All That Matters ...

'One Voice' up and running

2009-10-16T13:23:00.000-07:00

The new Website is up and running, although in sort of a skeleton form so far.

It's called "One Voice," and you can enter the following URL:

http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice

I'm not sure what we'll be doing here, but the new site is the place to be.

Thanks.

'One voice' will be the new site

2009-10-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

Where do we go from here?

I'm hopeful the new site will be up by the end of the week, and this one will then either be a subset of the main one or will just be absorbed into it.

I'm hoping to put more of an emphasis on the theme of this site -- the things that really matter in life. I really don't intend to write about political issues here anymore; I do so much of that on AllVoices.com, where I have become one of the leading contributors in the never-ending battle between left, right and the middle.

I'm changing the name of the site, largely because I think calling a personal site "All that matters ..." is a little arrogant. Who am I to decide what matters for all of you?

I thought about "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," because I love the title and I found that old book recently. I also thought about "How to Pick Up Girls," an amazing old book from about 35 years ago that you could only buy through mail order.

In the end, I settled on "One Voice," the title of a lovely song from about 10 years ago, mostly for the lyric "life's not that simple, down here on Earth."

And for your enjoyment while you wait, a lovely picture of the Amazing Baby.

Changes coming to the operation

2009-10-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry I have been a little slack in posting here the last couple of weeks, but I have been involved with some other things and figured it wouldn't be the worst thing to back off a little.

Actually, over the next few days I'm hoping to revamp and redesign the entire operation. This site will remain where it is, but I hope to make it a part of a larger mikerappaport.com site. I posted on that site for five or six years before switching to Blogger, and I'm hoping to do more.

I'm also planning to start working with video and podcasts; AllVoices is giving me an HD video camera to do reports for them, and I can use it to get some additional stuff on my own site too.

So sit back and watch as we move forward into the future.

Beatles remasters sound wonderful

2009-10-02T21:13:00.000-07:00

His name was Bob, but we always called him "Tunes."

He was always singing, or whistling, or humming, usually something from one of the popular songs of the day. Tunes loved the Beatles, and since we were growing up in an era when Beatles music was everywhere, we heard a lot of Lennon and McCartney songs.

I haven't seen Tunes in nearly 40 years and I have no idea how his life has turned out, but I'm sure he is really happy this year now that all the original Beatles CDs have been remastered and re-released for modern audiences.

Tunes really loved "Rubber Soul" and "Revolver," and both of those would show up on any list of greatest albums of the '60s. My favorite was always "Abbey Road," though, and I remember vividly listening to it for the first time in the fall of 1969.

I always thought George Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" would be pretty close to the top of any list of greatest Beatles songs ever. It's certainly my favorite.

I never heard Tunes singing it or humming it, but I can only imagine.

Go Tunes go.

Music still has its charms ...

2009-09-27T22:58:00.000-07:00

When my lovely wife and I decided to make our annual visit to the L.A. County Fair today, we figured it would only be for a couple of hours.

That's the way we usually do it. We walk around some and we visit the shopping buildings so that she can pick up the latest ShamWow or 1,000 thread count sheets or whatever it is they're selling this year.

But this time was a little different. When we got there a little before 3 p.m., we noticed that the featured concert at 7:30 p.m. would be the Beach Boys. Now I know the group is a pale imitation of the original, with Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson dead and the others split into three different bands.

This one had Mike Love, though, and it had Bruce Johnston as well, along with a group of younger guys who weren't even born when Beach Boys songs were all over the radio all the time.

I had seen the original Beach Boys -- minus Brian Wilson -- three times before, in 1974, '75 and '76 in Washington, D.C. They were great shows, and the group had provided a major part of the soundtrack of my life since their first national exposure in 1962.

Still, Love and Johnston are 68 and 67, respectively, and I'm still getting used to the idea of senior citizens rocking and rolling. But in a pretty tacky week, culture-wise, I suppose I was willing to try it.

It couldn't be worse than Mackenzie Phillips going on Oprah (no, not really on Oprah herself) saying that someone needed to speak up for consensual incest victims or Tom "The Hammer" DeLay channeling his inner Travolta on "Dancing With the Stars."

So I definitely needed some of the wonderful, upbeat music that I loved when I was in high school. Without the three Wilson brothers, the soaring harmonies from the '60s weren't there, but the audience didn't seem to mind. I saw people from 15 to 65 on their feet dancing and singing along with song after song, crammed into a 90-minute performance.

Johnston sounded all right on the lovely "God Only Knows," but he knew he was just a fill-in. When he finished, he dedicated the song to the "one and only Carl Wilson, forever in our hearts."

It was a pretty nice evening, and I didn't hear one person talk about politics all day.

I needed that.

Million dollar shot great to watch

2009-09-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

Talk about a dream come true.

I have been playing golf for 15 years and have never had a hole in one. I've come close a couple of times, including once on my favorite hole, the par-three No. 7 at Empire Lakes in Rancho Cucamonga.

I put a shot eight inches from the hole and tapped in for birdie. Close, but no ...

That's why seeing this shot from the Mark Eaton Celebrity Classic in Utah, in which a restaurant manager from Provo won $1 million, is so amazing.

The hole was 150 yards, just a little shorter than No. 7 at Empire Lakes, which is why it's obvious this guy is a much better golfer than I am.

You see, I use a five wood to clear nearly 150 yards of water.

He used a nine iron for his shot.

Amazing baby takes her first steps

2009-09-16T21:12:00.000-07:00

Milestone, milestone.

Madison Nicole Kastner, aka The Amazing Baby, took her first unaided steps today -- five of them before sitting down. I wish I could post the video here, but if you're a friend of mine on Facebook, you can see it on my home page.

Since today is Sept. 16, little Maddie walked three days before her first birthday. She's also really close to speaking her first words, so she's right on target developmentally. With her parents in language training, Maddie is spending her daytime hours in day care. She started in a class for kids who hadn't started walking yet, but it looks like they're going to have to move her up to the next class now.

Yay, Maddie!

Am I crazy, or is it possible ...

2009-09-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I have decided I'm not going to go gently into that good night.

I want to learn to surf. I want to get a board, head for the beach and learn how to ride a wave.

Editor's note: Mike, you're an idiot. You're almost 60 years old. You can't learn to surf.

Why not?

I can swim, I'm strong enough to carry a board and I've got enough endurance to work out for an hour at a time. Why can't I learn to surf?

Heck, if a penguin can do it ...

Seriously, from the first time I ever heard "Surfin' Safari" in the summer of 1962 on high-flying WING radio in Dayton, Ohio, I dreamed of going to California and trying it myself.

Of course, at 12 I wasn't going anywhere, and other than 10 days in the state in the summer of '78, I didn't make it back until I was 40 years old. I could have tried it in the summers of '90, '91 or '92, but for some reason it never crossed my mind.

Maybe it was just that I didn't have the kind of car you could strap a board to the top of, or maybe I was at a point in my life when I thought I was past all that. Then I became a family man and didn't think of it at all.

But it can't be that difficult.

You paddle out, turn around and raise ...

Isn't that all there is to the coastline craze?

A life without memories ... maybe

2009-09-14T18:04:00.000-07:00

One of the most difficult things about being human is the memory.

I always loved Annie Savoy's line from the wonderful movie "Bull Durham:"

"The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self awareness."

I remember mentioning that line to my sister Laura once. I don't know if she was in a bad mood or what, but her response was that she had never considered me particularly self-aware.

I wish she was right. I wish I were a year old, as my lovely granddaughter will be this Saturday. I wish I could sweep away all the mistakes, all the hurts and just live my life again from the start.

Of course, we don't get to do that. Even if we were in one of those goofy movies where the older person and the younger one switch bodies, it wouldn't be fair to Maddie to cheat her out of nearly 59 years.

I would actually be happy just to forget my past and live what's left of my life in clueless oblivion, to wake up to a new world every morning and just concentrate on loving the people I love and being good to the others.

Maybe I should try for that.

'Liberal' should not be a dirty word

2009-09-09T14:44:00.001-07:00

One of the things that fascinates me, particularly in some of the comments to posts, is how many of you seem to see "liberal" as a dirty word.

I can't say I blame you. For the last 30 years, the right has been hammering away at the word, doing its best to equate "liberal" with "libertine" in people's minds, and completely ignoring the fact that there are shades of difference in those left of center on the spectrum.

One of the tactics talk radio hosts like Fat Man and Little Boy have used for years is basically saying that liberal, socialist and communist are all pretty much the same. There really aren't that many people except on the lunatic fringe who try to equate conservative with fascist and Nazi.

What have liberals done for America?

Well, even though they were Republicans at the time, they fought to end slavery. They fought for women to have the right to vote, and for a whole myriad of workplace rights from child labor to minimum wage to workplace safety.

They busted trusts and created the inheritance tax that at least limited the creation of a permanent American oligarchy. They created Social Security and Medicare, and they led the fight for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam.

They stood for food and drug safety and for consumer protection, and they battled for women's rights in the workplace and in reproductive freedom.

If you look at each of those issues, in almost every one of them, conservatives were opposed. They don't believe in the minimum wage and they have hated Social Security and Medicare ever since they were created. Look at one of their current leaders, Sarah Palin, who wrote in the last 48 hours that Medicare should be changed to a system of vouchers for people to buy their own health care.

I have never been ashamed to consider myself a liberal, although I think in some areas I would go beyond where liberals go and consider myself a European-style Social Democrat.

Here's what that means, according to the definition by the Socialist International, which supports social democratic and moderate socialist parties:

Social Democracy affirms three basic principles.

First, freedom — not only individual liberties, but also freedom from discrimination and freedom from dependence on either the owners of the means of production or the holders of abusive political power.

Second, equality and social justice — not only before the law but also economic and socio-cultural equality as well, and equal opportunities for all including those with physical, mental, or social disabilities.

Third, solidarity — unity and a sense of compassion for the victims of injustice and inequality.

That mostly adds up to two things -- we're all in this together and we are our brother's keeper.

I don't disagree with any of it.

A little wisdom from the South

2009-09-07T22:46:00.000-07:00

I wanted to find out if folks really were as stirred up about Barack Obama as some are saying, so I went to my best source.

I called my friend Cooter Jackson. Cooter lives in a little town about 20 miles from Durham, N.C. He spent 30 years as a columnist for the Grits Advertiser ("All the news that fits, we print"), although he had to retire when he lost his sight in a fishing accident.

Some of you may notice that Cooter has a small resemblance to my friend Mick, who teaches at two community colleges in Southern California.

But it's obvious from the picture that the two men aren't the same. Cooter's hair is shorter, and you can tell from the dark glasses and the vacant stare that he's blind.

In fact, if you look at this picture of Mick teaching, his hair is longer and darker, and he clearly has his eyesight.

Now that we've settled that, it's actually sort of ironic. Cooter says being blind has actually helped him in a couple of ways.

"I was always purty good with the ladies," he said. "But now that I can't see, they're even more eager to come over. They say they don't have to put no makeup on and that's a pure pleasure."

So I called to ask him about Obama.

"Well, he surprised me some when he carried North Carolina last year," he said. "Part of it was McCain runnin' a bad campaign and part of it was folks bein' real fed up with ol' Dubya. Obama caught 'em at the right time, and there really ain't as much racism around here as there used to be."

And now, I asked.

"He wouldn't carry the state today," Cooter said. "Part of it is people thinkin' a president should be a miracle worker and he shoulda solved all the problems by now, and part of it is that he's probably a little more liberal than folks realized."

I asked him what he thought.

"Hell," Cooter said. "He's no more liberal than LBJ was, but Lyndon was a white Southerner, and back then conservatives hadn't turned 'liberal' into a dirty word. I think his biggest mistake is he left it to Congress to do health care instead of proposin' his own plan."

What about all the spending? The huge deficits?

"Bush ran the biggest deficits in history," he said. "He's the only president ever who cut taxes and went to war at the same time. Nobody was fussin' about it then. It's all about the propaganda, and Obama's losin' that battle to idiots like that Fat Boy on the radio and what's his name, Glenn Beck."

I knew Cooter had spent time with both Rush Limbaugh and Beck and he ddin't have much use for either of them. Rush had gone with him on one of Cooter's famous fishing trips.

"Worst one ever," Cooter said. "He just wouldn't stop talkin'. Scared all the fish away. And he kept smokin' those big ol' cigars."

Even so, he said he liked Rush a lot better than Beck.

"I met him at a party in Chapel Hill," Cooter said. "He has kind of a crazy look in his eyes, and I swear I never shook hands with anybody whose hands were softer and damper."

I asked him if he had any advice to pass along to Obama.

"He needs to get mad," Cooter said. "He needs to show some emotion, instead of just bein' so cool and collected about it all. Start runnin' people out there whose lives have been destroyed by insurance companies turnin' 'em down. Start askin' the folks on the other side what they'd do about that. He can still win this thing. He just needs to show he cares."

Howard Beale told the truth

2009-09-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

Howard Beale, huh?

I can live with that. If you saw "Network," you may remember that Beale was killed for telling the truth and threatening to scuttle a major corporate takeover. Listen to the 1976 speech Paddy Chayefsky wrote for Beale and see how much of it was truly prescient.

I don't mind criticism, especially when I'm wrong, but I've read and re-read my original post and my response to Jim and I don't see anything I need to walk back. I said I was tired of haters and that they were bad people and liars, and I said something mean about Ol' Dubya.

Sorry, but I just don't much like the man. I thought it was a disgrace he was even nominated, let alone elected. The man just didn't have the gravitas to be president, and thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis paid the ultimate price for that.

As for being far left, uh, not so much. For one thing, I'm pro-life. For another, during the years I was writing a newspaper column, I called for Bill Clinton's resignation over the Lewinsky thing. I'm not a big fan of Nancy Pelosi, but I do think one reason so many people are so worried about Obama is the way the media is distorting the debate.

Two Ph. D's, huh Jim? Good on you. The closest I ever get to two Ph. Ds is when I go to bed at night. I dropped out of school in the seventh grade myself. Wanted to explore the exciting world of carnival geeks, but when I found out they wanted me to eat chicken every night, I couldn't handle it.

Besides, my old daddy used to tell me that arguin' about who's smart and who's not makes about as much sense as rasslin' with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.

So no, I'm not insulting your intelligence or trying to claim I'm the smartest guy in the room. I am the smartest guy in the room right now, but that's only because I'm sitting here alone.

But I tell you what. If you're looking for fairness to Dubya or Dick Cheney, or measured commentary about Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter, you're probably at the wrong place.

I don't think I'm far left, but I am not ashamed to be called a liberal.

And Nan, in case you were wondering, I never censor comments or delete blogs.

I'm not afraid of words.

Time to put haters in their place

2009-09-03T15:59:00.000-07:00

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

I'm tired of seeing people trying to do something good and then seeing the haters try to turn it into something bad or evil.

Demi Moore and Ashton Kutchner, along with quite a few other recognizable Hollywood stars, made a video called "I pledge," which is basically a lot of people pledging to be less self-centered and do good things for the country and the world.

It's a response to President Barack Obama urging people to look outside themselves and be a better neighbor.

Here are some of the things the people in the video promise to do:

1. Work to end hunger.
2. Smile more.
3. Laugh more.
4. Love more.
5. To be a great mother.
6. To be a great father.
7. To be an American, not an African-American.
8. To find humor in everything.
9. To consume less.
10. To volunteer time.
11. To show more love to others.
12. To meet their neighbors.
13. To be a mentor.
14. To help build a culture of intelligence, not of ignorance.
15. To understand that we're all in this together.

All good things, but in the last minute of this 4:18 video, two different people pledge to serve President Obama in what he is trying to do to change America. It's these two quotes out of nearly 4 1/2 minutes of quotes that the people who hate Obama are using to characterize the video as "indoctrination" or "cult-like behavior."

The media is doing what it always does -- covering the controversy. Instead of the truth of the video, which is that people are trying to get people to do good things, they're treating it as if it is something shameful.

I'm tired of it. I don't care if it's liberals or conservatives, if anyone in this country urges people to do good things to help others, I'm on their side. If Rush Limbaugh says we should volunteer at the local hospital, I'll praise him. Ditto if Jane Fonda were to say the same thing.

It's time to call the haters what they are.

Bad people.

And liars.

Movies can have lasting effects

2009-09-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

It's funny how some things stick with you.

When Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" came out in 1960 with its famous shower scene, there were quite a few people who didn't take showers for months after that.

I was too young to see "Psycho" in its original release, but I know of one Brian DePalma film that still affects my behavior nearly 30 years after I saw it.

"Dressed to Kill" was released in 1980, and I have never looked at elevators the same way since. In the early part of the movie, Angie Dickinson has an illicit affair. When leaving the man's apartment, she learns that she has probably gotten an STD from him and also that she left her wedding ring in the apartment.

She takes the elevator back up to his floor, and when the door opens and she starts to get out, the killer slashes her throat with a straight razor and murders her.

It's quite a scary scene, and ever since then, whenever I am getting into an elevator or coming out of one -- particularly when I am alone -- I always look around before I take a step. Just making sure there's no killer with a straight razor waiting for me.

Silly?

Probably, but I'm still alive.

Wildfire threatens some lovely homes

2009-08-30T16:11:00.000-07:00

When you live in the West, you always have to accept the possibility of wildfires.

And the last few days, with the humidity in single digits and the temperature in triple digits, fires have been burning all around the Los Angeles area.

We owned a home in La Canada Flintridge for more than 18 years. Homes in our small city have sold for a median price of more than $1 million, making it one of the most desirable areas in all of Southern California. That's why even though we were selling in the middle of a housing crash and a national recession, we came very close to getting the price we were asking.

Boy, did we sell at the right time.

Less than three weeks after we closed and collected the cash for our equity, wildfires have destroyed most of the forest above La Canada. Families living within a mile of where we lived have been evacuated, and firefighters have been working day and night to save their neighborhoods.

We haven't been through a lot of anguish, but if this fire had happened a month ago, we would have been right there with our tenants/buyers doing whatever we could to keep the fire from destroying our property.

Ah, Southern California.

It's definitely paradise, as long as you don't mind earthquakes, fires, mudslides and the rest.

To my son on his wedding day

2009-08-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

My son got married today.

It wasn't the beautiful November wedding he and his fiancee had planned. That will still happen as a celebration of their love, but Virgile is leaving for Washington, D.C., in less than two weeks to start his career in the U.S. Foreign Service and he wanted to take Sterling with him as his wife.

We have come to know her well over the three years they have been dating, and we have seen how good they are for each other.

Things got rather hectic on our way to the courthouse in Lancaster, the only one within a reasonable distance that could fit them in. Our brand-new car conked out a few miles short of its destination, and we took a cab the rest of the way.

I didn't really have a chance to talk to my son about marriage, which disappointed me a little. We have had so many good conversations about life and what to expect. We even had the sex talk that so many fathers and sons struggle with.

I have seen marriage from both sides, from a failed one in my twenties to a good one that is coming up on 17 years this fall, so I probably wouldn't presume to give him much personal advice.

I actually would rather tell him about love, and I've never known a better description of love than Paul's first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Here's the famous excerpt from what he wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love is patient and is kind; love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."

I learned those lessons about love from a wonderful person -- Virgile's mother and my wife. Nicole is the most loving person I have ever known and God granted me the greatest blessing of all when he allowed me to meet her on Sept. 12, 1992.

She and our two wonderful children from her first marriage, Virgile and his older sister Pauline, have brought awe and wonder, grace and meaning to my existence. I have fallen short of glory so many times, including today when the car broke down and I lost my temper, but Nicole's love epitomizes all the best characteristics of the words in the Bible.

She will always be the best person I know, my favorite person in the world.

So the best blessing I can give our son on the day of his wedding is this:

"May you be as good a husband as you possibly can, and may you have a wife as loving and as wonderful as your mother."

Best to speak no ill of the dead

2009-08-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."
-- ancient Roman proverb

Ted Kennedy, a man who would almost certainly have been president if not for a wrong turn he took in 1969, died this week.

I have been wondering for a long time what some people will say when it happened, knowing that it is relatively traditional to speak no ill of the dead. Over the last 40 years, no one has been hated more by the lunatic right than the last son of Joe Kennedy.

No, not even Hillary Clinton.

It wasn't all about Chappaquiddick, although Kennedy's failures there gave the nuts the ammunition they needed to attack him without ceasing. It was also because he was the last son of what could have been a political dynasty, and that made him beloved to a lot of people in a way few other liberals were.

What did they say about him today? I don't know what the Limbaughs and Hannitys said; I don't listen to them anymore. But I did check in on Free Republic, the most "mainstream" of the lunatic sites, and they didn't disappoint me. A lot of "scumbags," and "good riddances" and a lot of talk about how the 77-year-old Kennedy is certainly frying in hell.

Far be it from me here to argue with them. I never expected them to be as gracious as liberals were when Ronald Reagan died and they didn't disappoint me. I always considered Kennedy a tragic figure, the least of the brothers who had to bear the burden of the family and the nation's hopes after his older brothers were murdered.

He made a fine record for himself in the Senate, and was considered by members on both sides of the aisle as one of the greatest senators ever for his 47 years of service.

Beyond that, let's just say rest in peace.

Pride goeth before a realization

2009-08-24T22:37:00.000-07:00

I was feeling pretty good about myself for a while today.

My wife and I had gone to meet with two financial advisors -- with the object of choosing one -- to discuss our impending retirement. I'm not sure when exactly it will happen, but the odds are pretty good we're down to counting the months on our fingers and toes.

We're not incredibly well off, but we have been working very hard to build up Nicole's 401(k) account and it's looking pretty good. We're living within our means and saving a significant account of money each month.

We managed to impress the advisors with our frugality, but what impressed them the most was the total amount of our liabilities.

Zero.

We just completed the sale of our house, so we no longer have a mortgage. We own all three of our cars free and clear and we have no personal loans or credit-card debt.

Frankly, I'm amazed.

I think I may have been in the same position for a while in 1984, but I didn't have any assets other than a 1979 Subaru that had already blown one engine.

So naturally, I felt good.

Then I thought about how little I really had to do with it. All I really did was marry well; my wife's income in one year is nearly equal to what I made in my best three years. She's a world-renowned scientist. I'm an unemployed journalist.

I write the checks to pay the bills, but that's about it.

So I'm happy I have a wonderful wife and proud that she loves me enough to keep me around.

That's enough for now.

Twists, turns and 17 wonderful years

2009-08-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in the front seat of my car a few minutes ago, waiting for a parking space to open.

My son and his fiancee were occupying the space, and they were carrying some things down from our apartment to load into the car. They're getting married Friday and moving to Washington, D.C., in about two weeks as Virgile starts his career in the Foreign Service. It means we'll have a true empty nest, with both our children traveling around the world for their careers.

Nicole carried a few things down too, and I found myself watching her in the headlights and remembering for about the one-millionth time why I love her so much. In 20 days, on Sept. 12, it will be the 17th anniversary of the day we met. Just 51 days later, on Nov. 2, it will be our 17th wedding anniversary.

Can a life really change so much in that short a time?

I'm here to tell you it can. When I married my first wife in 1975, I was 25 and she was 21. A month after my 30th birthday we had separated for good. I know I loved her -- it's tough to hear a lot of songs from the '70s without thinking of her -- but I know we got married for all the wrong reasons.

Nearly 13 years separated the end of the first marriage and the beginning of the second, and there were certainly other opportunities. For one reason or another, though, I was still single in the summer of 1992 when I met Nicole.

I used to occasionally wonder what it would have been like if I had met her younger and we had had a child of our own, but I rarely think of that anymore. I have the most wonderful daughter and the most amazing son; Pauline and Virgile are not just high achievers but geniunely nice people as well.

Now Virgile is getting married and I will have a lovely daughter-in-law. Someday, God willing, there will be a lot more grandchildren. They may not have my blood, but just like their parents, they will have my heart.

And as I sit and look at my wife through the headlights, I know one other thing.

I'm married to the most beautiful grandmother in the world.

A nice day, a nice new car

2009-08-22T22:20:00.001-07:00

For the last couple of years, I have been driving a car with some weird defects.

Both of the back windows in my 1999 Pontiac Grand Am are broken -- they won't go up or down and have to be wedged shut with cardboard. My gas gauge doesn't work, so I have had to estimate when I need to fill the tank.

But I like the car. It's the first one I've had in 30 years that wasn't a compact or a subcompact, and as I get older, I've been feeling more and more overwhelmed by all the giant SUVs on the freeways.

Still, it has 134,000 miles on it, which is a lot for an American car, and I have been looking longingly at car ads ever since we put our house on the market a year and a half ago. As we got closer and closer to completing the sale, I started comparing small SUVs and thinking how well my golf clubs would fit in the back of one.

When we were visiting in Seattle earlier this month, the rental car that I drove a few times was a Hyundai Sonata. I was impressed with some of the features, and I started looking at Hyundai's small SUV, the Tucson.

After 17 months of struggle, we finally closed on the house last week. The amazing thing was that despite the economy, we wound up selling for only 2.5 percent less than we wanted in the beginning. Believe me, it really is true what they say about "location, location, location."

To make a long story short, we salted away most of the money we got so that we'll have it to buy our retirement home. We did save a nice little chunk to buy a car, which we did today.

I didn't participate at all. My wife Nicole and my son Virgile both love to haggle, while I'm probably the only guy in the world who sees the sticker price and thinks that's what you have to pay. They got me a nice 2009 Tucson -- the same color as the one in the picture -- for $2,000 less than the sticker price and also got the dealer to throw in a $2,000 navigation system for free.

The best part is that we wrote a check and paid for it all today.

No car loan. No mortgage. No credit card debt or anything else. For the first time in my adult life, I don't owe anyone any money for anything.

I could get used to that.

America has changed since 1961

2009-08-21T13:13:00.001-07:00

I don't know that I've ever been particularly enlightened by Ronald Reagan, but this 1961 speech against Medicare is kind of interesting.

Not so much for its specific message. Conservatives fought as hard as they could to stop Medicare, and as recently as 1995 with Newt Gingrich, they were working to privatize it and gut it. That's no secret to anyone.

But what fascinates me so much about this speech is how much America has changed.

Before the 1930s, there was no government welfare in America. And even in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came along with the New Deal, he made a point that its programs were strictly temporary and designed to get people back on their feet.

Folks believed then that any sort of permanent welfare would simply destroy people's incentive to go out and work for themselves.

There was a feeling that we were different, that Americans were more self-sufficient and would be ashamed to have to be supported by their neighbors.

That's pretty much changed. Ask even conservatives if they would do without Medicare and they're likely to look strangely at you. Ask farmers if they would go without subsidies, or bankers without last year's bailout, or the millions of folks out of work without unemployment insurance.

Not a chance.

I worked without interruption for 29 years, only to find myself out of work in January 2008. I have been collecting unemployment ever since, and I have been paid at a higher rate than I earned until the fifth of my seven career stops.

When you consider taxes, I would have to make at least $14-15 an hour to make any more money, and even then I would be working 40 hours a week for a net gain of about $20.

Should I be ashamed? I've had numerous friends say no, that I paid into it for years and I ought to get it back. But my mother, who grew up in that different America, says that money should be for the truly needy and I should be working, even if it's for less money.

Have we changed?

You bet we have.

Living when you know you're dying

2009-08-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you knew you had a year to live?

Would you walk away from all your responsibilities and spend 12 months doing everything on your "bucket list?" Would you do things that previously scared you too much, like bungee jumping or hang gliding, or would you double down on your efforts to make sure everything you needed to do was finished before you ran out of time?

You might think that last year would be all for you, but very few people actually see it that way.

Most folks live their lives the way they always have ... for as long as they can.

What would you do if you had a month to live?

Make sure your finances were in order? Take one last shot at trying to hook up with the love of your life? Go on one last vacation?

Would you spend a lot of time regretting the things you never did, or would you take pride in the things you managed to get done.

Although those 30 days would pass quickly, for a lot of us, routine would hold sway at least until the last couple of days.

What would you do if you had a week to live?

A week isn't all that long. Seven days, 168 hours ... you'd spend a good chunk of it just sleeping. But what about the time you're awake? A week might be devoted mostly to saying goodbye, both to the people and places that have made up your life.

Some fun, but probably not so much.

What would you do if you had a day to live?

A day isn't much, but I think you might try to stretch it by not sleeping. If you had 24 hours, my guess is you would try to squeeze as much living as possible into that time.

I doubt you'd want to spend much of the time traveling. There might be some place that you still want to see, but losing time getting there wouldn't be much fun. You might just want to spend that last day with someone you love.

In a wonderful 1998 Canadian film, Don McKellar's "Last Night," a group of people in Toronto know that the world is ending at midnight. Most of them look for people with whom to spend their final hours. That's very human.

What would you do if you had an hour to live?

I know I would want to spend that time with the folks I love most -- my wife, my children and my grandchild. If any part of me lives on after my death, it will be in the effect I have had on their lives and the lives of the other people close to me.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time giving them advice. In fact, I don't think I would do much talking. I would rather look at them and listen to them, memorizing their faces and voices to carry with me into eternity.

What would you do if you had a minute to live?

A minute can be the blink of an eye ... or an eternity. But if I knew I were about to die, I would spend the final 60 seconds praying. I would thank God for everything He has given me and I would ask His blessing and continued guidance for the people I love.

I think I could make that minute stretch long enough to get that done.

Have you noticed what's missing in all of this, whether a final year or a final minute?

Anger.

Hatred.

Revenge.

Some folks do spend time regretting things left undone or things poorly done, but not many people go to their death cursing old wrongs. I doubt that even Richard Nixon spent his final moments thinking of those folks on his "enemies list."

Life is a precious gift. There used to be a sculpture in the United Nations building -- I don't know if it still exists or not -- with a caption on it.

"It is a privilege to live this day and the next."

It really is.

Time for Democrats to get tough

2009-08-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

There are apparently two kinds of people who are very vocal about not wanting any sort of health care reform.

One is real, the other isn't.

The real ones are mostly angry white people, many of whom would be opposed to anything proposed by the Obama administration.

Those folks are getting scary, many of them carrying guns to town hall meetings and bearing signs like the one in the picture that implies a message that Obama's blood should flow.

If you're not familiar with the reference, Thomas Jefferson once said that it was necessary from time to time to water the tree of liberty with "the blood of patriots and tyrants."

I'm sure this isn't true of all of them, but it's very apparent from some of the right-wing Websites, not to mention the words and signs of the protesters themselves, that there is more than a little racism involved here. Some of these people just cannot tolerate the idea that a black man is the face America shows the world.

Actually, they're not the worst. As vile and as ignorant as racism is, at least these folks are out there showing their true colors. The second type of protesters aren't even that; many of them have been recruited or hired by right-wing politicos or the insurance companies to derail reform. They're supposed to make it look like the grass roots are rising up against Obama, but it's actually a charade that Mother Jones magazine exposed 10 years ago.

It's called "astroturf" protests, aka fake grass roots.

These are the people carrying signs about death panels, or keeping government out of Medicare, or other ridiculous arguments.

It's time for supporters of reform to start turning those tactics against the people using them. Democrats need to get a lot more "in your face" with Republicans and stop treating lies as if they needed to be argued.

Why not just call a lie a lie?

Why not just call the people spouting them liars?

It's really the only tactic they fear.

Juvenile humor strikes again

2009-08-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

Q: "What do the U.S.S. Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?" A: "They both look for Klingons around Uranus."
-- children's joke

Third graders all across America got a good laugh Wednesday.

After hearing Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., put down a protester at a town hall meeting by asking a woman who compared President Obama to a Nazi "what planet do you spend your time on, talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh struck back quickly.

"Isn't it an established fact that Barney Frank spends his time hanging around Uranus?" Rush asked on his radio show.

Barney is gay, get it? I'd call it frat-boy humor, but Limbaugh isn't the fraternity type.

Ten million third graders and one retired MBA in Dallas are laughing their heads off.

Stay classy, Rush.

And remember, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

'Nazi' health care? Yeah, right

2009-08-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing.

It's often misunderstood; just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean there won't be consequences. I've heard people who have been fired for saying something argue that they were just exercising their freedom of speech. They misunderstood their right.

That's why I got such a kick out of Rep. Barney Frank's response to a woman's question at a Town Hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., when she asked why he supported a "Nazi program" like health-care reform.

Aside from the ridiculousness of the comparison, it has become increasingly weird to see the rise in paranoia at both ends of the political spectrum. Late last year, there were plenty of folks on the left who were at least somewhat concerned that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were going to declare some sort of martial law so that they didn't have to leave office.

Instead, we've learned from Cheney that he was disgusted that Bush "went soft" on him during his second term in office.

Now the right is wildly attacking "Obamacare," even though part of the problem is that there is no such thing. Part of the reason there's so much controversy right now is that President Obama didn't propose anything -- he told Congress to write its own bill as long as it followed certain general principles.

There is no "Obamacare," and even if there were, do we really think a liberal administration with numerous Jewish members would be writing a "Nazi" bill?

Nope, Barney Frank is right.

These people really do spend their time on some other planet.

The wilder the claim, the scarier it gets

2009-08-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why it is people can look at two sources of relative similarity and totally accept one while totally rejecting the other.

My friend Mitch is constantly sending me e-mails with things like "Isn't this scary?" in the subject line. When I open his e-mail to see what he's referencing, it's almost always some right-wing news source claiming that President Obama's health care plan will euthanize Grandma, sterilize the kid down the street and outlaw Christmas unless we agree that Santa Claus should be black.

Now Mitch, as you know, is a pretty intelligent guy. When leftist sources claimed that Dick Cheney ate boiled babies for dinner, watched snuff films for entertainment and led Dubya around on a leash when no one was looking, Mitch dismissed that as ridiculous.

Even when I showed him the evidence.

It's like the folks who listen to talk radio, left and right. Some take the words of Rush Limbaugh as gospel, while others wouldn't believe him if he said the sun was rising in the East.

Mitch's latest panty-twister was an editorial in the Washington Times citing some early writings by one of Obama's health-care advisors as proof that euthanasia and forced sterilization were goals of the left in the current battle over health-care reform.

Now I suppose it's always possible that some Democrats would love to see forced sterilzation of Republicans, and there are certainly plenty of conservatives wishing liberals weren't allowed to reproduce.

But if you look at motivations, it's easy to see that the Times -- owned by the Reverend Moon -- is opposed to health-care reform. And while it would be nice if both sides limited themselves to the truth in arguing their case, it just doesn't happen anymore.

Truth is nice, but to 21st century politicians, winning is much nicer.

Let's tell the truth about health care

2009-08-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

Who would ever have believed that health insurance companies would have become a symbol of all that is good about America?

Sound crazy?

Listen to some of the people fighting against any health care reform and you'll believe that they're fighting to protect the right to have a family or to believe in God, not massive corporations who have turned health care into a cash cow.

In fact, they're fighting to hard to protect Big Insurance that they're telling out-and-out lies. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she's worried that under a reformed system, she would have to go before a "death panel" to fight for the rights of her special-needs child simply to stay alive.

That's the new lie -- that reform would result in euthanasia, or even worse, eugenics.

As you can see from the cartoon, conservatives feel more comfortable surrendering constitutional rights than they do giving up any part of unfettered capitalism. By now we've all heard about the congressman who went back to his district for a town meeting on health care only to hear one of his constituents say, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

Then there's the woman who followed Obama around to town hall meetings until she got to ask the question "Name one thing the government does well."

Her question was straight out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth, and she seemed genuinely surprised by the answer. Obama named Medicare and Veterans Hospitals, but he could just as easily have named national parks, the interstate highway system, Social Security and a host of others.

Medicare works and it works well.

That's why conservatives have been trying to gut it or repeal it since it was passed in 1965.

The only way they can stop health care reform this year is to lie about it and scare the daylights out of people.

No, Sarah, there are no "death panels."

Just health care for folks who can't get it.

Any problem with that?

August escape is a wonderful time

2009-08-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

We escaped Southern California at just the right time.

It has been a very hot summer, and spending the first two weeks in August a thousand miles to the north is just what the doctor -- Dr. Feelgood, that is -- ordered for me.

We have been up here eight days, and I haven't had a television set on once. I've only read two newspapers. I haven't even kept real close track of news on the Internet. I know Bill Clinton freed the journalists in Korea and Sarah Palin is lying about President Obama's health plan, but that's about it.

I've been hiking in the forests with the Amazing Baby. Oh, Pauline and Nicole have been with us, but most of the time I find I can't take my eyes off little Maddie.

She's much prettier than Sarah Palin.

A wonderful vacation in the green

2009-08-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

This baby is just so incredible.

We're in Washington state for two weeks, visiting our lovely daughter Pauline and the Amazing Baby, little Madison Nicole.

Maddie is 10 1/2 months old now and is extremely close to both walking on her own and talking. She is becoming such an interesting person and is a delight to spend time with.

We're staying about 40 miles east of Seattle, near Snoqualmie Pass, and the one thing that is truly amazing is how green it is here. When you live in the Southwest, you get accustomed to duller shades of green and a lot of browns.

It's nice to relax, but nicer to be with Pauline and Maddie.

California's future isn't bright

2009-08-01T20:26:00.000-07:00

"It used to be I'd go places and people would say, 'Where are you from?' I'd say 'California' and they'd be, 'Ah gee, aren't you lucky.' Now it's ridicule."
-- MERVIN FIELD

Mervin Field has been polling Californians since shortly after World War II. In fact, there may not be anyone alive who understands Californians better than the 88-year-old Field, who was interviewed in Saturday's Los Angeles Times.

He was here during the boom after the war, when the state's population swelled to 10.6 million in the 1950 census. He was here during the can-do governorship of Pat Brown, when most of the state's infrastructure was built.

And he's been here since, through Ronald Reagan, through Proposition 13 and all the boom-and-bust times until the current time. As of last year, there were 38.3 million people in California, and only 43 percent of them were non-Hispanic whites.

As usual, California leads the way in looking like the rest of America will look in 20 or 30 years.

And what it looks like is ... ungovernable.

Whether you want to blame it on too much spending, on too little taxation because of Prop 13 or on too many illegal immigrants, the fact is we don't have the money to pay for the government we want.

So we'll hit 40 million people soon and eventually 50 million. The hillsides will be covered with houses, and people will be living farther and farther out into the desert and eventually everything will fall apart.

Too many people, not enough water.

Too many students, not enough teachers.

Too many criminals, not enough police.

Yes, we will lead the way either into anarchy or into some sort of fascist state. Those who have the money will either leave or barricade themselves into walled enclaves, and everyone else will fight over limited resources and eventually try and storm those enclaves.

Anyone who thinks the future on the present course is bright is fooling himself. By the 1950s and into the 1960s, America had built maybe the most egalitarian free society in history. The middle class was thriving and so were the wealthy.

But the super-rich never stand still very long. Enough is never enough for them. If they've got $1 million, they want $10 million. If they've got $1 billion, they want $2 billion. They're the only ones who never seem to understand that we really are all in this together.

So bad things will ultimately happen, both here and in the rest of the country. Not because we couldn't have stopped them, but because too many people had too short-sighted a view and the folks cashing in truly did think it would last forever.

But damn, this used to be such a beautiful state.

Books, libraries still matter a lot

2009-07-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

Some of the fondest memories of my childhood came in a library.

I always thought it was an old Carnegie Library, one of the 2,509 built in the U.S. with grants from the richest man in the world. It turns out Crestline, Ohio, wasn't on the list, but the library there -- whoever built it -- was one of the most wonderful places in the world to me.

Whenever I was visiting my grandparents in the summer, I would walk to the library, check out five or six books on my mother's old card and take them home to read them. It usually took me two or three days and then I was back for more.

I loved reading so much, probably more than anything in the world, and I enjoy it as much at 59 as I did at 9. Think about that for a minute. How many things other than eating and sleeping have you enjoyed for your entire life?

I was goofy. I thought all kids loved to read. How else were we supposed to develop our imaginations? How else could we visit any place in the world at any time in history? How else could we imagine ourselves exploring outer space?

Turns out I was wrong. Plenty of kids didn't enjoy it at all, and like me, they grew up and became adults. We live in a country where roughly two of every three adults don't read for pleasure, a country were 40 percent or more are functionally illiterate.

Now I see where Ohio is having big problems. The governor is cutting the budget for state libraries by 30 percent. Shorter hours, fewer days open, fewer people working there.

It's all pretty stupid and short-sighted. We've gone through it here in Los Angeles County and we may go through it again. Since so few people read anymore, libraries are a luxury. Besides, folks who enjoy reading can usually buy their own books.

But what about the kids who haven't discovered the joy of reading yet? If they're to find it, it's probably going to be in a library -- if it's open.

I would imagine if you asked Ohio voters -- or voters in a lot of states -- where the budget cuts should come, they probably wouldn't choose libraries. They might cut raises for prison guards, or ask state employees to pay more on their own health care.

At this rate, the odds are pretty good that we will eventually become a country where very few people read at all, and the majority get their entertainment only from flickering screens, or portable music players plugged into their ears.

There actually was a time before when almost no one read.

They called it the Dark Ages.

Jan Berry and the beauty of summer

2009-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:00

"Two girls for every boy ..."

Are there still summer songs?

I don't know, but if there aren't songs that sing of the sweetness of summer, of sunny days, balmy nights and the girls on the beach, it would be a real shame. Because there's nothing like a summer song to help you rejoice in the time that stretches through June, July and August until the evenings get chilly and school beckons.

I think the first summer song I remember was "Surfin' Safari," which I heard in the summer of 1962 on "high-flying WING" radio in Dayton, Ohio. I believe it was 1410 on the AM dial, but it has been nearly 50 years and I'm not sure. I had a cheap little table radio that I had won selling band candy, and I listened to it day and night that summer.

A few hundred yards north of our house, they were building Interstate 70, which eventually would run from Baltimore all the way to the Great Salt Lake. I'd never been to either of those places, but I knew I would someday.

I was 12 in 1962, and I loved those summer songs. The one that was maybe the greatest of all came out the next summer, after we had moved to Virginia. I don't think I had heard much by Jan and Dean at that point, but as soon as I heard the first line of "Surf City," I was hooked.

"Two girls for every boy ..."

I was a huge Beach Boys fan at that point, and "Surf City" was supposedly a song Brian Wilson had given Jan and Dean to record. I remember the record label gave him the writing credit, although at that point I didn't know the politics of such things. I just loved the music.

I had never been near the Pacific Ocean when I was old enough to remember -- I was born in California -- but listening to Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys started a lifelong desire to return that finally came true in 1990.

It wasn't the greatest song musically, even though the melody would be recycled for "Drag City" later that same year, but nothing could match it for exuberance and joy.

Of course, exuberance and joy are pretty ephemeral. They rarely last long, and when I heard in 1966 that Jan Berry had been critically injured in an automobile accident, I thought of "Dead Man's Curve" for a few minutes and then moved on.

I figured that was it, but years later I heard that Berry had made a partial recovery and that Jan and Dean were touring again. I never got the chance to see them, but I just finished reading Bob Greene's wonderful book, "When We Get to Surf City," and it was so poignant it brought tears to my eyes.

You see, Jan never made it all the way back. If you watch the video, you can see him as he looked both after and before the accident. He talked a little slower and he battled all sorts of physical problems from the head injuries he suffered in the accident.

He had to relearn the lyrics of his songs every morning and there were times when he fell in his room and couldn't get up until someone came to help him.

But he toured and he sang. He kept doing what he loved the most and at one point he put together an album of songs all by himself.

Berry died in March 2004, and Greene, who had been touring with Jan and Dean since 1992, wrote of how much he had loved summer. In fact, for 38 years he had lived from summer to summer, battling to keep going. You could probably sum it up with one line from another song, "Ride the Wild Surf."

"Gotta take that one last ride ..."

If you're lucky, you get 75 or 80 summers in your lifetime. Some will be disappointing, others pretty good. If you're lucky, you get a few that are memorable.

Bob Greene has been called "America's poet laureate of summer," which seems to me like a pretty good thing to me, so I'll close this piece with something he wrote.

"If all of life were summer, then our world would have no texture, no context. Summer would not taste the way it does if we thought it would last forever."

"Two girls for every boy."

Medicare is a government success

2009-07-30T23:28:00.000-07:00

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Rep. Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”
-- PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times

This story sounds almost too ridiculous to believe.

The idea that someone covered by Medicare wouldn't know that it was a government program and that he didn't want those bureaucrats in Washington to get involved in it, well, it shows us one thing.

What's that?

It shows us that largely because of all the demagoguery that's being used on this issue, government isn't getting credit for a job it does much better than any of the private insurance companies.

Krugman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, points out that the only reason as many people are insured as there are now is because of government subsidies -- tax breaks for employers offering coverage. Part of the deal is that to get the tax breaks, everyone has to be offered coverage, not just the ones who are young and healthy.

That's the problem with not having a public option in the current reform effort. If private companies are all there is, then people who are old, unhealthy or have pre-existing conditions won't be able to get coverage.

That's the biggest obstacle to reform. If we can't cover everybody, we come up short.

More great news from great kids

2009-07-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

We received a phone call yesterday with some wonderful news.

Our son Virgile, who has been traveling in Europe, told us that his security clearance had been completed and he would officially be starting his job with the Foreign Service in the middle of September.

He's also getting married this fall, and Sterling Miller (shown in the picture with Virgile) will be a wonderful wife for him and daughter-in-law for us.

As difficult as it is to become a foreign service officer, it makes me doubly proud that both of my children have qualified. Pauline had already been employed by the State Department for more than five years and has completed tours in Africa and in China.

Pauline is amazing in some of the same ways her mother is amazing. She's got incredible drive and the determination to do things correctly, and she has developed wonderful people skills. I know from her evaluations that she shows us that she is very highly esteemed by her employers, and it manifested itself in the fact that she has already received tenure in her job.

For all her good qualities, it has been the last year that she has really blossomed as a person. Having a baby and becoming a mother seems to have made my daughter's life complete.

Little Maddie has added so much to all our lives, and the joy I feel from being twice a parent and once a grandparent is more than I could possibly have imagined.

For all my pride in them, and all my pleasure in the times I have been called a good father, I know I am very lucky. I have friends who have done their very best and haven't had the same results. I am well aware that you can't really be called a good parent unless you have good children.

I don't have good children -- I have wonderful children.

Neither one of them has ever done anything really bad, and any parenting I had to do was usually just nudging them in the right direction once in a while.

I am a very lucky man.

Little kids make pool a splashy place

2009-07-25T20:42:00.000-07:00

When I was in my teens, my family went to a swimming pool a few blocks from where we lived.

It was a community pool, and we paid a fee each year to belong. I remember many hot afternoons hanging out at the pool, swimming and playing games in the water and getting out for five minutes every hour when the lifeguard called out "Rest period!"

If I remember correctly, I think once kids turned 16, they didn't have to vacate the pool for those five minutes. It was always more pleasant during those few minutes that the little kids weren't in the pool.

I don't live in Virginia any more, and our neighborhood pool is much smaller than the one I used to visit. But it's still wonderful to get into the water in the late afternoon of a hot day and cool off some.

The only problem is that in the smaller pool, even a small number of children can make for an awful lot of splashing. The children tend to be a lot younger -- at least half of them appear to be 5 or 6 years old -- and they get a lot of joy out of making the water fly.

They don't seem to play organized games. In all the times I have gone to our pool, I haven't heard the words "Marco" or "Polo" even once. I suppose I could try to teach them, and as wary as kids are these days, I wouldn't be surprised to hear one of them yelling "Stranger danger!" the first time I said anything.

Actually, I did have a brief conversation with one little boy this afternoon. I was standing in water up to my shoulders at the edge of the pool, trying to keep my copy of John D. MacDonald's "The Dreadful Lemon Sky" from getting wet.

He walked up to me along the side of the pool and asked me a question?

"Can I jump in right here?" he asked, gesturing to a spot about a foot from me.

I didn't pause for a second. "No."

He looked disappointed, so I explained to him that I didn't want to be splashed, but if he went to the other side of the pool, the water was the same depth.

That's what he did, but I still felt bad.

You kids get off my lawn.

Some folks just don't want the truth

2009-07-23T16:00:00.000-07:00

When I read Bob Greene's wonderful "Late Edition," which I wrote about yesterday, I was reminded of how newspapers have often been called the first draft of history.

Events are recorded for posterity, and while they may be revised, corrected or expanded at some point, it was reading them in the newspaper that told us they had happened.

That's why two newspapers from 1961, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Honolulu Advertiser, pretty much blow away any possible legitimacy to any claims the "birthers" have about President Obama.

For all the claims that Obama's birth certificate isn't real, or that there have been forgeries (despite the Republican governor of Hawaii saying she has seen it and it is a legal birth certificate), the one thing the birthers can never explain is that within a day or two of Obama's birth, both Honolulu newspapers reported it in their vital statistics sections.

So ...

To believe that there is still some conspiracy, we now have to believe that the newspapers were in on this and that the conspiracy goes all the way back to the time of Obama's birth in 1961. I mentioned this to one "birther" I know, and he came up with a perfect knee-jerk response.

"The newspapers could have been photoshopped to include a fake announcement."

Maybe, but who could ever be sure there weren't other copies somewhere in files or on microfilm that would contradict them?

That's why I believe, as I have from the start, that what this is all about is people who lost the last election trying to find anything they can use to derail Obama's administration. I'm sure that once this fails, there will be people coming out of the woodwork claiming to have been his gay lover, or claiming to have been raped by him, or claiming to have been a member (along with Obama) in a subversive group.

The most disturbing part of it all is that a part of our electorate seems to have taken a very primitive attitude toward the facts in all this. What they're saying, in essence, is that they won't believe anything they haven't seen with their own eyes.

And sometimes, not even that.

Still something special about newspapers

2009-07-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

I was 11 years old the first time I had the feeling.

I don't remember much about the newspaper, other than to tell you it was a local weekly in Huber Heights, Ohio. I opened up the sports page, looked at the bottom of the broadsheet and saw my name and picture with a column about junior high school sports that I had written.

I had a 1961 crew cut and the shirt I was wearing had red and white stripes. I looked like someone out of a barbershop quartet.

But I was a newspaper man. Or maybe more accurately, a newspaper reporter.

I wish I could say it was the beginning of a lifelong romance with journalism, but after that one season in Ohio, it was 17 years before I wrote for a newspaper again. That was when the real romance began.

From the fall of 1978, when I returned to college and went to work on the school paper to January 2008, when I was one of the first victims of last year's massive job cuts in the newspaper industry, I was a journalist.

I worked for wonderful people and I worked for people I'm pretty sure will roast in hell. I worked for terrific journalists and I worked for others who had been promoted well past the level of their incompetence. I even worked for people who seemed eager to hasten the demise of America's newspapers.

If I live to be 90 years old, and people ask me what I did, I will say proudly that I was a journalist. I didn't work in the media; I worked in the newspaper business, and if 30 years from now I have to explain to people what newspapers were, I will do so proudly.

I covered almost everything -- sports, business, politics, entertainment. I even got to write a column three times a week for the best five years of my professional life. I wasn't Bob Greene or Mike Royko, but I had a following.

I'm currently reading Greene's latest book, "Late Edition: A Love Story," about the four summers he spent at the old Columbus Citizen-Journal at the beginning of his own career, and the best compliment I could ever pay him is to say that he gets it. He understands exactly what it is -- what it was -- that made so many of us fall in love with deadline journalism.

He understands what we're losing, too.

Says Greene:

"We were not in the 'information business.'

"That is the phrase that newspaper executives often use today, to explain what they do. It is intended to be heard as a descriptive, even boastful phrase, but it can sound vaguely desperate. With the newspaper business in trouble, some publishers seem ever eager to proclaim to the public that they're not in the newspaper business at all. They're in the information business. Web sites, cable television channels, drive-time radio partnerships, e-mail editions, Internet entertainment offshoots ... a newspaper, the implication seems to say, is only a part of it. It's as if the publishers want the readers to translate that as" only a small part of it."

The last boss I had in the newspaper business, the one who ended my employment, gave us a long speech on more than one occasion to tell us we were not in the newspaper business, we were in the information business.

The sad part of it is that he was a frightened little man who covered his fear with bluster and meanness. He was far too eager to write off newspapers, and he even said several times that he didn't care about the print edition at all.

Sorry, Steve, but when I read the New York Times or USA Today on my BlackBerry, it just isn't the same as holding a newspaper and seeing words in print. Probably the greatest non-sexual thrill I ever had in my life was when I walked the campus on Mondays during the year and a half I was editor in chief of my college paper and saw hundreds of people reading my paper and discussing it.

I never reached the heights of a Bob Greene, but I got to be Bob Greene on the local level for five years and there is nothing like writing stories about people and knowing they meant something. Knowing that someone was paying me to use my judgment to choose subjects, research them and write them.

Being a journalist was wonderful, and seeing my picture with my column three times a week was as good a feeling as I ever had professionally.

It was almost as good as when I was 11.

Budget deal bad for Golden State

2009-07-21T22:43:00.000-07:00

Will the last person to leave California please turn out the lights?

The budget "deal" announced this week by the folks in Sacramento seems to assure only one thing. Life in our state is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Thanks to a Republican minority that absolutely refuses to support tax increases, and the tight collar forced on the state by Proposition 13 in 1978, California has become the first state to basically abdicate the idea of governing.

So much so, in fact, that for all his good intentions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger may end up being remembered as the man who destroyed California.

He's the one who was elected in 2003 by promising to cut the car tax, and the revenue surrendered when he did that was the first problem when the economy turned down and there was a revenue shortfall.

Just as Democrats love to spend money on new and expanded programs when revenues spike higher, Republicans love to cut taxes. They're both wrong. The way to handle unexpectedly high revenues is either with one-time expenditures or with tax rebates. You don't want to have to count on those higher revenues year after year.

So school funding has been cut, both for K-12 and for colleges, as well as all sorts of other health and welfare funding. The budget truly is being balanced -- if it is balanced at all -- on the backs of the poorest Californians.

Some folks will whine about illegal immigrants costing the state all sorts of money, but the fact is simple. Californians don't want to pay for the government they want.

It isn't a case of too much taxation.

It's a case of too little intelligence -- and political courage.

California summers getting worse each year

2009-07-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

I am no longer a fan of the land of the endless summer.

When I first came to California in 1990, we still had at least a semblance of seasons. I remember a day or two when the temperature actually got down near freezing, and January and February could be counted on for a lot of rain.

Well, call it global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it, but summer has stretched out to about nine or 10 months a year in Los Angeles now, and summer is getting hotter and more humid every year.

Not true, you say?

You've got facts.

Well, I'm sticking to my story.

It has been a little more than two weeks since I returned from two weeks in Europe, and each day seems hotter than the one that preceded it. I'm pretty sure our local temperature has hit the high 90s the last three or four days, and my energy level is usually a converse relation to the heat outside.

We sleep with an overhead fan in our bedroom as well as an open window, and I still find myself getting up in the morning drenched with sweat. It reminds me of one thing I always loved about Colorado summers -- it might be 95 in the daytime, but it would drop to 48 or so at night.

All we have in our apartment is a room air conditioner, and it's in the living room. Once we know we're going to be staying here for a while, we'll buy a window unit for the bedroom. And for my lovely wife Nicole -- who truly loves heat and hates cold -- to agree to that, the weather has to be truly awful.

We do have a swimming pool at our apartment complex, as you can see from the photo, and it has been a Godsend. In fact, I have spent a total of about seven hours in the water the last three days. If the weather stays this hot, I may double that in the next three.

It makes it tough to get much done, so I don't. But it does make me feel better, and the good feeling stays with me for an hour or two after I'm back in the heat.

Two more weeks and we're off to Seattle.

It had better be cooler there.

Cronkite's journalism no longer exists

2009-07-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

The death of Walter Cronkite the other day wasn't really all that significant, just as the death of Michael Jackson mattered a lot less than the media said it did.

Not to equate the two by any means, but just as Jackson hadn't been a significant force in music for nearly 20 years, Cronkite had been retired from journalism for even longer. He was the CBS Evening News from 1962-81, when CBS pushed him into retirement and gave his job to Dan Rather.

The most interesting thing about Cronkite isn't that he was charismatic or a compelling performer. He really wasn't either. What he was, though, is everything our "news" isn't anymore -- he was honest and he wasn't opinionated. For all the sniping from the right about him being "just another liberal journalist," for much of Cronkite's career, Democrats thought he was a Republican and Republicans thought he was a Democrat.

If he was the "most trusted man in America," it was because his viewers knew he wasn't trying to sell them his slant on the news. He didn't want to convince people to vote one way or another, and he really didn't give a damn about the ratings.

In short, he was everything today's news business isn't, and the fact that he isn't around anymore at least means that the folks who call themselves journalists these days will no longer have to be embarrassed by what Cronkite might think of them.

Modern journalism has become a squirmy thing, something neither fish nor fowl. In part because of 40 years of attacks from the right for a so-called "liberal bias," journalists these days won't even call someone out for an out-and-out lie.

An example:

It is fairly obvious that President Obama has a birth certificate that says he was born in Hawaii in 1961. Still, a fringe group of "birthers" on the right are insisting that Obama is ineligible to be president and that the birth certificate may be a forgery.

I'm not sure Cronkite would even have covered this story. If he had, though, it would have been to point out that these people don't really have any evidence and they're just trying to sabotage Obama's presidency.

Our modern-day "journalists" tend to treat everything as he-said, she-said, and no matter how ridiculous someone's point of view is, they treat it just as one side of the story.

Part of that is because the right -- there they go again -- say that telling people the story is elitist, that Fox's "We report, you decide" is the truly egalitarian way to go.

Maybe in an educated society, but when 65 percent of adults don't read, there are an awful lot of people who, as the old saying goes, don't know shit from shinola. The irony is that they don't see the news as being any different from pundits' voice on the left or right. If Katie Couric tells them the news and Rush Limbaugh tells them the "truth," who knows who they'll believe?

Covering the news -- whether in broadcast media or in newspapers and magazines -- has gotten so tied up with the cost of paying for it that we don't even really cover news anymore. If it's a choice between explaining Obama's cap-and-trade plan or reporting the latest gossip on Michael Jackson's death, the Jacko story is going to get 90 percent of the coverage.

My guess is this won't last forever. We may be slouching toward Bethlehem looking for a new way of educating people and keeping them informed, and the rough beast that will come out of this might be something we haven't even considered yet.

It won't be Walter Cronkite, though.

Those days are gone.

Hemingway isn't one of my favorites

2009-07-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"
-- final line of THE SUN ALSO RISES

I just don't get Ernest Hemingway.

I love the last line of "The Sun Also Rises," mostly because Robert B. Parker has used it in at least five different Spenser novels. But as far as Hemingway's oeuvre, give me Thomas Wolfe or F. Scott Fitzgerald anytime.

When it comes to Hemingway, I tend to agree with John D. MacDonald, who poked fun at the ultra-macho flavor of his work in numerous Travis McGee books.

Other than being male, I guess I don't have much in common with him. I don't like fishing, I've never been hunting and I'm somewhat appalled by the whole idea of bullfighting. That sounds to me like three strikes and out.

It isn't that I don't like the whole "Lost Generation" thing. I love Fitzgerald and plan to read everything of his that I haven't already finished before I die. John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson were also terrific writers, but I've been working my way through "The Sun Also Rises" this week and it doesn't do much for me.

I'm sure it's at least in part a question of perspective. When the book was first published in 1926, it was said that readers found the disillusionment of the characters shocking. But I know so many people now who are disillusioned with so many things, Jake Barnes seems like an amateur to me.

In case you're wondering, the picture is of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley as Lego figures. I was looking for something better, but it seems there's a rodeo star named Jake Barnes and Google has 10 million pictures of him.

I'll finish the book. I do want to read that final line in context, but I don't know if it will lead me to read too many more of Hemingway's.

There are just too many good books to read ... and so little time.

GOP needs to get its Latinos straight

2009-07-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

Would you be annoyed if someone made a joke about you that assumed you were Australian?

Or English?

Scottish?

Or maybe they would look at you and say something funny about New Zealand.

If you've ever had any of that happen to you, then you might understand how Judge Sonia Sotomayor must feel in all the discussion of her nomination to the United States Supreme Court. She's a New York native whose parents emigrated from Puerto Rico prior to the Second World War. She was born in the Bronx, and calls herself a "Nuyorican."

She is the first American of Latino descent to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and because of that, a lot of people seem to be confused about what a Latino is. At least one political cartoonist has portrayed her as a pinata, which is part of the Mexican Christmas celebration.

At least one Republican senator, in trying to be humorous, said that some of Sotomayor's statements meant that she had "some 'splainin' to do." That of course is a reference to "I Love Lucy," in which Lucy was married to a band leader from Cuba.

It may be hard for some people to believe, but other than language, the various peoples that qualify as Latino -- or Hispanic -- don't have much more in common than Newt Gingrich does with Crocodile Dundee.

Maybe Republicans need a couple of reminders. Roberto Clemente was from Puerto Rico, for one. Bernardo, Anita and Maria in "West Side Story," they were Puerto Ricans.

Ricky Ricardo was not a Puerto Rican.

Neither were Speedy Gonzalez, Pancho Villa or the Taco Bell chihuahua.

And as far as I know, Newt Gingrich never hunted crocs, although I'm not so sure about Dick Cheney.

A quest for fun in 30 cities

2009-07-15T18:04:00.001-07:00

Most of us have at least two different types of goal in life.

We have the important ones that we really want to achieve -- and the whimsical ones that give us pleasure as hobbies.

I have had several friends who have described their lives as the quest for the perfect cheeseburger, and I'm pretty sure my son-in-law is trying to sample every good beer in the world at least once.

I'm not that ambitious, but I would like to see a baseball game in every one of the major league stadiums before I die.

It's obvious I can't see games in every ballpark that ever existed, unless H.G. Wells were to show up on my doorstep. There are a lot of stadiums either no longer in use or no longer in existence. But there are 30 major league franchises, and each one of them has a stadium. I'll settle for completing the rounds in all 30 of them.

I'm actually a little envious of my granddaughter. In the picture above, Maddie is attending her first baseball game, at Safeco Field in Seattle. That's one of the parks I have yet to visit.

Here's where I stand as of July 2009:

AMERICAN LEAGUE

Baltimore -- I haven't been to Camden Yards, but I attended several Orioles games in the '60s, '70s and '80s at the old Memorial Stadium that preceded it.

Boston -- I've been to Fenway Park once in 1997, for a game between the Red Sox and the Mariners. It was in the days when the curse of the Bambino still afflicted the Olde Towne Team.

Chicago -- I've never seen the White Sox play at home.

Cleveland -- I haven't been to Jacobs Field, but my dad and my grandfather took me to Indians games at Municipal Stadium, the old Mistake by the Lake, in the '60s.

Detroit -- I've never seen a ballgame in Detroit.

Kansas City -- All I've ever seen in K.C. was college basketball.

Los Angeles -- I've been a number of baseball games in Anaheim, including a game with the Padres and Angels on the first night ever of interleague play.

Minnesota -- I've never been to a ballgame in Minneapolis.

New York -- I saw numerous games at the old Yankee Stadium, even prior to the 1974-75 remodeling. When I was 7 years old, I walked on the field after the game and saw the monuments in center field. I haven't been to the one that opened this year.

Oakland -- I've been to one ballgame at Oakland Coliseum, Orioles vs. A's in the summer of 1991.

Seattle -- I've never been to a ballgame in Seattle, but I'm hoping to add Safeco to my list next month.

Tampa Bay -- I've never even been to Tampa.

Texas -- I've been to Dallas, but only for the 1986 Final Four. No ballgames.

Toronto -- I've never been to Toronto.

NATIONAL LEAGUE

Arizona -- I haven't been to any games in Phoenix, although I imagine it's doable on a weekend trip from Los Angeles.

Atlanta -- I haven't been to Turner Field, but I did see Steve Carlton shut out the Braves at Fulton County Stadium on Opening Night 1984.

Chicago -- I saw Wrigley Field when I was 9 and in Chicago for a funeral, but it was winter and there was no baseball being played.

Cincinnati -- In 1957, I saw a Sunday doubleheader between the New York Giants and the Reds at old Crosley Field. I've never been to Riverfront Stadium or to Great American Ballpark.

Colorado -- I lived in Colorado before major league baseball, so I've never been to Coors Field. I did see the Class AAA Denver Zephyrs play in 1987, and I saw Minnesota and Toronto play two exhibition games in 1988 at Mile High Stadium.

Florida -- My only trip to Miami was Spring Break 1980, long before there was major league baseball in Florida.

Houston -- I've never been to the Astrodome or to Enron/Minute Maid Field.

Los Angeles -- My home stadium. Counting the two years I covered the Dodgers, I have probably been to close to 200 games at Dodger Stadium.

Milwaukee -- I've never even been to Milwaukee.

New York -- I saw several games at Shea Stadium, including one that Tom Seaver pitched on the Fourth of July in the early '70s, but I haven't been to Citi Field yet.

Philadelphia -- I haven't been to old Shibe Park or to the new stadium in Philly, but I did see the Dodgers and Phillies play at Veterans Stadium in 1982.

Pittsburgh -- I've never spent any time in Pittsburgh.

St. Louis -- I worked in the Gateway City for 2 1/2 years from 1984-86 and I covered about two dozen baseball games, including Game Three of the 1985 World Series, at old Busch Stadium. I haven't been to the new stadium yet.

San Diego -- I haven't been to Petco Park yet, although I covered a number of games at Jack Murphy Stadium, including the 1992 All-Star Game.

San Francisco -- I've seen only three baseball games at Candlestick Park, but they were all games in the 1989 N.L. Championship Series between the Giants and Cubs. I haven't been to the new stadium yet.

Washington -- My home town. I never saw a game at Griffith Stadium, but I saw numerous games -- including the 1969 All-Star Game -- at RFK Stadium. And last year, I saw the Nationals beat the New York Mets at the new stadium.

There's still a lot of racism in America

2009-07-13T16:12:00.000-07:00

My guess is the right wing would hate President Obama if he were white, red or green, but the fact that he is a black man is bringing out the worst in conservatives.

A photo of Obama's daughter Malia wearing a t-shirt with a peace sign on the front practically sent right-wing blog site Free Republic into full meltdown last week.

"A typical street whore." "Ghetto street trash." "Wonder when she will get her first abortion."

And some folks on the right have the nerve to say racism is dead in America and that we shouldn't be considering it anymore.

Malia Obama doesn't need me to defend her, and I'm enough of a product of the '60s that I don't see a peace sign as something shameful. But it's obvious that the trailer parks of America are filled with people who still do.

Until recently, a lot of the racism from the right had been relatively subtle. But read some of the other comments in this Vancouver Sun article and you'll see that the Freepers have jumped the shark, so to speak.

You won't find the Malia Obama thread there anymore. After hundreds of racist comments and a few complaints, it has been removed.

Questions that just will not go away

2009-07-11T20:33:00.000-07:00

"Omne animal post coitum triste."
-- attributed to ARISTOTLE

I was having a conversation with an old friend the other day and I was surprised to learn that he had never heard this phrase.

If it had been anyone but him, it wouldn't have bothered me. There aren't many people these days who quote Aristotle in Latin, but my friend is extremely well-read and he and I have had many conversations about sex over the years.

He told me that when he was younger, he often had melancholy feelings after sex, wondering if that was all there was. I threw the quote at him, a quote that translates as "all animals are sad after sex," and it made sense to him in the same way that letdowns after big accomplishments made sense.

My friend and I were raised in the '50s and came of age during the '60s and '70s, the very peak of the sexual revolution. He was better looking and more confident around women than I was, so he was far more of a player than I was.

In fact, a number of the women I dated made a point of telling me how good-looking my friend was, which did wonders for my confidence. And on those occasions when I was successful, I was a lot more like Billy Crystal in "When Harry Met Sally" than I was like any Don Juan.

It was always more about love for me, which was one of the main things that caused the downfall of my first marriage. When one person sees it as more of a recreational pursuit and the other doesn't, that's ultimately difficult.

Ironically, my friend who was a player in the early '70s got married in 1979 and has been married -- and faithful -- to the same woman ever since.

Me, I continue to wrestle with the same questions I did as a kid, questions that should have been settled in my mind decades ago. I wonder if I'll ever know the answers.

Look where you walk while texting

2009-07-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

What's the first thing you learn when you go out walking?

That's right, watch where you're going.

Wednesday evening in New York City, a 15-year-old girl was walking down the street when she stepped into an open manhole cover. She fell only five feet, apparently landing in sewage. She and her parents are considering suing the NYC Department of Environmental Protection because the open manhole cover wasn't marked with orange cones.

I'm not going to mention the girl's name, even though it has been all over the news in NYC. I just don't see much point to it. There is more to the story, though.

She was texting while she was walking.

For the benefit of readers who might not know what that means, she was using her cell phone to type out a message with the idea of sending it to someone else with a cell phone -- a friend, a relative, a stalker.

Well, maybe not a stalker.

She certainly wasn't paying attention to where she was walking.

Now I remember reading somewhere that age 35 is the dividing line for texting. If you're under 35, the odds are you send and receive text messages; if older, you probably don't.

I have received one text message in my life -- from someone under 35. I have never sent one.

I'm not a total geezer. I do use my BlackBerry to send and receive e-mails, but I admit the small screen and my large thumbs are not the greatest fit in the world.

If I were cynical, I might say that the young lady was lucky, that actually things like this might be referred to by my Social Darwinian friends as "thinning the herd."

Instead, I think I'll just hope she learned from the experience.

There's little better than 36 holes of golf

2009-07-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite golf holes ever is the Par 3 seventh hole at Empire Lakes Golf Course in Rancho Cucamonga.

Depending on where the flag is placed and which tee box is used, it's a 160-170-yard hole. If you play it right -- if you attack it -- all but the last 10 or 15 yards is over water.

It's possible to play it safe, to hit up to the left of the lake and not risk a splash, but you won't be on the green. And if your first shot isn't on the green on a Par 3, it's much more difficult to par the hole and nearly impossible to birdie it.

I don't play often enough to be good, and I sort of created my own swing without benefit of lessons. When I play well, I can break 90 once in a while, which was actually my goal when I started playing golf.

Why? I guess because I read in a golf book that only about 10 percent of recreational golfers ever break 90. On my very best days, I've shot 83 and 84. That's very satisfying, since I remember the first time I played nine holes about 17 years ago, I shot a 75.

Golf can be the most damnably frustrating game. Within five minutes, I can top a shot and have it go five yards and follow a couple of shots later by blasting a pitching wedge 100 yards to within six feet of the pin.

I can hit a horrible drive and on the same hole sink a 25-foot putt.

Heaven ... and hell.

Mostly for me, golf is a way to step back from all the things in my life that frustrate me. It's a way to spend eight or nine hours -- we play 36 holes -- in the sunlight and come home with more tan than is really healthy for me.

It's a way to spend a day sharing a cart with my buddy Mick, who remains my closest friend in the world in the 45th summer of our friendship. It's the 2009 equivalent of when we sat on a curb when we were kids and discussed the things we had done and the things we wanted to do.

More often that not these days, the conversation is about our various physical woes. We used to play baseball, football and basketball together, but we're both on the far side of 55 now and pretty much limited to golf.

We discuss our families. He was a father before I was, but I beat him to grandfatherhood, if that's a word.

We played today. On the course at 6:30 a.m. and off at 3 p.m. So-so golf with some highlights to keep us coming back. I blasted my tee shot successfully over the water on the seventh hole both times, but missed my putts and didn't par the hole either time.

Heaven ... and hell.

But mostly heaven.

Media plays Jacko for all he's worth

2009-07-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

In April 1945, a week after President Franklin D. Roosevelt was buried, his widow took a train from Washington, D.C., to New York City.

When she reached her apartment in Washington Square, reporters met her outside. They had lots of questions about her future plans, the late president's legacy and all sorts of other things.

Eleanor Roosevelt had four words for them.

"The story is over."

In 1975, on the brand-new "Saturday Night Live," Weekend Update anchor Chevy Chase satirized the coverage of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco by saying week after week that "Franco is still dead."

The story was over.

Of course, things have changed. Stories never end in these days of the 24-hour, Internet-fueled news cycle. Michael Jackson died two weeks ago today, and he is still the No. 1 news story despite everything else that is happening in the world.

For one thing, we are a lot nosier than we were in 1945 or even 1975. Remember the annoying journalist in "Die Hard 2?"

"The people have a right to know everything about everyone all the time."

We're got Perez Hilton, TMZ, the Smoking Gun and a dozen other sites designed to catch every celebrity's most embarrassing moments. We know more about Lindsey Lohan or Britney Spears -- including anatomical details -- than we ever did about any of our presidents.

We attribute qualities to them they don't even have. We ask them what they think about issues, when in some cases they haven't read a book in years or even finished high school.

Michael Jackson made great music, music that touched millions of people and made a difference in their lives. A letter writer to the L.A. Times today said he thought everyone on the planet probably had a favorite Michael Jackson song.

Well, I don't, and I'm pretty sure my wife doesn't either.

I don't think CNN needs to do breaking news updates on discussions of who will raise Jackson's three children, or what his albums are doing on the charts. Those children could be raised by winos and they'd still be better off than most kids in the world because they are rich.

And if Jackson's "Thriller" is the biggest selling album of all time, well, "The Eagles' Greatest Hits" is second and I doubt CNN will go nuts when Don Henley or Glenn Frey pass away.

But as long as there's money to be made and ratings to be won, American television will be chasing every detail of every story -- real and imagined -- about everyone in the world.

It's a shame we can't agree on one thing about Michael Jackson.

The story is over.

Laughter is always a good thing

2009-07-08T21:39:00.000-07:00

I actually meant to post this a while back, but forgot. It's from "Pearls Before Swine," a comic strip that has become one of my new favorites.

This particular strip made me laugh out loud, which doesn't happen all that often anymore.

Enjoy.

Is any of this stuff really news?

2009-07-08T21:04:00.000-07:00

Some habits are very difficult to break.

When I wrote earlier this week that I was opting out of the news cycle, I deleted a number of news Websites from my Internet favorites. I stopped checking Rush Limbaugh's transcripts and I decided that what news I needed, I would get from my subscription to the Los Angeles Times.

I've been having the print edition of the Times delivered since I came to California in April 1990, and even in decline, it's still a pretty good newspaper. The great thing about print over broadcast is that if I decide I'm not interested in a story, I just skip it.

I read Sports, I read the Calendar section and I consistently read the front section. I figured I'm at least as well informed as somebody who watches hours a day of CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.

As a rule, I don't watch TV news. I stopped watching local news shows in 1994 when I tuned in to the local NBC affiliate at 11 p.m. and watched a half-hour broadcast that didn't include anything other than sex, scandal, celebrity news and a car chase.

Hey, that's Los Angeles.

I did watch the CBS Evening News a few times because of this lust in my heart thing I had for Katie Couric, but as for the cable giants, the only time I ever hear or see them is when someone else is watching.

That's what happened to me Wednesday afternoon when I took my wife to the hospital for some x-rays. CNN was on in the background, and even though I couldn't hear anything, I saw Wolf Blitzer spend the better part of 15 minutes discussing Michael Jackson's children (Who will raise them?), Sarah Palin (What's next for her?) and President Obama's declining approval ratings.

I did the only sensible thing.

I fell asleep.

A promotion for little Maddy

2009-07-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

When does a baby stop being a baby?

Since I didn't enter my own children's lives until they were already in school, I didn't get to see either of them as babies, infants, toddlers and whatever else comes in those early years. In fact, just about the youngest kid I ever hung out with was my friend Mick's lovely daughter Kelsey, who was 3 at the time.

My granddaughter Madison, who I christened the Amazing Baby on this blog, is on the verge of walking and talking. She actually stood up for 15-20 seconds the other day before realizing she wasn't supporting herself.

She promptly sat down.

If you look at some of the earlier pictures I've posted of her, she has this sort of goofy happy look in most of them. But if you look at this picture, she seems to have more going on in her mind.

I think she's earned a promotion.

From now on, Maddy is the Incredible Infant.

Jackson's sad odyssey at an end

2009-07-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

I never really got Michael Jackson.

I wasn't that big a fan of his music, except for some of the early stuff with the Jackson Five. I was sort of repelled by his apparent obsession with plastic surgery, and I figured he was guilty at the very least of some incredibly inappropriate behavior with young boys.

My favorite story about him -- the one I thought really said a lot -- was the time he invited Elizabeth Taylor to dinner. The table was set for four and the guests were Jackson, Taylor and two chimpanzees.

Jackson himself didn't come to dinner, leaving Taylor to eat dinner with the two chimps.

I felt like the last significant contribution he made to music was at least 20 years ago, yet millions of people have been mourning his death for more than a week now. His greatest album, "Thriller," does nothing for me. I don't think it measures up against albums like "Born to Run," "Sergeant Pepper" or "Tommy," to name a few.

It isn't a black-white thing, either. I think Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" is one of the greatest albums ever, and Stevie Wonder has made much better music than Jackson over a longer period of time.

Jackson was always a little too androgynous for me, and even though he was never convicted of pedophilia, he bought off at least one accuser with an eight-figure settlement.

I even thought his title -- King of Pop -- was sort of a left-handed compliment. "Pop" music was the stuff that wasn't quite rock 'n' roll or rhythm and blues. Pop music was Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.

Sort of like being the King of Marvin Gardens.

People are comparing Jackson to Elvis Presley, who died 32 years ago this summer, but anyone who thinks there is a serious comparison wasn't around when Presley was in his heyday. Elvis not only ruled the music charts, he made about two dozen movies whose only purpose was to get Elvis out there in front of his fans.

No, Jackson was no Elvis Presley.

He may have been the perfect symbol of our graceless age, a talented misfit who made hundreds of millions of dollars and spent most of it. A musical prodigy who was mostly spent by his 30th birthday. A man who never really related to women, whose arrested development left him comfortable only with prepubescent boys.

His choice of name for his home said it all.

Elvis had Graceland.

Michael had Neverland.

That says a lot.

Looking forward to an Amazing Baby

2009-07-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

I'm going to have a wonderful summer, especially the month of August.

For one thing, it's beginning to look like we will finally complete the sale of our house. We have spent the better part of a year and a half struggling with the declining housing market, but -- knock on wood -- things are coming to a satisfactory conclusion.

Then Nicole and I will be spending the first half of August in the Pacific Northwest and I get to spend 10 days with my three favorite female people in the world -- my incredible wife, my gorgeous daughter and the Amazing Baby, my wonderful granddaughter Madison.

You can't imagine how much I'm looking forward to seeing Maddy. I heard her cry when she was 10 minutes old and she slept on my chest when she was 10 days old.

I've been watching videos of her for several months on Facebook, and she is really starting to develop a personality of her own. She's very close to walking without help and my guess is she'll be talking sooner rather than later.

But what is every bit as wonderful to me is spending the better part of two weeks with Pauline. I have never been as proud of anyone in my life as I am of my wonderful daughter. In addition to doing a terrific job as a mother, she has made amazing progress in her career as a foreign service officer. When I hear what colleagues say about her and I read her evaluations, I am absolutely blown away with admiration.

Maddy, Pauline and Nicole.

Damn, it's going to be a great summer.

Turning down the volume can't hurt

2009-07-06T07:31:00.000-07:00

I have decided to do something for my health.

I am opting out of the 24-hour news/talk cycle.

When I returned home from France this weekend, I was surprised by how little it had mattered to me that I had spent two weeks without CNN analysis, talk-radio rants or the various op-ed columnists I had been following voraciously.

To be honest, most of what I used my BlackBerry to keep up with was ... baseball scores.

I did receive a couple of e-mails from my friend Mick that included news or opinion pieces designed to advance a particular point of view. I read them, but I realized later that reading them had only made me angry at what I thought was sophistry.

So I made this decision.

The times when I am at my best -- as many of you have noted in the past -- are times when I promote certain values, not when I try to advance a particular political point of view. In fact, I started this particular blog site to make the point that there are things in our lives -- friends, family and a few good laughs -- that are more important to most of us than politics.

That doesn't mean it doesn't matter who is running the country. Sometimes it matters terribly, and sometimes the people we choose for those jobs are totally unsuited to them. But all we can do is vote and speak out occasionally. The best thing we can do is touch the people around us and try one by one to create a nation of people who will behave ethically and fairly, people who will put reciprocity above self interest at least some of the time.

I don't need to know what Rush Limbaugh thinks about that, and it doesn't matter to me if Keith Olbermann agrees with me. I am not a person whose words will reach millions, but I believe I am thoughtful enough and eloquent enough that they can mean a great deal to the people I do reach.

I intend to be happy for the rest of my life, and I intend to express the reasons for that happiness through the words I write.

Is it enough?

It had better be.

From wonder to reality in two days

2009-07-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

It is hard for me to believe that just two days ago, on a lovely Friday in the south of France, I stood on one side of the Lot River and took this picture of this village.

Saint-Cirq-Lapopie is just a little town in the mountains, but the view is truly spectacular and a restaurant known as Le Gourmet Quercynois served us a truly wonderful lunch.

A little more than six hours later, I was on my way back to California and reality. It took me 32 hours to reach California, while reality seems to be a little more elusive for me.

I spent the better part of two weeks in three European cities -- London in England and Nice and Toulouse in France -- and my greatest disappointment was that I apparently brought unseasonably hot weather with me to all three cities.

I would never call myself well traveled, but this was my fourth trip to Europe in the last 15 years, my third to France. I also visited France for nine days in 1977, and I loved the country even before I had a French wife.

I'm actually something of an odd duck, as my French relatives have told me, because I love both England and France. Since those two countries have bad blood between them going back more than a thousand years, it's difficult to like both of them.

I shared a good laugh with a cabdriver in Nice when he told me he liked Americans because Americans think they're the best in the world and the French know they are.

"What about the English?" I asked him.

"I was speaking of human beings," he said.

I actually kept up pretty well with what was happening in the U.S., thanks to my BlackBerry. I read the New York Times, USA Today and news from CNN, and even though way too much of it was about Michael Jackson, I found myself reasonably satisfied.

Through all of it, the person I truly felt sorry for was Farrah Fawcett. She suffered through her years of cancer with true dignity, only to find her death overshadowed by the greatest freakshow the world has seen in many years.

I was actually surprised Jackson lived as long as he did, since his lifestyle seemed to be little more than a series of unhealthy, risky choices. His death at a relatively young age probably cemented his legacy in a way dying in his sleep at age 85 never could have.

I also noted the freakshows that were Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin, and I'm not sure what to say about them other than that there are probably more people like them in politics than we could even imagine.

Stories like this always remind me of the line from Psalm 146:3:
"Put not your trust in princes."

Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, I'm not sure any of them can really make that much difference to us in the way we live our daily lives. Too many of them are too concerned with their own power to really stand for anything, so I keep coming back to the question of reciprocity.

If I treat people the way I would want them to treat me, then I am living my life successfully. If I make the decision that my own success should not be built on someone else's pain, then I can sleep at night.

When I walk through villages in France that have existed for hundreds or years, when I see people whose lives aren't based on how big their house is or how fast their car can go, I realize how short I fall of my own aspirations.

But when I see my young son battle for more than 12 hours to compete an Ironman Triathlon, as he did last Sunday in Nice, I am filled with pride. All any of us can do is try and affect the lives of the people around us in a positive way, and my children are my greatest joy.

So France is once again a memory, and California is a reality.

Onward we go.

Long trips and weird keyboards

2009-07-02T07:51:00.001-07:00

I feel a little bit like Mickey Mantle, who once stayed out all night drinking because he was injured and didn't expect to play.

Hung over as hell, Mantle staggered to the plate, hit a massive home run and limped around the bases to thunderous applause. Collapsing in the dugout, Mantle said, "They have no idea how hard that was."

Well, you have no idea how hard it is to type on a French-language keyboard. The first line is not QWERTYUIOP. It's AZERTYUIOP. The period is a shift key.

Yeah; I know. Call the whaa-bulance.

It's just a pain to keep typing "a" and getting "q."

Anyway, I'm in France. My son is an honest-to-goodness Ironman after completing the Nice course in 12:10:01, and I'm wondering what's going on in America. Hey, Al Franken is a senator (and Rush Limbaugh is furious), Manny Ramirez is about to return to the Dodgers and Michael Jackson has returned to his home planet.

Jeez, I don't know what else to say about the guy the Fleet Street media in London call "Jacko." He lived, he made some music, he got weird and died. Sort of like Elvis.

I suppose it's sad to see a great talent disappear, but it had been a long time since "Jacko" made any great music.

I do have a lot to say about Europe, but I'm going to wait till I'm back on my own keyboard, assuming I survive the return trip from hell -- Toulouse to London Gatwick to London Heathrow, an overnight in the chairs, London to Chicago and Chicago to LAX. Home late Saturday afternoon.

I'll write again by Sunday.

Wish me luck.

A long-awaited trip 'across the pond'

2009-06-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how much we will be carrying on this conversation of ours over the next two weeks or so.

This Saturday, Nicole and I will be flying to London for a scientific conference (hers, not mine). We'll spend six days in the United Kingdom and then a week in France, first in Nice and then in Toulouse.

I usually write these posts from my desktop computer, which of course is not portable. I have a laptop, which I will be taking with me, but I don't know what my Internet access will be like. I have unlimited access through Verizon, but I'm pretty certain that's only good in North America.

It's quite possible I'll have access at our hotel, and if I do, I'll try to post at least two or three times a week while we're in Europe.

This will be my fifth trip to Europe, although the first one lasted almost two years and cost me a marriage. I actually lived in Vienna from the summer of 1976 till the spring of 1978, and we did some traveling around while we were there.

Nicole and I went for the first time in 1994, although that trip was only to Paris and Toulouse. It was on that trip that I first met my in-laws, and I was actually given a bottle of French wine by a neighbor caught up in the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings. He thanked me for saving his country, and I accepted on behalf of FDR, Ike and all our troops.

We spent a couple of weeks in Oxford, Paris and Toulouse in the summer of 2001. One of the things I remember most about that trip was French relatives and their friends sincerely trying to understand what it was Americans saw in George W. Bush.

My last previous trip across the pond was in May 2003, when we spent 10 wonderful days in Venice. Nicole generally goes to Europe for one conference or another at least once a year, but 2003 was the last time I went along until this year.

I'm looking forward to it, and I'll try and come up with some interesting things to share with all of you.

Of all the places in the world ...

2009-06-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

If I could choose one place in the world to live, I'm not sure where it would be.

There are so many places I have been fortunate enough to visit that have seemed so wonderful to me. Moorea, the big island of Hawaii, London, the South of France and Colorado are all places that live on in my heart. Even Vienna, where I was both happy and sad during two years there, was named in a survey by a British newspaper as the best city in the world in which to live.

In fact, just about the only place I've visited outside this country where I can't imagine myself living is Beijing, and that's for political reasons as much as any thing else.

The picture is of Cook's Bay in Moorea, which has been called the most beautiful place in the world by quite a few people. I had the opportunity to see it for a week in 1999 when Nicole and I visited Club Med.

It is definitely breathtaking, but Moorea -- the next island over from Tahiti in French Polynesia -- is somewhat off the beaten track.

That isn't altogether bad. I have lived right in the middle of the beaten track for the last 19 years, making my home in one of the world's great cities, and I think I have been about as entertained by great cities as I care to be.

Actually, where I choose to spend the remainder of my days depends on one thing -- whether Nicole and I are still together. I'm not talking about divorce. We will be together as long as we are both alive. But my life will be very different if I should ever have to be alone.

If we are together, we will probably retire to Northern Colorado, an hour or so north of Denver. Close enough to a great city to enjoy the benefits, but far enough away to escape the pollution and the traffic.

If it's just me, I may move far from the madding crowd. I don't think I'd ever want to live without electricity or running water, but I think I could be very happy passing a few days at a time without the milk of human kindness.

Of course, I'm rooting for Option A.

Sorry, Sarah, the jokes were funny

2009-06-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

If somebody were to ask me about my beliefs, I would tell them three things:

I believe in the law of reciprocity, otherwise known as the Golden Rule. Life works best when we treat others the way we would like to be treated.

I believe that nothing matters more than family and friends.

And I believe in the power of laughter to entertain us, to help us through the day and even to heal our wounds. Sir Donald Wolfit reportedly said it first, "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." There are few things more blessed than the power to make people laugh, which is one reason I'm on David Letterman's side in his recent dust-up with Sarah Palin.

It wasn't a tough choice. I don't believe in political correctness of any kind when it comes to humor, and I'll give you an example in a joke by comedian Robert Schimmel about 15 years ago.

"I heard on the news that Ronald Reagan has Alzheimer's Disease. I wonder how that makes him feel. I wonder if he hears it and says, 'Uh oh.' Or maybe he just hears it and says, 'Hey, honey. Ronald Reagan has Alzheimer's Disease.'"

That to me is funny.

So when I heard Letterman's top 10 and his other jokes about Gov. Palin earlier this week, I laughed at all of them. I thought they were funny.

Palin obviously didn't, but I wonder how much of it was real outrage and how much just desperation to stay in the news. She chose to misinterpret more than one of them. When Letterman said she went shopping for makeup to "update her slutty flight attendant look," Palin called it an attack on all the hardworking flight attendants."

No, just the slutty ones. You can't build your image on things like "Coldest state, hottest governor" and "GILF -- governor I'd like to ..." and then object when someone picks up on it.

As for her choosing to say Letterman had made a disgusting joke about her 14-year-old daughter Willow (who, oddly, is 15 1/2) being "raped by Alex Rodriguez," most people who heard it understood it was about 18-year-old Bristol, who got pregnant at 17 and was used by Palin to preach abstinence.

Actually, when you consider that it was a New York audience in the theater, the joke was as much a shot at A-Rod for all the catting around he has been doing.

Watch the YouTube clip at the beginning of this post and you'll see plenty of comedians -- Jay Leno, Bill Maher, Conan O'Brien and yes, Letterman -- making Palin jokes, including jokes about Bristol.

"Sarah Palin dropped the first puck at the Philadelphia Flyers hockey game. Then she spent the rest of the game trying to keep the players out of her daughter's penalty box."

That was O'Brien. When Palin was in the news all she wanted to be, she never complained about the jokes. Now she goes around dressing like, yes, a slutty flight attendant and tries to make a fuss.

No way, governor.

Humor is humor, and while young children certainly ought to be off limits, Republicans don't always think so.

Not only did John McCain make that joke about 18-year-old Chelsea Clinton, Rush Limbaugh called Chelsea "the White House dog" when she was only 13.

And it isn't as if Palin didn't drag her entire family into the spotlight to burnish her own meager credentials last year.

There's only one sin when it comes to humor.

Not being funny.

America is pretty much the same all over

2009-06-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

"This used to be a hell of a good country."
-- Jack Nicholson in "Easy Rider," 1969

I was reading an entry on Huffington Post about restaurant chains that are in danger of going out of business, and one of the ones they mentioned was "Krispy Kreme."

The southern donut chain expanded too far and too fast and is carrying a large amount of debt. Servicing that debt cuts way into the company's income.

For some reason, that made me think of Coors beer. Anyone who came of age in the East in the '60s and '70s probably remembers that Coors was only sold west of the Mississippi River. Folks who traveled out West would invariably bring back a six-pack of Coors -- "Colorado Kool-Aid" -- and we would marvel over its good taste.

I hesitate to say those were the days, but there was something very interesting about this country in the days before everything from coast to coast and border to border became homogenized.

If you grew up in California, you raved about In 'n' Out burgers, while folks in New England loved Friendly's ice cream. I remember the first time I came out West in 1978, I was surprised to see that you couldn't get Stroh's beer.

One thing changed all that -- shopping malls. About 25 years ago, I started using a term that I had never heard before. Ten years ago -- or so -- George Will started using it.

"The mallification of America."

I believe that if you were to be blindfolded and dropped into most shopping malls in this country, and you weren't allowed to ask anyone where you were, you wouldn't be able to figure it out from the stores, from the way people dress or even the way people talk any more.

Regional accents certainly aren't what they once were. Most people are influenced by what they hear on television, and everyone from network anchors to characters on situation comedies seems to talk with that flat Midwestern twang now.

Local bookstores have become endangered by Barnes & Noble and Borders, and local sporting goods stores are being eliminated by the big chains as well. As for the old downtown areas, I'd be willing to be that if your town has a Wal-Mart, there's no thriving downtown shopping district.

I suppose this is a really minor thing to rant about, and it isn't as if I find myself brooding on the subject. But it was wonderful to be a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio, and to travel to New York and see all sorts of stores I couldn't see at home.

Or to move from Ohio to Northern Virginia when I was 13 and find a lot of different chain restaurants than I knew back in the Midwest.

For about a decade, from 1981 to 1990, I moved a lot for my career. I lived in seven different states, and I saw a lot of different things. When I left Virginia and moved to Gastonia, N.C., I discovered the wonderful barbecue joints and the terrific fish camp restaurants, both there and in my next move to Anderson, S.C.

When I went to St. Louis in 1984, I found the wonderful Italian cuisine in the part of the city known as The Hill. A move to Greeley, Colo., in 1986 taught me about Rocky Mountain oysters, among other things, and Reno in 1988 showed me all the wide and varied casino buffets as well as authentic Mexican food.

L.A. in 1990 had pretty much everything, but there was one thing I found every time I moved. There was always a McDonald's, always a Burger King, always a TGIFridays or a Sizzler. Go to the mall wherever you are and 90 percent of the stores would be national chains.

I understand it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Successful businesses try to expand their territory as much as possibly, and if they drive out small local businesses in the process, well, c'est la vie.

It certainly makes it easier for people who are traveling. If you're old enough, you might remember the old adage, "never eat at a place called Mom's, unless your only other choice is a place called Eat."

You never know what you're going to get.

But if you go into a Burger King, that Whopper with cheese is going to taste the same in Oregon as it does in Mississippi or New Jersey.

Well, maybe not New Jersey.

I just think it's a shame that taking the uncertainty out of life also takes away some of the adventure.

It's difficult, but I still believe

2009-06-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. ... I think peace and tranquility will return again."
-- Closing paragraph, "The Diary of A Young Girl," Anne Frank

So where do we go from here?

I remain basically an optimist about the good hearts of most people, and I was definitely taken aback -- and seriously flattered -- by Amy's comment about being the "last best hope for a permanent MIDDLE viewpoint."

And anyone who doesn't believe in the basic goodness of people -- especially in view of the fact that a young girl hiding from the Nazis can feel that way -- is either seriously afraid or a serious misanthrope.

I even believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had basically good hearts, although I'm not at all sure about Dick Cheney. (That's a joke, Ernie)

But what do you say to someone visiting a museum if they're shot or killed by some lunatic who believes the Jews are out to get him? Too bad? Tough luck? You should have ducked?

What do you do when you encounter hate like that?

In the fall of 1989, I was covering a 49ers football game for my employer, the Reno Gazette-Journal. After I filed my story, I walked to the Candlestick Park parking lot to find that someone had smashed the passenger window in my car. Since I faced a 220-mile drive across the Sierras to get back to Reno -- in December, at night -- I was also faced with basically freezing.

When I got into the mountains, I couldn't take the cold any longer. I pulled off I-80 and went into a convenience store to buy a pair of cheap gloves and a ski cap. A perfectly nice-looking man, manning the cash register, made conversation with me and asked me why I was buying those particular items.

"Somebody smashed my window and broke into my car at the 49ers game," I said. "I'm freezing."

"Probably your ni**ers," he said. "Your ni**ers will do stuff like that."

(If you can't figure it out, the * replaces the letter g)

I knew I wasn't going to convert this individual to tolerance, and I was getting tired, so I just thanked him, got my change and went back to my car.

If I had been younger, if I hadn't been a tired 40-year-old who had seen too much, I probably would have criticized his racist remarks. But except for the racism -- and I know that's an "except for that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln" remark -- he didn't seem like a bad guy.

He didn't say what he said in an angry voice. He was more old and ignorant than anything else, and I'm not convinced we should hate people for being old or ignorant.

I hate what James von Brunn did yesterday, and I hate the intolerance on both the far left and the far right.

But when it comes down to it, I have to agree with Anne Frank.

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

Obama haters on right getting scarier

2009-06-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

Some of you have been critical of me when in previous posts I have written about the extreme right. You've told me it's only a fringe and it doesn't say much about the way our society really functions.

After Wednesday's murder at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I'm not so sure.

An 88-year-old white supremacist walked into the entryway of the museum and opened fire. He reportedly killed a guard and wounded one other person before one of the other guards shot him and stopped him.

James Von Brunn, and didn't you know he would be of German descent, is also a Holocaust denier who once tried to kidnap the Federal Reserve Board. He also wrote an anti-Semitic book and said that Jews were "trying to destroy the Aryan gene pool."

Don't kid yourself that this guy is some lone lunatic. There are thousands of people like him in this country and they are all heavily armed. These are people whose hatred of people different from themselves has been festering for years and now they are forced to accept the indignity of a black man as president of the United States.

Surf the Internet a little. Enter words like "Aryan," "racist," "hate" and "white supremacy" and you will find folks who could easily live right down the street from you, spewing the most vile lies about Jews, people of color, people of ethnicity and of course, the president himself.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has a Website that exposes some of the worst of them. They have names like Stormfront, the National Alliance, the 11th Hour Remnant Messenger and that old favorite, the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

It's weird how people are perverting Christianity these days. I'm sure somewhere in Heaven, Jesus is weeping at Pastor Wiley Drake, a Buena Park, Calif., minister who admits he is praying for President Obama to die.

We're growing a strange crop of Christians these days, and a stranger crop of Americans.

I know the hosts on mainstream right-wing talk radio aren't saying things like that, but I'm sorry, when the Rush Limbaughs, Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks call Obama a Marxist and say he wants to take away our freedom, they have to know it's a call to arms for the lunatic right.

Even on Fox New Channel, no friend of the president, anchor Shepard Smith said he is getting hundreds if not thousands of horrific e-mails every day attacking Obama for non-policy reasons.

I'm worried. There are too many crazy people and too many guns in this country. If we get through Obama's tenure in the White House without an attempt on his life by the rabid right, I will be surprised.

I blame the Internet for a lot of it. For all the wonderful freedom the Net provides, it still serves as an anonymous meeting place for criminals, pedophiles and the scum of the Earth.

You think I'm kidding?

Check out these Websites and then tell me I'm overreacting.

I am reminded of W.B. Yeats' "The Second Coming."

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born?"

'Woodstock' a sad reminder of a time

2009-06-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have spent a good part of the day today watching an extremely sad movie.

It wasn't intended that way when it was first released 39 years ago, but the four-hour director's cut of "Woodstock" almost made me feel like crying.

Not just for a time gone by, not just for the fact that so many of the wonderful artists who performed there are no longer with us, but for the loss of all that optimism.

If most of the kids who went to Woodstock were between about 18 and 30, that means nearly all of them are in their 60s now.

I wasn't there, but I was 19 that summer and I know how they felt. I felt the same way. We were living in an era of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and we honestly thought we would change everything.

No more sexism, no more racism, no more greedy corporations dominating our economy.

Oh, a few things changed. Last year we essentially decided between a woman and an African-American man to be our president. If sexism and racism haven't quite gone away yet, they are clearly on the wane.

But who would have figured we would have two presidents -- 16 years -- who were even worse than Nixon? And who would have figured the government would be controlled by people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for eight years?

None of us would have believed that the '60s would be the high-water mark of egalitarianism, and that the middle class would be as threatened as it is 40 years later. How could we have comprehended the "Greed is good" culture of the '80s and the second Gilded Age that follows?

Listen to the interviews in the movie.

Listen to the music.

So much optimism.

So much hope.

Part of the problem is that the counterculture, as it was called then, was never really a unified movement. Blacks cared more about racism, women about sexism and white men about the war in Vietnam.

We couldn't keep it together, so it all fell apart.

But watch the movie if you get a chance. For one brief shining moment -- three days at least -- it was all there to be won. It was a glorious time, and maybe someday it will come again.

I still believe.

Remembering what is really "wonderful"

2009-06-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

When my lovely wife leaves for work each morning, I always say the same thing to her:

"Have a wonderful day."

In the context in which I say this, "wonderful" is a synonym for "terrific" or "great." I think that's probably the way most of us use the word "wonderful" these days.

Of course, that's not what it means.

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary says the following about "wonderful:"

won·der·ful
Pronunciation:: \ˈwən-dər-fəl\
Function:: adjective
Date:: before 12th century

1 : exciting wonder : marvelous, astonishing wonderful to behold>
2 : unusually good : admirable wonderful job>

It's pretty clear that most of us all but ignore the first meaning and have adopted the second one, but the origins of the word "wonderful" come from "full of wonder."

Is there anything that fills us with wonder anymore? There ought to be.

-- I own computers, and so do most of you, that are more powerful than early models that filled entire rooms. Using them, I can communicate almost instantaneously with almost anywhere in the world. I own a pocket device -- a BlackBerry -- that is more powerful than the computers that took the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

-- Vehicles weighing hundreds of tons fly overhead, high in the sky, delivering people from one part of the world to another faster than we could ever have imagined a hundred years ago. I can have breakfast in London and be back at my home in Southern California in time for dinner.

-- We can control the climate in our own homes to the degree. Two hundred years ago, it was either sit by the fire and roast or sit away from the fire and shiver.

-- With the right kind of cellular phone, we can talk to people hundreds of miles away from any electrical source, whether they're on a ship in the middle of the ocean or climbing some tall mountain somewhere.

Of course there are plenty more, but those are only technological advancements. Think of the wonder of a painting by a Rembrandt or a Van Gogh, of a symphony by a Beethoven or a Bach, or a sculpture such as Michelangelo's "David," and wonder at the incredible talent that went into them.

Or wonder at the dark side, at man's ability to kill millions of people at once with a nuclear weapon where at one time killing was truly one at a time -- with rocks and clubs.

Think of the most wondrous things of all -- the development of helpless babies into strong, intelligent adults.

Think of man's humanity to man, of men and women who sacrificed their lives so that others might live.

We live in a truly wonderful world -- in the real meaning of the word.

I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Every day.

Songs evocative of a strange time

2009-06-08T18:09:00.000-07:00

I've been watching Season One of "The Paper Chase," barreling through one episode after another and enjoying the heck out of good intelligent television that just isn't around anymore.

That first season aired in 1978-79, and there was one thing common to every episode -- the song that played over the credits by Seals and Crofts. To me, at least, theirs was a unique sound that more than any others, says "1970s" to me.

From "Summer Breeze" and "Hummingbird" in 1972 to "You're the Love" in 1978, with three or four other hits in between, the harmonies of Jim Seals and Dash Crofts were all over the radio for the better part of the decade.

"Summer Breeze" in particular was a wonderful song; I was 22 that summer and it wasn't one of the summers I remember all that fondly. I was still getting over the lovely Joyce Sonnemann and it wasn't until that fall I would meet the woman who would become my first wife.

Ah, the '70s.

I wonder where my old albums are.

A memory of intelligent television

2009-06-06T19:58:00.000-07:00

The release of the first season of "The Paper Chase" this spring was really a nice surprise.

The series, based on the 1973 movie of the same name, wasn't a hit. It played for one season on CBS and an additional 35 episodes over three years on Public Broadcasting and never got great ratings. But it was an incredible example of just how good television could be.

Imagine a series based on law school, one that had its funny moments but wasn't goofy or wacky. In fact, the plot line in many of the episodes involved legal principles. Nearly every episode was set at least in part in a classroom, with professor and students using the Socratic Method.

Of course this was 1978, and for all the talk of the goofiness of the '70s, television in general was of much higher quality.

Check it out, and then hope for those next three seasons that PBS owns to be released soon.

Housing decline good for some folks

2009-06-05T15:51:00.000-07:00

When you look at the prices of homes in California, it's important to remember that old Paul Simon line.

"One man's ceiling is another man's floor."

A few years ago, at the peak of the housing bubble, the median price of a home in the Golden State reached $580,000. Affordability was at an all-time low and wealth -- at least on paper -- was flowing to people who owned homes.

Many of them took advantage and refinanced their mortgages to pay for remodeling, new cars, vacations and other luxuries. They figured if the bills came due, they could always refinance again or sell their homes at a profit.

Then the bubble burst.

The economy fell apart, unemployment went up and the state budget incurred massive deficits. And in the process, all that wealth disappeared. In April 2009, the median price of a home in California was $256,700. That's a drop of more than 55 percent from the peak, and there's no guarantee that the bottom has been reached.

Bad news, huh?

Not for the people who couldn't afford houses before and have seen them drop into their price range. They may still have trouble getting loans with the current tight credit market, but when it starts to loosen, there will be many new homeowners.

And that's certainly not a bad thing.

Media only makes Tiller story worse

2009-06-04T10:22:00.000-07:00

I don't know if I have ever agreed with Brent Bozell.

Until now.

Bozell is about as far to the right as they come. He ghosted Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," and his Media Research Center is a right-wing "media watchdog" that continually whines about the so-called "liberal media."

I read his weekly column, just as I read Ann Coulter's column and some of Rush Limbaugh's transcripts. I think it's important to be aware of what the other side is saying.

But in his column this week, Bozell made a lot of sense. He wrote about the media reaction to the shooting of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas, and he started with this:

"In the very heart of the pro-life community, there is nothing they wanted less than another shooting of an abortionist."

He's right, of course. Recent polls show somewhat of a change in the country, with 51 percent now saying they think abortion is wrong. Of course, this is one of those issues where you can ask the same question different ways and get very different responses. Try asking whether a woman and her doctor should make the decision or if the government should force women to have babies and you won't get 51 percent.

Still, there are tens of millions of people in this country who believe abortion is wrong.

I'm one of them, as I have explained before.

But not only would very few people kill an abortionist, most of them wouldn't even think it was a good thing that he was murdered.

You see, at the heart of this whole abortion thing is "Thou shalt not kill." That means everyone, not just the babies. I think most folks see the death of Tiller as relatively meaningless to the number of abortions performed; someone else will take his place as long as abortions are legal.

But Bozell's point, and it's a good one, is that Tiller's death hurts the pro-life movement far more than it helps. Once again the media is talking about religious fanatics. Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, who ordinarily I like very much, spoke of a "religious Jihad by fundamentalist crusaders."

Coulter, who is way crazier than Bozell, wrote in her column that Tiller had bragged of performing "more than 60,000 abortions." She also pointed out that for all the furor about killing doctors, Tiller was only the fifth abortionist killed since the enactment of Roe v. Wade nearly 40 years ago.

Don't get me wrong here. Five is still five too many. There's no reason to kill doctors, but five in all this time is probably no more than any other random sampling of people killed by lunatics over the same period.

This issue is a little bit like the Middle East, with two irreconcilable positions. You're never going to get hard-core pro-choicers to agree abortion should be banned, and you'll never get hard-core pro-lifers to say it isn't murder.

But is it too much to ask the media not to stir things up more than it already does? Do we really need people looking at fundamentalist Christians as if they're as dangerous as Osama bin Laden?

Frankly, no.

In the Tiller case, we ran up against the media's longtime "if it bleeds it leads" mantra. I'd rather the media adopted a slogan that's far older, from the oath doctors take.

"First, do no harm."

Tienanmen's 20th traumatic for Chinese

2009-06-03T21:05:00.000-07:00

In 1989, hundreds of thousands of Chinese people held massive protests in favor of Democracy in Beijing's Tienanmen Square.

It was a time of hope, if you recall. Most of the satellites of the Soviet Union had broken away and established fledgling democracies, and even the USSR itself was on its last legs. Later that year, the chief symbol of Communist repression, the Berlin Wall, came down.

The Chinese protesters -- many of them young students -- thought they could have the same effect on their country. We all know what happened after that. The government cracked down quickly, and on June 4, 1989, the authorities cleared the square of protesters.

China has never admitted that anyone died in the crackdown, not even the young man above who so bravely stood up to a row of tanks, but there is much that is not yet known about what happened.

Last fall, my wife and I visited our daughter Pauline in Beijing. We went to Tienanmen Square as tourists; of course there is no sign, no commemoration, of what happened there in 1989. What I remember most is all the street vendors selling Chairman Mao watches and English translations of the Little Red Book.

Clearly, China has changed a great deal in 20 years. There's a great deal of what looks suspiciously like free enterprise. You can buy a knockoff set of Callaway golf clubs for $200, about a tenth of what they would cost here. You can buy DVDs of movies just barely released for about a buck and a half.

There is at least some personal freedom, but not the kind that matters. You can't write anything critical of the government, and free speech is only a rumor. When my wife and I wanted to attend Mass on Sunday, we had to show our passports to prove we weren't Chinese.

China also heavily censors the Internet. If 1.6 billion people ever realized the way the rest of the world lives, their government might have trouble keeping them under control.

That censorship has been stepped up seriously in recent days as the 20th anniversary of Tienanmen Square approaches. Chinese people can't use Facebook or MySpace. They can't visit this Website.

I wish I could say I had come to the attention of the Chinese government, but they ban all the Google Blogger sites.

But just as much of the news of Tienanmen Square in 1989 got out to the world through the use of new technology -- at the time, fax machines -- eventually the Chinese government won't be able to stop the flood of information that's out there.

A change is gonna come.

Reverse racism? Don't be ridiculous

2009-06-02T20:03:00.000-07:00

I am so tired of hearing about reverse racism.

That's the big new thing on the right, since they realized that all their cries of "socialism" weren't resonating with the American people, who apparently decided they had enough of eight years of unbridled capitalism under George W. Bush.

Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., got a big surprise when he went home to talk with voters. Baucus represents one of the more conservative states in the union, and he told voters he was opposed to single-payer health insurance. Montana voters were angry, and polls in the state showed that a solid majority favored what the right loves to call socialized medicine.

Ditto with President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. A Gallup poll released Tuesday said 50 percent approved and only 22 percent opposed Sotomayor, a higher number than approved of any of Bush's nominees to the court.

So despite the controversy the media loves to highlight, a lot of Americans seem to approve of the direction Obama is taking us.

So the right wing is playing the race card.

If you listen to them, Obama hates white people and so does Sotomayor. In fact, if you listen to them, nominating Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is the moral equivalent of a Republican nominating former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke.

Now you might be surprised to know that I'm not all that disappointed -- and certainly not surprised -- to hear Rush Limbaugh saying that about Sotomayor. He is what he is, and he has his audience.

But it's only been this year that the mainstream media seems to be playing up whatever he says. In fact, Rush has gotten more press coverage this year than any year since his arrest on prescription drug charges.

I'm sure he's loving it.

I'm sorry, though. The last thing we need is white people at the bottom of the economic spectrum thinking that the reason they're not getting ahead is someone else's reverse racism.

In my entire career, I lost out on one job because I was white. And I never really wanted to be president of the NAACP anyway.

Seriously, for all the talk of affirmative action, there is no doubt that being a white male is still the most advantageous position to hold in this society.

So let's not whine about reverse racism.

My guess is it's about 97th on our list of national problems, right behind whether we have enough calcium in our diets.

Amazing baby will be back soon

2009-06-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

The amazing baby, aka my beautiful little grand-daughter Madison Nicole Kastner, will be returning to the United States in about a month.

I can hardly wait.

Little Maddie is now 8 1/2 months old and she'll be spending the next year or so in the USA. She may not take her first unassisted steps here -- she's pretty close to that now -- but she'll probably do her first talking this summer in Washington state.

After two months up there, Maddie will follow her parents to Washington, D.C., where her mother -- my wonderful daughter Pauline -- will have nine months or so of language training for her next posting.

We're looking forward to spending two weeks with her in August, and we're hoping we can get back east for Christmas as well. We're probably still a year or two from a Christmas that Maddie will actually remember, but it should still be fun.

I never really believed people who said how wonderful it was to be a grandparent, but yes, they were right.

And then some.

You don't save lives by killing doctors

2009-05-31T14:41:00.000-07:00

Here we go again.

This morning in Kansas, a gunman walked into a Wichita Lutheran church and gunned down one of the ushers. The usher, Dr. George Tiller, was notorious in the pro-life community for performing late-term abortions.

Most folks who have commented have said all the right things, including the hard-line group Operation Rescue, which said "We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning."

But somewhere, I'm sure there are at least a few folks thinking that killing Tiller meant that at least a few additional babies might live.

I consider myself pro-life in a qualified sort of way -- more on that later -- but if there's one thing I know, it's that you don't grab the high moral ground in this debate by killing doctors. What happened in Wichita is every bit as much an act of terror as a suicide bomber walking into a restaurant in the Middle East and setting himself off.

Killing is killing, and that's the reason I am opposed to capital punishment, euthanasia and assisted suicide as well as abortion.

Here's where my position becomes "qualified," though. I believe that as long as our laws and our society are the way they are, abortion needs to be safe and legal. That said, if a woman in my life became pregnant, I would do whatever I could to dissuade her from terminating her pregnancy.

Of course if I couldn't, the choice would be up to her. That's a choice I'm perfectly willing to let her make, as long as she understands that her actions have consequences and that she may have to justify herself before God at the end of her life.

Before I would even consider restricting abortions, I think we need to do everything we can to help women make the decision for life. That includes financial aid if needed, pre- and post-natal health care, adoption assistance and child care if she decides to raise the child.

Without those things, we're not pro-life. We're just pro-birth.

That's the way to reduce abortions.

Not killing doctors.

America 1909 wasn't really that long ago

2009-05-30T20:42:00.000-07:00

"Those who fail to remember the lessons of history yadda yadda yadda ..."
-- GEORGE COSTANZA on SANTAYANA

To be fair, I'm not sure this particular quote ever appeared on "Seinfeld." It's just that I figure you all know it, so rather than insult you by making a big deal out of it, I decided to have a little fun with it.

I'm not sure we have forgotten the lessons of history. I just think we don't think they matter anymore.

It wasn't even 30 years ago that President Reagan said these words: "The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor."

"Yes, but .... didn't 9/11 change everything?"

Most scientists now believe than man has been on this planet for somewhere in the neighborhood of two million years. That's 2 with six zeroes. In the overall scheme of things, do you know how little change takes place in say, a century?

Look back a hundred years and you see a country very different from the one we occupy today. In 1909, roughly 40 percent of Americans were farmers, fishermen, forestry workers, miners and other outdoor types.

They occupied a country in which white men didn't take any guff from anyone. Women couldn't vote except in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. California would follow suit in 1911, but it would be 1920 before all American women could vote. Black people knew their place, and if they didn't, there were lynchings and other atrocities to remind them.

In 1915, the most popular movie ever made, "Birth of a Nation," had members of the Ku Klux Klan as its heroes. Ten years later, more than 400,000 Klansmen in full regalia held a march through the streets of Washington, D.C.

But we've changed, haven't we?

No one gets lynched anymore, at least not that we hear about. We don't even need affirmative action, do we? Gosh, even Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter say we live in a post-racial society.

Hey, we elected a black man president.

That we did, and it was a wonderful thing.

But do you ever really surf the Internet? Do you visit some of the right-wing Websites and see some of the vile things people have been saying about Barack Obama? Have you heard about the classified ad that got sneaked into the newspaper in Warren, Pa., the other day?

"May President Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy."

I suppose the fact that the employee who took the ad didn't make the connection is another one of those "lessons of history" things.

I wish racism were gone from our society, but I'm afraid it has only gotten smarter and more subtle. Limbaugh can call the mayor of New Orleans "Mayor Nay-ger" and then just say he made a mistake. "Urban" can become a code word for black, just as Richard Nixon used "law and order" as code words in his Southern Strategy.

Yes, we're a better country now than we were in 1909, 1915 or 1925.

But let's not kid ourselves that we're past racism. The men marching in those hoods in 1925 were our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers. Maybe not mine, maybe not yours, but they were somebody's ancestors.

I'm not saying we need to keep apologizing or atone for anything. I'm just saying that when it comes to discriminating or speaking ill of people, we ought to remember one rule when we think of doing something.

Would your mother be proud of you if she knew?

That sure would eliminate a lot of bad behavior.

Shed a tear for Thomas Starr King

2009-05-29T21:43:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry, but I have never been a fan of Ronald Reagan.

I know he was a popular governor and a beloved (at least in some circles) two-term president. He was even pretty good on "Death Valley Days," hawking 20 Mule Team Borax.

But I don't see why we have to name everything in the world after him.

Ever since President Reagan left office in 1989, and with increasing frequency since he announced he had Alzheimer's Disease in 1994 and died 10 years later, there has been more and more pressure to name things after him.

He got an airport (which is ironic when you consider that firing the air-traffic controllers screwed up the system for years), a massive federal building in Washington, D.C., (and we all know how much he loved big federal buildings) and everything from freeways to schools, hospitals and maybe even churches.

Some folks have suggested adding him to Mount Rushmore. Others wanted Reagan to replace FDR on the dime.

There's even a group devoted to making sure that something is named after him in every county in the USA.

Great, but why did Thomas Starr King have to suffer for it?

King didn't suffer much personally. After all, he died in 1864, nearly 50 years before Reagan was born (although Bob Dole was already around). But King, one of the greatest men in California history, is having his statue bumped from the National Statuary Hall to make room for -- you guessed it -- a 7-foot tall Ronald Reagan.

Wonder who King was? Here's part of what his bio says in the Hall:

Thomas Starr King, "the orator who saved the nation," was born December 17, 1824, in New York City. The sole support of his family at age 15, he was forced to leave school. Inspired by men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher, King embarked on a program of self-study for the ministry.

At the age of 20 he took over his father's former pulpit at the First Unitarian Church of Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1848 he was appointed pastor of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church, Boston, where he became one of the most famous preachers in New England. He vacationed in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and in 1859 wrote a book about the area entitled "The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscapes and Poetry."

In 1860 he accepted a call from the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. In California during the Civil War, he spoke zealously in favor of the Union and is credited with saving California from becoming a separate republic. In addition, he organized the Pacific Branch of the Sanitary Commission, which cared for wounded soldiers.

The baby boom generation has often been accused of thinking the world began when they were born. Well, I wish Republicans would stop thinking the world began when Ronald Reagan was born.

King is just the sort of person who fades away into history, and that's a shame.

He deserves better than having his statue taken down, crated up and sent to Sacramento. After all, where are we going to put it there once they get that Terminator statue finished?

Seeger among greatest of Americans

2009-05-28T18:48:00.000-07:00

Pete Seeger turned 90 earlier this month.

I'm sure most of you have heard of him, at least in passing. He's a great American singer, songwriter and all-around pain to people in power. He wrote such classics as "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "If I Had a Hammer" and "Turn, Turn, Turn" (that last one with a little help from Ecclesiastes.

While there are certainly those who will disagree with me, I firmly believe that few people in the 20th century worked harder to help the poor, the disaffected and people of color than Seeger did and is still doing. Yes, he made the mistake of being a Communist in the 1930s and supporting the way Joseph Stalin was running Russia.

He later renounced those views and blamed himself for not looking deeper and trying to see the meaning behind the meaning.

Can you imagine very many modern politicians doing that?

He was a contemporary of the man regarded as the greatest of the folk singers, Woody Guthrie, and while Guthrie's guitar was inscribed with "This machine kills fascists," Seeger had an inscription of his own on his favorite banjo.

"This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender."

He was one of the leading musical voices in the civil rights movement and was actually the man who popularized the old Negro spiritual, "We Shall Overcome," as a civil rights anthem.

He even got the Smothers Brothers in trouble with CBS when he sang "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy" in December 1967 to protest the Vietnam War.

In more recent years, his work has dealt more with the environment, and many of you doubtless saw him at the Obama inauguration when along with Bruce Springsteen and his own grandson, he performed Guthrie's wonderful anthem, "This Land is Your Land."

And wasn't it wonderful for Seeger to live long enough to see a black man elected president of the U.S.?

Godspeed, Pete. When you're gone, I doubt we will see your like again.

Schools should educate, not brainwash

2009-05-27T17:27:00.001-07:00

"That's why everyone MUST be forced to go to public school and forced if necessary to give up these primitive viewpoints. ... If I had you in one of my classes, you'd learn to drop your stupid, 'hatemongering' ways or I'd fail you. It doesn't matter to me what your grades are -- it's time we concentrated on reprogramming you idiots with the right and proper viewpoint."
-- COUSIN IT

I actually don't like the idea of calling our friend from the education community "Cousin It."

That's a little demeaning, even though she refuses to give her name. I think it would probably be nicer -- and maybe more accurate -- to call her Mrs. Tingle. There was a 1999 film starring the excellent Helen Mirren called "Teaching Mrs. Tingle," in which students tried to get back at a vicious teacher who terrorized her classes.

Now I'd be willing to guess from the quotes above that our own Mrs. Tingle doesn't much like her own students, unless they knuckle down, toe the line and follow instructions to the letter. She clearly doesn't see education as learning -- people who use words like "forced" and "reprogramming" rarely do.

I would be very interested in knowing what subject she teaches, because the best teachers I ever had -- in public schools, yes -- didn't always try to get you to agree with them, but to look for deeper meanings on their own.

I really didn't think any of the comments -- even though I disagreed with some of them -- were "hatemongers," except for maybe Mrs. Tingle. I will guarantee you one thing. Whether this woman is straight or gay, she is incredibly sexually frustrated. If you'll pardon the expression, it almost drips from every word she writes.

Is America really supposed to be a Brave New World, where everyone fits into the niche the authorities decide they belong in? We have enough economic shackles on us these days that freedom often seems less than free, but I guarantee you that if the purpose of the public schools is what she describes in the beginning, Americans would tear down those schools brick by brick.

I don't ban anyone from posting here, and I don't delete any comments. I try not to ridicule anyone who goes to the trouble to read and comment, but this woman is a joke. In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised to see that it was someone faking what they think is political correctness run amok.

Sorry, Mrs. Tingle, but people don't always vote the way you want. That means you need to do a better job of making your case.

It doesn't mean we drag them into your classroom and lobotomize them.

Not yet anyway.

An evolving view of same-sex marriage

2009-05-26T00:25:00.000-07:00

At some point later today, the California Supreme Court will either uphold or strike down Proposition 8, in which voters decided that same-sex marriage in California should not be legal.

My guess is it's a tough call that could go either way, but just as my own views have evolved over the last decade or so, so has the consensus in California.

In 2000, there was a proposition on the ballot declaring marriage as being between a man and a woman. I voted for it.

In 2008, Prop 8 took the same stance. I voted against it.

The 2000 proposition passed with 61 percent of the vote; last year's passed with 52 percent. Give Californians another eight years and you'll see a solid vote in favor of allowing anyone to marry, gay or straight.

Nine years ago, I didn't see it as a civil rights issue. I still didn't know whether being gay was a choice or a genetic condition, and my own religious values got all tangled up with defining marriage. I figured civil unions were fair enough.

But even my friend Mitch, one of the last of the great homophobes, is evolving on this issue. (Even though he doesn't believe in evolution) Thirty years ago, Mitch told me that if he found out one of his friends was gay, that would be the end of the friendship.

A couple of soul kisses cured him of that.

Just kidding. He came to realize that just as most straight people don't see their sexuality as what defines them (sorry, Mr. Hefner), neither do most gay people. Sexuality is just a part of what makes us who we are.

The problem with banning gay marriage, or same-sex marriage, or whatever you want to call it, is that civil marriage is not about religion. It's about property rights, and benefits, and visitation and all sorts of other things.

I think everybody ought to have the same rights when it comes to that stuff.

That's why I'm hoping the court rules against Prop 8 today. It isn't a matter of public opinion. When the court struck down laws against mixed-race marriages more than 60 years ago, 90 percent of Californians thought it was a bad decision.

The people aren't always right.

Memorial Day a day for reflection

2009-05-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

"They say it was a shocking sight, After the field was won; For many thousand bodies here lay rotting in the sun; But things like that, you know, must be ... after a famous victory."
-- AFTER BLENHEIM, Robert Southey

I wonder why it is that the English have always been so much more eloquent in honoring their war dead. Whether it's Southey, or Canadian John MacRae's haunting "In Flanders Fields," or a host of others, their words can almost make you feel the sacrifice of so many young lives, often for such poor reasons.

When was the last time we sent our young off to war without the motive being questioned? When was the last time our military men and women really felt they were fighting to protect our freedom and the folks back home agreed with them?

It doesn't really matter. It has been said that war is old men sending young men off to die, and even if the cause isn't all that just, it in no way diminishes the selfless sacrifice the young make. That's why I was so infuriated to hear Dick Cheney the other day when he blamed Abu Ghraib on "a few sadistic prison guards (who) abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency."

There isn't a military unit in the world where those at the bottom of the ladder take that sort of thing upon themselves. Soldiers follow orders, and if they didn't get specific orders about how to treat prisoners, they certainly followed the tone of what their superiors said.

That's why when President Eisenhower warned us of the emerging "military-industrial complex" in 1961, he also said privately, "God help us if we get someone in this office who doesn't understand these people."

Yes, the world is changing. Particularly with Vietnam almost 40 years in the past and World War II nearly 65 years gone, we're more likely to get presidents without first-hand military experience than we once were.

But when we get presidents -- and vice presidents -- who want to use the U.S. military for empire building, we not only cheapen the sacrifice, we make it far more likely that young men and women in our military will die in unnecessary ways.

It isn't our job to police the world, or to decide which dictators to overthrow.

It isn't our job to bring democracy to the Middle East.

We need to elect wise leaders, leaders who will send men and women into battle only when it is truly necessary to protect the people of the United States and our allies.

Otherwise, some future poet will again be writing of bodies rotting in the sun, and calling it a famous victory.

Senate on record favoring usury

2009-05-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

"He who has the gold makes the rules."

The Golden Rule is part of almost every religion known to man, including that non-religion known as secular humanism.

Yet we go so far out of our way in this country to show no religious preference that we can't even get that one right. It's pretty obvious when you look at public policy in almost every area that we live more by the satirical quote above than we do by any law of reciprocity.

Think about this. The cost of money to banks right now is just about as low as it can go. If you figure in the various federal bailouts, it's actually below zero. The government is paying banks to take its money.

Yet when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the senate's only avowed Socialist, tried to add a provision to the credit card bill to limit interest rates to 15 percent, only 32 other senators voted with him. The other said they were concerned that limiting the amount banks could charge would cause them to be more restrictive in the credit they offer.

Well, excuse me, but maybe the problem is that they haven't been restrictive enough.

When I came of age in the '70s, you had to have good credit to get a credit card. You sort of worked your way up, maybe starting with a gas card or a department-store card and showing you could make payments on time. Then, after a while, you could apply for a Master Charge (that's what it was called then) or a BankAmericard (the old name for Visa).

You started with a low credit limit and get it raised as you proved your ability to handle it. I think my first bank card had a limit of $200.

Nobody had the right to have credit. You had to earn it.

As of about three weeks from now, I'll be out of the credit-card business. I have a small balance still to pay on the cards I have in my wallet, which between them offer me $52,000 in EZ credit. Once I'm done I'll close two of the accounts and keep one card for emergencies.

It just isn't worth it to use them. We had a balance of $19.95 on one of our cards last month. I sent in a check to pay it in full, but it was received a day after the due date. We were charged $35 for a late fee on a balance of $19.95.

It's ridiculous. Even in the '70s, before Congress allowed credit card companies to charge whatever the state in which they were headquartered allowed. South Dakota and Delaware repealed their usury laws, and most of the companies moved there. That's why you see rates of 25 percent, 30 percent or even more in some instances.

Sanders is one of the few people to call this what it really is -- usury, which is defined as an unconscionable or exorbitant rate of interest for a loan.

Now the banks will tell you that no one is forced to use credit cards. In fact, no one is forced to borrow money from them. Let's be real, though. Do they expect people who don't have enough money to pay their rent, or to buy groceries, or to pay medical bills, to just go and live in a cardboard box?

Maybe they do.

Maybe all this is about Social Darwinism. Maybe it's just the survival of the fittest. The problem with that is that we don't come into the game at the beginning. Most of us come into a one-mile run with other people already halfway through the course because of advantages their parents or their grandparents gave them.

There's another thing about saying people don't have to use credit cards.

Even for voluntary purposes, it can be pretty damned hard to resist when 80 percent of the advertising out there is aimed at separating you from your money for all these things you just must have.

Interestingly enough, most major religions speak against usury. In the Bible, it's "thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother." (Deut. 23:19). The Koran is even more forceful: "God condemns usury." It goes on to say that "those who charge usury are in the same position as those controlled by the devil's influence."

It's a shame we have to wait to the next world for the usurers to get what's coming to them. At least that's what the Senate says.

There's just one way to live forever

2009-05-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

"A hundred years from now? All new people."
-- ANNE LAMOTT

I have never wanted to live an extremely long life.

The thought of being around for 110 years or so, blinking through cataracts and unable to hear anything less than a jackhammer, has never appealed to me. When I read about the 115-year-old woman who died in Indiana just before Thanksgiving, several things about the story jumped out at me.

First, she had married the love of her life, but when he died of a heart attack, she was a widow for about 70 years.

Second, she had outlived her children and all of her grandchildren. There were plenty of great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren still alive, but the two generations following her were gone.

It reminded me of the saying that if you live long enough, you lose everyone you love.

That's why I always said I would be happy with 80 good years, free from dementia and still able to get around. If there's more, fine, but I certainly wouldn't want to live 30-35 more years with my 80-year-old mind and body.

I first saw the Lamott quote in a biography of the wonderful singer/songwriter Steve Goodman, an old favorite of mine who died at 36 after living nearly half his life with leukemia. Goodman wrote some wonderful songs for Jimmy Buffett ("California Promises," "Banana Republics"), one great song that a lot of people did ("City of New Orleans") and a couple of songs ("Go Cubs Go," "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request") that immortalized him on the north side of Chicago.

I think he knew he wasn't going to live very long, but I think he also realized that some of those "all new people" would still know him through his music.

I don't know if any of my work to date -- my newspaper columns, the stuff I've written for the Web -- will be that long-lasting. By its very nature, this sort of stuff is ephemeral, transitory.

But I certainly hope the part of me that has been imprinted on my children as I raised them will outlive me, and I hope some of the things they learned will be passed along to their own children.

You see, for most of us, there are only two things about our lives that matter -- the way we treat other people while we're here and the way we raise our children. How many insurance policies we sold, or how many loans we made or most of the other work-related stuff doesn't count for much. If we didn't do it, someone else probably would have.

That's why you hear folks say that while a lot of people at the end of their lives say they wish they had spent more time with their families, very few say they wish they had worked harder at their jobs.

People matter.

In fact, they're really all that matters.

Truth and lies about California economy

2009-05-22T00:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know whether to be happy or sad about the failure of the California budget propositions Tuesday.

I didn't vote -- for the most point, I avoid participating in this part of the electoral process -- although if I had voted, I'm pretty sure I would have been against all of them.

You see, there are two men basically responsible for the mess in which the state finds itself, one living and one dead. Both of them for pretty much the same reason.

The dead guy is Howard Jarvis, the leader of the tax revolt and the author of 1978's Proposition 13, which set such stringent limits on property taxes that it pretty much permanently hamstrung the state budget process.

The living guy is our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who ran in 2003 on the platform of cutting the vehicle tax. That move almost single-handedly created the budget problems we now have when it comes to a shortfall of revenue.

Yes, spending in some areas is too high. Union contracts, particularly in the area of pensions, are killing the state. I'm not sure it's necessary for state employees to have gilt-edged pensions at a time when private companies have all but eliminated them.

Health care hurts too. We've got way too many Californians -- illegal immigrants and otherwise -- without health insurance, seeking care at the state's emergency rooms.

You want to know one thing we don't have, though?

Onerous taxation.

All we ever hear from the right is that we're staggering under some of the highest taxes in the nation. The fact is, though, that our taxes and fees as a percentage of income rank 18th among the 50 states.

We also hear that we can't soak the rich for everything. True, but according to non-profit Citizens for Tax Justice, the rich are barely getting wet. The top 1 percent of wage-earners, who made an average of $2.3 million in 2007, paid 7.4 percent of their income in state taxes last year.

Those earning $20,000 or less paid 10.2 percent.

The main reason for this is the sales tax, the most regressive of all taxes. Since poor people have to spend much more of their income, they pay a lot of sales tax. That's why whenever you hear someone pushing something called a "Fair Tax," where the only tax would be on consumption, you know they're either on the payroll of the rich or they don't understand taxation at all.

So what's wrong in California?

Actually, quite a few things:

-- When it comes to the federal government, California -- like most blue states -- pays in a lot more than it gets back. That's particularly true when it comes to illegal immigrants. We're paying to educate them, heal them and jail them, and we don't even get any say in whether they can be deported. That's federal.

-- We're locked into an archaic tax system because of Prop 13 and the requirement for a two-thirds vote to pass budgets.

-- We are locked into mediocre legislators because of term limits.

-- Our school system is way too top-heavy with administrators, adding billions of dollars in cost.

All that's just scratching the surface. One of the biggest problems is that no one tells the truth to voters about paying for the government they want, and the initiative process has turned into a private game for rich people.

I've lived in California for nearly 20 years, and I'm glad my kids went to good California public schools and excellent public universities. But I'm also glad they're grown and neither is planning to live in the state permanently.

We won't retire here, either. The next 10-20 years are going to be way too painful, and that's if they can straighten all this out.

If not, they could be disastrous.

Why I love 'Animal House' so much

2009-05-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

"I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part."
-- ERIC "OTTER" STRATTON

Ever since the first time I saw "Animal House" in 1978, it has been my favorite movie.

Friends and acquaintances who know me as a serious, mature adult capable of deep thoughts always ask me how a movie whose greatest quote is "You fucked up, you trusted us" could possibly mean so much to me.

They don't understand how not only does the movie fit into the great tradition of the '70s -- probably the last great decade of American cinema -- it also might just be the quintessential movie about being a guy.

Think about it. Not one person in that movie has any sort of awakening in which he realizes he needs to grow up, settle down or get on with his life. Otter becomes a gynecologist, Boon and Katy get married and divorced and Niedermayer is fragged by his own troops in Vietnam.

Yes, Bluto becomes a U.S. senator, but if you think he grew up at all, just look at the example of our recent president.

Then there's my favorite of all -- "Daniel Simpson Day, whereabouts unknown."

Think about all the movies "Animal House" inspired, and think of all the "bromances" you're seeing these days. None of them even compare. Even the good ones -- "Talladega Nights," "Wedding Crashers" and others like them -- always show the protagonist learning some sort of lesson. Growing up. Getting in touch with his feelings. Appreciating friends and family.

Not in "Animal House."

In that movie, Pinto does have sex with the 13-year-old. The bad guys do beat the good guys, such as they are. And in the end, in their "really futile and stupid gesture," the Deltas do get revenge for their expulsion by trashing the entire downtown area.

And they don't get punished for it.

It's one of the few movies I've seen in the last 35 years that is funny just for funny's sake, one of the few that doesn't worry about who is offended.

I suppose I wouldn't love it so much if I hadn't been in a fraternity, although our chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon was much less outrageous. We did have one guy who was a little too tightly wound, talking about the .44 Magnum he kept in his apartment in case anyone tried to break in.

My brother Steve -- my real brother and my fraternity brother -- turned to me and said, "Best argument for gun control I've ever heard."

Comedy.

There's nothing better.

On the 'virg' of two great achievements

2009-05-20T11:42:00.000-07:00

For the last 18 months or so, my son has been working toward two great goals.

A short time after graduating magna cum laude from Cal State Northridge, Virgile decided that he wanted to follow his sister into the Foreign Service. He also decided that he wanted to complete an Ironman Triathlon. Either one of those goals would be daunting to the average person. Both together made me want to curl up in a corner and whimper.

The Ironman is one thing. The one he set sail for will be held in Nice, France, on June 28th. He'll swim 3.8 kilometers in the Mediterranean Sea, bicycle 180 kilometers and then run 42.195 kilometers.

For those who are metrically illiterate like me, that's about a 2-mile swim, a 112-mile ride and a 26.2-mile run. It'll take somewhere in excess of 11 hours.

He tells me that theoretically, anybody could do it as long as they didn't care about their time. I'm not sure. I know I couldn't swim two miles in open water.

He has been working toward this by training almost every morning. Some days he swims, some days he rides and other days he runs. He has competed in shorter events all around the West Coast, but June 28th will be his first shot at the whole magilla.

At the same time, he has been working toward succeeding at the highly competitive Foreign Service Officer exams. Six months ago, he took and passed the written exam, the first stage that qualifies people for the oral exams.

That's a pretty big accomplishment in itself. Most folks don't pass phase one.

But this week he went to Washington, D.C., for the oral exams. It was such a thrill to get the call yesterday.

"I passed, Dad."

Of course he did. I wanted to explain to him that I had expected nothing less, but I was afraid he would misunderstand.

It isn't that I demand success from him, or that I would be disappointed in him if he didn't succeed. Neither of those is true. What I meant when I say I expected it is that I have complete and total confidence in both my children. Both Virgile and Pauline are wonderful kids who don't settle for anything less than success.

When they're going after something, I don't worry that they won't get it. I know they will.

There's a scene in the Robin Williams movie "What Dreams May Come" where he tells his son that if he ever had to storm the gates of Hell, he's the one person he would want with him. Well, that's how I feel about my kids. If I ever had to undertake some seemingly impossible life or death quest and could have one person at my side, it would be Pauline or Virgile.

The whole thing with the foreign service reminded me of when I first became Virgile's dad. Nicole and I married when he was 7, and we agreed that he would call me "Dad."

He did come up with one humorous alternative.

"Can I call you 'Officer?'"

With that in mind, and thinking of the job he just qualified for, I guess I can say this:

"Well done, Officer."

Don't have to change the world to win

2009-05-20T00:14:00.000-07:00

"What good is a book? Not much in the hands of people who do not think, and to be honest, most Americans do not even know how to think. Just consume."
-- JOE BAGEANT

If you've been following this blog and its earlier incarnations, you know how much I admire Joe Bageant, the author of the amazing book "Deer Hunting With Jesus." Along with Thomas Frank and Barbara Ehrenreich, Bageant writes eloquently about what has happened to the working class in this country over the last 30 years.

Bageant's subtitle alone says a lot -- "Dispatches from America's Class War." He basically points out that the working class would vote Democratic -- in its economic interest -- except that Democrats not only don't understand them, they insult them.

Republicans might be stealing them blind, but they're doing it while they're complimenting them and telling them what fine Americans they are.

When I read Bageant and the others, I become extremely discouraged at the possibility of political solutions. I think our society has slid so far into a crass, soulless materialism that people are desperate for any chance to feel good about themselves.

"Just consume."

Other than committing actual crimes, do you know what the worst thing Americans could do as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century?

You guessed it. Stop consuming. Our economy is so dependent on a certain percentage of us eating fast food every night, a certain percentage buying x number of DVDs and a certain number replacing television sets, refrigerators and cell phones every year, among other things.

This is our duty as Americans. If we don't spend money, other people lose their jobs.

Bageant calls our society the "American hologram," writing that the picture of our society that most of us accept is anything but what we really inhabit. In the hologram, folks are smiling, playing ball and enjoying their lives. In reality, 70 percent of American families are either just getting by or not getting by financially.

So what do we do about it?

I'm sorry, but I don't think there are political solutions to this problem. I certainly believe it's better for working people when Democrats hold power, but I think the Democratic Party of 2009 is basically Republican Lite on economic issues.

I think one step is that just one person at a time, we can start behaving ethically toward the people around us. We can refuse to cheat or con them, refuse to take advantage of them and not encourage them to buy things they don't need.

Aside from that, my solution would be as much as possible, do this:

Refuse to participate in the consumer society.

Don't buy a new computer if your old one still works. Don't buy a new car until your old one falls apart. Save your money, in credit unions instead of banks as much as possible.

And look for a way to define yourself other than as an American consumer.

I'll finish with a paraphrase from a Garth Brooks song that I think says it pretty well.

Don't do this so that you can change the world. Do it so the world won't change you.

The most evocative sound of all

2009-05-19T14:32:00.000-07:00

When I was 5 years old, I used to lay awake at night in my bed in my grandparents' house and listen to the sounds of night.

They lived in north central Ohio, in a little town named Crestline that once was the biggest railroad center between Pittsburgh and Chicago. There was a massive roundhouse outside town where locomotives from several railroads were serviced, repaired and renovated.

Dozens of trains passed through town, both day and night, and each and every one of them had that long whistle that signaled their presence with what is without doubt the most evocative sound I have ever heard.

I was born in California and lived in Chicago when I was very little, but the only part of my life I could remember was in Ohio. So the thought that trains were passing through and taking people to Chicago, or New York, or far-off California was very exciting to me. I dreamed that someday I would be riding on trains like that, traveling all over the world.

They had such great names, too. The Broadway Limited ran from Chicago to New York, while the California Zephyr took passengers from Chicago to San Francisco. Then there was the train immortalized in song by the late Steve Goodman, which ran from Chicago to St. Louis to Louisville and then on to the City of New Orleans.

John Denver, Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson all had more famous versions, but I also liked Jerry Reed's performance.

Wonderful trains, wonderful memories. And sadly, almost all of them are gone now, lost to a world that started turning faster and faster and lives running at such hyperspeed that getting on a train to cross the country was a total waste of time.

But of course, we lost something when life speeded up so much. Not only did we cram ourselves into smaller and smaller airplane seats, not only did we stand in longer and longer lines. No, we also put ourselves on the short leashes of laptops, cellphones and BlackBerries that have almost totally destroyed any sense of privacy we once enjoyed.

But imagine that 5-year-old. It was 1955 and the American Century was at flood tide. Imagine the dreams of an American generation whose parents had survived the Great Depression and saved the world for democracy in World War II.

We could do anything, and the trains would take us there.

A few of them still exist, but nothing like they once did. It has been a quarter of a century since passenger trains stopped in Crestline, Ohio, and apart from the East Coast corridor, nobody rides trains for business anymore.

I can't remember the last time I rode a train in this country. In 2001, I took the Chunnel train back and forth between London and Paris, and in 1977 I rode around Europe with my first wife using Eurail passes.

But someday I'm going to fly to Chicago, take a taxi to the railroad station and board the train with what I always thought was the greatest name of all.

Empire Builder.

It was named for James J. Hill, head of the Great Northern Railroad, and it has covered a 2,206-mile route from Chicago to Seattle since 1929.

"Fastest and finest between Chicago and Seattle," the ad read, and in those early days, it must have been an amazing way to travel. Passengers got to see all of the northwestern United States, from Chicago through Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Washington.

At Spokane, the train split, with the last four cars hooking up to another locomotive for the run to Portland, Oregon, while the Builder went on to Seattle.

I can only imagine a 5-year-old, living out on the prairie, hearing the sound of the train passing through and thinking that someday he or she would go to Seattle ... or to Chicago ... or to anywhere the train could take them.

"Good morning, America, how are you? Don't you know me? I'm your native son ..."

Don't ever fool yourself into thinking we don't pay a price for progress.

What's wrong with singing 'Kumbaya?'

2009-05-18T13:23:00.000-07:00

"Kumbaya, my Lord, kumbaya ..."
-- Gullah spiritual song

When someone wants to accuse someone else of being naive in their dealings with others, they accuse them of thinking we should all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya."

I wonder if any of them even know what it means.

I was 11 years old and spending a week at Camp Templed Hills the first time I heard the song. I remember the summer of 1961 pretty well. It was the only time I got two weeks of camp, one of them at Camp Kern, the YMCA camp, and the other at Templed Hills, the church camp.

At our evening campfires, we sang, and one of the songs we learned was "Kumbaya." We were taught that it was an African tribal song, and that "Kumbaya" meant "come by here." The song was intended to invite the presence of God among those singing it.

Of course Africa had little to do with the origin. The song actually came from the early 20th century Gullahs on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts. It was revived in Angola, of all places, in the 1950s, and American folk singers like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Peter Paul & Mary picked it up from there.

Of course it's ridiculously naive. Who would even imagine inviting God among us these days. Who would want God to see what they're doing or how they're behaving?

I hope you can tell I'm being sarcastic.

I know not everyone is religious, but I also know that every religion except Satanism -- and I include secular humanism in this -- involves the principle of reciprocity. You know, "do unto others ..."

Now most of us follow a somewhat twisted version of that. With our guards firmly raised, we treat others the way we expect them to treat us.

But what if we didn't? What if we did take a "kumbaya" attitude, if we made a decision that we would behave in a way that would make God ... or our mother ... or even ourselves proud of the way we had acted?

What if we behaved morally, not just legally?

Now before you write me off as hopelessly naive, I don't mean smiling and holding out a hand of friendship to our enemies. Osama bin Laden is still on the "bad" list.

But what if we dealt with people who hadn't shown themselves to be our enemies as if we hoped they would be our friends? Or at least that they would walk away from the encounter respecting us?

Just imagine what the world would be like if each one of us resolved to be proud of ourselves.

Kumbaya?

Absolutely.

What if we all behaved well?

2009-05-17T17:52:00.000-07:00

Sixteen months ago, I lost my job.

It was my fault. I was working for someone who didn't like me, and I should have realized he would jump at an opportunity to get rid of me. I was essentially set up to be fired, and I fell into the trap.

I didn't fight it, and I'm pretty sure that was his biggest disappointment. He got the thrill of getting rid of me, and he milked it for all it was worth, but I stood up for myself without groveling.

In the end, I told him I understood and that I forgave him.

I've been thinking about that a lot in the 16 months since. He obviously didn't react well to it; he showed his anger in at least one action I've mentioned before, and I'm pretty sure he has been spreading false allegations about me as well.

It would be nice to say I didn't give a rat's ass, and I certainly have been fortunate that my wife has a good job and that unemployment insurance has been very generous. But I was a damn good journalist for 29 years, and it wasn't pleasant to have my career end the way it did.

What was exceedingly weird about the whole situation, though, was how much pleasure my former employer seemed to get from it all. Several of the things he said really had nothing to do with the situation, and seemed to be there only for the purpose of making me feel bad.

It left me wondering why some people really do seem to think that putting other people down somehow lifts them up. I used to be like that, when I was much younger and much less happy with myself. Now all I have are regrets when I think of some of the things I said or did back then.

When you meet someone, do you expect them to behave well or are you on guard for bad behavior? Do you automatically figure that people are honest or that you had better hold onto your wallet or you'll lose it?

Are you outgoing ... or guarded?

A puppy that has never been around people will be friendly and curious, but one that has been hit or kicked even once will never be totally open toward humans again.

I think it's probably the same way with children, although parents can certainly instill fear in their young ones just by repeating it over and over again. "Don't talk to strangers." "Don't get into strange cars."

You know the drill.

We have too many Bernie Madoffs and too few Mohandas Gandhis, too many people who will betray your trust and too few who will honor it.

Changing the world is a difficult thing. Any effect any one of us has is probably comparable to a stream running through mountains -- nothing visible, but in a million years there's a deep cut and a big river.

When I forgave my former employer, it was more for me than it was for him. I knew that if I were angry and bitter, it would hurt me a lot more than it did him.

As it is, I'm OK. I've probably had dozens of nightmares about what happened in the months since, but at least I can tell myself I behaved honorably.

In the end, that's all we can do.

Behave honorably and hope the light from our example can affect even one other person.

One way of looking at America

2009-05-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

What is America?

Who are we as Americans?

What's the most important thing about our country?

It's a question I've been asking myself for quite some time now, and it's one I've written about in this space. What concerns me most about it is that our "republic, if you can keep it," as Ben Franklin once said, depends a great deal on an educated citizenry. That's something I'm not sure we have right now.

Once was a time -- actually just a few years ago -- when I toyed with the idea of running for Congress. My plan was to do retail campaigning, going door to door, mall to mall and shaking as many hands as I possibly could. I would run on sensible, moderate-to-liberal positions, and I would refuse to do any negative campaigning at all.

I'm a really good public speaker, and I relate well to people in small groups or individually as well. I actually thought I might have a chance if I could devote a year to it, full time.

Of course I was crazy.

I could never have won. I probably wouldn't have even gotten into double digits in an election. Any opponent would have pounded me as inexperienced (the last election I was in was in 1980 for president of my fraternity -- I won) and as someone who would be a disaster in Washington.

You see, I believe in American values.

I believe that freedom of speech is nearly absolute, that political correctness on the left and on the right is an abomination.

I believe in freedom of the press, and think that concentrated ownership of the news media is destroying the independence of the Fourth Estate.

I believe in freedom of religion, and feel strongly that even though I am Roman Catholic and accept Jesus as my savior, folks who have other faiths -- or no faith -- are every bit as American as I am.

I believe that to the extent America is a force in the world, it needs to be a force for good. That means repudiating the idea of pre-emptive wars and also of torturing prisoners.

I do not believe in laissez-faire capitalism. Every time we've done it, the rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have gotten screwed. On the other hand, managed capitalism as we did it from Roosevelt to Reagan was the most effective -- and fairest -- economic system in the modern world.

I believe a lot of other things, but mostly that American exceptionalism, a term thrown around a lot in recent years, is only valid when we behave well, both toward our own people and toward the rest of the world.

We were never meant to be an empire.

All we ever really wanted was to be special, and there's no reason we can't be that again.

Even if it means I never get elected to Congress.

Not much to look forward to?

2009-05-15T21:38:00.000-07:00

A close friend of mine went to a job fair the other day.

He's got a job, which is better than a lot of us can say these days, but he was looking to see if maybe he could find something better. His current job doesn't provide health insurance, and it's costing him a small fortune to keep his family covered.

He spoke with a recruiter who shall remain nameless working for a company that shall remain nameless and he dropped off a resume. The recruiter was polite at first and told my friend he was well-qualified and that he would pass his resume along.

My friend wasn't expecting much, so he thanked the recruiter and started to walk away.

Then the recruiter decided to be "honest" with him.

"We're not going to offer you a job," he said. "You're qualified, but you're 56 years old and we just aren't hiring anyone that old unless we go out and recruit them from another company."

My friend wasn't surprised. He asked the recruiter how old he was and found that he was 42.

"Nobody wants to hire anyone that old," he said. "If we hire someone in their 20s or even 30s, we can train them the way we want them and then have them be part of our company for 20 years."

It makes sense. My friend has heard it before and I've heard it before. But then the younger man decided he just had to be a little bit mean, I suppose.

"At your age, you've got nothing left to look forward to except grandchildren and death," he said.

I would have punched the guy, but my friend just asked, "What about retirement?"

The guy sneered. "Nobody's going to be able to retire in this economy," he said. "Everybody's retirement savings have been wiped out."

My guess is our Gen-Xer's 401(k) account has taken a major hit, because he's certainly not accurate in what he says. I know people in their late 50s who have already retired, who are about to retire and who are very well prepared to retire.

But "grandchildren and death?"

Sounds like our recruiter is lacking in some people skills. It also sounds like someone has a lot of hostility toward the Baby Boom generation.

I suppose there is one other possibility.

Maybe he's just a jerk.

No good argument against steroids

2009-05-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

I covered sports for the first 17 years of my journalism career. From 1979-96, I wrote stories about youth sports, high school and college athletes and professionals who had reached the pinnacle of their world.

I met wannabes who had a chance and plenty who didn't but still wouldn't give up on the dream of someday being somebody, of being special enough to play at the highest level.

Some of them took steroids. Some admitted it, some didn't and more than a few of them probably never got caught.

I've heard all the arguments against it. It's cheating, for one thing. It can cause serious harm to your health, for another. NFL great Lyle Alzado, who died some years back of brain cancer, was convinced that his steroid use had caused the cancer.

Here's the problem, though. The rewards of being able to play a sport at the highest level have become so outrageous -- both in terms of money and fame -- that they outweigh the negatives. It isn't even close.

Some years back, there was a study that showed former linemen in the National Football League -- the really big guys -- were living about 20 years less on average than ordinary American males. They were doing so much damage to their bodies that they were sacrificing two decades of life.

So I asked some friends of mine this question:

If you could play in the NFL, make a lot of money and be famous, knowing you would live 20 years less in the end, would you do it?

You would be surprised at how many people didn't say no.

Most of us have heard the famous Henry David Thoreau quote about men leading lives of quiet desperation, but I wonder how many of you have heard the whole quote.

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."

Pretty profound, huh? The average major league baseball player makes between $3 and $4 million a year. Manny Ramirez, who just received a 50-game suspension for violating baseball's drug regulations, was scheduled to make $25 million this year.

Would you do steroids and risk damaging your health if you could make $25 million a year and be worshipped by baseball fans?

When I graduated from high school in 1967, a minimum-wage employee working full-time made $1,300 a year. The average major leaguer made about $19,000. Decent money, but hardly a salary that separated players from average folks.

Now someone making the federal minimum wage as of this summer will earn $15,080 a year. Not even in the same galaxy as the average ballplayer anymore. In fact, playing two months for the average salary, a ballplayer earns more than a minimum-wage worker will earn in a lifetime.

That'll pay for one helluva song.

So if you tell some kid whose only future is in sports not to do steroids, you'd better come up with a better reason than they've managed to come up with so far.

Unless you're one of those old-fashioned types who makes decisions based on whether something is right or wrong, the pluses outweigh the minuses by way too much.

UK apparently not 'Savage nation'

2009-05-13T18:10:00.000-07:00

"Will Obama follow the UK's lead and ban politically incorrect speech? Based on his administration's left-wing agenda and the recent attack on Rush Limbaugh, it's highly likely that the administration will follow suit."
-- Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, host of the Jesse Lee Peterson radio show

Hey, big controversy. The United Kingdom refused to allow talk radio host Michael Savage to enter the United Kingdom. Savage is outraged that he has been placed on a list that includes Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and purveyors of hate.

Imagine that. Savage, who goes places even Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity fear to tread, is getting punished for some of the things he has said.

-- He has accused the president of "hating America" and "raping America."

-- He accused Muslims of devising the swine flu and using illegal immigrants to bring it into our country.

-- He said the government is out to take everyone's guns and predicted a "Reichstag fire" in America within a year.

-- He said Obama has a plan to force our children into a paramilitary domestic army.

-- He said any heterosexual woman over the age of 25 who grew up in this country is basically a dominatrix.

-- He called Glenn Beck a "hemorrhoid with eyes."

Hey, maybe he gets one right once in a while.

Now before you accuse me of overreacting, let me state that I think Savage wishes he had one-tenth the influence Limbaugh or Hannity have. I don't worry about him at all. But the point of this is that we do allow lunatics like this guy to speak in this country, and very few people are trying to get him off the air, regardless of what Rev. Jesse Lee says.

By the way, who in the heck is Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson?

And who are half of these other hosts quoted on World Net Daily in support of Savage? I get the feeling there are more right-wing talk radio hosts than there are right-wing voters.

As for the Rev, his quote at the beginning is full of fallacies, most importantly that the administration's "attack on Rush Limbaugh" means that Obama is trying to ban right-wing talk radio. I'm certain there are a few in the ultra-PC crowd who would like to see Rush digging ditches or cleaning latrines, but I think most people -- like me anyway -- would just like to see him give the truth a chance.

The idea that now that Democrats are in power, they're going to ban right-wing talk radio, well, that's a bunch of garbage. It's the right wing creating a straw man to raise money. It's not going to happen.

No matter what the Rev says.

As for Savage visiting England, well, that's their choice.

No matter what he says.

Joys of family not always unmixed

2009-05-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

Some of the weirdest moments of family life involved group photographs.

Either it's the parents trying to stage some cutesy/bizarre tableau, or it's a picture that had to be taken when someone's hair was filthy, someone else was retaining water or a third person had a giant zit on the end of their nose.

You can't win, unless you're one of those made-for-Hallmark families that always look great. But for the rest of us, there's an amazing Website. It's called Awkward Family Photos, and it's got every sort of weird family picture you can imagine.

Consider this one:

This was obviously either Dad or Mom's bright idea, one of those "wouldn't it be funny if ..." pictures that probably resulted in one or both children either killing themselves out of humiliation or running off to join the Moonies.

What could they possibly have been thinking?

It's like the parents who give their children cute names or cute initials that result in the kid being bullied from first grade through 12th.

And excuse me, but there's got to be something very very wrong with the little girl in the picture fondling daddy in an extremely familiar place.

I'd be willing to bet that no matter how odd or disabling your childhood was, it doesn't compare with this particular family.

Check out the site. There are quite a few other humorous pictures, including one that doesn't look all that strange at first glance. It's a good-looking family, with a smiling dad, a happy mom and two cute blonde girls. The only thing at all odd about the shot is that the two girls are wearing shirts in the pattern of the American flag.

The background behind the family is very nice too. It's a seaside shot that looks like it was taken somewhere in New England, as you can see.

Nice family.

Cute little girls.

The parents look a little like someone famous, I suppose. Maybe it's the dad.

Is he a movie star? An athlete?

No, he looks a little like ...

Oh, dear Lord. He is.

Are stereotypes just easy short cuts?

2009-05-11T16:07:00.001-07:00

Q. What's a thousand lawyers on the bottom of the ocean? A. A good start.

My apologies to the barristers among you, but I wanted to make a point very quickly.

If you're introduced to someone you don't know, and you hear they're a lawyer, the odds are pretty good one of your first thoughts will be of one of the dozens of lawyer jokes you've heard.

Q. What looks good on a lawyer? A. An angry Doberman.

In a world where our senses are constantly assaulted, a world in which we meet new people every day, we often draw conclusions based on very quick information.

What do you think if you meet someone who's morbidly obese?

Or a blonde woman with large breasts? (Or a blonde man with large breasts, for that matter)

How about someone whose first comment to you is, "I'd like to talk to you about Jesus?"

Now not everyone with a major weight problem is sloppy in their personal habits, and there are certainly large-busted blonde women with high IQs. There are probably even people in the last category who aren't obsessed with evangelizing.

But what's probably true is that before we get a chance to know all that, we've formed an opinion that may or may not be accurate.

What happens if you're the father of a teenage daughter and her prom date drives up with rap music booming loudly from his car speakers?

Or if you meet your son's girlfriend and the first thing you notice is her tattoos and piercings?

First impressions aren't always wrong, but they aren't always right either. When I first met my future son-in-law, I learned that he considered himself a connesseuir of beer and had a tattoo of Ireland over his heart.

I was reminded of Dan Hedaya's classic line from "Clueless:"

"Anything happens to my daughter, I have a .45 and a shovel and I doubt anybody would miss you."

Imagine my surprise when Ryan turned out to be a wonderful young man, an outstanding husband to my daughter and a terrific father to my granddaughter.

That's when I realized once and for all that stereotypes are just lazy.

And usually wrong.

Are people smarter than they once were?

2009-05-11T00:39:00.000-07:00

"People are smarter and more aware of what's going on than at any other time in human history. The average 19-year old today knows ten times as much as a 19-year old did forty years ago. Look at the technology and information that is routinely mastered."
-- AARON, commenting on earlier post

Do you really think so, Aaron?

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, and I think I come to it from a fairly reasonable perspective. You see, I was 19 in 1969, which was exactly 40 years ago.

I'm not going to deny that there is more knowledge available now. After all, 40 years ago this month we were still two months or so from going to the moon for the first time. For most of us, computers were large machines that took punch cards (do not fold, spindle or mutilate) and kept only important records.

Heck, who could have figured that by now we'd have computers in most middle-class homes?

Not me, that's for sure.

In 1969, 19-year-olds weren't allowed to vote. It might have made a difference. If we'd had the vote in 1968, we might have spared the U.S. two terms of Richard Nixon.

But that's not the point.

I think you're making a mistake when you talk about average kids. I think the smarter kids today know things we only dreamed of knowing, but did you know that high school kids in the '60s scored significantly higher on the SAT than kids do now, and that was before the test was dumbed down.

You know what we didn't have?

Video games.

You know what else we didn't have?

Cable TV.

You know what else we didn't have?

An epidemic of fat kids, an epidemic of over-medicated kids, an epidemic of kids whose attention span is about equal to the lifespan of a gnat.

I'll tell you something else. Go back 40 more years -- to 1929 -- and you'll find kids who were more serious about their education and harder-working than we were. Evolution isn't making kids smarter as the years go on. In fact, in an awful lot of cases it's making them soft.

We're turning into a race of eloi, and if you know what that means, you are smarter than the average 19-year-old today. Between a school system that's more about training than it is about teaching and mass media that's aimed more at the groin than at the intellect, we're probably within a generation or two of either total societal collapse or complete authoritarianism.

Did you know that two-thirds of all Americans now work in service industries? We can joke all we want about "Do you want fries with that," but the fact is we used to make things. We used to build things and then stand back and take pride in what we had accomplished.

Comes the time, we'll have decisions to make.

One choice will be to accept the yoke, while the other will be to take to the hills, tear everything down and get back to what America used to be. Heck, we didn't need socialized medicine or any of that other stuff because we had communities. We cared about our neighbors and we took care of each other.

Now most of us don't even know who our neighbors are.

No, Aaron. Things aren't getting better.

They're getting finished.

Why are some teachers so pompous?

2009-05-10T20:28:00.000-07:00

"Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym."
-- WOODY ALLEN

Whenever I write anything to suggest that the way we educate our children is less than perfect, there is always at least one teacher who comes out of the woodwork and suggests that my feet stink, my parents weren't married and Jesus doesn't love me.

I suppose it all depends on whose Al is gored.

A few years ago, it was a woman teaching at a community college who suggested that everyone should leave thinking and decision-making to those people who had proven themselves worthy by earning doctorates in their chosen field.

Now it's this (man, woman) who at various times has suggested that I am a) a neocon, b) a Nazi, or c) dooming the world to chaos.

If (he, she) could answer just one question satisfactorily, I would leave this subject alone forever.

Why do so many kids -- good kids, smart kids -- absolutely hate school?

I know the answer, and I'm trying to do something about it. Too many kids with high IQs and tremendous potential get sidetracked -- some of them for a lifetime -- because of a system that rewards obedience ahead of intelligence. A system that if kids don't fit right into the little niches where the teachers want them, they're either ignored, beaten down or medicated into submission.

To quote my admirer on the purpose of the schools:

"A certified teacher has spent years learning how to shape and steer your children into fitting into society. Teachers and school officials know what they're doing. Imagine a world where parents had to supervise their children's education. It would be chaotic and nothing would ever be accomplished. People need structure, training, and guidelines to know where to sit, where to stand, and how to serve the needs of the nation."

Now I've been called a lot of things, including a Socialist, but I have never suggested that anyone in this country needs to be trained on "how to serve the needs of the nation."

I'm not an anarchist, but I do believe that each of us gets to choose his or her own way to fit into this world, up to the best of our own drives and abilities. I didn't become a journalist because some wise teacher pointed me in that direction. I did it because the jobs I really wanted -- president, pope, center fielder for the Dodgers -- were all taken, and I liked to write.

If a teacher had suggested a field for me, I might have said I would look into it and appreciated their interest. If a teacher had told me I needed to go into the exciting world of fast food, I probably wouldn't have been as polite.

There's an old saying that I think pretty well sums up what it means to be an American. It goes like this:

"An Englishman walks the earth as if he owns it. An American walks the earth as if he doesn't give a damn who owns it."

Now some teachers might be smart enough to manipulate people into doing what they want them to do. I've never met one, but they might exist.

But nobody "shaped" or "steered" either of my children, and as I believe I mentioned earlier, both of them were honors graduates from their universities. We taught both of them to be polite and respectful, but never to take any crap from anyone that wasn't necessary.

I've had good teachers and bad ones, and I know one wonderful teacher. My friend Mick never wanted to teach, but he wound up as an adjunct professor at Pasadena City College and at Citrus College. Almost without exception, his students love his classes and rate him highly.

The last thing he would ever do is try to steer someone in the direction he thinks they should go. Encouraging them is a different story, and I know many people have come out of his classes more knowledgeable, more in love with learning and feeling more positive about themselves.

Mick is a Teacher.

My anonymous critic is someone who teaches.

The saddest comment on our educational system is that there are far more people who just teach than there are Teachers.

Four generations of great mothers

2009-05-10T00:16:00.000-07:00

Well, not this time.

I promised to continue our education debate in the next post, but it's going to have to wait till Monday. I certainly can't let Mother's Day pass without talking about what it means to me.

I have known four wonderful mothers in my lifetime (only one of them was mine), and each of them were different in their own way. My grandmother (my mother's mother) is probably the finest person I have ever known. She was intelligent, insightful, empathetic, loving and gentle. She raised two children to appreciate the values of education and family, and she lived almost 95 years.

My own mother was part of the first generation of women that didn't automatically think they were supposed to stay home and raise families. She was in and out of the working world for years with five children, something that certainly limited how far she could rise.

I have no doubt that if all her efforts had been devoted to a career, she would certainly have been a CEO, or perhaps even a senator or president. She's one of the two smartest people I have ever known, and also one of the two hardest workers.

She has also been a wonderful mother, both protective of her children and also encouraging. She has been a widow for the last year, an adjustment after more than 50 years of marriage to the love of her life. If she's slowing down some, it isn't much. She can still run circles around me.

The third mother I know well is my wife, who did a wonderful job with two children first through a bad marriage, then through five years alone and finally through the last 16-plus years with me. What has always impressed me the most about Nicole as a mother is that she never tried to limit her children's dreams, and she reacted fiercely to anyone who did.

Whenever either Pauline or Virgile needed someone to talk with one of their teachers, I was always the one delegated to do so. You see, if anyone had tried to say anything bad about either one of her babies, my wife might have scratched their eyes out.

That's three generations of mothers, and each can be judged favorably by the fact that their children not only grew up strong and successful, they all still love their mothers very much.

The fourth mother in this story is Pauline, who had her first child last September. From everything I can see, she may turn out to be the best mother of the lot. Despite the fact that she works full-time as a foreign service officer with the Department of State, her daughter is getting all the attention, all the love, that a baby could ever want.

I'm so proud of her, and I love her so much.

I'm actually proud of all of them. So on this day when we honor our mothers, I'll think of Florence Kindinger, Yvonne Rappaport, Nicole Rappaport and Pauline Kastner and I'll smile.

Happy Mother's Day to all of you.

And baby Maddie, you've got a lot of tradition to live up to.

Where the rubber meets the road

2009-05-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not surprised that there was a fairly violent reaction to yesterday's post, but it's a little disappointing that my anonymous critic didn't bother looking up John Taylor Gatto before branding him a "traitor."

Gatto actually taught in the New York City public schools for more than 30 years, and was named both NYC Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year for his efforts.

It's precisely because he was such a wonderful teacher that he objects so much to the way things are done now. In his book "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling," he starts by listing and explaining seven things a public school teacher is trying to teach his or her students.

1. CONFUSION: Particularly in elementary school, kids have everything thrown at them. From astronomy to adjectives, from long division to physical education, nothing is emphasized as being more important than anything else. Essentially kids are told that it's better to know a little about everything than a lot about one thing.

If you want to learn a lot about something, there's always college, trade school or the military. The education you get in K-12 is almost worthless in helping you live your life.

2. CLASS POSITION: Where we assign you is where you belong. You learn to envy and fear the kids who are smarter and have contempt for the ones who are dumber. It's a caste system nearly as rigid as India, and it's nearly as difficult to escape your assigned position.

You learn that there will always be people better than you.

3. INDIFFERENCE: We teach children not to care too much about anything. You might love math and be really good at it, but when math is over it's time to move on to history. We learn on the installment plan, and we learn when the teacher wants us to learn.

There's always time later to be enthusiastic -- if you don't get burned out.

4. EMOTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Thirsty? Need to go to the bathroom? Ask the teacher, and if someone else is already using the hall pass, prepare to wait your turn. The teacher giveth and the teacher taketh away.

Everything depends on the teacher, and if the teacher doesn't like you ...

5. INTELLECTUAL DEPENDENCY: A good student waits for the teacher to tell them what to do. Gatto says this is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for people smarter than we are to tell us what our lives mean.

My critic put that in a very interesting way: "We just need to help every child from the time he or she enters school to start thinking properly."

6. PROVISIONAL SELF-ESTEEM: Kids are constantly being judged and evaluated, and if they don't measure up, we tell them there's something wrong with them.

The catch here is that kids who know their parents love them unconditionally can't be touched by this one. Both of my children ran afoul of a teacher at one point during high school, and in each case, the teacher told them they were bad kids.

They knew they weren't, though. They knew we loved them and were proud of them no matter what someone else said about them. Yeah, they were bad kids. So bad, in fact, that my daughter got two degrees from UCLA cum laude and my son graduated magna cum laude from Cal State Northridge.

7. ONE CANNOT HIDE: Kids are under constant surveillance, constant supervision. Anytime they leave the classroom, they need a pass. Even in their free time, they're given homework so that the teacher can have some control over what they're doing.

***

We did this.

We created generations of kids who hate school, and by extension who hate learning. Why is it that something like 65 percent of adults never read books after they finish school? My guess is because they're taught that reading is a chore, something to be endured.

Would I eliminate public education? Not on your life. Everybody needs to know how to read, to write and to do basic mathematics, but I'm not sure that learning how to fix a computer wouldn't be more useful than memorizing facts about the sack of Rome or the exports of Argentina.

What I would eliminate is a system based on fear and loathing, a system where fitting in and winning teacher's approval is first and foremost.

What we have now is little more than a baby-sitting service, little more than a way of keeping kids off the streets while their parents are working.

It seems to me we can do better than that, and we'll talk more about this next time.

Gatto exposed mandatory education

2009-05-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

If you've never heard of John Taylor Gatto, prepare to be shocked.

Gatto is the author of numerous books, including the stunning "Underground History of American Education," and a former public school teacher. His book exposes the primary purpose of American public education, which is not to educate or to create people who know how to think, but instead to create obedient citizens who can work at mindless jobs and follow orders.

In case you'd rather listen than read, here's a YouTube clip of a 30-minute radio interview Gatto did:

Did you know, for example, that since the beginning of mandatory public education in the 1840s, the literacy rate in this country has never been as high as it was before then?

Did you know that President Woodrow Wilson said that only 3 percent of people were worthy of being trained to do independent thinking?

Read Gatto.

Where this all came from was Prussia. In the Napoleonic wars, the Prussians were defeated because many of their soldiers were too independent and not quick enough to follow orders. So the system was changed to create good soldiers, capable of following orders without thinking.

Most of you probably went to public schools. Remember the emphasis? It wasn't on what you learned, it was on how well you followed the rules.

I have a young nephew who has an extremely high IQ. When I was talking with his father about Gatto a couple of years ago, we called his son -- 7 at the time -- over to ask him a simple question. I asked him which was more important to his teachers -- getting the right answers or following the rules.

"Following the rules," he said without hesitation.

Remember back to when you were in school. Which kids had the most problems getting along? Aside from the total misfits, it was usually the ones who kept asking "Why do we do it this way?"

In this country, it was all about the industrial revolution. In an 1859 speech, Abraham Lincoln pointed out one of the strengths of America. Nearly 75 percent of working people were their own bosses, either as farmers, small businessmen or artisans. They didn't take orders from anyone. They were independent thinkers.

The industrial revolution changed all that. Companies wanted workers who would follow orders without question, who were essentially interchangeable cogs in a big machine. They didn't want people who would ask questions, unless that question was "How high do you want me to jump, sir?"

Why is so much of education based on rote memorization, on true-false, multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blanks testing? Because it teaches people that there is a right answer to everything, and if you know the right answers, you succeed.

When I was in 12th grade in 1966, I did something I don't think had ever been done at my school. I called a teacher a racist.

It could have been worse, I suppose.

I could have called her a Nazi.

She was German, and this was at the height of the Civil Rights movement. She told an all-white class that the problem with black people was that they didn't want to work and only wanted handouts. I told her that was a racist thing to say.

Of course in the overall scheme of things, I was the one who lost. She spent the rest of the year getting back at me.

Kids just weren't supposed to talk to teachers that way.

So listen to the interview. Read Gatto's book, or at least part of it. The link given earlier is to a PDF version of it online.

I guarantee it will shock you.

It certainly shocked me.

'Derangement syndrome' now 3-for-3

2009-05-07T23:24:00.001-07:00

My friend Gordon Campbell, who is a wonderful political cartoonist despite being somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun, did an interesting cartoon a few years back.

He showed an elephant and a donkey at a bar together, with the donkey totally livid over something then-President Bush -- Dubya, not Poppy -- had done. The elephant, smiling and lifting his drink, points to his friend and comments.

"Was I ever that bad about Clinton?"

My guess is Gordon wouldn't want to revisit the topic, but if he did, the elephant would be going nuts about President Obama while the donkey smiled.

"Was I ever that bad about Bush?"

Actually, yeah. Wing nuts on both sides have been going crazy for nearly 17 years now, and the current group can be pretty well summed up in the cartoon by Don Wright. Just as the right went after Bill Clinton with such ridiculous things as "The Clinton Chronicles," which claimed the president had dozens of people murdered, the left was after Bush for his Saudi connections, among other things.

Those two are in the past, though.

The Obama stuff is all too present, whether it's the "birthers," the folks who claim the president is a Muslim, or the ones who say Obama is actually a puppet taking orders from ... wait for it ... the Taliban.

We also hear he's implementing the agenda of radicals such as Saul Alinsky or Bill Ayers. I got a lot of people angry at me last year when I suggested Ayers should be considered more a hero than a villain for his efforts to stop the war in Vietnam.

Rush Limbaugh calls Obama not just a terrorist, but a totalitarian.

Of course, folks on the left said Bush had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that he allowed them to happen to further a neocon agenda.

I know most this stuff is coming only from the fringes -- maybe 10 percent on the far left and 10 percent on the far right, but what's ridiculous is that between talk radio, the Internet and 24-hous cable news stations, everybody hears it.

And the problem with that is that with so few people taking the trouble to read or to investigate some of these claims, too many people believe these ridiculous allegations.

Did then-Gov. Bill Clinton has dozens of people killed to further his own criminal agenda, as the film claims?

Hardly.

Did George Dubya know in advance that 911 was coming?

Hard to believe.

Is Obama controlled by the Taliban?

Don't make me laugh.

Are we ever going to have another president that the "loyal" opposition gives half a chance to?

Let me check my Magic 8-ball.

Try again later.

Increased mobility a mixed blessing

2009-05-07T00:12:00.000-07:00

A hundred years or so ago, most Americans did not live in cities.

A majority of Americans spent their entire lives living in one place, many of them never traveling more than 50 miles from where they were born. Even if they did move somewhere else when they came of age, they were usually able to return home and visit their parents, who were living where they had always lived.

Most of us have not had lives like that.

With the exception of a couple of years in Buffalo, N.Y., my grandparents lived in a small town in north central Ohio from 1895 until their deaths in 1985 and 1990. My uncle and my mother were born in Crestline, Ohio, and only one of them left the state as an adult.

Until my grandmother died at age 94, we always had the house in Crestline to return to. I remember being inside that house -- the source of so many wonderful memories -- for the last time the day of her funeral. I remember a conservation with my cousin Pete Kindinger.

"It's very strange," he said. "Strange to think that we will never be inside this house again."

Strange, yes. Also very sad.

The first real home I remember was Huber Heights, Ohio. We moved there when I was 7, into one of the great new subdivisions of the postwar era. For all the talk of the different Levittown communities, Huber Heights billed itself as the world's largest community of all-brick homes. By the time we moved away in 1963, there were 8,000 homes.

It was totally a bedroom community, with most of the commuters going to work either in Dayton or at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base just outside Fairborn. Dayton was a pretty big city in those days, nearly 250,000 people in the 1960 census.

We moved to Washington, D.C., in January 1963 when my dad was promoted to a job at the Pentagon, and my parents bought a house in Fairfax, Va., that my mother still occupies until this day. I lived there for the better part of 12 years, which turned out to be the longest I ever lived anywhere until I married Nicole and moved to La Canada, Calif., in the fall of 1992.

So I'm from everywhere -- and nowhere.

I've lived in California for 19 years now, and I was actually born here as well. But the places that seem more like "home" are the ones that bring back childhood memories, and most of those come from Ohio and Virginia.

I suppose my life might have been very different if we hadn't left Ohio. I'd have attended Anthony Wayne High School instead of W.T. Woodson, and I quite possibly would have wound up at Ohio State for college.

I probably wouldn't have stayed. I've always had a certain wanderlust, and even when I was 12 years old and listening to the radio, California was calling me. There was something about me that wanted to be here.

But it's really impossible to say. Maybe I would have formed strong enough friendships in the area. Maybe I would have married someone from my high school -- lovely blonde-haired Diane McClish, my third-grade girlfriend ever so briefly, or beautiful dark-haired Claudia Dunaway.

Maybe I would still be living in the Dayton area. Maybe I would have been taking my children and grandchildren to ride the roller coasters at Le Sourdesville Lake or to our summer cabin at Indian Lake. Maybe we'd be making the 60-mile drive down to Cincinnati to see the Reds play, or over to Columbus for OSU football.

I would be a very different person, but I would definitely have a sense of place that I have never really had as an adult.

I don't know how many places the average American lives in a lifetime, but I know I'm past that -- San Diego, Chicago, Crestline, Dayton, Fairfax, Vienna, Austria, Gastonia, N.C., Anderson, S.C., St. Louis, Greeley, Colo., Reno, Nev., and now Southern California.

That's 12, and if you figure in three more residences in the Dayton area, four additional ones in Northern Virginia and four here in California, that makes 23. Two apartment changes in Gastonia, one in Reno and one in Austria lifts the total to 27, making at least 26 times in my life I have moved from one home to another.

Yes, increased mobility is definitely a mixed blessing.