Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life - Hardcover

Medved, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400051878 ISBN 13: 9781400051878

Publisher: Crown Forum, 2004

Synopsis

Nationally syndicated talk-radio host and noted film critic Michael Medved has taken an extraordinary journey from liberal activist to outspoken conservative. Along the way he has earned millions of admirers—and more than his share of enemies—by advancing controversial, often counterintuitive arguments, including:

· Liberals love losing because it makes them feel virtuous
· America isn’t normal—it’s bizarrely blessed
· Hollywood has lost touch with America—and punishes people who point that out
· Conservatives are both happier and nicer than liberals
· Talk radio is a source of hope, not hatred
· Business isn’t exploitative—it’s heroic
· There is no such thing as “planned parenthood”
· A more Christian America is good for the Jews
· Do-it-yourself conservatism provides the only cure for save-the-world liberalism

In the candid, electrifying Right Turns, Medved chronicles the adventures that taught him these and many other lessons—the startling events that propelled him from Vietnam protest leader to optimistic promoter of American patriotism, from secularism to religion, from adventurous single guy to doting husband and father. In the process he skewers leftist orthodoxy, revealing why the Right is right and why his former colleagues on the Left remain hopelessly wrong on every cultural, political, and social issue.

Medved enters today’s ideological fray armed with experience as, among many other things, a campaign aide for radical Democrats, a minority recruiter for police departments, a Hollywood screenwriter, a Bobby Kennedy volunteer, a teacher at religious schools, a world-champion hitchhiker, an expert on bad movies, and a veteran TV host on PBS and a British network—who declines to own a TV himself.

Medved relishes the contradictions behind the high-profile controversies in which he’s played a leading role—as a prominent movie reviewer who attacked the film industry in a bestselling book, as an observant Jew whose radio show is a favorite with evangelical Christians, as a writer once designated the “Bard of the Baby Boomers” who now expresses contempt for his generation’s arrogant indulgence, and as a fearless battler who has sought advice from both Rush Limbaugh and Hillary Clinton and has given advice to both Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand.

Right Turns displays the slashing argument and disarming wit that have made Medved’s radio program America’s number one show on politics and pop culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Medved’s daily three-hour radio program, The Michael Medved Show, reaches more than two million listeners coast to coast. He is the author of nine other books, including the bestsellers Hollywood vs. America and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65?, and is a member of USA Today’s board of contributors. For more than a decade he cohosted Sneak Previews, PBS’s weekly movie review show. An honors graduate of Yale, Medved lives with his family in the Seattle area.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Lesson 1: America Isn't Normal
Before she came to this country, my grandmother watched five of her six children die.

They were all girls, lost between the ages of three weeks and fourteen years, doomed by malnutrition, disease, persecution, and war.

There was nothing extraordinary, nothing exceptional about this series of tragedies; Eastern European parents commonly buried their children in the early decades of this century and learned to accept and expect a dismal pattern of suffering.

It was America, on the other hand, that proved radically different, utterly abnormal--a land bizarrely blessed in defiance of all laws of history. My grandmother understood American exceptionalism before she ever set eyes on the USA--in fact, she staked her life on it.

She was born in 1881 in the ramshackle village of Machnovka in the Ukraine, the blue-eyed, vivacious daughter of a slaughterer, a shochet, deemed respectable and comfortable by the standards of that time and place. At twenty-one, she married a barrel maker, Hershel Medved--hardworking, quiet, and reliable--who relocated to her town from Chmelnik, some twenty miles away, an even more remote and dreary corner of the Pale of Settlement. They bore children nearly every year that they lived together, before my grandfather made the journey to America in 1906. He traveled with his older brother and found work and lodgings in Philadelphia, living miserably but sending home money every month, saving his remaining pennies to pay for the steamship tickets that would bring his wife and children to the New World. After two years, he returned to Russia for a springtime visit that ended up lasting for nearly twelve months, long enough to produce another pregnancy. My grandfather returned to Philadelphia and never met the resulting twin girls, who barely clung to life--one of them lasting only three weeks and the other losing her fight for survival after several months. While my grandmother busied herself with the funeral arrangements for the second twin, she left her three-year-old in the care of a nearby relative. With the mourning period concluded, she reunited with her surviving children--immediately recognizing the deathly pallor of the youngest, Chansi, who had contracted one of the fevers ravaging the region. She died within days, enveloping my grandmother in overlapping cycles of grief.

In Philadelphia, through fanatical labor and self-denial, my grandfather sent money every month to Russia so that the blue-eyed wife he adored could accumulate enough to pay her way to America. She needed to save the cost of ship's passage across the Atlantic, train fare for herself and the children all the way to the Baltic port city of Riga, and bribe money to deal with the corrupt and sadistic Czarist bureaucrats who supervised the complicated border crossings. My grandmother painstakingly packed her nine-year-old son, Moshe (known a(c)ectionately as Moish), and her remaining two daughters, along with her elderly father, who refused to remain behind at home. They sold most of their meager belongings and tearfully departed their Ukrainian village in the summer of 1914.

They rode crowded trains, stifling with heat and sweat, herded together with other would-be emigrants. The swaggering immigration agents, demanding daily bribes to keep their unauthorized charges moving west, forced the mothers to tape shut the mouths of their children so they couldn't cry. When they arrived at Ostrolenka, on the border between Austria and Poland, the officials led the crowds to a row of huts where they could spend the night before crossing the frontier the next morning. According to my grandmother's vivid recollection it was a balmy, beautiful mid-summer evening with an orange-tinted half moon, a dazzling canopy of stars, and the fresh smell of pine forest drifting into the shack where the frightened refugees tried to sleep. That lovely night also happened to mark the beginning of World War I, with the weary Jews awakened before dawn and told to run for their lives ("Yiddin, loif!") and to find their way back to their home villages. With Russia and Austria-Hungary suddenly at war the border had been sealed and the police had begun rounding up or robbing all immigrant bands without the proper papers.

With three wailing children and her frail and ailing father, my grandmother straggled back to the Ukraine, dodging both police and bandits. By the time she arrived, the aborted journey had drained every kopek of the money her husband had sent her from America, as well as the funds she had assembled by selling her possessions. The war that began on that August night lasted for more than three bloody years, followed by revolution, civil war, starvation, persecution, and chaos. My grandmother watched her father die a slow, wasting death she could do nothing to stop, and then her two surviving daughters perished with merciful speed in the same grim and hungry year. Her son, Moshe, the only remaining member of the immediate family, became desperately ill and survived only through the ministrations and prayers of a mysterious, ragged, elderly stranger who had been passing through the village. Till the end of her life, my grandmother identified the visitor as Elijah the Prophet, eternal protector of his suffering people, come to earth in a wretched Ukrainian shtetl to spare her the final, crushing stroke of pain.

More than nine years passed from the time of her first attempt to leave Russia, fourteen years since she had last set eyes on her husband. For months, even years at a time, he lost contact with his grieving wife and only surviving child but when he could reach them reliably he continued to send them money from America, their only hope of survival. Finally, late in 1923, with Lenin consolidating the grip of his Communist dictatorship on a broken and bleeding Russia, her eighteen-year-old son led my terrified grandmother out of the only world she had ever known and they successfully boarded a ship to America.

Once again, their timing proved almost inconceivably poor: by the time their squalid ship made its way to New York Harbor, the year was 1924 and the United States had adopted a strict new immigration law, abruptly and harshly enforcing an act of Congress designed to stop the "invading" hordes, particularly from eastern and southern Europe. After forty years of mass immigration, native-born Americans worried that any sense of national identity and cohesion might be lost; after all, the percentage of U.S. residents born in another nation was even higher then (14 percent) than it is today (11 percent).

In any event, the new legislation took effect during the time my grandmother and her son had been at sea, so the American officials informed them that they had arrived just a few days too late: no immigrant ships could disgorge their human cargo in the United States. This declaration caused hysteria and near riot from the passengers, some of whom threatened to jump overboard and risk drowning rather than give up their goal so close to the promised land. My grandmother could see my grandfather on the deck, dressed in the only suit he owned, waving at her with both arms, but remaining painfully, perhaps permanently, out of reach. For two days, the matter remained unresolved, especially regarding the newcomers who had left Europe before immigration restrictions had taken force and who traveled to America for the purpose of family reunion (theoretically permitted, even under the new law).

Given the circumstances of her arrival, I cannot imagine my grandmother's emotions when she finally descended the gangplank, searching for her husband among the waiting crowds. My grandfather had said goodbye to a vital and reportedly beautiful bride of twenty-nine, with six tiny children. He now welcomed a forty-three-year-old survivor of uncounted horrors, accompanied by one wary, adult son. They would have been virtual strangers to him and to the life he'd built over all those years of toil in the crowded city of Philadelphia. The fact that they managed to renew their marriage, to sustain their love, without hesitation or complaint must in itself count as a miracle.

But the miraculous aspects of the family history don't end there. In 1925, my grandmother fell ill, gaining weight at the same time she lost appetite. The neighbor ladies who she had befriended in their Yiddish-speaking enclave of South Philadelphia made an instant diagnosis: she undoubtedly suffered with a tumor and must immediately visit the doctor. She hesitated, keeping the problem from her hardworking husband, unwilling to allow more bad news to enter a life that had already accumulated its full share. When she could delay the examination no longer she dragged herself to the neighborhood physician, who determined that against all logic, against any expectation, she was pregnant. My father, David Bernard Medved, arrived in February 1926. Because of the widespread local assumption that it had been a tumor, not a baby, growing in my grandmother's body, my father drew the ironic nickname Tumerel--or "Little Tumor"--during his childhood. In an era when most people--especially poor people--aged far more rapidly than today's time-defying Boomers, his mother was forty-five and his father was fifty in the year of his startling birth.

No wonder that my own earliest memories feature a sense of wonder, of gratitude, or providential intervention, of anything-possible optimism regarding our family's place in America, this Land of New Life. Leaving behind the years of mourning and loss in the Continent of Death, my grandparents could come together and in every way begin again.

They read an obvious significance in my grandmother's name--she was Sarah, following the example of her ancestor, the matriarch of Israel. The Bible reports that Abraham's wife conceived at age ninety, after "the manner of women had ceased to be with Sarah" (Genesis 18:11). Her husband had reached the ripe age of one hundred, making them each exactly twice the age of my grandparents ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Forum
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1400051878
• ISBN 13: 9781400051878
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 448