We really are our brother's keeper

After listening to Barack Obama's acceptance speech tonight, I found myself wondering what the Republicans would say to counter Obama's soaring rhetoric.

I know I could just have turned to Fox News to hear the junior partner in the firm of Fat Man and Little Boy -- Sean Hannity -- but believe me, life is too short to listen to Hannity or to his senior partner, Rush Limbaugh.

I figure they'll go after him on the "big government can't do things as well as the free market" attack, saying that America works best when the government gets out of the way and allows real freedom.

Except it never does.

Get out of the way, I mean.

Look at all the tax breaks and subsidies available to big corporations and those who are already rich. Look at the obstacles in the way of folks really pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.

Heck, some of their "self-made men" were anything but. Limbaugh's first job in radio was at a station his father owned. George W. Bush never had a company where he wasn't either backed or bailed out by his father's wealthy friends.

So anybody who needs help getting started -- scholarships, loans, tax breaks -- certainly shouldn't feel guilty.

America works best when we help each other.

It's a pretty good message.

It's best when I stay home

I've been to three political conventions, none of them as a delegate.

I attended the first night of the 1980 Democratic Convention in New York as a college journalist, and I don't remember a thing about it. I didn't have to write anything until a month later, and by then I was concerned only with sounding cool for my audience.

I covered the 1996 Republican Convention in San Diego and the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles as a columnist. I wrote every day on subjects as varied as Operation Rescue and Caroline Kennedy. My most exciting moment was when Bob Dole yelled at me to get off his lawn.

As enjoyable as they may seem when something exciting happens, nominating conventions have a tendency to be very boring. If you watch on C-SPAN instead of one of the commercial networks, you're just as likely to hear a speech by the assistant to the associate secretary of commerce as you are to hear Ted Kennedy or Joe Biden.

And if you're actually on the floor, good luck at seeing all the interesting people in the seats who get pointed out.

Actually, it's better when I stay home. Democrats in 1980? Lost. Republicans in 1996? Down the drain. Democrats in 2000? Nope.

If they're smart, they won't let me in.

Does America still make sense?

I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother in the last year or so before she died.

She was born in 1895 and lived until 1990, and amazing changes took place during her life. When she was born, the telephone and the electric light were still relatively new; most folks in small towns didn't have either.

The very first automobiles were being built, but 99 percent of Americans hadn't even seen one. Motion pictures were still a few years away, and radio and television, airplanes and computers, were still off on the distant horizon.

In her lifetime, men went to the moon.

I'm nowhere near 94 yet, but I've been thinking about the ways our country has changed since my own birth in 1949. Many of them aren't as dramatic -- planes fly faster, computers do more with less space, there are a lot more channels of television and things that weren't portable are now.

But not all the changes have been positive ones; indeed, many of the things we would call "progress" have actually served to balkanize us and divide us from one another.

I always get a kick out of comedian Jeff Foxworthy talking about growing up in the '50s and '60s and saying kids had it tough because there were only three channels of television -- ABC, CBS and NBC.

"And if the president was on, your evening was shot."

Now there are hundreds of channels, on all the time, and a hit show is lucky to garner 20 percent of the audience. You can watch television for women (Lifetime), for kids (Nickleodeon), for guys (Spike), or for almost any interest group you can imagine.

So nobody watches the same show.

Nobody has the same frame of reference anymore.

But on January 19, 1953, 44 million Americans, nearly 72 percent of the audience, watched the episode of "I Love Lucy" in which she gave birth to her first child.

Think about it. Seventy-two percent of the audience. Super Bowls don't draw that well; the Olympics or the Academy Awards would kill for that kind of viewership.

I started thinking about this yesterday when I found the YouTube clip of Sarah Brightman singing on the Johnny Carson show in 1991. I can't remember the last time I heard someone reference something that happened on late-night television, but there was a time when folks who were still awake at 11:30 p.m. tuned to NBC so they could at least hear Carson's monologue before falling asleep.

Are we one country anymore? I don't know. I've heard so much about red states and blue states that I'm starting to hate those colors. But we're far more divided than that. We're secular America and Christian America. We're beer America and wine America. We're meat America and vegetarian America.

Is there anything other than a 232-year-old idea that still holds us together?

I wonder.

The end of a 17-year search for Sarah

It was January 31, 1991, when I first saw Sarah Brightman and heard her sing.

If I had been a Broadway fan, I probably would have known her from "Phantom of the Opera," but I'm one of the three people in America who never saw that show. So when Sarah came out to sing on "The Tonight Show," it was my first exposure to her.

It was actually her third appearance on what most of us called "Carson," but I wasn't a regular viewer and had missed the first two.

She sang an adorable, funny song that I thought must have been called "Have a Nice Day," and which the Johnny Carson Website calls "Welcome to Beverly Hills."

I immediately started looking for Sarah Brightman CDs in hopes of finding that song, but I didn't come across it in her more recent releases.

Over the years, I have become a big fan of her work, and by now I probably have seven or eight of her collections -- including a couple of imports -- but I still have never found any songs on them that even resemble the one I vaguely remembered from all those years ago.

Google had never worked for me on this one, but finally I decided that someone as popular as Sarah must have a fan site, and of course she does. I signed up, went to the message boards and opened a new topic. I asked if anyone had heard of the song or knew where it could be found.

Within 24 hours, I had a response. The song wasn't called "Have a Nice Day" or even "Welcome to Beverly Hills." It was called "Capped Teeth and Caesar Salad" and was from a show called "Song and Dance." The only soundtracks of the show featured other performers singing it.

But there was a happy ending. I was directed to a clip on YouTube. Someone had posted Sarah's performance, and today, for the first time in more than 17 years, I listened to her singing the song I had heard only once before.



It made me happy, but it also filled me with an ineffable nostalgia for the days when Johnny Carson ruled the nighttime and when I rarely turned the television off until I at least had heard his monologue.

Sorry, but Leno isn't the same. Neither is Letterman.

Watching Johnny Carson do late night was like watching Willie Mays play baseball or listening to the Beatles singing.

Once in a lifetime.

Well, twice anyway, thanks to YouTube.

Remembering when newspapers mattered

I was thinking about my father recently.

He died on a Sunday in March, and one of the unreported facts about his death was that on that day, the Sunday New York Times lost a long-time reader. I never knew anyone who valued his Sunday paper more than my father, but it wasn't just any paper.

It had to be the Times.

When I was younger, no matter where we were in the country, one thing my dad always did was scout out a place where he would be able to get the Times on Sunday. That may not seem like a big deal now, when anyone can subscribe to the national edition of the paper, but in the late '50s and the '60s, he often had to drive 20 or 30 miles on a Sunday to be able to get a copy and read all the news that was fit to print.

Even though he lived in a city that had one of the best newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, it wasn't enough. I always thought the Post was a pretty good paper, but it wasn't just pride in the city of his birth that kept my dad reading the Times. As he pointed out to me, what other paper covered science the way it did? What other paper had editors for things like gardening, stamp collecting or chess?

Easy answer.

None.

I'm sure it made it easier in his later years when he could have the Sunday Times delivered to his doorstep, right along with his daily Washington Post. I know every time I visited and was there on a Sunday, part of his day included reading the paper.

He knew that newspapers mattered, that television news was only a highly limited collection of headlines, and that anyone interested in more than just the lead paragraph of a story should be reading a good newspaper.

I'm pretty sure his love for newspapers had something to do with the fact that I read at least one and usually two or three newspapers daily, and that I have become a consumer of newspapers from all over the country and the world on the Internet.

I know it had something to do with the fact that I became a journalist as a career. He was the one who taught me that covering the news mattered.

I never really got the chance to talk to him about what the Dean Singletons and the Sam Zells are doing to the newspaper business. I think he would agree with me that the increasing dumbness in the country is closely related to the fact that so many people have stopped reading newspapers or simply never acquired the habit.

Something is going to have to take their place, and I don't mean blogging, "citizen journalism" or news on the 'net. Otherwise, we're halfway to becoming eloi, and if you don't know what that means, you probably don't read much.

Newspapers mattered.

They need to matter again.

When did Shatner become "The Shat?"

I'm all for irony.

Even post-ironic civilization is OK with me.

But when I first realized that William Shatner -- perhaps the worst successful actor of the last 40 years -- had now become "The Shat," I realized that we had gone way too far.

Give the man some credit. After playing the lead in two television series -- the original "Star Trek" and "T.J. Hooker" (cop by day, prostitute by night) -- he has managed to hang around for another 30 years or so basically by making fun of himself.

But "The Shat?"

I'm not so sure about that. At least when I was growing up, "shat" was the past tense of a verb that people didn't say in mixed company. I feel the same way about that word that I did when I first learned the "scrod" wasn't the pluperfect subjunctive of another nasty verb.

I saw every one of the original 79 "Star Trek" episodes, and I think I caught all the movies, either in theaters or on cable, and watching Shatner play James T. Kirk has become something like watching Benny Hill. It's an inside joke.

Let's keep it that way.

Why did we decide not to grow up?

I blame it on Pepsi.

Not seriously, but there has to be some reason that so many of us in the Baby Boom generation -- myself included, to some extent -- resisted so strongly against becoming an adult.

I was reading a new thriller -- Brad Thor's "The Last Patriot" -- about the clash between America and radical Islam, and very early in the book the author posited one of the problems we have in this battle.

"Up until the 1950s, American children yearned for adulthood. When their time came to be adults they stepped into the role proudly, leaving childhood behind and taking up the mantles of responsibility, honor and dignity. They embraced and championed the ideals of those who came before them while valiantly tackling new ideas and problems that their families, communities and nation faced. Those days were long gone.

"Americans now shunned adulthood, preferring to remain in a state of perpetual adolescence. By failing to move forward with grace and dignity, they left a gaping hole in American society.. They treated relationships like disposable lighters, tossing marriages away when they ran out of gas.. Children were left without families, and even worse, they were left without adults who could be role models of responsible behavior.

"With this lack of willingness to step forward and embrace adulthood, the nation had lost sight of its core values and ideals. In its place had morphed an 'every man and woman for himself' mentality in which materialism was placed before spirituality and submission to God."

Now there will certainly be some people who will rail at those last four words. They'll say we're a secular society and God has nothing to do with it, but that's precisely the problem. I'm not saying we should all be fundamentalists or even Christians, but when we get to thinking of ourself as the center of the universe, the apotheosis of creation, something is very wrong.

My first wife wasn't religious. She said she believed in God, but it was really more of a "Mother Nature" figure she visualized, and she didn't worship at all. If she had a philosophy of life, it was that she would do whatever she wanted as long as it didn't hurt anyone else.

We all know people like that.

They're the ones who never grow up, the "Pepsi Generation" of the '60s. To some extent, they're the Bill Clintons among us, who lead very productive lives but have little or no control over their impulses and appetites.

There's a phrase I remember from the '60s -- "Don't lay your guilt trip on me."

But when there's no guilt trip, is there really even a society?

We've gone a long way down that road. I hope we can find our way back.