The Week Ahead

++Today is former Vermont Governor Howard Dean's 65th birthday. Happy birthday, Howard.

++This coming Thursday, the late Bayard Rustin will be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for,among other things, organizing the 1963 March on Washington. Receiving the honor will be his partner,Walter Naegle. Will Walter receive bound copies of all J. Edgar Hoover's wiretaps on Bayard? A great honor, belatedly bestowed on one of America's great civil rights and human rights champions.

++Tomorrow, despite the government shutdown, NASA will launch the MAVEN to Mars right on time.

++This week expect either a temporary nuclear deal with Iran or a collapse in the talks. President Obama talked 90 minutes with Bibi Netanyahu this past week. Bibi has revved up the engines to lobby the Hill against any deal. Bibi wants Iran not to be able to enrich any uranium at all. Iran says a pre-condition for a deal is their right--which is guaranteed by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. I expect a two fold deal, which will lead to deeper monitoring of the program and a delay in the Arak plutonium processing facility. Meanwhile,it is reported that Israel and Saudi Arabia are planning preliminary strikes on Iran.

++The healthcare. gov website is humming along now. Throughout the week, just check on Obamacaresignup. gov for the ongoing figures. The Washington Post headlines that only 80% will be able to sign-up before the January 1 deadline. Josh Marshall today at TPM goes behind the headline to find out the three different categories of people who might not sign up and finds out that the 20% may become considerably less. But don't worry the media will moan all week about that this is Obama's Masada.

++A Reminder of what's at stake:The New York Times on Saturday published a piece in The Arts section on the 0+ Festival in San Francisco where artists play for medical care. The killer figure is that 43% of all artists have no health insurance; for musicians,the number was 53%. With Obamacare, on struggling artist, my son, has health insurance. ACA will be a boon to artists and free-lancers of all sorts--in other words the only productive part of our society.

++The 0+ Festival can occur because five-year old Miles Scott aka Batkid rid the city--renamed Gotham for a day--of its villains. I agree with Rachel Maddow this was the Greatest Thing of the week. Miles, who is five years old and has been suffering from leukemia for his young life,wanted to be a superhero for one day. Make-A-Wish Foundation made it happen in an awesome way. The San Francisco Police Chief made a call for Batkid to save the city. Batkid riding in his Batmobile corralled the Joker, the Riddler and the Penguin and brought them to jail. The San Francisco office of the Department of Justice printed subpoenas out on the villains and the San Francisco Chronicle printed a supplement headlined Bat Kid Saved the City, which appeared today. His adventures made the website of Major League Baseball, when he saved the Giants' Mascot from the Penguin. Hundreds of thousands of people came out to cheer Batkid on and a tired Miles Scott made it to City Hall to receive the key to the city in front of adoring fans. By Friday night, the Make-A-Wish website was so overwhelmed by donors they apologized to users. Even the great Bayard Rustin could not organize something that diverse and successful. Amazing. President Obama sent his congratulations to Batkid via Vine and Michelle Obama,Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz by twitter. What will Make-A-Wish do for an encore?

++This past week was the 175th anniversary of Moby-Dick. And this week,I will be receiving Hershel Parker's account of how he sought the great White Herman Melville for his two volume biography

Ray Bradbury's Moby Dick

In the paleolithic age I was introduced to Ray Bradbury through a Bantam paperback "Something Wicked This Way Comes". The only citizen of Los Angeles who doesn't and won't drive a car--he has a pathological fear of them--Ray Bradbury keeps writing his marvelous short stories and novels. He has entered the pantheon of American great writers with his own Center of Ray Bradbury Studies at the University of Indiana. From their archives comes Bradbury's 1954 screenplay for the John Huston film of Moby Dick. Bradbury has chronicled this traumatic time in a wonderful book of his time in Ireland working with a cantankerous John Huston. Bradbury had never read Moby Dick until he was asked to write the screenplay and he had only one screenplay to his credit, an appropriate science ficton space opera. Upon arriving in Ireland and receiving no guidance from Huston about what he wanted, Bradbury experienced writer's block and finally overcame it by imagining that he was Herman Melville himself. The screenplay "Moby Dick" was published by Subterranean Press in 2008.

In 1969, Bradbury at the UCLA American Film Institute taped an interview about his experience and his views on Moby Dick. In the current national climate,I think Bradbury's observations are worth repeating:

" Moby Dick is the most American novel that has ever been written. It's far more American than anything that has been written since. We don't have anyone writing today who really combines the kind of American character that Ahab illustrates in this story. Blasphemy--that's what we are. We're blasphemous people. We have always been and we always will be. We are people who promulgated the industrial revolution in the world. It didn't start there, but we finished it off. Our technologies, our sciences,our medicines--all go against God. We fear death. We make people live to be older. This is all blasphemous. Ahab is really the instructor of our blasphemy. While I was working on the screenplay I realized this."

Bradbury later tried to update Moby Dick for the space age with Leviathan '99, which was dedicated to Herman Melville.

For Melville fans like me, we are promised in March the Newberry Library's definitive edition of Billy Budd, which was discovered in a trunk of Melville papers and only published in 1921.