Amerikai Magyar Hírlap, 2007 (19. évfolyam, 1-50. szám)
2007-01-26 / 5. szám
Art Buchwald Writes No More Chavez: 'Go to Hell, Gringos!' CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chavez told U.S. officials to “Go to hell!” on his weekly radio and TV show for what he called unacceptable meddling after Washington raised concerns about a measure to grant Venezuela’s fiery leftist leader broad lawmaking powers. The National Assembly, which is controlled by the president’s political allies, is expected to give final approval this week to what it calls the “enabling law,” which would give Chavez the authority to pass a series of laws by decree during an 18-month period. On Friday, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey said Chavez’s plans under the law “have caused us some concern.” Chavez rejected Casey’s statement in his broadcast, saying: “Go to hell, gringos! Go home!” Chavez, who was re-elected by a wide margin last month, has said he will enact sweeping reforms to remake Venezuela into a socialist state. Among his plans are nationalizing the main telecommunications company and the electricity and natural gas sectors. The president’s opponents accuse him of using his political strength to expand his powers. Relations between Caracas and Washington have been tense since Chavez was briefly ousted in a 2002 coup that he claimed the U.S. played a role in. The Bush administration has repeatedly denied being involved, although it recognized an interim government established by coup leaders. Since then, Chavez has consistently accused the U.S. of conspiring to oust him and often asserts the CIA is working to destabilize his government. U.S. officials have denied trying to overthrow Chavez, but they have labeled him a threat to democracy. Criticizing excessive consumption and self-indulgence, Chavez also announced plans in his broadcast to raise domestic gasoline prices and approve a new tax on luxury goods such as private yachts, second homes and extravagant automobiles. Journalist and author Art Buchwald died on Wednesday, at the age of 81 in Washington, D.C. With his trademark wit, Buchwald used his newspaper column to skewer politicians in the nation’s capital, and over the decades millions of Americans began their morning by reading his unfolding chronicle of history writ small and satirical. At the end of his life ill health gave him a new subject, his impending death, and he wrote a series of poignant dispatches from a hospice center he later left after outliving his stay. Mr. Buchwald died in Washington on Wednesday evening, according to his son, Joel, with whom he lived. The columnist was 81 and had published a book last year, “Too Soon to Say Goodbye,” that celebrated the unexpected coda to his long life of achievement. In February, he entered hospice care when his kidneys failed as a result of diabetes, and doctors gave him just weeks to live. After a year long respite that his son described as “a victory lap,” Mr. Buchwald - who had declined dialysis from the beginning - began once again receiving hospice care at home 13 days ago. “What was difficult was him almost dying and then not,” his daughter Jennifer of Roxbury wrote in an online forum on the Washington Post’s website. “And then it was great for a year. Every day was a gift. That made it easier ... to accept his death last night.” Mr. Buchwald, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1982, had lived in Washington nearly 45 years, dividing his time between the capital and a summer home on Martha’s Vineyard for the past 35 years. At its height, his syndicated column was published in hundreds of newspapers around the world, including The Boston Globe. He gathered columns into more than two dozen collections and many became bestsellers. In the past several months, Mr. Buchwald’s columns about hospice and his impending death inspired renewed interest in a columnist whose career began long before many of his readers were born. Rose Styron, a Vineyard Haven neighbor who had known Mr. Buchwald for 50 years, said that “his last year may have been his best. He was fondly fulfilled by the love and attention of all his friends and the recouping of his writing, both in newspapers and a final new book - with a gorgeous cover of the smiling Art we knew and loved.” “He was absolutely a dear, wise, friendly, caring man. He was just the best,” Mike Wallace, the “60 Minutes” correspondent and a Vineyard Haven neighbor, said. “We went through times of clinical depression together. When I didn’t know what the hell it was, he would call me every bloody night, no matter where I was, to talk me through it and to tell me how to handle it.” Mr. Buchwald was first treated for depression in the early 1960s and helped Wallace and novelist William Styron when they, too, struggled with the illness. He dubbed the trio the Blues Brothers and they occasionally traveled together about a decade ago, speaking to groups to help raise awareness about depression. Styron, who published “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness” in 1990 about his own struggles, died in November. In newspaper columns last year after entering a hospice center, and in last year’s book, Mr. Buchwald confronted the topic of dying, though with the twinkle in his eye readers had come to expect- especially when his health did not decline as predicted. “So far things are going my way. I am known in the hospice as ‘The Man Who Would Not Die,’ “ he wrote in his last book. “How long they allow me to stay here is another problem.” He added, “Dying isn’t hard. Getting paid by Medicare is.” Mr. Buchwald’s hospice room became a place where laughter- usually his own - often rang out as his bedside became a mandatory stopover for the boldfaced-name set. A headline for a March 26 New York Times story on his time in hospice declared, “Washington’s Hottest Salon Is a Deathbed.” Mr. Buchwald’s health improved to the point that he was able to leave the hospice on July 1 and head to the Vineyard, where he had spent every summer for so many years. “The whole point is I didn’t expect to be here,” he told the Globe in July at his gray-shingled house on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. “My plan was to leave the earth. And then I thought, to hell with it, I’ll go to the Vineyard.” Though known for his political humor, Mr. Buchwald began his career in his 20s writing about restaurants and night life for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune. He expanded into writing about celebrities, and the column was syndicated as “Art Buchwald in Paris.” Against the advice of friends, Mr. Buchwald relinquished his status as perhaps the best known American in the City of Lights and relocated in the early 1960s to Washington, where he began writing political satire columns. “There was no better way to start the day than to open the morning paper to Art’s column, laugh out loud, and learn all over again to take the issues seriously in the world of politics, but not take yourself too seriously,” US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement yesterday. Mr. Buchwald employed an approach to his work and a writing style that were deceptively simple. He would tear an article from a newspaper, tuck it in a pocket, and mull the subject - - sometimes for days - before quickly pounding out a column in unadorned prose that often turned the topic of the day on its head. Glib on the page, Mr. Buchwald had endured what, for many, would have been a lifetime’s share of sadness, which he explored in a pair of memoirs published in the 1990s. “Leaving Home” chronicles a New York City childhood in the late 1920s and early ‘30s that veered toward the The English Page of the Hírlap can serve as a bridge between the non-Hungarian-speaking members of the family and the community. Use it to bring people together! Subscribe to the Hírlap! Advertise your business in the Hírlap! If you have any questions or suggestions, please call (323) 463-6376 Dickensian. His mother was institutionalized for severe depression not long after his birth, and he and his two sisters were sent to a series of foster homes by a father who for many years was unable to support his children. At 17, Mr. Buchwald joined the Marines. After his hitch was up, he spent three years at the University of Southern California, then moved to Paris — ostensibly to study French on the GI Bill, though he coveted the expatriate writing life. He talked his way into the night life column at the Herald Tribune. His second memoir, “I’ll Always Have Paris,” recounts a rich life that included showing Elvis Presley around the city and letting Gene Kelly dance with his bride, Ann McGarry, at their wedding. But it also touches on Mr. Buchwald’s battles with depression. He was hospitalized in 1962 after returning to the United States and suffered recurring bouts, telling interviewers that he twice strongly considered suicide. The illness contributed to the break-up of his marriage. Mr. Buchwald and his wife separated in the early 1990s, but he moved back in with her after she was diagnosed with cancer. Ann Buchwald died in July 1994. Mr. Buchwald and his family first started going to Martha’s Vineyard in 1971 to escape Washington’s summer heat. Along with using the Vineyard as a retreat, Mr. Buchwald served for many years as master of ceremonies and auctioneer at an annual fund-raiser to benefit a consortium of island social service agencies. “I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve become the Jerry Lewis of Martha’s Vineyard,” he told the Globe in 1996. In hospice care last year, Mr. Buchwald retained his sense of humor and took pleasure in being able to eat whatever he wanted after deciding to forgo dialysis treatment, which would have prolonged his life. “The thing that is very important, and why I’m writing this, is that whether they like it or not, everyone is going to go,” he wrote in a March 14 column. “The big question we still have to ask is not where we’re going, but what were we doing here in the first place?” In addition to his son and daughter, Mr. Buchwald leaves another daughter, Connie Buchwald Marks of Culpeper, Va.; two sisters, Edith Jaffe of Bellevue, Wash., and Doris Kahme of Delray Beach, Fla., and Monroe Township, N.J.; and five grandchildren. (The Boston Globe) DUNA Travel 8530 Holloway Dr. #102 W. 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