There are many roads to Damascus

When I was much younger and far more callow -- I believe it was during the Nixon administration -- a friend and I shared a common hobby.

We made up lists of people who would be taken out and shot if we ruled the world, which is a pretty ridiculous hobby. Our lists weren't based on political opposition or good and evil, but mostly on people who offended our sensibilities. For example, we thought the Osmond Brothers were a pale imitation of the Jackson Five, so Donny and his siblings would have been on the list..

Ditto for people who brought 11 items into the 10-item line at the supermarket or folks who parked their cars across two spaces at the mall.

At any rate, with sunshine coming to Washington in the form of the Obama administration, I've heard people reviving my old game -- but with lesser penalties. Rush Limbaugh seems to be on a lot of those lists, and I can certainly understand why. The Fat Man has been a thorn in the side of decency for a long time now, and there are few messages more downright tacky than his unrestricted free-market drivel.

But as a Christian and an optimist, I'd rather see Rush change.

Not that it wouldn't sort of a hoot to hear one morning that Rush had slipped and fallen into the rhino cage at the zoo, leading to an amorous rhino deciding that the corpulent Mr. L looked like a pretty attractive mate.

"Limbaugh sodomized by amorous rhino"

Yes, there's a definite beauty to that headline, especially if we were to learn that he was with child, er, rhino. But I would be the first to admit how callow those thoughts are. I would much rather see Rush really read the Bible and realize there are few things Christ cared more about than doing right by the poor.

Imagine Rush telling his audience they ought to be contributing both time and money to help reduce poverty in America.

Now you and I both know that's never going to happen. Limbaugh isn't making $35-40 million a year to do anything other than stir up the yokels so that they don't realize how badly they're being sodomized by the rich.

But we can hope, and we can certainly try to change hearts and minds as we finally approach the end of the Bush years in Washington.

It's worth the effort.

Black Friday tragedy hits close to home

A lot of people are going to write a lot of nasty things about what happened at the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., yesterday morning when shoppers trying to be first into the store at 5 a.m. for Black Friday specials knocked an employee down and trampled him to death.

We're going to hear how horrible our consumer society is, and how screwed up people's values are.

We might even hear mean stuff about the kind of people who shop at Wal-Mart.

Sorry, but none of that is the real story to me. This is the first year in the last eight that I wasn't out as a reporter Friday morning covering the pre-dawn rushes to get incredible bargains at the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.

I've talked to people who waited in line 15, 20, even 30 hours to get things they could never come close to affording otherwise. And let me tell you, those lines are getting longer every year and it's not because the deals are getting better.

Yes, there's something in the air in those early-morning lines, and contrary to what you might think, it isn't greed.

It's desperation.

For the last six years in George W. Bush's America, people are working harder and harder for less and less money. Statistics I saw recently said productivity is up something like 20 percent over that time, while real wages are down between 1-2 percent.

Good old George Dubya accomplished what Ronnie Reagan only dreamed of; we're now the ultimate trickle-down society. Folks at the top get rich, and when they mess up they get bailed out. The rest of us stay up all night trying to get decent Christmas gifts for our kids.

I guarantee you there wasn't one person in line for those 50-inch plasma TV sets at $798 just to get a bargain. Everyone in line for one was there because it was the only way they could even dream of buying one.

I don't know what the other bargains were, but there are way too many of us now who can't afford the so-called "good life." Maybe that's a good thing and we'll eventually transition to a society based less on possessions and more on values.

Maybe.

But I guarantee you one thing: Before that happens, a lot more people are going to get trampled.

Time's perspective not always a comfort

It has been 10 months since one man brought my journalism career to a premature end, at least for now. And while I wrote recently about how this man and others in the company were without honor, I think there may actually be more to it.

I think for the last couple of years of my 29 years in the business, I might have been working for a man who was losing his mind.

I really don't know any other way to put it. So many of the things this man did were only borderline rational, and although I always wrote off his aggressiveness and his mood swings to "short man's syndrome," there might have been more to it.

I still remember the way he ranted at me again and again about how he was my boss when he called me in essentially to fire me, even though he extended it over a weekend. And he was completely infuriated when I refused to beg for my job during the second interview when he finished the task.

And when my last four words to him were "Steve, I forgive you," I honestly thought he wanted to hit me.

But the capper on it all came four weeks later. He had confiscated a piece of my personal property -- a Rolodex filled with phone numbers -- and I had asked that he return the Rolodex, even if he wanted to keep all the phone numbers.

My Rolodex came to me via UPS in an unmarked box -- broken into 15 or 16 pieces.

When it happened, I laughed at the thought that a vice president of a major media corporation had been so angered by the fact that I told him I forgave him that he felt the need to completely destroy my property.

But it's actually fairly creepy to realize someone hates you that much, and I'll admit I've had nightmares about it that have recurred time and again this year. I'm sure he would be happy to know that.

But I still forgive him. I've had a very relaxing year, and I've spent a lot more time with my lovely wife than I could when I was commuting 86 miles a day. My blood pressure is back to normal for the first time in a few years, which is also good. I'm pretty sure that's a direct result of not working for him anymore.

I do still have friends there, though, and I worry for them. I'm sure he isn't getting any better, and as the economy has turned down, he probably is feeling a lot more pressure.

I hope he can get some help.

I may be going back to work soon. I don't need to work, but I hate to see all my years in the newspaper business end on that note. If I do accept a job, though, I'm going to make sure of two things.

The people I work for need to be honorable -- and sane.

Living 115 years must be amazing

I found myself thinking about Edna Parker this week.

Parker, who died Wednesday in Shelbyville, Ind., had been the world's oldest person for the last year or so of her life. She was born April 20, 1893, so she didn't just live in three centuries during her 115-plus year on Earth. She inhabited them. She started school in the 19th century and was still urging people to get "more education" in the 21st century.

One part of her story made me feel very sad. She married her childhood sweetheart in 1913, when she was 20, and lost him in 1939 to a massive heart attack.

Imagine losing the love of your life when you're 46 and then living for another 69 years. She continued living alone in the farmhouse they had shared until she was 100 years old.

She lived long enough that she outlived both of her sons. When she died Wednesday, she was survived by five grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and 13 great-great-grandchildren. Imagine getting to see four generations down the line past yourself; most of us never get to see more than two.

I have been overwhelmed by the miracle of my baby granddaughter, who was born just two months ago. I literally cannot comprehend seeing little Maddie as a grandmother with my great-great-grandchild in her arms. I cannot even imagine being at the halfway point of 115 years of life, of seeing the world in the year 2065.

I was in high school in 1965, and I have recently been reconnecting with some of my friends from those days. The thought of approaching a 100-year reunion at which I would certainly be the only attendee just blows my mind.

One of the saddest statements I've ever heard is that if you live long enough, you will lose everyone you loved. With so many descendants, that didn't happen to Edna.

I do hope that when she showed up at the Pearly Gates, St. Peter had something to say to her.

"Edna, we're glad you're finally here."

Thanksgiving is truly the weirdest holiday

Thanksgiving used to be so simple.

You got together, you watched football, you ate a massive turkey and you fell asleep. It was a big Norman Rockwell thing, and at least in the '50s and '60s, when many of us were kids, it was usually just your family and maybe a grandparent or three.

But the holiday has taken a real beating in the last couple of decades. We've read books, we've seen television shows and we've gone to movies showing us how grown-up baby boomers, some with kids and some without, have returned home loaded down with all their resentments.

This will be a strange holiday in a way. I haven't gone "home" for Thanksgiving in more than 20 years. When you live on the West Coast and your parents live on the East Coast, you tend to focus on Christmas when you can make it back at all.

This will be the first Thanksgiving since my dad died, and the first since my granddaughter was born. My mother and my younger brother are flying in for little Maddie's baptism this weekend, and they may or may not come over for dinner today. If they do, it'll be the first time in my memory that we have had four generations of our family in the same room.

That's sort of wonderful, but the dinner won't measure up. It'll be the first time I've made Thanksgiving dinner, and I didn't feel confident enough to tackle a turkey and stuffing. I'm doing a beef roast, along with numerous side dishes.

But it isn't without controversy. My wonderful son and his fiancee came over a little while ago, and Virgile let me know in no uncertain terms that he didn't find microwaveable mashed potatoes acceptable. Yes, he offered to make "real" mashed potatoes himself, but that didn't make me feel any better.

Oh, well. He's a great kid, and if this is the worst dysfunction our family has today, I suppose we almost qualify for a Norman Rockwell portrait.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The greatest athlete I ever saw

I was a sportswriter for nearly 17 years, and I have been a sports fan for nearly half a century.

A little while back, someone asked me who was the greatest athlete I ever saw. At the time I went back and forth between Michael Jordan and John Elway, with Wayne Gretzky out there on the fringes of the argument.

I settled on Elway, maybe just to be a little ornery, but I did see him do some amazing things as the Denver Broncos quarterback during the two years I lived in Colorado.

But I think overlooked the greatest -- mostly because I was counting only humans.



The only athletic performance I ever saw that literally gave me chills -- and not just the first time I saw it -- was Secretariat in the 1973 Belmont Stakes. The horse they called Big Red had already won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes and was trying to become the first horse since 1948 to win the Triple Crown.

Sham, a great horse in his own right, had battled Big Red valiantly twice, coming up second in both races, and he was battling him again deep into the backstretch.

But Secretariat broke his heart, pulling away to the most dominant victory in the history of the Triple Crown. He won the race by 30 lengths and his time in the race is still the fastest ever on dirt for a mile and a half.

The greatest athlete I ever saw?

Big Red, no doubt.

The ineffable sadness of being

The first time I met my lovely granddaughter, Madison Nicole, I was definitely happy. Maddy is a beautiful baby -- she doesn't carry any of my genes -- and a total delight. She slept on my chest for more than an hour on her parents' couch in Beijing.

That was five weeks ago, when Maddy was only about two weeks old.

Now she's closing in on two months, and she and her parents are visiting us in California. While she is growing beautifully, smiling and grabbing at things, and I'm very happy to see her, I'm feeling sort of a curious sadness as well.

I didn't know why at first, but now I'm starting to understand it.

My own experience with fatherhood began when my children were 12 and 7, so I never had the opportunity to enjoy them as infants. When I see my son-in-law Ryan carrying the baby and talking to her, I'm sort of sad that I never had the chance to do that. Both Pauline and Virgile already had experienced quite a bit by the time I met them, and they were definitely too big to hold in my arms and carry around.

It's funny. I married for the first time at 25 and for all intents and purposes it ended when I was 29. More than one person told me it was a blessing we hadn't had any children to be hurt by the divorce, and most of the time I agree with them. My life would certainly have been very different -- I would never be living in California, for one thing -- if I were a divorced dad.

We all make choices in life. We accept some things and miss out on others, but when my first wife and I split up, I would never have dreamed that I would be a month shy of my 43rd birthday when I remarried. I never would have dreamed that I would never father a child.

It's a very strange feeling to be happy and sad at the same time.

Very strange.

Amazing Baby appears on NORAD radar

The Amazing Baby, also known as my tiny little two-month old grand daughter Madison Nicole Kastner, is on her way to America.

As I write this, little Maddy is flying across the Pacific Ocean en route to Seattle. Her parents are following close behind in an airplane.

It will be wonderful to see her again. The first time I heard her voice, it was over a phone line. She was 10 minutes old. The first time I held her, in her parents' apartment in Beijing, she was about two weeks into her journey toward the 22nd century.

When she arrives at Burbank Airport this evening -- yes, in an airplane -- she will be a few days short of two months old. She and her parents will be visiting for three weeks, and my only regret is that baseball season is over and I won't be able to take her to a Dodger game.

Sure, the Lakers are playing, but it really isn't the same. This child needs to learn at an early age that baseball is more than just a sport, it's a way of life. I learned it from my grandfather and there's nobody better to teach her than me.

I can hardly wait.

Even the worst day on the golf course ...

I didn't really start playing golf until I was in my forties.

Oh, I had gone out a few times when I was younger, but I never really took up the game until my knee was too bad for basketball, my shoulder was too bad for football and my eyes were too bad to see a baseball.

It's a shame I didn't start sooner. During the years I was working in St. Louis and in Reno covering sports, there were often outings for sportswriters connected with tournaments. I missed out on those.

When I first started playing full-length courses around 1996, I was horrible. I'd score something like 130 for 18 holes, and learning that only about 10 percent of golfers ever break 90 didn't make me feel any better. I was about as far from breaking 90 as Sarah Palin is from being president.

Actually farther.

But my game started getting better, and about eight or nine years ago I broke 100 for the first time. That was a big deal to me, and it was an even bigger deal a year or so ago when I finally managed to get my score under 90.

I'm not consistent. I played 36 holes today with my friends Chuck and Mick out at the lovely and challenging Empire Lakes Golf Course in Rancho Cucamonga, California. My first round was my worst in years. I was breaking in a couple of new clubs and I shot 111.

But after we broke for lunch, I came back and shot 91 in the afternoon.

Not a great day, golf-wise, but a wonderful day overall. Golf courses are so beautiful, and I'm a firm believer in the old saying that even the worst day on the golf course is better than the best day at work.

I'm already looking forward to our next time out.

There really is a 'banality of evil'

I used to think the worst thing that could happen to me personally was losing my job.

Then I lost mine. I was fired from what had been a 28-plus year career as a journalist at least in part because I wouldn't lie to readers who were calling in to complain about changes in the paper that were making the product they received worse.

I was supposed to string them along, to make them believe there was a chance the paper would go back to the way it had been, but I refused to tell them that. I told them changes were being made for financial reasons and that it didn't matter how many people complained or cancelled their subscriptions.

That was almost 10 months ago, and if there's one thing I've learned in that time, it's that there isn't a real big market for over-50 journalists who can't be hired at entry-level salaries.

Of course, that didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was the other lesson I learned -- that while I might miss the salary, I was actually much better off not working at a place where the people in charge have no sense of honor.

I'm sure the man who fired me doesn't think of himself as a bad man. He and I never got along, and in the end he didn't want me working for him. But the idea of lying to readers, the idea of pretending that he cared what they thought when he knew his mission was to cut costs and downsize the newspaper, was a terrible thing.

Some of you may not see it that way. Twenty years after the Reagan Era, when movies told us "greed is good" and many people believed that if someone was rich, that person must be a better person than someone who wasn't, things like "truth" and "honor" may seem like horribly outdated concepts.

In 1963, in her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Her thesis was that many of the great wrongs of history, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by psychopaths or sociopaths but by ordinary people.

Arendt understood that Adolf Hitler and other great instigators were certainly evil, but in many cases, the people who actually carried out their orders -- the ones who actually did the killing -- were little more than bureaucrats or minor functionaries.

Nothing better describes the banality of evil than the statement, "I was only following orders," and there are few better examples than the bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.

I'm certainly not equating what has been happening in business -- all the downsizing and budget cutting that has affected so many lives -- to the Holocaust, but if you work for someone who lacks honor, it sears your soul.

I'm purposely not mentioning any names here. Those of you who know me well know where I worked and who my former boss was. He wasn't any fearsome troll, just a short, balding little man with a family and a mortgage who was doing what his boss wanted. And the fact that I have occasional nightmares about what happened just tells me how lucky I am not to be there anymore.

These days I work only for my wife -- taking care of her and cooking meals -- and myself. I'm writing a book that has nothing to do with my career or what happened to me, and it is a joy to work on.

I'm healing and I'm lucky. I'm reasonably well off and nearing retirement age, so I will never again work for people I can't respect, people who lack a sense of honor.

I have no critical feelings toward people who do so because they need their jobs to support their families. I'm realistic. We can't all just say no, even to the banality of evil.

But I sure am glad I can.

The challenge is not hating the haters

The engine had barely cooled on the Obama Victory Bus when the haters began fighting the next battle.


It was Wednesday morning on the West Coast, and the electoral votes in Missouri and North Carolina hadn't even been determined, and Rush Limbaugh was already saying it was time for the game to begin. The game, of course, being the battle to defeat Barack Obama by hamstringing his administration and then beating him in the 2012 election.

A few hours later, Sean Hannity was saying that he wanted Obama to succeed but then following it up by saying Obama was still a mystery to him because of all these iffy connections like William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

One day later, Anne Coulter was writing in her syndicated column that now that the election was over, Obama could go by the name he really wanted to be called by -- B. Hussein Obama.


The important thing to remember about these people and the others like them is that they never stop battling, that any defeat is seen only as a temporary setback on the road to ultimate victory. Limbaugh has been on the air for more than 20 years now, and he has often said that he won't retire until everyone in America agrees with him.

Since he has somewhere between 15 and 20 million listeners out of more than 300 million Americans, the Fat Man might be broadcasting long after he no longer has anything to say.

Hannity and Coulter are actually far more obnoxious than Limbaugh, largely because Rush at least makes the effort to seem friendly and amiable. Both Little Boy and Rabid Annie make frequent use of anger, sarcasm and total disdain for those who disagree with them.


One of the major differences between those on the left and those on the right, at least the ones who aren't the most extreme, is that liberals are usually willing to grant that their opponents might have a point. Conservatives tend to feel their way is the only way and their opponents are not only wrong, but stupid or even evil.

That's where Coulter comes in.

Her entire schtick is outrageousness, and she feeds off the hatred of others. The thing I've seen that seems to bother her most is being laughed at -- or ignored.

That's actually the best route to go with all three of them. We need to listen to reasonable people on both sides, but we don't need to make the extremists on either side richer or more famous just by letting them upset us.

It's why I'm actually not that upset that Al Franken appears to have lost his bid for the Senate in Minnesota. It isn't that I wouldn't have minded another vote for the Democrats, but I really don't think that one of the qualifications for being a senator should be writing a book called, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot."

Even if he is.

Amazing baby coming to America

The amazing baby, my granddaughter Madison Nicole Kastner, will make her first visit to America next weekend.

Madison, who is growing like the proverbial weed, was born only seven weeks ago in Beijing. We had the opportunity to spend 10 days with her in early October, and we have been missing her ever since.

But next weekend, she and her parents, my lovely daughter and her husband, will be coming to the States for a six-week vacation. We get them for the first three weeks, and little Madison will be baptized at our church at the end of the month. Then in early December they'll move on to Seattle to visit the other grandparents and spend Christmas with them.

We've picked up all sorts of goodies, including a bed, a playpen and a car-seat base, so we're definitely more than ready for their arrival. We'll introduce Madison to as many people as possible; it's never too early to begin her campaign for the 2048 presidential race.

We are living in historic times

I'm sitting here in my dining room in California, about an hour before midnight, thinking about something I never expected to see.

If the present numbers hold up, Barack Obama will not only have been elected president, he will have won by an electoral landslide. If Obama's leads hold up in Indiana and North Carolina, he will not only carry every state John Kerry won in 2004, he will have turned around nine different states that George W. Bush won.

Some of them, in fact, are states Democrats just don't win.

Indiana and Virginia, for example, were last won by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Jimmy Carter won North Carolina in 1976.

That's a lot of elections, a lot of times Republicans have been able to take their votes for granted.

Obama won two states that are critical to any GOP winning coalition -- Ohio and Florida -- and he won both by significant margins.

It looks like the final count will give him 364 electoral votes to John McCain's 174.

I'm sure the Rush Limbaughs and the Sean Hannitys of the world will discount this election by saying the collapse of the economy this fall doomed the Republicans to defeat. But I think there's more to it than that.

Millions of people who had never voted before came out for Obama this time, and I think it was because instead of trying to frighten people into voting for him, he tried to inspire them.

He ran a mostly positive campaign.

And in the end, there didn't even seem to be a Bradley Effect. Obama's race helped him as much as it hurt him, and I believe it will mean a great deal in the face America shows to the world.

We live in historic times, and I for one am glad I lived to see it.

Maddiebug, Maddiebug, fly away home

There's one thing that sort of stinks about being a baby.

No, not that. What I mean is that during your first year of life, when you're experiencing everything for the first time, you don't form any memories of it.

The amazing baby, Madison Nicole Kastner, had her first Halloween the other night. Little Maddie was wearing a costume that I picked out and purchased for her.

We got it at Target when we were shopping for some other things for Maddie. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was perfect, but my lovely wife Nicole (who has wonderful taste), didn't like it.

If Nicole has one flaw, it's that she doesn't have a real great sense of humor.

But I bought it anyway, and her folks loved it.

As you can see, Maddie is perfect in her little ladybug costume.

Too bad she won't remember it at all.

'Jib'Jab' still funniest site on the Web

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Many of us who love Jib-Jab discovered it during the 2004 election campaign when the Jib-Jab guys poked fun at the race between George W. Bush and John Kerry with its parody of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land."

Since then, more and more political parodies have added to the legend, and Jib-Jab has become one of the leading political satire sites on the Web. Unlike YouTube and its terrific videos, Jib-Jab is done as a cartoon parody. Once you've seen its versions of Dubya, Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton, you'll never look at the real thing the same way.

Jib-Jab's take on the 2008 election, "It's Time for Some Campaignin'," was done before the vice presidential candidates were picked, so we don't get the Jib-Jab take on Sarah Palin.

We do, however, get the opportunity to put ourselves into the video, which I did. The picture -- the only one I had that would fit -- is from 1967.

Hope you enjoy it.