Songs evocative of a strange time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.