If God tells you to kill, it isn't God

Karl Marx once called religion the "opiate of the masses," but these days it appears to be anything but calming.

Whether it's radical Muslims who believe the Koran is ordering them to kill infidels, or out-of-work truck drivers who shoot up Unitarian churches because they hate liberals, a lot of people seem to be hearing God on the wrong channel.

Jim D. Adkisson is the same age as I am, and we're both out of work. But Adkisson went into a Unitarian church in Knoxville, Tenn., Sunday and proceeded to shoot as many people as he could before he was tackled. He shot seven people -- two have died so far -- but he had 76 rounds of ammunition with him.

A note found in his SUV said he was targeting this particular church because of his hatred for its liberal policies and for the liberal movement in general. I don't think it's too much of a reach -- and in fact I would bet a large amount of money on it -- to expect that Adkisson was a faithful listener of Mr. Rush Limbaugh's radio program.

Now let's be completely fair here. Limbaugh never tells anyone to take up arms or to hurt anyone else. He's far too intelligent for that, and I would bet that he is every bit as horrified by what happened in Knoxville as I am. But you can't preach what he preaches three hours a day about liberals and not expect some weak-minded people to draw the wrong conclusions.

I wonder what Adkisson is thinking as he sits in jail awaiting first-degree murder charges.

I wonder what the National Rifle Association is thinking.

I'm pretty sure I know what Rush Limbaugh is thinking.

"It's not my fault."

It never is.

Heartbreaking to see what's happening

I went out to my driveway this morning to get my paper.

I try to get it early because the carrier leaves it in a place where the runoff from the lawn sprinklers will hit it, and even though it's in a plastic wrap, it doesn't stay dry.

I got it early enough, but I was stunned to see how light the paper was when I lifted it. The Los Angeles Times seems to be getting smaller every day, which might not seem like such a big deal to some of you but really bothers me.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there have been literally thousands of newspaper jobs eliminated this year, most of them never to return. Media moguls from Dean Singleton at Media News -- my former employer -- to Sam Zell with the Tribune Company have bemoaned the economic situation and have said that every job cut was necessary.

Of course they're lying, or at least being disingenuous. What Singleton, Zell and the others never tell you is that their papers are not losing money, they're just making smaller profits. They overextended themselves to buy additional properties and were counting on the traditionally large profit margins newspapers enjoy to service their massive debt.

I don't really blame Singleton all that much. With a few exceptions, most of the papers he owns are too big to be true community papers and too little to be really good or really important. Nobody over the age of 5 sets their life's goal as working at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin or other papers like it. Folks at papers of that size fall into three categories -- kids on their way up, people with strong ties to the community and older journalists who have reached their highest level and are too comfortable or too burned out to leave.

Most of the time, papers like the Daily Bulletin or other Media News properties do good work in good times and squeeze every nickel till it screams in bad times. Nobody really expects them to be good, so it's a nice surprise when they are.

But there are newspapers, at least a handful of them in this country, that are iconic. Call them papers of record if you will, but papers like the Los Angeles Times are places where kids thinking of going into journalism dream of working. They're papers that cover stories all over the world, and seeing them make massive cuts in their editorial department is hurt heartbreaking.

Bloggers can't replace the kind of journalism papers like the Times does.

We'll all suffer for its loss.

Very little matters more than friendship

"Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Why you doin' this, Doc?
"Doc Holliday: Because Wyatt Earp is my friend.
"Turkey Creek Jack Johnson: Friend? Hell, I got lots of friends.
"Doc Holliday: ...I don't."
-- TOMBSTONE (1993)

If we look seriously at things that really matter in life, which is what we're supposed to be doing here, we have to take a long look at friendship.

"Tombstone," quoted above for a purpose, is only one of hundreds of movies about friendship and what it means. At the risk of being sexist here, it seems to me that friendships -- particularly long-term ones dating back to childhood -- are more common among men than they are among women.

My three closest friendships in the world all date back at least 35 years. I've known my friend Tom, who lives in Colorado now, since 1965, the same year I met my best friend Mick. I met my friend Bill, who lives in Florida now, at community college in 1973.

There's a reason that our closest friends usually date back to childhood. It's when we're young that we have chance to build friendships, to nurture them and allow them to grow. It's when we're young that we can have misunderstandings that result in fights one day and by the next day everything is fine.

During the 1984 presidential campaign, my friend Mick and I had a serious disagreement over Ronald Reagan. Mick basically loved him, I pretty much despised him (Reagan, not Mick). I was living in St. Louis at the time and Mick was in California, but we generally talked on the phone a couple of times a week.

I was so frustrated at the fact that I couldn't get my friend to see what I considered the reality of the situation that we didn't talk at all for four months, but eventually we picked up where we left off and are still friends 24 years later.

The best opportunity I've had to make friends as an adult has come through my fantasy baseball league, with which I got involved in 1993 and became commissioner of in 1995.

There are all sorts of baseball leagues, including plenty in which you never actually meet any of the people involved. But our league, which has been around since 1984, has really been something special.

I can honestly say it has made my life more enjoyable, and it has given me the opportunity to meet and get to know some of the nicest people I have ever known.

See the grinning guy on the left? I only see Bryce Wood one weekend a year, but I can honestly say I've never met anyone nicer. The guy just to his right, Mike Haskins, has become that rarest of creatures to me -- a good friend that I didn't meet until I was 45 years old.

As our league ages, there's plenty of psychodrama, and as commissioner I suppose I tend to let it bother me more than I should. But nine of the 10 guys in that picture, which was taken more than three years ago, are still in the league.

Seven of our 10 guys have been in the league at least 13 years.

With all the crap that's been going on in my life this year -- a lost job, my father dying and a host of other sad events -- I haven't been as good a friend to my friends this year as I have in the past.

I've gotten especially weird with my friend Mike Haskins. We haven't talked for about three months, and I had become convinced he was angry with me. So I didn't call for a while, and then it got to the point where it reminded me of girls I stopped calling when I was younger. There were times I wanted to call these girls, but it would have been too weird to explain why it had been so long.

"I was in a coma."

"I was out of the country."

As opposed to just the truthful one.

"I can be kind of an asshole."

The truth hurts.

Some habits are too easy to lose

For nearly 29 years, I went to work five days a week.

Except for illnesses, vacations and a seven-week break in 1985 when my employer declared bankruptcy, I always worked. When it came time to transition from one job to another, as often as not I had choices.

In addition to the places I worked, I was offered the chance to go to Washington, D.C., Charlottesville, Va., Anniston, Ala., McComb, Miss., Columbia, Mo., Syracuse, N.Y., and San Rafael, Cal.

I didn't always like the places I worked -- Gastonia, N.C., really is one of the armpits of America -- but I always managed to respect the work, the readers and my employers enough to do quality work.

At most places, I really enjoyed working. In 1987, when I was sports editor of the Tribune in Greeley, Colo., I committed myself to working as hard as I could for one full year to see what I could accomplish. I averaged 70 hours a week and won a ton of awards, both for myself and for the section.

As I write this, I haven't worked for pay one day in the last five months. I lost my job in late January because I refused to toe the line on a policy change and wouldn't tell irate readers what our management wanted them to hear.

It's actually amazing that I lasted as long as I did. I had worked for my employer for nearly a decade when Donrey Media sold out to Dean Singleton and his Media News company, and it didn't take long for me to start despising my new employer.

Honestly, it's tough to keep your heart in your job when you have no respect for the people signing your paycheck. I did some good work for Media News, but overall, the quality and particularly the consistency of the work I did the last seven years of that 29 wasn't as good as what came before.

What bothers me is that people will think my work suffered because I got older, but if I was burned out as a journalist, it was because I had seen too much and was too disillusioned by all we were having to go through just to cover the news.

Since I lost my job in January, hundreds of good journalists in the Southland have lost theirs as well. There has never been a time in Southern California journalism -- maybe anywhere in the U.S. -- where the job market has been worse.

If I'm ever going to work again, it's not going to be in newspapers. The jobs just aren't there, especially since my wife and her job keep me tethered to the Los Angeles area.

That's a shame.

I never considered myself a media personality. I was a newspaperman. I'm not ashamed to say I bleed ink, even if it's possible I'm going to be part of the last generation that does.

I used to love working.

That habit is gone, though. If I work again, it will be for money.

Just money.

Why have people gotten so stupid?

This post isn't about politics, although it uses politics to ask a question.

I was listening to CNN today when I heard some quite stunning poll numbers. Apparently, after he has been running for president for more than a year, a large number of Americans still believe that presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama is -- or was -- a Muslim.

Listen to these numbers from the Pew Organization:

-- 39 percent of those polled believe Obama attended a Muslim school as a child.
-- 26 percent believe he was raised as a Muslim.
-- 12 percent believe he is still a Muslim and took his Senate oath of office on a Koran.

Then add a New Yorker cover that attempted to satirize all that but failed miserably and you've got a full-fledged controversy.

Is Obama Muslim?

Of course not.

Was he ever a Muslim?

Nope.

So why do so many people want to believe that he is one, that he can't be trusted to be our president during a time of tension between the United States and the Muslim world?

Unfortunately, stupidity has a lot to do with it. Too many people don't read, write or think independently. Too many people are getting their news from biased Internet sites or from even more biased talk show hosts.

I can't count the times I've heard people quote something incredibly wrong that Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity said. When I correct it, what I hear all too often is that "they couldn't say it on the radio if it weren't true."

It's ironic. We live at a time when more people have more access to real evidence, to source material, than ever before through the World Wide Web. You can read the actual words of any bill before Congress. You can read the transcript of most political speeches.

You can, but most of us don't.

So if you look at those poll numbers and laugh that so many people could be so stupid, don't laugh.

It's really not funny.

Starting all over again

Maybe it's the heat, or maybe it's just that I've become a mean, crotchety old bastard.

Whatever the reason, I deleted all my earlier blogs -- except the one that I set up for my high school graduating class -- earlier today. I hadn't been posting to them anyway, so what was the point?

I've come to the conclusion that what I say about politics doesn't really matter anyway. I've been shooting verbal darts at Our Dubya for more than seven years, and his term is going to end at the same time it would have ended if I had been praising him all that time.

Rush Limbaugh is richer than ever, Ann Coulter still hasn't been outed as a transsexual and Wal-Mart is still expanding all over the world.

Editor's note: Face it, you weren't meant to be a political philosopher.

Hey, face it yourself. You weren't meant to join Warren Jeffs' cult and marry both Olsen Twins.

Editor's note: That's just plain mean.

You asked for it. At any rate, I'm just past the halfway point of what has been a pretty unspectacular year so far. I got fired in January and haven't had any luck finding work, my dad died in March, my old friend Walter Masterson died in April and we're moving out of our house into an apartment at the end of this month.

Compared to that, the judge telling you that you have to stay 500 yards away from Ashley Olsen really isn't that big a deal.

Besides, I still have a number of good things happening in my life, and becoming a grandfather this fall is at the top of the list. My amazing daughter Pauline is due to have her first child -- a girl -- in about two months. Pauline is stationed in Beijing, about halfway through a two-year tour, and we'll be going over there to visit her a week or two after little Abigail Nicole Kastner is born.

It isn't as if I'm not ready. If I were 48, the thought of being a grandfather would probably fill me with more than a little dread. But at my more advanced age -- closer to 60 than to 50 -- I'm hopeful I'll have the chance to be around to see my first grandchild enjoy a good part of her life.

I'm also pretty darn proud of my wonderful son. Virgile's push forward is a little bit on hold right now as he tries to decide that the next step will be, and he has devoted this year to physical fitness.

He ran in the Los Angeles Marathon in March, and finished in less than 3 1/2 hours, which is pretty spectacular for someone running 26 miles, 385 yards for the first time. He's building on that success by competing in triathlons, and his goal is to compete in a worldwide Ironman Triathlon next summer in Nice, France.

Editor's note: There's a town in France called "nice?"

Actually, they pronounce it "neece," and before you ask, yes, the restraining order applies there too.

Editor's note: Dang.

An ironman triathlon involves a two-mile open water swim, a 115-mile bicycle ride and then a marathon run. For me that would be about six months worth of exercise, but they complete it all the same day.

Anyway, I'm incredibly proud of Virgile, who has a blog of his own set up to track his progress. And maybe it's just that I'm getting old, but I've come to the conclusion that what I've done to help my children grow into the wonderful adults they are is a lot more important than anything I ever wrote about politics.

So that's what this blog is going to be about.

What really matters.

All that matters.