I'm Mad as Hell

I have never been in Brooklyn. But I would like to go there. In all of the old WWII movies, there was one scruffy, down-to-earth sergeant with a thick Brooklyn accent. He was always the symbol of the solid blue-collar, ‘regular’ guy. The one you wanted in your foxhole. In 1990 I got to know and become friends with a great woman, the late Rita Klimova. She was then the Czech Ambassador to the United States. She was the woman who coined the phrase “Velvet Revolution” while interpreting for Vaclav Havel. She was a professor of economics with a very practical view of world affairs. Once at a luncheon in San Francisco someone at our table asked about the possibility of Czechoslovakia breaking up. “Well,” she said diplomatically, “it is like a divorce. Sometimes it happens, and nothing can stop it. But who ever heard of both sides coming out richer after a divorce?”

Nice line, but the reason I repeat it and speak of Rita is that she said it with a pronounced Brooklyn accent. And that accent, after one got over the surprise of it, tended to sooth her audiences. This was someone you could trust. A straight talker and a straight shooter. Rita’s family had escaped Hitler, and she learned her first lessons in economics by selling Girl Scout Cookies in the neighborhood of their wartime Brooklyn home.



One of my favorite writers of all time is Don Marquis, who wrote: “. . . the Brooklyn Bridge, that song in stone and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist . . .” Don also said: “Politeness, rooted in the soul, is the only true politics.” President Obama has tried to live up to that adage, I believe. But there are limits. I have been waiting for someone to speak up about the pure political obstructionism of the Republican Party; the new incarnation of Newt Gingrich’s “Shut Down Congress.” Someone more like Harry Truman. Someone who would finally get up and remind us of the line from the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

I took a congressman from Brooklyn to do that. My hat is off to him. Give’m Hell, Tony!