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.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Invasion of the Stick People
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.
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.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Random Thoughts ...
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.
############
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.
###############
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.
#############################
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.
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.
############
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.
###############
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.
#############################
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.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Edward M. Kennedy 1932-2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Harper's Island
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??
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??
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Common sense about food
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.
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.
Monday, May 11, 2009
In defense of newspapers
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.
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.
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