A year ago, I received a phone call out of the blue from the legendary producer Norman Lear. He said he was ringing me to say that he was impressed with my work, mentioning my recently published book American Psychosis and my appearances on MSNBC. I wondered if there was something more to the call. Did he need me for anything? No. He just wanted to pass along a compliment and chat. Norman was 100 years old at the time, but he was, as usual, astute, funny, and well-informed during our wide-ranging discussion of the news of the moment, the dire state of American politics, and the continuing threat to democracy posed by MAGAism. “I love liberty," he told me. “It’s the heart and soul of all I’ve tried to do.”

When our conversation was done, I was in the clouds. The man who changed American culture with All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, and his many other successful television endeavors and who had long been a champion of liberalism with his creation of People for the American Way (formed to challenge the religious right) and his decades of extensive philanthropy appreciated my work. But it was especially an honor coming from a fellow who was extraordinary also because of his personal qualities. As many have noted through the years, Norman was one of the most engaging, intelligent, witty, warm, and delightful men you could meet. It is difficult to convey the experience of being in his company. He exuded decency, smarts, and affability, and he possessed a remarkable ability to connect. He had an aura, and it was a rush to be within it.

Norman died at the age of 101 this week. His obituaries depict him, quite rightfully, as a towering figure of modern America. His accomplishments in transforming America are staggering. What also deserves mentioning is that he was a helluva guy. He embodied the best of liberalism and the American spirit.

His call to me was not my first encounter with Norman. We met in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I was having lunch outdoors at a Los Angeles restaurant with Stanley Sheinbaum, a philanthropist and civic activist widely considered to be one of the top L.A. liberals. Norman and his wife Lyn sat down at the other end of the patio. Even at that distance, Norman, then pushing 70, had this hard-to-believe healthy glow to him. “I hope,” I thought to myself, “I look that good when I’m 50.” 

“Look at Norman,” Stanley said to me. “He’s two years younger than me but looks 20 years younger. When he first came to town, I introduced him around. Soon everybody liked him better than me.” When we finished lunch, Stanley introduced me to Norman and Lyn. Norman was the bigshot, but he asked me, this young pisher, a host of questions about my work. He made me feel 10 feet tall. “Keep in touch,” he said, as we left. It was a much-valued invitation. At that point, he was not just a showbiz titan; he was a political force.

Norman was an early participant in the nation’s culture wars—but as a positive and witty warrior. His early TV hits in the 1970s injected social issues into primetime network sitcoms for the first time, poking fun at bigotry, hatred, and small-mindedness. A key value all his storylines advanced was tolerance. Naturally, he was aghast to see at that time the rise of the religious right—most notably, the Moral Majority led by Jerry Falwell—and its powerful merger of fundamentalist intolerance and politics.

As he recounts in his wonderful memoir, Even This I Get to Experience, one day he was watching the highly popular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart (not yet disgraced in a prostitution scandal) and saw him ask his viewers to pray for the “removal” of a Supreme Court justice. Requesting good Christians to beseech God for the death of a justice pushed Norman over the edge. Soon thereafter he created a public service announcement with an actor portraying a hard-hat worker standing next to a forklift who says straight into the camera:

We’re a religious family, but that don’t mean we see things the same way politically. Now, here come certain preachers on radio and TV and in the mail, telling us on a bunch of political issues that there’s just one Christian position, and implying if we don’t agree we’re not good Christians. So, my son is a bad Christian on two issues. My wife is a good Christian on those issues, but she’s a bad Christian on two others… [M]aybe there’s something wrong when people, even preachers, suggest that other people are good Christians or bad Christians depending on their political views. That’s not the American way.

Whoa, his friends told Norman. You’re Jewish, rich, and a Hollywood top dog, and you want to go to war on your own against the Christian right? Norman recognized his pals were right. He recruited prominent religious leaders to endorse this spot: Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame; Rev. Jimmy Allen, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (yes, you read that right—the last moderate to hold that post); William Sloane Coffin, a prominent liberal Episcopalian clergyman; Charles Bergstrom, the spokesperson for the Lutheran Church; and others.

With the support of these folks (including Stanley Sheinbaum), he organized People for the American Way, a nonprofit to advance liberal causes and values, and barnstormed across the nation raising money for the new outfit. PFAW eventually bought time to play the PSA on a Washington, DC, television station. That landed Norman and former Iowa Sen. Harold Hughes, a Democrat, evangelical Christian, and PFAW supporter, on the Today show. Norman’s group was now officially on the map. More PSAs followed (including several directed by Jonathan Demme, who would go on to fame as the director of The Silence of the Lambs). Norman produced a blistering half-hour documentary on the Moral Majority that indicted the extremist organization by showing the speeches and sermons delivered by its officials. Burt Lancaster narrated the film. (Today, PFAW is a vital piece of the progressive infrastructure; among its many activities, it funds the essential Right Wing Watch.)

Continuing in this vein, Norman pitched to the three broadcast networks a variety show to be called I Love Liberty. His plan was for it to be a star-studded, completely nonpartisan, two-hour salute to America to mark the 250th anniversary of George Washington’s birthday in 1982. The executives had a tough time believing an avowedly liberal group like PFAW would be able to eschew partisanship, but ABC told Norman that if he could get two ex-presidents—a Democrat and a Republican—to co-sponsor the shindig, they’d go for it. Jimmy Carter was the only living former Democratic president and still unpopular after his recent loss to Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, well….you know. So Norman countered: How about an ex-president and a former first lady? He had Gerald Ford and Lady Bird Johnson in mind. With the help of Betty Ford, a fan of Maude, Norman roped in her husband. Johnson subsequently agreed as well.

The showed began with Sen. Barry Goldwater, the legendary Arizona conservative and former GOP presidential candidate, standing alone in a spotlight. He said that he had wanted an enormous opening with a great deal of patriotic hoopla but that the producer had desired something much more modest. Then came the number: a jamboree with 1,700 performers, including marching bands, a dozen Uncle Sams on stilts, dancers, jugglers, 16,000 red-white-and-blue balloons, the reenactment of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and much more.

When it was done, the camera cut to Goldwater: “That was the compromise.”

The rest of the show featured the Muppets as members of the Continental Congress, Martin Sheen reading a letter from George Washington, a host of patriotic tunes, Jane Fonda, Jimmy Buffett, LeVar Burton, and other famous entertainers, as well as Barbra Streisand singing “America the Beautiful.” In one segment, a Black man, a Latino, a Native American, a woman, and a gay man each vented his or her frustration that the United States had yet to deliver fully on its promise of equality. They concluded their remarks with this line: “Right now America isn’t working that well for me, but I love my country.”

One of the best bits was Robin Williams performing as the US flag:

The Christian Science Monitor praised the show: “Through the skillful use of songs, dance, dramatic skits, and recitations, ‘I Love Liberty’ tries to wrest away from and then share the mantle of patriotism with those who insist upon using the flag as their exclusive cloak. It invests the love of freedom, liberty, and the flag symbol itself with a kind of natural and refreshing sophistication in which all Americans can join unashamedly. However, besides championing good old-fashioned patriotism, 'I Love Liberty' succeeds in being good, old-fashioned family fun.”

Several times when I chatted with Norman about his television career, he reminisced more about I Love Liberty than his many other achievements in the business. At the time, he knew that he was in a knife fight with the reactionary forces of the right, but he brought to this clash not another knife, but humor, goodwill, creativity, and entertainment. He refused to concede patriotism to the bigots of the religious right and their political allies.

Not long after that phone call from Norman last year, I was in Los Angeles and went to see him at his home. He was in a wheelchair, wearing his customary bucket hat, and a motorized lift carried him up the stairs to his memorabilia-filled office. We spent about two hours together. His mind was sharp. But he did say that he was getting forgetful about certain matters. He asked me to remind him of some of our previous encounters, and I recounted for him an evening during President Barack Obama’s first inauguration when we had dinner in Washington, DC, with Mike Mills and Michael Stipe of REM. I have no idea how we managed to gather in this group. But the five of us ended up at a fancy restaurant having a wonderful time. As we dined and drank, Lynda Carter, who had starred as Wonder Woman in the television series, walked past. She spotted Norman and tried to vault over a group of large planters to say hello, stumbled, fell to the ground, and then stood up and with great dignity presented herself to him. He was, of course, gracious and chatted with her for a while. Wonder Woman doing whatever was necessary to be with Norman—that made sense. “Ah, yes,” he said to me, perhaps remembering. But maybe not.

We discussed the never-ending tribalization of American politics, the grip that hate-fueled Trumpism had on the GOP and millions of Americans, and the unsettling prospects of a Donald Trump restoration. Though the recent midterm elections had provided reason for hope, he knew that the dangers of MAGA demagoguery had not passed. “It’s never over,” he said with a sigh, referring to the battle to preserve tolerance and progressive gains. This was a fight he had led for over four decades.

As he did so often, during our visit, Norman expressed astonishment at his immense good fortune. He reminisced about his television years and chuckled when I told him I was a big fan of some of his lesser-known shows, particularly Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a soap opera spoof, and Fernwood 2 Night, which became America 2 Night, perhaps the first send-up of late-night talk shows. He was developing a television show, he said, that he wanted me to work on. It was about a host on a liberal cable news network whose adult daughter was a Trump conservative. Once again, in All in the Family style, he would be exploring modern-day politics through family dynamics, but in an inversion of the relationship between conservative Archie Bunker and his liberal daughter Gloria and son-in-law Michael. He told me one of his own children was a Trump supporter, and the two of them had to rely on love to navigate through their political differences.

Norman, I said, you’re 100. You have future projects? He described the five shows in development he was overseeing, including an animated version of Good Times. And I could see he was not kidding. Throughout our conversation, the telephone kept ringing. He would pick it up and say something brief like, I read the script; the notes are on the way. Or, I can review the edit tomorrow. Or, Arrange a meeting so we can flesh that out further. He was creating and juggling—and still looking for how he could be a meaningful part of a debate that could make the United States a better nation. And, damnit, he still looked good. The glow was there.

If anyone could cheat the Grim Reaper—hold him at bay, perhaps with a mischievous smile, a wink—it would be Norman. His optimism was contagious. Maybe, I thought, we would soon be working on a sitcom that would convince people that they can find shared values and connect across harshly drawn lines in these divisive times. Alas, it was not to be.

I don’t know how he did it, but I felt as if I became a better person just by sitting next to Norman. When I tweeted that sentiment upon the news of his death, actor John Cusack, who had worked with Norman, replied, “Feel exactly the same. Whenever you left his company you left a better and more thoughtful kind person.” Norman was responsible for so many marvelous and important parts of American life. (His film company backed This Is Spinal Tap when others wouldn’t touch it.) He deserves all the encomiums he’s now receiving. But for those lucky enough to have known him, he uniquely graced their lives. That’s a success that can’t be honored with an Emmy.

For more on Norman Lear, watch the 2016 documentary Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

Inexperienced MAGA-ish House Speaker Mike Johnson stepped into it again this week. Announcing that he would release to the public footage of the Trump-incited January 6 riot, he declared that the faces of the “persons who participated in the events of that day” would be blurred before the videos would be made public. The reason? “We don’t want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ and to have other, you know, concerns and problems,” he said.

That remark provoked much tittering. Just to get this straight: the person second in line to be president of the United States didn’t want prosecutors to be able to prosecute supposed criminals who assaulted the Capitol and attacked law enforcement officers? That’s not very law-and-order-ish. His spokesperson immediately said the faces would be blurred to “prevent all forms of retaliation against private citizens from any non-governmental actors.” Indeed, the feds already had access to this footage. But Johnson’s bias was revealed. Referring to the rioters as “persons who participated in the events of the day” is not the kind of language he would use to describe migrants crossing the border without documentation. And he clearly was not in favor of prosecution of any more of these “persons”—quite the stance for a lawyer whose workplace was ransacked by violent marauders.

As Democrats and reporters increasingly point out Trump’s authoritarian impulses and the potential dangers of a second presidential term for him, Trump, his allies, and Fox News have begun a campaign claiming that actually President Joe Biden is the leader who threatens democracy. Covering the Biden “threat,” Fox News put up an image this week headlined “Critics Slam Trump as ‘Dictator,’ Ignore Biden’s Overreach.” Its evidence? “SCOTUS nixed affirmative action in colleges. SCOTUS rejected Biden’s pandemic eviction ban. Supreme Court hesitant to green-light Biden’s wealth tax plans.”

Let’s unpack the logic here. On one side is a former president who falsely claimed he won an election, tried to overturn the results, encouraged violence to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, and called for suspending the Constitution so he could be restored to the presidency. On the other side is a current president who’s lost a few policy battles in the Supreme Court. Yeah, what about that Biden?!

As I noted last week, some of the New York Times coverage of Henry Kissinger’s departure from the land of the living downplayed his actions and decisions that led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of civilians around the globe. This week, the Times outdid itself by running a front-pager that focused on Kissinger’s life as a party-hopping socialite. Its lead:

Henry A. Kissinger, the powerful diplomat who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and accused of being a war criminal for his realpolitik approach to foreign affairs, had a kind of second career on the society circuit, especially in the years after he served as secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

The piece cheerily reported that Kissinger “moved with pirouette precision through benefit galas and became part of the scene at Studio 54.”

Not a single word about Cambodia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Chile, and Argentina. Nothing about organizing secret bombings, backing coups, and okaying torture and murder. But, man, you should have seen Henry par-tay! 

The judges tend to skip the GOP debates because there’s simply too much material and too little time. After all, they all have day jobs. But this week, after the Republican’s fourth kiddie-table mosh pit, they are making an exception and awarding a runner-up prize to the smarmy Vivek Ramaswamy for insisting that January 6 was an “inside job” and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Spoiler alert: They were not.

Ramaswamy’s predictable conspiracy-mongering was not enough to earn him the cup. That goes to former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for asserting, "For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17 percent more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that."

Wow! That’s some rate of growth. Using Haley’s math, after using TikTok for two hours, a person would be twice as antisemitic. And what happens the next day? And the next? Pretty soon this single TikTokker will be 100 times more antisemitic!

What the hell was she talking about? Turns out there was a supposed study that concluded that people who are on TikTok for 30 minutes a day are 17 percent more antisemitic. But this study was not peer-reviewed and appears loaded with problems. If you’re watching Taylor Swift TikToks for all that time, does that make you more antisemitic? In any event, couldn’t Haley figure out that this formula she was promoting—every 30 minutes of TikTok-ing adds 17 percent more antisemitism to your worldview—was absurd? Time for some remedial math classes for her. 

I could fill entire issues of Our Land with mail prompted by articles on the Hamas-Israel war. There was a range of reaction to the recent issue on opposition to a ceasefire.

Carol Moore wrote:

Just a quick note to express my agreement with and gratitude for your newsletter headlined, "The Tragic Indifference of ‘No Ceasefire.'" You will likely get some angry pushback, and I suspect you are expecting it. But I'm in complete support of what you have written. I worry that the Palestinians are viewed as expendable, even by the Arab states around them. Who will speak for them?

And there was pushback. William Scharf emailed:

For most of my life as a Jew in the United States I have been a moderate. I always hoped there would be a two-state compromise. But if I place myself as a Jew living in Israel, I would defend Israel and not be in favor of a ceasefire. Why the change of heart? Palestinians and their supporters call the Israeli bombing and killing of civilians a "genocide" and should be prosecuted for "war crimes." Where was the world when the US and Britain bombed Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, and many other German cities killing an estimated 600,000 civilians. Where was the world when the US firebombed Tokyo, Yokohama, and 30 other Japanese cities killing several hundred thousand Japanese civilians? Where was the world when the US dropped two atomic bombs killing over 100,000 Japanese civilian? Where was the world when the US dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia? Where was the world when the Bush Administration lied about "weapons of mass destruction" and bombed Iraq prior to the invasion?

The killing of civilians was considered collateral damage in those bombing campaigns. But when the Israelis drop leaflets and communicate warnings ahead of the invasion, somehow they are "mass murderers" of a people who teach their children to hate Jews, have sent their youth strapped with bombs into Israel, continually fire rockets into Israel, and attack Israeli men, women, and children with the barbarity that words cannot describe. And somehow Israelis are accused of genocide.

I do not support the killing of civilians. But when you cannot tell the difference between the innocents and the aggressors and those aggressors hide within the civilian population, then it is Hamas who is promoting the slaughter of its own civilians. I do not support Netanyahu in his political career, but whatever Israel decides to do in this war I will support them.

Does Hamas’ horrific massacre of Israeli civilians justify Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians through a massive bombing campaign? Yes, history is replete with barbarous bombing campaigns, conducted by the United States and others. But should we rely on those horrors to rationalize the current death and destruction in Gaza? I know what the answer is for William.

Sid Plait also took issue:

What people seem to forget is that Israel is totally surrounded by water and nations that have declared that their goal is to destroy Israel and eliminate Jews all over the world, including in “Palestine.” Israel has not started a war… ever. Israel doesn’t go to war looking for land, and yet in every war they have won, they’ve had to give back land. Israel does not go to war to eradicate anyone, much less a people. 

All the protests around the world are created by people who are either uneducated on the situation, are for peace everywhere, or being manipulated by others with a hateful agenda. Those who seek peace everywhere are deluded in their thinking. Even if Israel stopped fighting, those who hate her will just continue to attack her. I hate that people are being killed, but they brought this upon themselves. Until Hamas and others who attack Israel are stopped, people will die. 

I read your reports whenever I get them, and will continue to do so, but I cannot stand still when anyone sits on the side of ending war. We didn’t start it and we must see Hamas and their ilk, who were created only to wipe out the Jews and Israel in particular, removed from the planet. The Palestinians voted to accept Hamas and their agenda. They are now paying a painful price for that. 

I’m not going to get into a point-by-point rebuttal with readers who justify Israel’s actions. I’ve had my say in previous articles. I will note that Sid seems to overlook how Israel has treated the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the fact that the far right in Israel, which keeps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power, does contain elements calling for the removal of all Palestinians from occupied territories. One more thing: Half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18. They did not vote in 2005 to accept Hamas and its agenda. Do they deserve to be punished in such a brutal manner?

Peter Greenwald chimed in:

Hamas should ceasefire, that’s who! If Hamas would cease its years-long reign of terror on Israel, agree that Israel has a right to exist, and stop calling for the destruction of Israel, then the war would be over. Until Hamas changes its charter, recognizes Israel, and stops its terror attacks and suicide bombers, there can be no peace.

Hamas is a genocidal, terrorist outfit. It will not do that. The question then is this: Should Israel, which insists it is a democratic state guided by moral values, continue to kill large numbers of civilians to achieve an unclear military purpose? And to what end?

Back to a supporter. Roger Cain emailed:

Thank you for making sense about the senseless killing going on there. Keep up the good work. There are many people, sane, sensible people, who see that you are right. If we keep saying it to everyone we know, more people will join us.

I hope so. From the mail, though, it seems many people are committed to supporting the Netanyahu administration’s war plans, even though that causes them to justify the terrible killing occurring daily in Gaza with the help of American taxpayers.

“Hey, isn’t it that time of day when we go outside and play with the ball?”
“It would be, Moxie. But look. It’s dark outside now.”
“What happened? Did someone change time?”
“Exactly. They changed time.”
“Why would they do that? Darn them.”
“Congress could change this by passing a bill, Moxie.”
“Don’t hold your breath...Throw me that stuffed rabbit.”