We left the city last week, the day the news broke that Diane Schuler, the mom who killed her daughter, three nieces and two strangers driving the wrong way on the freeway, was legally drunk and high. (Schuler’s five-year-old son survived.) The Taconic connects New York state to the area in Connecticut we’re in and the talk has been about nothing else since, even as new tragedies have taken that story’s place. 

How Could She? asked both NYC tabloids and denials have emerged from her husband, who says his wife was never drunk, and his lawyer who suggests she might have been diabetic. Or had a toothache. There is conflicting evidence: the kids working at the MacDonald’s where they ate said she seemed fine (perhaps not the most reliable witness) while drivers complained of her tailgating and honking at cars on the freeway. She called her brother to say she was having trouble seeing (he told her to wait) and most heartbreaking of all, his daughter called him to say auntie was “having trouble seeing and talking funny.”

There is still some mystery surrounding this horrible story, and I don’t mean to pretend I know what happened and why. But dollars to donuts this woman had a major alcohol problem and kept it hidden for years. Alcoholics (such as I) know the lengths we’ll go to hide our addiction, and how good we get at it. There is a stranger inside us that we have spent countless days and years to conceal. Usually we just kill ourselves. You get a special seat in hell for taking others (your own child!) with you. 

I don’t think I ever drove my son anywhere when I was drunk — but I can’t swear to it. I do remember finding myself much more loaded than I had meant to be, often because the amount of secret vodka (the alcoholic’s drinks of choice, and seemingly Schuler’s) I had sloshing around in my system would suddenly get ignited by a socially acceptable, publicly consumed glass of wine or beer. That’s when the secret was no more, when the monster was no longer submerged. 

Here’s to all the sick and suffering waiting to surface and the survivors (her own child!) praying they won’t be drowned. 

It’s too bad that Pete Townshend pimped that song out to anybody with a dollar because we could really use it as an anthem right now. If you remember the Hillary health care debacle of 1993 (and if you don’t, shouldn’t you be in bed?), you remember Harry and Louise: the fictional couple who derided Clinton’s health care initiative as too much too soon in a series of ads which captured the national zeitgeist, which could best be described as “Do we really have to fix this thing?”

The H&L ads were sponsored by the Health Insurance Association of America, of course, an organization as disinterested in the outcome of the debate as a Yankee at a Red Sox game. But things have changed since then, thank god: the industry has splintered (even the HIAA has changed its name) and while there is much disagreement about what must be done, the consensus is that something’s gotta give. The system as is could bankrupt the nation, and the abstract injustice of nearly 50 million uninsured Americans just got a more tangible face in California, where cuts in the state budget have left two million poor children without health care. And as history has proven, CA leads the way for the rest of the nation. 

Which is why you will see Harry and Louise (a little older but wiser for the years) embracing Obama’s push for reform, even as Congress drags its feet (or several of them: Blue Dog dems are concerned the plan might be too expensive, especially for small business, while some progressives don’t think it will look enough like socialized medicine). The coming month, as Congress takes a recess and constituents give their representatives an earful, will be stinky and not just in NY: the RNC is spearheading the campaign opposing reform and they are getting stupider by the day. Here’s a few things you can do to insure health care reform in the fall:

1) Write your congressman. Seriously. I know you think no one reads those letters (or emails) but they do tally them: up or down, pro or con. They care how their constituents feel about so contentious an issue, because they are looking for political cover — especially if you live in a swing state or district. 

2) Support the president. Tell the White House, and everyone else, that you support Obama’s efforts and try and turn the tide of uncertainty that has been reflected in recent polls. 

3) Stay informed. Don’t turn the page (or the channel) when health care news or opinion appears. Try and stay abreast of legislative efforts and smart opinions, on both sides. (Groups such as MoveOn.org will send you email alerts to help you better follow the bouncing ball.)

4) Talk to your friends and ask them to do the same things. 

5) Mute the ads — or turn off the TV, even. It’s August for chrissakes. Go jump in the lake.

And while you’re at it, tell the Republicans to do the same. 

The hardest part of returning home is not actually driving through East New York; it’s turning on cable news and seeing what new stupidity grips the land. I have been watching news through the international filter the last few weeks, in Amsterdam and Prague: BBC News and CNN International. CNNI is to US CNN what good espresso is to Maxwell House coffee — though they also read viewer email, which is every bit as dull-witted as the stuff you’ll hear in the states. 

But you miss all the really appalling stuff. Of course we heard about the arrest of, and subsequent commentary by Obama and others about, Henry Louis Gates — though what’s this “Skip” shit? When did he go from distinguished Harvard professor to a drummer in a California surf band? That seems one of those telling moments when we remind ourselves, and in this case the world, that we are not really one nation, or certainly don’t all see things the same way or come from the same experiences. When we left the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was hinging on the same sorts of issues, with Republicans saying, How dare you say your background might influence your actions!

But we missed the seemingly exponential growth of the “birther” movement: those people on the right that don’t necessarily believe Obama was born in the US. And it was only watching MSNBC last night that I saw the list of GOP congressmen who won’t say they believe the president is a US citizen, abetted by people in the media like CNN’s own Lou Dobbs. 

I can’t think of an exact correlative in political history. Some might say those on the left who insisted on the illegitimacy of Bush’s election, but they didn’t get much traction in the mainstream media, and when they raised their heads post 9.11 (and then after the second election) they were routinely dismissed. It was the sort of sour-grapes reaction a liberal would reach for at the end of an argument, as a sort of parting shot. It was not elevated to a national movement, complete with legislation demanding future presidents show proof of citizenship. 

To me it’s more like the anti-semites who called FDR Rosenfeld; he wasn’t Jewish, of course, but you couldn’t prove that by them. Like Holocaust deniers and that guy who Buzz Aldrin punched for saying he didn’t walk on the moon, these birthers don’t need logic or truth on their side. All they need is a smidgen of suspicion and a ton of resentment and suddenly “alien” can mean all kinds of things. It could mean you’re a brother from another planet, which was my old nickname for Obama, or just another black man trying to break into a house you already own. 

If the Anne Frank House is a fitting refutation, or logical conclusion, of the goal for a Jewish museum that Hitler envisioned (see note below), he would have been disappointed in the turnout. Every day crowdes queue up from the time the museum opens to past ten pm, when it is strangely light out still. They stand in the rain for a chance to feel the pain, the shame we must share as humans.

I know: you may have lost relatives in the Holocaust, or may have fathers who fought in the war, as did mine. But the history is bleak: the news of the death camps was everywhere (including Reader’s Digest!), and stories of the Nazis rounding up Jews was not enough to get some people involved. And that is the collective shame.

The good people of Amsterdam, some of them anyway, formed anti-fascist groups as early as 1933, and welcomed the first German refugees with open arms. Many were artists, intellectuals and performers; Anne Frank’s father made jam, which is a form or art where I come from. After the Nazis invaded many resisted (see the Black Book) and gave aid to those fleeing persecution.  Most of the people helping to hide the Franks were rounded up, too.

There is not a lot of hoopla here: no guided tour, no audio guide. You move from room to room, most of them as bare as the Nazis left them, informed by bare-bones text and excerpts from Anne’s diary of what happened. There are videos and some first-person accounts as you move up the stairs and to the last rooms, filled with reproductions of the clips from movie magazines she had on her bedroom wall, followed by photos of the camps themselves.

The last room features a video of her father, who survived to oversee the museum’s opening. He speaks of the surprise he felt at first reading her diary: what a serious girl! he marvels. What deep thoughts she kept hidden and he wept to recall how little he really knew his own daughter.

Back on the street the tourists kept coming. I recalled a reading William Gass gave at Eugene Lang College a few years ago. The then head of the writing program asked him about the moral force of fiction, positing the idea that if Hitler had read Anne Frank’s diary, he could never have gone forward with the Holocaust. Gass (good name!) was quite dismissive of the idea, and practically laughed like a Santa. Of course he could have read it and killed them all.

Next question.

Going from Amsterdam to Prague and back, it’s hard to avoid the history of the Holocaust. Maybe it’s because the house where were staying is just two blocks from the Anne Frank House. Or maybe it’s just that the history of the Jews in Europe, the diaspora that Hitler tried to end, is so thick beneath your feet. Like blood on the tracks.

I had always wanted to go to Prague, or at least since I was 13 during the Prague Spring and Life magazine was filled with pictures of Czech hippies with their fingers held aloft in a peace signs. And then reading Kundera all those years later, and even seeing Stoppard’s Rock ‘n Roll, made me romanticize the place. It became a cool destination after the Velvet Revolution put Havel in the driver’s seat, if only for a while.

The reality was a little colder and darker than my Alan Furst-drenched fantasy. Turns out the movie of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for instance, was shot elsewhere and remans a source of comedy for Prague’s citizens. Renata, the woman we had dinner with the first night there, told me that Kundera himself was somewhat controversial. He still lived in France, all these years later, and even wrote in French. His books had to be translated into his native language.

In the Czech Republic, nothing is black and white,  she told me as I ate my duck and sauerkraut. Her mother’s family was killed in the Holocaust. Her father was later jailed by the Communists. She visited him each month in prison for ten years and he encouraged her to join the Party so that she might someday work as a journalist, as she hoped to. But she was allowed into the university in 1968 because of her father’s reputation, not in spite of it: The academics all admired him for going to jail. And a  year after she arrived, the people who accepted her were out of power at the university. If I had gone a year before or a year after, I would not have gotten in, she said.

Josefov, the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, is a small part of the old city; it was walled off from the rest of Prague for hundreds of years to keep the Jewish population out — and sometimes to protect them from the Christians’ ritual pogroms and blood libels. When the Nazis captured the city they forced the Jews to reside there again, while looting their art and holding it in the neighborhood’s synagogues. Today those buildings house some of that art — and the names of the tens of thousands of Czech Jews killed in the camps.

Hitler wanted to make a museum of Jewish culture right there himself: That’s right, after obliterating an entire people he thought it would be nice to make a little memorial to them. (This is one of the many reasons Hitler still holds the gold medal in evil and why comparing any other despot or madman to him is so unfair.) He didn’t have chance to see his museum.

Instead we have the Anne Frank House.