Memories of a different time and place

I love listening to Harry Chapin.

I saw him twice in concert, and I think at one time or another I've owned nearly all of his albums. He died at the age of 38, which cost the world another 30-40 years of great songs. Maybe even more if Chapin had been as prolific as his hero, Pete Seeger.

Anyway, there's one song that always touched my heart and evoked strong, wonderful memories. Chapin's "Old College Avenue" tells the story of a young man's first love affair while in college, and it always makes me think of the winter of 1969-70, when I was at George Washington University.

Her name was Kelly, or something close. She was 18 and beautiful and I was 19 turning to 20 and still pretty innocent when it came to girls.

We had a winter and a spring together, but we didn't survive a summer apart. We did so many things together, goofy things like walking in the rain and eating pizza at 3 a.m. and wonderful, optimistic things like falling in love and planning a future that never came.

With her I learned how wonderful love could be -- and how much it could hurt. It was those lessons that helped make me the man I am, both in a failed first marriage and a successful second one.

"It was Old College Avenue, and in the time of having you, I remember it as if it were today."

It was nearly 40 years ago, and it changed my life. I didn't see Kelly again until I ran into her at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. I was older, much heavier and I had a beard, almost unrecognizable to her. But she asked me to take my glasses off, and she looked into my eyes.

"I remember those eyes," she said.

Later that year I sent her a picture of me at age 20. That was the me she remembered.

This isn't a story about two long-lost lovers hooking up. I'm happily married and so is she. I found myself thinking about her for two reasons. One was that on one of my last trips home, I found myself wandering through the GWU campus, remembering things as they were in 1969, when Quigley's was still a hangout and Vietnam was still a problem.

Another was the news I got yesterday about the death of David Poole. It reminded me that no matter how long I'm going to live, I'm a lot closer to the end of this race than I am to the beginning.

Memories are good, especially the ones that make us what we are today.

That's one of mine.

Not a friend, but a fine man

I don't know if I ever really liked David Poole.

We were colleagues for a year and a half in Gastonia, N.C., my second job in journalism back in 1982-83. He was the city editor of the Gazette and I was the assistant sports editor. He didn't like the way I wrote -- he said I buried my leads -- and said he would cure me of that if he was ever my boss.

He said something back then that shocked me as a writer. He said it was the job of the reporter to get the facts and it was the editor's job to make it into a story.

With that in mind, I told him I would dig ditches before I would ever work for him.

I almost had to. When our sports editor moved on, I was the logical choice to replace him. But Poole, a local boy, had been promised the job before I ever got there. I wound up leaving for Anderson, S.C., and points west.

Dave stayed.

I knew him better than just work. Along with a third staff member, we shared a three-bedroom townhouse for nearly a year. We watched a lot of television together and spent a lot of time eating dinner in local restaurants.

He was a big guy even then. I had been fighting a losing battle with my weight for years, but I was nowhere near as heavy as he was and I thanked God for it. I wound up ditching a sleeper sofa when I moved; there was a permanent indentation in the middle of it.

We didn't get along all that well. He loved the North Carolina Tar Heels and I was a big Virginia fan. I grew up on the Washington Redskins and he hated them with the passion only a Dallas Cowboys fan can muster.

One moment I remember to this day was watching Super Bowl XVII with him. Miami led most of the way, but I'll never forget David's reaction when John Riggins broke free on his game-clinching touchdown run.

"Oh hell!" he shouted, jumping up off the sofa.

I never saw him again after I left North Carolina in August 1983, but I was certainly aware of the name he made for himself as the top NASCAR reporter in the country. It didn't surprise me a bit, even though he didn't follow the sport when I knew him. David was, after all, a Southern man, and Southern men love NASCAR.

We hooked up again this year through Facebook, and I was pleased to see David had gotten married and had fathered children. There's nothing that gives more meaning to a man's life than being a dad.

I loved it that he said his best friend was his little grandson Eli.

I remember the last note I sent to him on Facebook. I told him that he had really turned out to be a fine man. I hope it meant something to him.

Oh, yeah. I buried the lead again.

David Poole died yesterday, at age 50, of an apparent heart attack. He was still overweight, and if there's one lesson a lot of us ought to take away from that, it's that you can't get away with neglecting your health forever.

As I said, I don't think David and I were friends. Still, I was proud to know him.

Rest in peace, Poole.

A time when TV was much wittier

From the one comment I received about the death of Bea Arthur, it seems that most people reading this didn't seem to understand why I would bother to write about her.

Maybe the YouTube video at the beginning of this will shed some light, or maybe not. Seeing Arthur and the late Rock Hudson performing a duet that could never be done these days in a CBS special sort of says something to me about where we've gone in 30 years.

If you remember, 1980 was back in the very early days of cable television. If I remember correctly, CNN and ESPN hadn't even started yet. The big deal was Home Box Office, and getting Atlanta Braves games -- and their midnight repeats -- on WTBS out of Atlanta.

The culture was much less fractured. It was much closer to the '60s, when you basically had a choice of three channels -- ABC, CBS or NBC -- and that was it. A big show, like "Who Shot J.R." on Dallas in September 1980, could still draw most of the country.

I don't remember this Bea Arthur special, which came after "Maude" and before "Golden Girls," but there's one thing painfully clear about the duet with her and Hudson. It was wittier and more intelligent than anything I've seen on network TV in a long long time.

Jokes about poppers?

Amazing.

Try that these days and you'd have protests from the left and the right.

Why is it I think we had a lot more fun in this country when everyone took themselves a lot less seriously?

It's all about having a sense of humor

I don't know if I had ever mentioned Ohio State University in a post before yesterday, but here we are with another story coming out of Columbus.

It might shock you, but it didn't surprise me a bit.

Writing on the Huffington Post, blogger Jason Linkins reported on an OSU study about political humor and how people at different ends of the political spectrum react to it. In particular, how they reacted to Comedy Central's wonderful satire on Bill O'Reilly, The Colbert Report.

According to the study,

"This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. "Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion."

It makes sense to me.

After all, conservatives don't have much to laugh about since "Amos and Andy" was cancelled.

Editor's note: Mike, they're going to call you an arrogant bastard again.

Yeah, I suppose I'd better walk that one back a little.

I actually don't think folks on the far right or the far left have much of a sense of humor. I've always been told that there is one clear way to judge if someone has a sense of humor, and that's if they can laugh at themself.

As far as I know, neither Keith Olbermann or O'Reilly are real good at that.

I do feel for the folks in the OSU survey, though.

It's hell to live in a world where you never get the joke.

There's no big city like Columbus

I have lived in California for nearly 19 years, and I lived in Virginia almost that long. I went to high school and college in Virginia, and I raised my family in California.

But I was a kid in Ohio, living there from about age 3 until I was 13.

Ohio is a strange place ... in sort of a wonderful way. When I was in junior high school, we studied the 1960 census and saw that Ohio -- that's right, Ohio -- had more cities with at least 100,000 people than any other state in the country.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but there were nine cities in Ohio with at least 100,000 people, and there weren't that many in California. The difference is that there may still be only nine cities that big in Ohio, and there are probably between 50 and 100 out here. I can drive through more than nine cities with 100,000 or more people in less than an hour.

But this post isn't about California, it's about Ohio, a state where more than 95,000 people attended a spring football scrimmage Saturday.

You can have your Cincinnati Reds, your Cleveland Browns, your Cleveland Cavaliers and your Columbus Blue Jackets. There is nothing bigger in the Buckeye State that Ohio State football, and along with it, the biggest college town in America.

That's right, Columbus is the largest city in the state. It's the state capital. In the most recent census numbers, it's got 1.75 million people in the metropolitan area. But first and foremost, it's a big college town.

OSU is a great public university, but a lot of people know it for football, going back to the legendary Woody Hayes. I remember seeing a survey of adults in Columbus about 20 years or so ago, and I was stunned by the results.

-- Roughly 90 percent of all adults, men and women, said they had attended at least one Ohio State football game.

-- More than 50 percent of all adults, men and women, said OSU football was their No. 1 topic of conversation with their friends, year-round.

We're not talking about Bug Tussle, Oklahoma, or East Snowshoe, Montana. Columbus is a major city with a lot happening, but OSU football still rules the roost.

I have a cousin who's getting ready to retire after a career in the Columbus schools as a teacher and a principal. He was thinking of moving to North Carolina, but it probably won't happen. He can't imagine himself without Buckeye football.

Weird place.

Weird and kind of wonderful.

This always seems to happen to me

All right, now.

Let's get one thing completely straight. I'm nobody's sex symbol.

A few years ago, on a different Website, there was a woman who was very critical of my writing. She called herself "Miri the Angel of Light," and she disagreed with almost everything I wrote.

I suggested that the lady was protesting a little too much, that it was obvious there was a sexual tension between us. At first she responded by calling me a "pig," as in male chauvinist porker. I stood my ground, though, and eventually Miri came around.

I think the same thing is happening now with the lovely and charming Sharee, who has been all over me in her posts. I suppose I could say the same thing about Jerzy, but I've never been that aware of feelings from the other side of the aisle.

I've got no gaydar.

Besides, Jerzy sounds a little old for that. I do have a friend from high school who's 60 and gay, but he had to actually tell me he was playing for the other team.

It's Sharee I'm concerned about.

You see, I'm taken. I've been married to the lovely and gracious Nicole for nearly 17 years, and quite frankly, I'm too faithful -- not to mention too old -- to look around. Besides, I was involved with a woman named Shari (spelled differently) more than 20 years ago and it didn't end well for either of us.

So Sharee, I'm happy to hear your comments on what I write. I love getting comments, even when they're mean and/or snarky. It's why I admired Alice Roosevelt Longworth so much. She's the one who said, "If you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me."

But comments are all I want. You may be lovely, charming and for all I know, quite sexy, but I'm too old for that. As you can see from the picture, I used to be a good looking guy, but that picture is nearly 30 years old.

The excitement would probably kill me -- if my wife didn't kill me first.

Even-handedness only on one side

It's funny that people on the right always complain when folks opposed to them aren't even-handed.

It's actually one of the great weaknesses of liberals. If two people disagree on something, the conservative rarely gives an inch. The liberal seems much more willing to say, "Well, you might have a point, but ..."

That's where things really changed in the '80s. When Newt Gingrich was a back-bencher in the House of Representatives, he developed a strategy whereby conservatives would use words like traitor to describe their opponents. It was a sort of in-your-face, muscular conservatism that liberals took a long time to figure out how to handle.

Bill Clinton never did. He triangulated.

Barack Obama did, and he gets accused of practicing "Chicago-style" politics.

Well, on a lot of issues, folks on one side don't think the folks on the other have a good point. We've been hearing plenty from conservatives like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove about Obama somehow hurting our national defense. Well, it's pretty strange that the only major attack came during a Republican administration, when those in power ignored all kinds of warning signs.

I don't hate Republicans, but I despise people who want to destroy what's good about America to make the world safe for capitalism, whose only answer to almost every problem is to cut taxes for the rich.

To those who call me "pink," or Socialist, or whatever you want to say, you couldn't be more wrong. All I want is for the 70 percent of American families who are just getting by -- or not getting by -- to get a fair shake.

They can't all be lazy ... or stupid ... or somehow unworthy of success.

I see no reason to give the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, or Paris Hilton, or any of the others like them help from the government. They don't need it.

And if that's not even-handed, too bad.

If that's immature or arrogant, maybe you should consider plucking out the beam in your own eye first.

Anybody who's here because they enjoy my writing, I welcome you. I do my best, and when I mess up in some way, I do my best to take responsibility for it.

But if you're just here to give me a bad time, you might want to consider why. If you've been told to read this for some college class, I know the professor and I've asked him to stop sending you here.

I don't write just for my own enjoyment, but that's definitely Job One for me.

Enough said.

Farewell to a great lady

We're losing our icons from a great era.

Bea Arthur died the other day, and in addition to being a great actress who created iconic characters, she was also one of the survivors of an era when television still tried to say something.

Arthur was 86, and a family spokesman said only that she died of cancer. Most of us will remember her as Dorothy from "The Golden Girls," but it was her earlier role as Maude -- first on "All in the Family" and later on her own show -- that made her a household name.

Maude was a big brassy woman, an early feminist who took no crap from anybody. What made her a memorable character was that she was a female lead who wasn't there for her sex appeal, and she was anything but subservient to the men in her life.

Her biography on the Internet Movie Database contains a fascinating fact I never knew about her, one that if it were on Wikipedia I would assume was a hoax. According to IMDB, Arthur served in the United States Marine Corps, presumably when she was much younger. She was also a qualified medical technician, which might have been what she was doing in the Corps.

Her first show was one of those great Norman Lear comedies that actually tried to say something. That may be hard to believe in this era of shows that go out of their way not to offend anyone, but on "Maude," they actually did a show about the title character having an abortion.

Yes, there were numerous complaints.

I'm sure Lear -- and Arthur -- wore those complaints as a badge of honor.

Nearly 40 years later, those Lear shows seem impossibly dated, but compare them with more recent "iconic" shows such as "Seinfeld," and you'll see similar levels of humor in shows that aren't even in the same universe when it comes to having meaning.

Yeah, I'm old.

But I'll miss Bea Arthur, and I have a feeling we will not see her like again.

Another victim of our torture

When I read Joe Bageant's wonderful book "Deer Hunting With Jesus," I found myself with a great deal of sympathy for Lynndie England, the face to many Americans of what happened at Abu Ghraib.

She was the one smiling and holding the leash, the one who became infamous overnight for a policy she had nothing to do with creating. She was sentenced to 36 months in prison, and it wasn't until this year that people really started wondering how all this happened.

My guess is you've never heard of Alyssa Peterson, who paid a much higher price for torture than England, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney or George W. Bush. After seeing some "enhanced interrogation techniques" shortly after arriving in Iraq, Specialist Peterson killed herself in September 2003.

She refused to participate in torture. A few days later she killed herself.

To be fair, no one is exactly certain what she saw -- or what else was going on in her life. The Army isn't talking about it.

For all our talk about "supporting the troops," we don't do anywhere near enough to help these young people cope with things far beyond their previous life experiences. Imagine growing up in a small town or rural area in America, where pretty much everyone knows everyone else, and then being dropped into a war zone where everyone hates you just because you're an American.

Lynndie England didn't have a damn thing to do with why she was sent to Iraq, and neither did Alyssa Peterson. They may have seen the Army as a way to a better future, or surprise of surprises, they might just have been patriots.

Now one is dead and the other is pretty much a national joke.

So say what you want about why we went to war in Iraq. I think the reasons have been pretty much discredited, but even if you don't agree, you ought to be pretty angry with policies that ruin the lives of so many young Americans.

I know I am.

A city on a hill has to be different

"Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us — and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill -- constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities."
-- JOHN F. KENNEDY, 1961

Americans have been talking about the city on the hill for nearly 400 years, but the first recorded use of the term came in the Sermon on the Mount. As Christ saw it, and as others have seen it since then, living in a city on a hill brought with it responsibility. Things that happened in such a city could not be hidden, nor should they.

That's why the debate over whether President Obama should have released the Bush administration's "torture" memos is important. Republicans are arguing that Obama has made us less safe as a nation by telling the world what procedures we used to get information, while many Democrats want to prosecute the people who argued in favor of torture.

As expected, Rush Limbaugh weighed in Friday, and he thought he had a great point to make when he said the fact that North Vietnamese torturers had "broken" POW John McCain proved that torture works.

Of course, in a city on a hill that isn't the point at all.

Many presidents have referred to America as the "last best hope of mankind," a phrase most often credited to Ronald Reagan. But it was an earlier president who made the point first.

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. ... We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."

It was Abraham Lincoln who spoke those words to Congress in December 1862, and one point he was making was that to be an American meant something. It meant standing up for freedom and for the rights of human beings.

Many of us see those rights in different ways. To some it means the opportunity to make as much money as possible, while to others the right to own weapons and protect themselves is paramount. But one right that goes all the way back to the Magna Carta -- nearly 800 years ago -- is the right against self-incrimination.

That's where Limbaugh and other conservatives miss the point. The question isn't whether torture is effective. it's whether torture is something Americans should be doing. It's part of that age-old question about whether the end justifies the means.

Certainly some would say yes, while others would say there are no ends and it's all about the means.

I tend to come down on that side.

I tend to believe it's how we live our lives that matters most.

As for those who say torture is the only way to protect America from terrorism, I'm reminded of the famous quote from the Vietnam War.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

I don't believe we can save America by destroying what it means to be American.

When free speech isn't all that free

Jesse Nieto is wondering why they call it free speech if he can't express himself.

Nieto is a retired gunnery sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps who has a civilian job at Camp Lejeune, N.C. His son Marc Ian Nieto was one of 17 Americans killed in October 2000 when Al Qaeda launched an attack on the USS Cole, so he is understandably annoyed at any sort of political correctness toward Muslim terrorists.

His personalized license plate says "USS COLE" and he had several bumper stickers and decals on his car expressing his feelings. One of them said "Islam = Terrorism" and another said "Disgrace my country's flag and I will shit on your Quran."

His stickers apparently violated base rules against political statements, and MPs removed some of them from his vehicle. He's suing, saying his right of free speech was violated.

I'm a big free speech guy, but I don't think he's got much of a case. Camp Lejeune has the right to set rules, and no one is forcing him to work there. If he wants to work somewhere, he has to accept that there are rules.

Not that I don't sympathize.

Facebook helps keep family in touch

A lot of people talk about getting "addicted" to Facebook, and I would be the first to admit I'm spending too much time on the social networking site.

Still, there is one thing totally wonderful about the time I spend there, and that's that I'm getting to watch my infant granddaughter grow up.

Maddie was born in Beijing last Sept. 19, and I had the opportunity to hold her in my arms when she was less than two weeks old. Later in the fall, she and her parents -- my daughter and her husband -- came to visit us for three weeks. It was wonderful, but when they left, the Amazing Baby was still less than three months old.

We'll see her again later this summer after Pauline finishes her two-year tour in China and returns to the States, but in between, there's Facebook. Pauline and Ryan have started posting videos of Maddie trying to stand up, Maddie eating real food, Maddie with a baseball cap on her head backwards and Maddie learning to deliver a razzberry.

It's all wonderful, and I feel like our generation of grandparents has been particularly blessed to be able to keep in touch with our children and their children from thousands of miles away.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got videos to watch.

One thought about 'tea parties'

I actually have very little to say about yesterday's "tea parties" across America.

I believe very strongly in the right to protest, even when I disagree with the people doing the protesting, so I'm not at all unhappy that people opposed to President Obama's policies took to the streets to make their point.

Just one thing, though:

In what was probably an effort to link these protests to the famous Boston Tea Party in 1773, quite a few people had signs complaining about "taxation without representation."

Sorry, but that's not true. Just as the right told the left for eight years to "get over it" when some of us protested the 2000 presidential election, folks need to understand that when you lose an election and the winners do something you don't like, that doesn't mean you aren't represented.

It just means you lost.

That's as simply as I can put it.

Two icons of a decade are gone

As much as I consider myself a child of the '60s, it was the '70s when I really came of age. And although the '60s get all the credit, the decade that followed was in many ways more interesting.

Consider:

Tapestry. Watergate. Disco. Gas lines. Platform shoes. Plato's Retreat. Four dead in Ohio. Pet Rocks. Rubik's Cube. Peace is at hand. Ping pong diplomacy. Secretariat. The Big Red Machine. The list goes on and on.

Two cultural icons of the '70s died this past weekend, and even though both had been out of the spotlight for a long time, neither was totally forgotten. Baseball pitcher Mark "The Bird" Fidrych captivated the sports world in 1976, and actress Marilyn Chambers showed that porno wasn't all middle-aged people in domino masks.

Fidrych first. A lanky 21-year-old from New England, Fidrych had an amazing rookie season with the Detroit Tigers, winning 19 games and losing only nine. He pitched 24 complete games, which is a career for most pitchers nowadays. He was very good for a very short time, hurting his arm the next season and never pitching as well again.

But it wasn't his pitching success that made him an icon. It was his sheer exuberance and his total goofiness. Fidrych acted like a kid out on the mound, getting down on his knees to shape the ground the way he wanted it and talking to the ball before throwing it.

He was the biggest thing going in that bicentennial summer.

Chambers' claim to fame came a few years earlier, with the 1972 release of "Behind the Green Door." It wasn't the biggest hardcore film to connect with a mainstream audience -- "Deep Throat" owns that honor -- but it was the first to aspire to something more and to include a star would could just as easily have been the girl next door.

In fact, Chambers' first fame came as the lovely young mother on the Ivory detergent package, a gig she lost when Ivory executives found out she was doing porno.

"Green Door" was one of the first films that started drawing couples to porno theaters, and one thing that set it apart from others of its ilk was that it showed a woman enjoying what was happening to her. Hard to believe, but 40 years ago, there were still a lot of people who thought only men enjoyed sex.

I don't know if Mark Fidrych and Marilyn Chambers were the '70s icons. You'd have to include Gerald Ford, Chevy Chase, John Travolta and more than a few others on that list, but Fidrych and Chambers certainly are wonderful examples of why the '70s were a lot more interesting than people want to remember.

Sometimes it's best to just live your life

I have a friend who sees conspiracies in everything.

He called me today with some new ones about 9/11, going all the way back to the Federal Reserve and the beginning of the federal income tax. He threw in another one about the electorate was manipulated in 2008 to see that Barack Obama was elected president.

He always assures me that the people who tell him these stories are reasonable -- "middle of the road," he calls them -- and that they have plenty of evidence supporting them.

When I listen, I always listen with one ear.

You see, there's something my friend doesn't understand.

It doesn't matter.

Not one bit.

Whether there are seven bearded Jews in Switzerland running the world, or the Trilateral Commission pulling the strings, or my personal favorite, shape-shifting lizards behind it all, it literally does not matter.

Anyone powerful enough to control the world -- assuming that such a thing is true -- is powerful enough to deal with any little uprising, assuming most people truly don't care and would rather watch "American Idol."

In fact, if anyone were to become a real threat to the way things are, they are certainly powerful enough to take care of them.

That's why so much of our news is anything but news, why people are stirred up by so many false issues, why our education system is designed more to create obedient citizens than real thinkers.

Very few of us have the opportunity to change the world or even to shift the paradigm in which we live. It's best to just affect what we can, to live our lives as honorably as possible.

It's best to leave the conspiracies for the movies.

Can America's rift ever be healed?

If there's anything more frightening someone can say than "Burn the books," I'm not sure what it is.

Well, maybe "Ready, aim, fire," but aside from real violence, the thought of suppressing ideas by burning the paper on which they're printed is about as anti-democratic as it comes.

That's what you'll hear if you listen to this video from one of Glenn Beck's "Tea Party" meetings recently.



On the surface, what Beck is doing in trying to return America to the feeling people shared on Sept. 12, 2001 -- the day after the attacks -- seems relatively innocuous. But what is actually going on here is an anti-tax, anti-government, anti-Obama movement that's starting to sound really nasty.

I know there's an element of "whose ox is gored" in all of this. When George W. Bush was in office, those of us out of power said a lot of vicious things about him, just as the Republicans did when Bill Clinton was president.

But it seems like every time it happens again, it's another rip in our national fabric, and it seems to me this time there's a disturbing undercurrent of anti-intellectualism in it. When someone asks the woman who wanted to burn books in the video what she means, she talks about the "evolution crap."

I have otherwise intelligent friends who reject the idea of evolution, but they know they're doing it in spite of scientific evidence. I myself am a practicing Catholic who has read and accepts Genesis, seeing no contradiction at all between an obviously allegorical Creation story and Charles Darwin's theories.

What bothers me the most about this is that both sides seem so angry in support of their point of view. Liberals see conservatives wanting to "dumb down" America in a world where we need to be smarter, and conservatives see liberals as wanting to eliminate God from our lives.

I'm afraid this won't end well.

"I have here in my hand ..."

Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama apparently hasn't read Santayana.

Bachus told the Birmingham News today that he has a list of 17 members of Congress that he considers to be out and out Socialists. He said he has some hope for President Obama, calling him a better listener than his predecessor, but that he worries Obama will be pushed too far to the left by his party's members of Congress.

Now I don't know Bachus. This is the first time I ever heard his name. But my guess is he probably shouldn't have used the "I have a list" thing. It's awfully reminiscent of old Tail Gunner Joe and his "I have here in my hand a list of 87 Communists ..."

I'm not particularly surprised that there are Socialists in Congress. Remember than Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont actually ran as a Socialist and was elected. I also wouldn't be surprised if there are some members so far to the right that they could be considered Fascists.

But 17 Socialists?

Out of 435 members?

It reminds me of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" from 1965.

"... handful of senators can't pass legislation ..."

So Spence, relax a little. And lose the list.

You'll be a lot happier.

So where did all that come from?

Silly me. I actually thought last Tuesday's post was relatively innocuous.

I certainly didn't think I was plowing any new ground -- big cars, big houses, overweight Americans. It's all been said time and again by people both smarter than me and stupider than me.

I didn't even come to any big conclusions. All I said was that we might have to do something.

You would have thought I pissed on the Statue of Liberty.

I appreciated the long post that was essentially a pep talk about losing weight. I've actually lost about 500-600 pounds in my lifetime; I just keep gaining them back when I get sedentary. I made a decision this time to do something my son has been asking me to do. Virgile wants me to start training for a triathlon; he's currently building up to an ironman triathlon this summer in France.

Now I'm not going to swim 2 miles in open water, cycle 115 miles and then run 26.2 miles. I may be stupid, but I don't have a death wish.

I'm going to train for a sprint triathlon like the one he did last month -- a 5k run, a 15k ride and 150 meters in the pool.

The goal is for next March in Pasadena, when I will be 60 years old.

So losing the weight isn't a huge deal.

But I am surprised at how some people react whenever they think I'm saying something critical about this country. Sorry, but millions of people in this country are not just fat, they're obese. Millions of people spend billions of dollars on crap they don't need. Which part of that don't you get?

Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I despise commentators on the far right and the far left who distort issues and stir people up. If you like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, you're not my audience. I'm actually kind of bitter about how I lost my job too.

Afraid? No, I'm not really afraid of much. I'm too damned old to be afraid of anything in this world, and I'm too strong in my faith to be seriously afraid of what comes next.

So say what you want -- I love getting comments and I love it when those comments disagree with me -- but sorry, I'm not that fearful of anything more than keeping my wife healthy and making sure my kids get every advantage they can.

But thanks for asking.

Life has to be lived in the present

When I was working at the Reno Gazette-Journal in the late 1980s, I wasn't dating much.

I was actually in pretty good shape -- I got down to 160 pounds with a major diet in 1989 -- but I really couldn't find anyone to go out with. My interesting co-workers were mostly already spoken for, and for part of the 18 months I was there, I was still getting over a major disappointment that happened right around the time I left Colorado.

So I didn't date much. But when I got a job in Southern California in April 1990 and was getting ready to leave, a really attractive woman who worked in another part of our building told me it was a shame I had never asked her out.

"I really kind of had a crush on you," she said.

My heart sort of broke, even though I had no idea who she was.

Something similar happened today when I got an e-mail from an old high-school classmate who I vaguely remembered. I looked her up in the yearbook and noticed that she had been pretty, and when I read her second e-mail, she told me that she had sat behind me in English class and had had a crush on me but didn't do anything about it because she was too shy.

I think I considered retroactive suicide. To steal a line from a Woody Allen movie, my social life back then was "The Petrified Forest;" I dated exactly zero girls in my graduating class during high school. It wasn't a small class, either. There were 804 of us.

Actually, those two examples are pretty typical. The first 40 years or so of my life were all about missed opportunities when it came to the opposite sex, so it's a good thing I survived them.

Still, maybe I should have turned around.