Chapter Twenty Eight of Keeping Score in America: The new year of 2014
By Michael Moriarty
web posted January 6, 2014
2014 presents for me, I believe, both one of the most challenging years of my life and, ultimately, one of, if not the most rewarding year of my existence on this Earth!!
Why do I say that?
Well, I can't be absolutely certain of either description, "challenging" or "rewarding", but I am nearing the end of my life and what a splendidly full, six decades it has been!
No, I hardly plan to die tomorrow but I am indeed 72 years of age and the victim of heart failure and a survivor of major heart surgery. Somehow life seems to be getting more dramatic instead of less dramatic. How much drama my heart can take will soon be seen in this increasingly tremulous future for the entire world.
I take this New Year's opportunity to make a few small confessions that might enlighten if not amuse and delight you.
I once confessed, to my adoptive and very Italian Catholic mother, of all people, that I was a porco vecchio.
In Italian that means literally an Old Pig!
I do indeed snort around my office, grumbling and wallowing in my own sort of manure which is quickly translated into music.
Rather lovely offal if I do say so myself.
Offal, appropriately rhyming with "awful", is assumedly a Shakespearean word for manure.
Since Life is eternally the war between generational ideas of Good vs. Evil, I see "Bad Guys" on both sides of the battle lines.
Where is goodness, at least my idea of American goodness to be found today?
My repeated choice for a Third Millennium Hero and President of the United States is Alan B. West.
The Leading Knight of a Second American Camelot
This cited article is a seminally important gauntlet thrown down by one of the most indisputably noble and vitally important "Knights" of Third Millennium American History!
I'm an artist not a politician nor a soldier and, having tried politics for ten minutes and never having served in Vietnam for medical reasons, I realized how not only out of place I was but literally doomed as a politician or warrior.
America cannot elect porco vechios or Vecchio Porco's, the actual name of a restaurant in Milan, as President of the United States.
The likes of my own personal and indisputably proven hero, Winston Churchill, have never found completely safe-footing in North America. Too many Americans are like President Barack Obama, and throw a bust of Churchill back at the Queen of England from whom it so generously came.
That, in my opinion, is not only Obama's doing but clearly North America's fault; and shame on her!
My New Year's Resolution?
I will concentrate, as I already and increasingly have, upon the men and women of the Arts that I admire rather than try, as I so laboriously have, to delve into the agonizing mystery of America's undeniable desire for the kind of suicide which Abraham Lincoln prophesied for her. The 16th President of the United States wrote that since America could never be defeated by a foreign power, it could only be destroyed by suicide.
Barack Obama for a second term as President of the United States?! After all we'd experienced in the first four years?!?!
You see?
An absolutely suicidal decision to reelect Barack Obama!!
With all those exclamation marks I use, I am much too much the histrionic actor and the would-be intellectual to attempt any reliable position among The Establishment.
Whatever chances I did have with The Establishment I either overlooked or purposely ignored.
Life can, occasionally, be quite lonely within my lovely but now most humbling Canadian perch.
That, however, has always been the price of individual freedom, a commodity under increasing threat by governments throughout all of the Americas, both North and South.
Oh, I thought this photo might amuse you!
A lucky young me at Sardi's
Who's kissing me so warmly?!
I wish I knew!! 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty.