My apologies to President Biden

Allegations of plagiarism.  Anti-Semitism.  Racism.  War overseas.  The country on fire.

 

These sound like issues currently besetting the United States and the world.  

 

They also happen to be issues broached in The Holdovers, a 2023 film directed by Alexander Payne, a film that is set during the school year of 1970-71.

 

Some of us can get depressed when we think about the state of our country and the world.

 

But art has always had the ability to inspire us, to amuse us and to give us hope even in the midst of circumstances that can be dire, perhaps especially when we are facing crises that may be existential, such as climate change, the evil of Putin, the threat of tyrants and wannabe tyrants at home and abroad.

 

Yes, art can heal us.  

 

It may be what God wants us to appreciate the most about life, except, of course, for our love, the devotion, that we have for Him, for the Lord.

 

As it concerns movies, it was my dad, who first sat me on his lap in 1971, when I was in 1st grade, which is coincidentally the very time period in which The Holdovers takes place.

 

I will talk more about The Holdovers later in this essay.

 

Let me begin, though, with a discussion about my dad’s brilliance and his love for movies, a love that I share.

 

My dad, who passed away in 2020, once told me that he had read that George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars series, saw elements of himself in each of the four main characters in American Graffiti, his breakthrough film from 1973.

 

While it is true that every character in any film, novel, play or other work of art is filtered through the perspective of the writer, I did not know anything about the writing of screenplays or plays or fiction when I was a boy.

 

Nor did I know about the power of a work of art to reach a person.

 

When a work of art is of unsurpassed originality, it can reach just about all of us.

 

In a luminous work of art, we can identify with a character, whether we are the writer or director of a movie, like George Lucas, or whether we are a filmgoer or playgoer or reader of fiction.

 

I was just a kid, 6 years old, in 1971, as I already mentioned, when my dad blessed me with his love for movies.

 

I have written before of how my dad in a stroke of genius ushered into my life the  old Warner Brothers movies from the 1930s and ’40s when I was in 1st grade, a time when I had stopped reading.

 

My father did not understand why I no longer had any interest in reading, and I did not understand either because I was dissociating from the evil of my kindergarten teacher who had traumatized me beginning in October 1970 when she smacked my left hand and put me in the “dunce corner,” where I had to crouch for perhaps an hour every day, as a friend recently reminded me.

 

Mrs. Crawley, my K teacher, also sexually abused me in the bathroom in the basement of Mishkan Israel, a synagogue, where my public school kindergarten class was being held in 1970-71, while Spring Glen School’s regular building in Hamden, Conn., was being renovated.

 

Despite the abuse that I endured from Mrs. Crawley, she could not destroy my soul, and that is because God blessed me, as He has blessed all of us, with the Holy Spirit.

 

I have learned more about Jesus in the past few years since I started hanging out with some dear friends to whom I was introduced by Barbara, my wife, who passed away in 2019.

 

Barbara, like my dad and mom and my friends, nurtured me back to health, and one of the ways that Barbara did so was through the movies.  Barbara and I used to see a lot of films for years, until her health deteriorated significantly about 10 years ago.

 

Until that time, we went often to the movies.

 

Of course, as I have written before, movies had been a passion of mine since my dad brought into my world the imaginative dreamscape of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, John Garfield, Edward G. Robinson and Errol Flynn after we bought our first color TV, a Sony, in late 1971 when I was in 1st grade.

 

As we enter 2024, I have been reflecting not only on the movies and the role that they have played in my life, I have also been reflecting on the current state of our politics and the world.

 

I don’t know when President Biden moved to Delaware from Scranton, Pa., but, as we all know, President Biden was just a little boy when he was mocked by a nun on his first day of Catholic school in Delaware.

 

He told his mother about how the nun taunted him due to a speech impediment that he had; Joe Biden’s mom admonished the teacher the next day.

 

The nun apparently stopped mocking Joe Biden after that.

 

Mrs. Crawley did not stop abusing me, even though I did tell my parents about the abuse that I endured on what I believe was Oct. 12, 1970, my first day back at kindergarten after I had missed two days of school for Yom Kippur around the time of my 5th birthday.

 

What I did not know and would not know for years was that Oct. 12 was the very day that my paternal grandfather, Samuel, after whom I was named in Hebrew, had taken his life in 1942.

 

When I told my parents on again what I believe was Oct. 12, 1970, that Mrs. Crawley had put me in the “dunce corner,” my dad began to speak to my mom in Spanish.

 

He did not want me to understand what he was saying.

 

He may very well have been spooked because of the eerie resonance of his father’s tragedy occurring on the same day years earlier.

 

I want to be clear that I am not faulting my dad or my mom because they did not call the principal of Spring Glen School to complain about Mrs. Crawley.

 

I love my father and my mother.  And they did nothing wrong.

 

In deciding not to call the principal, my parents probably thought that Mrs. Crawley would not repeat her act of hatred toward me.

 

After all, who could fathom the evil of what Mrs. Crawley ended up doing to me, then a 5-year-old boy, abusing me spiritually, mentally, physically and sexually for the next seven to eight months.

 

It is also true that my parents had not been invited to join High Lane, the local swim and tennis club, when we moved into our house in the Spring Glen neighborhood of Hamden, Conn., two years earlier in 1968, whereas another family, a Gentile one, who moved in a year or so after us, was immediately offered a membership at High Lane.

 

Still, my public school, Spring Glen, was being held in 1970-71 at Mishkan Israel, a synagogue, in a sign of religious tolerance, openness and interfaith outreach.

 

And, as I say, my parents could not have foreseen the evil that would afflict me for the rest of the school year.

 

Unfortunately, a few days after the initial abuse on Oct. 12, 1970, Mrs. Crawley sent me back to the “dunce corner,” and I began to dissociate.

 

She mocked me, as I started to talk to myself, and she would later commit other acts of evil against me.

 

It may be that President Biden and I have a lot more in common than I ever realized.

 

It is not only that we were both mocked and harmed by teachers when we were little boys.

 

President Biden and I are on the same side of almost every issue.  

 

In learning about Jesus the past few years from a dear family in the Bay Area, a family that happens to be overwhelmingly African-American, I have learned a lot about myself.

 

I have learned about forgiveness and healing.  

 

I do not hate Mrs. Crawley.  I do not hate anyone.

 

Like Jesus, I overflow with love, as Miss Charlotte Bruney, my 9th grade math teacher, told everyone at Hopkins, when I was a senior at my high school, a prep school in New Haven, Conn., and when I was on the verge of possibly being kicked out of school after people had lied about me, a pattern that would repeat in my life.

 

When you have been traumatized at a young age, you sometimes dissociate for years whenever there is a trigger effect that reignites the trauma.

 

In my case, I dissociated for decades when evil savaged me, and I was also unaware of the kindness of people who were trying to help me fight that evil.

 

It should be clear to us all that God operates on His own time clock, and He reveals trauma, as He reveals goodness and evil, when He decides, when He believes that we are ready to process it.

 

God is the Author and Finisher of our Faith, and He reveals different events at different times at His own pace.

 

He is the Master Storyteller, the Master of all art forms, including film, theater, fiction and everything else that is beautiful in the world. 

 

Getting back to my time in high school, when I was a senior at Hopkins, I was being harmed by a bunch of people.

 

I had been accepted early at Yale and was going to be accepted at Brown, as well as at Harvard, as is almost always the case of a winner of the Harvard Book Prize, which I won in 1982.  But my apparent acceptance at Harvard in 1983 was denied because of the lies that were being told about me by some people at Hopkins.

 

None of the details may be particularly important anymore.

 

What is important is that Miss Bruney, who was African-American and a devout Christian, not unlike my friends in the Bay Area, stood up for me in front of morning assembly at Hopkins and denigrated the entire school for the character assassination that was being conducted against me, as I wrote in a piece in Thrive Global in 2021, “The Gospel of Charlotte Bruney.”

 

Miss Bruney, like my dad, like my mom, like Barbara, and like my friends in the Bay Area and other friends, did the right thing and did what Jesus would do by calling out the Pharisees, by lambasting the hypocrites and liars, and by standing up for me, someone who was being victimized by evil.

​

In addition to Miss Bruney and Mr. Delaney Kiphuth and my buddy Andrew Levy, who has carried the Ark of the Covenant for me for decades, and Leila Parikh, our class valedictorian, a person, who had one of the greatest impacts on me, was Mrs. Toni Giamatti, my first adviser at Hopkins and my English teacher in 7th grade.

 

Like Joe Biden, who loves Yeats and many of the great Irish poets, Mrs. Giamatti had an appreciation for poetry, for language, for the way words sound in combination with one another.

 

Mrs. Giamatti stood up for me when I was being harmed at Hopkins and at Yale, where Bart, her husband, was the president from 1978 through 1986.

 

As it turns out, Paul Giamatti, son of Mrs. Giamatti and Bart Giamatti and star of The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s recent film, was a classmate of mine in Professor George Fayen’s English class at Yale in 1986, a class where we studied Chaucer and had to recite the opening 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales.

 

This past August, I saw Paul at Professor Fayen’s memorial service, and we talked about Paul’s mom and dad, Mrs. Giamatti and Bart Giamatti, as well as Marcus, Paul’s brother, and Elena, Paul’s sister, who sadly had just passed away, like Professor Fayen.

 

All of these people are angels, and, like Paul, all of them have or had a gift for language.  They could and can speak the speech trippingly on the tongue, as Hamlet instructs the players in Shakespeare’s famous tragedy.

 

It should go without saying that anything beautiful that anyone of us has ever written or said or done was in fact written or spoken or performed by God.

 

God Is, as my friends in the Bay Area have told me.

 

God is all of us.  He is every person, every animal, every invention, every work of art, every tree, every building, everything.

 

God is love, as Barbara, my wife, always used to say, citing the New Testament.

 

God is certainly everything good, everything beautiful in the world. 

 

And, as President Biden knows so well, God is the Word.

 

As I pointed out before, God is the Author and Finisher of our Faith, which is to say all faiths, for we are all under One God; we are all under the same Creator, even if we call Him by different names, Jesus, Yahweh, Allah, Buddha, the Great Spirit, or any other name.

 

Of course, we all sin; indeed, we all get the thorn of Satan in us from time to time.

 

I know that I do, and I atone for this every day.

 

Not one of us is perfect, except Jesus, except God.

 

Jesus is not here to heal the perfect; He is here to heal the rest of us, for we are all sinners, and there is no one righteous, no, not one, and that includes me.

 

I am without a doubt a sinner; sometimes, I think that I may be the chief sinner, as Paul, the Apostle, says of himself.

 

I have not persecuted anyone or sent them to their deaths, as Paul the Apostle did.

 

But, among other sins, I have been arrogant and cruel at times in my writing and in my speech.

 

I have apologized to some people in the past, like President Obama, and I want to apologize right now to President Biden.

 

In 2014, I wrote a column titled “Joe Biden: Shakespearean Wordsmith” for the Huffington Post.

 

I criticized Joe Biden because he used the term, “Shylocks,” to refer to unethical money lenders who prey upon servicemen.

 

It was very cruel of me when I wrote the following of President Biden, then vice president of our country: “that he is not a brain surgeon is well known.”

 

I am very sorry that I wrote this.  And I am very sorry that I wrote other cruel and disrespectful things about Joe Biden in that piece.

 

For instance, I wrote that he was an “absent-minded bumbler, who happens to be a proverbial heart beat from the presidency.”

 

Let me state for the record that Joe Biden is the best president of my lifetime.  

 

Barack Obama, under whom Joe Biden served as vice president, is the most inspirational president of my lifetime.  

 

But Joe Biden is the best.

 

And Joe Biden is the best president, perhaps the best since Harry Truman and John Kennedy, because he has a rare combination of humility, wisdom, strength, intelligence and empathy.

 

President Biden also believes deeply in Jesus, deeply in God.

 

And God has blessed Joe Biden with the Holy Spirit.

 

Sometimes, when you are a writer, you can forget that you need to be kind and humane and empathetic when you are writing about people who are good public servants.

 

Joe Biden is a very thoughtful man, filled with wisdom and empathy.  He speaks quite well, and he has the experience and compassion and intelligence and strength of character to lead us through the next four years.

 

In my 2014 Huffington Post piece, I also wrote about the allegations of plagiarism against Joe Biden when he was a younger man. 

 

Joe Biden probably had no idea that he or his staff was borrowing from Neil Kinnock’s speeches back in 1988 when Joe Biden was first running for president of the U.S.

 

Also, Joe Biden did apologize for apparently borrowing some passages from a law review article when he was a law student at Syracuse University.

 

He apologized then, as he always has, when he has made errors.

 

And the errors that Joe Biden made, from what I have read, were relatively minor.

 

The issue of plagiarism is one that I take seriously, not least because people have tried to steal from me over the years.

 

It is not for me to judge anyone who has been accused of plagiarism.

 

There are some scholars, for instance, who have others take notes for them, and they sometimes forget to attribute other writers in their footnotes.

 

I have never plagiarized, but the unfortunate truth is that some people have not only tried to steal from me; they have also lied about me and probably tried to claim that I plagiarized.

 

This indeed is what happens to Paul Giamatti’s character in the recent Alexander Payne film, The Holdovers.  Part of the backstory is that Paul Hunham, Giamatti’s character, was kicked out of Harvard when he was a student because another student plagiarized from Hunham and then lied, claiming that Hunham plagiarized from him.

 

This is not the space for me to discuss all of the pathetic lies by others, who have attempted to steal and plagiarize from me, going back to when I was a student at Hopkins or even earlier.

 

Nor is it the space for me to comment on the resignation of Dr. Claudine Gay, who recently stepped down as president of Harvard over allegations of plagiarism following her testimony before Congress.

 

These are all complicated issues and subjects perhaps for another column.

 

The bottom line is that Joe Biden, on whom I am focusing in this essay, is a very good man, who has apologized when he has made errors in his life.

 

I too have made errors.

 

I too am a sinner, as I say.

 

I have written about how I got sexual massages from call-girls when I was a young man in college in a piece I wrote in L.A. Weekly in its 2005 “Best of L.A.” issue, a piece titled “The Big Rub.”

 

I continued to get some sexual massages at times when I was married to my angel, Barbara, a sin for which I repent every day and a sin that I no longer commit.

 

It might be worth pointing out that I never had an affair.  I did not want the possibility of another woman falling in love with me, nor did I want the possibility that I might fall in love with another woman.

 

None of this excuses me for my sin.

 

While it is possible that I may have been a sex addict, I have quit my odious behavior.

 

In the past few years, I have become “born-again.”

 

I am still a sinner.  Among other sins, I can get jealous of other people, like President Obama, as I wrote in a piece in Thrive Global in 2018 (“Barack, Baruch and Blessings for the Holidays”).

 

I repent for my jealousy and my other sins all the time.

 

But I no longer get sexual massages.  

 

I have changed my actions and “reconfigured my life,” to quote the late Bart Giamatti, then Major League Baseball Commissioner, when he spoke of how Pete Rose, whom he banished from baseball, needed to quit gambling and betting on the game. 

The Holdovers does not allude to gambling, another addiction, but it does allude to prostitution and other acts of sex that might be considered sinful, another reason why this film speaks to me.