Still fun to take my best girl to the movies

My wife Nicole and I had a fairly whirlwind courtship.

We met on Sept. 12, 1992, and on our first three dates we went to the movies. We saw "Bob Roberts," "Gas Food Lodging" and "Hero." The Geena Davis/Dustin Hoffman one, not the Jet Li one.

We went to the movies a lot back then, and at one point during a fight in our first year of marriage, my wife said to me, "I didn't want to get married. I just wanted someone to go to the movies with."

That's the kind of thing that happens when the wedding follows the meeting by only 51 days, but we have stayed together and are now in our 17th year of marriage. I don't have much doubt that we'll be together till death does that old parting thing. I love her, she loves me -- forever.

The only sad thing is that we don't go to the movie much anymore. In fact, I think we've been twice in the last year. We saw Meryl Streep in "Doubt" a couple of months ago and we finally got around to seeing "Slumdog Millionaire" Saturday.

We're sort of pushing to try and go a little more often, but it's tough. There are a lot of movies in which our tastes don't really coincide, which is mostly my fault. She likes intelligent movies that ask important questions, and I like movies with laughs, nudity or action, or sometimes all three.

"Slumdog" surprised us. We knew it was good, but I don't think we were expecting the level of violence and action in it. They also made a big deal out of 20 million rupees, but it was kind of a Lire situation, if you remember the old Italian currency; 20 million rupees is less than $400,000 American.

But nothing's perfect. We went, we had a good time and we'll go again soon if I can get motivated. It's not as big a deal as it once was anyway; our 37-inch HD television is pretty nice to watch movies on and I don't care where I am as long as I'm with her.

We'll see "Australia" tonight.

Earmarks aren't always wasteful 'pork'

Let's talk about earmarks for a few minutes.

Republicans are going on and on about how evil earmarks are in bills coming out of Congress, with former presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twittering away gaily at how humorous some of them are. Of course the most famous earmark ever was former Sen. Ted Stevens' "bridge to nowhere" for Alaska, but not all earmarks are stupid and not all are pork.

Remember the Republican response to President Obama's speech last month, when Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal tried to ridicule the idea of volcano monitoring.

Bad move, Bobby. Governors who need monitoring for one kind of natural disaster shouldn't make fun of the other kinds. Volcanoes matter to the Pacific Northwest, hurricanes matter to the Gulf Coast.

The GOP had a lot of fun with an earmark that actually was cut out of the final stimulus bill; $150,000 for "honeybee insurance." Let's ignore the fact that $150,000 is chump change in a budget that measures in the trillions. It's probably less than the Pentagon budget for toilet tissue.

But let's think about those honeybees for a minute.

I know it's tough for Republicans, many of whom believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old and Jesus and his disciples used to ride dinosaurs to Sunday school, to comprehend real science. They seem to have no idea how crucial bees are to our ecosystem. Bees pollinate plants, making it possible for them to grow.

And plants ... food, right?

There seems to be a great debate over whether Albert Einstein actually said the famous quote that has been attributed to him, but a pamphlet distributed by the National Union of French Apiculture (a country that respects science) quoted him.

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination ... no more men!"

Whether you're aware of it or not, an amazing number of honeybee colonies have been dying for unfathomable reasons. Seems like spending about as much as Bernard Madoff would spend on a weekend in the Hamptons on studying the problem would be a pretty good idea.

If we spent one tenth as much on science as we do on tax breaks for people who don't need them, we'd be a lot better off than we are. As it is, we're stumbling along at a time when we ought to be racing ahead.

So yeah, there's pork in government bills. But just because somebody says something in a funny voice doesn't mean it's funny.

It just means they think you're stupid.

For we lived so well so long

"I don't know a soul who's not been battered, don't have a friend who feels at ease ..."

I haven't always enjoyed Peggy Noonan's writing, but I seem to agree with her a lot more than I once did.

Noonan's book "Patriotic Grace" opined that we should all try to be a little nicer to each other, because all of us really are in this together. That's not the consensus either on the far left or the far right, where folks tend to think more about ovens, guillotines or firing squads for their political opposites. It is, I think, where most Americans fall, though.

Of course Noonan didn't write the lines that open this column; they're from the wonderful 1973 Paul Simon song "American Tune." But her column in the Wall Street Journal today sounded a lot to me like Simon in the late Nixon era. Titled "There's no pill for this depression," the Noonan column says basically that whatever "depression" we're going through right now is as much a crisis of spirit as it is of finance.



Simon's song -- which you really ought to listen to if you've got 4 minutes -- was pitch perfect for the way we felt in 1973, with Vietnam winding down, Nixon fighting to stay in office and economic stagflation that had lasted for three or four years by that point.

Yet now it's easy to look back on that period and think of it as the "good old days." Gas was still cheap, most of what we bought was still Made in America and the Reagan/Clinton/Bush attack on the middle class was just a gleam in some baby neocon's eye.

Of course I'm romanticizing it. Of course I was only 23 then, believing that possibilities still stretched out before me. But I'll tell you one thing. I knew very few people in the mainstream who worried that they would lose everything they had.

Noonan writes:

The writer and philosopher Laurens van der Post, in his memoir of his friendship with Carl Jung, said, "We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time." We are actors in a moment of history, taking part in it, moving it this way or that as we move forward or back. The moment we are living now is a strange one, a disquieting one, a time that seems full of endings.

I think she's absolutely right. We lived very well for a very long time, and we are coming to the end of something. I don't think it's necessarily the end of America or anything like that, but I think it may well be the end of the time when it matters what kind of coffeemaker you have or how many expensive pairs of shoes are in your closet.

I think we're coming to some sort of testing, a testing of not only our intelligence, but also of our guts and our hearts.

I pray we pass.

Some folks have forgotten basic civility

I don't know whether to pity Meghan McCain or to admire her.

Maybe I'll do both.

The former Republican presidential candidate's daughter went on Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC the other night and talked about how negative some talk radio is and how that hurts the GOP in terms of its appeal to young voters.

Today talk radio struck back in the form of Laura Ingraham, who I had often found to be rather reasonable but lately has turned into Ann Coulter Lite. Ingraham went all out ridiculing McCain, calling her "just another Valley Girl gone awry" and referring to her as "plus-sized."

Of course that's PC-talk for "fat," and McCain is only fat in comparison to some of the Skeletor wannabes out there like Ingraham and Coulter.




First of all, McCain did something folks like Limbaugh and the rest of the talk-show crowd never do -- she put herself in position to be questioned by an intelligent liberal. Maddow is the new star of the broadcast left, and she is smart, quick and funny.

All she got from Ingraham was snark. Is there one right-wing talk show these days with a host that isn't mean as a snake? Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly, Savage -- they're all acting like a government in exile. They don't seem to get that the country rejected their brand of conservatism.

We ought to at least demand that they be civil.

Ingraham acted like a seventh-grader Thursday.

"She's f-a-a-a-a-a-t!"

Thanks for that contribution to the public discourse, Laura. Now eat a sandwich.

Are newspapers really dying ...

... or is it murder?

I don't read Time magazine anymore, but a friend sent me an article that coincided with the folding of the Rocky Mountain News, listing 10 other major papers that were in danger of folding before the end of the year.

It didn't surprise me that there were papers in trouble, but I was shocked by at least a few of the ones on the list. The Boston Globe, for instance. The Globe is one of the finest papers in the country, but it's reportedly losing $1 million a month.

The Miami Herald, for another, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Both are the dominant papers in their market and have been for a long time. When I see papers like that in trouble, I really find myself wondering if journalism has a future.

It doesn't help that most papers now aren't owned or run by news people. Big companies looking for big profits scarfed up a lot of papers in good times, when profit margins were running 25-30 percent.

Now that profits are down, and in some places gone completely, there's no sense of mission to keep them going. A newspaper losing money is just like a department store losing money to these people -- something to be sold or closed.

The San Francisco Chronicle, another disappearing newspaper, was the flagship of the Hearst empire for the better part of a century. I would have loved to have worked there; it was one of my dream destinations.

Now of course some will say that print media itself is obsolete, that with the Internet we really don't have to kill all these trees. Yes, I can read the news on my BlackBerry. It isn't the same, though, and they'll never be able to monetize the Internet as effectively as they did when they sold copies of papers. There are just too many people who believe with all their hearts that content on the 'net should be free.

So they'll survive in Web editions with much less revenue, which means fewer reporters and less investigative work. Fewer malefactors and miscreants will be exposed, and those who work in the shadows will have a much easier time of it.

I've said for several years that newspapers should not be operated as for-profit businesses anyway. Their constitutional protection via the First Amendment makes them far too important. Maybe it's time we got serious about finding a way to save newspapers before they're all gone.

Time for America to grow up a little

Why is it I have a feeling that if our Founding Fathers were to look at us, they would laugh?

Or worse, be ashamed of us.

We have become a country where the loudest voices tell the biggest lies, where much of our effort goes to protecting the wealthiest of us.

We have reached a point where something like one of every seven working people is either unemployed or underemployed, yet efforts to help them in any other way than discredited trickle-down economics is decried as "socialism."

Indeed, if you listen to the loudest of their voices, socialism morphs without difficulty into "communism" and "Marxism," as if the discredited, long-dead commissars of the old Soviet Union were running America.

Well, pardon me, but that is such a load of crap.

Economically, the middle class in this country is no better off than it was in 1972, when far more families lived on only one income. Individual debt is staggeringly high; too many people have bought into the "he who dies with the most toys wins" philosophy. Got a 37-inch HD-television? Hey, look at this 52-incher.

Meanwhile, one of every eight homeowners is either in foreclosure or more than a month behind on mortgage payments. Of course, we're more concerned about whether gays are allowed to get married.

And if you think this downturn in the economy will somehow even things out, don't kid yourself. During the Great Depression, the rich got a lot richer, picking up distressed properties for 10 cents on the dollar.

Ever since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the share of America's wealth controlled by the top 1 percent has increased. We're now at the point where 1 percent of our people control about 25 percent of money, property. etc.

Meanwhile, the "American Dream" of upward mobility, that any boy or girl can become rich through intelligence and hard work, has become almost impossible for many. George Carlin put it best when he said, "They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Well, I think we could do with a little more socialism in this country. For all the right wing says about European socialism being a failure because their economies are 30 percent less productive, well, so what?

I think if you asked people in this country if they would be willing to have significantly higher taxes in return for guaranteed health care, free education for their children through college and an assured retirement, you might be surprised how many would say yes.

We are on the verge of a massive disaster in this country, the likes of which we have never seen. The Baby Boomer generation is approaching retirement, and it's a good bet that something like 70 percent are totally unprepared. Remember, most Baby Boomers will not have pensions. All they'll have is Social Security and whatever they've managed to save.

Quite a few of us have been counting on selling our houses for big profits to finance our golden years, but housing prices have plummeted the last two years.

What you're going to see is older workers staying on past 65 -- if they can.

The American Dream?

It's time to start creating a new American Reality, something we can do by shutting off talk radio and the screamers and realizing that we may not know the guy next door, but we are all in this together.

We need a little less Calvinism and a little more Socialism.

I'm beginning to understand how Ochs felt

Phil Ochs was one of the great singer/songwriters of the mid 20th century, a man who believed that his songs ought to say something and mean something.

He was a folksinger, seen by some as the poor man's Bob Dylan, and he killed himself at the age of 35 because he could no longer sing. I saw him at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., a couple of years before his death, and it was one of the most memorable nights of my life.

His voice was awful; he had been strangled in Tanzania in 1972, damaging his vocal cords. He growled out most of his songs, but the audience was packed with people who loved him and we kept calling him back for encore after encore.

I think it was 1974 when I saw him. I would have been 24, still filled with the enthusiasm of someone who thought he could get it together and really accomplish something. Believe me, it took enthusiasm. I had flunked out of college three times by that age and I was working the graveyard shift at a fast food restaurant.

I'll be 60 this year, and there are a lot of times I feel I've lived too long. For all intents and purposes, my career in journalism ended 14 months ago, when a corporate flunky with a Napoleon complex set me up and fired me. Since then I've been working on a book, but the closer I get to finishing it the more I wonder if it will ever be finished.

It's a look back, of course. I always find myself looking back.

I always find myself wondering what might have happened if I hadn't fucked up my life when I was young.

I'll never kill myself. It's too hostile an act, and there are too many people who love me and would be badly hurt by it. But I find myself sympathizing with Ochs, and understanding why he did what he did.

I set this site up to update it frequently, but I have been doing a horrible job of that lately. I suppose I'm depressed, suffering from empty-nest syndrome. The only thing in my life I ever did really well was be a father, and my two children are grown and gone. These days I stumble around trying to be a good husband and pretending I'm not counting the days till ...

Well, till whatever.

Something has got to change.