Home?

If anyone contributed to Carrying America Off To A New World Order, it would be Norman Mailer et al. The et al includes Henry Kissinger and reminds me that the only reservation I have about a President Herman Cain is that his reading on American foreign policy includes a respectful nod to Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

Ergo my title for America’s general enemy, those who helped to drag the United States away from both its Declaration of Independence and its Constitution: “The Bipartisan Progressives of The New World Order.”

Herman Cain’s utter lack of membership in the Washington Beltway Fraternity is one of his greatest assets and recommendations.

Herman Cain’s governing principles are meat and potatoes Norman Rockwell and, undoubtedly, offer the only way to renew America and insure us that Mr. Cain himself is the most reliable, Presidential candidate to Bring America Home Again.

Since Mr. Cain is now becoming the main target for both Democrats and dueling Republicans, I look forward to cheering him on during this year-long home stretch for Republican candidates. They have already become, in some instances, too familiar to offer anything new to the America audience.

The test now for Herman Cain the frontrunner is how much grace under pressure he can sustain in the grueling year ahead. So far he is proving to be the most regal candidate of them all and unquestionably the most presidential.

I suspect that his entire Presidential campaigning, particularly in a polarized America, will prove vastly more challenging to Herman Cain than the Presidency itself. His clarity of purpose will balance out any dilemmas he might face as occupant of the Oval Office.

The fact that, as President, he no longer just wants to “make a difference” but actually is achieving that goal will be more than enough satisfaction to keep him in, yes, joyously fighting shape. It has been his Destiny all along to become President of the United States and bring America back from the brink of Marxist suicide.

I find Herman Cain an even more comforting voice than that of Ronald Reagan. It has the wisdom of true suffering in it, yet without self-pity. He will lead not only by example but by the very rich sound of his voice.

You now have more than the perfect American President for this Third Millennium. You have the United States reunited and coming home to heal.

After what has happened to America since John F. Kennedy’s assassination, that would be a miracle.

Why?

Premeditated, homicidal radioactive poisoning.

Such an assassination by a personalized nuclear weapon has only one notable precedent, and that is the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Since Litvinenko died under British protection, and the producers of ‘Edge of Darkness‘ come from a BBC television series, one can’t possibly deny these connections between fiction and fact.

However, the mainstream press and Wikipedia seem deliberately deaf, dumb, and blind to the obvious. For them, the radioactivity theme is an “environmental issue.”

BBC’s most recent attention to the Death of Alexander Litvinenko as a dissident of neo-Soviet Russia, September 12, 2011, is here.

Not only is Vladimir Putin implicated in this murder, but the book on Litvinenko’s assassination, authored by Alex Goldfarb and Marina Litvinenko, the widow of Alexander, stresses the strong connection between Putin and one of his major benefactors, George Soros.

Hmmm …

The brevity of Wikipedia’s attention to the book and Wikipedia’s dismissal of the Goldfarb/Livinenko point of view is profoundly unconvincing. A major disagreement between the likes of Putin and his former benefactor, Boris Berezovsky, is not only likely but, in light of Putin’s undeniably dictatorial reign over Russia, inevitable.

To what extent the ‘Edge of Darkness’ producers, typically to the left of the American political center, wished to deflect the issue of what amounts to the “atomic assassination” of Alexander Litvinenko is open to highly divisive interpretation.

The ‘Edge of Darkness’ film undeniably maligns the American government, American politicians and — with the Jay Saunders character betraying Gibson, his fellow detective — it also stains American law enforcement. The film clearly intends to deflect the attention from England and onto America. It seems to intentionally blur the growing headlines of Russia’s refusal to deport the two Russian suspects in the murder of Litvinenko.

Not unexpectedly, ‘Edge of Darkness’’s very French concoction of a film noir anti-hero, Jedburgh (performed with icily charming brilliance by Ray Winstone), is the only British presence on the screen. Robert De Niro had been scheduled for the role but withdrew due to “artistic differences.” England is exonerated totally by the surprising climax. The American establishment and its weapons industry is revealed as entirely at fault for the rather Kamikaze fates of both the Gibson and Winstone characters.

Hmmm, indeed.

Marina Litvinenko has admitted that her husband was a British spy. Here’s the possible scenario, if indeed Putin was behind “the atomic poisoning story that will not go away.”

“Leave this message on the doorstep of the entire world, but particularly in the parlors of Russian dissidents, in exile and otherwise: protesting anything within Russia can bring terminally nauseating results!”

We, as they say, “read you loud ‘n clear, sir!!”

Why did Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic, do this exceedingly evasive spin on the death of Litvinenko? Perhaps he thought someone might speak about these obvious connections?

Or perhaps, since Litvinenko performed a sudden and most likely a death-bed conversion to Islam, the translation from Russian homicidal policies to America’s corrupt “State Capitalism” seemed appropriate to Gibson.

The film gets my B+ rating, if only for the myriad questions it raises in my mind. It also introduced me to the most disarming new film personality I’ve seen in quite awhile: Bojana Novakovic as Gibson’s daughter, Emma. Hers is and all-too-brief and breathtakingly un-self-conscious appearance in a film filled with so much “serious acting.”

George Moriarty, my father – tacitly known as a “Little George” to my grandfather, “Big George” Moriarty – was easily as “big” as that police officer in Norman Rockwell’s ‘The Runaway.’

Over a decade older than that boy in the painting, I ran away to New York City and London only to face a painfully humiliating return to Detroit where I was born.

Oh, well … we’ve all had those moments in our lives … and, as I’ve learned, “God had other plans for me than my own” and God’s plans turned out more blissfully rewarding than the ones I’d dreamed of as a boy.

However, it seems like more than 40 percent of Americans are now running away from the defining principles of America and America’s individual freedom. They applaud Barack Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform the United States.”

Why do I say that?

Obama’s approval ratings are still that high for both himself and his Obama Nation. It is not happening without the help of Radical Leftists, American or otherwise, plus the Islamic organizations that support and fund the Jihadists. Please read this article from The New American.

Into the arms of the Progressive New World Order, that Utopian Lie, the foundations of which were indisputably laid by not only George Bush The Senior but his successor in the White House, Bill Clinton.

The Clinton Initiative is, to the Progressive New World Order, what all window-dressing has always been for inevitable tyranny. Clinton’s so-called “decade of difference” has helped leave America bankrupt. Even a Bloomberg publication thinks Clinton went too far as President. Now, as philanthropist, he’s calling a decade of world, economic disaster a “decade of difference.”

From recent photos of the President, I ask: Is William Clinton’s nose beginning to grow with his Clinton Initiative calling over two decades of Presidential deception a “Decade of Difference?”

A bankrupt, demoralized United States is quite a difference!

I am sure Bill and Hillary were both surprised when their very own Democrat Party made it clear that Slick Willy’s Ways and Hillary’s Heavenly Wiles were now a thing of the past. That Far-Left, blessing-in-disguise, President Barack Obama, has delivered more of the truth beneath the Clinton Smiles than I am sure Bill and Hillary Clinton would have wanted.

Without President Obama there would never have been The Tea Party. The Tea Party is definitely not running away from home. The Tea Party’s growing hopes in Herman Cain may well be the most important turning point, away from the progress of the United States toward its own self-inflicted abortion, its own suicide.

Obama calls this National Hara-kiri a “fundamental transformation of the United States.”

For 89 years, America carried on a love affair with slavery. Our Supreme Court even condoned it with the Dred Scott Decision. Now with our Highest Court’s Roe v Wade Decision, we have carried on a 38-year love affair with legalized murder.

Does God have “other plans” for America aside from those envisioned by Smiley Bill Clinton and his doppelganger, the charmingly icy Barack Obama?

The Progressive Battle Cry: “It is time for not only The Arab Spring but the American Autumn as well!”

I left America because of the Clinton Administration. I knew for certain that with the Clintons occupying both my home town and home state of New York, that things could only get worse.

Indeed, they did!

Not only did 9/11 happen to Manhattan but both President Barack Obama and his operative in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, arrived to blame everything on the traditional America they are both helping to “transform fundamentally!”

The New York Police Department will not end a violent protest on the streets of New York and the President of the United States supports the protestors?!

Hmmm …

Obama prefers a runaway America. Is he interested in building some other stable home for Americans?

No.

What the President is building is an undeniably Marxist New World Order. Such a dream demands the end of Capitalist America and its individual freedom and individual responsibility.

With his feet constantly upon the President’s desk, Obama’s contempt for anything traditionally American is intentionally divisive. His greatest success is in the Lincoln axiom: “A house divided cannot stand.”

If anyone can destroy … or … “transform” America in the coming year, Barack Obama can begin the process. With another four years, he could finish the job.

As the Arab Spring is intent upon ultimately destroying Israel, the American Autumn is utterly intent upon disuniting the United States.

Despite the vaunted, “nuanced” thinking among Harvard graduates, the final goal of a Marxist New World Order is simple mathematics: the Obama Nation’s goal demands the “fundamental transformation” of the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution and the United States itself:

“Gestating infants are not created equal!

Many can and, in some cases, must be aborted!”

The Progressive New World Order, the American Autumn and the Arab Spring were everything our Founding Fathers tried to prevent with America’s founding documents. However, what can The Founding Fathers possibly do with a Runaway America?!

It is now up to Herman Cain to bring America home. Perhaps it is predestined that a child of American slavery should perform that seemingly impossible feat.

No other Republican candidates can do it. They are actually not American enough.

Herman Cain, by God, is American to the deepest sense of that word’s charismatic meaning. Obama Care belongs to not only a different continent but an entirely New World Order.

The only “New World” I’ll ever recognize happened when explorers confirmed that a new continent called America even existed. The only new worlds we should expect to build are on other planets.

Amidst God’s other stars.

George Moriarty umpired five world series.

After one particularly contentious game, Big George, as I had learned to call him, “took on” not one, not two but three angry ballplayers after the game was over. He showed up for work the next day a bit bruised and battered.

Two of the “vengeful players,” however, couldn’t even make it to the next game. That’s only one of the stories I was told about my grandfather and how tough he was.

He and Charlie “Boss” Schmidt were the only two Detroit Tigers that the rest of the team wouldn’t mess with. That
category included the great base-stealing intimidator, Ty Cobb. The man that sat visibly in the dugout sharpening his spikes!

Given Cobb’s bullying ways and my grandfather’s sense of right and wrong, Law and Order and our family’s protective instincts for Law and Order have been in the Moriarty family for three generations.

My father was kind of a cop as well. A police surgeon. That’s one thing all three of us have had in common: law and order. However, during my belated second childhood in my sixties, I took on four Canadians and lost. Big time!

I was learning to recognize a common ailment, quite prevalent among cops: alcoholism. Had I not been in a bar, the beating I suffered never would have happened. That I’m still alive after that; and, later on, after an inevitable heart failure from smoking and drinking?

It is a miracle.

Herman Cain’s survival is a bit of a miracle, isn’t it? I’m expecting a miracle now for the United States of America, and that miracle is Herman Cain! Will the United States come home again? That’s what this editorial series is all about. One great sense of “Home for America” is Norman Rockwell.

In my coming articles about bringing the United States back to the fundamentals, rooted again in the law and order which my grandfather, father and I staked our lives on, I will depend greatly on the Sarah Palin of American artists, Norman Rockwell.

The so-called serious critics of painting looked down on Rockwell’s patriotism and his love of the basic ingredients that distinguish America from any other nation in the history of the world. The Art World’s Elitists had the same contempt for Rockwell that the know-it-all, bipartisan Progressives have for Sarah Palin. Now that the Progressives have driven Sarah Palin out of the 2012 election, what are the chances of America ever coming home again?

Those hopeful prospects now lie with Herman Cain!

One of the greatest of quintessentially American success stories is Herman Cain! He not only “whipped” racism, he beat cancer! The American fundamentals is how. Individual freedom, individual responsibility and a minimum of self-pity!

As he obviously believes, those in America who have not succeeded have only themselves to blame.

However, as Mr. Cain also indicated: If we live with four more years of President Barack Obama, unemployment will grow to even more record-breaking heights and the American Spirit will be waning if not utterly lost. Drowning in the quicksand of the Progressive New World Order.

What we will have is this – please watch the video until a justifiably upset John Lewis eventually leaves this undeniably self-loathing, Marxist gathering of the Obama Nation. What happened to Lewis, happened to me at a jazz club in New York. John Lewis, with his courageous individuality in the history books, cannot be allowed to talk at that event.

More than one message about free speech has obviously been sent in the past few weeks.

Some people, such as presidential candidate Ron Paul, think that President Obama has become the very dictator that Woody Allen said was necessary for America.

Meanwhile the veteran likes of former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, thinks the President, rather than being a dictator, is “naïve” and his policies “incoherent.”

According to Bolton, President Obama is an American “innocent abroad.”

Which is more dangerous?

A theatrically exaggerated warning by an American entertainer, Hank Williams Jr., about the behavior of President Obama?

Or the “Politically Correct” pronouncements of a veteran Washington “insider” that patronizes President Obama by calling him “naïve”?

Which is more misleading and therefore more dangerous? The frank opinion of one American voter, Hank Williams Jr., about President Obama? Or the impressive credentials of a former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton?

Sarah Palin, for obvious political reasons, has been as frank about President Obama’s behavior in office as anyone considering a run for the Presidency can be.

Just this week, presidential candidate Ron Paul has considered Obama’s drone-strike execution of  an American terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, a possibly “impeachable” offense.

“We have an obligation,” says Paul, “to protect the rule of law.”

We have a President who is “a prosecutor, a judge, a jury and an executioner.”

Paul reminds us that “Adolf Eichmann … was tried in Israel!”

Before he was executed.

Yet an American was ordered by our Presidential Godfather to be executed without a trial in an international and domestic “conflagration” which the President himself avoided identifying as a “war.”

Apparently there are no strings, Constitutional or otherwise, attached to the Obama Nation’s “Executive Powers.”

There is no “rule of law” for President Barack Obama.

Why?

As he complains, the Constitution is nothing but a list of “negative liberties.” It’s all about what the government can’t do.

I wonder why?

Our Revolutionary War with the British Monarchy taught us nothing about the abuse of power by self-appointed and self-inflated authority?

We are now learning how increasingly uncomfortable it is to have a monarch in the Oval Office who holds to the rights of Kings, Czars and Community Organizers.

The Haunted Heaven of America still lives with the ghosts of a slavery that had been legalized by the Supreme Court and its Dred Scott decision. The United States are now burdened with the cold-blooded killing of over one million gestating infants per year because of the Roe v Wade decision.

I have repeatedly reminded my readers that legalizing cold-blooded murder, to say the least, leads to disastrously dangerous side-effects.

Now that the President has chronically chosen hit men and drones to solve his problems with Islamic Pirates, Osama bin Laden and now al-Awlaki, don’t we have any serious questions about such homicidal authority?

The President and his wife, Michelle, are the American Presidency’s two most aggressive proponents of state-subsidized abortion. They are both far less apologetic than the Clintons.

Death as the Obama Nation’s increasingly best and quickest solution has become chronic in the brief two and a half years of Barack Obama’s hold upon Presidential power.

Killing seems to be the thing the President is best at and most successful with. That, of course, and creating a divided United States that has never seen such a gaping abyss between fellow Americans since the Civil War.

With that, plus his stand on abortion, Barack Obama reminds me more of President Jefferson Davis of Confederate slavery than of Abraham Lincoln and his original desire to rein in the spread of slavery.

Such increasingly disturbing displays of not being “naïve” but of swaggering with authoritarian arrogance?

Perhaps Paul, for once, is entirely correct about the impeachable abuse of power contained in the “hit” on Anwar al Awlaki.

There are inevitably more such displays of President Obama’s abuse of power on the way.

One thing is for sure: Barack Obama’s increasingly quick trigger finger is by now utterly undeniable.

Apparently to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” requires more than breaking a few eggs. To make this omelette, “ya gotta be a made man!”

In this case the Mafia is not the Cosa Nostra. It’s the Radically “Progressive” New World Order.

May God have mercy on America. This “fundamental transformation” is not a magic act.

It has become a “hit.”