Steve K's World

God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen ... and everyone else

2011-12-25T10:00:00.001-08:00

Are we all aware that for the simple positioning of a comma, the entire meaning of one of our most beloved Christmas carols would take on an entirely different meaning?

It's true. "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is, I'm sure, in our heart of hearts of Yuletide tidings (say that 10 times fast). But it doesn't mean what we all think it means, and it's because of where the comma goes.

You see, it's not "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen ..." it's "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."

Same words ... comma one word over.

The first version would seem to mean be at peace, merry gentlemen, as you celebrate Christmas. The second ... correct ... version leaves room for a bit of a more robust celebration. In this case, "God Rest Ye Merry" doesn't mean "be at peace" at all. It means by all means, make merry the celebration of Christmas. You know ... eat, drink, and revel in the company of your friends and families.

I have to say I like version No. 2 ... the correct ... version much better.

This is one of many Christmas carols/songs that are either misinterpreted, or that translate badly into English, or that simply make no sense at all no matter what language you're talking about.

For example. Let's discuss "The First Noel." First of all, despite the use of the word "Noel," this is actually an English carol. Which makes it even more confusing. You could excuse the obtuse lyrics if someone told you they were translated from some old French verse. But how to you explain this line: "On a Cold Winter's Night that was so deep."

OK. Are we missing a line here? What was deep? The snow? It could be, but there's no mention of snow in the song ... and if the baby Jesus was, indeed, born in Bethlehem, it doesn't snow there very often. In fact, a cursory google of Israel and weather says that it only snows regularly in Golan Heights. Bethlehem has more of a Mediterranean climate, which means generally cold and rainy winters.

So maybe the "deep" refers to the manure in the barn where the Baby Jesus was born. Who knows? Or maybe the author was trying to convey the message that the birth of Jesus was a profound event in the history of man, and, hence, very deep. But we're getting way to analytical here.

Next on the agenda to discuss is "Silent Night," which has a rather fascinating history all of its own. It was written by an Austrian priest in 1816 and set to music two years later in Oberndorf when the organ at St. Nicholas' Church broke down on Christmas Eve. It was intended to be played at Midnight Mass with a simple guitar accompaniment.

And from those humble beginnings it has become, arguably, the most beloved Christmas carols of them all.

But that's not why we're discussing it here. We're discussing it because of the line "Round Yon Virgin, Mother and Child." This has to be a case of German being translated badly into English, because I defy anyone to tell me what-all that means.

Reminds me of the story about the kid bringing home a drawing he did at school of the nativity, with the baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, sheep, shepherds, the three kings, and this grotesque, hulking figure looming in the background.

"Who's that?" the kids mother asks.

"That's Round John Virgin," the kid replied.

My guess is that "Round Yon Virgin, Mother and Child," means "behold Mary and Jesus." Can't think of what else it could mean.

Let us proceed. "Away in a Manger" actually has two tunes with the same set of lyrics for both. One is written by someone named Murry, or Mueller, and is based loosely on a Strauss waltz. The second, which is also in 3/4 times, was written by William J. Kilpatrick in 1895. And while the tunes are radically different, they actually counterpoint each other quite well.

In 1865, English writer William Chatterton Dix had a near-death experience and, as a result, was confined to months of bed rest. He wrote many hymns during that period, including one in which he put lyrics to the tune of the popular folk song "Greensleeves." That became, of course, "What Child is This," which has the distinction of being covered quite eloquently in the 1970s by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues.

A lot of these songs are steeped in history. Did you know, for example, that "Joy to the World" was based partly on a refrain from Handel's "Messiah?" Yes, indeed. Not the entire song, perhaps, but the chorus "Let heaven and nature sing ..." was taken from the refrain "Comfort Ye" from the famous oratorio ... the same one that gave us the Hallelujah Chorus."

As Casey Stengel would say, "you could look it up." I did.

Now, speaking of odd little histories, "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!" is certainly unique.

It was originally written as a somber, solemn piece of music. But it was later changed to the more majestic tune we know and love today. And much of that tune was ripped off from a piece by composer Felix Mendelssohn (who brought us the traditional wedding recessional from "A Midsummer's Night's Dream," among other things). And when Mendelssohn wrote it, it was a cantata celebrating Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.

But the first time I heard it, I thought it was about some guy named Harold.

If some of the traditional carols have roundabout histories, so do our more secular songs. "Silver Bells" was ostensibly written about hearing the Salvation Army bell-ringers that are ubiquitous in New York during the holiday season (you won't find this one in Wiki ... I heard it from a Salvation Army captain during a rotary club luncheon).

The word "Christmas" never appears in "Winter Wonderland." Yet it is one of our most enduring season songs ... at least in the Northern hemisphere.

A personal favorite here is "Sleigh Ride," by Leroy Anderson, who wrote some hundreds of light concert pieces, such as "The Syncopated Clock" and "Buggler's Holiday" that were introduced by his good friend Arthur Fiedler via the Boston Pops.

"Sleigh Ride," another piece where you'll be looking all day if you seek to find the word "Christmas" in the lyrics, wasn't even written in the winter at all. It was written as an orchestral piece during a July heat wave, with lyrics, depicting a simple generic winter scene, added later. Thus, it would appear Anderson wrote "Sleigh Ride" for the same reason I might break out the DVD to "Fargo" in the middle of August ... to simulate the feeling of being able to cool off.

If you want your head to really spin, look up the origin and explanation of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Nobody's sure whether it's English or French, and the words are different depending upon which version you hear. In one there are twelve drummers drumming; and in another it's nine drummers drumming and twelve fiddlers fiddling.

This would generally speak to the belief that the song got its beginnings as one of those parlor games where everyone has to go around repeating all the stuff they'd heard prior until someone finally slips up.

And, of course, the simple scope of the gifts, and what receiving them would do to the poor person who receives them, has been the subject of many spoofs.

And then there's "We Three Kings of Orient Are." This is actually an American carol written in the mid 19th century by an Episcopalian priest in New York. And although the words are pretty ponderous (field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star ...) they make sense. They were written for a Christmas pageant, and they actually tell a story.

But I can never hear it without laughing, because I think kids of all ages, and all locales, learned to sing it this way: We three kings or orient are ... tried to smoke a rubber cigar ... it was loaded and exploded ..."

I know. I know. Dumb. But when you're 11, dumb is entertaining.

Finally, Christmas isn't Christmas without hearing certain songs. If I don't hear "Do You Hear What I Hear" at least once, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the holiday season is incomplete. But here's the caveat: I can hear any one of a hundred different versions of the song, but the only one I care about is Der Bingle's. There's something about Crosby and Christmas.

It's just a nice song, with a nice sentiment. But when you find out why it was written, it just punches you right in the stomach. It was written in 1962 as a plea for peace during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And its authors couldn't perform it without getting choked up because, as one of them put it, "you must realize we were under the threat of nuclear war at the time."

But when it comes to Der Bingel, his recording of "White Christmas" remains the best-selling single of all time. It was written by Irving Berlin and it pretty much symbolizes an old-fashioned Christmas the same way his "God Bless America" symbolizes patriotism (but did you know that Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land is Your Land" as a response to "God Bless America?").

What I find ironic, however, is that we all sing "White Christmas" like it's some kind of idyllic dream, yet if the weatherman even mentions the word "snow" in the days leading up to Christmas, we act as if someone snatched the Christmas pudding right out from under us.

Another "must hear:" "Father Christmas" by the Kinks, which kind of shatters the idyllic Christmas myth to smithereens and gets down to gritty reality: Leave all the toys to the little rich boys and give me money. Then there's "I Believe in Father Christmas" by Greg Lake, which speaks to a number of issues: The commercialization of the holiday and the loss of childhood innocence associated with it. Following along, we have a very eclectic selection that includes poppy pieces like "Jingle Bell Rock" and "Little St. Nick" by the Beach Boys (which Brian Wilson actually once sang during a concert in the middle of July); twisted pieces such as "Christmas Wrappings" by the Waitresses and "A Christmas Song" by Jethro Tull; and Bruce Springsteen's "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town."

John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Happy Christmas, War is Over" was written and recorded in 1971, with the Harlem Boys Choir providing the backing. It was kind of a combination protest and Christmas song written as the Vietnam War was raging.

But its tune was actually taken from a traditional folk song about a racehorse called "Stewball," that was sung by, among others, Peter, Paul and Mary.

Of course, the song became an instant Christmas staple in 1980 after Lennon was shot to death in New York. The other irony: Yoko Ono sings on this record. You can hear her loud and clear. In Lennon's life, she was reviled as the "woman who broke up the Beatles," yet now, all these years later, she has emerged as an almost sympathetic figure in the group's historical dynamic.

By the time John Williams stepped down as conductor of the Boston Pops I was pretty tired of him. That's because he'd always manage to sneak one of his own compositions into just about every concert, and with such a wide and distinguished palate on which to paint, I thought he slanted his concerts with too much ego. It would be like telling Picasso he could host an art show, telling him he had access to every classic ever painted, and seeing half his cubist paintings speckle the gallery.

This doesn't mean Williams was/is a hack, or that Picasso was a bad artist. It just means that John maybe could have stepped aside once in a while and featured someone else other than himself.

Yet Williams did write one of my very favorite Christmas songs, simply called "Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas." I first heard it in the closing credits of "Home Alone 2," but the Pops usually play it during their Christmas show every year (yes, even with Keith Lockhart at the podium) and it captures the spirit of the season very well.

After today, they'll all be put in a box and kept on ice until, I don't know, next October. Radio stations and department stores seem to trot them out earlier and earlier every year, which really does nothing except defeat the purpose behind what makes them special in the first place. And while I know that the never-ending debate over whether we should even acknowledge the religious aspects of Christmas at all in public seems to be more divisive each year, there's no denying that, as music, a lot of these carols are very beautiful and peaceful, and that they reconnect you to your childhood faster than any other single thing you experience.

I hope they're around to enjoy for many years to come ... and that ever-encroaching commercialism doesn't eventually blunt completely their singular purpose in our lives.

Quick Hits

2011-09-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Just a random sample of quick hits as we catch up on the events of the past weekend ...

I'm a charter member of the "I Think John Lackey Is Overrated" club. I thought it was a terrible decision by the Red Sox to throw that ridiculous contract at him, and always pegged him as middle-of-the-rotation guy who might be able to give you innings, and even shut a team down once in a while.

But that's all. He's not a front-liner, and he never was. And if the Red Sox had paid any attention to how Lackey's pitched against their own team they'd have saved their money and re-signed Jason Bay. Because, with few exceptions, the Red Sox have pounded Lackey worse than when Buster Douglas cold-cocked Mike Tyson.

That said, the fact he sucks as a pitcher shouldn't turn him into a pinata when it comes to his personal life.

Sunday night, Lackey went off on reporters because someone (we still don't know who) texted him an hour before he was supposed to start against the New York Yankees to ask him (I guess) to corroborate TMZ reports that he and his wife were getting divorced.

Well I have to questions right off the bat. First, why would someone do that? Has the media become so invasive that someone would harass the guy an hour before the biggest game he'll probably pitch this regular season? Couldn't it wait? I'm a fan of getting the story, and getting it first too. That's how I was brought up in the business.

But this? Lackey's right. That crossed a line. Even though Tiger Woods can attest to the fact that your life is not your own when you're a worldwide celebrity, I'm sure no one who covers golf would walk up to Tigger as he's teeing off at the Masters and ask him about his 10 affairs.

So, yes, that was more than a little insensitive and invasive.

As for my second question, why is Lackey even paying attention to his cell phone?????

Man, you've got the ball in a game that could possibly make or break the entire season. The difference between rescuing your team from this tailspin and kicking it further along on the road to the Underachiever's Hall of Fame rests on your overrated right arm!

What are you doing checking your text messages?

No wonder why the guy can't get out of the fourth inning half the time. If you're that unfocused you don't deserve to do well.

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Onto the Patriots. There's nothing mysterious about what happened Sunday. The Patriots thought they'd just roll over the Buffalo Bills, just like they always do, but the Bills weren't having any. Lazy, sloppy play by the Patriots got the Bills back into the game, and once they got a taste of it, they weren't going to stop until they finished the job.

Good for them. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to see teams like Buffalo rise up and start counting for something ... even if it's against the Patriots.

Bill Belichick and Tom Brady aren't above learning a few lessons, even as they're getting measured for those ugly banana-colored blazers wear when they're being enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame. It's never too late, and you're never too good, to be humbled.

But there are some glaring weaknesses on that team, no? We're back to two years ago with the receivers. They don't have a deep threat, and I can't imagine how anyone would trust Chad Ochocinco after Sunday's game. It wouldn't surprise me if Belichick cut him this week and cast his lot with Matthew Slater.

Yes, the loss of Aaron Hernandez ultimately ended up hurting them (though it shouldn't have ... if you jump out to a 21-0 lead should be able to finish the job without much trouble). It would be nice if they could run the ball a little better. That way they wouldn't have to keep throwing it up and risking interceptions.

The defense is a mess. Belichick made that a priority in the short signing period between the time the walkout ended and the season began. But so far, that has been a massive disappointment. They're getting no push, and I'm sorry, but you could have Ty Law and Darrelle Revis out there together, and if the quarterback has all day to throw, he's going to beat you.

Devin McCourty is neither Ty Law nor Darrelle Revis. He's a second-year player who probably could have benefited from some off-season workouts that got wiped out by the lockout.

Kick a few of those big guys in their big asses and get them to rush the passer. That'll make the likes of Devin McCourty a much better player.

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I thought maybe that last night's win over the Yankees might do the same thing for the Sox that the Ortiz home run did in '04 ... serve as a catalyst to snap out of it and start playing baseball.

Nope. It's 6-2 Baltimore in the seventh, and Tampa Bay's winning. If the this holds, the Red Sox are done. If the Buffalo Bills smelled blood, what do you suppose it is the Rays are smelling? And they're playing a Yankee team that isn't the slightest bit interested in putting the pedal all the way down to the floor.

Just awful.

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On that subject, I'd find it real hard to gas Terry Francona for one bad season. The month of September was like some virus that just spreads through your system and destroys everything in its path. By the time you know you even have it, it's too late to do anything else but wait until it runs its course.

Every possible thing that could go wrong with this team has gone wrong. Everything. Bad luck. Bad breaks. Bad baseball. And bad attitudes.

You know, I do have a lot of sympathy for Lackey when it comes to defending him against idiots who would invade his privacy on that whole TMZ divorce thing. But having said all that, he's a big boy. And while he gets some slack for his personal problems, he gets none for choosing to make an issue out of them after what could have been the team's biggest win of the season.

Sorry. That was just wrong.

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Even quicker hits ... Apparently Michael Vick thinks he's special. After breaking his hand Sunday, he went off on the referees, suggesting that their standards for protecting him are different than they are for protecting everyone else. Way to go, Michael Vick. Just when your image is somewhat on its way to being saved, show the world what a jerk you really are ... I like this Rays team a lot. They have a look about them that reminds me of those Minnesota Twins teams under Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire, a team that was impossible to dislike. I like the manager, Joe Maddon, who is kind of a quirky character, and I love their pitching. I don't know what happens to them if they make the playoffs, whether they run out of gas because of the energy they had to expend to get there. But if they make the post-season, they're my team. Hands down ... And, please, can the Cardinals do the same thing to the Braves? Pretty please? ... Before anyone concedes the AL West to the San Diego Chargers, let's see the Oakland Raiders play a few more games. Somebody, apparently, forgot to tell them they're supposed to suck. Right now they're 2-1, with a win over the Jets. And if you want to judge them for coughing up a big lead to the Bills, you'll have to judge the Patriots similarly ... I guess Tony Romo gets SOME props for playing with a punctured lung and broken ribs. There. I said it. It was painful, but there it is.

Labor Day Musings

2011-09-02T21:45:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day Weekend, everyone.
Labor Day is easily the most bittersweet holiday of the year. For while it introduces the month that has perhaps the most spectacularly great weather of the entire year in the northeast, it also draws the curtain down on summer, and reminds us that uncompromising cold is not very far away.

But, as they say, let's enjoy the moment. We have September and October -- two absolutely gorgeous months, generally -- ahead of us before we have to start worrying about freezing to death. Right?

Anyway, let's begin ...

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I've been catching up with an old friend (and by old, I mean we haven't communicated but for a few emails in almost 30 years) recently. We made friends the first day of college (on orientation day, actually) and remained so for the five years (and beyond) we were at Northeastern University in Boston.

Fern was always a challenging person when it came to debating and discussing issues. We could never totally agree on anything. I've never considered myself conservative, by any stretch, but compared to her, I'm Dick Cheney.

Fern, who grew up in New Jersey, is now a Californian. And as such, probably more used to unstable ground than I am. So when the east coast had a 5.8 earthquake last week (more on that later), she emailed me out of the blue to ask me about it.

It was great to hear from her, and we've been emailing back and forth since. Over the course of our correspondence, I told her how much I idolized the author John Irving, and she told me how much she idolized Paul McCartney.

OK. I took that as a cue that we were going to discuss Paul's indelible contributions to baby-boom culture, so I sent her back a long, convoluted email outlining my self-appointed expertise on the subject.

I got one back basically telling me to stop being so convoluted and high-falutin', and that her idolatry for "Macca" began when she was 10 because he was the cute Beatle.

And it reminded me. At the end of the day, and despite everything that happened with the Fabs in the ensuing years, our first, and perhaps lasting, memory of them is of four mop-tops who shook their hair all over the place when they sang, and whose most profound lyrics might have been, "yeah, yeah, yeah."

It's easy to forget that. They may have grown into cultural phenomena, but they began as the cute one, the sarcastic one, the quiet one, and the guy on the drums with the big honker.

I guess you can't over-analyze that.

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It also occurred to me that 10-year-old guys did not look at, say, Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark the same way as little girls looked at the Beatles. It's hard, when you're 10, to get all worked up over women twice your age. My first celebrity crush -- if you want to call it that -- came a few years later when I was debating as to whether I'd want to kiss Ginger or Maryanne (and believe me, it was "kiss." Not anything else).

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I wouldn't know who Chaz Bono was were it not for the sex change procedure he's undergoing. I vaguely remember that there was even a Chastity Bono. And the only reason why that registers is that I really think that people who give their kids such strange names ought to be put in a room so that the rest of us can slap them around for a while.

But Chaz is going to be on "Dancing with the Stars" this fall. Now, the obvious question is when did Chaz Bono become a star? It's the same question I asked when Bristol Palin got her turn to spin around the dance floor. Other than getting pregnant when she was 16 and having a relationship with the father right out of Dogpatch, what did she ever do to become a star? Just because she's Sarah's daughter?

My only reaction is that we've set the bar quite low lately for defining the word "star."

That said, the reaction to Chaz being on the show -- not to mention the reaction to the reaction -- is certainly interesting, if not exactly eye-opening.

I do not watch Dancing with the Stars. Couldn't care less about it. And Chaz being on the show isn't going to make me watch either. I hate all that stuff ... American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, America's Got Talent ... (though I thought it was great that Kirstie Alley lasted as long as she did on the show).

First, to the producers of Dancing With The Stars: Chaz's story is compelling. No question. Him being on the show brings this story to light even more than it's been exposed already; and it perhaps entices more viewers as well.

Well, if you're going to put yourself on the line like that, then deal with the fallout. Because only an idiot wouldn't expect any. You can't have it both ways.

To the moralists out there who think that Chaz's appearance on the show is somehow sending the wrong message to kids: Please. The whole show's a circus. The only way Chaz would send the wrong message to kids is if he wore a sign around himself saying, "I'm transgender, and I'm lovin' it." And even then, what's the wrong message?

It makes me wonder when, in this country, are we simply going to allow people to be happy with who they are? When are we going to wake up and understand that as long as Chaz Bono (and others like him) isn't careening through life causing large-scale misery and mayhem, why should anybody be concerned about his lifestyle?

It brings to mind the whole gay marriage issue. I've always rejected the notion that gay marriage somehow destroys the sanctity of the institution. No it doesn't. The strength of the institution, at its most pure, comes down to two people who love each other, and whether they can sustain that love over a lifetime. Gay, straight, transgender ... what's the difference? Love is love ... happiness is happiness.

Leave them alone. And leave Chaz alone. I'm sure the process he went through to even arrive at the decision to have a sex change was tortuous enough.

And finally, this is the very definition of irony. We're talking about dancing. Theater. Entertainment. Or, to be as delicate as I can possibly be about the subject, one of the most nurturing environments in the entire country for gays and transsexuals. I wonder whether these armchair moralists out there have any idea, when or if they go to the theater, how many of the people they're watching may also be gays or transsexuals?

We'd need one paramedic for every 10 of them!

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I promised more earthquake/hurricane talk. Well, when that earthquake hit, we were sitting in the theater that contains the massive diorama of the Battle of Gettysburg. Part of the production involves simulated artillery fire that is pretty vivid in its realism (it is said that the artillery barrage was so loud during the gunfight preceding Pickett's Charge on Little Roundtop that it could be heard as far as away as Philadelphia).

As we were preparing to listen to the presentation, the ground shook intensely for about 10 seconds. We looked around, a bit puzzled. There are no subways in Gettysburg (the usual reason the ground would shake in the middle of the day), and the train station's on the other end of town from where all the historical museums are.

With no other explanation forthcoming, we just figured that it was a bit of simulation to get us prepared for what was to follow. We saw the display, never giving it a thought (and yes, the artillery simulation was quite vivid). But when the show ended, someone who works at the museum came in to tell us, that the ground shaking was a 5.8 earthquake.

There was no damage. In fact, the only residual effect of the quake, in southern Pennsylvania, at least, was that we couldn't use our cellphones to make calls for almost two hours. We could text, however, and email through our Blackberys. But no calls.

Needless to say, there were countless texts sent back and forth to ensure all the folks up in Boston that we were OK.

The best line from the whole thing was from my friend Nancy in Minnesota, who emailed me, "well, you certainly felt the earth move, didn't you?"

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And not only did we get to experience an earthquake while we were in Pennsylvania, we got chased home by a storm ... Hurricane Irene.

First of all, can I just say that people who whine and complain that the storm was a bust, and that it was overhyped, maybe ought to move to Vermont. I'm sure the people up there would disagree. The state -- which is one of the most pristinely gorgeous in the entire country -- is a mess. Roads washed out ... bridges collapsed ... massive flooding ... a genuine tragedy. There are ton of people along the east coast who still don't have power, and it's been almost a week since the storm hit.

So let's stop talking about how overhyped this storm was. If there's a problem, it's that all storms are overhyped ... so much so that when the forecasters are actually right about one of them, nobody takes them seriously.

Thankfully, my little corner of the earth didn't get the worst of Hurricane Irene. This isn't to say we came through unscathed. There are lots of downed trees and power outages in metropolitan Boston too. But it could have been worse.

In fact, my worst experience with Irene came not on the day when the storm was supposed to be at its height -- in our case last Sunday -- but the day before, when we were driving home from Philadelphia. Even though we'd heard that there would be only "showers" on Saturday, the word "showers" didn't do justice to what actually happened.

It didn't just rain. And it didn't just pour. I don't even know if there's a word for what it was. I guess the best way to describe it is that there was a wall of water so thick you couldn't see. Were it not for the lines on the Mass. Pike, I'd have had no idea where I was. Thankfully, through all that water, I could see the highway lines as they came upon me, and could also see the tail lights -- barely -- of the car in front of me.

But some people are just idiots. We're talking so much rain in such a short period of time that there was nowhere for the water to go. Even the Mass. Pike was a river, especially the left and right lanes. The center lane wasn't as bad, and that's where I stayed!!

But there were people who just went speeding through those puddles like it was 80 and sunny. And one of them poured so much water on my car that, for a few seconds, I felt as if I was going through a carwash. I couldn't see anything.

That was scary. And that was also the worst it got for the rest of the weekend.

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Four and a half hours to play nine innings, with only six runs scoring? That's what happened Thursday at Fenway when the Red Sox and Yankees wrapped up their three-game series.

There's no excuse for this.

I don't know when throwing a strike became such a project, but Major League umpires are going to have to relax the strike zone a little bit. It was the same for both sides Thursday.

I really have to congratulate the umpire on his pinpoint eyesight. Either that, or suggest he get another job, or stronger glasses. There's no in between. Either he was so "on" the plate that he could tell the difference between a ball hitting the outside corner and one a hair of an inch off, or he was just being a jerk (I'd use a different word, but Lord knows what armchair moralist may read this and suggest I'm sending a bad message to someone).

My guess is No. 2.

Then, he calls Adrian Gonzalez out on a pitch that was low and outside ... and a ball every other time he saw it.

And I'm beginning to see the wisdom of timing pitchers and batters between pitches. This stepping out, stepping off, rumba is getting absurd. Throw the ball. Get in there and hit.

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No real way to end this, except to say it's been a nice, although short, summer. Not as warm as last year's perhaps (I'm not one of these people who complains about the heat).

We somehow missed June entirely, and August was up-and-down, weather-wise. But July was one for the books. With any luck, we'll have a seasonal fall and a much milder winter than we did last year, when it snowed enough to make me think we were in the Arctic.

My most vivid memory of last winter was watching my son shovel off my roof ... and then seeing him limping around with back pain for a month afterward!!

No repeats, please.

The Impossible Dream

2011-07-11T12:38:00.001-07:00

There really is no other way to begin this but to say that Dick Williams is directly responsible for stoking one of my lifelong passions.

This isn't to say I didn't follow the Boston Red Sox before he became manager -- and propelled the team from ninth place in 1966 to an American League pennant a year later. I was ... but even in those childhood years (I was 14 when Rico Petrocelli caught that popup that ended the '67 regular season), I understood that being a fan of the Boston Red Sox meant being much too familiar with futility.

I understood that part of it. But I didn't understand the other part ... that from about 1964 on, the seeds that ultimately changed that ethic had already been planted.

Well, actually, we have to go back to 1961, when I was 8 years old, and Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were battling each other for the honor of breaking Babe Ruth's home run record (for the record, I was pulling for Maris because everybody else seemed to be pulling for The Mick).

Carl Yastrzemski was a rookie in 1961, and the only thing I could really tell about him is that he looked as if his head was somewhere between his shoulders and his armpits when he stood up at bat. He had what I thought was the word's worst stance. But dammit if he didn't manage to hit the ball just the same.

Despite the promise he showed (I was much too young to know, or care, about his other traits), the Red Sox meandered in those years through an endless haze of mediocrity -- and worse. They always had guys who could hit. Dick Stuart hit a ton of home runs. The only problem is that he probably made MORE errors. He was the ultimate guy who could keep both teams in the game.

They even had some good pitchers in those years. Bill Monbouquette was a lot better than anyone ever gave him credit for being; and Earl Wilson went into have a fabulous career -- with the Detroit Tigers. Wilson's an interesting character study. He looked like an athlete; pitched like an athlete and even HIT like an athlete.

But Earl Wilson was black, and we're talking about the team that didn't introduce its first African-American player to the Major League roster until 1959 ... and one can only assume that was done with the gun of public opinion aimed squarely at Tom Yawkey's head. It's also safe to assume that even after that watershed day in Red Sox history, African-Americans probably had to tread lightly around the clubhouse, lest they get on the wrong side of some of the bastions of modern thinking that ran the team in those days.

Seems he went into a bar during spring training of '66 and the bartender dropped the "n" word on him after refusing to serve him.

He sought solace from the Red Sox management, who told him to forget it. He didn't. Instead, he told his tale to the media. Then -- of course -- he was shipped out of town, to the Tigers for Don Demeter. After he was traded, Wilson was 13-6 for Detroit in 1966. The following season he was 22-11 on a team that battled for the pennant the Red Sox eventually won until the last day of the season.

He never approached those figures again, but neither was he terrible. Demeter had a decent half-season for the Sox in '66 (to be fair), but by the middle of '67 he, too, was gone ... shipped to the Cleveland Indians for Gary Bell (who was a vital part of that '67 team).

My only theory on this is that Dick O'Connell, who had been named general manager in 1965 (on the same day Dave Morehead pitched a no-hitter), hadn't established enough of a presence in the Fenway hierarchy to stand up to whatever demands the Red Sox made to trade Wilson. By '67, he knew what he wanted, and wasn't as timid about acting. As I said, that's my theory. I could be all wrong.

Looking back, it is infuriating to realize what went on behind the scenes with those Red Sox. It really alters this image people seem to want to foster that Yawkey was a benevolent owner who "suffered" for 21 years without a pennant (from 1946-67). If he suffered, and if you're to believe some of the stories about how rampant the racism was over there, it was his own fault.

The only thing one does know is that O'Connell wasn't cut out of the same cloth. O'Connell brought players like Reggie Smith, Joe Foy and George "Boomer" Scott into the fold, traded for guys like John Wyatt (a valuable closer on that '67 team) and -- at the trading deadline -- got Elston Howard over here (who didn't hit, but was involved in what had to be the play of the year when he blocked the plate so that Ken Berry couldn't get near it, and then caught Jose Tartabull's throw that ended the first game of a doubleheader with the Chicago White Sox).

Things bottomed out in 1965 when the Sox lost 100 games. The malaise continued through the first part of 1966, when they were on pace to hit the negative century mark for the second straight season (opening with a 3-11 mark). Then, things jelled. They had a couple of lengthy winning streaks, and by September, they actually looked like a ballclub. By then, Jim Lonborg was in the rotation, Tony C. Foy, Scott, Rico and Yaz were firmly in place, and I could see -- even at my age -- that things were looking up. The question was how up? And besides, winning games in August in September when you're basically playing out the string is a lot different than winning them with a pennant within your grasp.

And besides, even with their late-season up tick, the Red Sox still led the American League in losses (90). The Yankees finished last (wasn't THAT sweet!!!) only because they played fewer games, won fewer, and had a lower winning percentage.

But in our cynicism to dismiss that second half of '66 as an aberration, we forgot one thing. Manager Billy Herman was going to be fired. He was a throwback to the "good old days of the good old boys," and, thus, not Dick O'Connell's kind of guy (whenever anyone starts talking about '67, I always caution them to leave room for Dick O'Connell).

These kids were playing to impress whatever manager came after O'Connell (who was, as it turned out Dick Williams, who'd managed their Triple-A team in Toronto).

Dick Williams was a Brooklyn Dodger. And like a lot of the old Dodgers (Don Zimmer being another one), Williams learned baseball at the knee of some of the all-time greats, like Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Roy Campanella. Like Zimmer, Williams suffered a debilitating injury early in his career (a broken shoulder) and ended up being a utility player. Like Zimmer, Williams had no use for what we would describe today as "the modern athlete." He was old school. Even at the ripe old age of 38.

Those old Dodgers are a lot like those Orioles teams of the mid-60s and 70s. They only learned how to play baseball one way ... the right way. And they translated that knowledge ... and that passion ... wherever they went. Look at guys like Frank Robinson, Zimmer, Williams, Hodges, Don Baylor, and even (much as I can't stand him) Davy Johnson. You can't, even if their personalities may rub you the wrong way, argue that they -- as a group -- have a profound impact on the game.

I honestly don't think the Red Sox knew fully what they were getting when they hired Dick Williams. I think O'Connell knew that he was getting a young, aggressive guy who was sorely needed to turn this collection of young talent he'd assembled into a team. But nobody could have predicted how fast that would happen, or how profoundly the culture of ineptitude would be smashed to smithereens.

Williams was Marine drill-instructor tough. I can see him walking into spring training on Day 1 the way Gunnery Sgt. Hartman did in the opening scenes of "Full Metal Jacket."

(Scott, what are you doing to my beloved Sox!!!!).

Speaking of Scott, Williams said, famously, during that '67 season that talking to Scott was like talking to a cement wall. I've talked many times with Scott, both during and after his career, and I can easily see why the two of them might not have connected. But Scott, in 1967, was a .300 hitter with power, as Ken Harrelson used to say, he could "pick it" around the first base bag. He was a four-tool player (let's not get carried away; he was painfully slow around the bases).

One of the first things Williams did was strip Yastrzemski of his captaincy (a position Yaz still says, today, he never wanted). One gets the impression that spring training, in the Good Old Days of the Good Old Boys, was pretty much a paid vacation. Play a little ball in the morning, play a lot of golf (or do a lot of fishing) the rest of the time.

That wasn't spring training at Williams Island. By all accounts, the time was strictly structured, and the focus was on baseball. Players were urged to leave the sticks home.

Williams wasn't afraid to make examples out of players (such as Scott, who was benched when his weight ballooned ever-so-slightly at one point in the season). But all he asked, in the end, was unrelenting effort and attention. He could tolerate the odd physical error. Mental errors (such as throwing to the wrong base, or stupid base running) would definitely cost a player some in-your-face time, and maybe even a few bucks.

Coming out of spring training, he guaranteed that the Red Sox would be a hustling ballclub; and that they'd win more than they lost. This seemed brash coming from the manager of a team that lost 100 and then 90 games the previous two seasons. But I was only 13 when the '67 season began. I believed him.

I remember, early on, that faith being sorely tested. I used to hang around with a guy named Dickie Mariano, who would go absolutely crazy if the Red Sox lost. He'd stomp around the room, yell, throw things ... and I'm afraid some of that rubbed off on me. No. Check that. A lot of that rubbed off on me.

So one day, in April, they were playing the White Sox, and they blew a lead in the late innings. And I went ballistic. And I distinctly remember, as I was stomping around the house, saying things like, "same old Red Sox," and "why was I stupid enough to believe this guy when he said they were going to win." I also remember my mother getting very cross with me for all the stomping around I was doing.

But soon enough ...

And you know, the season just became one maze of moments, all of them captured for posterity by announcers Ken Coleman, Ned Martin and Mel Parnell on the "Impossible Dream" album that was released in time for Christmas '67.

Who could ever forget ... "Yastrzemski going back, way back, way back, he dives and makes a tre-MEND-ous catch."

Or ... "He's out. He's out at the plate ... Tartabull has thrown the runner out."

And, of course, the one for the ages, "Petrocelli's under it, he's got it, and the Red Sox win. Pandemonium on the field."

The only other time I'd ever heard that word used was to describe Beatlemania. THAT'S how big this was.

There are still large parts of that recording forever etched in my memory.

"At all-star break, for heaven's sake, just six games from the lead."

"And Glory Be, There's Tony C, with homer number twenty; we may not win the pennant, but we sure will scare them plenty."

“They sounded attack, and came battling back. They called them the Cardiac Kids.”

Look at 'em go, ten in a row, and now our kids are second."

But it wasn't all euphoric either.

"And then, one night, the kid in right, lay sprawling in the dirt. The fastball caught him squarely; is Tony badly hurt?"

Tony WAS badly hurt. And he was never not hurt, in one way or another, from that night until he died at the age of 45.

The saga of Tony Conigliaro was every bit as incomprehensible as those of Darryl Stingley, Len Bias and Reggie Lewis. In fact, I'd even say it was more so, when you consider that Tony was a local kid, living not just his dream but all our dreams, and that he was pretty much on top of the world when he was felled by that Jack Hamilton fastball on Aug. 18 of 1967.

Tony may have grown up in Revere, MA, and lived later in Swampscott, MA, but he was a kid from my hometown of Lynn. That's where he played both his high school and American Legion ball. There are at least three of his best high school friends that I still see on a semi-regular basis (and who will return my phone calls at the drop of a hat no matter what they're doing).

Tony had it all ... looks, charm, charisma ... and talent. It's been said (though never really proven) that if there was one potential flaw that could have ripped that '67 team apart, it was Yastrzemski’s lingering resentment over the amount of adulation Tony C. received in comparison to all the criticism he received.

It's true that Tony C. was the very definition of the swinging '60s athlete. But nobody -- and I mean nobody -- gets to be as good as he was in his brief Major League career without having a passion for the game, and the motivation to work hard. So I'm sure a lot of that talk about him "burning the candle at both ends" was myth created by people who couldn't even have dreamed of being what he was and were, as a result, jealous of him.

And his friends (and I've talked to enough of them to get a consensus) tell a much different story.

Oh, sure, Tony wasn't above having himself paged in the lobby of a hotel in Chicago so that everyone would know he was there. And it's true that Tony liked the ladies a little too much sometimes. But, those friends also say, Tony was notoriously clean living when it came to all aspects of chemical health. They swear by that.

The only thing Tony C. didn't have in abundance was luck. He was star-crossed. At least once every season (and sometimes twice), Tony C. would either run into a wall and break his arm (or wrist), pull a groin or a hamstring and miss time, or have other nameless, mysterious ailments befall him (or so the stories go). He could never seem to get a full season in.

By August of '67, it looked as if he might. He was in the middle of a slump on Aug. 18 when he stepped up to face Hamilton of the California Angels. Maybe he was so anxious to snap out of it that he got a little too close to the plate (he always crowded it anyway) and dug in just a little bit more.

Whatever, Hamilton threw high, tight, and hard; and Tony couldn't get out of the way. He got hit right below his left eye, detaching the retina and creating a permanent blind spot. That was it for him. He was never, ever the same, even after a fairly successful comeback in 1969 and 1970.

His horrible fortunes would continue. In 1982, he suffered a devastating heart attack while being driven to Logan Airport by his brother Billy ... after auditioning for the Red Sox color analyst job he probably would have landed. He lived in a vegetative state until 1990, when he died, at the age of 45.

Whenever someone shows footage of that 1967 clubhouse celebration scene, there’s always a short Tony C, Rico and some others doing four-part harmony while hanging out at one of the locker stalls. It was spontaneous, fun, and seeing it gives you goose bumps when it dawns on you how unfair life really is sometimes.

As someone who’s closely involved with the Harry Agganis Foundation (Agganis was another local athlete who played for the Red Sox, and who died tragically young – at age 26 – of a pulmonary embolism), this hits home once a year, in July, when the Agganis all-star classics are played in his memory.

Like all truly newsworthy people, Tony C. made life interesting. And Dick Williams -- taskmaster though he may have been -- had zero problems with Tony C. Why? Because Tony C. busted his ass on the field. That's all Williams ever wanted.

“The doctors say he’ll be OK, but he won’t be back this year; with Tony through, what will we do? Who’ll carry us from here?”

Carl Yastrzemski. Carl Yastrzemski. The man we call Yaz …

Jess Cain was an actor, born in Philadelphia, who matriculated up to Boston and became one of the city’s most beloved DJs. At the time his station, WHDH, was also the Red Sox flagship station, and when the season ended, ‘HDH (which has since been absorbed by WEEI sports radio) hit upon the idea of making its commemorative album based around some of the more memorable moments – from a broadcasting perspective.

As part of that album, Cain – who had done some theater in his day – took an old ragtime tune called “Shoutin’ Lisa Trombone” after the 1967 season ended, and composed the words to the "The Carl Yastrzemski Song" around it. It ended up being the indisputable “hit” of the record.

Yaz would go on, of course, to win the MVP, have a car dealership opened up in his name on the Lynnway in Lynn (Yaz Ford) and have his own bread (Big Yaz bread, which I confess never to have eaten despite being a diehard teenage fan).

And if he was having a phenomenal year prior to Aug. 18, Yastrzemski was just getting warmed up. Once Tony C. went down, he went into overdrive. You couldn't get him out! It's been said that while people have had far better numbers (.326, 44 homers, 121 RBI), nobody ever had a more significant season. Remember, too, that by the late '60s pitching was becoming so dominant that Major League Baseball lowered the mound after the '68 season.

As July segued into August, which segued into September, the Red Sox refused to die. Every time you said "this is it. Here comes the letdown," they'd rally, win a couple or three in a row, and pull back even. I don't ever recall, unless it was way early in the season, or maybe for five minutes here and there during the season, them even being in first place. They were always knocking on the door … forever looking up.

In the last week of the season, they had to play two games at home against the eighth-place Cleveland Indians. It was a perfect time to make their move, as the Indians were – as they often were – absolutely wretched. But Cleveland won both games (it just always seemed that no matter how bad the Indians were, they played like world-beaters whenever they played the Red Sox). And in one of them a pitcher who later became one of Boston’s most beloved baseball icons shut them out. His name was Luis Tiant.

Luis was great. I remember reading somewhere that all Luis did, that whole game, was taunt the Red Sox for choking. It was more likely that Tiant was just so good on that day that nobody could touch him. That happened often in Tiant's career!

By then, school had started and I was playing (or, should I say, trying to play) freshman football at St. John's Prep. Our coaches, sticks in the mud that they were, didn't care about the Red Sox being shut out by Luis Tiant. In fact, we tried to come up with a plan to ferret out information from the kids walking around with transistor radios to get updates, but the coaches smoked it out and made us run a lap for being inattentive.

Thank God, the pivotal Twins-Red Sox game was on a weekend. Coming into the '67 season, the Orioles, who'd won the World Series the year before, were the favorites to repeat. But Frank Robinson collided with Al Weiss' (White Sox) knee trying to steal a base, and was injured seriously enough to miss significant time. The Orioles were a great team, but they were nowhere near as good without Frank Robinson. The O's faded early, and it became a four-team race among the Red Sox, Tigers, White Sox and Twins.

Of the four, the Twins were probably the best on paper, with the Tigers next. Minnesota had two of the game's best pitchers at the time: Dean Chance and Jim Kaat (in today's parlance, Kaat was "filthy"; he had stuff on top of his stuff). The Twins also had Harmon Killebrew and Tony Oliva (who was still a facsimile of the player he was earlier in the decade), Zolio Versalles, Cesar Tovar (who got the only first-place vote Yaz did not get for MVP), Bob Allison and a rookie named Rod Carew.

The Twins were one of those teams that you couldn't help but like ... unless they were standing in your way. Even today, I like the Twins. But I didn't in 1967, only because they were standing in the way. But if the Sox couldn't win, I'd have been happy with them.

I did not want the White Sox. Their manager, Eddie Stankey, was obnoxious. But in retrospect, we should all give Eddie a heartfelt thank you. He's the one who insulted Yastrzemski by calling him "an all-star from the neck down."

The White Sox also couldn't hit, even if it was by accident. They won with pitching ... and they had plenty of that. But they were BORING. And rumor had it they cheated. They couldn’t hit, so they made sure no one else did either. Reportedly, they stored their baseballs in a refrigerator to deaden them … and grew the infield grass high to slow down ground balls.

And people worry about steroids!

I had no feelings for the Tigers, except when Earl Wilson pitched (although knowing now what I know about the likes of Al Kaline and Norm Cash, I’d have probably liked them a lot).

Coming down the stretch, the Tigers seemed to be in a good spot because they had three pitchers (Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich being the other two) who were winning consistently. But according to Sports Illustrated, McLain, who lived pretty fast back in those days, got in trouble with the Detroit mob over gambling debts. The story goes that McLain was somehow roughed up during the season, and that as a result, he injured his foot and couldn't pitch. Who knows what would have happened otherwise!

The first team to be eliminated was the White Sox, who got beaten by the Kansas City Athletics (as in last place Kansas City Athletics) on the Friday before the final weekend.

Thank you God. Anybody but them. And what makes this really ironic is that for five years, I played for the West Lynn American Little League … you guessed it … White Sox.

That left it a three-team race. The Sox had two at Fenway against the Twins on Saturday, Sept. 30 and Sunday, Oct. 1. And entering that series a game out of first, the Red Sox had to sweep.

The Tigers had four (back-to-back doubleheaders) with the Angels over the same two days. If they won three of four, and the Red Sox swept, there would be a tie between the two teams after 162 games.

This shows you how different things were back then. No way would a team in the middle of a pennant race be forced to play back-to-back doubleheaders to close out the season in today's MLB. We'd play until December before that ever happened.

The Saturday game looked as if it might be the end of the road. Jim Kaat was on his game, and the Twins led 1-0 into the fifth. The way Kaat was pitching, things looked pretty bleak.

Over the years, several members of that Red Sox team have said that although Chance was the one challenging Jim Lonborg for the Cy Young Award, they feared Kaat more. They figured they could get to Chance. They were far less confident of facing Kaat.

And for good reason. The man ended up with 283 big league wins, and won 16 games in '67. Why he's not in the Hall of Fame I'll never know.

But Kaat heard (and presumably felt) something pop in his elbow on his way to mowing down the Cardiac Kids and had to leave the game. An army of pitchers followed, beginning with Jim Perry. And none of them were any kind of a match for the Red Sox, who, freed from the burden of facing Kaat, pounded on them all for six runs in the final four innings. Two of them came off the bat of Scott; and three more came from Yaz, who hit homer No. 44 -- a three-run job.

It was during this game that Williams did something I've never seen before (or since). The Red Sox went into the ninth inning up 6-2. But with Gary Bell on in the ninth, Minnesota got a base runner and Harmon Killebrew -- who ended up tied with Yastrzemski for home runs with 44 -- stepped up to the plate. Williams was not interested in putting him on so that the Twins could have runners all over the bases and perhaps gain some momentum. Neither did he feel particularly duty-bound to protect Yaz's triple crown ... not with a pennant at stake.

So, he went out to the mount and told Bell to pitch to Killebrew. And not only did he tell him to pitch, he told him not to be afraid to throw him a nice, big, fat strike and take his chances. Williams figured that 6-4 with no one on base was a whole lot better than 6-2 with runners moving all over the place and the likes of Tony Oliva, Bob Allison and Rod Carew coming up next (even as a rookie, Carew hit .292 that season) facing a jittery pitcher with the whole season on the line.

Bell did what he was told. And Killebrew did just what you knew he was going to do. He put one into the left-field screen (no Monster Seats in '67). But just as he figured, that was all the damage Minnesota could do, and Bell hung on.

Sunday brought us a pitching matchup for the ages: Dean Chance vs. Jim Lonborg. Before we go on, let's talk a little about Lonborg. Lonborg came up in '65 and for two seasons, wasn't really much of a factor. One of the reasons was his nickname: Gentleman Jim. He took that moniker to extremes. Batters dug in on him, and Lonborg let it go. But when Williams came to the team, he brought with him Sal Maglie as his pitching coach. As in Sal "The Barber," so-named because he wasn't afraid to give Major League hitters a close shave if they dug in.

Maglie and Williams were teammates for a while on the '56 Dodgers, before Williams got shipped to Baltimore (in fact, Maglie was the opposing pitcher in Don Larsen's perfect game in the '56 series).

Maglie saw talent in Lonborg, but saw no desire to be mean. And mean was something Sal the Barber was all too familiar with. He looked like the Grim Reaper, and certainly put the fear of God in batters.

Maglie hounded Lonborg to be meaner out there, and Lonnie got the message. There was no more Gentleman Jim in 1967 ... at least not on the mound. Lonborg was involved in a signature moment during that season and -- as always seems to be the case -- it was against the Yankees.

Thad Tillotson of the Yanks drilled Joe Foy in the helmet with a fast ball ... one night after Foy had hit a home run to win a game between the two teams. Foy stayed in the game. Next time Tillotson came to bat, Lonborg plunked him on the arm (not that it's entirely on the subject, but this is but one of many reasons the DH doesn't work for me ... pitchers don't have to face retribution for doing stuff like that).

A brawl ensued (with Petrocelli and Joe Pepitone of the Yankees on the bottom of the pile flailing away at each other). They were old Brooklyn acquaintances. Petrocelli's brother, a New York cop, was duty at Yankee Stadium too. Life is just full of ironies!

(Another irony: The single act that perhaps spurred the Red Sox to come together in 2004 after meandering their way through the season (to that point) was the famous Varitek-ARod fracas.)

Now, Lonborg was pitching in what turned out to be the single most important game of his life. And like Saturday, he and the Red Sox fell behind early, 2-0. And like Saturday, with each scoreless inning, it looked as if the air was slowly escaping from the balloon.

But Lonborg began the Red Sox half of the sixth inning by laying down a surprise bunt and beating it out. From there, everything the Red Sox did was charmed. And the inning turned into a nightmare of errors (mental and physical) for the Twins. Jerry Adair and Dalton Jones followed with singles – neither of them hit particularly hard -- leaving the bases loaded for Yastrzemski, who was 7-for-8 in the two-game series and so locked in it was scary. There was no way he was not going to get a hit. He took a nice, even swing and lined a two-run single up the middle to tie the game. And things just unraveled for the Twins from there.

Ken Harrelson hit a grounder to short on which Versalles tried for a play at the plate ... and he was too late. Jones scored the go-ahead run. Two wild pitches by Al Worthington later, it was 4-2 as Yastrzemski scored. An error led to the fifth and final run.

The Twins looked as if they might stage a little two-out lightning against Lonborg in the eighth, but when Allison hit an RBI single scoring Killebrew, he tried to stretch it into a double and was thrown out by Yastrzemski, who -- as I've said about 100 times already -- was scary good in 1967.

That was it. Lonborg mowed them down in the ninth, with Rich Rollins hitting the popup to Rico Petrocelli that became one of Ned Martin's most iconic broadcasting moments.

Still, we had to sweat out the Tigers-Angels. The two teams split the Saturday doubleheader, and Detroit won the opener of Sunday's games. If Detroit won the second one, the season would have ended in a tie between the Sox and Tigers, forcing a one-game playoff (which is how the American League settled things, as opposed to two-of-three in the National League).

But the Angels -- who had really been a thorn in the Red Sox' side all season (don't forget who they were playing when Tony C. was beaned) -- were managed by another one of those old-school baseball lifers back in 1967, Bill Rigney. He wasn’t going to give anyone anything. And California won the nightcap, 8-5.

Channel 4 of Boston, which was the Red Sox broadcast station in those days, kept a camrea in the lockerroom so that we could see the players react to the final out ... a double play grounder by Dick McAuliffe. The station also broke in with a news bulletin, with a red script no less, that the Red Sox had won the pennant. I really think that the last time I'd seen an actual news BULLETIN like that was when JFK was killed.

What a time. What a season. The Sox may have lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, but by then it really didn't matter. What they -- and specifically Williams -- did that year was enough. And although the Red Sox have had their down seasons, and have certainly disappointed us on many, many occasions, the fact of the matter is that they were, and still are, relevant enough in the scheme of things to put us in the position of BEING disappointed.

Sure, some of those losses have been excruciating. But what would you rather have: An opportunity to have the guts taken right out of you or mind-numbing mediocrity. Myself, I'll take the lows for what the highs bring.

And this is Dick Williams' legacy to baseball -- at least in Boston, and at least to me. He went onto win two World Series with the Oakland A's at a time when the A's had some of the greatest talent ever assembled in one stadium, but don't dismiss what he brought to the table even with all those stars. Someone has to lead the orchestra, and someone has to manage all the egos that exceptional talent spawns. Look at what he had to deal with over there. There's no way you can minimize his contribution to that era.

Williams also took the San Diego Padres to the 1984 World Series, rallying them from an 0-2 deficit to the Chicago Cubs. Everywhere he managed, his teams won more than they lost. Current Red Sox manager Terry Francona talked Thursday about the time he played for Williams in Montreal ... and of how petrified he was of him.

Williams probably couldn't manage today ... not with his style. The ship of the autocratic manager has sailed. Too many players make too much money, and they all have agents who, when they're not negotiating contracts, are finding all sorts of nefarious ways to interfere.

And in the end, he couldn't see eye to eye with Yawkey, though with what we know now about TA (A for Austin), that's not necessarily a bad thing now, is it? He was fired with about a week to go in the 1969 season, an act that -- to me -- signified the return of the Country Club that the Red Sox were notorious for being prior to Williams' tenure.

They went through some flat years with Eddie Kasko – an era where they were just good enough to relevant, but not anywhere near good enough to break through the Orioles stranglehold on the American League East.

Also during the Kasko era, the specter of racism in Boston reared its head once again when Tommy Harper ran into trouble in Winter Haven … and was roundly ignored by the powers-that-be. And it wasn’t just Harper either. Reggie Smith took to wearing a batting helmet when he went out to play center field because he was afraid of being pelted by projectiles that actually hurt him.

This was also around the same time that former Boston Celtics center Bill Russell sounded off about his experiences with racism in Boston. Within a few years of all this, Boston was embroiled in a serious, real-life racial meltdown when federal judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the integration of Boston’s schools via forced busing.

Kasko also presided over another sad denouement: the trade that sent Conigliaro to the Angels (of all teams!). This happened after the 1970 season, when Conigliaro hit over 30 homers and it looked as if it has all come back.

His brother, Billy, blamed Yastrzemski and Smith for the trade, saying the two of them were jealous of Tony and undermined him every chance they got – charges both vociferously denied. For the most part, the media sided with Yaz and Reggie (who were best friends in those years).

Yet two years later, while signing autographs and talking with reporters, Carlton Fisk, then a rookie, happened to mention casually that he didn’t think either Yaz or Reggie showed the requisite leadership that veterans are expected to show.

But you had to know Yastrzemski. A lot of what you see today (the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy calls him the Garbo of Red Sox alumni) is basically what he’d always been. He had his friends. He took his job seriously. But he just wasn’t a gregarious person … not in 1961, 1967, or anytime before or after.

The only time we ever saw Yastrzemski get emotional was the day he retired at the end of the 1983 season and took an unplanned lap around Fenway Park slapping palms.

Yastrzemski had one more hurrah, and that was in 1975, with Kasko long gone and Darrell Johnson running the ship. That was the year Fred Lynn and Jim Rice tore the American League apart and the Red Sox basically ran away with the A.L. East and then swept the three-time champion Oakland A’s to win the pennant.

Toward the end of the season, Rice – who ended up being one of the most feared hitters of his time – was hit by a Vernon Ruhle fastball and broke his wrist. That meant Yastrzemski, who had played first base just about all season, had to go to left for the playoffs and World Series. And boy, did he ever put on a show … both with the bat and with the glove. Just like in ’67, he threw out a runner trying to stretch a single into a double, in the pennant-clinching game. In ’67 it was Bob Alison; in ’75 it was Reggie Jackson.

The Red Sox didn’t win that World Series either. But they did take part, along with the Cincinnati Reds, in what has been judged by the MLB Network as the greatest game of the modern era: Game 6 of that series when Bernie Carbo’s three-run homer tied the score in the eighth, and Carlton Fisk’s solo job off the left-field foul pole won it.

All childhoods have defining moments. For me, that 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox team was one of my biggest. I'd been a baseball fan prior to that. But '67 turned me into a fanatic ... which is something I continue to be today. And despite all the heroics, performed by all the heroes described above, the author of this amazing turnaround … the resurrection that turned Boston into a baseball town again … was Dick Williams.

If there was greatness in Yastrzemski, Williams coaxed it out of him. George Scott became a Gold Glove first baseman under Dick Williams. Rico Petrocelli’s first two years with the Red Sox showed him to be tough … but brittle, and woefully inconsistent. Rico flourished under Williams and became an all-star shortstop.

Go down the line. Reggie Smith, if he’d just been able to stop being offended by anything anyone said to him, was an all-star center fielder. He learned from Williams. Jim Lonborg was an average pitcher until Williams/Maglie got hold of him. Then, he became a Cy Young Award Winner, and probably would have won a few more of them had he not liked to ski.

The other thing Williams never really got a lot of credit for is this: That Red Sox team, if you compare it to the one they put on the field these days, suffered by comparison. But what that team had was a lot of castoffs and reserves (Adair being perhaps the most notable) who somehow meshed to become greater than the sum of their parts. You can attribute that to very good managing.

One of the byproducts of the free-agent era, sadly, is the paucity of Jerry Adair type of players. They’re the ones being driven out of the game by ridiculously high salaries, because GMs now fill their teams with cheap talent to compensate for having to pay all the stars. There’s just not enough room for middle-of-the-roaders unless you have the New York Yankees’ payroll.

Dick Williams made all of this work. It’s been said over the last couple of days that he’s still, after all these years, the best manager the Red Sox have had in our lifetime. Maybe. You can’t just dismiss someone who won two world championships without at least thinking about it, so I’d be cautious before I just eliminated Terry Francona’s name from the conversation.

But that said, I’d put Williams up against anyone else … and maybe even Tito too. Who knows? However, whatever else you want to say about the late Dick Williams, who died Thursday at the age of 82, his legacy will be that he saved baseball in Boston, and catapulted the Red Sox back into the conversation at a time when Fenway Park could have passed for Sunday mass.

And, true to his word, and with a rare exception or two, the Red Sox have, since 1967, won more they’ve lost.

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

2011-06-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

So, it turns out that Sarah Palin wasn't entirely wrong when she -- allegedly -- butchered her history regarding the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere."

Pity. You don't know how much I wish she was. I'd consider her one of the lighter lightweights on today's American political scene, except that she continues to be much too divisive not to take seriously at some level.

But just as nobody's right all the time, nobody's wrong all the time either. Not even Sarah Palin, as it turns out.

In 25 (or so) words or less, Palin turned Paul Revere's ride from a warning to colonists that the British Army was on the move to something in the order of an anti-gun control mission.

Palin may have the facts somewhat correct, but she's got the context horribly wrong. It was much different time -- obviously. If you're trying to launch an insurrection against the established authority, it's realistic to expect that you need weapons at some point. You need to defend yourself against reprisal.

That makes sense. It also makes sense that these weapons are not going to be in plain view, where they can be seized in a matter of minutes. It also makes sense that the established authority -- threatened as it obviously is -- is going to do whatever it can to seize those arms to rid itself of the problem.

Today, we ARE the established authority. And we'd better hope that another insurrection doesn't come up and bite us someday, because I suspect the results won't be very pretty. And I can almost guarantee that the people who cry the loudest against some form of reasonable gun control will not garner much sympathy from whatever forces may ultimately bring the government down. And to me, that's the absolute irony of the whole issue.

But back to Sarah. I think half the problem here is that she stumbled along, sounding as if she was making the thing up as she went along. That's not uncommon in politics, where candidates (or would-be candidates in her case) often have to think on their feet and sound intelligent when hit between the eyes with questions they don't expect. Slip up, just once, and you own it for life.

During the campaign, Barack Obama said he'd visited all "58 states." Now, everyone (and even, I'm sure, Obama) knows there are only 50. But there are territories where citizens vote. And if you've been asked a question at the end of a day in which you might have jetted into four or five states, I can see where you might, just out of sheer fatigue, say the wrong thing. It was harmless. And our president does, I'm afraid, have a tendency to give out flip answers sometimes ... oblivious to how they might sound to (and how they might be construed by) his opponents.

Palin's rambling version of Paul Revere's ride does, however, contain quite a few elements of truth. The first is the obvious one. The Redcoats were going to Lexington and Concord to seize weapons. They weren't interested in having a fight on their hands. Who really is? I mean, other than the U.S., which has -- in its recent history -- gone out of its way to initiate military action.

It's been said that the British also wanted to arrest John Hancock and Samuel Adams, but that one's still in play. It's also been said that arresting Hancock and Adams was the last thing Gen. Gage wanted to do, lest the move inflame already-intense feelings by the colonists (who were, after all, still British subjects) toward the authorities.

But it is absolutely correct that the Redcoats were massing, and were about to cross the Charles, and ride into Concord and Lexington to seize weapons. Paul Revere and William Dawes got ahead of them. In fact, the colonists had set up an intricate warning system a few years earlier for this very purpose: to make sure the militants were caught by surprise by the British regulars.

Paul Revere was also confronted by the British at a checkpoint, and he did tell them that he and his fellow couriers had warned the countryside that they were on march ... and there would be a healthy contingent of Minuteman soldiers to greet them when they got to their destinations. But like everything else in life, context is key. He certainly didn't set out to do that. That would have almost made him a traitor.

By the time the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" was over, there were many, many colonists "sounding the alarm to every Middlesex Village and Farm," which -- basically -- consisted of what is now Cambridge, Somerville, Medford and Arlington. And we all know what happened after that.

I guess what I object to is Palin's hints that Paul Revere's ride was some sort of lesson about the sanctity of weapons. In the context of the times, maybe it was. But that was a much different era, and the purpose for having weapons was much different too.

If anyone's ever seen "Assume the Position" with Robert Wohl, he said one thing about the American Revolution that -- sarcastic or not -- kind of rings true. He said the movement was led by "rich, white men who didn't want to pay taxes." There are still plenty of them around.

One of the frustrating things about U.S. history is that what we learn in grammar school (and even high school) is a purified version of what really happened. And it does make you wonder how our times are going to be portrayed 300 years down the road.

The reality is that revolutions don't just happened. They evolve over a period of years ... sometimes decades. It took an incredibly long time for the seeds for the American Revolution to sprout. The issues that exploded in 1775 were born 12 years earlier, at the conclusion of the French-Indian war, when the British upped the tax ante (as well pass enacting other measures), citing the high costs of keeping the American colonies in the empire.

There were several boiling points ... the two most notable being the Boston Massacre (1770) and the Boston Tea Part (1773). There were many other smaller fires that erupted before shots were fired in Lexington and Concord (and that's Concord Massachusetts, lest any congresswomen from Minnesota gets confused).

As a footnote to all of this, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861, just as South Carolina was about to secede. Longfellow was an avowed abolitionist, and the poem was undertaken as a means to rally Northerners to the cause of saving the union. He cited Paul Revere (some historians note, cynically, that it's easier to rhyme words with "Revere" than it is some of the others who also participated in the ride) as a courageous man ... and said that history favored such action.

It is not entirely accurate, both in small details in in the bigger picture. For example, Revere did not receive the lantern signals from the Old North Church. It was he who devised them.

He did not row himself across the Charles ... he was rowed.

It wasn't just Paul Revere who rode through the countryside. It was a series of men, some of whom have not survived history, and it was part of an elaborate warning system devised to alert colonists in a hurry that the British regulars were on the march.

No matter. As Wohl said in "Assume the Position," "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

That in itself is a line from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." And it means if a legend has taken hold, it's useless to fight it with facts. The legend is what endures.

Some morning-after thoughts

2011-02-07T12:38:00.001-08:00

So what happens when two of the proudest, most traditional National Football League franchises meet in the Super Bowl?

The team with the most long-standing tradition ends up winning. And I'm kind of happy about that.

When I was a kid, the Patriots were an American Football League franchise -- and a bad one at that. So we had to root for other teams if we wanted to experience the exhilaration of winning ... at least in football.

Since all we ever saw up here were New York Giants games on TV, I adopted Y.A. Tittle as my go-to quarterback (soon to be supplanted by Johnny Unitas when I got a little older).

But when it came to teams, and coaches, and legacies, and all the things that make sports so meaningful in the lives of their fans, I was a Green Ban Packers fan. Some of this might have to do with the fact that one of my favorite high school teachers was a big Vince Lombardi guy (he had us convinced that he was personal friends with Vince). That was my freshman year of high school, when The Packers won the Ice Bowl over the Dallas Cowboys and Jerry Kramer threw the celebrated "instant replay" block on Jethro Pugh that allowed Bart Starr to sneak in with the game-winning touchdown (imagine, having a name like Jethro Pugh ... I half expect to hear him singing Aqualung!).

The Steelers were official NFL doormats until 1969, when they hired Chuck Noll, who was the defensive coordinator for the Colts team that the New York Jets upset in 1969 (little known fact; he also interviewed for the Patriots head coaching job that ended up going to Clive Rush; how history might have been different, eh?).

With Noll, the Steelers slowly transformed themselves into an NFL power, with Mean Joe Greene, Franco Harris, Rocky Bleier, Terry Bradshaw (didn't like him then; like him even less now) and Lynn Swann, et al. Ever since, the Steelers have been one of the model franchises in the NFL, despicable as they can be sometimes, and have more Super Bowl victories (6) than any other NFL team.

But the Steelers are Johnny-come-latelies compared to Green Bay, so in this case, historic tradition won out over recent tradition.

And I'm glad for a number of reasons. First, it's tough for me to root for anything good to happen to Ben Roethlisberger. If ever there's a man who needs to have Humble Pie thrown in his face -- Three Stooges style -- it's Big Ben, who -- twice within a calendar year -- was accused of rape and finally suspended for four games for conduct detrimental to the image of the NFL (whatever that is!).

And the idea of seeing him "redeemed" by winning a Super Bowl, as is so often the case in pro sports, was nauseating to ponder.

Second, it's tough not to like this year's Packers. They are living proof of the age-old cliche that injuries are not to be used as excuses, but circumstances to overcome. The Packers had 15 players -- many of them projected starters -- on injured reserve. They lost three of their key players (Charles Woodson, Donald Driver and Sam Shields) during the game, yet absorbed the hit and hung on after going up 21-3. That is something you can truly admire.

You had a sense that the Packers learned an awful lot about themselves in that oh-so-close loss to the Patriots in December, when Rodgers was out with a concussion and their backup quarterback almost pulled off the upset of the year.

Third, how can you root against Aaron Rodgers? Brett Favre's monstrous and monumental ego kept Rodgers on the bench perhaps a year or two longer than he should have been, yet you never heard him complain; never heard of him wanting out. He waited his turn, said all the right things, and performed well when he finally got his chance.

All season long, Rodgers has been mentioned in the same sentence with all the other NFL elite quarterbacks, and all season long my attitude has been "win something before you allow yourself to be Tony Romo'd." Sunday, was clearly his time. You don't get many opportunities to experience your time, and the great ones recognize this and rise to the occasion. Tom Brady's "time" came early in his career and he was smart enough to realize it and respond. Romo's time may have passed, and he's never capitalized. Rarely does your talent transcend your accomplishments. Peyton Manning and Dan Marino were great quarterbacks despite never having won a Super Bowl. But that is rare. Most other quarterbacks need at least one trophy.

It couldn't have been laid out any clearer for Rodgers. His defense was depleted, and his No. 1 go-to receiver was out. The receivers who could play were dropping passes as if the ball was a collection of hot coals. If the Packers were going to win Sunday, Rodgers was going to have to get them there.

He didn't have his best game ever. The Steelers do play defense, and they made it a pretty tough slog for the Packers offensively. They were hoist upon their own petard by coughing up the ball three times (two picks by Worthlesberger ... YES!) and Green Bay scored on all three of them.

That's OK. Like I said, when opportunity knocks, you answer the door and embrace it. When Green Bay had to put together a drive to eat up some clock and keep the Steelers at bay, Rodgers engineered one. True, it only resulted in a field goal.

The Packers, for reasons I really don't understand, went exclusively with the pass, which -- you'd think -- would have made Rodgers a sitting duck. Instead, he never got sacked. And if you factor in the passes that were right in his receivers' hands that were dropped, Rodgers was incredibly accurate.

As Al Davis was so fond of saying, "just win baby." That's all. Win. This isn't theatre (well it is in some cases, but not when it comes to the final score). You don't get extra points for drama. If your team has more points than the other team when the gun goes off, whatever multitude of sins potentially waylaid you along the way are quickly forgotten. Especially in a championship game.

So, you have to give Rodgers his props for rising to the occasion. Because we all know that had the Packers lost, Rodgers would have been in for a boatload of blame.

Finally, and strictly from my perspective, Woodson -- who is a very good player -- finally gets a ring. Woodson, you may recall, was the defensive back who stripped Brady of the ball in that 2002 Snow Bowl in Foxborough ... the play that introduced to all of us who'd never heard it "The Tuck Rule."

Oakland Raiders fans treat the implementation of "The Tuck Rule" as if it's the football equivalent of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. But while I think it was a terrible call (or, at least, a terrible rule), it isn't as if incompetence has never been an issue in pro sports. This might have been a bit more egregiously incompetent, but there isn't a team out there that hasn't felt as if the officiating crew represented the 12th man on its opponent's side.

But while Raiders fans boo-hoo about how the team got jobbed (which, translated, means they were deprived of experiencing that rush of winning a championship ... which I totally understand as Ed Ambrister is still standing in front of Carlton Fisk today ... and Jorge Orta still hasn't touched first base), what about Woodson?

If the Raiders got jobbed, how do you define what happened to Woodson? He was the hero. He saved the day for the Raiders ... clinched what would have been a heroic victory, on the road, in a freakin blizzard ... the stuff of legends.

Instead, the play is overturned by an NFL rule that seems to me to forever blur the definition of "fumble." Hey, I like the Pats as much as anyone else who grew up in Boston, but if you deny the fact that this single play could easily mean the difference between "dynasty" and "just another one-and-done playoff team," you're delusional. Well, there is the matter of Belichickian skulduggery too ... but we're not talking about that now.

Woodson has never forgotten ... nor would I if it had happened to me ... nor did Ray Hamilton (he of the phantom "roughing the passer" call in 1976) ever forget what happened to him (just thought I'd throw that in to remind Raiders fans that they've benefited from some outrageous calls too).

Woodson was having a whale of a game Sunday until he got hurt. And it would have been terrible had Roethlisberger been able to pick apart a depleted Packer secondary affected by his and Shields' absence, and ended up winning the game. First you lose a chance at a title because of the zebras; and then you break your collarbone and watch a truly detestable quarterback engineer the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history.

Only this time the Packers hung on, and Woodson finally gets to experience what it feels like to win this thing.

So, this was the best possible outcome. Big Ben will have to wait a year for true redemption, NFL-style (maybe even longer if there's a lockout), and a group of guys who sucked it up when things got tough and found a way to win despite all their setbacks get to have a parade. For once, the good guys won.

----------

What's left are some random observations ...

I don't generally pay attention to the commercials, but the people I was with Sunday were riveted to them. There wasn't one of them that stacked up to the best from other years, but the ones that stood out were the little kid dressed as Darth Vader in the VW commercial; watching Rosanne Barr get steamrolled; watching the idiot tormenting the little pug dog get blown away; and the guy who sends an e-card to his honey for Valentine's Day and tells her, "I really think your rack is unreal." That one caused a splort ... On the other hand, the guy who licks everyone's fingers after they've eaten Doritos was creepy ... The less said about Christina Aguilera's butchery of the National Anthem the better, except that it really bothers me when people try to put their "personal stamp" on it. It's not about you, Christina and other like you. Sing the damn song straight up, and maybe you'll remember the words ... The Black Eyed Peas were awful. Whether that was just the sound, or I'm becoming my mother and father is subject to debate. But the show was terrible ... a complete waste of time ... There were some regurgitation moments, such as when the camera caught Cameron Diaz feeding popcorn to Alex Rodriguez ... a true "blech!" moment ... I got a lot of email from people celebrating the fact that President Obama's absence from the Super Bowl (he said he was going to go if the Bears had won) was a good thing for our national budget. Yet there were George W. and Laura Bush sitting in Jerry Jones' box, with Condi Rice. You don't suppose there was a detail assigned to them, do you? ... When I watch football, I'm prone to thinking out loud and getting emotional, much to the chagrin of those faced with the prospect of being in the same room with me. But I swear, Troy Aikman miked my house. Every time I made a pronouncement about how the game was going, Aikman followed a minute later by saying the same thing! ... Like just about everyone else who commented on it, I thought Michael Douglas equating the Super Bowl with some of American history's most iconic events was juuuuuust a bit over the top ... And, finally, what's with Sam Elliott's white hair ... and black eyebrows?? I couldn't watch!

Random Musings ...

2011-01-19T11:17:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I've attempted to write anything ... December 5, to be precise. That was the night I wrote about John Lennon as I waited for the Patriots to destroy the Jets.

Too bad the Pats couldn't have saved some of those points, eh?

Anyway, to get back into the practice of doing this, here are number of musings that I've gathered up since then ...

---

On the matter of Gabby Giffords. It was a horrible, horrible tragedy that I'm not sure is ever really preventable. This country is far too big, and far too populated, to expect that people aren't going to fall through the cracks now and then.

That said, I don't think you can escape the reality that -- even if the gunman was seriously mentally disturbed -- there is definitely an undercurrent of ugliness in how we relate to one another in the 21st century ... whether we're talking politics or any other type of discourse.

And, of course, with the internet and the blogosphere, people get to hide behind screen names and fake IDs on line and say some of the most outrageous, hateful, and bigoted things you can imagine.

It's easy to say "oh, well, it's only a blog ... it doesn't mean anything." But it's just as easy -- and just as much of a cop-out, to blithely pass this off as the act of a deranged man ... WITHOUT at least considering the context of the times.

I think it's fair to say that mentally disturbed people might possibly have a different -- less effective -- filter than the rest of us. I think it's fair to say that if the rest of us -- the ones who aren't mentally disturbed -- can shrug and see this stuff for what it is, an emotionally sick person might react differently. He might feed off such negativity and feel compelled to act on it.

I don't know this for a fact. But I sense that it's certainly possible ... and even probable.

Now, hate has no particular political ideology; no "official" religion; and no exclusivity. History is filled with instances where irrational hate has spurred monumental tragedies far more horrific than what happened in Arizona earlier this month. We saw it in World War II, we saw it in Oklahoma City, and we saw it on Sept. 11, 2001.

In the immediate aftermath, considering it was a political figure who was gunned down (along with six others who were killed), it seemed logical to conclude that the acrimony of public discourse might have had an influence on Jared Lee Loughner (and why is it, as an aside, that all assassins are referred to by their full names: Mark David Chapman; John Warnock Hinkley; this guy). And since Giffords is a Democrat, it might have further been a natural reaction that the continuous vitriol liberals and conservatives too routinely fling at one another might have also been a contributing factor.

Conservatives don't like hearing this, but too bad. Whether it was, or wasn't, a factor, the reality exists. My take on this is that it's much easier to arouse people to anger than it is to appeal to their better nature. We may be more highly developed, but we're still animals, with animal instincts -- which is to say we're hard-wired to worry about ourselves, and our survival, first before we become overly concerned with others.

Compassion and regard for others are qualities that need to be taught. Self-survival is instinctive.

So, it's much easier to rally people to your cause if you can easily convince them that the "other guy" is picking their pockets, or destroying all that they hold near and dear, or giving "them" all the breaks instead of "us."

Thus, George W. Bush was a "Nazi" to liberals; and Barack Obama is a "Socialist" to conservatives.

Both are buzzwords, political code, if you will. Bush, or course, was not a Nazi and Obama is not a Socialist. Half the people who throw those words around probably don't know the half of what they mean because -- sadly -- history is not a subject that is well taught, or even valued, in the United States of America.

It's much easier to throw those words around, though, because they result in visceral reactions in people not disposed to like particular people or their politics. I was not, and never will be, a George W. Bush supporter, but I can certainly acknowledge that there were elements about him that were likable. I also think that toward the end of his presidency, he had a better sense of how ill-used he'd been by some of his inner circle. I just think it's too bad it took him so long to realize this. He was not prone to introspection or curiosity, or -- as he famously said -- nuance. And I feel he allowed himself to be led too easily by people with agendas that didn't necessarily put the best interests of the country first.

I do support Obama, but -- again -- I can acknowledge that he could stand some improvement. I think he made the same mistake Bill Clinton did ... picking an issue right out of the chute (health care) that was hopelessly muddled in all kinds of arcane debate. He set himself up for what followed ... and what is yet to come.

I'd rather have seen him pick some winnable issues in Year One -- and take a few victory laps for them. He needed to establish some political cachet before picking an ugly fight ... and it WAS ugly. There's no getting around that.

We're off the track here, but this is only to show that ugliness has no preference. I think the entire tenor of public discourse is ugly, and I also think that mentally disturbed people have a different set of antennae than the more stable among us. Who knows what signals they're receiving ... and how they're processing those signals.

You put all of this together ... the free-wheeling blogs and bulletin boards where people who know they'll never be held accountable spew outrageous invective ... the stridency of the public discourse ... one obviously disturbed individual ... and you have the makings of an immense tragedy.

But what's curious about all this, to me, was the reaction for both liberals and conservatives. Whatever we may think privately, to come out in public (and by public I also mean blogs, bulletin boards and Facebook, as well as the mainstream media) and pin the blame solely on Sarah Palin's crosshairs advertisement was irresponsible. Even if I might not necessarily discount such stridency and hyperbole as contributing factors, to come right out and accuse her (or the Tea Party in general) -- especially in light of such a horrible tragedy -- struck me as outrageously opportunistic.

And I say this with the full admission that I do not buy -- even a little -- anything the Tea Party movement (or Palin, for that matter), says. It's just that Palin has become, in a very short time, the Ted Kennedy of her party ... which is to say she's made herself into a cheap and easy target that liberals can freely lambaste as sort of a symbol for all that they oppose ... the same way Teddy was a magnet for conservative missives.

Yet at the same time, I feel Palin -- and people like her -- certainly aren't blameless. The ad was there ... and whether she was or was not the first person to use the crosshairs theme, she certainly refined it and seemed pretty darn proud of it too ... until she took it down after the shootings. So obviously she felt some initial responsibility to tone her OWN rhetoric down (which is why I find it hilarious that she so vehemently denied culpability when she had a chance to think about it some more). In fact, if the basic liberal reaction was to blame Sarah, the basic conservative reaction was to say "not MY fault," and complain about attempts to stifle their First Amendment right to free speech.

I'm not sure which was more of an overreaction at this point.

Everything in life has context. Students didn't demonstrate at Kent State -- and end up with four of them being killed by National Guard fire -- in a vacuum. They were spurred on to do that by a systematic drumbeat of inflammatory rhetoric and violence (a lot of it by the radical LEFT) that funneled itself into this singular tragedy.

Likewise, people, mentally disturbed or otherwise, don't target politicians just because. There's a reason ... a context. And I think it's because we've reduced politicians and leaders in this country to evil caricatures, with each radical element demonizing the other to the point where shooting them might almost seem noble to a sick person. And when I say "radical element," I mean anyone who goes predictably nuclear whenever someone from the opposite end of the political spectrum says, or does, something.

I won't even get into the whole "blood libel" thing. First, I doubt Palin even knew the historical context of the term (if she did, and still used it ... God help us all if she's ever elected to anything ever again). And second, it's just typical hyperbole ... and again, hyperbole that adds nothing to the gravitas of the debate -- which is that we all could perhaps take a step back from the rhetoric and at least THINK about the damage it's doing to this country.

---

Onto other things ... New England is in one of those crazy winter weather patterns where it seems to snow every other day ... and then it gets so cold everything turns to cement. Cities and towns all over region are having a devil of a time keeping up.

But I fear we, the people, have become far too spoiled when it comes to how fast, and how effectively, the plows are cleaning up. Granted, I've seen better in my life, but there are factors to consider when it comes to snow removal.

The first one, obviously, is the amount of snow. Our first real serious snowstorm was a blizzard the day after Christmas, which lasted well into the next day. It was a 24-hour storm, yet by Tuesday -- the first full day after the storm stopped -- the whining about how awful the plowing was reached fever pitch.

Seriously, people. A foot and a half of snow fell! Life ain't a sitcom, and problems don't get solved in a half hour.

The next big storm was even worse. We got almost two feet. And this time, rather than the fine, powdery stuff that's easy to move, we got the heavy sludge that weighs a ton.

This one started around midnight and lasted through the afternoon. Not a 24-hour event, but a much more intense storm with a lot of wind. Again, the streets weren't down to pavement by the next day because ... well ... that would have been impossible. Still, you'd think nobody touched a plow the way people moaned and groaned.

Yesterday, we got snow that changed to rain ... and enough snow that the ground looked like that river of slime that flowed in "Ghostbusters." It was unplowable. How do you plow water?

But again, waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh. Why aren't my streets plowed?

Grow up, people.

---

Onto sports: It is indeed refreshing to see how thoroughly Shaquille O'Neal is enjoying his Boston Celtics experience. In fact, it's refreshing to see how much Shaq enjoys being Shaq. You can't help but like the guy. He's infectious ... and a perfect counterbalance to the dour, sour persona demonstrated in Foxborough.

I'd never go as far as saying that refusing to engage in trash talk translates into defeats. But I will say that Bill Belichick's reaction to Wes Welker's brilliant injection of the words "foot, feet or toes" into every sentence of his brief press conference last Thursday (he benched Welker for the game's first series) was idiotic.

To those who don't know the context, New York Jets coach Rex Ryan -- apparently -- has a bit of a foot fetish ... something that came out in a YouTube clip. Now, that is totally, totally harmless. There are far worse sexual fetishes one can have.

But Ryan, as we know, is a bit of a blabbermouth and blusterer in the finest sense of George Steinbrenner. And people who are like that are trying to get under the other guy's skin.

And while it's futile to match a blusterer word for word (by their nature, guys like Ryan are always going to win that game) it was rather brilliant of Welker -- after a week's worth of scurrilous insults by the Jets directed toward the Patriots and Tom Brady -- to offer a gentle, subtle dig at ol' Rex.

Consider: a guy who has fathered nine children by eight women, and who had to have his wages garnished by the Jets to pay back child support (Antonio Cromartie) is running around calling out Brady in the crudest terms possible. His coach (Ryan) thought that was just fine. Cromartie played the entire game Sunday and -- as much as anyone on the Jets did -- absolutely KILLED the Patriots. He was clearly the game's MVP.

Yet Welker very craftily responds -- and not even in KIND -- and finds himself benched for the first series of the most important game of the year? Ridiculous.

Maybe Welker should remind Belichick of HIS first amendment right to feet speech!

Bringing up Shaq in this context is my way of saying that maybe if the Patriots lightened up a little, and weren't so haughty about how much better "their way" is, and learned to allow their players even the simplest of latitudes in what they say and how they act, they wouldn't tighten up like a drum in big games against teams that do a lot of yakking (you'll recall Plaxico Burress did his share before that 2008 Super Bowl ... and caught the game-winning pass!).

Larry Bird was the worst trash talker ever ... and he has three rings. It doesn't necessarily follow that piously turning the other cheek accomplishes anything in the long run.

Besides, you can't fault Rex for understanding that pro sports, in this era, is as much about theater as it is about athletics. The objective is to keep people interested enough in what you're doing to attend, or watch, the games. Lack of interest will kill the golden goose.

And nobody can say there was a lack of interest in this game.

You're Fired

2010-06-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

I never watched Donald Trump's "The Apprentice." I never appreciated anything that made light of one of life ultimate indignities ... getting terminated from your job.

To many of us, our jobs define us. They give us a good sense of who we are, what we've accomplished, and -- perhaps most importantly -- how well we can provide for ourselves and our families.

To lose that ... even if the reasons are valid and unavoidable ... is no laughing matter. So when I see a rodeo clown like Donald Trump (even if he is a rich rodeo clown) on TV blabbering that "you're fired," I want to scream. And it makes me think that it's reason No. 124 (or something) about why our economic system in in such terrible shape. There are many reasons, of course, but once of them could be that we just don't appreciate what people do ... the contributions they make.

Yes, it's true. They get paid. But anyone who thinks this is strictly due to the largesse of the employer is hoplessly naive. Maybe that happens once in a while, but by and large, we get paid for what we do because our expertise is needed to keep the business going.

And that means it's a two-way street ... that our employees deserve a little dignity and respect along with their money, and that if there's ever the perception in the work place that one or the other (or both) is lacking, you'll see some pretty poor attitudes bubble to the surface in a hurry.

I've been fired. It was back in 1987, and it was from a job that I probably never should have accepted in the first place. It wasn't for me. It was too young, and too immature, and too used to the sloppy informality of the newspaper environment to adapt to the corporate protocol of an august company like NYNEX (now Verizon).

I lasted a year. And I walked on eggshells for probably half that. And it occurred to me that just like there are horses for courses, there are people better suited for certain jobs. Or, as the managing editor of the paper that took me back after I was let go said, "some people just belong in certain places.

And some people don't, too.

Getting fired was devastating. It just burrowed through to the very core of who I was, and it also struck a deep nerve of failure. Even now, 23 years later, I can rationalize about it only so much. Yes, it was a personality conflict between my boss and me. Yes, it was a job that I just wasn't cut out to do. Yes, it was very much a case of bad karma gathering momentum until events overtook me. And yes, despite anything I might have been able to do, I was powerless to do it once all this negativity was set in motion.

It took me a long time to understand this wasn't a reflection on me, but, rather, a chain of events that spun out of control. By the time I was called into an office and given the news, it was almost a mercy killing.

This isn't to say I enjoyed it. And this isn't to say that, even today, I have extreme bitterness toward the boss who chose to make it so difficult for me to thrive there. There are good bosses, and there are bad bosses. This one was definitely in the latter category.

The problem, as I see it, is simple. You, as an employee, get the sense (whether it's real or not) that you have a bull's eye on your back. Right away, that affects how you do your job. You cannot work effectively when your boss has his foot on your throat.

And it just becomes an unbreakable cycle. The harder you press, the worse you do ... the more mistakes you make, the worse the mistakes are ... and it becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And even when you do something that you perceive to be the right thing, it'll often be looked at as wrong simply because your employer is more interested in building a case against you than he is judging your work objectively.

These are all feelings I had when I got fired from that job 23 years ago. As I said, I never should have taken it. But at the time, it looked too good to pass up. The money was tremendous, and I thought this was my ticket to bigger and better things.

As an aside, the experience taught me, perhaps more than anything else, that money cannot buy you happiness in your job. It helps, but if the job keeps you up at night, there's not enough money in the world to compensate for that.

So when the axe finally fell, it was almost a relief. It was a simple meeting, really ... just my boss and me.

"This is unfortunate," he said, turning his back on me as he spoke and handing me an evaluation he'd done that had more misspellings and typographical errors than a third-grader's book report. "I'm letting you go."

I actually made him say "fired." I knew what he meant, but I wanted him to say it. So I said, "what do you mean, letting me go?"

He had to say it. And that's all he said too. "Fired."

I guess that's the thing that always stuck to my crew. He couldn't even look me in the eye to tell me this. He turned his back on me. And judging from the amount of professional care he put into his evaluation of me, he didn't spend a lot of time thinking about either.

Once the shock of it all wore off, there was relief. Whatever else I had to deal with (and the timing couldn't have been worse, as we were in the middle of buying a house), I didn't have to deal with the Sword of Damocles hanging over my head.

Life got pretty dicey for a while. But I was fortunate. I had people at the newspaper where I'd previously worked who thought enough of me help me get back on my feet in the immediate aftermath; and hired me back full time a few months later.

So why do I write this today? Someone at my office was let go yesterday. I can't say it was a huge shock. Even he knew it was coming (if you're honest, you know). Still, though, it took me back to that day, August 11, 1987, a Tuesday morning, when I got the news that I was being terminated. And no matter how much you suspect it's coming, and even know it's coming, there's a finality to it that just leaves you weak, even if it's only for a second. You have to sit down.

The purpose here isn't to judge the justification of whether the person should have been fired. All I can ever hope is that the reasons are valid, and that there was no other alternative. I don't dispute the fact that some people are just not meant for certain jobs, and I also don't dispute the fact that even if they are, it can reach a point where the situation just becomes untenable, whether it's performance or personality related.

In this case (and in most cases), that's between the employer and employee.

But it doesn't stop you from feeling badly that whatever happened, it couldn't be resolved ... that things just couldn't be worked out. It's an awful thing to have happen to you.

And it's also difficult for the people left behind, too. We don't know what to think ... what's next ... or who's next ... or even if anybody's next. You just don't know.

All you're left with is confusion. And the feeling that you'd better step a little livelier around the office.

But your last image -- or, at least, my last image is of someone who's just had his whole life pulled out from under him. That's not a good feeling. And a pox on anyone who treats it as if it's some kind god damned joke.

Bruins bite; Celtics beat LeBron like a drum; Sox crack halos

2010-05-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

I am, by trade, a sports writer. The reason I decided to do this blog is because while I make my living talking about sports, it's not the only thing on my mind on most days.

But once in a while, you just can't help it. And last night was a truly extraordinary one in Boston sports. We had three teams playing ...and three teams won. Two of them rather easily; the other in what is becoming, lately, thrilling fashion.

Choices are difficult. The Red Sox and Bruins started at 7; the Celtics at 8. Unless you were in one of those all-purpose sports bars, with six TVs split between the three stations broadcasting the game, your thumb got a workout.

As much as I love to watch sports, I find it difficult sometimes to watch them on television. First, there are the idiotic announcers who, rather than say nothing when nothing need be said, will the air with irrelevant drivel. In Boston, that is known as Jack Edwards, the Bruins play-by-play guy, who has a hyperbole for every occasion.

When the Bruins eliminated the Buffalo Sabres last week, Edwards cried out "Buffalo's hopes lie with the Edmund Fitzgerald, at the bottom of Gitche Gumee."

Uh, Jack, a couple of things. First, Gitche Gumee (however you choose to spell it) is actually Lake Superior, which is quite a ways away from the eastern shores of Lake Erie ... which is where one can find the city of Buffalo. Second, You'd think that in the 21st century, and with serious and heart wrenching tragedy all around us, we could refrain from using overblown, bombastic sports hyperbole.

Then again, what would you expect from a guy who, last year, compared the Bruins beating the Montreal Canadiens (sweeping them, actually), to the American Revolution. I didn't get that one at all. Other than the fact that the B's won the deciding game on Patriot's Day, there was no real connection.

We've already established (or I have, anyway) that Stanley Cup hockey is second to none. One of the reasons it's second to none is because emotions run so high that strange things happen in playoff games. Such as last night's episode where Marc Savard, fresh from a two-month layoff due to a concussion, was accused by Philly's Daniel Carcillo of biting him on the finger.

It wouldn't be the first time a Boston athlete got caught in a biting dustup. Back in '83, Tree Rollins (he didn't get the name because he was short) took a bite out of Boston's Danny Ainge (who, by NBA standards was short) in a playoff game. It was a case of Mutt biting Jeff. Instead of a "Man Bites Dog" headline, we got "Tree Bites Man."

It's tough to tell from the films whether anyone bit anybody. But Savard (and this is wonderful) said, in his version, that Carcillo tried to pull his teeth out, and his finger hit up against his choppers. Uh huh. Reminds me of the time I got sucker punched by the kid across the street and his mother actually told my mother, "well, Stephen's face got in the way of Jimmy's fist."

Myself? I think Savard was hungry and saw an opportunity to eat a chicken finger (do I need to elaborate on the pun?).

Anyway, Bite-gate happened early in an otherwise tense game where, much of the time, you had to cover your eyes and pray. The last time I was this nervous was during the 2004 playoffs when the Red Sox were busy coming from three down to beat the Yankees in seven games. I can remember, in one of those games, a co-worker literally covering her face with her jacket because she couldn't bear to watch. That's how I feel sometimes, too.

There were highlights -- at least from a viewing standpoint: No. 1 came at the end of the second period when the Flyers tied it after a sloppy line change by the Bruins. The goal wasn't so great (it was one of those times where you hope you have a soft, non-invasive object in your hands so when you throw it at the TV, the TV doesn't break), but coach Claude Julien's reaction was absolutely spectacular. He literally slammed his fist up against the boards and uttered clearly visible vulgarity.

I loved it, mainly because I was doing basically the same thing he was. Only I get paid a lot less to act that way, and my tantrums aren't broadcast all over Versus (thank God it was Versus, too, because they'd have had to scrape Edwards off the ice after that one).

The second, naturally, was Milan Lucic's game-winning goal with about two minutes left. Lucic's had a tough year. He was my favorite Broon at this time last year, but he couldn't keep himself healthy this season. It started almost immediatley, and he was in and out of sick bay for virtually the whole season.

He's had a stretch of decent health now, and he's starting to play like the Milan Lucic of a year ago.

The Gahhhhhhden just exploded. I remember when the TD Garden opened (it was the FleetCenter in those days), and people complained that there just wasn't any atmosphere there. It was too quiet.

Of course it was. The teams playing in it were awful. Neither the Bruins nor the Celtics were worthy of any emotion or atmosphere. Now, they are. And there was no lack of it last night. It was electric.

So now we had to Philly for two games, it would really be nice if they stole one down there. It's pretty obvious that the Philly fans, as well as the Flyers themselves, can't wait to sink their teeth into Da Broons, but that's OK. That's what makes hockey hockey. One can only hope, though, that the Flyers prove to be as pusillanimous toward the Bruins as the B's were to the Pittsburgh Penguins after Matt Cooke leveled Savard in March -- giving him the concussion that forced him to the sidelines for two months.

Somehow, I doubt it, though. The Flyers, even with all their injuries, haven't stopped being physical. They may not be the Broad Street Bullies of the 70s, but they don't have too many Lady Byng candidates either.

(Aside, in a rough, tough sport like hockey, does it strike you as odd that one of the NHL's major awards has the word "lady" in it?)

Expect at least one beat down in Game 3.

And speaking of which, what are we to say about the Celtics? They beat the Cleveland Cavaliers and LeBron James like a drum. Take away that 15-0 fourth-quarter run by Cleveland (and you knew that was going to happen eventually) and the Celtics dominated the game.

I have to admit one thing: If either Boston team is fortunate enough to go all the way this spring, I'd prefer it to be the Bruins. But I won't complain if it's the Celtics.

My reasoning is simple: The Bruins haven't won the Cup since 1972, my freshman year of college. In '72, with Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, et al, Boston fans had every reason to expect that this team would just keep on winning.

Only it didn't. Things happened. Orr had major reconstructive knee surgery after that '72 season, and while even a half of an Orr was better than the whole of almost anyone else in the league at the time, the extensive surgery slowed him down a bit. Also, 1972 was the year the World Hockey Association pilfered many good players from the NHL with promises of piles and piles of Monopoly money, and several key members of Da Broons jumped (Ed Westfall, Derek Sanderson, Johnny McKenzie and and Gerry Cheevers among them).

They were never the same team. They got back to the Cup finals in '74, but became the first established, original NHL team to lose a final series to an expansion team (Philly, ironically), and then lost two straight finals to Montreal in '77 and '78. They were poised to beat the Habs -- finally -- in '79 and would have been favored to win the Cup, too, as the New York Rangers upset the Islanders in the other semifinal. But, alas, coach Don Cherry forgot how to count, and the Bruins caught caught with too many men on the ice. The Habs tied the game with about a minute to go, and won it in overtime.

The gaffe cost Cherry -- easily the most enjoyable coach in the history of Boston sports (well, my history anyway) -- his job. These days, "Grapes" is on Hockey Night in Canada, and is good for saying something totally outrageous, which he knows will piss people off royally, at least once a week. Good to see the man's still got it.

The Bruins made it to the Cup finals two other times -- in 1988, where they were swept by The Great Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers (that's the year the old Garden went dark during one of the games, and former Globie Leigh Montville wrote, famously, that "the gerbil -- the one who has to run the generator from a treadmill -- died"); and again, two years later, when they lost to the Oilers in five (a series that featured a triple overtime opener in which Glenn Wesley missed an open net ... a goal that would have won the game for the B's. Instead, Petr Klima scored for the Oilers and took all the starch out of the Bruins).

The Bruins have been plagued, for years, with an ownership that refused to spend money to bring talent into Boston. It got so bad that Ray Bourque, their best player since the days of the Big Bad Bruins, had to get himself traded to Colorado at the end of his career so he could win a Stanely Cup out there ... instead of here, where he should have been parading around Boston with several of them.

The Bruins also been plagued by awful luck. Orr isn't the only player to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune when it comes to injuries. Other than Bourque, their best player since the Orr era was Cam Neely, and he had to retire early because of a hit he took at the hands of Ulf Samuelson. Another of their real good prospects, Normand Leveille, who was only 19, suffered a brain aneurysm and never played again.

And one of their top draft picks, Gord Kluzak, never saw his career get off the ground, as knee injuries cut it short.

Still, none of those guys died, the way Len Bias and Reggie Lewis did. Obviously, those were incredible tragedies in and of themselves. But, from a practical standpoint, they derailed the Celtics for a long, long time. Bias was going to be, to those 1980s Celtics, what John Havlicek was to the 60s and 70s team ... a transitional figure they could build around in their efforts to keep the dynasty going. Lewis was as pure a scorer as they had in many years, and he was truly coming into his own when he developed heart ailment, and collapsed and died while playing a pickup game in 1993.

The Celtics have certainly had their run, though. They won eight straight NBA titles in the 50s and 60s, and they've snagged 17 flags overall. Their last title was in 2008, and many of the guys who won it are still with the team -- albeit two years older.

I didn't expect the Celtics to make it out of the first round this year. They played horribly for the entire second half of the regular season (which reminds me, there has to be some kind of incentive for teams to stop screwing around from October through April. Judging from the way both the B's and C's are playing now, it's obvious they used the regular schedule as an extended exhibition season, and that's kind of insulting to the fans who plunk down valuable bucks to watch).

We need to work on that.

The Celtics handcuffed LeBron and his bad elbow until the game was pretty much over. Then, they let up and allowed the Cavaliers to pick up some steam. It may have made you squirm in your seat a little, just as the Miami Heat did in Game 5 of their series, but they were never in any real danger. It's an NBA axiom that teams that put it in overdrive for 15-0 runs generally lose some zip the first time something goes against them. So it was only matter of time before that run stopped.

The only thing about the Celtics I will say is this: Rajon Rondo, their point guard, is the marquee player on this team now. Maybe the older guys have been slow to realize that, but they'd better get with the program now. They are only going as far as Wajon Wondo (as Bob Cousy might say) will take them (oh, how I wish the Cooz was still doing games so I could hear him pronounce that name; reminds me of the time the C's had Rick Robey, and The Cooz said "ohhhh, fewocious webounding by Wick Wobey). The Cooz was/is our very own Babawa Wawters.

Acutally, Wondo reminds you little of The Cooz, because if there's a routine way and an, shall we say, artistic way of doing things, Wondo will do the latter. Nothing's ever routine with Wajon Wondo.

Last night, Rondo handed out 19 assists and scored 13 points. They don't do scoring in hoops like they do in hockey, where assists and goals have equal point value. But if they did, Rondo would go down in the box score as having scored 51 points. That's one helluva night's work!

Finally, and briefly, there were the Red Sox, fresh off an ignominious sweep at the hands of the Baltimore Orioles (who have won seven games this far this season; four of them against Boston). They took out their frustrations on the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Orange County, California, USA, North America, Planet Earth, to the tune of a 17-8 beatdown. Balls were flying out of Fenway Park like rockets.

For one night, anyway, they were the Red Sox, and not some feeble facsimile thereof.

Maybe they just got swept up in the surging tide of victory. If that's the case, then I approve!!

The Internet is for Porn

2010-04-21T05:05:00.001-07:00

Friday, April 23, 2010
The Internet is for Porn
Well, OK, not really (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

But apparently the folks at the Securities and Exchange Commission think it is.

I woke up this morning -- as I always do -- to the local news on our ABC affiliate. I do this for many reasons, not the least of which is that Channel 5 has, at the moment, my favorite weather babe ... J.C. Monahan ... and it's somewhat more palatable to hear that it's going to snow, or rain for three days and flood my basement, from J.C. than it is to hear it from, say, grizzled old weatherman.

Hey, if you're going to get bad news, you might as well get it from someone who looks good. Right?

But I digress. After today's two-hour local news cast (which features so many spots of J.C. and her weather map I don't even count anymore), Good Morning America had a spot about how the watchdogs at the SEC -- you know, the people who are supposed to be making sure corporate pigs like Goldman Sachs and AIG aren't fleecing is all blind -- spend, in some cases, up to eight hours a day surfing the web for porn.

My first reaction to this was that I thought only the death and the leftfield wall at Fenway Park were the great equalizers. Little did I know that porn falls into that category too.

No matter how important, or indigent, we are in life, death makes worm food out of us all. As one friend put it to me once, we're in that box, and in the ground, for eternity. Our lives here are tantamount to a mere blink of an eye.

As for Fenway, all you have to do is mention the name Bucky (Bleeping) Dent. If a guy like him can hit one out of the yard, then you know what I mean about that park being the great equalizer.

But porn? Actually, I should have known. We're all hard wired the same way in the end. We are all slaves to our sexual stimulations, even if some of us are more stimulated than others.

We all have sexual needs, desires and fantasies, and we all have aspects of each that we'd just as soon nobody knows about.

All of which is why porn is a natural for the internet. Back in the good old days, when we all hid Playboy and Penthouse under our mattresses, we lived in fear that our sexually explicit material would find itself in the wrong hands (such as snoopy mothers).

My mother was a snoopy mother. And unduly paranoid, too. She once took the cover to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band down the basement, and parsed every lyric of every song for drug references. She came back upstairs, convinced she'd uncovered the key to some nefarious plot by the Beatles to get every kid in America hooked on drugs ... and damn near banned us from listening to the album, or them, ever again.

(I should add, she bought me the record for my birthday).

So you can imagine how my mother would have reacted had Forum Magazine popped up between the mattresses while she was changing the sheets. And we won't even get into what she'd have said, had she seen one of those disgusting periodicals, about any undefined stains on those sheets.

For the record, I was way too smart to import pornographic material into the Krause House -- or even on the Krause property.

Most people, when they think of the internet and porn, undoubtedly have this visual of a bunch of schieves in their sleeveless T shirts, pleasuring themselves while sitting in front of a computer in their parents' basements. I know that's the image I have.

And while I'm sure there plenty of them, and that they're doing what they do even as we speak, I guess the SEC circle jerk proves that porn has no bounds. It knows no class distinction. Doesn't matter if you're a Harvard lawyer or a hard core voyeur (gee, can I make a poem about that??). If you're hooked, you're hooked.

I work at a place where one of our top executives got caught downloading porn on his computer. Of course, he was pretty stupid. He supervised an office of mainly women, and his computer screen was situated in such a way that they could see the images reflected through the window in his office.

Someone complained (well, obviously!) and next thing you know, our executive was shown the door. And as a result, the company drew up this list of rules and regulations governing use of the internet more explicit, in its own way, than any of those letters you used to read in the Penthouse Forum. Of course, we all named this document after the poor soul whose weakness for the internet flesh cost him his job.

We are nothing if not twisted people ourselves!

Anyway, back to the SEC. I wish some of these guys could get dragged into court someday (who knows, maybe they will). I would love to hear some crusading attorney get one of them on the stand, and ask, "what were you people doing while Bernie Madoff was making Ponzi look like a Boy Scout? What were you people doing while AIG and Bear Stearns were driving themselves -- and the rest of us -- straight through the ground and halfway to hell?

"Well, your honor, we were busy. One of the guy downloaded the latest episode of 'Alien Space Fembots,' and it was just too good to pass up."

I can just see one of these guys thumbing through the latest porn catalogue (with one hand, of course) and then going into a meeting where they're charting statistics, and having his chart look like a parabola.

(For the math-challenged, a parabola, on a Cartesian graph, charts all the possible solutions to quadratic equations. They can, in many cases, resemble a well-proportioned male member.)

Of course, now, the double entendres will just come pouring out. Today, on the ABC website, there's a sidebar to the main story that asks, "How Big is the SEC's Porn Problem." Sort of reminds me of the time the Buffalo Sabres had a hockey player named Michael Peca. The Bruins were about to face Buffalo in the playoffs, and one of its reporters -- a female, no less -- wrote a story about him. Some Globie, and I'm convinced it was meant for in-house purposes only, wrote a headline that said, "Buffalo's Peca really big."

Alas, it got through ... and got into the paper the next day.

It also reminds me of that Year from Hell, when I worked in public relations for the company that is now known as Verizon. There was a whole list of expressions we could not use when we wrote press releases, and one of them was "enter the market." I, in my naivete, thought that was pretty innocuous, until it the urban connotation of the word "enter" was pointed out to me. Now, I wouldn't call myself a rube when it comes to this stuff by any stretch. But even I thought that was a bit too paranoid.

all of his only proves that when it comes to porn, and and prurient interests, we are all teenagers whose hormones still rage out of control.

Well, at least now we know why the economy tanked as badly as it did. All this time, we were led to believe it was Bill Clinton's fault (man, don't even go there ... can you just imagine? ... no, never mind ... the thought of that is just too gross, even for me). Or Barney Frank's. Or the head of AIG. Or General Motors.

Turns out it was none of the above. It was Debbie Does Dallas. It was Larry Flynt's fault. Or Hugh Heffner's (though to be honest, that stuff's pretty tame compared to what you can find on line if you really care to look).

And here thought, all this time, that Monica Lewinsky's dress was the only article of clothing floating around the American power structure that also served as the host for someone's incriminating DNA.

Thank God for Net Nanny, though, and other inter-office internet tracking devices. I'm sure that's how all these Wall Street Wankers were found out. Otherwise, we'd have to get Bulah Balbricker from Porky's to feret them out. That would have been a hoot.

So, in closing, I leave you withthis ... perhaps the real theme song for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Enjoy it.

Invasion of the Stick People

2010-04-20T18:09:00.001-07:00

I cannot say I was always the biggest fan of the Boston Marathon. I've kind of had a love/hate relationship with it for my entire professional life.

It was barely on my radar through high school. I knew about it, but that was as far as it went. In those days, it was the BAA Marathon, and it was a race for amateurs who were (in my humble opinion) crazy enough to run 26 miles from the western suburbs to the Pru for the honor of throwing up the bowl of beef stew they got when they finished.

And that was, literally, my first experience covering the race, too. I was still 19 years old in 1973 when assigned by United Press International (my first professional job) to the bowels of the Prudential Center in Boston, where the post-race triage unit was set up. There, I saw enough digestive distress to turn me off from EATING (let alone running) forever.

And it caused me, for a time, to be as derisive about these runner as possible. I thought the whole thing was overrated. It permeated everything in its wake, including the Red Sox, who had to play early on Patriots Day. To me, that was simply a craven accommodation to a bunch of narcissistic freaks who thought that a 26-mile road race was an excuse to shut the whole city down.

Of course, I can say, now, that a lot of that ill-will was masqueraded envy. I had no idea, when I was 19, what it was like to work feverishly toward setting a difficult goal and then experience the euphoria of achieving it. That is the essence of the Boston Marathon. The story here isn't which African professional flew in here to win it. The story involves the rest of the pack ... the ones who began in this year's second wave. They are the reason this race remains an indelible civic institution.

Covering the Marathon for a wire service makes it difficult to see it from that perspective. You're there to report news ... and the news is who won, who almost won, and any other noteworthy events that take place along the way (and a lot of that involves celebrities who jet into Boston for a day to run). We never got to hang back and talk to the dedicated runners who do this to realize their OWN dreams.

Because in the end, it doesn't matter whether you're Robert "Swing Low, Sweet" Cheruiyot or some anonymous runner with a five-digit bib number. Everyone who runs, and who finishes, gets to cross that line. They all get to hear the cheers along the way. They've all trained, often alone, and often in unforgiving weather conditions. The course offers the same harsh realities to all, whether they're elite runners or plodding through for the first time.

And when it's over, they all have something extremely, wonderfully important in common: They've all conquered the 26.3 mile Boston Marathon course ... Natick and Wellesley, Heartbreak Hill, Cleveland Circle, Kenmore Square, Mass. Ave., Hereford Street, and Copley Square ... and they all deserve an equal amount of credit.

I rode the media bus in 1975 when Bill Rodgers won this race for the first time; and rode it again in 1976, when it was 95 degrees at the starting point in Hopkinton and in the low 60s at the finish line (the notoriously strong New England sea breeze having taken effect). I've seen the toll the elements can take on the runners, particularly when the race -- which begins well inland -- wends its say to the coast and the winds and temperatures can change wildly. I've seen runners so cramped up, and in such intense pain, that you wonder why on earth they put themselves through the ordeal. It just doesn't make any sense.

The answer comes with a very positive aspect of human nature ... and one that, I'm afraid, is lacking in more people with each generation: the desire to challenge ourselves ... to continually raise that bar to (to use another track analogy).

We've lost that desire, I'm afraid. I don't know if it's because we've just had too many things handed to us, or whether technology has made it unnecessary. Maybe we're just not conditioned anymore to accept challenges. You can see it everywhere you go.

Nobody has any desire anymore to embrace the tough challenges. In fact, if anything, we go out of our way to deny they even exist Problems that have left geniuses vexed for generations are now reduced to simplistic, easy solutions by today's pundits.

And I don't want to get overly political here, because there's an equal amount of guilt here. We all do it, whether we're liberal or conservative. We just don't have the patience anymore to sit down and work out complicated solutions. There's no glory in it.

You won't get elected to office if you admit you have no idea, for example, how to stop a recession from getting worse, and that, to you, the only solution is to try different things and see how the markets react to them. You can't do that because nobody wants to hear that there isn't an answer that cannot be found in the same time it used to take Ward Cleaver to solve The Beav's weekly dilemma.

I think if I were to profile my ideal political candidate, he or she would have to be a distance runner. I don't mean someone like Bill Clinton, or George W ... one who dabbled in it for show (though I suspect Bush was probably more dedicated, on the whole, to fitness than The Fantastic Billy C was). I mean someone who understands the commitment to keeping your eye on the prize, and who won't let a couple of setbacks along the way derail them. I mean someone who has trained patiently, in all kinds of elements, and understands that true achievement often comes after an extended period of great pain and frustration.

After all, wasn't it Thomas Edison who said, "genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration?"

We do not have a government of long distance runners today. I don't think we even have a government of sprinters. Or hurdlers. We have a government of hucksters ... car salesmen ... people who will say anything to anyone to close the deal, and worry about the ramifications later.

Of course, all of this is contingent on an electorate who understands the same things, but that's just not the case either. Some of it has to do with the fact that our problems tend to reach such a critical stage (and that's because their complicated nature is counterproductive to them even being address by today's politicians) that people just cry out for easy answers. And there just aren't any.

But a lot of it is simple conditioning. We're not conditioned to think long-term anymore. Everything is "now," whether we're talking about stopping terrorism, losing weight, getting rich, building and maintaining our national infrastructure, curbing recessions, health care ... the focus seems to be to achieve the maximum results with the minimum output.

That is why you see these commercials for Bowflex home gyms, or Jenny Craig ... why there's Judge Judy on TV ... why we ever thought we could eradicate terrorism by killing every last terrorist (which is akin to trying to kill every last cockroach that lives in the walls of your house) ... why, for the longest time, we thought the solution to every social problem was to throw money at it.

We remain married to anything that allows us to get around life's complications ... that reduces the overly complicated to the overly simplistic ... and (and I hate to use this expression because it's become such a cliche) dumbs us down.

People often dismiss sports as being totally artificial and irrelevant ... and the exclusive domain of tremendously self-absorbed athletes who no longer have the slightest thing in common with the rest of us.

And a lot of ways, that is true, especially the major professional ones where even being an elite athlete isn't enough. This is why we have so many instances of cheating, whether it's steroids, growth hormones, blood doping, and the rest.

The last bastion, to me, of old-fashioned American perseverance and tenacity is distance running, because there is absolutely no way to get around anything. If you're going to succeed, you have to work. You have to take risks. You have to protect your body so that it can withstand those risks. And you have to know, going in, that even if you do everything right, things might not go your way ... and you have to prepare to accept whatever comes.

You compete not against Robert Cheruiyot, but against yourself. You answer only to the person on the other side of the mirror, and we all know that person is absolutely the toughest one of all to please.

Congratulations to those who dared, even if they didn't finish. For they have done something that nobody can take away from them ... and they've dedicated themselves to something much bigger, collectively, than they could ever be individually.

A few years ago, on the local sports radio talk station (a refugee for exactly the type of people on whom this entire screed would be totally lost), an angry caller got on there (aren't they all angry??) the day before the race and complained that the "stick people" were going to be clogging up his streets for the next couple of days. His streets. Stick people.

I thought the use of the term "stick people" was as humorous as it was pejorative, and in some of my more caustic moments, I've come to refer to the Boston Marathon as "The Invasion of the Stick People."

But I also know that running a Marathon requires dedication, discipline, a bit of fire in the belly, and a lot of patience and endurance ... all traits that, I'm afraid, we, as a people, could do well to learn a little better.

Random Thoughts ...

2010-01-28T07:28:00.001-08:00

Some random thoughts today as we anticipate -- with great relief -- the passing of January ... easily the longest month of the calendar year.

Scott Brown is the flavor of the month. How else do you explain a poll that says he'd be competitive with Barack Obama in 2012?

Let's give him his due. He ran an effective campaign -- not hard to accomplish, seeing that his opponent, Martha Coakley, barely showed up -- and captured the pulse of an electorate that was sick and tired of being taken for granted.

But let's not run too far afield with this. This was not some dramatic repudiation of Obama's agenda as much as it was a statewide election where people got a chance to tell the local leadership that they're not to be taken as rubes who will vote, like robots, for all candidates with a "D" next to their name.

Say what you will about Ted Kennedy (and I have), but the man never took anything for granted. Even when he was running against token competition (can you just IMAGINE how he'd have mopped the floor with Brown?), he worked.

Brown is a Mitt Romney clone (a point that was hammered home to me when it was Romney who introduced him when he gave his victory speech). Maybe he'll surprise me and be an effective advocate for Massachusetts, and I'll be the first to eat Humble Pie if that actually happens.

But it's far more likely that he'll play to the cheap seats, on behalf of the Republican leadership that -- despite his victory -- still sees our state as the People's Republic of Massachusetts.

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I suppose if you asked 100 people what their idea of an effective leader is, you'd get 100 different answers. There's no right or wrong definition. And that's especially true if you examine just WHO it is that some people choose to follow.

So with that in mind, here are some of MY criteria for a leader:

-- Inherent decency. By that, I mean honest, accountable, moral and sober (in thought, please, not in temperance).

-- Dignity. This was my only knock against Bill Clinton, and it's one of the reasons why, even though I agreed with him politically, he left me cold in the long run. I can understand human weakness, even though I might not always like it. But getting it in the Oval Office? Tawdry.

-- Even-handed. So far, I think I've described George W. Bush as much as I've described Barack Obama. I had no doubts that Bush was a decent enough guy, even though I didn't agree with much of anything he said. And he was certainly dignified ... WAY more so than Clinton was. But where I part company, and start drifting to Obama's side, is in this category. I never liked the bellicose language that came out of the previous administration. "Bring it on," "Axis of Evil ..." All words like that did was stoke the fires rather than help put them out. I'm not naive enough to believe that there's never a place for that type of draconian language. But not as a matter of course.

-- Independent in thought. Again, my definition of this might differ than yours. I don't want people in high office who are bought and sold by unelected groups of people, whether they're corporations (HATE the latest Supreme Court ruling), unions, lobbyists or political power brokers. If you're a Democrat, and you vote along party lines the majority of the time, I can live with that. You are, after all, a Democrat. And it would be the same if you were a Republican.

But I always got the feeling, with Bush, that his thoughts and actions were almost directed, behind the scenes, by a cabal of -- for lack of a better term -- neocons, led, of course, by Dick Cheney. I know, I know ... I know ... it's almost a cliché. But I have the luxury of having thought that before he was even elected the first time. I also think that it took him almost seven years of an eight-year presidency to realize that these people led him down the wrong path in many respects. And that once he realized it, and fought to stamp his OWN identity on the presidency, he became much more likable.

It's too early to tell whether Obama will meet my expectations in this department. I get the feeling, behind the scenes, that he bucked some fierce opposition to the bank and auto industry bailouts, which leads me to think that -- MAYBE -- he honestly thought these actions were the best way to go (as opposed to the Iraq War, which -- I think -- was clearly the brainchild of unelected neocons whose idea of peace in the valley was more like imperialism).

I could end up being all wrong about this. Obama could end up being a worse hack than I could ever imagine. He could end up being a bigger tyrant than Idi Amin.

Or ... he could capitulate too much to his political opposition ... something Clinton also did when the GOP won the House and Senate in 1994. Right now, he's walking a fine line, and all I can say is that I wouldn't want to be him.

Or ... he could be what he appears to me to be like now ... an honest guy who leans a little too far to the left sometimes (farther than I do, that's for sure), but who seems to be staking out an agenda in which he truly believes. I'll give him that he's a whole lot smarter than I am, and privy to a lot more facts than I am, and that he -- like all our leaders -- has our best interests at heart.

I guess it just comes down to defining what those bests interests are.

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Sports are a pretty clear microcosm of the "build you up, tear you down" syndrome. We see it everywhere, but nowhere is it more prevalent than sports. And all you have to do is look at the Patriots to get a good dose of it.

From the time they won their first Super Bowl until they lost, earlier this month, to the Baltimore Ravens, they were the model NFL franchise. Everyone wanted to be like them.

That, of course, is because they were amazingly consistent, and because they won three Super Bowls. This doesn't make them all that special. The Steelers have won six. That's twice as many as three. Other teams, as well, have won more than three Super Bowls, such as the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers (four each).

Heck, even the New York Giants have won three Super Bowls.

But the Patriots won theirs in this decade, which means that they're the latest "model NFL franchise). And the way people went on and on and ON about them, you'd forget that they were, for the previous 40 years of their existence, basically one of the most inept franchises in NFL history .. a team of which it could have TRULY been said that everything they touched turned to shit. The Midas Touch in reverse!

All of this ended the day Bill Belichick signed on to coach them. Belichick is a curious creature. If you get him in a relaxed moment, he's actually an engaging person. He can talk endlessly about arcane matters of football ... and actually make it interesting. I can still remember the day, shortly before the Patriots' Super Bowl win over the Eagles, Belichick gave a wonderfully concise summation of all of Paul Brown's contributions to the modern NFL game.

Trouble is, he's also a churl, especially on game day, and even more especially when you ask him something he doesn't want to address.

For nine years, those who covered him -- and that includes me -- had to sit and chafe under the intense aura of Bill Belichick the genius. How could you prove any of that wrong? The Patriots were successful, and they seemed to have the whole salary cap issue -- a challenge even for the most brilliant economists -- completely knocked.

Then, they lost that famous Super Bowl to the Giants and you could see a little of that veneer of invulnerability starting to chip off. That game exposed some holes that the Pats had managed to keep hidden throughout that 16-0 season. For example, it's easy to hide a mediocre defense when you're scoring 35 points game. But if you can only manage 14 (the way they did against the Giants), that defense had better be a little more than mediocre. Sadly, it wasn't.

Belichick got a reprieve when Tom Brady was hurt in 2008. The Patriots still won 11 games with Matt Cassel calling signals. And even though the Patriots didn't make the playoffs, the season itself validated Belichick's genius once again. Hey, he won 11 games with a guy who'd never played a down in anger since he joined the NFL. He MUST be a genius.

But was that it? Or did the Patriots take advantage of an incredibly soft (by usual NFL standards) schedule? They played some terrible teams in 2008, and -- for the most part -- lost games to teams that matched their abilities ... or were better.

That trend continued in 2009 ... beating teams that they should have, and losing to teams as good as they were (and, it goes without saying, better). Can you recall a game in 2009 where you walked away saying, "I can't BELIEVE they beat that team?" I can't. What's worse, the only time I actually really felt that way was after they beat Carolina, because they played like shit (that was the Randy Moss game, if you know what I mean).

So it should have been no surprise that the Ravens came in and just pounded them. Anyone paying attention could just see the handwriting on the wall.

The point here, though, is that people reacted to it as if it had just happened ... as if someone had pressed a button and the entire bottom just FELL OUT ... just like that!

And now, Belichick may not be a genius as much as someone who has become overly affected by hubris. Now, the question isn't whether Belichick can coach (I think it's pretty clear he can), but whether he has anyone on his staff who doesn't genuflect at his mere presence.

The truth? These things happen in the NFL. It's set up that way. First, it's a copycat league. If everyone likes what you do, they do it too ... until, someday, the rest of the league catches up. Second, you don't just go out and buy Tedy Bruschis, Rodney Harrisons, Bradys, Mike Vrabels, Ted Johnsons, Willie McGinests and Troy Browns in the discount rack. They are special people, and you should consider yourself truly blessed when you have that many of them playing for you at the same time.

They bring more to the table than their abilities, and losing that many of them, in such a short period of time, is bound to affect what you do on the field.

It was a special era. But it's over. That's nobody's fault. That's the way it's supposed to be in the NFL. It's someone else's turn. Deal with it.

######################

Is Brett Favre going to retire? At this point, I don't care.

I also don't care that even at his age, he had a pretty good year, and that the Vikings most likely wouldn't have even had a sniff of a Super Bowl chance without him.

Because in the end, not even Favre, even with his ability to pull plays out of thin air, couldn't save a franchise that has been -- to these eyes -- a combination of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs of the NFL. Every stinking time they get close, either the kicker who hasn't missed a field goal all year shanks one with time running out, or the future Hall of Fame quarterback throws a horrible interception at the worst possible time.

I know people from Minnesota who simply refuse to watch them anymore because they're tired of being let down (which is a feeling that I almost got myself a few times suffering through the famed "Curse of the Bambino.").

But this year, Favre proved everything everyone ever said about him -- good OR bad -- true.

Does he have guts? Absolutely. I thought his leg had fallen off last Sunday, but he never missed a beat. He came back onto the field, and you could clearly see he was hurt. But he soldiered on, completing improbable passes, and leading his team downfield ... so much so that you were SURE they were going to spring the upset and beat the New Orleans Saints.

THEN ...

And that's the trouble with Favre. For the nine things he does right, the one thing he does wrong cancels everything else out. Two years ago, he throws an interception -- horrible pass -- in overtime, and the Giants come back down and win the game.

(And, as an aside, did anyone NOT think the Patriots would have just eaten the Packers for lunch in a Super Bowl? Did anyone NOT think, "oh, oh, this Giants team is playing with house money, which means they're could be tough to beat?)

Sunday, all the Vikings have to do is get five more yards, by hook or by crook, and they win! And while it's true they'd have likely served as cannon fodder for the Colts, it's better to be cannon fodder for the Colts than home watching on your LCD.

Yet, in typical Red Sox/Cubs fashion, the most unlikely, inharmonic convergence of events happens. First, the Vikings call two of the worst, most unimaginative plays imaginable. One of them was so slow to develop they lost five yards.

Then, of all times, they get confused as to who's in and who's out (which begs the question: Hasn't ANYONE on that team heard that when you're in, you're in; and when you're out, you're out), and get knocked five MORE yards back because they had 12 men in the huddle.

That penalty just about knocked them out of field goal range (the Vikings announcer who complained that "all they had to do was take a knee and kick a field goal" was probably simplifying things just a little). They still could have used about five or six more yards. Favre went back to pass (which, at that point, seemed to be the best option), but there was nothing there ... and nothing but open space ahead of him for about 10 yards -- surely more than enough for a decent shot at a field goal, even given the extreme ineffectiveness of all post-season kickers this year.

Now, maybe he was too hobbled to run. Maybe he didn't see all this room he had. Maybe he was just being Brett Favre ... wanting to make "the big play," even though "the big play" was nowhere in sight.

Did I also mention there were about seven seconds left in regulation when the Saints picked him off?

Whatever ... running right and throwing across your body back to the middle? Nothing good ever comes out of that. You're asking for exactly what Favre got ... disaster. Throw the ball away and at least give your team the shot ... slim as it might have been ... to pull this one out. It would have been a 51-yard attempt ... certainly doable indoors, if not automatic.

Well, we know the rest of the story now. The Saints, helped immeasurably by Viking penalties, marched downfield and kicked the game-winning field goal. New Orleans is redeemed. Katrina never happened. The Saints are marching to Florida. And all the rest.

The remaining question is about Favre? Is this it? And this brings us back to the beginning. I don't care. Whatever he does, he does. In some ways, he's heroic. In other ways, he's pathetic. He wants one more shot at the brass ring ... that much is for certain. And if he feels he still has it in him, all I ask is that he say so, now, and not string everyone along the way he did the previous two seasons. THAT'S what makes him so pathetic.

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Finally, some quick hits and a parting shot:

-- I wish there was a way to get Johnny Damon back on the Red Sox. He's the same type of "special player" Troy Brown was with the Patriots. Of all the miscalculations the management has made, the one allowing him to leave was the biggest.

-- I'm told Barack Obama used the word "I" 96 times in his State of the Union address. In order to know that, someone had to count. If that's all this obsessively anal retentive person has to worry about, I'd like to be Sean Hannity.

-- Are the Bruins still in the NHL?

-- I can't say I follow the NBA that closely. But come on .. Allan Iverson an all-star? What? You say Wilt the Stilt was dead, and therefore unable to make it? wonder if Iverson will attend practice (there was an incredibly funny bit on Comcast Sports counting all the times Iverson said "practice" in that now-famous rant ... but that's different than counting the "I's" in the president's State of the Union speech).

#####################################

Finally ... it's incredible what's going on with Toyota. This isn't just scary stuff (although it's plenty scary, since my son drives a Matrix -- which, thankfully, s too new to be on the recall list). It's could be a death blow to the concept that the Japanese make better cars.

That's all we've heard in the last decade or more ... that U.S. cars are inferior to the Japanese ... that the two countries' business models are different ... that the unions strangle the American manufacturers to the point where they can't produce decent cars ... blah, blah, blah.

Well how about now? I realize these cars were manufactured HERE ... but, face it, if your name's on it, it's yours. This MAY put an end to the myth that, somehow, foreign cars (and especially Japanese) are superior to their U.S. counterparts because -- as far as I can tell -- we've never heard of case of a GM car, or a Ford, being a moving death trap (OK, Ralph Nader, there WAS the Corvair, truly unsafe at any speed).

I won't say it's time to put the blinders on and "buy American," no questions asked. But right now, I feel pretty good about the fact that every car I've ever owned falls under the U.S. manufacturers' umbrella.

Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009

2009-08-26T14:56:00.001-07:00

Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009
First, let me say that my feelings toward Sen. Edward M. Kennedy are ambivalent at best. It's tough to really describe. Out of one eye, I saw a deeply flawed man, a scion of privilege, a playboy, the very essence of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at the end of The Great Gatsby when he said, "They were careless people ... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."

He was describing Tom and Daisy Buchanan in the novel, but he could have easily been talking about the Kennedys, as that same carelessness, or recklessness, seemed to follow them around too. Ted Kennedy was very much a product of his family's seeming air of privilege and invincibility, and it should come as no shock that, as No. 9 out of nine, he inherited a lion's share of this view of life.

Hence, Ted Kennedy could get someone to take his Spanish exam for him at Harvard so he could remain eligible for football. And he could expect -- without really giving it a second thought -- that his aides and coat-holders could simply clean up the tremendous mess he left behind in the waters off Dike Bridge in July 1969.

Why not? It had always been this way. He got back into Harvard even after it was proven he'd cheated; it's tough to say how much of the Old Man's money came from ill-gotten gains, but it's fair to say it was a substantial amount; it's also fair to say the Old Man's money and influence helped get his brother elected president; and it's fair to say that with people of privilege, in general, the rules are always meant for other people to follow. They play by their own rules.

It didn't matter that mind-crippling tragedy seemed to belie that feeling of privilege and indestructibility that ran through the Kennedy family. All that money couldn't protect Joe Jr. from dying during World War II -- on a mission he undertook, in no small part, because he was jealous of his younger brother Jack's heroism during the PT-109 battle.

And it didn't seem to faze Ted Kennedy that his sister Kathleen took a huge risk flying on a private plane in the middle of a thunderstorm ... and paid for it with her life. Nor did Jack's assassination. Nor Bobby's. Not even the plane crash in 1964 that almost claim his life.

None of those events seemed to put much of a dent in No. 9 son's view, apparently, that no combination of human folly, arrogance and carelessness could do too manage damage to him. So when Ted Kennedy drove his car off the bridge that separated the main part of Chappaquiddick from the poison ivy-infested beach on the other side, he had every reason to expect that all of that influence ... money ... public cachet over the mind-crippling family tragedies, would somehow leave a very forgiving and sympathetic public feeling very sorry for him.

But it didn't quite work out that way. Instead of being the type of chapter in his life that he could close quickly, and from which he could move on, Chappaquiddick became the defining point in a life that may have reached dizzying heights in terms of legislative accomplishment and prestige, but never could reclaim what was lost in both 1963 and 1968 by assassins' bullets.

Of course, it wasn't supposed to be this way when the Kennedy dynasty was set in motion. I would imagine if Old Joe had revealed his wildest dreams, they would have involved a 24-year dynasty of Kennedys, beginning in 1960 with Jack, continuing through 1974 with Bobby, and ending in 1984 as Teddy closed out HIS second term.

Could that have ever happened? Doubtful. Americans got sick of the Clintons ... and the reason they got sick of the Clintons is because it had no stomach for a political dynasty that flipped back and forth between two families. That's one VERY big reason Barack Obama is your president today. Certainly not the ONLY reasons ... but a big one.

But the Kennedy brothers were well positioned to at least make a run at such a dynasty. But again, one wonders just how ambitious young Teddy was. Chances are, had he not had this tremendous legacy dumped on him with the responsibility to uphold, he'd have been content to serve his two or three terms in the Senate and then go off and count his money. I truly believe that's all he ever wanted out of life.

Fate, of course, had other plans. And I really think that what defined Ted Kennedy from the time Sirhan Sirhan killed his brother Robert until he met and married his second wife Vicki was that inner tug-of-war that went on between what truly made him happy and what he felt his obligations to his family were. Here was a man who grown up with an army of maids, nannies, family members, and coat holders to clean up his messes for him. He wasn't exactly a ne'er-do-well, as was George W. Bush (a man who I find has an awful lot in common with Ted Kennedy, especially in his younger days) until he straightened out, but he was certainly destined for a life of no heavy lifting. His brothers had blazed the trail, first Jack and then Bobby. They were the ones who kept the Old Man's political ambitions alive and fulfilled. All Teddy had to do was show up.

He showed up, of course. And even when he was greener than the lawn on a bright spring day, he had instincts. He knew enough not to get angry and self-righteous when opponent Eddie McCormack told him in a debate that his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1962 would be a joke had his name simply been Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy. Any outward show of anger of indignation would have reinforced the fact that McCormack was, of course, right. If ever a man ran on his name and not his resume, it was Edward M. Kennedy. He knew it. He was stunned, of course, that McCormack showed so little class as to point it out ... and was probably very tempted to point out, himself, that the name McCormack, in Massachusetts, in 1962, had just as much political cachet as the name Kennedy (Eddie's uncle John was, of course, the Speaker of the U.S. House).

But he didn't. He let it pass. And the good people of Massachusetts felt sorry enough for him that Teddy swamped Eddie McCormack in the primary and went on to win the seat he never relinquished as long as he was alive.

Teddy's early career in the Senate was a virtual blueprint on how to win friends and influence people. He did what his brother Jack never could do ... followed rules of protocol. He ingratiated himself into the Senate club in a way Jack never did.

He'd grown in stature so that by 1969, when the Democrats chose their leadership for the new term, Ted was named assistant majority whip.

There was already serious talk about Kennedy running for president in 1972, but even if he chose not to, he'd still only have been 40, so there was plenty of time. Besides, it wouldn't have been too smart to waste him unduly in '72, so it seemed more sensible to see him as a major force in 1976, when he'd be 44 ... a year older than Jack was when he was elected.

Chappaquiddick, of course, rendered all of that speculation moot. There was no way he could run in '72 ... a mere three years after the accident. And when Ed Muskie self destructed, George McGovern picked up the pieces ... and lost famously.

Four years later, still gunshy about putting himself through all that scrutiny, and besieged by other, more personal, issues (such as his son's cancer, his wife's increasingly obvious drinking problem, and his family's natural antipathy on the whole issue of running and making himself a target for a third crackpot assassin) he ceded to Jimmy Carter (though brother-in-law Sarget Shriver gave it a try).

This is where I believe Chappaquiddick might have changed the course of U.S. political life. Without it, there would have been no Jimmy Carter. And, perhaps, no Ronald Reagan. I have no idea what would have happened in a Ted Kennedy presidency, but I am saying that here are two major U.S. political figures -- who couldn't have been more opposite in their approach to government -- who may never have seen the light of day had Ted Kennedy not been politically vulnerable in 1976.

By extension, too, you could conclude that much of what happened beyond the 80s might have been altered too.

Then again ... there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Ted Kennedy could just have easily thrown his hands up and said, "I don't WANT to be president." It certainly does seem that way. He always seemed very ambivalent about the whole idea of it. Even when he chose to run, in 1980, he couldn't complete a simple sentence telling Roger Mudd why he wanted to run.

He obviously felt a family pull toward reclaiming the White House out of memory for his fallen brothers. But it didn't seem to be a joyful task. It seemed to be more a grim project than anything else. He didn't really appear to be truly free of those expectations, and that legacy, until he chose not to run in 1988. That somehow triggered this tremendous release in him, too, as that's when he began what could only be described as his second adolescence ... a sort of non-stop spring break that culminated in him being in Palm Beach the night his nephew, Willie Smith, allegedly committed rape (a charge of which he was acquitted).

That was the only time in his life when his public transgressions affected his job. Because of all he was going through with the trial, and the exposure of his own sophomoric behavior, he was a non-factor in the Clarance Thomas hearings. And he had to get up at Harvard and confess these transgressions publicly, and promise to sin no more.

From that point on, a new, more dedicated, and certainly more effective Ted Kennedy emerged. He met, and married, his current wife, and it seemed truly happy and content with what life had given him. At an age when most people seem eager to kick back and enjoy the fruits of their lives, Kennedy was in there fighting ... and winning.

Always gregarious, friendly and helpful man even at his worse, he turned bipartisanship on issues that affected people positively into an art form. Kennedy developed the reputation for being able to reach across the aisle to either get support for his bills, or broker support for Republican legislation that he believed in.

Even though he had the reputation as being the "liberal lion," he also understood that compromise, and negotiations were more important when it came to getting things done than ideology. He could still state his case with resounding forcefulness, but he could also close a deal too.

His biggest political challenge came in 1994 when Mitt Romney ran against him, and somehow managed to insinuate that the Kennedys weren't as altruistic when it came to public service as they'd like you to believe.

"Mr. Romney," Kennedy shot back, "the Kennedys have never been in public service to make money. We've paid too high a price."

Game, set and match.

I don't know how you rectify the two diverging elements of Ted Kennedy's life. He was a deeply flawed human being who still managed to become a de facto father to a horde of nieces and nephews, and, with few exceptions, shepherd them to adulthood and productivity. It took him forever to grow up, yet even as he behaved like a college freshman in a dorm for the first time ever, he spearheaded some of the most meaningful legislation in our nation's history.

He might be the last true liberal to come out of old Roosevelt way of doing things, yet in many ways he was much larger than that.

Most of all, for a man with such national stature, he understood the old Tip O'Neil line that all politics is local. Ask anyone who ever sought help from him. He delivered.

Warts and all, Ted Kennedy is the last of a dying breed. We'll never see his likes again, and that, in the end, is a tragedy in and of itself.

Harper's Island

2009-07-15T20:54:00.001-07:00

Give me a good old fashioned whodunit and I'm a happy man. It doesn't have to be a good one either. Give me any whodunit and I'm there.

This would explain how easily I became hooked on "Harper's Island," the blatantly derivative whodunit it extravaganza that just concluded last Saturday on CBS.

I grew up watching Perry Mason, which, to me, is still the best whodunit TV series ever made. Yes, it's a lawyer show. But the whole premise was that the excruciatingly incompetent DA -- named Hamilton Berger (of all things!!) -- couldn't have won a case even if the defense didn't offer counsel. So you knew that whoever they arrested was NOT guilty. Which made Perry Mason a glorified whodunit.

But a good one nonetheless.

You want a good whodunit author? Agatha Christie springs to mind. Her murders were neat, sophisticated and unintrusive; and the killer was never a dead giveaway. Arthur Conan Doyle ... another one. First, there was Sherlock Holmes and Watson (who was played as a buffoon in the movies by Nigel Bruce, but wasn't anywhere NEAR as dumb in the books). The plots were intricate, and, like Christie, the killers were never obvious. I've see "Hound of the Baskervilles" about 600 times and there's still a point, every time I watch it, when I'm totally clueless as to the murderer, even though I KNOW who it is!

For my money, the single most artful, and most FUN whodunit ever was "Ten Little Indians," based on Agatha's "And Then There Were None." Imagine, 10 people on some little island, all of them bumped off one by one, until it's down to the final two characters (in this case, Philip Lombard and Vera Claythorne). Each suspects the other, because neither -- as it turns out -- is the perp.

I won't be the spoiler just in case you never saw it, but the ending will give you a jolt or two. I'll also say that the book and the movie have different endings. Same perp, but different endings.

"Harper's Island" owes a lot to "Ten Little Indians." Where the 10 victims were invited to the island by "Mr. U.N. Owen," in the earlier work, About a thousand potential victims (or so it seemed sometimes) sailed off to Harper's Island -- which is just off the Puegot Sound in Washington, apparently -- for a destination wedding.

And that's the first real weakness in this miniseries. There are just too many damn people to keep track of and care about. Ten -- as in the number of Indians -- was a nice little number. In Harper's Island, there were people crawling out of every corner. And once the show got going, they started dropping off faster than you could either count or absorb.

This was necessary, I suppose, to plow the field so that the cast characters who really mattered got their famous final scenes. And once the incidentals were winnowed out, THAT's when the thing finally got me hooked.

Another problem with this show was the absolute overkill of horror/slasher movie cliches. There was the obligatory creepy kid (you know, the precocious little twerp who seems to know way more than she chooses to tell, and has this "Lizzie Borden" look about her that makes you think that SHE has somehow pulled off this trainwreck of a wedding).

It was her voice that intoned the creepy "one by one" that served as the signature line in the opening credits. Some of the killing was rather derivative of whodunits of yore.

And it was too freaking BLOODY, even for a 21st century murder mystery. Here, I have to say that you're either a good, pot-boiler murder mystery or you're a slasher film. But you can't be both. "Harper's Island" tried to be both. I call this the "kitchen sink" method of TV production. Just get EVERYTHING in there so that when it's all over, you can say you had it all covered. In this regard, "Harper's Island" was no different than "Forest Gump" and "Mr. Holland's Opus" -- only with a lot more blood than both.

But the biggest complaint I have is that unlike "Ten Little Indians" they took the absolute cheap and easy way out. At least in "Ten Little Indians" the murderer WAS part of the group that got invited to the island. In Harper's Island, the murderer (or one of them, anyway), pulled a Lazarus and rose from the dead.

A little backtracking here. Seven years prior to the time period of the show, some guy named John Wakefield terrorized the island with a serial killing spree. One of the victims' daughters, Abby Mills, is returning to the island for the first time since the killings to attend the destination wedding. Even before she gets there, she's haunted by the memory.

The reason she's going is that her best friend, Henry, is getting married to Trish, the daughter of a rich businessman. Henry coaxes Abby back to the island.

Henry and Trish make the perfect Yuppie couple. Good looking (almost TOO trendy looking, actually), they look to be custom made for each other (even if Trish's father doesn't like Henry).

Anyway, Abby's father is the sheriff of Harper's Island, and -- supposedly -- he shot and killed Wakefield and that ended the spree.

But as soon as the wedding party arrives on the island, the murders begin anew ... each one more grisly than the last. Trish's father's murder is particularly gruesome.

Week after week after week, we get it POUNDED into our heads that John Wakefield is about as dead as Jacob Marley was. And that would be dead ... as in doornail.

Soon enough (but not soon enough for me!) the incidental characters were killed off -- some spectacularly and some off camera -- so that we were down to manageable cast. There were, of course, Abby, Henry and Trish; Jimmy (Abby's former boyfriend); Madison (the creepy kid) and her mother Shea; Chloe and Cal (the hottie and her English lover), Sully and Danny (Henry's best buddies) and Sheriff Mills.

The first to go is the sheriff, and what do you suppose happens after that? We find out that Wakefield is ALIVE!!! No shit! After more than 10 weeks of wondering WHO THE HELL could do something like this and still look everyone in the eye, we find out ... NO ONE!

This did not make me happy. I figure if CBS is going to make me sit through 10 weeks of blood, guts, bad dialogue, and a plot that -- at least in the beginning -- crept along slower than rush hour traffic in Manhattan, there should be some spectacular payoff ... not ... the dead guy wasn't dead!

Boy, did that piss me off. So OK, I figured, he couldn't do this all by himself. He HAD to have help. That much was obvious. There were still three episodes to go, much to early for a denouement.

But here, this just started getting ridiculous. Just about everyone on the island ended up wielding shotguns trying to catch this guy, and NOBODY COULD HIT HIM. Unbelievable. You'd think SOMEONE could have filled him up with buckshot.

Second, and let's not be too snide about this, if we'd sent John Wakefield over to Afghanistan, he'd have single-handedly killed the Taliban and captured Osama bin Laden. I mean, this guy was the commando's commando. Where the island denizens couldn't have hit water if they'd fallen out of a boat, this guy committed all his murders with NO WASTED MOTION. He went around with this boarding knife, while all the islanders had shotguns. He stayed alive; they got killed.

This actually led ME on a hideously wrong course because I got the bad feeling that we were going to be Victoria Principaled (remember ... she wakes up in Dallas to find out that Bobby's death -- and the subsequent year's worth of episodes -- was just a bad dream?).

Chloe and Cal were next, and their scene had some BALLS (one of the few that did). One of the games the writers in this series played is that every time the islanders split off in their efforts to find Wakefield (or whichever of the victims he'd spirited off to the underground tunnels -- another cliche) they were paired off differently. This -- obviously -- was done to divert suspicion from any single member, and I can understand that. But it often took on the characteristics of a Keystone Kops movie. You couldn't tell the players without a scorecard.

Anyway, Chloe goes missing and Cal goes off with Henry and Abby to find her. THEY go off in another direction, leaving CAL to rescue Chloe and propose marriage (kind of an odd place to get into all of THAT).

They have just enough time for one little kiss when WHOOOOSH, along comes Wakefield. Now, Cal SEEMS to be a pretty normal guy. He's smart ... he's a doctor ... he's good LOOKING ... but damn, he's standing about 10 feet away from Wakefield with a loaded gun ... and MISSES. I mean .. Come ON!

Naturally, he runs out of ammunition and tries to butt-end Wakefield (he of the boarding knife longer than a porn star's pecker) with the rifle.

Forget it. Wakefield easily disarms him, throws the rifle into the water, and in no time rams the knife through Cal, killing him (and throwing HIM into the drink too).

What follows is EASILY the best scene in the entire 13 weeks. Chloe tells Wakefield that he'll never have her (I suppose, meaning that she won't give him the satisfaction of killing her), leans backwards and falls into the water blow ... right next to Cal.

Even more annoying than the in-again-out-again antics of the cast (you go with him ... I'll go with her ... you stay ... and the next time we do all this we'll reshuffle the deck and play MORE musical chairs ...) were the obligatory red herrings. Most of them concerned Jimmy, who'd had a tough time adjusting when Abby left the island following her mother's murder.

Throughout all of this, the absolute ROCK of the group was Henry, the groom-to-be. He just seemed to absorb what needed to be absorbed, and he emerged as the voice of reason when everyone else was in full panic. In short, a real mensch.

But ... but ...

Well, they finally catch Wakefield ... and have another GOLDEN opportunity to kill them and put themselves out of their misery. And they elect NOT to. Instead, they tie him up with belts (are these fucking people SERIOUS????) and throw him in jail.

Here, we learn that Wakefield is bitter because Abby's mother -- with whom he'd had an affair years earlier -- gave up their son for adoption ... and to him, that was as bad as throwing him away. So he came back to the island to kill everybody all over again out of some sense of vengeance. And not to give anything away too soon, but this whole story line is absolutely preposterous if you can do even simple math.

These stumblebums, none of whom should have ever attempted law enforcement had they gone on to live through this, manage to allow Wakefield to escape, and he kills Danny (who at least puts up a good fight) with a paper spike. Shea and Madison (manning the fort with Danny while the others are out hunting around for God knows what) escape, Trish and Henry go back to the hotel for a shower and some sex, and Abby and Jimmy are paired off doing something else.

Henry and Trish are spooning on their bed when they hear a sound. Henry heroically goes off to investigate and Wakefield bangs the door down and goes after Trish, who is decked out in the wedding gown she WOULD have worn had the marriage ever taken place.

Trish breaks a window and escapes ... running into the arms of Henry ... who informs here, at this precise moment, that HE is Wakefield's accomplice. She cries, calls him a bastard, and he stabs her to death. Just like that. The anticlimax to end ALL anticlimaxes. We still have FIVE PEOPLE (not including Trish and Abby) alive and we already know who the killers are.

I suppose in the minds of the writers, the rest of the show had to have some kind of a denouement where the whole things was explained. Bullshit on that. I wanted it to go down to the wire, and have the killer and the lone survivor go mano-a-mano ... a fight to the death. That sort of thing. Either that, or I wanted one of these people to FIGURE IT OUT without all of them getting killed. Whatever, I didn't want the fucking KILLER to tell me with SEVEN PEOPLE STILL ALIVE!

Sadly, Sully's the next to go. Sully started off being an obnoxious frat boy and ended up tragically heroic. Yet Henry gets him alone, unburdens himself with some of the creepier aspects of his sociopathology, and stabs his erstwhile best friend to death.

What an asshole!

I don't even have to tell you this, because I know you're not this dumb, but for the sake of being thorough, Henry is -- of course -- Wakefield's son. And he staged this whooolllllle thing just to get Abby on the island ... presumably so she could watch as he and "dad" picked everyone off "one by one."

Henry, however, has one more trick up his sleeve. He kills WAKEFIELD instead of Abby (he backshoots Jimmy and thinks he's killed him, but dammit all if Jimmy doesn't turn up ALIVE). Oh, and I forgot ... Creepy kid and her mother got off the island in a motorboat that they just happened to find (golly, gee, look at THAT!!) in a deserted boathouse. The boat is gassed up, the motor works ... voila. As the Church Lady might have said, "how conveeeeeeeeenient."

I think I'll stop here for a second and offer this observation: These freaking people were just too NEAT for a bunch of scared shitless spoiled rich kids forced to run for their lives for all this time. Not a hair out of place, clean clothes, no brown spots anywhere in telltale areas, no stubble on the guys ... nothing. But you know ... if you're going to die, at least leave a good looking body behind. Right?

OK. After Henry kills Wakefield (he "chooses" Abby over his long-lost dad ... the same guy he's done all this killing for), Abby (FINALLY!!!!!!!) puts two and two together and gets the right answer. Henry flips over over so violently she hits her head and passes out ... and wakes up in some strange house. And for a fleeting moment, I'm saying "Shit! Fuck! NO! Not a dream! Goddamnit. If this is a dream I'll be so PISSED I might break my brand new LCD 42-inch flatscreen!!)."

Thankfully, no. Not a dream. But just as bad. Henry, as it turns out, is a RAGING sociopath (he says he always had these FEELINGS, but reconnecting with his father the serial killer just, you know, made it all make sense) who staged this whole thing, and got everyone from his previous life as an adopted son, out of the way so he and Abby (his half-sister as it turns out) could live happily after after. He also stages a church fire and fixes it so everyone's presumed dead. So he's a sociopath ... but he's a THINKING MAN'S sociopath. Uh huh.

Well, OK. They're supposed to be the same age, so HTF can they be half-siblings??? Somehow, the writers didn't exactly think that one through, ya think?

Abby, not surprisingly, wants know part of this lunatic. She escapes (more people escape in this damn show) and runs into the barn next door, where Jimmy sits, bound and gagged. Henry and Abby go into this whole song and dance about Jimmy, and why is he still alive, and how come you didn't kill HIM, and yada yada yada. Then she goes to kiss Jimmy goodbye and slips him a piece of metal so he can pick the locks of his handcuffs, which are behind him.

Jimmy turns into a contortionist and a locksmith and frees himself (again, if this were a creative writing course, this writer would have FLUNKED due to the sheer implausibility of the crap he wrote). Henry goes down by the water and threatens Abby, but Jimmy manages to jump Henry and they both fall over the cliff. One thing leads to another, and Abby -- who had Wakefield within her sighs about six dozen times and couldn't pull the trigger -- runs the boarding knife through Henry and kills the pathetic sonofabitch.

And she and Jimmy leave the island in a coast guard boat ... presumably headed for a life filled with group therapy, alcohol and drug abuse, and cursed with NEVER BEING ABLE TO EVER HAVE A NORMAL RELATIONSHIP AGAIN.

Despite all these criticism (and there were certainly enough of them), I watched every show, hung on every word, and tried to see through all the red herrings and other idiotic crap and find my killer. I had a sneaking suspicion Wakefield was going to turn up alive, but I didn't want to believe it, so I kept telling myself that it wasn't going to happen. They weren't going to be this cheap. But they were.

I also disregarded totally any suspect who was painted negatively during the course of the show, because that's Cliche No. 1 in throwing off whodunit aficionados. The bad guys are NEVER the killers. Ever. So JD (Henry's brother) and Jimmy (who was kind of sleazy) never crossed my mind as suspects.

Henry makes the most sense in that he controlled the levers here. It would be way too far fetched to think that any of the friends were involved, because how would they get everyone in one place? But for all I didn't like about the show, it's a credit to the writers that they put so many plot twists and red herrings in there that it wasn't BLATANTLY obvious that Henry was behind it all.

But as I said right up top, even BAD whodunits can hook me GOOD. And this just proves it.

What am I going to do on Saturday nights now??

Common sense about food

2009-06-04T05:20:00.000-07:00

I’ve always believed that most of life’s truly important decisions come down to that unwritten rule that can best be called “common sense.” You won’t find it in any textbook. And a lot of the time, what you DO find in textbooks, or in journals, or on the internet, defies that unwritten rule that can best be called “common sense.”

For example, common sense should dictate that inhaling acrid smoke from cylinders of tobacco wrapped in paper has to be unhealthy, especially since if you sucked the same chemicals contained in cigarette smoke from the exhaust pipe of a car, you’d die from carbon monoxide poisoning.

So whether tobacco is carcinogenic or not, you’d have to think it’s unhealthy. But ask anyone addicted to tobacco and they’ll rationalize their way out of it with explanations that make about as much sense as pretzel logic. The fact that tobacco IS a proven carcinogen just reinforces the common sense aspect of refraining from it, but, for whatever reason, people still flock to it like a moth is drawn to a flame. “It relaxes me.” “It relieves stress.”

Yeah. And it KILLS you too. Don’t forget that. Not to mention that it might be the most addictive of all commonly-abused substances.

But as addictive as tobacco is, there’s on surefire way to keep yourself from getting hooked. Don’t start smoking. That way, you’ll never have to deal with the problem. Similarly, there’s one ironclad way to manage alcoholism. Stop drinking. Not easy, but if you make the decision to stop, you never have to drink another drop of alcohol. Look the other way when you pass a saloon or a liquor store. Politely decline wine-tasting parties. Go home and play solitaire when someone breaks out the suds if you can’t handle being around it.

The point is … you don’t have to indulge.

Food is something entirely different, and that’s one of the reasons you see so many people today fighting weight problems. You can’t stop eating. Even if you are prone to uncontrollable binges, or 24-hour grazing, or you’re so badly diabetic that even a piece of bread spikes your blood sugar off the board, your body has to absorb nutrients, and the easiest – and certainly the most aesthetically pleasing – way to do that is through food.

Let’s talk a little about food. Or, rather, let’s say something nice about it … because there’s a lot nice to be said about it.

Food is cultural. It is central to most celebrations, especially ethnic celebrations. If you go to “Italian Night” at your local parish, you’re going to have pasta. You won’t see Vitamin C tablets underneath all that tomato sauce.

Food is also sensual (which is different from sensuous, although it could be that, too). Its flavors and aromas are certainly conducive to creating a friendly – even romantic – atmosphere. Or, to put it another way, if you’re wooing someone, and have a romantic evening in mind, you wouldn’t invite the object of your affections over to for a Met-RX shake. But you might cook a romantic dinner for two, with a nice, fresh apple pie for dessert afterward.

All of this goes in the way of saying that food is necessary component of life. Not only is it life-sustaining in a strictly biological sense, but it’s life-sustaining in a very real, spiritual and metaphysical sense too.

But while food can be hypnotizing in its effect on people, there is that double-edged sword where it can so dangerous too. Some foods are best eaten sparingly … delicious though they may be. And some foods – especially the ones that aren’t as aesthetically pleasing or conducive to romance -- seem to be the ones that end up being most nutritious and most beneficial to healthy living.

That’s not true in every case, of course (though if you’re in a position where you have to be selective about what you eat for health reasons, it might seem that way). But mixed in with all the joys of eating are some very stark, very cold, and very unappealing facts.

And the most important fact is this: Foods loaded with empty calories are of no nutritional value at all. They may taste heavenly, but they add nothing to the mix except inches around the middle and throughout the hips and, finally, the ever-expanding arse.

This doesn’t mean you can’t eat them!! It simply means that a steady diet of them, over a decent amount of time, will be more destructive than healthy.

We will get into what the term “empty calories” means. But the objective here is to address weight loss through common sense. I say that because we do not need formulas to lose weight. We don’t need “Zone diets” or “Dr. Atkins” or “L.A. Weight Loss” or anything else. I might take a flyer on Weight Watchers because it strives to create balance in the diet … which is the most important aspect of healthy eating.

But even then, losing weight comes down to common sense. If you eat every meal like it’s your last, filling yourself to the brim with whatever it is you’re putting into your mouth, you’re not going to lose weight. If you don’t exercise – even a little – and continue to eat like there’s no tomorrow, it won’t matter what you’re eating. You won’t lose weight.

There is no magic wand. There is no pill … no formula … no “ironclad” method. There is only you, your common sense quotient, and that little voice inside of you that will tell you how much you WANT to lose weight.

Oh, everybody wants to lose weight. Everybody wants to be healthy. Just like everybody who’s ever played baseball, or football, WANTS to be in the Major Leagues or the NFL.

Everybody wants it … until they figure out what it costs, not so much in terms of money, but in terms of sacrifice and hard work. Losing weight is the same. You won’t achieve one goal you strive for if you don’t want to make concessions, make sacrifices, be accountable, and take ownership of your particular body situation.

Of the four things I just mentioned, accountability is, to me, the most important. You cannot skate through life without being accountable. We’re all accountable. If we veer from the program enough times, that scale’s going to go in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter why. You could have a million good reasons … a wedding, a funeral, a birthday party, a banquet, a family cookout, a dinner party, some sort of a stressful situation … all perfectly good, perfectly NORMAL, reasons to relax your disciplines and overeat.

The scale doesn’t know the difference. Your cardiovascular system doesn’t know the difference. And if you’re diabetic, your body’s ability to handle glucose normally doesn’t know the difference. The accountability comes with what the scales, or the blood readings, or the cholesterol screenings, show.

So, the first thing we need to learn is that losing weight is 100 percent dependent upon how much we want to lose weight. How willing are we to do whatever it takes, no matter how crazy, how uncomfortable, how socially constricting, and how miserable it makes us. If you want to compare yourself with anyone, go to the gym and watch an athlete work out, especially in the summer. While all their friends are at the beach, they’re lifting weights, or running the track … often all alone.

They didn’t get those sculpted bodies just by wishing. They got them by working. If you’re heavy, or unhealthy, you won’t change YOUR body just by wishing. Or bitching about how unfair life is. Of course it’s unfair. Big deal. It doesn’t change anything. The scale does not lie. The blood kit does not lie. If the news isn’t good, then the only person who can change that is YOU!

We are all born with our own genetic code. Some of us are lucky. Obesity might not run in our families. Diabetes may not be a hereditary issue either. We may escape without becoming arthritic (though chances are that won’t happen; all of us eventually fall victim to that in some way, shape or form).

But the rest of us have to face these issues in some variety, and if we do, we do. If we’re inclined to be overweight, and if our bodies are naturally pear-shaped, or even more rotund, the reality is that we may never have a beach body. Women are hamstrung by the fashion-model look (which, I swear, is obtained only through extreme anorexia or bulimia) but guys don’t have it much easier. The guy-ideal is some buffed up ego freak who has either gotten that way through 24/7 gym time or (and probably more accurately) through steroids and human growth hormones.

The rest of us should be so lucky. My advice to anyone who sees these images and gives up hope is, “don’t look.” And if you forget yourself and look, keep repeating after me, “that’s not reality … that’s not reality.”

Reality is we come in all shapes and sizes, and reality is that we won’t get anywhere on our road to being healthy and REASONABLY thin if we can’t accept who we are or what our bodies look like; and that, like them or not, our bodies are uniquely our own.

But acceptance and giving in aren’t anywhere near the same. We may accept bad bone structure, but that doesn’t mean we have to concede our health as a result. We may accept that we’re doomed to a life of fighting the good fight, but that doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the dark side.

Oh, we do need to surrender sometimes, but in a different way. We need to surrender the notion that we can control our physical idiosyncrasies, or that we can control certain aspects of our life. We need to get that idea completely of our heads. But before I start sounding like a friend of Bill W (not that it’s a BAD thing to sound that way), I should stress that what we can’t control, we can certainly MANAGE. And maybe that’s a better word for it. And that’s what I mean about taking ownership. It’s our body, warts and all. It’s up to us to love it and accept it as our own, warts and all.

And of course you don’t deface something you love. You do your best with what you have. If you’re anywhere past the age of 13 and female, you’ve probably experimented with makeup (I shouldn’t be sexist; maybe there are some guys who do this too). And if you’re any age, and any gender, chances are good that you try to find a hairstyle (well, those of us who still HAVE hair anyway) that fits our face and looks reasonably pleasant.

We need to see our bodies in the same way we see our faces and hair. At its most basic, it is what it is. But with a little makeup, a nice hairstyle, some coloring, and perhaps a decent wardrobe, it will look somewhat presentable to the world at large.

We should put the same care into the body from the neck down, too. It is what it is. But healthy living, a decent diet, some consistent exercise (though certainly not excessive by any stretch) could make all the difference in the world.

Consistent exercise is simply walking at a good clip for about 45 minutes to an hour a day. It is also important to incorporate about two or three days worth of strength training … not to look like Ahnuld in his prime, but because, in later years, it could go a long way toward warding off osteoporosis.

But again, common sense comes into play here. What does that mean? Does it mean going to the gym every day and getting a hernia lifting weights? Are you supposed to drop dead trying to power lift three times your weight?

Of course not. It could mean anything from doing a 15-minute routine with handweights three mornings a week while watching “Crossing Jordan” reruns all the way up to the aforementioned. Whatever works best for YOU … as long as it’s SOMETHING.

So it’s not necessary to set records when it comes to exercise. Just move! Eventually, when you get comfortable with it, and it doesn’t become such a chore, moving might be easier and you may want to move even MORE. But never to the point where you injure yourself or where it becomes counterproductive in any way.

I view eating in much the same way. It is an excellent idea – if you’re totally new at this – to see a nutritionist (not to mention a cardiologist if you’re just starting out on an exercise plan after not having done any stressful activity in years) for some basic education. But that’s really all you need. A healthy diet should consist of a core group of foods (and it cuts a pretty wide swarth, too) with enough variety to comprise about 80 percent of your diet.

Anyone who’s ever done this knows what they are without me having to go over them here, but let’s generalize: Lean protein, lots of complex carbohydrates (and let’s understand that means fruits and vegetables, NOT truckloads of spaghetti), fiber (cereals, broccoli, etc.) and SPARING amounts of starchy carbs. And if you have to eat them, avoid white flour and refined sugar – at least as part of this core food plan (I hesitate to call it a diet). They are the WORST. And if you’re a diabetic, they convert to glucose once they hit your system faster than GLUCOSE does!!

Naturally, there are limits. But rather than bog you down with measurements and formulas, let’s just say that if you can refrain from eating until you feel full, and you’re keeping to these core foods, and you’re exercising, you WILL lose weight.

Nobody says this is easy. It’s simple … but not easy. It’s not easy to tear yourself away form a nice meal before you start feeling full. Sometimes, it’s not easy even KNOWING how to gauge that. But it’s a trick we should all learn.

One way is to train ourselves to eat slowly (a big problem of MINE; I eat like there’s a hurricane approaching). Eating rapidly puts you in the “full” category before you even know you’re there. Eating slowly gives you a fighting chance to take stock in what you’re doing. Remember this: It takes 20 minutes for the brain to know the stomach is full.

Another way is to make eating your sole occupation for the duration of your meal. That means no eating while watching TV, no eating while you’re working, no eating while you’re reading (even the morning paper, alas). Just eat. It’s part of the retraining process.

Another way is to eat AT THE TABLE. Sit down and ENJOY YOUR MEAL AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE ENJOYED. Don’t shove eating in there with a thousand and one other activities.

Also, get RID of this notion that eating is only allowed three times a day with no snacks. That’s true if your meals are spaced within five-hour intervals.

Otherwise, you should incorporate healthy snacks into your meal plan because they curb the excessive hunger that can lead to an overeating binge.

We tend to eat the most when we’re ravenously hungry. So, not only should you not SKIP meals, you should perhaps HAVE that mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack. Just know that when you do, this is when you have to have the discipline to limit it to something sickeningly healthy … like an orange, or maybe a small salad, or carrot sticks (you get the idea).

Finally, it’s not a bad thing to splurge every once in a while. This accounts for all the times that you go somewhere and find out there’s nothing healthy for you to eat. So what you do, instead of obsessing about it, is eat the best thing you can find AND DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP OVER IT.

It also accounts for those days when you’re just sick to death of the grind and the pressure of it all, and just HAVE to have that steak bomb, or the quarter pounder with fries. That’s OK. Eat up. Just know that these items are delicacies if you ever plan on taking off weight and keeping it off.

Most of all, try not to obsess. There are plenty of things about life to obsess about, but food shouldn’t be one of them. Remember, if we weren’t meant to enjoy the sensual side of life, we’d be chomping vitamins and eating leaves off trees like elephants and giraffes.

Since we’re not, then let’s celebrate the fact that we get to choose how we provide nutrients to ourselves … and let’s go about making GOOD choices.

More later.

In defense of newspapers

2009-05-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

Thirty years ago last month, I began my association with what was then the Daily Evening Item. Now it's simply The Daily Item.

I bring this up not to seek accolades, but to comment that much has changed in our industry since that Tuesday morning in 1979 when I walked into the second-floor newsroom to begin what has been an enriching and rewarding career at the paper.

In 1979, newspapers still held the upper hand in the gathering and dissemination of information, although television was – and in some cases still is – an unwelcome intrusion into the world of serious journalism. Even then, print people despised the “mike jockeys” as “rip and readers” whose only attributes were their voices and their looks.

Today, of course, the print medium – judging from the depressing advertising and circulation figures we’re seeing daily – would appear to be pretty far down the list of preferred news sources. There was no internet in 1979, and therefore no explosion of free, easy, and often glaringly biased information tailored to fit the political slant of just about everyone who has an opinion.

We are what we’ve always been … a slow-moving industry (printing once a day in an age of lightning-fast dissemination of news tends to paint you with that brush) that, while flawed by natural human imperfections, still holds to a uniform set of standards and is still bound by a uniform set of laws. And while there are some serious and responsible blogs on the web, it’s also true that, for the most part, internet postings are impervious to the types of checks and balances that at least attempt to keep the print medium fair.

Newspapers aren’t dead, but their print editions are in trouble. It’s likely that if you added the number of editions sold and the number of hits papers get on their websites (and this is especially true for papers that update their sites frequently) one could conclude the industry is as healthy as it ever was.

But that doesn’t explain why papers such as the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe are reeling, and why other papers have shut down their print editions entirely. I will leave it to those with far more expertise in the business side than me to explain that!

We stand to lose something very valuable if newspapers are to fall victim to the Information Age. And I’m not talking about the eradication of democracy as we know it (I don’t like that argument very much, frankly).

Of course, it’s true that a good newspaper holds the powerful accountable (often to the chagrin of the powerful and their allies). But whatever flaws there may be in the internet’s ability to be restrained and responsible, holding the powerful accountable is well within its capabilities.

But newspapers have other purposes. Even with a laptop and wireless, eating breakfast with your computer can be cumbersome. Eating it with the paper spread out in front of you is saner, neater and far less expensive if you spill your cereal or get crumbs all over the place.

Joking aside, I got into this business, and gravitated toward newspapers, because I always saw them as communities unto themselves. They were one-stop shopping vehicles where you could find out what was going on in your communities, find out who died, who got arrested, which local teams won, what was playing at the local theaters, which store was selling hamburg at five percent off, and what was on TV tonight. At the same time, you could clip coupons, do the crossword, play bridge and even chess, do word puzzles, check box scores and standings.

And best of all, you could do all of the above in some degree of comfort and with absolutely no pressure to be technologically current.

I’m sure someone from every generation has said this, but it’s doubly true now: this is a terrifyingly fast, impersonal age. Advances in technology happen faster than most of us can fathom, and there’s more and more pressure to either keep up with them or fall hopelessly behind.

The pace may be slower with newspapers, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even with things changing a mile a minute, it’s necessary sometimes to digest, and to process. It’s also necessary to preserve and remember.

Newspapers give you something you’ll never find on the internet: A daily snapshot of life. Years from now, you can go back to an edition from The Item, and get a pretty accurate picture of what life was like on that day. It would really, really be a shame to sacrifice that for the convenience of staring at life through a monitor.

Reflections on Brother Linus, CFX, upon the dedication of the new athletic complex in his name at St. John's Preparatory School ... my alma mater.

2009-05-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Brother Linus was my religion teacher in my freshman year at St. John’s Prep … but to end the sentence there does monumental injustice to the man.

He was so much more.

He was, all at once, a coach, a teacher, a mentor, a guidance counselor, and, perhaps most of all, a shepherd … taking the often-frightened freshmen who swarmed into the school each September and guiding them through that transition into young adulthood.

Schools such as St. John’s Prep are not for everyone. Even if you do have an above-average intelligence quotient, a place like The Prep demands so much more in the way of academic accountability than simply the natural, sometimes effortless ability to absorb information.

In fact, if you’re academically gifted, and expect to coast through St. John’s Prep based solely on that good fortune, save your money. You’ll have missed the entire point of what makes The Prep special.

Every school of this type needs a Brother Linus … someone who is not afraid to remind a 14-year-old kid that he’s just entered the world of high expectations while, at the same time, making it clear that he has that young man’s back as he navigates the rough waters of adjustment.

In 1967, I was that 14-year-old kid, catapulted out of the cocoon of Sacred Heart School in Lynn and thrust into the social maelstrom of The Prep. I had no idea what to expect. I knew this wasn’t Lynn Classical. For one thing, the school resembled a small college campus (my grandmother could never get used to that; she’d always ask me “how’s college?” when she inquired about school). And, back in 1967, residents boarded there. But otherwise, it was all new … and terrifying.

It was major culture shock … not to mention culture clash. One of my classmates came from Aruba, and had never seen snow until the first time we got some that winter. And boy, did we get some … a sneak snowstorm in November that made a major mess out of the commute home. I can still remember sitting in a parking lot that was Route 128, until well past nightfall, in a car with four other classmates and one beleaguered mother whose turn it was – sadly, for her -- to carpool.

Welcome to the winter wonderland, Mike Maxey (the classmate) and Mary McGovern (the mom).

Maxey must have liked the snow, by the way. He lives in Quincy now.

My freshman class was divided into seven groups, ranging from Offical Class (O.C.) Zero (the exceptionally smart ones) to O.C. Six (do the math). The only thing all of us had in common that year was the religion teacher: Brother Linus. I’m sure that, since we were at a school staffed with Xaverian Brothers, this not due to a shortage of religion teachers; nor was it any accident.

As a freshman guidance counselor, Brother Linus was – for all intents and purposes – the official “shepherd” of the ninth grade, whether that was part of his job description or not. He was the best friend a young kid could have at The Prep. Between the clashes in background and the inevitably wide disparity in emotional maturity that comes with a diverse group of kids, The Prep could be an extremely difficult and lonely place if you found yourself on the low end of the food chain in one respect or another.

Brother Linus was always there to help you sort it out, even if he often did it with tough love. He wasn’t afraid to tell you if he thought your difficulties were of your own doing, but he could do it in a way that reinforced your confidence instead of destroying it. That is a special gift.

As a religion teacher, all I can say is that Brother Linus turned the Baltimore Catechism on its head daily, whether he was describing Moses and his refugees -- as they wandered through the desert -- as “a bunch of rag-tag Jews,” or calling all the women in the Old Testament “Jezebels.”

He also used religion class as a time to bond with his students – many of them budding athletes (The Prep being an athletic, as well as academic, Mecca) – in other ways.

His universal greeting to all was, “Hey, ace.” One of the first things he told us was that he was a close personal friend of Vince Lombardi, the late, great coach of the Green Bay Packers. His lectures were always peppered with “Vince-isms,” and he’d often begin a class by saying, “I was on the phone with Vince last night …”

This seemed like it could be true. He was the freshman football coach. And there may have been a time, albeit briefly, when, naïve as I was, I actually believed him.

He loved his football … and disdained basketball (which he derisively called “bouncy-bounce”). He’d have us in the aisles with his impressions of a basketball player, running around in his short-shorts, screaming, “owww … he touched me.”

He didn’t seem to have much use for tennis, either. Once, during a particularly uninspired freshman football practice, he gathered us all together and pointed to where the tennis courts were (you couldn’t see them from the field, so it was an approximation) and said, “if want to go over there and hit that little rubber ball back and forth across that net, be my guest.”

But if he was entertaining as a coach and a teacher, he was also tough. He ran hard and physical practices, both in football and hockey … and never let up (not even when the Red Sox were fighting to win the 1967 pennant and – much to his annoyance -- we’d all be on the lookout for game updates if they were being played in the afternoon).

He was one of the few teachers I had at The Prep who actually gave out a syllabus (he didn’t call it that; but that’s what it was). On it was the term “SQ,” which stood for “surprise quiz.”

The only surprise about these quizzes is that they were brutal.

Brother Linus also demanded that we maintain a thorough (and legible) notebook that chronicled all his bon mots (over which he pored – at the end of every quarter -- as if he were an auditor for the IRS).

This, of course, was part of the shepherding process. I came to The Prep grossly unprepared for young adulthood, of course, and my first encounter with the tough side of Brother Linus the Teacher came when I got that notebook back at the end of the first quarter … with just a string of question marks all in a neat, tidy row … and a great, big “F.” I got a 75 for that quarter, pulled down considerably because of the sloppy notebook.

He told me he was being “generous,” because it was the first quarter of my freshman year, but that he was also pretty steamed at my total lack of care and organization. My mother was mortified. How could such a good Catholic boy – “and an altar boy, no less -- do so horribly in religion?

This led to the discovery of Krause’s Law No. 1: Religion teachers are eternally vigilant when it comes to ferreting out students who would tend to blow their courses off as irrelevant in comparison to English, Algebra, History and/or just about anything else … and they mark accordingly. I learned, after that disaster, never again to slight the religion teacher at St. John’s Prep.

Brother Linus died, quite unexpectedly, in 1977 … six years after I left The Prep and only a decade after I had the privilege of being one of his students. I always thought of him as indestructible, much like Red Auerbach. And it was hard to fathom that he had died.

Thanks to teachers like Brother Linus (and Paul Smith, Tom Ford, Bob McKenna, John Westfield, and many others) I sailed through college. I developed decent and disciplined study habits thanks to the expectations placed on me by the Xaverian Brothers education model.

Above all, I always kept an organized, legible notebook for every course in my five years at Northeastern University. Thank you, Brother Linus.

Shortly after the new Brother Linus athletic complex was dedicated, I went up to The Prep on a whim and decided to give myself a private tour. I walked all around the complex (which is massive, and impressive, and has neither a basketball nor a tennis court on hits grounds!) and, well, the ghosts just spoke to me.

I was immediately transported back to 1967, on that very field, hitting a tackling sled, listening to his lectures about guts, determination and Vince Lombardi, and how much it killed me to face him, in late October of that year, and tell him that due to poor grades my parents told me I had to quit the freshman team.

As I walked around the campus on that beautiful April day, I made my way up to the cafeteria and saw a gaggle of 14-year-old freshmen emerge from the building and spill out onto the campus. Which one of them was me? Which one of them had been ejected from the cocoon of a protective Catholic elementary/middle school and thrust, totally unprepared, into the social maelstrom of The Prep?

And who, in 2009, is The Prep’s Brother Linus?

Whoever he is, may God bless him.

Farewell, George W. Bush

2009-01-17T20:31:00.000-08:00

I did this eight years ago, when Clinton's term expired, and I'm going to attempt it again ... and TRY to be as fair as possible.

First, let's establish one thing: George W. Bush is probably a good guy deep down inside. He strikes me as such. I mean, if I sat next to him at a ballgame, and we struck up a conversation, I'd imagine we'd be able to talk, and laugh, and wax philosophical about our love of baseball and sports.

So I'll go into this thinking he's not the personification of evil. I'll reserve that judgment for some of the others who contributed toward making these last eight years a very dark period in American history. But I'll cut HIM some slack. He reminds me of nothing more than a regular guy who has difficulty hiding his frustration at times, and even more difficulty admitting he might have miscalculated and made some mistakes. Sort of like your average fear-crazed boss bucking for a good review at your expense. Nice enough people ... until cornered. Then, the claws come out, and the fangs bared.

I wasn't happy he got elected, even though I never liked Al Gore. I thought Gore was bad candidate, that he made a poor choice in running mates, and that his campaign, and the way he campaigned, was very uninspiring. On the other hand, Bush is like a lot of political candidates ... great on the stump, able to connect on a personal level, but with nothing tangible to back it up. If I didn't study issues, and really LISTEN to some of the things he said -- not to mention pay attention to the people with whom he surrounded himself -- I might have voted for him too. He was a much more amiable-looking person on the campaign trail, happier, looser, more relaxed, and I would imagine people with no other point of reference voted for him because of that.

I don't know if the election was stolen. It's quite possible that Florida was simply a giant clusterfuck that was nobody's fault, and that the process was irreparably muddled. I know that's the way you steal elections ... create enough doubt and uncertainty as to render the entire process irrelevant. But since the Democrats have done this too in the past too, my reaction to this is shame on THEM for not being prepared for such an eventuality. If they got caught looking -- to borrow a baseball term -- then too bad. It isn't as if it's the first time it ever happened.

But if I were the Republicans, I'd hesitate to be that brazen, on the assumption that the Democrats would have watchdogs on the payroll to ferret out such things. I'll bet the Republicans did!

At any rate, the entire process was a farce, it made the U.S. look bad, and whether it was legit or not, by January 20, 2001, we had a president and it was up to us to at least wish him well. To do anything else borders on unpatriotic, I think. The process played itself out under the system that was put in place to adjudicate it, and, flawed or perfect, it is what it is. If you don't like the process, by all means get it changed by the next election. But absent that, it was what it was.

He wasn't my guy, and I'll admit that once the process started, I hoped, against hope, that they'd find something down there to overturn the results and swing the election to Gore. His issues, and his way of thinking, were more in line with mine. But despite everything, I had this feeling of powerlessness. My president was George W. Bush, I'm an American citizen, and, like him or not, I certainly didn't want him to fail. But I didn't think it was a realistic expectation.

I got an uneasy feeling even before the inauguration ... well, even before the election. Dick Cheney was a Henry Kissinger disciple, and I'm of the opinion that Kissinger, as Machiavellian as they come, did more than any American diplomat of his era to put us in bad standing in the world.

Anyway, that was one of the big reasons I could never have voted for Bush. Another is that even though he seemed like a regular guy, I had no respect for his intelligence or his curiosity (sometimes, you don't even have to be that SMART ... but for God's sake have some innate curiosity about the world around you!).

I saw Bush then -- as I do now -- as a child of privilege who never extended his realm beyond his core world. And while you may counter that the Kennedys were also children of privilege, let's not forget that three of them fought in World War II, one of them was killed, and another wounded badly enough that he was physically incapacitated for the rest of his life. There WAS another side to them ... a side that George W. Bush, by his own doing, avoided seeing.

Simply put, George W. Bush was, to me, a frat boy whose life was bought and paid for by privilege. He might have been an amiable enough fellow, but didn't have a clue as to what the problems in this country were. He rode out every possible crisis the country faced, protected by money and privilege. About the only thing in which he truly succeeded was running the Texas Rangers, and he was so good at that he traded Sammy Sosa to the Cubs!

So, my fear wasn't that George W. Bush, himself, would take the country down some lonely, badly-traveled roads; but that the people around him -- the ones who groomed him for this undertaking -- would steer him there, and that he'd lack the requisite intelligence and curiosity to know any better.

As dull, boring, and completely uninspiring as Al Gore was, I got the feeling that he'd at least be his own man. He could have been the most ordinary of ordinary presidents (and I have a feeling he would have been), but I doubt there would have been half the drama, and half the trauma, that we got out of Bush -- and that's even WITH the acknowledgement that 9/11 probably would have happened regardless of WHO was president.

More about 9/11 before we go on. Within months of Bill Clinton's inauguration, terrorists planted bombs beneath the World Trade Center. Within months of George W. Bush's inauguration, terrorists flew planes into the WTC and killed 3,000 people. If the Obama people don't see a trend here, then they're not paying attention and have NO business claiming they were taken by surprise if some radicals try something this year.

But, alas, 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch, and, rightly or wrongly, he gets the blame. Just as Obama will get the blame if some public mall, or sports venue, is blown to smithereens this year.

Pursuant to 9/11, let me say here that I doubt there was a right, or a wrong, initial response. We needed Bush to express justifiable outrage, and we needed him to pledge, firmly and without hesitation, that those responsible would be held accountable. It's what happened AFTER that, however, what we can debate.

While nobody's suggesting we should ever forget that day, Bush pretty much based his entire presidency on the event. Especially during his first term, when he needed the seed to sprout daily for political purposes, he managed to get Sept. 11 into the conversation every chance he got. It was as if he woke up in the morning, looked at himself in the mirror, and the first words out of his mouth were "9/11." People got irritated with Jimmy Carter during the 1980 campaign for wrapping the flag around himself, hiding in the Rose Garden, and using the Hostage Crisis to his advantage, but he had NOTHING on Bush. George W. had now written the textbook on how to exploit a national tragedy.

Or should I say Karl Rove has.

I think history will judge George W. Bush the same way it judged Warren G. Harding ... as a slow-witted man led astray by advisers with agendas that didn't exactly jibe with the national interest. In an era when the world was changing, and in an era when our enemies had discovered an effective -- deadly, even -- way to level the playing field, Bush's team tried, in vain, to turn the clock back to the 1950s ... the immediate post-WWII aftermath in which the American Way was seen as the World Way by the part of the planet not imprisoned by the so-called Iron Curtain.

Problem is, a lot of water had flown under the dam between 1945 and 2000. Where our reputation, coming out of World War II, was of benevolence and heroism, our armor had been pierced a few times. We overthrew regimes, regardless of their popularity, if it didn't serve our interest. We lost, and lost BADLY, in Vietnam, after all was said and done. Each time we tried to play traffic cop to snuff out some local dispute, we created enemies as a result. A rag-tag band of Iranians got the better of us, holding our diplomats hostage. Zealots snuck a truckload of bombs into a Beirut barracks, killing over 200 marines. We got caught with our pants down in the Iran-Contra scandal. We sent the marines into Granada, and launched a military assault on Panama. We sent troops to Saudi Arabia and drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. We launched periodic bombing raids on Iraq.

This isn't to say that some of these actions were justifiable or strategically necessary. But we got a reputation for being heavy-handed in much the same manner Israel is perceived now.

The world may have been prepared to accept a sort of pax Americana in 1945, but it wasn't in 2000. And overtures by the neocons who took over the Bush White House had to appear, to the outside world, as if the U.S. was going to try to reassert its dominance at a time when many countries and cultures were fighting to assert their own way of life. And I think this really came back to haunt the U.S. when it looked for allies to fight in Iraq. Countries that were with us in the 1991 Gulf War, declined this time.

I have no problem with what happened in Afghanistan. The Taliban supported bin Laden, and in that situation, that's guilty enough for me. I just with that Bush had finished one job before going onto the completely unnecessary war in Iraq.

There's plenty of evidence that this was the game-plan from Day 1. Perhaps there were a few neocons who worked in H.W. Bush's regime who disagreed with Poppy when he refused to march onto Baghdad when he had the army and the tactical advantage to do so. But while Poppy may have been patrician and out of touch himself, he was not dumb. Poppy understood, obviously better than the neocon zealots who worked for him, that there was always a "now, what?" about conquering Baghdad.

And the “now, what” would have been the most difficult part of such a campaign. H.W. obviously didn’t want to deal with that, and, in retrospect, I’d say H.W. made the right choice. I’m also guessing that he followed the advice of his Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the person of Colin Powell, who convinced him that owning Baghdad was more trouble than it was worth.

And Dubya made the wrong choice. Not only did he make the wrong choice, he lied and schemed to win support. I refuse to believe, for example, that Bush didn’t know the intelligence was cooked prior to the invasion. I know I’ve said that he was woefully lacking in curiosity, but you’d have to comatose not to be able to say to your intelligence community “look, SHOW me a weapon – any weapon – and we’ll talk. Until then, forget it.”

No. These people wanted to finish the job they felt Bush I vacated, and they talked his son into doing it. No other explanation fits. And there are all sorts of problems with this. First, all situations change with time … and 10 years is a lot of time. There were obviously other trouble spots, different enemies, different threats … and, well, Saddam Hussein was soooo 1990. He wasn’t bothering anyone outside his own borders. And to the people who try to justify our involvement with the canard that we were overthrowing a cruel dictator, my answer is that there were people over there shooting at US … and OUR citizens, and OUR military. With all due respect to the Iraqi people, we needed to solve THAT problem first. Try to stabilize the rest of the region – as best as you can – and THEN figure out how to deal with Saddam.

Instead, the Bush administration destabilized the region even more. Not only that, it invited radical fringe groups to sprout up all over the country and turn what should have been a relatively easy military exercise (based on the comparative strength of the armies) into a protracted struggle that lasted longer than our involvement in World War II. This was such a monumental failure in planning and execution that it staggers the mind.

This would have been inexcusable even if the circumstances that led to the war were legitimate. The fact that they weren’t makes such gross failure criminal.

The Iraq war tops the list of Bush administration catastrophes because it was conducted under false pretenses and bungled worse than a third-rate burglary. But there were others.

Hurricane Katrina was nobody’s fault, to be sure. And even if federal response was perfectly orchestrated, and even if Brownie HAD done a heck of a job, there would have been devastation in New Orleans of a similar scope to what eventually happened.

But there wasn’t. And while it’s certainly true that state and local authorities should also be held accountable for THEIR part in this massive show of incompetence, the fact remains that there was NO federal oversight until it was much too late.

Acknowledging the fact that natural disasters defy planning and order, the biggest beef I have with Bush over Katrina was his seeming lack of concern while it was happening. As with the days preceding 9/11, when the intelligence community was all over the possibility that something was afoot (they just didn’t know what), Bush remained in vacation mode while one of his country’s most vital cities was literally going under water.

Compare that response to that of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was in the U.S. meeting Ronald Reagan when a massive earthquake ravaged a part of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev hopped the next plane and went back to the USSR. He understood the urgency. Bush didn’t … and still doesn’t.

I was never a fan of Bush’s rhetoric. I cringed at “Axis of Evil,” and “Bring ‘em on.” I thought his ridiculous preening on May 1, 2003, and the whole “Mission Accomplished” fiasco was unconscionable, not only because he turned out to be so wrong, but because he did everything in his POWER to avoid putting the uniform on when it was his time to. It’s one thing to get out of serving in the military. Clinton did it too. But you didn’t see him running around in a fighter pilot’s uniform!

This brings us to the 2004 presidential campaign, when Bush and Rove et al were their most Machiavellian … managing to turn John Kerry’s war record against him, even though Kerry at least HAD one to distort. That took gall, and the only thing I can say about it is that these people were their most cynical when it came to the way they played politics. And we Americans are at our most unconscious when it comes to being able to see through blatant political distortion. Karl Rove understood that, and took advantage of it daily.

I’m sure John Kerry wasn’t the most highly decorated veteran ever to have served in Vietnam. But he went, when he could have easily done the George W. route and hid in the guards … and then not shown up half the time there.

Kerry, like Gore, did not run a good campaign. He didn’t hit back hard enough when Bush attacked his war record. No, it didn’t help him that he took such an active stance in the antiwar protest movement when he came back, or that he threw his medals over a fence, or that he had a different story for every move he made, depending on what day it was. Kerry did plenty to derail himself. And the Democrats were perhaps a little squeamish about the idea of a loose cannon like Howard Dean as their standard bearer too (hindsight being what it is, however, they should have stuck with him. Turns out crazy old Dean had a plan in 2004, and was probably just as responsible, as chairman of the DNC, as anybody else of helping Obama get elected last November).

But damn. Kerry was running against a guy who was in the middle of massively botching the war he’d PLEADED for. And the No. 1 weapon the Bush team used AGAINST him was – of all things – his war record. George Orwell must have smiled, wherever he was.

That, of course, and religious extremism. I think if there’s any one positive that came out of Bush’s presidency it is this: it forced people in this country to re-examine the role religion plays in their lives. Not everybody, of course, because while a lot of Americans woke up to the dangers of religious manipulation, others dove that much deeper into it. That was one of the other big stories of 2004 – the grip that the religious right had on parts of the country.

I should think that by now, all but the most zealously religious can understand WHY it’s dangerous to mix anything “faith-based” with government. All we need to do is see how badly religious extremism, not necessarily in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, has been an instrument of destruction.

Only the unsightly denouement of the Bush presidency in his second term loosened that grip.

Part of Bush’s stubborn streak is due to his religious fervor – his steadfast belief that he’s on the side of “good” as opposed to evil. He never stopped to see, or to even look for, the shades of gray. Because, as with most religions, there are no shades of gray. Only absolutes.

Even before Obama was elected, Bush had already basically abdicated. His standing within his own part had deteriorated to the point where the alleged allies he’d had over the course of his presidency turned on him and embarrassed him badly over the bailout. And although John McCain ran a campaign that was every bit as bad in 2008 as John Kerry’s was in 2004, the fact remains that the financial meltdown greased his skids as much as anything else did. Until the meltdown in October, this race was not only close, it looked as if McCain might even pull it out.

I don’t want to get into the subtle racism of the 2008 campaign, because, honestly, I don’t see where Bush contributed to it. Bush basically stayed out of it. He may have made some half-hearted endorsements of McCain, but he didn’t go out of his way to help the guy – which must really gnaw at McCain, since he all but sold his soul to the neocons in an effort to win.

No. I can blame a lot of things on Bush, but I don’t think you can lay the codified racism at his feet. Mainly because by the time October rolled around, I don’t think he even cared. He knew the end was in sight, and I think he had reached the point where it couldn’t end soon enough. I honestly don’t think it mattered to him who won as much as it mattered to him that he was OUTA HERE!

In fact, I’ll extrapolate a little here and suggest that what really vexed Bush about the meltdown is not that it happened, but that it couldn’t wait until he was out of office. It was like one, final kick in what was already a flaming-red ass.

Once Obama won, Bush all but abdicated. There was no final flurry of activity … no rush to do something monumental to cement his legacy … the way Clinton tried, hard, to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians (do we remember how the Republicans stood in his way so he couldn’t DO that??).

The day after he got elected, Obama said that the country had only one president, and that he was perfectly willing to wait until his time came. Problem was, Bush seemed to want to hand the job off NOW! It was one, final ignominious act in presidency full of them. In the last month, we’ve heard more from Obama on official national matters, particularly with regards to the economy, than we have Bush.

That is sad.

If I were to use a psychological term to describe the Bush presidency it would be “bi-polar.” It was filled with high risks, intertwined with whining and sniveling when hit with criticism. On one hand, he wanted to go boldly where no man had ever gone … but treated those who might not have been up for the trip with scorn and derision. He unfairly questioned people’s patriotism, worked toward defeating politicians who opposed him by hinting they were traitors, felt it necessary – and even allowable – to violate civil rights and engage in the type of torture indigenous to the very people we were fighting … and, in short, probably did more to tarnish this country’s stated standards than any president in my lifetime.

I am not sorry to see him go. My ONLY hope for Barack Obama is that he act in a more even-handed, less arrogant, and less ideologically CERTAIN, manner. I’ll deal with my disagreements with him so long as he refrains from the arrogant recklessness of his predecessor.

November 22, 1963

2008-11-21T23:22:00.000-08:00

I was in the fifth grade. We’d just had art class, and the kid sitting next to me must have eaten his crayons rather than drawn with them, because he vomited all over the floor.

We’d just gotten him squared away – the janitor had to come in and clean, and disinfect the area – with me still sitting right next to it – and we tried to get on with what was left of the afternoon.

It was somewhere around 2 o’clock – maybe even earlier -- when another knock came on the door … the same janitor … Pop Geary, we called him … probably to come back with Round 2 of disinfectant, since, truth be told, the area still smelled pretty bad.

Instead, he whispered something to Sister Waltrude, the fifth-grade nun at Sacred Heart School in Lynn. She let out a shriek, and came back into the classroom holding her head in her hands, with an awfully stricken look on her face.

My GOD, she cried (blasphemous, really, for a nun teaching fifth grade. The President has been shot in Dallas.

I was slow on the uptake. I thought she said “battle,” and asked the kid on the other side of me why a president fights in a battle and dies. He didn’t know. I don’t think he even heard the question. He was just stunned. We were all stunned.

In 1963, every class at Sacred Heart School was equipped with its own TV set … mostly so we could watch PBS broadcasts of Mme. Slack’s French lessons, or some other current events programming on Channel 2. All I remember about any of THAT is that the Channel 2 test pattern song was the Radezky March, by Johan Strauss (well, I didn’t know that at the TIME, but I heard it properly introduced much later and put it together).

Sister Waltrude immediately turned on the TV to Channel 5, which was the CBS affiliate at the time, so we could listen to Walter Cronkite broadcast.

News – even now – can be frustrating to follow, and we have 24/7 cable outlets that can give us instantaneous information from the far corners of the world. Things in 1963 weren’t anywhere near as sophisticated, and the news came at its own pace … and was reported that way as well.

I don’t remember the exact time Walter gave his now-legendary “from Dallas Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2 p.m. Eastern Standard time … some 38 minutes ago.”

Now, I was 10 years old. I knew nothing of the geopolitical ramifications of the president’s assassination. I did not know, for example, of the fears that we’d be invaded by the evil Communists, or that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marxist sympathizer … it took me years to delve into it and read up on all the conspiracy theories. All I knew is that the president was dead. That was scary enough.

Boys don’t cry … although Lord knows I wanted to. And I didn’t even know why. I didn’t know JFK. I didn’t cry a year earlier when my grandmother died, so why should I want to cry NOW?

But girls cry … at least, that’s what kids my age were always told. Boys don’t … girls do. And they did. I went into the cloakroom to get my jacket (it was unseasonably warm that day in New England) and Jan Jenerlavitch was sitting on the floor, crying her eyes out.

I lived far enough from the school so that I had to take the bus home. That bus came from downtown Lynn, MA, and included Lynn Classical High school, Cobbet Junior High School, and St. Mary’s catholic high school students on it. These were all people older than me, and some of them scared the HELL out of me on most days. Not today. The bus was somber, and there were a LOT of people crying. Especially black high school kids.

Again, at age 10, I had only a dim, and very superficial, understanding of the civil rights movement. I knew what I saw on TV, and it made sense to me that all people should have access to the same things, regardless of color. In the mind of a 10-year-old, that makes perfect sense, and you wondered why anyone in the world would think differently. But apparently, people did.

Studying history does fill in the cracks. And since the assassination has haunted me for 45 years, just about everything I ever learned about the history in and around that era has been seen, though my eyes, in the context of JFK’s death. A couple of years later, when I began to understand the struggles in the south (and the north too; let’s be fair), I understood why these kids were crying. It may have come a little later in the game than people would have liked, but John F. Kennedy (and his brother) took a stand at the University of Alabama and other places. And, after all, it was only the previous August – just three months earlier – that Martin Luther King Jr. led the march on Washington.

The after-school hours were a blur. Naturally, the entire family (mother, father, my sister Jayne and I) sat and watched all evening and well into the night. I learned for the first time that JFK was one of nine children, that his brother Joe had been killed during World War II and that his sister Kathleen had died in a plane crash. I learned that his father couldn’t talk because he’d had a stroke; and even found out that his grandmother was still alive at the age of 98.

I knew there was a Ted Kennedy because his senatorial campaign was only a year earlier (that’s when his opponent, Ed McCormack, said “if your name was Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke). But I never knew there had been a Robert F. Kennedy, or that he was the attorney general.

I grew up in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, in an Irish Catholic parish, and couldn’t understand the significance of JFK being the nation’s first CATHOLIC president. I thought everybody was Catholic. It just never occurred to me that anyone would admit to being anything else, since the nuns always taught us that the Catholic Church was the one true church.

I know there was a real fear that this was some kind of a larger plot to take over the country, and I suppose that scared me a little. But mainly, I just sat, motionless, taking it all in. I watched the plane land in Washington, I saw Lyndon Johnson make his short speech on the tarmac, saw Jackie Kennedy’s blood-stained dress, saw grown men crying (something I’d never seen before), and, well, it was all just too much to take.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I kept going over and over it. I had this image of JFK riding in that car, top down, looking like the world was his … and BANG! Dead. It didn’t help that our evening newspaper – the one I work for now – printed a special edition with a big, bold, oversized headline that simply said “Kennedy dead.” It didn’t just add to the drama; it added to the overall sense of fright, doom and grief that was just pervasive.

I suppose the next morning I was on sensory overload, because I don’t recall much about the morning broadcasts. I was still 10 years old, it was still Saturday, and that meant “go out and play.” So I’d imagine that’s what I did. I know that we played endless games of touch football in the next door neighbor’s yard (not because of the Kennedys, but because that’s just what we did), and perhaps spent a good deal of Saturday doing that.

All I know is that the next time I got in front of the TV; everybody was talking about Oswald, and the death of Officer J.D. Tippett, and was re-running footage of his arrest and booking the previous day.

I’m not sure when, exactly, this took place, but at some point, Kennedy’s body was taken from the White House to the U.S. Capitol so it could lie in state under the rotunda. That’s the first time I heard those muffled drums … boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom boom, tadadada, boom, boom, boom, tadadada, boom boom-boo-boom.

I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I started marching around the den in cadence to the drums, and my mother just SNAPPED at me, “Stop that!”

Sunday proved to be almost equally as momentous as Friday was, because that’s the day this country – in its unfathomable grief and fear – witnessed a vigilante killing on national television. I mean, what was next??

Today, with all of the paranoia that comes with security, security and more security, Lee Harvey Oswald would have never seen the light of day … or the light of anything. The Dallas Police Station would have whisked him away under the cover of darkness, at an unannounced time. He’d have been held in some isolation unit somewhere out in the boondocks of El Paso, or someplace like that … far, far, FAR away from the madness in Dallas.

But not in 1963. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to parade Oswald in front of the TV cameras as they escorted him from the police station to the county jail. I guess they thought they had it covered. It was just a short walk, after all, from the station to the car that was to take him to the jail, but not short enough.

Out of the crowd came Jack Ruby with a snub-nosed revolver. He shot Oswald in the abdomen, and the most notorious murder suspect since John Wilkes Booth in 1865 met the same end as did Mr. Booth … shot dead in his tracks. Odd that these two assassinations were almost 100 years apart.

I wasn’t watching when all this happened. We were playing touch football in Bobby Kaminski’s back yard – blowing off the pent-up steam that all kids my age were probably blowing off. Mrs. Kaminski – Eleanor – opened up the back door and shouted, “they just shot Oswald!”

We all ran inside to watch, me wondering why everybody was so stunned.

“Well, he shot the president,” I kept saying. I COULDN’T understand why Jack Ruby was being led away, COULDN’T understand why everybody thought this was so horrible.

But Oswald SHOT THE PRESIDENT,” I’d say. “Isn’t he a hero?”

My father had to sit me down when I got home – still tremendously upset that Jack Ruby was being treated as a criminal for killing the man who killed the president – and explain due process, and the American judicial system to me. It was just one of many lessons, civics and otherwise, I learned that weekend.

From the moment JFK’s death was confirmed, rumors started circulating that Charles DeGaulle would fly over to attend the funeral. Big Deal, I thought. Who’s Charles DeGaulle?

Again, my fifth grade brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion that there was anyone in the world close to being as important as the president of the United States, or that Charles DeGaulle was one of the heroes of the French resistance in World War II … OR that he was extremely important, maybe even more so than JFK; OR that he was one of the most prickly men ALIVE.

It was a very big deal that Charles DeGaulle came to the U.S. to attend John F. Kennedy’s funeral. Earlier that year, JFK had gone to France – at a time when relations between the two men weren’t exactly tremendous – and Jackie Kennedy went with him. And she charmed the socks right OFF Mr. DeGaulle.

You see, to me, the world was the globe that sat in the corner of our living room. Spin it around, and point to a country, and say “here, this is France.” I had no concept of what that meant … that there were French people who swore by their country, and their leaders, the same way we did. It was all just one big ball with a bunch of colors on it. I knew about the evil Communists (who didn’t?) but that’s how the world was presented to me in 1963: The Russians … and us … and faceless people who occupied other lands, and who weren’t nearly as important as either us or the Soviets. Or the Cubans (I remembered just enough of the Cuban Missile Crisis to know who they were).

Sunday, November 24, was just a lot of day. Period. I don’t know if I, or anyone, really, had any energy or emotion left to endure the funeral Monday. But it was heart-wrenching … and this time not so much because of what it put the country through, but for what it put the Kennedy FAMILY through. The rider less horse … the incessant muffled drums … the dirges … and Jackie Kennedy, her two children, and Robert and Teddy.

I remember Cardinal Cushing, of Boston, a good friend of the family’s, delivering an impassioned sermon. I remember Jackie Kennedy lifting the flag off the coffin as it sat in the capitol rotunda, so she could kiss the casket. But most of all, I remember JFK junior saluting his father one last time. He was only three. In fact, his birthday was on the day of the funeral. Sure, the moment was choreographed somewhat. Jackie Kennedy heavily choreographed that entire funeral to mirror the great state funerals of Europe.

But staged or not, how could you not cry for this kid? Even at the age of 10, I knew that while the country would have other presidents, he’d never have his father back. I thought of what would ever happen if my father just up and died when I was 10. The thought chilled me. My dad only died last year, when I was 53, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t miss him at some point and grieve for him. Imagine going through all of that when you’re three?

I think we were all relieved when taps were played at Arlington National Cemetery. Somehow, the bugler hitting a wrong note lent not only authenticity to the occasion, but –in a perverse way – a very fitting end to it. The entire four days had been a bad nightmare, and that just put the period on the end of the sentence.

Today, I’ve come full circle on whether there was a conspiracy. When I was in college, which was right around the time the Abraham Zapruder film was made public, I was convinced there was one. Life was just an endless series of grassy knolls, magic bullets, intricate plots … I read books upon books, all of them advocating for some mammoth plot, and just ate up all of it.

The Zapruder film itself was unsettling. I’d never known the extend of JFK’s head wounds and as time went on, completely shut that aspect of the assassination out of my head, preferring to contemplate the socio- and geo-political ramifications instead. By the time I got into college, it was 1971, and the entire decade of the sixties had passed. Malcolm X was killed. So was Martin Luther King. And Bobby Kennedy. The fissures caused by these cataclysmic social events, along with the Vietnam War, and the growing rift between young and old – the so-called “generation gap” -- all of that could be traced back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

And it wasn’t just social and political either. You could make a very strong case that John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr never would have made it out of England had the American psyche not been so damaged by JFK’s death. The Beatles came along in early 1964, and they were certainly a sweeping breath of fresh air, youthful exuberance, and optimism for a country that had just been overwrought with grief and gloom.

And since we all have the benefit of knowing what the Beatles brought forth, both musically and culturally, it could be further argued that JFK’s death opened the Pandora’s box for the rampant use of recreational drugs, as well as the deepening cynicism, that just about ensured the demise of what had once become such a promising, optimistic decade.

Through the 70s and 80s, I was all for ripping the masks off the FBI, CIA, the Warren Commission, and anyone who had been a party to pulling the wool over our eyes by claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Then, I saw JFK, the Oliver Stone movie … and I just thought it was the biggest crock of bull ever. I know … I know … it wasn’t supposed to be historical. But come on! This is a guy who saw a bogeyman jumping out of every corner. And it just made me think that fertile imaginations were at play here … and that maybe, after all, that was just a random act of violence by a social misfit who was tired of being marginalized for his Marxist sympathies.

Because when you come right down to it, history rarely turns on conspiracies. It turns on random events that RESULT in people banding together. The Boston Massacre wasn’t planned. But it was certainly a tipping point toward arousing anger among the Boston colonists … without which there would have been no American Revolution.

There’s also this: It’s been 45 years since JFK was shot. Most, if not all, of the principal players on that day has long since died. There is no reason anymore for anyone who may have been inclined to keep a secret or two regarding a conspiracy to do so. Yet nobody’s said a word. Maybe there aren’t any words to say.

I used to be a bonafide Kennedy-phile. Worshiped the ground they walked on. I knew everything about all of them … the family histories, the unspeakable tragedies, the words of wisdom … but that died when Willie Smith was accused of rape and it came out that Ted Kennedy had rousted his son and his nephew out of BED so they could all go drinking. I’m no prude, but dammit all if I’d ever want to go out and get drunk with my son. I don’t care how old he is. A kid should always be able to look up to his dad without reservations. I looked up to mine every day he was alive … and I still do. One of the enduring American tragedies, if you ask me, is that there are so many kids who either don’t have dads in their lives to whom they CAN look up; or that their dads consistently fall short. And while nobody’s perfect, I just don’t see how a father can be so sloppy and undisciplined that he needs to go out and get hammered with his son.

For the longest time, I even tried to wish away the most damaging aspects of Chappaquiddick in my mind. I tried to justify the whole thing, believing that Teddy was just too stressed, too overwrought, too burdened by tragedies and responsibility, to have a clear head about much of anything.

And while I’ll always have tremendous sympathy for what the family has gone through, it’s just as true that at some point, your pass expires. At some point, you have to take accountability for the mistakes you’ve made. And I just don’t believe that Teddy ever has … at least not with regards to Chappaquiddick. He never admitted what most of the world seems to accept as universal fact: that he was drunk, horny and too consumed with alcohol and hormones to pay attention to where he was going … and too much of a coward to stick around after the accident to make sure every effort was made to remove Mary Jo Kopechne from that car.

And there were just so many eyebrow-raising details. This is a man who, only five years earlier, had severely broken his back in a plane crash. He had to walk around with a back brace, the pain permanently etched on his face. Yet he can crawl out the window of a car submerged in a lagoon and swim to safety? He can swim across the channel that separates Martha’s Vineyard from Chappaquiddick Island?

To me, the Kennedy dream began its slow, painful demise with Bobby’s death. In many ways, I think he was Jack times 10. Maybe not in the beginning, but by the time he died. John Kennedy was a cold warrior when he took office in 1960. In fact, if you go back and study that campaign, JFK was even scarier than Richard Nixon.

But he grew in the short time he was in office … grew past the bellicosity that marked his formative years in politics. He died before he could ever complete this transformation, but Bobby took it and ran with it. I think that if Bobby had lived, he’d have been one of the best presidents this country ever had. He seemed to have the right amount of ruthlessness mixed with genuine compassion for the downtrodden that either things would have improved or he’d go down in flames trying to improve them.

Alas, none of this ever came to pass. Instead of the Kennedy family dynastic that Old Joe pined for so deeply, we got the Bush dynasty.

Today, 45 years later, JFK’s death haunts me more than any single historical event in my lifetime. You look at all the potential that he brought to the White House … and you look at all the wreckage from strewn throughout history.

And that’s when you see the things that are … and ask why.

My case for Barack

2008-10-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

Election day is a week from Tuesday and according to some polls released today (October 26) the race is tightening.

I suppose I should have expected it, but it has taken me somewhat by surprise. The Republicans -- or, should I say, the McCain campaign -- is out of ideas and has BEEN out of ideas since forever. While some of the minutae of the current GOP platform may vary slightly from what the current administration has offered us, what McCain and Co. are proposing is more of the same.

I find myself in kind of a strange position. Back in February, I -- an independent -- registered as a Republican on Super Tuesday for the specific purpose of voting against our former governor -- Mitt Romney.

This meant voting for McCain, even though I went into this campaign season liking Rudy Guiliani very much, partly because I love New York and love the way he helped clean it up; and partly because I thought he handled himself magnificently on Sept. 11, 2001. But I soured on him rather quickly once I started listening to him, and by February figured the best of a bad lot was McCain.

John S. McCain, I figured, was the one Republican I could stomach in the White House if my guy -- Obama -- couldn't survive the primaries. So, logic dictated I throw a little support his way just in case.

That was in February. Hillary took Massachusetts (which I figured would happen) and Romney won the GOP side. But that was bascially his last, and maybe even only, hurrah. He flamed out soon afterward, and by March McCain's nomination was a foregone conclusion ... pretty remarkable for someone who'd been so dismissively written off only six months earlier.

So there's my reasoning ... and I'm sad to admit it now. I have been proven wrong. McCain's election would not be in the best interests of the United States of America. His ideas are old, terribly shopwarn, and they're proven failures based on what has happened, both over the the last eight years and the last eight weeks. Worse, McCain seems to be the same type of angry reactionary who ruled the White House for the previous eight years ... shoot first, ask questions later. Though hee likes to say he's a maverick, McCain -- just by his termperment -- would have fit in very well with the angry reactionaries in the Bush administration.

Then, there's the matter of Sarah Palin, who -- I'm sure -- is a nice woman who could, someday, command quite a presence on the national stage. But not now. Not even close. And McCain took what is already a ridiculously politically expedient process and multiplied it Times Ten with this selection.

Not that Joe Biden is any prize. And unscripted Biden is a terrifying thing. As someone on Bill Maher's show said last Friday, "he's on the 10-yard line. All he needs to do from hereon out is show up." Instead, he plants this SEED in people about the bogeyman terrorists launching some kind of horrendous attack on the country to "test" Obama.

Of course, that's exactly what the bogeymen did with George W. Bush. And maybe Biden's biggest mistake here was to remind people what an abject failure Bush's response to the test was ... how he completely fouled things up beyond repair with his response. His type of hot-headed, incendiary response was exactly what Osama Bin Laden wanted, and Bush was either too stupid or too stubborn (or both) to see it.

But at least Biden had something tangible -- both in terms of politics and experience -- to offer the Obama ticket. I'm still trying to figure out what it is Palin offered -- unless it's an infusion of youthful vigor to detract from the rapidly-aging McCain.

This is a roundabout way of talking about Barack, because right off the bat, Obama gets points for at least being sober and rational in judgment. His reasons behind selecting Biden were sound and mature. He understood the politics of Biden's campaign ... and he understood that good leadership involves surrounding yourself with people whose opinions and expertise you respect, even if you're not the best of friends.

On the other hand, McCain's apparent reasons for picking Palin -- she's a woman (and could sway disaffected Hillary voters), she's young ... and evangelical to boot -- seem a bit more reckless.

Let's examine the "experience" factor. Experience in presidential politics is overrated -- unless it's YOU who are running ... and YOU have the glittering resume. George H.W. Bush had a glowing resume, both in diplomatic, executive and intelligence circles. You name it, 41 did it. He was head of the CIA, head of the GOP National Committee (a position he held at the time of Watergate), a U.S. Representative ... and vice president. I'd imagine he knew where every lever of power was, and how to push it when he had to.

Yet, he was a one-term president who couldn't parlay a legitimate accomplishment (the 1990 Desert Storm war) into four more years. And why not? Because for all his experience, he couldn't control the lunatic fringe of his own party. He tried. He came into office -- despite the brutally dirty campaign against Michael Dukakis -- with a reputation of being a genial country club Republican. But it did seem that George I lacked the backbone to stand up to the nut jobs in his party ... and by trying (and failing) to accommodate them, he not only lost THEM, he lost the middle, too.

I have no love for Ronald Reagan, but one thing I'll give him: He kept those nut jobs at arm's length. And for all his bluster, he actually governed from the center a lot more than people think.

With few exceptions (Ed Meese, Casper Weinberger), he employed pragmatic people who understood that to actually get things DONE you had to throw a few bones to the opposing party. He lost it late in his second administration when the combination of being a lame duck and -- just a personal opinion -- the beginnings of the Alzeimers reduced his effectiveness. But for all I didn't like about him ideologically, he knew how to communicate with people AND understood how to work with people with whom he had political disagreements.

He also understood the prudence of cutting your losses. When those Marines were blown up in Beirut, he didn't allow the rest of them to stick around so they could get killed too. He got the hell OUT of there and didn't worry about this "saving face" nonsense that has us still in Iraq now.

I thought George H.W. would be something like that, and while he wasn't my guy, I wasn't depressed for a month when he got elected (partially because I wasn't all that fond of Michael Dukakis either). But H.W. couldn't take the heat when the nut jobs started in on him -- even with a 90 percent approval rating (after Desert Storm). He tried to win these people over, and on election day, they couldn't get to the polls fast enough to vote for H. Ross Perot. That's gratitude for you.

It's important to understandn this, because when it was George W's turn, he learned his lessons. There was no way he was going to get outflanked by the Republican right. So he invited them all to the table, where they controlled him instead of the other way around. I seriously doubt George W. Bush ever HAD a policy he could call his own. Anything he got, he got from the wignuts with whom he surrounded himself ... Henry Kissinger refugees like Cheney and Rumsfeld, who itched to be back in power after eight years of Bill Clinton.

These are the people to whom McCain -- the so-called "maverick" -- sold his soul to get the nomination.

But as I say, experience ONLY counts when it's YOUR GUY who has the experience. In 2000, George Bush's only real military experience was in finding ways to avoid showing up for his Army Reserve commitments. So you never heard the Republicans talk about it. In 2004, John Kerry -- recipient of multiple medals in Vietnam -- was reduced to defending himself against scurrilous charges that he'd fabricated his record.

But all of a sudden, in 2008, we have a genuine war hero on the ticket ... and all of a sudden the ONLY criteria for holding the Oval Office is ... you guessed it ... experience. I have a tremendous amount of respect for what McCain endured in Vietnam. I can't imagine how he got through it, and I'm sure that in many ways it hardened him. But at the same time, I know lots of Vietnam vets who came back from the war permanently scarred. Some of them have overcome those scars; others, sadly, did not ... and sunk into lives of drug addiction and mental illness, and, in a few cases, died tragically prematurely as a result.

I'm not suggesting John McCain is afflicted with either the diseases of addiction OR mental illness. But the pendulum does swing so wildly on these issues that the experiences of being a POW, or having been wounded in battle, make up no more than a portion of your overall resume. The Republicans proved this in 2004 when the voters rejected John Kerry. So it's disingenuous for them to use it now as a reason to vote FOR McCain.

The next item to examine is McCain's record as a U.S. Senator, which, on average, would appear to be ... well ... average. He's done some good things. But he's also managed to get his name associated with one of the bigger scandals in modern Senate history ... the Keating Five.

The Republicans love to run against big government. Bush campaigned in 2000 as being an outsider ... a stranger to the Beltway. McCain's been a U.S. Senator for more than 20 years. His name has appeared on one of the biggest scandals the senate has seen in that time ... the Keating Five.

While his record as a senator doesn't DISQUALIFY him from being president,it, in and of itself, doesn't uniquely QUALIFY him either. Like his military service, it's certainly a FACTOR in the overall judgment of him, but there's nothing there the jumps up and says "Damn, we HAVE to vote for this man."

Again, going back to George W. Bush ... he campaign on being anti-Washington ... NOT part of the Beltway crowd. Why? Because he argued -- and not incorrectly, either -- that to be a part of the solution, you cannot be a part of the problem.

If the legislature is bogged down in petty partisanship, then the only logical thing to do is get new people in there who aren't so married to the old ways of doing things that they've become obstructionist. Right?"

Shouldn't logic, then, dictate that the most qualified person to be president is the LEAST qualified in terms of legislative tenure? Wouldn't a person not so thoroughly entrenched in the legislative morass that has affected politics since the first Clinton administration be more prone to see things differently than one who's been part of the problem for over 20 years?

Obama has been a senator for only four years -- hardly enough time to be an entrenched member of the club. So in a curious way, his LACK of experience actually plays to his favor.

But there are other reasons to support him. Unlike Al Gore and Kerry before him, Obama has a pulse. He has passion. He has ideals. He has noble goals. And he's black.

Wait. Stop. You're reading this, and you're saying "Ahhhh, that's it. he's voting for Obama because he's black." And you're right. I am. But please, let me explain.

You can thank Robert Wohl for what's about to come next. Wohl has a couple of HBO specials called "Assume the Position," that are both hilarious and illuminating. In the second one, his opening bit talks about the presidents, and the total lack of diversity that runsn through all 43 of them. As he says, "for such a diverse country ... not a whole lot of it up there, is there?"

Yes, that's a funny observation ... but it's also a very sad reality. This country grew to be the giant it is on the backs of ethnic immigrants who came over here and did all the heavy lifting that made us kings of the Industrial Age. And they have been poorly represented in the White House. With the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower (German-American) and John F. Kennedy (Roman Catholic) the overwhelming preponderance of presidents have been White Anglo Saxon Protestants (including the current one).

Barack Obama represents the HOPE, at least, that the next president will have the ability -- and curiosity -- to see the whole picture from a different template. I'm confident, given Obama's basically sober, measured and moderate nature, that this is NOT a man who's going to give away the store, open up the borders and let ALL the illegals in carte blanche (even if his distant aunt lives here illegally), or strip off his mask someday and become the modern-day Karl Marx.

But I AM confident that Barack Obama will see situations differently, see them from a fresh set of eyes, and perhaps react accordingly. I hope he does. We need to at least CONSIDER the possibility of taking a different road to get where we want to go. The one we're on is leading nowhere.

I also think Barack Obama, as person who has spent considerable time overseas, and in lands not always friendly to the United States, will bring a sensitivity about our place in the modern world that this administration simply does not possess. And not only does the Bush administration not possess this sensitivity, it don't WANT to. The Bush people don't care.

In fact, one of the gripes I HAVE with George W. Bush is his complete LACK of sensitivity about how we're perceived abroad. He -- and his followers -- think this a non-issue. I beg to differ. Countries act, and react, toward us based on what they SEE, and PERCEIVE ... not by what we TELL them. And they SEE what we do from a much different perspective than we do, and that has as much to do with the propaganda OUR government disseminates as it does the usual mistrust that exists between the U.S. and its enemies.

There's no better example of how destructive that mistrust can be than the sight of airplanes loaded with innocent people careening into buildings loaded with MORE innocent people. It takes an awful lot of hatred and resentment to whip yourself into the type of frenzy that would allow you to even CONSIDER doing something like that ... let alone carry it out. You don't just wake up one morning and decide to kill 3,000 people who have done absolutely nothing to you. You have to be so blind with hatred and zealotry that you'll kill ANYBODY for the advancement of your cause.

I'll grant you some of that is because of the indocrination that the radical muslems who pulled this off received in their native countries. But the Bush administration never seemed interested in identifying the catalyst ... what set these people OFF? Simple chemistry. You can mix up a bunch of chemicals in a test tube, but ONE of them has to act as a catalyst for there to be a reaction.

What was the catalyst? And what did our insistance on starting a war in the middle of that cauldron do to the cauldron ... both in the short and long term?

I'm hoping Barack Obama will be more of a soothing, sobering element on the world stage than George W. Bush was ... and I'm afraid I see John McCain as being cut out of much the same cloth as the current president.

We have also had the bonus -- sad though it may have been -- of seeing how both men would react to a crisis. Witness McCain's reaction to the Wall Street meltdown vs. Obama's.

McCain tried to inject himself into the process and ended up being party to making the situation worse. Obama -- who had no power beyond his seat in the U.S. Senate (same as McCain) stepped back and let the people in charge do their jobs. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obama's position in the polls took a huge leap after that. People saw that Obama has a cool head while they saw McCain as a glowering, angry man willing to elbow his way into the spotlight, even if he doesn't belong there.

Obama also came up with one of the better lines when he said "people expect their presidents to be able to do more than one thing at a time." It wasn't as good as "I can see Russa from my house," perhaps, but good enough.

I don't think Obama is perfect. I don't see him as being "the messiah," and nothing aggravates me more than the GOP taunting that Obama's supporters are hero worshipping of that they've had the wool pulled over their eyes.

I admit the country is taking a big risk in turning to him ... but I think the same thing about McCain too ... except I think it's a bigger risk. He's come across as angry, bitter, and caustic on the stump this fall, and I think this country has been run from anger now for eight years ... and all you have to do is look around to see how corrosive that anger has become. I look forward to someone a bit more dispassionate and introspective ... and less ready to come out swinging without examing the situation first.

Some of the anti-Obama swill has been nothing more than coded racism -- especially the efforts to hang Rev. Jeremiah Wright around his neck. I certainly don't AGREE with the reverend, and it would probably be a cold day in hill for me to get up and say "God DAMN America" in front of a church full of people. But if I did, I'd be appalled if someone tried to indict every OTHER person in the church because of what I said. That's dangerously close to McCarthyism, only there's the extra-added tinge of racism in there because of the anger --unique, in many ways, to African-Americans -- that Wright was expressing.

Similarly, the whole ACORN nonsense is just that ... nonsense. This was just a case of the loser pulling out all the stops. McCain took out all the guns, and started firing into the crowd, hoping that one of the bullets hits a vein or an artery. Again, even if ACORN's methods completely lacked ethics, there's no evidence that Obama, or any of his staff, put ACORN up to commiting voter fraud. And I doubt there will eve BE proof. However, there IS the fear that this is a Rovian Republican attempt to lay the groundwork for enough challenges to REALLY gum up this election ... perhaps as payback for the Florida challenge of 2000.

I have my concerns about the issue of Bill Ayers, however. I don't think Obama's a terrorist, and I don't think he condones, or ever condoned, blowing up buildings as a way of airing political grievances.

But at the same time, either he should have known, or someone should have told him pretty damn quick, that Bill Ayers would be a good guy to steer clear of, especially if he had political aspirations down the line.

I can also certainly understand McCain's desire to hammer away at this, too. I'm sure his reasons are aren't merely political. I'd image they're bitterly personal -- and I have no problem with that. While Ayers was blowing up buildings, McCain was a guest at the Hanoi Hilton. And if I were him, it would gall me, too, that Ayers had anything at all to do --however minor -- with springboarding Obama's political career.

But honestly, similar to the Rev. Wright issue, this doesn't mean Obama is sympathetic to terrorists -- either domestic or foreign. You DO run across a lot of people over the course of a political career. You're often forced to rub elbows with some unsavory people (I'm sure McCain has too), and seeing as Obama was eight years old when the Weathermen were blowing up buildings, perhaps he really DIDN'T grasp the full significance of what Ayers and his cohorts did in the 60s.

It's the same thing with the SDS. I know what the group DID ... but beyond the usual suspects, I couldn't name five other people associated with the group. So someone with an SDS past could come up to me and wine me and dine me, and get me to intercede on their behalf, and unless I have the presence of mind to vett them on the spot, I wouldn't know .

I'm comfortable that Bill Ayers, today, is nowhere near Obama's campaign. I am confident Barack Obama has more brains than that ... even if he might not have known the full extent of Ayer' radicalism back when he was looking for people to help him get his state senate campaign off the ground in Chicago.

McCain's run a weak campaign. It's been rightly ridiculed as ineffectual, especially when someone such as Sarah Palin can go into a militantly red area of the country and talk about being with "real Americans," as if the rest of us are impostors. In response to Obama's position on taxes, McCain could do no better than to concoct a senario unique to him ... meaning he constructed a hypothetical containing ONLY that which he desired to include. He called this hypothetical "Joe te Plumber," even though the person in question was neither a Joe nor a licensed plumber.

It's difficult to disprove hypotheticals because to do so you have to inject "facts" into the scenario that -- as they used to say on Perry Mason -- are not not in evidence.

This is eerily similar to Reagan's much-ballyhood "Welfare Queen" (whom he also pulled out of thin air).

These anecdotal figures are nothing but condescending and insulting, and the fact that McCain actually scored some points with this pathetic attempt at distortion says more about us, as an informed electorate, than it does about him.

Barack Obama brings a breath of fresh air to a political system that is growing so polluted that it's bordering on toxic. He brings intelligence into a White House that hasn't had any in the past eight years. And of the two candidates, let it also be known that while McCain talks a good game when it comes to old-fashioned American values, HE'S the one who left his wife for another woman while Obama's the one who -- as far as anyone knows -- has a solid, loving marriage.

I don't mean to sound as if that's the only criteria for being president, but since the Republicans would like you to think they've cornered the market on morality, we DO need to bring this up.

Please. Cast your vote for Barack Obama tomorrow and let's turn the page and move on from these last very ugly, divisive, eight years.

Music, Music, Music

2008-08-05T05:22:00.000-07:00

Today, I was listening to "I'm No Angel" by Gregg Allman and immediately I thought of July 3, 1991, at the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts in Norton, MA. My friend Mike called and asked if I'd like to go see the Allman Brothers with him. Free tickets. How on earth could I refuse.

So, I passed up the annual fireworks display at Lynn Beach and went to see the Allmans with Mickey. I'd see the AB's before. They're one of my favorite groups. But there was something about July 4 and Americana and the Allman Brothers that just seemed too surreal. Here we were, in the middle of a sea of bikers (nothing like the Allmans to bring out the inner Hog in us all), with firecrackers and cherry bombs exploding all around us. Talk about the rockets' red glare!!

What a great show! They played for so long -- and jammed so freely -- that the went way past the curfew and never got around to playing "Ramblin' Man," (which was to be their ultimate encore). You'd think that would be disappointing, but it wasn't. The discerning Allman Brothers aficionado knows that while "Ramblin' Man" is certainly a great song (indeed, their signature tune), there are so many other great songs in their repertoire that you could listen to three hours worth of music (which we did, bascially) and always come away wanting more.

Anyway, I bring this all up because "I'm No Angel" was one of that concert's real highlights. The group just come out of a mid-set intermission with "In Memory of Elizabeth Reid," a very cool jazz-oriented instrumental piece (inspired by the fact that when the Allmans used to go drinking in a nearby cemetery, they always gathered at the headstone of one Elizabeth Reid), and it served as an introduction to a more mellow point in the show (they also did a wonderful acoustic version of "Midnight Rider" -- another Allman solo piece).

Not that the mellow portion was bad ... but if you went there to see kickass rock 'n' roll, this was probably your cue to go to the bathroom, or get up and get something to eat ... of fidget. Me? I loved it.

However, "I'm No Angel" was the first song they played after this mellow interlude, and it just jerked the audience back into the spirit of the evening. It's a great song anyway, all about a roughhouse biker-type ("come on, baby, let me show you my tattoos") who promises that despite his savage appearance and reputation, he'll treat the girl of his dreams gently ("I'll never lift a hand to hurt you and I'll always leave you glad."). It's full of vivid images.

And it rocks! Especially when you get into it. And besides, who among us hasn't wished, once in a while, to explore his dark side? Even the ever-romantic Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues wrote "The Other Side of Life," about the desire to explore his dark side.

That song kicked the concert into overdrive, and paved the way for a parade of sizzling classics, from "Jessica" to "Revival" to "Statesboro Blues" to a lengthy first encore of "Tied to the Whipping Post" that had to last 15 minutes, with not a second of it wasted.

I've seen the Allmans several times, yet this concert stood out as special (though it would have been more special had we not got caught in a massive traffic jam leaving the stadium; I think we finally got home on July 5!).

So listening to the song brought back memories ... not only of that concerts but of others as well. I cannot count the number of rock concerts I've seen. Some of them have been perfectly dreadful (there was the Bob Dylan show a few years ago that was so bad that all I could think of was that line from Positively 4th Street, "I wish that for just one time, you could stand inside my shoes; then you'd know what a drag it is to see you!"), and I remember seeing the Cars once and wishing someone would steal them and dismantle them in a chop shop (RIP, Ben Orr).

Then there was Duran Duran (don't ask how that came about). Horrible.

But the great ones more than make up for the lemons. If you can go through life with even a handful of experiences like that July 3 Allman Brothers show (which was one of the most perfectly laid out shows Ive ever seen; if I were a rock star, and were planning a show, I'd have done it the same way), you're doing OK.

I think the absolute best rock show I've ever seen, barring none, was the October 1973 Jethro Tull concert at the Boston Garden. Well, first of all, even if you didn't intend to get stoned going INTO the show, you were totally wrecked coming out. That's how much cannibus swirled around unfettered. I remember wondering how in the world any cop could let THAT go! Probably because it was a hopeless battle.

This was right after "Passion Play" came out, and Tull performed the entire album in the first set. I can remember not really liking the album all that much when I heard it the first time (It's still one of the least played CDs in my collection even today). "Thick as a Brick" was so good that "Passion Play" seemed like a poor facsimile. It was as if Ian Anderson said "I'm going to do 'Thick as a Brick' all over again, but call it something else."

Now, it always helps when you get a guy like Ian Anderson, who understands theater, and understands that just getting up there and playing isn't enough. Rock 'n' roll was never MERELY about the music ... and that's what people my parents' age never understood (and it's probably what people of my generation and culture fail to grasp about rap). Rock 'n' roll was about the attitude ... the excitement ... the rawness and edginess that all the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin fans from the 40s and 50s never quite got because they'd never experienced it (though I suspect that if you appreciated the sophisticated jazz and blues of the 1920s and 30s you might have had a better chance of getting it).

"Passion Play" came to life that night. It helped that Ian Anderson made it an audio-visual show, with animated beginning that featured the contorted ballerina that adorns the album's cover. it was bizarre ... actually disturbing. But it was effective. It left you with your mouth agape, and just when it climaxed (like any good sexual encounter), out burst Ian Anderson (he almost ejaculated onto the stage, if that's possible!) to perform the album. It was probably the only time I ever found that album enjoyable.

It didn't stop with "Passion Play" either. They went onto do a good chunk of "Thick as a Brick" and a lot of "Aqualung," including an immensely enjoyable (and out-and-out kickass) version of "Locomotive Breath."

Thing is, though, I'm more of a fan of Tull's quieter, chamber music-like material, and really have a problem with Anderson if he forgets about that stuff when he performs shows. Usually, he's good about including it (though not always; I've come away from several shows of his extremely disappointed about the material he's chosen to perform). On this night, he represented his softer side more than adequately.

There was the obligatory "Bouree," of course ... Anderson does Bach. But there was also "Sossity, You're a Woman," from "Benefit," and one that he put on "Living in the Past" called "Life's a Long Song," which is one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever heard. It still remains a Krause staple on the iPod today.

I was just 20 years old in 1973, and went to the Tull concert with Mickey as well (we both had dates; he had some girl, forget whom) and I had Donna "Boobs" Bertazzoni from Quincy, who went to school with me at Northeastern University. We were just friends (although I'd have perferred it to be more than that). She was actually dating a guy named Sterling W. Honeywell (imaging dating a guy named Sterling??). The "W" stood for William, and, much to his credit, he preferred to be called Bill. But I always referring to him as Sterling, much to Donna's irritation.

For some reason, unrequited love and music go hand-in-hand with me, and it has a lot to do with why I like the Moody Blues ... who own another chapter in my "favorite concert" book.

First, the history. My freshman year of college, I fell madly for this girl Melinda Marchi, a stunning Italian from Cromwell, Connecticut. She had long, straight, jet-black hair and similarly dark, Mediterranean features. We took economics together, and hit it off, and I thought I had a chance.

Boy, was I wrong. I found out, through talking to her, that she liked opera, so I went out and got two tickets to "Tosca" by Puccini (hey, I wasn't proud; I'd have done anything back in those days!!). I'd never heard of it, but she'd mentioned she wanted to see it. Except, apparently, not with me. Because when I summoned up enough nerve to ask her if she'd go with me, she said she had other plans ... I guess sorting her socks or something.

I was crushed. First, the tickets weren't CHEAP! And second, abject rejection, especially if you've invested that much time and energy into cultivating that type of a crush, is like free falling off the Empire State Building.

As it so happens, though, life went on. Later that day, I discovered that the Northeastern bookstore didn't have a piece of reading material on my political science syllibus, so I had to truck on up to the Harvard Coop to find it.

Now, I LOVE Harvard Square. Some people go to Disneyland for fun and excitement. I go to Harvard Square and look at the freaks. And there are plenty of them! Brattle Street, which, to me, is the capital of the Eastern Elitism that conservatives always love to hate, is like a freak Mecca. It always energizes me, too, to walk into the Coop, as I did recently, and see stacks of books staring at me villifying the latest conservative du jour. In 1972, it was Nixon. the last time I went, it was 56 different books basically saying that George W. Bush sucked.

I always feel home at Harvard (and by the way, just to clear something up, you cannot pahhk your cahhh at Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd because you cahhhn't DRIVE in Hahhhvahhhd Yahhhd).

Even on that day, after having had my balls summarily chopped off by Melinda Marchi, I kind of felt a little rejuvenated (though not a lot) by getting off the subway at Harvard and drinking in the atmosphere.

I found the book at the Coop (short for cooperative) and stood in line for what had to be a good 20-25 minutes to pay for it. I noticed this exotic music playing from a really nice set of speakers that just seemed to surround the room. It sounded familar, but I couldn't place it. It was mournful yet uplifting at the same time. The music ended with an orchestral flourish, a poem, and a loud gong.

Remember, this was 1972. There were no CDs. Just long-playing albums and record players that went back and repeated the same records. And on this one, the needle arm reset itself to the beginning of the album and all of a sudden I'm hearing "Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues.

What I HAD been hearing, of course, was the conclusion to "Days of Future Passed." Now, having heard it a few hundred thousand times, I picked it up around the song "The Sunset" and rode it through to the end, including "Nights in White Satin," and "Late Lament."

I'd probably heard NIWS a few times in my life (though not many) and had never heard the album. Nor had I heard much of anything else by the Moodies (just the singles they made famous).

Well, I ran right out and bought the album, and it nursed me through my own blues over being rejected. And through the rest of that year, I resolved to educate myself about the Moody Blues. I snatched up every album I could find (by then, there were six of the original upon release).

By October of 1972, I was thorougly Moodied. My sister thought I was possessed. So did my friends. It was Moodies, Moodies, and more Moodies. So it happened that I stood in line outside the Boston Garden the day tickets went on sale for their 1972 show for three hours with a bunch hof buddies from school and scored some. They sold out in no time, as this when they were REALLY at their peak.

By October, I'd stopped obsessing over Melinda and had gone back to enjoying life. So my friends and I simply went to the Boston Garden to enjoy a good show.

The show was all right. What made the concert memorable were the three guys sitting in front of us who were dressed like characters from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Seriously. I just remember one guy was dressed in black, with this pointy hat, and half-moons drawn all over him. He had a long beard and he was tanked before he even got inside. He was Merlin the Magician, or so he said.

They were primed, obviously -- and, just as obviously, they thought "Are You Sitting Comfortably" was about THEM!!!

Now, THIS was funny. Demented and funny. The only thing I'll always regret about the experience was that I was with a bunch of guys, and not with a girl, because that's the type of thing -- that kind of ambiance -- that can REALLY serve as an ice breaker if you want to end up getting laid. I looked around at the five guys sitting with me and just sighed. AWFUL timing.

As I said, the show wasn't memorable for the music. In those days, the Moodies were not a good live band ... at least I didn't think so. Their music was very sophisticated, a lot like the type the Beatles produced toward the end of their careers. Great on vinyl; difficult to reproduce in all of its technical wizardry on stage. Not to mention that they were probably just as stoned playing it as we were watching it. I understand there were a lot of drugs flying around the Moodies' entourage in those days!

All of this made for very sloppy musicianship, which -- musical fuss budget that I am -- annoyed me. I was kind of disappointed, to be honest.

But the show in the audience more than made up for it. These three guys were great to watch. They were SOOOOOOOO stoned that they couldn't keep themselves sitting up. They flopped all over each other (they were probably gay!!) and just swooned in RAPTURE every time a new song began. The ironic part, though, is that by the time the Moodies finally got around to playing the end of "Threshhold of a Dream," which they almost ALWAYS did as a whole block toward the end of the show in those days, these three guys were catatonic from having smoked so much weed. They couldn't even enjoy it!

I have two more shows to discuss before calling it a day. The first was in February 1990 ... Paul McCartney at the Worcester Centrum. Macca went out plugging his tour as a journey through the past, and boy, was it ever. Beatles songs, Beatles songs and more Beatles songs, and some of them really raised that lump right to the base of your throat. The first of this absolute melange of Fab music was "Got To Get You Into My Life," which is my absolute most favorite song of theirs, and it just got better after that. Old stuff ("I Saw Her Standing There" and "Things We Said Today"), solo stuff ("Live and Let Die"), trippy stuff ("Fool on the Hill") and classic stuff ("Hey Jude," which audience participating at the end that almost made it seem like a religious experience).

You watched the show, and you were keenly aware that this was history unfolding before your eyes. A lot of those songs had never been performed in public before, and there was just such an outpouring of gratitude on the part of the fans that, after all these years, Paul McCartney toured and played them.

Finally, but certainly not least, there was the Brian Wilson show in 2005 in which he performed the entire "Smile" album. In a lot of ways, this was one of the most extraordinary shows I've ever seen. Wilson toured with an 18-piece band, and you got the idea that maybe he was able to perform his old Beach Boys songs in a manner in which he'd envisioned them when he wrote them. He turned "Help Me Rhonda" into a symphony, almost, and I remember thinking to myself, "is this cool, or what!

"Smile" is also an extraordinary piece of music. Had it been released in 1967, the way it was intended, no one would have understood it. At least "Sergeant Pepper" had elements of the ritualistic rock album (and even at that, Pepper stood out as singularly bizarre that year). This had none, really. It was a collection of little songs strung together in a way to tell a story (perhaps a drug-hazed story, but a story nonetheless). If it reminds me of anything at all, it reminds me of the second side of "Abbey Road", with unfinished bits of songs strung together to create a definite aural effect, if nothing else; the songs themselves weren't that cohesive on "Abbey Road" and aren't on "Smile").

What separates the two records, of course, is the placement of the songs. Where "Abbey Road" was divided by sides (the first side being a collection of normal songs while the second side kind of wanders off into the realm of the bizarre), "Smile" interspersed both freely. Hence, you get these moments of brilliance that just seem to crop up out of nowhere.

For example, from "Heros and Villains" to "Surf's Up" you get a collection of melodious songs that -- as I've said earlier -- aren't really complete; yet create, by their sequencing, a definite mood. But in the middle of it all, there's "Surf's Up," one of the most complicated, perplexing, wonderful, beautiful, confusing, exasperating, uplifting, almost ethereal, songs in the rock repertoire. It is said to be the song that caused all the friction in the Beach Boys (Mike Love didn't understand it and wanted nothing to do with singing it), and it led, not-too-indirectly, to all of Brian Wilson's subsequent mental health problems.

It's not as if I'd never heard it before. It came out on other albums, and though you never heard it much, even on FM radio, once in a while someone would play it late at night ... and you could almost see the marijuana smoke swirling around the room when you heard it.

But hearing it live, sung by Brian Wilson, with all that history ... that was almost too much to take. The audience grew quiet, almost reverential, as the song unfolded. There was literally no noise. I thought I might be in church.

Then (another relic from the past) the matches and lighters came out and there was a sea of flames as Wilson wrapped up the song. And when he finished, the ovation was deafening. And it lasted for a good five or six minutes ... people standing, screaming, some of them even crying. What a moment!

This was not the first stop on the tour. Yet, Brian Wilson sat there ... and I don't think he knew what to do. He's not the most stable person ANYWAY, and I think he just wished it would end so that he could just go back to playing music. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but he accepted it graciously as it waned, and went back to playing music!

The ovation was almost as long, and as long, when he finished "Good Vibrations," too.

But the bonus was after the intermission, he and his band came out and played some real old, vintage Beach Boys material, ending the night with "Surfin' USA" and "Fun, Fun, Fun," with everyone up and dancing in the aisles.

The concert was also noteworthy because it was in July of 2005 ... and Wilson played "Ol' St. Nick." THAT was funny!

So there you have it. Five classic concerts I'll never forget.

Idle Chatter

2008-03-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

Idle chatter while waiting for this goddamned winter to finally go away:

* Are people who constantly complain about taxes similarly outraged when they get raises in their jobs, and -- as a result -- the price of their product increases? Something tells me that when the shoe's on the other foot, these people will defend their raises to the death and argue that "if you want good service, you have to pay."

Yet when anyone gets a raise in the public sector, or if the cost of plowing streets, or collecting trash, or heating and maintaining schools goes up due to circumstances beyond anybody's control (have you checked the price for a barrel of oil these days?), the first thing these people worry about is their taxes ... as if that's the ONLY thing that matters. Your school system's books are so archaic that some of them might say "someday, man will land on the moon," yet don't raise MY taxes to update the curriculum.

Silly.

* I do not like Hillary Clinton. To me, she's about as phony as they come. Beyond any of her issues, the reason I don't like her is because when she ran for U.S. Senate in 2000, she went around wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and declaring to everyone that she was always a Yankee fan. Right. Let's see. Born in Illinois, educated at Yale (where, I guarantee you, she didn't know the difference between a New York Yankee and a Minnesota Twin), lived in Arkansas. Spent eight years as the First Lady and -- as far as I or anyonen else can see -- never used the perks of her position to become a fixture at Yankee Stadium, the way her initial opponent, Rudy Giuliani, was.

Sadly, this seems to be 100 percent representative of her. If you look up the word "politically expedient," there's her picture.

Having said all that, I really hate it when people start bringing up how "shrill" she is. There are plenty of other things on which to roast her. Why bring up something she can't help? And if it's not "shrill" it's the "cackle." Here's how answers.com defines "cackle:" To make the shrill cry characteristic of a hen after laying an egg. To laugh or talk in a shrill manner."

In other words, a "cackle" is a sound unique to the female ... not the male.

This is what you call "code." It's the same thing as saying Katie Couric lacks "gravitas." Well, if "gravitas" means having a deep, authoritative voice, then of COURSE she lacks "gravitas." So what? For Chrissakes Ted Baxter had "gravitas" if you want to go by that definition!! It's not politically correct to hate on someone merely because of her gender, so you have to find other reasons that don't sound so politically incorrect -- yet deliver the same subtle message.

This is why someone thought it would be hilarious to post a picture of Barack Obama wearing native Somali attire. You won't get any mileage anymore by comparing "Obama" to "Osama," but if you can show him dressed like a Somali warlord, you get your point across without saying a WORD!!

Look, there are plenty of legitimate reasons not to like Hillary Clinton. I just gave you one of mine, and while it's certainly lame, it's not nearly as lame as saying she lacks "Gravitas" or that she sounds "shrill." And people -- especially women -- who insist on using these code words to describe them you're just playing into the hands of the sexists who resent BOTH of them invading their playing field.

* I was going through a toll booth in Boston Saturday night and -- as always -- I thought of The Godfather and James Caan. Some images are just too indelibly ingrained to escape. I'll always think of Sonny Corleone whenever I go through a toll booth. I'm always expecting the collector to drop my money, bend down to pick it up, only to find an army of machine gun-wielding thugs popping up to blow me away. And there I'll be ... lying in the middle of the street, with blood and glass oozing out of me.

But isn't it funny how you can't avoid certain images. I love piano bars, yet I can't go to a club with a piano players without going up to the piano player and saying "you played it for her, you can play it for me," in my most ridiculous Humphrey Bogart voice.

I can't see anyone hit a ground ball to first base -- at any level -- without AUTOMATICALLY knowing that it's going to go right through the kid's legs. I have Bill Buckner to thank for that.

Whenever I see Bill Belichick, I see him in a captain's uniform on the USS Caine, rattling those ball bearings with his fingers, just like Captain Queeg.

I can't even THINK of Wade Boggs anymore without thinking of Roger Dorn in "Major Leagues."

If I see a picture of anyone in a soldier's uniform, no matter what they're doing, all I see is Mike Dukakis in that damn tank.

I'm sure there are many more of these, but that's all for now.

* I always had a fascination for the Wild West, ever since I was a little kid. I wasn't obsessed with it, and I certainly wan't much for watching westerns on TV (or movies), but the legends themselves always fascinated me. I couldn't have cared less about the latest John Wayne movie. Never saw "True Grit." But the true historic stuff, or the more intelligent movies like "The Oxbow Incident?" Loved those.

I bring this up because during my Super Bowl weekend, I spent a day in Tombstone, Arizona, which -- for those who don't know -- was the site of the famous "Shootout at the O.K. Corral." What amazed me was that the gunfight itself lasted all of about two minutes (if that), with the Earp brothers (Wyatt, Virgil and Morgan), along with Doc Holliday, scoring a decisive rout over Ike Clanton's game. But the fallout from the fight lasted years, with Virgil being wounded and Morgan being killed.

I suppose this particularly skirmish stood out, among all the rest of the lawlessness of the old west, because of the characters involved. Who hasn't heard of Wyatt Earp? or Doc Holliday?

Wyatt Earp is a fascinating study. I guess the best way to describe him was "morally ambiguous." He certainly never let the expediency of the moment bother his conscience. He spurned all offers to become a marshal in Tombstone (after having performed the duties elsewhere) and wasn't happy when his brother, Virgil, became one and outlawed guns in the main part of town as one of his first official acts.

But when the Clanton gang -- with whom the brothers were already feuding -- decided to cause trouble, Wyatt got talked into going down to the area of the corral (along with a very willing Doc Holliday) to disarm the men. Instead, a gunfight ensued and the Clanton gang very much got the worst of it.

I've read about this gunfight for years, been fascinated with it, seen movies about it ... but never really got the FEEL for it until I stood where the shootout actually occurred.

Great stuff.

* And speaking of Arizona, it's a nice state ... when it's not cold (which is was, when I was there in February). There's some beautiful scenery, and Scottsdale is a very trendy city.

But the Valley of the Sun is also rather strange in that its subdivisions are all basically the same. They're all cut out of nothingness. It's as if someone threw a dart at a zone and said "here! Here is where I'm going to build my subdivision," and then went in there, put up a bunch of cookie-cutter houses, and left. In some of these places, you can actually visualize how they looked before they were developed ... because all you have to do is go down the street and see the vast nothingness -- even in built-up places such as Mesa.

What a difference between that and Boston, where there's no rhyme or reason to where houses are built, and no homeowners' associations to govern how uniform they must look. I don't know. Houses are bought and sold up here, too. It would seem to me that if you're going to put down a half million dollars for the house of your dreams, you should have the right to paint it whatever color you want.

That's all for today.

"He's Not the Kind You Have To Wind Up on Sundays"

2008-02-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

If you've never heard this fine tune, it's the final song on Jethro Tull's "Aqualung," and it deals with the hypocrisy of people who wear their religion on their sleeves on Sunday ... but basically ignore it every other day of the week.

If you're looking one of the great social shifts in the United States of America in the 21st century, look no further than religion ... or, to be more specific, Christianity.

In 1966, John Lennon said the following: "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right, and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock'n'roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

Now, it's quite possible that Lennon, since he was only 25 years old when he said these words, uttered them in a haze of human hubris. It's doubtful that Lennon had anywhere near the insight, at his age, and regardless of HOW much acid he'd ingested by then, to have been able to predict the controversy that religion has caused in this last decade.

In 1966, the western world was still predominantly, and smugly, Christian. People questioned it, sure. Time Magazine even had a cover story asking if God was dead. There have always been agnostics, athiests, and -- perhaps more important -- people who subscribed to other religions, and other forms of spirituality. But there is no doubt that, back in 1966, that people who argued against school prayer, for example, were clearly in the minority (and by school prayer, I think we can all agree that we were talking about Christian/Catholic school prayer).

I use 1966 is a point of demarkation here because that's the year Time asked if God was dead, and the year that Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Like most everything else about the '60s, attitudes about religion were being re-examined under a different microscope. Maybe, the examinations revealed, it wasn't such a good thing to marry government and religion as freely as we had in the precedingn decades. Maybe, the examination revealed, the first amendment that prohibited the establishment of a national religion REALLY meant that government couldn't coerce its citizens, either overtly or covertly, to subscribe to a specific religion ... and that MAYBE the umbrella under which the amendment protected religious freedom included the banning of school prayer in public schools.

Now, the more introspective Christians (and let's include Catholics here so we don't have to keep saying two words instead of one; Catholics often don't want to be associated with a lot of these right-wing nut Christian sects, even though they're not really bastions of liberalism themselves) among us understand this, and they're all right with it. They see that public schools in the United States, especially in the inner cities, are melting pots whose religions affiliations go in a thousand and one different directions.

The less introspective Christians (and thre are a TON of them!!!!) see this as an example of "Godless Communism."

Now, let's digress for a few minutes and discuss Godless Communism. And let me preface by saying that in no WAY to I think that came out of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution was in any way desirable, moral, or even workable (as history has ultimately proven). But I do understand the Soviet Unionn's feeling about religion. Christians don't like hearing this, but religion has been the cause of a lot of pain in this world, from the time of Christ all the way up to now. It causes divisions and rifts among people for no other reason than their chosen paths toward spiritual fulfillment, which is perhaps the WORST reason to divide people. At different times in world history, people have been slaughtered en masse because of religious differences, and the Christians are no less guilty of this -- over the long, long haul -- than the most radical Muslem.

So if the Soviets, in their effort to create a more balanced society, felt that religion unnecessarily divided people -- not to mention got them killed -- then it's certainly understandable. But all the Soviets really did, however, was create a state and it treated like a God, and that's really not much of a difference at all. You'd better not worship God, but you'd better worship the state. That's the worst kind of nationalism there is, and you can see where this system didn't even last through the end of the 20th century.

Back to the subject at hand. The Constitution prohibits the establishment of a national religion, but it doesn't say people cannot practice their religions -- either in their own homes or right out there in public. And while I can see the logic that causes citizens to complain about using public money to put a Christmas creche up in the town square, I cannot see the logic that allows them to complain, and picket, if a private enterprise wants to foot the bill for said creche. We still have religious freedom in this country, not to mention freedom of expression, and if the owner of a department store wants to pay to put a plastic Baby Jesus in a manger, and put it on the town common, well, don't be telling him he can't do it. That's going too far.

On the other hand, when some judge in Alabama, or Mississippi, wants to carve the 10 Commandments on a slate outside his courthouse, that's a not-so-tacit crossing of the line between church and state ... and CLEARLY must be prohibited. Whatever laws we deem to follow on this country, we follow because they're ethically inspired, not religiously inspired. And even if, oftentimes, they're one and the same, that's not the point.

Most of these arguments were in place, and very much in the field of play, when George W. Bush was elected president (well, to be more accurate, was handed the presidency by the U.S. Supreme Court), and brought his born-again philosophy to the White House. Under ordinary circumstances, the excessive tendencies of zealots were to be watched, for sure, but there were all probably deemed harmless in comparison to other issues that greeded the president in 2001.

But then came September 11, 2001. Everything changed. And among the great changes that swept across the country were attitudes toward religion. There were people who dug in, and saw this as the resurrection of an ancient battle between the Moslems and Christians (if you go to Wiki and look up Muhammad, it'll tell you that the Moslems consider themselves the purest form of God's teaching, and that all the rest of the religions are infidels). The more radical Moslems consider it their duty to weed out the infidels (a polite way, I suppose of saying "kill them,") so that the purity of Islam can flourish once again.

This is one attitude.

Others, and I kind of put myself in this boat, suggest that the purity of Islam has very little to do with what's happening, and that all of this terrorism is purely political, borne of the Moslem world's raging resentment over how it's been occupied and exploited by western powers for centuries. There's one thing about religious people that rings true again and again: the most zealous of them are gullible to ridiculous degrees. Tell them if they do this, or that, that they'll be saved for all eternity, and they're on board. Tell someone you're asking to martyr himself for a cause (that -- as any sensible person can see -- is more political and spiritual) that he'll be greeted by seven virgins in paradise, and if that's their ONLY formal education, they may buy into it.

I don't think the people who lead these terrorist cells are as devoutly religious as they are devoutly political. They use religion to twist people into doing their bidding for them the exact same way David Korech and Jim Jones did.

This is no big secret ... at least not to me. So when these hysterical people want to frame this debate as some monolithic religious struggle, I want to scream.

But there's been a curious backlash ... I think, anyway. And it's being borne out by reports, that just came out this week, that people are changing their religions more now than at any other time in U.S. history.

Why is this?

I think it's because for the first time in American history, we see the damaged, up close and personal, that radical religion can cause. There haven't been many times, in the history of this country, where religion has caused serious, historic tragedies. There have been the Jonestowns, and Wacos, and all of that, but these people have always been dismissed as the lunatic fringe. And while it's true ... they ARE the lunatic fringe ... we've always been able to smugly disassociate ourselves from the worst of it. That's not US. No WAY the local Episcopalian church at the corner would ever be on board for THAT. We need not worry. That'll never happen in Smalltown America.

Even after 9/11, as horrible as that was, we could at least say "that's those crazy Moslems. We should just carpet bomb every country over there and exterminate them. Then everything would be OK."

But would it?

I remember a few years ago when a soldier from Marblehead, Massachusetts was killed in Afghanistan, and this small sect called the Westboro Baptist Church, from Kansas, picketed his funeral because, to them, his death was God's way of punishing America for being tolerant of homosexuality.

It didn't surprise me that they picketed. it's America, and Lord knows there are crazies all over the place -- even in America. What bothered me was the stunning silence of more mainstream Christian groups who DIDN'T consider it their duty to set the record straight and say "hey, whoa! They don't represent ME, my CHURCH, or ANYTHING that I think and believe."

As they say, the silence was deafening.

Now, I thought it was every Christian's duty to set the record straight. And that really, really opened my eyes. There are times in this life when you have to set yourself apart from the thundering herd of Rhinoseri careening down the street (a tip of the cap to Eugene Ionnesco). And if there's that much hatred in this world, then if you consider yourself anywhere near a MORAL person, you have to stand up and be counted.

But fringe groups notwithstanding, there was the Roman Catholic pedophilia scandal in which the church was very slow to see what was happening, and even slower to respond. If one of the stated purposes of religion is to set the moral bar high, then how is that possible when your priests (or some of them, anyway) are molesting young boys and your organizational structure will not respond?

Finally, there's the 2004 election, in which the Republican party absolutely co-opted evangelicals all across America. It's one thing to be religious, and it's one thing to apply your religious beliefs to the way YOU live. But for a group of generally extremely right wing religious zealots is allowed to hold that much sway over a national election? That's downright scary.

So I think Americans now see religion with a much more cynical eye. I think people really, and finally, see why it's so important to keep religion out of government, and government out of religion.

Don't forget: the framers of the constitution were only a century and a half removed from persecuting "witches" in Salem, Massachusetts. They were only a century and a half of stockades, and other forms of public humiliation, for religious transgressions. They were only a century and a half of a puritan heritage that actually survives, in many quarters, TO THIS DAY.

There are all kinds of reasons to be concerned about the growing influence of the religious right in American politics, beginning with a general rush to judgment about how we live our lives up to, and including, hijacking Roe vs. Wade.

This examination is long overdue, as this is the single most unsettling development in this country's political history, probably, since the runup to the Civil War.

Make the break ... Bill Belichick must go

2008-02-24T19:38:00.000-08:00

This is difficult. Bill Belichick is the author of perhaps the great run of success in Boston sports since Red Auerbach coached the Celtics to eight straight NBA championiships (and nine out of 10).

He's almost universally acknowledged, and rightfully so, as the National Football League's pre-eminent coach. The problem is, he's also almost universally acknowledged as the NFL's pre-eminent jerk.

Now, it's no big sin to be a jerk ... as long as you win. Red Auerbach wasn't exactly the most gracious winner in history either. Jeeezus, Red used to light up a cigar -- right there on the floor of the Boston Garden -- when he determined the game was over ... even if there was time left on the clock. Just that alone makes Belichick's one-second-early exit from the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., in Super Bowl XLII seem almost like a good will gesture by comparison.

Jerks abound in professional sports, and most of the time, the jerks coming out on the winning end of the final score. Just go through the list: Jimmy Johnson, Barry Switzer, Billy Martin, the aforementioned Auerbach, George Steinbrenner ... and that's just a small sampling. Until Herb Brooks coached the U.S. Olympic hockey team to a gold medal in 1980, he was a monumental jerk who, once, kept his team on the ice, skating up and down the ice, until everyone one of those kids was ready to vomit. And that was just after they'd played a game.

It's not such a good thing to be a jerk when you lose, however. Around here John McNamara springs to mind. Johnny Mac may have managed the Boston Red Sox to the 1986 pennant, but then Rich Gedman let the ball get past him, the next ball when through Bill Buckner's legs, and Sox suddenly became an international symbol for having a foreign object lodged in one's throat.

Johnny Mac never stopped being a jerk ... and he was fired a year and a half later. Good guy Joe Morgan took over and probably lasted a few seasons longer than he had a right to expect ... because he was the anti-jerk.

But name me a jerk ... from any era, any city, any sports, and I say Bill Belichick laps the field. Let's start with the obvious: Spygate. This is starting to sound like Roger Clemens (speaking of jerks) and steroids. Everything you hear is worse than the last thing you heard. I doubt Clemens has ever heard of Sir Walter Scott, but perhaps if he'd read a little bit by him he'd know the adage, "oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive."

Ditto Belichick. Way back in September, when this broke, Belichick -- if he had any sense of decency -- would have told NFL commissioner Roger Goodall "ok, you've got me," and taken his medicine. And that medicine should have been a suspension AND a fine.

If either Belichick or Goodall had acted with anything other sweeping this whole thing under the rug in their minds, we wouldn't be listening U.S. Senator Arlen Spector (what DO these people do all day long anyway??) treating this thing as if it's the Nuremberg Trials Redux.

(For that matter, had Clemens been equally forthcoming, he wouldn't have been dragged before Congress so that his stupidity could become an indelible entry into the Congressional record).

Now, if you believe the myriad of anonymous sources and apparent sleazeballs like Matt Walsh, there's so much illicit footage in the Patriots vaults they could make a miniseries out of it. By the time all this "spygate" drama truly unfolds, it's possible that all three Super Bowl victories could be irreparably tainted.

And while I couldn't care less about Belichick's reputation, I do care about Tom Brady's ... and Tedy Bruschi's ... and Adam Vinatieri's ... and Richard Seymour's ... and Mike Vrabel's ... and Rodney Harrison's (even if he DID use HGH ... at least he admitted it). They stand to get swept up in all of this too ... just by association.

"Spygate" is not my only grievance with Belichick (though it's certainly enough of one). He's also, quite simply, an embarrassment ... to himself and the organization he represents. The real tragedy here is that, apparently, he's a very intelligent, and very engaging person when he's among friends, and among people he trusts.

And that just makes his conduct in competitive moments even more puzzling.

I think we can all understand competition. I think we all understand that competitive people get into this "zone," where they're so totally focused that they allow nothing, or no one, to stand in their way.

And I admire that. I think it's great, for example, that David Ortiz can zone out 35,000 people screaming for him to get a hit and concentrate on his battle with the pitcher enough to be one of the best clutch hitters I've ever seen. I love the fact that Larry Bird could go into a hostile arena, with upwards to 18,000 people screaming at him, and sink the two game-winning free throws. And how can you not tip your hat to Brady et al. when they can go into a place like Pittsburgh, or Indianapolis, with all those crazy fans, and win.

But do you know what's greater about David Ortiz? When the Red Sox lose, and the game's over, he acts like a gentlemen. Larry Bird may not have enjoyed dissecting a game after the Celtics lost, but he did it ... and intelligently, too (this business about him being the hick from French Lick was so phony). Win or lose, Brady, Bruschi, and Harrison stand up and answer questionsn intelligently and civilly.

Even when the Patriots win, Belichick acts like you're trying to extract valuable information out of him. When they lose, he acts like Captain Queeg. You can almost see the ball bearings.

Well, you say, who cares about how he treats the news media? They're all out to rip him anyway, so why should he be civil to them? It's a point well taken. The media are frustrated when it comes to dealing with Belichick. It's not a very pleasant task. The media's job is to relay information to the fans who pay for tickets, buy merchandise, and whose interest in the team makes it worth what it is today.

There's no other way to get information. And while it's understandable that the Belichick doesn't want to give away the store, with regards to injuries, some of the questions he dodges, and the lengths to which he goes to dodge them, is absurd. And this was never more evident than it was last September when he flat-out refused to discuss the developing Spygate story.

Excuse me, Coach, but you don't get to make that decision. If you don't want to discuss the severity of Brady's ankle sprain (which was probably way worse than anyone let on, judging by the way he played in the Super Bowl), that's fine. But when you violate the rules and get caught -- especially by the guy who used to work for you (and, for all any of us know, did the dirty work himself back in the day) -- then you don't get to decide when the story's run its course. That's just arrogant.

But arrogant, thy name is Belichick. Let's talk about Eric Mangini. Apparently, Belichick didn't think Mangini was ready to coach in the NFL when the Jets approached him about taking the job. Well, isn't this just every office conflict that's ever come down the pipe? Isn't there always a boss, somewhere, who stands between you and advancement ... and for some ridiculous reason (such as "you're too valuable and I can't afford to lose you").

Right.

The difference between you and Mangini, though, is that Mangini got an offer he couldn't refuse. And he took it. The problem is that while all this was going on, the Patriots were getting ready for the 2005 playoffs -- where they lost in the second round to the Denver Broncos. Mangini, or so the rumors say, tried to talk to potential Patriots free agents on his way out the door ... another thing that chapped Bill's buttocks.

So now it's 2006, and you have to drag Mangini's name out of Belichick as if saying it will mean instant death. He refers to Mangini as "the Jets' coach." THEN, the Jets beat the Patriots in Foxborough and Belichick doesn't even shake Mangini's hand.

Now Lord knows, this is not a requirement. It's not in the list of "thou shalts and thou shalt nots" governing the conduct of NFL coaches (the way filming defensive signals from the sidelines is). But it is accepted protocol, and it's widely practiced. Allowing yourself to be seen as a churl, on national TV, indicates a remarkable lack of respect for your owner ... the guy who's paying you all this money (we'll get to Bob Kraft in a minute).

The coda to this story, of course, is that the Patriots beat the Jets in the playoffs, and Belichick, so anxious was he to be seen as the ultimate gracious winner, bowled over a photographer (shoved him out of the way, actually) so he could offer Mangini a hearty handshake.

If that's not irony, I don't know what is!

Let's cut to San Diego, where some of the Patriots players displayed an uncharacteristic lack of class and stomped on the Chargers' logo after upsetting them in the divisional round of the playoffs.

Afterward, LaDanian Tomlinson -- clearly upset and stunned by the loss -- said that the Patriots players probably got their lack of class from their coach. I can't see how he could have POSSIBLY made that connection, can you?

Let's talk about this season.

After Spygate broke, Belichick apparently saw as his mission to humiliate the entire NFL as a means of payback. Week after week, the team went out and bludgeoned a series of hapless opponents (well not all of them were hapless; the Redskins, 52-7 losers, actually made the playoffs; and the Browns came close). The only close game was the 24-20 come-from-behind win over the Colts.

And you have to ask: Was all that bludgeoning really necessary? Did it serve any useful purposes, other than to make the Patriots the most hated franchise in the NFL? Did it help establish them as a superior team? Or did it result in having a bull's eye painted on their backs?

Whatever the psychological ramifications of those bludgeonings were, the PR effect was disastrous. The Patriots were seen as bullies, and Belichick came across as Dr. Evil with a hoodie. Except that Dr. Evil was funny, and Belichick isn't.

By the time the season ended, and the Patriots finally got roughed up a little, there was an air of vulnerability to them. They absolutely limped to their 16-0 regular season record, seemingly getting worse instead of better ... as is the usual formula for success in the NFL. If there was ever a team ripe to being upset by a hungry, nasty and motivated team like the Giants, it was the Patriots.

This of course brings up another absolutely unlikeable Bill Belichick trait: Hubris. This man wrote the book (or, at least, he co-authored it with George W. Bush, who seems to have an overabundance of it himself).

Hubris is basically an unjustified belief in yourself. It is not hubris, for example, to say "I'm a good enough coach, or a good enough player, that I'm capable of going out there on any given Sunday and winning the game." Why play at all if you think you're going to lose?

It is hubris, on the other hand, to say "I can strip mine my team yearly, let go of valuable free agents, bring in lesser players and teach them MY system ... but it's MY system, and not the athletes, who have won these three Super Bowls."

After all Adam Vinatieri did for the franchise, why is he playing for the Indianapolis Colts? After all Deion Branch did for this franchise, why is he with the Seattle Seahawks?

If Adam Vinatieri was so expendable, why is that Belichick was afraid to have Stephen Gostkowski kick a field goal on a fourth-and-13, from the 31-yard line -- IN A DOMED STADIUM, no less -- that would have given the Patriots a 10-3 lead in a game where points had been non-existant since the first quarter? Do you think he'd have snubbed Vinatieri in that situation?

When Belichick allowed BOTH starting receivers to walk after the 2005 season, that spoke volumes about how he treats loyal players. I'm not talking about either Branch or Givens. I'm talking about Tom Brady, who gave money BACK to the team when he signed his last contract so it could sign talented players and stay within the salary cap.

Belichick rewarded him by taking away his two best receivers and then replacing them with the likes of Reche Caldwell. I can still see Caldwell dropping a pass that would have been a sure touchdown in the AFC championship game in Indianapolis. Just about everyone else on the field was in Ohio. That's how wide-open Caldwell was.

These are small transgressions, and, taken separately, they're certainly not grounds for dismissal. Coaches have to make personnel decisions every day, and they're not all going to be strokes of genius.

And there probably isn't a coach out there who hasn't acted like an ass at least once ... unless it's St. Tony Dungy (let's everyone pause for a minute and genuflect).

But Belichick's hubris, arrogance, blatant disregard for even common civility, and -- of course -- his spectacular disregard for the rules of the NFL -- add up to a man who has overstayed his welcome here. If I were Bob Kraft, I'd be embarrassed beyond words by this guy. Sure, he's won Kraft three Super Bowls, but he's also left a ton of wreckage in his wake. If we were talking economics here, he's reached the point of diminishing returns.

Because Belichick was much more interested in stonewalling, and since Goodall was equally interested in doing the same thing, this Spygate issue is not going to go away. It'll be like the drip, drip, drip of some bizarre water tortue drill (waterboarding in super-slow motion?).

And by the time it really explodes, Kraft may have no choice but to rid himself of the problem's head: Bill Belichick.

They all said Bobby Knight would ever get fired ... he did. The New York Yankees fired Billy Martin after he won a World Series. Woody Hayes was enabled by Ohio State so much that he apparently thought it was OK to punch an opposing player out after he'd intercepted a pass. That one got him canned.

Jerks whose surly behavior ultimately haunt their teams like a hulking ghost DO get shown the door. And perhaps it's time to point Bill Belichick in that general direction.

Let's hear it for February!

2008-02-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

The conventional wisdom in New England is that February is the worst month of the year. It's cold, stormy, and even though it's the shortest month of the year, it seems to take the longest to complete.

I would disagree with that. For whatever reason, March seems longer; and January is much colder, and much darker. Actually, as months go, December is probably the toughest one on me emotionally because the days get inexorably darker, whereas once you hit January, and especially February, things lighten up.

But this essay is on February. And while everything everybody says is true ... it's cold, it's stormy, and all that ... there are also aspects about it that -- to me -- make it go by faster.

Some of these things are local; some are national, and some, believe it or not, are meteorological. But put them together, and you have a month with plenty to look forward to.

First, the local. The first two Mondays of February feature the Beanpot Hockey Tournament. This is one of those parochial, local events that pits Boston's four Division 1 colleges -- Boston College, Boston University, Harvard and Northeastern -- against each other for the city championiship.

On one hand, the Beanpot has been a constant bane of my existance. I went to Northeastern (graduated in 1976) and while I was there, we never won it. In fact, we didn't win it for the first time since 1980 when Wayne Turner scored an overtime goal to beat BC. We won it three more times in the 80s (the last championship being in 1988) and haven't won it since.

Usually, Boston College or Boston University (mostly BU) win it. Now, before I go one, what -- you may ask -- is the difference between BC and BU? One's Catholic and one's not. That would appear to be it. They're both private institutions, both cost a fortune, and both award doctorates.

BC is, at the moment, the largest Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States. That is correct. It even has Notre Dame beat. There are two very large, and very prestigious, Catholic colleges in Massachusetts: BC and Holy Cross, which is in Worcester. Holy Cross is older, and at the time BC was established, Holy Cross was considered a school for elites while BC catered to the sons and daughters of Irish immigrants.

That's certainly not the case today. BC is every bit as elitist as Holy Cross. They're both extremely difficult to get into, and if you graduate from either institute, you're set for life unless you're the world's biggest moron. As with Harvard, you reap the benefits of at BC or Holy Cross education for the networking that results from it, if not the actual LEARNING.

Boston College is also an athletic factory -- at least in comparison to the other three. Actually, in comparison to other, REAL athletic factories in the United States, BC is probably a lot more responsible about its connection between athletics and academics. It has rigid standards for acceptance, and that includes athletes. Naturally, coaches complain about that, but I'm on the side of the school. If you've paid close to $200,000 -- by the time it's all said and done -- for a BC degree, you certainly don't want it cheapened by some idiot who can't spell Boston getting a scholarship.

BC borders Boston's suburbs of Brookline and Newton. It's on a nice piece of land, with a beautiful campus. On a picturesque autumn day, it's postcard perfect.

Boston University is a city school, as is Northeastern. Acutally, they're not that far apart, nestled in the bowels of Boston's Back Bay (on either side of Fenway Park). BU, in its own right, is a very prestigious university -- every bit as academically challenging as BC. Tuition at the two schools is comparitively similar. The only thing it really lacks is the sports pedigree BC has. The two schools are rivals only in hockey, where BU has poured virtually ALL of its athletic money. When the U.S. Olympic hockey team won the Gold Medal in 1980, four of its players -- including captain Mike Eruzione -- were BU graduates (so was goalie Jim Craig, as well as Dave Silk and Jack O'Callaghan).

BU and BC are the only schools that, year in and year out, can compete with the Minnesotas, Wisconsins and North Dakota States of the country.

Northeastern has worked awfully hard to re-establish itself as an institute of serious learning, and seems to be getting there. For a while, it was definitely No. 4 out of 4, with a huge gap between itself and No. 3. When I went there, it as old, bloated, and -- I think -- out of touch with the city and academia in general. To give you an example, three of these four schools had extensive plans on how to celebrate the country's bicentennial in 1976. Northeastern had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing something.

Now, there's less of a gap academically. NU and BU contain two of the best journalism schools in the Northeast (right up there with Syracuse and Columbia Universities). BC and Harvard are more business and law oriented.

Of course, there's Harvard. It's not REALLY a Boston school, per se, as most of it is in Cambridge (with parts of it that spill over). Like BC and Holy Cross, the biggest advantage in going to Harvard is the opportunity to network. Graduate from Harvard and you've got it made. It is also one of the better schools athletically ... not so much for the power rankings of its teams, but for the fact that Harvard treats athletics as something to do to round out your education. The school does not award scholarships based solely on athletic ability (though if it finds a kid who can play quarterback, it'll certainly HELP him). All of its teams compete in the Ivy League, which will never be compared favorably to the Big Ten.

As it so happens, there is only one sport in which these four schools are equally competitive, and that's hockey. BC surpassed the rest in football and basketball years ago, and BU doesn't have football or baseball programs. Hockey is the only sport that unites these four schools.

So each year, on the first two Mondays of February, we have the Beanpot Hockey Tournament ... and every year, Northeastern loses (which it did this past Monday -- one day after the Big Super Bowl El Foldo by the You-Know-Whos).

February is especially interesting this year because it's a presidential election season. Ordinarily that means nothing in Massachusetts, but this year it actually did. First, Mitt Romney is not wildly popular in Massachusetts, even if he was our governor for about a minute and a half. A lot of Massholes (like me) took out Republican ballots at last Tuesday's primary and voted for McCain just so we could case one FINAL vote against Mitt).

That's the Republicans. As for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton won our state and it's significant because both she and Obama need every vote they can get to stay afloat. Rarely in this political culture is Massachusetts ever a player in the elections because a) it almost always goes Democrat (remember "Don't Blame Me, I'm From Massachusetts?); and b) by the time our primary takes place, there's usually a clearly-established front-runner and we just hop on board.

That wasn't the case this time. There is no Democratic front runner, and perhaps there will not be one until the summer. All of which makes every primary from hereon out crucial to both Clinton and Obama. So it was refreshing, for a change, to be in a political atmosphere that radiated excitement instead of resignation.

Valentine's Day falls right in the middle of February. Now don't look at ME if you're trying to find some hopeless and helpless romantic who sees Valentine's Day and gets all kinds of lumps in his throat. It's definitely a Hallmark Holiday.

But it falls RIGHT SMACK in the middle of the month, and in my mind, anyway, once Valentine's Day passes, I consider it the turning point of winter. It's all downhill from here, baby.

This doesn't necessarily mean winter's over. But in most years, the worst of it is over. Not always. But usually. Besides, by February 14, the sun's higher in the sky, the days are longer, and whatever snow you DO get melts faster.

Which brings me to another thing about February that people tend to forget. Unless it's snowing, or unusually cold, you get spectacular weather in February. It's great month of you're an outdoors person of any kind. You get crisp, clear days, all the fresh air you could ever want, and they last right on through the work day (as opposed to December and January, where it's dark by 4 p.m.). And this is going to sound absolutely perverse, but there are years (and many of them, too) where the weather's better in February than it is in April.

Finally, and this is strictly local, the high school winter sports tournaments begin in February. If you do what I do, this is the most fun you have all year. Throw a pro sports event at me, and the tournament has it beat. It's three weeks of absolute madness, and by the time it's over, we're on the threshold of spring.

I don't know whether it's because these games are indoors, which rachets up the intensity, or what it is. But all I know is that there's nothing quite as exciting as seeing a bunch of boys and girls playing for the honor of their school. In many ways it's a throwback to a (perhaps) more innocent time in this country. It certainly has a small-town America feel to it. And you know? Sometimes, especially in this day and age, that's pretty cool.

And, on top of everything else ... the truck left Fenway Park today for Ft. Myers, Florida. It's time for baseball!!

So that's my hymn to February.

Super? Hardly

2008-02-05T22:48:00.000-08:00

We need to make one thing clear right away: The Super Bowl -- which is certainly a uniquely American spectacle -- is not about football. In fact, I'd submit to you that the game is irrelevent in the big picture.

Oh, it's certainly a part of the day ... a very large part, too, since without it there would be no vehicle for the wretched excess that goes with it. But in a curious sort of way, once we acknowledge how important the game is, it quickly sinks below the surface of what has become one of the most celebrated days of greed and excessive consumerism ever foisted upon the American public.

You get a sense of this when you watch the Super Bowl on television. Maybe one in five people watching actually care about the game. The other four watch for the commercials, or the halftime show, or the pregame show. I liken it to the Kentucky Derby because even people who know next to nothing about horse racing watch it because, heck, it's the KENTUCKY DERBY!

Only the Super Bowl is worse. Name me one other television show where the topic of conversation the next day centers around the commercials. Most of the time, commercials are an annoying necessity. We tune them out, or we take care of our physical needs, or we go out to the kitchen and make a sandwich. But in the Super Bowl, we stick around and rate the commercials as if they're up for academy awards.

And notice I said "television show." That was not a mistake. The Super Bowl is a television show, and that's why -- after having seen one without the benefit of commercials to compensate for the ennui of inaction -- I can no longer take it seriously as an American SPORTING event.

American ENTERTAINMENT event ... yes. You have to respect the Super Bowl for the sheer power of the money it hauls in. But it's time we all got the stars out of our eyes when it comes to the importance of the GAME, as opposed to the importance of the EVENT.

Here is the Super Bowl in 2008: One giant cacophony of NOISE. There is no way to filter this noise out, either. There is no time to just sit in the stands and be allowed to take it all in on your own terms. You are assaulted with noise from the time you get there until the time you leave.

The jumbotron scoreboard goes non-stop. NFL season highlights, advertisements, interviews with players, non-stop NFL self-promotion. And -- worst of all -- non-stop NFL self-congratulations for what wonderful people they all are.

These messages are repeated over and over again at ear-piercing decibels, with loud music, loud percussion, and loud narration. As soon as the action stops, the noise begins. It was so bad this year that Tom Petty's four-song halftime set was actually quiet by comparison.

This brings us to the commercials. I will concede that when it comes to creativity, Super Bowl commercials bring out the A-game in every advertiser. Some of them are pretty clever, some of them are funny, and, conversely, some of them overreach beyond comprehension. But you have to admire the effort.

But if you're at the stadium, you don't see the commercials. You hear excessively loud noise that launches a wholescale assault on your eardrums ... and you hear it for the entire time the rest of the country is entertained by those commercials.

What probably made it worse this year was that the first quarter flew by -- thanks to a nine-plus minute drive by the New York Giants that opened the game. That must have had the FOX honchos screaming. I know they'd have given anything to stick a four-minute block of commercials in there while Eli Manning was leading the Jints upfield, but even the NFL isn't that shameless.

That meant that FOX was left to squeeze them in basically over three quarters instead of four. That meant longer delays down there on the field. And it meant more noise everywhere else.

What does all this mean? It means the Super Bowl isn't a football game as much as it is a television show. Now before anyone accuses me of being naive, I understand that just about ALL sports these days are like this. Whenver the Boston College football team has a nationally televised game, there's a man in a red jacket who stands out there on the 20-yard line, with a set of headphones in his ears, and in a bright red jacket, and he's the guy who signals the referee that it's OK to start playing again.

However, the Super Bowl is essentially that times about a hundred. About the only thing I could ever compare it to was the time I went to see Bozo the Clown when I was a little kid ... and became horribly disillusioned at how absolutely FAKE it was ... the forced spontaneity ... all of it. Everything was choreographed right down to the last second, including the enthusiastic cheer the children gave Bozo. Even that had to be rehearsed.

That's how intricately choreographed the Super Bowl is. And if just went to Glendale to see a game -- as I did -- it is horribly frustrating to have to sit through all that noise, all that mindless spectacle, just for the honor of watching a football game.

I didn't have to pay a cent. I got a press credential so I didn't measure my experience in terms of dollars and cents. But had I spent up to five figures for a good seat, I'd be thinking that I got zero bang for my buck.

People ask me, often, how I can go from covering the AFC championship game, or the Super Bowl, or the World Series to going to Saugus High on a Saturday morning to watch the Sachems match wits with Winthrop. And the answer is easy. It may be a miniature version of what went on this past Sunday, but it's just as real to the kids who play high school ball on a Saturday afternoon in Saugus as it is to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. And I am privileged to be able to treat it as if it's every bit as real.

People always want to know "what is it like" covering the Patriots and Red Sox. It's WORK. Your average Patriots game -- for me -- starts at 9 a.m. on a Sunday when I have to leave for Foxborough ahead of the traffic. It ends somewhere around 9 at night when I'm finally pulling into my driveway. When they're home, and when they're playing their normal 1 p.m. game, they cost me an entire Sunday. If they play at 4 p.m., or at night, it's worse. There's nothing like driving up to your house in Lynn at 3 a.m. after having covered a Sunday or a Monday night football game in Foxborough.

I'm not complaining. It's work a lot of people would kill to be able to do. It's certainly not boring. Even the dullest game is better than sitting around an office from 9 to 5 every day, going to endless meetings and listening to executives drone on and on about God knows what. Covering pro sports has given me some pretty big thrills. And even though I was certainly not rooting for the Giants Sunday, how can you not walk away from a game where the pivotal play involved a receiver catching the ball off his HELMET without being eternally grateful that you were THERE to see it?

I just wish there was more of that Sunday and less needless noise. Because at the end of the day, we may have witnessed one of the true upsets in the history of the National Football League. But it was all buried beneath the symphony of noise, consumerism, excess and greed that, all rolled up into one, makes up the Super Bowl.

The anticipation grows

2008-01-20T10:12:00.000-08:00

It's shortly after 1:15 on Sunday afternoon, and Gillette Stadium as empty, save for the crew that'll be charged with maintaining law and order during the AFC championship game between the Patriots and San Diego Chargers.

By 3 p.m. the stands will be filled and there will be an air of frenzied electricity.

The Patriots take the field knowing that everyone outside of New England wants them to lose. Their national reputation is that they're joyless, robotic, bullies, and -- perhaps worst of all -- cheaters. If there is a taint to this so-far perfect season, it's that a) the Patriots somewhat compromised their usual lofty ideals when it comes to player personnel (especially with the latest hoo-hah surrounding Randy Moss); b) they blatantly went out and bought this team with as much ruthlessness as anything George Steinbrenner could have pulled off; and c) you can't be sure what's real accomplishment and what's been derived by violating NFL rules.

Ordinarly, that wouldn't matter much. If this were Al Davis, and we were talking about the Oakland Raiders, no one would care. Al's motto was "just win, baby," and tacit in that exhortation is that he didn't care what kind of miscreants his players were. In fact, the Raiders always rounded up the castoffs and turned them into winners. That's as much a part of their legacy as Ken Stabler and John Madden.

But we're talking about Bob Kraft, whose wife practically forced him to rescind a draft choice a decade ago because of his history of violence toward woman. The Patriots set lofty goals with regards to player personnel, and that leaves them open to all kinds of criticism when they fall short of these standards.

Since Bill Belichick took over the football operation, the Patriots have always been seen -- and emulated -- as a team that paid prudent attention to how it valued players ... and one that never overpaid. Be it Lawyer Milloy, or Deoin Branch, or David Givens, or Willie McGinest or Adam Vinatieri, the Patriots always drew the line and never crossed it. The only exception to that, maybe, was Tom Brady and, well, what do you do when your quarterback continues to make that line move? He is the one indispensable player on that team.

Then they lost to the Indianapolis Colts in the final minute of last year's AFC championship game. If you want to go by what happened on the field, the defense -- which is aging -- couldn't stop Peyton Manning and the Colts in the final two quarters.

But it goes deeper than that. Brady had no first-class weapons to work with. Belichick played hardball with both his receivers -- Givens and Branch -- and as a result, the Patriots had neither. They made do with Reche Caldwell and Jabbar Gaffney, along with Troy Brown, but nowhere was there a guy like Branch, who could stretch the field.

The Patriots won 12 games on the back of a solid defensive line and an all-pro season by Ty Warren, combined with an easier-than-expected schedule. But against Indy, things broke down badly. It couldn't have been lost on Belichick that of all the gaffes in that game, the biggest one, on offense anyway, was Caldwell dropping an easy pass that clearly would have resulted in a touchdown. When he came back to the huddle, his eyes were as wide as the UFO in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

After addressing a huge problem at linebacker (by signing Adalius Thomas), Belichick retooled his receiving corps by signing, or acquiring, Moss, Donte Stallworth and -- for money -- the most valuable addition to the team, Wesley Welker.

I've always like Welker -- and hated him. When he was on the Miami Dolphins he was a pest. On third down, he was unstoppable, and I'd just explode at the TV when I saw this teeny-weeny little guy catching passes and running all over the field.

Well, now he's OUR teeny-weeny little guy and he's been so valuable to the Pats. He gives them a tremendous weapon on third-and-crucial plays. Even when he doesn't catch the ball ... even when it's not thrown to him ... he's a weapon. Go back to that final regular season game in New York, when Brady and Moss hooked up on that spectacular touchdown pass that put the Patriots ahead for good, and it happened because of Wesley Welker.

It was a third-down play, and the Giants double-teamed Welker because they were sure he was going to get the ball.

Surprise.

Brady went up top to Moss and that was the ballgame.

If the Patriots are guilty of having spent themselves into this position, they can at least be secure in the knowledge that they spent wisely.

This brings us to point No. 3: Spygate.

It goes without saying that Belichick got caught exhibiting a generous dose of both arrogance and hubris. With this offense, he didn't have to cheat. He may be right by saying all NFL teams resort of some kind of skullduggery. But the NFL told teams specifically NOT to film the other team from the sidelines. So no matter what Belichick says, he shouldn't have authorized this.

While this doesn't negate everything the Patriots have done, it does add to the ambivalence much of the country has displayed toward them. It adds to the litany of reasons people have to despise them.

But wherever you want to put "cheating" on the list of grevious offenses, the bottom line is that the Patriots are hated more because of the robotic way they win than anything else. Some teams win a lot, and you just can't bring yourself to hate them. For example, I always like watching the San Francisco 49ers win because -- to me -- they weren't obnoxious about it. Joe Montana didn't talk a whole lot, but he went out there and won.

I loved the old Oakland Athletics teams of the mid-70s, but for a different reason. They may have been Team Turmoil, but when they weren't fighting, the A's had fun. They played like they had fun, too.

I look back and it seems to me that most of the time, I hated show-off teams like the A's. But watching Reggie Jackson was always fun to me ... even when he played for the Yankees ... because you never knew what was coming. He was worth the price of admission even when he was striking out.

On the other hand, I hated ... HATED the Dallas Cowboys. There was never anything about them to like. Tom Landry, the coach, was just like Bill Belichick ... a dour, humorless man who just couldn't seem to connect with people on any kind of a level. And whether it was Don Meredith or Roger Staubach (both obviously at opposite end of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes extreme), I hated them both. I especially hated Staubach, who, to me, epitomized the goody-two-shoed, holier-than-thou athlete who always droned that God was on HIS team.

I loved it when the Cowboys lost. God must have been a Green Bay Packers fan because whenever the Cowboys got into big game against the Packers, Green Bay won.

The Cowboys, of course, cemented their place in the coldest regions of my heart when the junked Landry in favor of America's favorite tonsorial specimin, Jimmy Johnson.

Johnson won two Super Bowls with the Pokes (I rooted against him both times) and his hair never got mussed up until one of his players poured water all over it and mussed it up on national TV.

And if hiring Johnson wasn't bad enough, we won't even get into Barry Switzer.

I put Belichick in the Landry category with one glaring exception: Landry, as bland and robotic as he was, was not a churl. Belichick is ... at least that's his public personna. I've read stories about what a wonderfully funny guy he is when he's with his friends, but I just don't see it. You watch him on TV, or on the sidelines, and he looks like he's going to growl and snarl at you. There doesn't seem to be a happy bone in his body.

This is why -- if you talk to anyone whose parochial emotional investment isn't tied up with the Patriots -- everyone would just love San Diego to win this game. The Chargers are the white knight; the Pats wear the black hat.

The Chargers are Luke Skywalker; the Patriots are Darth Vader. The Chargers are George Bailey; the Patriots are Mr. Potter.

So if it seems today as if the network boys are silently (or maybe even not-so-silently) rooting for the Chargers, it's probably because they are.

As Wilt Chamberlain once observed, "nobody roots for Goliath."

Hello, everyone

2008-01-18T14:01:00.000-08:00

My name is Steve K, and this blog is about anything and everything ... but I think mainly you'll find it's about politics and sports.

For my first official blog entry, I will make the bold, go-out-on-a-limb prediction that the Patriots will win Sunday ... and go one to win their fourth Super Bowl this decade.

It's uncanny how this team doesn't blink. As a New Englander, it's weird to finally -- after all the years I've been alive -- to have a team (other than the Celtics) that wins relentlessly. Usually, whether it was the New York Yankees, Miami Dolphins, Montreal Canadiens, and even the Chicago Bulls ... we'd have to watch from a far as cities won title after title. I'd be sitting there in my den, rooting like MAD for the other team ... just to break things up ... but these teams were just too good.

I believe that Patriots are just too good. Nobody outside of New England likes them, and I suppose if I were from anywhere else but here I wouldn't either. They're not very likeable on the outside. Their coach is a churl (not to mention a bit fo a sneak) and their players have this air of superiority about them ... as if they're too good, and too mature, to get down and dirty and play the trash talk game with other teams.

Now ... about the trash talk game. It's fun. If you have to wait a week between games, the only thing that makes it bearable is the trash talking, because at least it's different. Otherwise, there's precious little NEWS that happens between one game and the next ... and all you see and hear are the TV talking heads going over stuff that couldn't POSSIBLY matter, except to them.

Here's all you have to know: The Patriots are better than any team in the National Football League, and at some point Sunday, whether it's early or late, they're going to leave San Diego in their dust. This doesn't mean the Chargers are going to lay down. It just means that even if the Chargers punch and claw for 60 minutes, whatever the Patriots punch and claw WITH is better.

Patriots 28, Chargers 14.